How to Deal with Stress and Feeling Overwhelmed – Functional Medicine Approach | Podcast #380
Let’s get real: there are times when you’re going to feel overwhelmed. Whether with work, school, social obligations or just life, we all feel anxious, overwhelmed, or stressed at some point. In this podcast, Dr. J and Evan discuss that giving yourself grace and patience when you have these feelings is essential as well as your gut health.
Different coping mechanisms work for each person. The following suggestions can help. If one doesn’t work for you, consider trying a different one. The most important thing is to check your diet since what you eat can significantly affect your overall function.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:28 – Foundational Physiology
12:51 – Mold and Fight and Flight Response
28:35 – Takeaways
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani. I’m with Evan Brand today. We are so excited to be back at you with a live podcast. We’re going to be chatting about stress and overwhelm, and how to deal with it. What’s the functional medicine approach? Evan what’s cooking, man? How have you been?
Evan Brand: Oh, really good man. The first thing. Let me make sure my camera looks good. The first thing is like people run to alcohol in modern society, it’s socially acceptable to run to the liquor store, even as a soccer mom, and go buy enough alcohol to just kill your whole family and nobody bats an eye. And that’s like our.Coping mechanism not just as Americans, but other societies too. So I’m hoping today everything people have been through. Overwhelm is huge, man. A lot of people are burned out. A lot of people are frazzled. The stress response is broken. Their fuses are short. They’re nervous systems are stuck in fight or flight. So I was like, man, let’s hit this as a topic because, let me tell you, the pharmaceutical route is nasty too. It’s Gabba like products, but it’s Xanax and lorazepam and all these benzos, which are benzos terrible. They’re addicting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That could be hard to get off. You start at a, you know, 0.25 to 0.5 milligram dose, and then you keep on ratcheting up and then it’s hard to come off it once you start getting really high.
Evan Brand: Now if you saw a VAT of adaptogenic herbs that you and I have consumed in the last decade between us it would be a large VAT of adaptogenic herbs, but that’s what allows us to work hard with sick people and raise children and keep up with animals and wives and houses and all of that. And so for me, that’s my first thing for someone. If I could take someone as a conventional American on the street going to drink alcohol tonight because they’re stressed or overwhelmed. I’m gonna say, hey, instead of reaching for that bottle, reach for the bottle of water or maybe some herbal tea like chamomile if you want. But then let’s hit some adaptogens. Let’s go for maybe some Relora. Let’s hit the passion flower. Let’s hit Rhodiola, let’s hit something that we can do to change the stress response. There’s tons of studies but today’s more free flowing conversation. But if you type in Rhodiola stress, there’s many, many studies done on this and how it literally alleviates the feeling of stress meaning, you and I can’t magically make the stress and overwhelm disappear from someone’s plate. But what we can do is provide their body nutrients so that their brain, their nervous system, doesn’t think that plate is as full as it really is. And that’s the cool thing about these.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So when I look at any type of stress, I always look at the foundational Physiology because if you take someone’s Physiology and you throw it off kilter like for instance the easiest stressor to put someone under acute is acutely is just don’t sleep for a night and then let me just kind of, you know, see you in the morning and list out all my problems and complaints and stressors that you have to then deal with. Well, you’re gonna have problems being able to take that information in and be able to execute. So we have to look at the foundational Physiology. So the first thing is sleep means if you can just get 8 to 10, eight hours of sleep and get to bed on the other side at midnight. That sets your Physiology up in regards to recycling your neurotransmitters having a good healthy cortisol awakening response. That circadian rhythm or cortisol is higher in the morning and lower at night. So then you have this inverse melatonin-Cortisol ratio. Where your cortisol drops at night, your melatonin goes up and then of course, you know, making sure the food is nutrient dense, good proteins as fascinate meal and we’re not overdoing the carbs, what our body needs and it’s anti-inflammatory and we’re stabilizing that blood sugar because people forget one of the biggest stressors on our hormones is that blood sugar fluctuation throughout the day the more this glycemia we have, the more our blood sugar goes up and down, like a roller coaster. We have to make stress hormones to bring it up and then insulin to bring it down, which then causes us to be in a fat storing mode. And so if we can manage your blood sugar, prevent these disc glycemic swings, we can make sure we have good proteins and fats. Stay away from the junkie process, fats, and we manage that blood sugar reading every maybe five hours or so and getting to bed on time. That sets the foundational Physiology and then we can come in there and biohack and add other nutrients and stuff as well.
Evan Brand: Meaning if you’re a vegan, living on date bars and drinking yourself to sleep with wine. Yeah, you gotta stop.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, like with alcohol, like every now and then is having a little bit of alcohol to kind of distress. Is it OK? Sure. Choose clean organic alcohol, do it after a meal, maybe have some activated charcoal or or some NAC. But that’s like at the end you really want to have the foundational food, the foundational nutrients. Again, if supplementally, the easiest things I’m going to add and I like to stick to nutrients first, so I’m gonna do magnesium. That’s a very kind of sedating, calming, supporting herb. I mean nutrients and minerals. It’s going to have 300 enzymatic roles in the body, anywhere from blood sugar to relaxation, to relaxation in the heart, to vasodilation, to sleep. Very anti-inflammatory in the brain so I love magnesium. You can even do it with a magnesium salt Epsom salt foot bath which is great too. If you have gut issues that help with the absorption you could be doing theanine which is an amino acid that helps upregulate and support healthy GABA levels you can even add-in pharma GABA, maybe a sublingual GABA tablet, that’s excellent as well. So a magnesium, GABA theanine, these are excellent things out of the gate from a nutrient standpoint. Anything else nutritionally you want to highlight?
Evan Brand: Well, I told you, I was texting you over the weekend. I got hit with something luckily I’m back in action. But my resting heart rate was pretty fast, so my nervous system was just kind of boom, boom, pumping, responding to whatever type of sickness I had. And so that kept me up. So I took some motherwort as you know, motherwort is one of my favorite herbs, because it’s great for the heart. We use it for A-fib, we use it for atrial flutter or any kind of heart palpitation type symptoms. It’s amazing, it’s calming that, but it’s great it’s calming emotional stress too. So if you’re overwhelmed, if you’re frazzled, if you’re even getting to the point where you’re like.I’m going to have a mental breakdown. I’m gonna have a panic attack. Somebody put me on some kind of drug. A lot of times psychiatrists will prescribe antipsychotic medications, which are not the answer. They’re not the root cause at all, but motherwort can really calm you. So it’s an emotional support and it’s a heart nervous system support and it’s great if you wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t get back to sleep. Take a little squirt, go lay back down. It’s amazing. Doesn’t taste great, but it works amazing. So I would rate that as more potent than something like theanine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And then also um ashwagandha I find to be very helpful as well. I’ll take that before bed if I need to, I’ll typically do a magnesium before bed. Ashwagandha can be really good, especially if you’re stressed because that’s going to help modulate the high cortisol, but also can help bring up any of the low cortisol as well, so ashwagandha is excellent. You can easily combine that with the Rhodiola. Two things like ginseng tend to be a little more stimulating so things like ashwagandha are going to be great and even phosphorylated serine. Serine can be very common. What serine does? It sensitizes the receptor sites on the hypothalamus to cortisol. So there’s this natural feedback loop of cortisol circulating in the body. It binds to receptor sites in the brain and the brain is like, whoa, this is a little bit high, let, let’s kind of calm down that cortisol secretion so it helps regulate that cortisol from getting too high, so phosphorylated serines are excellent. PhosphatidylSerine is kind of 1 electron. It’s one step in the enzymatic process backwards. So phosphorylated it’s better because it’s a little bit more activated and activated state. So that’s excellent.
Evan Brand: Man, I’ve been looking at some papers on mold toxicity and melatonin. So mold actually does a couple things. That’s crazy. If you type in mycotoxins, dopamine, you can find papers saying that mycotoxins damage the part of the brain that makes dopamine, so then you’re less likely to have energy and focus and concentration. So I’m sure that brain fog increases your stress and overwhelms you because you feel like you’re less capable of being a parent, being a boss, whatever you got to do at work. So, that’s one impact of mycotoxins and then also it’s reducing melatonin. So, I know when I was out of my house, we were staying in a hotel for like six weeks with the kids. It was crazy, but I didn’t sleep. I mean, it took me 3 different hotel rooms to find one where I could sleep and I just, I’m assuming now it was a mycotoxin issue, screwing up my sleep. I’m sure I was stressed from being out of my house. I mean that was years ago now. But I look back at that time and I go, Oh my God, anytime I’m exposed to mold, like in a hotel, I just don’t sleep. And then the research proves that. So my advice is if someone is dependent upon medication and herbs, a supplement for sleeping. If you are sleep deprived, the first thing you mentioned is the foundation. If you are sleep deprived and that’s creating stress, well, what’s your environment look like? Do you have good air purification? Do you have dehumidifiers? Do you have a mold problem? Do you have water leaks? Are you living in a moldy apt, a condo or townhome? It has water damage because if so even the most perfect supplement protocol can’t counteract us, so you may need to take steps to investigate your air quality, like some Petri dishes. And maybe there’s something there. Maybe when you get out of there, you sleep better. That’s a good clue that you’re onto something.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The problem is most people, they have issues and they take action, but they’re still kind of anxious about what’s going on. So it’s really important. Action should help with the anxiety. Like the reason why anxiety is there from an evolutionary standpoint is to get you to take action to avoid, I don’t know if there’s someone gotten that woods. Last month they got eaten by a bear. Well, yeah, when you get near that woods you should be anxious because your body’s hardwired and make you more alert so you don’t get eaten by that bear. So you have to understand where the anxiety is coming from and as long as you’re taking actions. And you’re closing the loop, so to speak, on what that anxiety is coming from. You should feel better about it. And so I always say whatever the anxieties are, just try to have one or two solutions for each one of those. Then your brain knows, hey, I’m doing something about it, I can turn down that stress response because action are already being taken. So think about that as well. And then also like you mentioned, hey, if I have, if I’m uncertain about my environment, let’s get that mole test. If the mold test is positive, let’s do at least one thing to make sure that the environment gets better. Are there active leaks? Do I see water stains on the ceiling? Is there a chronic high level of humidity? Let’s work on that.If not, we can always just get in some good air filtration. We can work on fog in that area, make sure there’s no active leaks coming in. Then we’re, you know, getting a dehumidifier in there. We’re taking active steps. So you shouldn’t feel as anxious about that environment because you’re starting to make it healthier.
Evan Brand: And people say, what the heck are they talking about molds for on a podcast about stress and overwhelm? Well, here’s the mechanism. Your immune system responds to the mold as a threat, and it is a subconscious threat, meaning you Evan, or you Justin sitting here, you might think, OK, I’m not very stressed right now, like, I’m having a good time, this is great. But your nervous system subconsciously is running all these programs that are saying, hey, look, there’s actually a toxin in this room I’m responding to. And so you’re amygdala, your fighter flight system, part of your limbic system sends out an alert. Danger, danger, danger. And you may not even know it. So you could be sitting here on your couch, anxious for no reason. And it’s your limbic system. And many, many people report when they improve their air quality. They can settle down. So that’s the mechanism. I want people to understand when you think overwhelm you think just emotions in your head. But no, these external factors, these external toxins and variables can impact you. I mean, what about a bad neighbor? What about every time you see your neighbor’s car pull up, you’re like, Oh my God, there’s John again. And John stresses you out every time he pulls in the driveway because you guys got in an argument, so, you have to.Integrate some four of, I would say trauma release into all of this too. So you and I are big fans of tapping. So I would say if you’re catching yourself in these loops, you mentioned closing, closing the loop, which I think is smart but if you’re stuck in a loop well maybe you could integrate some tapping to pull you out of that. So tapping is basically acupuncture, but without the needles. You tap these points and then you say an affirmation. You know, I’ve done that many, many times here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s very good. Kind of helps calm down the nervous system response. There’s different programs out there. I’ll put some links down below like there’s DNRS or the Gupta program. These are excellent programs that involve visualization, maybe some aspects of NLP. You really work on controlling the thoughts and the images in your brain, whether you do tapping or eye movement like EM DRI movement, desensitization, response techniques, these things help calm down that fight or flight response and then you kind of allow you to be using more of your frontal brain because the data is when you’re in this chronic stressed out state, the amygdala right that. That forebrain or that hindbrain is kind of more active, that’s the prehistoric brain that is involved in fight flight and that fear response. And so most people are all working from this reptilian brain versus that frontal cortex that involves thinking and looking at your options and coming up with solutions and problem solving and predicting outcomes based on where you’re at, right. We need that frontal brain. But if we’re using our reptilian brain right, then that’s gonna be activated with a lot of these stressors. And so one study right here, I’m looking at, I’ll pull it up here and we can talk about it. I think that kind of supports what you’re saying regarding mold and this fight or flight response, being a big deal. So this one study here was looking at mold inhalation causes an innate immune activation, neural cognitive and emotional dysfunction. And they were talking about intranasally administering different, you know, this is black mold Stachybotrys. And they were looking at, you know, innate immune activation, toxic mold and how it affects your emotions. And of course it’s going to impact inflammation. It’s going to cause joint pain. It’s gonna cause sleep issues. You mentioned earlier, it also has a major effect on dopamine. Can you highlight that again?
Evan Brand: Yeah. Dual control F is dopamine in that paper. It might be a different paper. See if you can find it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, here you go. So exposing drosophila to 0.5 mil part per million of this chemical causes significant loss of dopamine neurons. So decreased dopamine levels and initiated onset of Parkinson’s, suggesting that exposure to mold produces the chemical that may be another environmental risk factor for Parkinson’s disease. So dopamine is really important for feeling good, for focusing, for dealing with stress. It’s that neurotransmitter that gives you that kind of connection that makes you feel loved, so really, really important and it talks about long term inflammation following mold exposure and autoimmune changes in the brain. So that’s that’s powerful.
Evan Brand: Yeah, this is huge. Uh, trying to get Dale Bredesen on the podcast, he wrote a book called the End of Alzheimer’s. And now he’s really hitting the mold angle as an Alzheimer’s link. I think it’s a huge piece of the puzzle. That and heavy metals but many people may hear this and they may just glaze over what we’re seeing. We’re literally saying that your environment could be contributing to a neurodegenerative disease where your neurologist is not going to have a clue. They’re not going to be testing you for this stuff. They’re not going to ask you about your water leak under your kitchen sink. They’re not going to be running mycotoxins in the urine, they’re not gonna look at the Great Plains or organic acids test. So in terms of. We’ll talk about testing in a second, but I think we should describe to people, how do you know if you’re in a state of overwhelm? Because many people are so used to living in fight or flight that they don’t really know how to downshift. So maybe we should go through symptoms, I will say inability to make decisions or analysis paralysis, like, if you’re struggling just to decide what to make for dinner, or you’re struggling just to decide what to do tomorrow, that’s that’s a huge problem. You can’t comprehend simple decision making, I would say loss of libido, loss of energy, motivation, sleep disturbance, maybe some sugar cravings, brain fog, anxiety, I would say distractibility or escapism, meaning you’re always jumping from like social media app to social media app. Like you just don’t want to live in your reality because you’re in a state of overwhelmed, that’s like escapism. What else would you add to the list?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like, well, I would say it just depends where someone’s at, right? If someones going into an acute exposure or an acute stressor and they have a good foundation. That’s a good, that’s good because a good foundation you know allows you to deal with and adapt to stress. So I always look at it’s always good to model healthy people. So you work on the water, you work on the food, the blood sugar, the good fats, the good proteins, the sleep before midnight, getting enough movement so you feel energized but not tired. That’s a foundation. And then if the stressor comes into your world like mold, right? In this study, they talk about not just mold, but pesticide exposure, smoking. Right. So basically I’m looking at air and living quality. So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to just cross things off my list. I’m gonna get a mold test from my house, whether it’s a plate test or an army test. I’m going to make sure I have good quality air filtration because even at my home there is no mold. You’re going to still have some off gassing of some furniture or paint or carpet or hardwoods or professional grade vinyl. There’s something in your air that’s gonna be more stressful and so you want to make sure you have a good quality air filter. Whether it’s an Austin air or an air doctor, you’re going to want to make sure your water is filtered and clean, and then you want to make sure if you’re in a human environment, you know, get a dehumidifier for your home and keep the humidity below 50%. I think that’s really key out of the gate.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. What other symptoms do you think somebody would experience if they were in a state of overwhelm? Well, it depends. I mean, chronic overwhelm can just happen by having a lot of open loops on someone’s plate, a lot of stressors that are in your environment, emotional stressors, and you’re not taking action on them and now you have 2, 3, 4, 5. And so your body is going to cause you to get really anxious, really stressed and really overwhelmed because you’re not closing the loops. And so I just look at what are the top three things that are stressing you out from an emotional stress thing you haven’t taken action on. Just pull out your phone or paper and just write down what they are and write down A&B options for each one. And then say OK, good, I got them down and I’m gonna execute it when the time’s right, but I can at least put that to bed. And so that’s a really important thing. It’s kind of like that. Just trying to think of one situation. We had a, you know, mold issue in my home and it was like, OK, took action on it, got the remediation person out, got the air filtration, did it the right way, did in a negative air containment. Make sure we test it like.I just, I took action. But, you know, when I knew this problem, this environmental stressor was there, it was stressing me out because of all the unknown, right? And so I just said, I’m going to take action. I’m going to handle it the best way possible. I’m going to make sure we test, I’m going to make sure we clean it out. And I felt a lot better about it. But the more you leave these things open, it just kind of gnaws at you quite a bit.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, this applies to the debt too, right? A bill here, a medical debt here, a debt here on the car and then the car is going back like, so those things, you got to try to chip away at those too, I mean, this is in the financial podcast, but I would tell people try to knock out your smallest debts. Because if you’ve got like this bill and this card and that card and that debt, like that really weighs you down emotionally. And I see it all the time with people. It’s a huge piece of the stress. So like if you’ve got a credit card. Let’s say you’ve got an Amazon or Target credit card with 500 bucks. Like knock that one out first and then go to your $5000. One, like you have to chip away at these things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I think biggest thing out of the gate, I mean you can look at some of the Dave Ramsey stuff on that, but if you use a credit card or not, like I use credit cards because they get 2% back on everything, right? So it’s like, OK, I’m gonna get paid 2% for using it. Sure, I’ll use it. The difference is I pay my credit card off every day. And the reason why I do that is running a business and doing all these things. There’s lots of expenses and one if I have hundreds of transactions at the end of the week.What if there’s fraud? What if there’s issues? At least I can see it every day and then I can also monitor it. I can have my pulse on what’s where money’s going in and out. And so it makes me feel on top of it. And I would say just from a stress standpoint, financially, you know, three to six months of living expenses, I think is a good one to have in savings at all times. So if any issues happen, you have that to lean back on too many people. I think you don’t have that three to six month buffer. I think that can be a big stressful thing. That’s just kind of in the background for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah so even some of I think it was Shaq or someone I saw it’s been some, I think it was Shaq or someone I saw recently an interview, some extremely high level millionaire was saying that every day they still look at the numbers, they still check their numbers, the bills, where the moneys going, where the credit is, where the debt is, they still look at it even though they could buy anything in the world, they still take a look. So if you’re just out of the loop on, that’s a big problem.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And with phone apps, you know you can jump on it and you can finalize it and look at it in about one or two minutes. The more you kind of have your pulse on things, the better. I think it’s really good and then you know you could talk about all the inflation that’s happening. That’s a whole different strategy in regards to investment and such like that that you know we do a lot of things on the investing side as well. But I think the biggest thing is to have about three to six months and just be on top of income coming in and expenses going out. So you have your pulse on it.That allows you to pivot and make changes.
Evan Brand: Yep. So that’s the financial piece, to try to get that buffer. The environmental piece, try to have a good clean Oasis where you can properly sleep, your nervous system can calm down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think a couple of good air filters. Couple of good air filters. Get your home tested. Even if you just get a couple of the plates and you just wait five or seven days and count the spores and make sure the spores are under five or so, that’s fine. You can avoid setting it to the lab that is more than five, then we definitely want to send it to the lab. Um, you know, take a look at your ceilings. Go walk around, make sure you don’t see any spots on your ceiling. You know, go hire someone to come out once a year and just do a roof inspection. Just make sure your roof looks good. Go take a peek in your attic right, get a moisture meter and just kind of test the walls out a little bit and make sure everything looks good there. You know, those are all good simple things you can do out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Keep the exhaust fan on if you’re gonna take a hot shower. I’ve seen many, many people have issues with that just because of that hot steam of 2020 minutes or however long the shower you’re taking, all that steams.Gotta go somewhere. So if you’re not sucking it out with an exhaust vent, it’s gonna have to soak into that drywall so that paper backing on that drywall can get real moist. We see that as a huge problem area.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Or even just get a dehumidifier for your bath or even just a portable one. That’s a big one. If you don’t have an exhaust fan and you get a portable dehumidifier and just keep it on to at least pull that moisture out of the air and think that’s important.
Evan Brand: Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then I would say, I would say message. Get body work done, whether it’s chiropractic, that very coming on your nervous system, having your spine adjusted, that’s where your central nervous system flows from your brain down the spine, making sure your spine and your vertebrae are moving. Make sure soft tissue is doing well, those good pliability in that soft tissue. Making sure that fascia is being manipulated. Myofascial release different things to help that fashion that connective tissue stay soft and supple like a tenderloin versus harden and flame like beef jerky. Chiropractic, I think it’s powerful as well just to make sure all the joints in your hips are moving your upper cervical spine. Really important that that’s all kind of dialed in as well. All these are all really important things that can calm down that nervous system and inhibit the IML, the intermedial, I think it’s the intermedial cell column that kind of stimulates that fight or flight nervous system.
Evan Brand: Turn your screen share off. That way I can see your figure. Yeah, the message is huge. I went to get a massage a couple weeks ago and the ladies like, yeah, we’re all fragrance free. And I went in there and my God, I left smelling like a dryer sheet. Like my wife is ready to kick me out of the car on the way home. She’s like, you reek. And so I guess they’re, they’re sheets at the massage studio just had driver seats on them or something. So that was a stressor for me because here I am going to do something good like call my system and then I leave smelling like a dryer sheet. So double check the head.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The best thing you can do, and I told you about it too, the best thing you can do is the cheapest thing is to get washed soda, which is basically baking soda for your washing machine. And then what you do is you do your wash and then you put like a 30 minute soak on there. Or one hour or soak you could do 30 minutes, right? Put a cup of the wash soda in there so you know it’ll sit for 30 minutes. The baking soda absorbs any smell, any stink. I had a little lemon shirt that was moldy. It was so bad because it got washed and then it sat there for a couple of days and it got moldy and the washer, I couldn’t get it out. I washed it like a dozen times. My mom comes into town, she’s like, oh, here, it’s just, it’s an Italian trick here and she will put the arm and hammer in there, do an hour soak, and it literally kills it. It felt brand new and I had washed it dozens of times wiith all these essential oils and anti mold uh, shampoos couldn’t touch the smell. So wash soda, especially if you’re sensitive. Use that to suck all the smell out of what’s in your detergent or anything else. And I’ll use just like the free and clear, no sense. I’m like Evan. I’m very, very sensitive to smell. Just really. It’s really ready to shop there for me, man.
Evan Brand: It was my skin though. My skin ripped. I had to take like 2-3 showers. I still smell. Maybe I should, like, scrub myself with baking soda. It was nice. It was like impregnated into my skin, man.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I don’t know what it is, but there’s like a I think it’s like I’m not sure if it’s younger woman today, but it’s like it’s like my parents generation that group wore at least the females a lot of perfume. Like you could literally be 15 feet away from someone and you could smell their perfume, it’s definitely changed. Like my wife’s generation, right, women in their 30s and 40s, there’s a less perfume smell. I think people are using more essential oils and natural things, but it’s funny how generations change how much perfume to last more and but I’m super sensitive to perfumes. We try to keep zero in our home and if we do anything, it’s like an essential oil or like a lavender or like a little bit of cedar or kind of rose. Those kinds of things keep it simple.
Evan Brand: We could hit the smells for a minute too. That is a stress to the system. It’s a big stressor, yeah, especially if you’re burning it. So, like candles, throw them away. If they’re not essential oil based, it’s just garbage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dryer sheets. Throw dryer sheets away. If you want to get the benefit of dryer sheets, you can get one of those static balls. Just put it in there.It’s like a little ball that knocks the static down. That’s the purpose of dryer sheets mostly, right? But then you don’t have all that scent and smell, so that’s a good way to kind of mitigate the stress from that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, we hit the blood sugar, the sleep, the environment, the smells, the finances, I mean, those are a lot of pieces of overwhelm, really. What else are we missing?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I just think, you know, close those loops. Look at what’s on your plate for stressors, what’s bugging you out, what pops into your head. Be on top of that. Also monitor that self talk. Most people, if you look at how you talk to yourself, that inner voice. right? Behind your head that you hear. Most people would not be friends with a person that spoke the same way as their inner voice. So make sure you really upgrade the quality of your inner voice. Having that inner voice really gives you guidance, intuition. But also don’t beat yourself up. I think it’s super important. There was no Anthony Robbins quote that was really important as well. It’s like, you’re going to do so many things right in the day, so many things you’re gonna do right and well. And you gotta give yourself a pat on the back. Because if you’re not watching yourself succeeding and then giving yourself that congratulations to that PAT in the back and you’re looking for your kids or your spouse or your friend to do it all the time, they’re not going to see enough of it. So really make sure you’re catching yourself doing a lot of the good things and pat yourself on the back for it. And you know, take your wins whenever you can take your wins.
Evan Brand: Yeah, no, that’s great advice. The rumination, right this negative self-talk, ruminating about your problems, thinking about your past, the things you did wrong, living with regret. Those are big problems. So someone told me years ago,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I want to hit that. It’s really important. So the rumination, I find serotonin and acetylcysteine plays major major role that sulfur and serotonin for me I used to be a little more OCD and ruminating and getting my NAC up and getting my serotonin levels up five HTP and B6 really help rumination. It allowed me to kind of like OK that that’s the issue and then allowed me to disconnect from it and and then just kind of focus on what the next thing is and not have to be playing the loop on repeat all the time, which is very stressful.
Evan Brand: Oh yeah, it’s huge. So people don’t understand that. They think once again negative self-talk, they think rumination they think .We’re talking about these emotional things, but no, we’re actually talking biochemistry. We’re talking neurotransmitters also. So what I was going to say is someone told me years ago, if you want to get out of your head to get into your body. So that’s what I do a lot of. If the weather is decent enough, I’m out there on the mountain bike, I’m out in the woods, I’m hiking, I’m biking and moving among the water. I’m doing something to get out of the head by getting in my body. So do that, and then the testing. Let’s talk about that, because you brought up serotonin and then overwhelmed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, go. Go ahead, go ahead. Hit that part. One more thing that you brought up, I wanna hit it too.
Evan Brand: OK, don’t forget. So if you’re overwhelmed, I would say do the following. Get the urine test, urine done at home. You can order it through our office. If you need help, reach out to Doctor J at justinhealth.com or Evan Brand on evanbrand.com. Let us help you order these at home from the Functional Medicine Lab so we can investigate the cause of this overwhelmed because there could be internal toxins. There could be pesticides, mycotoxins, bacterial overgrowth, parasites, worms, H. pylori, gut inflammation, brain inflammation, low neurotransmitters, nutrient deficiencies, all combining to create these emotional issues. So get the oh, we may want to look at stool, we may want to look at chemicals. But reach out and then we can help you develop a plan to figure this out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really important one last thing I wanted to highlight too is appreciation. Because most of the time when you’re overwhelmed, you’re thinking about what’s missing in your life or you’re thinking about this problem that you have to address and you’re like, I don’t know what, do I have time to do this? So you’re thinking about this expense that you’re thinking about things that you’re you’re missing or things that you have to expand or you have to lose, but when you appreciate your focusing on all the things that you have and you’re really trying to create context for that and really feeling that sense of gratitude and appreciation and appreciate essentially like if your finances appreciated, if your investments appreciate, they get greater, they get bigger. So you’re taking everything in your life and you’re feeling that sense of gratitude, making everything bigger in your life in regards to how you feel about it and how appreciative you are and having a perspective of, you know, if you live in the United States like you’re, you’re a one percenter just living in the United States, right? I mean I think it’s if you make $19,000 a year, right, which is poverty in this country. You’re 1% in the world. It’s like, whoa. That’s like, that’s perspective, right? Perspective also gives you appreciation.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, I can have dark humor with my grandparents. Like my grandma called me the other day. Apparently my grandpa hit a curb and busted a tire. They were without their car, then the tires on backorder. Nobody has that size in stock. And I was like, well, it’s better than being dead and she’s like, you’re right, you’re right. I’m gonna enjoy this. This is fun. We’re gonna get a rental car. It’s no problem. And so I just tell her all the time, you know, if there’s a complaint, like, at least you’re not dead because, you know, her relatives have disappeared. And you know, she’s one of the last women standing elf, that generation, you know, from the 40s. So I’m like grandma, like, enjoy it, you’re alive. This is amazing. And usually it kind of snaps her out of the funk.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, appreciation is important, right? Because usually you’re just focused on all the things that are going wrong and you’re just flipping that switch. And if you look at NLP and kind of the work of Richard Bandler, he is a really interesting guy, but he would always take a look at successful people and he talked to them. He’d want to know what’s the image in your head when you’re in this peak state and you’re succeeding and you’re doing well, what are the images in your brain look like at the time? Meaning like, what are you thinking of? What’s the picture real in your brain look like when you’re achieving and doing these things? And almost always it’s in the positive, almost always it’s showing in visualizing the outcome and you’re already seeing it happen multiple times already before you actually do it. And versus it’s the negative, it’s the worst case scenario. So really be aware of the picture screen on your brain almost like go within, pretend like you’re in a movie theater and you’re literally seeing the picture screen, which is what you’re seeing through your eyes. And then you’re really changing that screen. Like you’re the director directing that movie screen while you’re seeing it in the movie theater through your eyes. Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: It does. It does to me because I do it all the time. I’m always trying to visualize the outcome. This has already happened. The person I want to say yes, already said yes. What I needed? It’s already here. Even though I don’t have it yet, I’ve already got it. And that goes a long way.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then also pretend like if you’re there in that movie theater inside your brain, remember you have control over that. If it’s in a bad space and you’re just all negative and you’re just looking at everything the wrong way, you can just put a new movie in, right? You’re not a victim, you’re not sitting there chained down like Clockwork Orange, right where they peeled the guys eyes open, right? It’s like you have control over what you’re watching, so put a different film in there.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the last thing I would say is just take a nap. Like if you’re just so overwhelmed the middle of the day hits, you’ve got fatigue that can also be overwhelming because you’re so tired. You have so many obligations you’re trying to do, but you’re so fatigued. Number one, get the labs run so we could figure out why you’re so damn tired on paper will,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Your adrenals looked at, yeah. See how stressed out there do you have that chronic low DHEA? Are your neurotransmitters VMA, HVA, 5-hydroxy, indoleacetic? Are they all depleted and down? Because this could take a while to get this thing repleted.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So if you’re feeling that, get the data then. If you gotta close your eyes for a minute, close your eyes, lay there and take a nap. If you can do it, if your lifestyle allows you to take a nap, escape from the kids, whatever you gotta do, do it. And hopefully you’ll come back a little more refreshed, a little more in control when you’re not so exhausted.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And when your neurochemistry is depleted, it’s really hard to willpower out, willpower that. And so sometimes, yeah, they get the food and the supplements on track and then it’s like then the willpower and then the energy and then the ability to now start doing the things you need to do is start to become easier, there’s less resistant to get this downhill kind of momentum, so that’s very important. And again, looking at the adrenals, looking at the neurotransmitters, looking at your DHEA sulfate, looking at your circadian rhythm, right, that circadian rhythm should should go up in the morning and down at night, and the more dysregulated that is if it’s reversed or flat, that tells me that stress feedback loop is disrupted and you’re probably using that amygdala in that brain stem. You’re operating more from that fight or flight state all the time.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that makes sense if you need help, reach out. You can reach Doctor J at justinhealth.com worldwide consult meaning labs can be sent to your door. Wherever you are. You get the results. Look at them, make a protocol, get yourself better. So justinhealth.com for Doctor J and myself Evan at evanbrand.com. We look forward to helping you guys, and hopefully this content was helpful. Share it with your friends, your family. If we can get somebody else out of the whole, that’s what we love. I mean, it just takes one person that could totally transform your life. This is your husband you’re trying to get out of, overwhelm your wife. Have them listen to this so we can help lift them up because it’s gonna make your life way better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, just pick one thing. If you’re overwhelmed already and you’re like, crap, he just said 15 things, just pick one, like what’s the easiest thing that you can do? And then once you get some momentum, then we’re gonna go to two and then we’re gonna go to three. So just start kind of stacking and get that momentum and then you get that downward momentum going. Then it starts to be easier to add new modalities to the mix.
Evan Brand: Yep, Amen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Alright man, great chatting with you Evan and hope everyone listening enjoyed it. Feel free to share with friends or family. We’ll put a link down below where you can review us. We really appreciate a review on both our iTunes channels. Super helpful. It’s the word out there and you guys have a phenomenal day.Take care of y’all.
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How to Deal With Stress and Feeling Overwhelmed? | Podcast #376
Connections between the brain and gut abound, which can be seen in the dysfunctions that often unite them. Many neurological and mood disorders often have enteric manifestations, GI disorders may present with neurological and psychiatric symptoms, and psychological stress may adversely impact microbiome balance and GI function.
Dr. J and Evan Brand discuss that consideration of the bidirectional relationship of the gut-brain axis will inform individual treatment strategies. Managing external stress-related factors while optimizing gut health may jointly address some chronic health conditions. Specifically, personalized therapeutic strategies that combine stress transformation approaches with gut health interventions, such as functional testing, nutrition, and natural supplements, may help to optimize gut function and bolster related body systems. Learn more about supporting the microbiome and its effect on overall health when you subscribe to this channel!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
0:46 – Stress
6:41 – Brain Chemistry
7:51 – Water Filtration and Organic Foods
13:56 – Cortisol Patterns
23:13 – Stress and Hormones
30:00 – Testing and Functional Strategies
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s doctor J here in the house with Evan Brand. Really excited. We are back doing our live podcast. Really excited to be back in the saddle. Evan, how we doing, man? What’s going on?
Evan Brand: Oh, doing really well. I’m excited to talk about stress. My wife, she woke up this morning.Which is like my jaws tight was like grinding my teeth last night and maybe you need to talk about that today. So I thought, OK, everyone is stressed, there’s a lot on everyone’s plate, but it’s really how you respond to it that really determines whether it makes you and you become someone and something and you get success out of your stress. Or do you just get frazzled and burned out and you resort to alcohol and tobacco and other addictions, chocolate and wine and whatever else to cope with that? And I think there’s a lot healthier coping mechanisms or stress for burnout, for feelings of overwhelm. And you and I have done this for years clinically. We’ve helped people through the toughest of cases. You and I have taken the huge load on our shoulders of, you know, trying to be the helper, be the healer with someone that’s struggling. And that’s a lot, that’s a heavy toll on us. So there’s things that you and I do personally. And then there’s things that you and I do clinically and then we’ve got some studies to kind of verify you know, what we’re seeing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% So when I look at stress.You have the actual stress issue, like whatever that stress issue is, right? And so feeling anxious or feeling stressed about an issue is a good thing, right? Part of the reason that is there is to get you motivated to get off your butt to solve the problem. So I always look at the issue and I’m like. Right. Why do I feel stressed? Usually there’s you haven’t closed the loop yet. I call it closing the loops. Problem, right? You take action to resolve the problem, the problem goes away. That’s the closed loop, right? And so you have a lot of people with open loops. Meaning they have a problem out there and they just haven’t even figured out the solution. So when it comes to being healthy and having good neurotransmitters, good adrenal function, good healthy diet and lifestyle habits, good anti-inflammatory type of environment, nutrient dense foods coming in. Good nutrition, your ability to process one that stressor when it hits you, it’s not gonna hit you as hard. It’s not gonna knock you off your pedestal to you’re going to be able to adapt and you’re going to be able to think clearly and troubleshoot whatever the issue is. And so I always look at a problem. I said OK, got it, how do I close the loop on that, what’s the action item to execute? That so I always just kind of get clear, have a list. What are the things I can do and set in motion to resolve the issue. I think it’s really important if you just dust it away. The healthiest adrenal glands eventually is gonna eat away at you because you haven’t closed the loop. So always think about closing the loop on your issues #2 get healthier so these things don’t bug you as much, right? If you have good levels of B6, good levels of magnesium, you’re sleeping adequately, you have good blood sugar stability, Good amino acids. It’s gonna allow you to be able to process it. You’re not gonna activate that fight or flight part of your nervous system. That shuts down the frontal cortex and activates the reptilian brain stem part of the brain that’s all about fight or flee, fight or flee, fight or flee. And so the more you can keep this kind of reptilian brain from being activated, and then you can use that frontal cortex, you’ll be able to sit back, become troubleshoot the issue and close the loop.
Evan Brand: And this is hard if you’ve got toxins, if you’ve got lyme, different infections. I mean we’ve seen in the literature that certain infections and toxins. Basically, decrease the blood flow to that front part of the brain. So you become a monkey. You do become primitive as you mentioned. This reptile brain kicks in and you can’t make good decisions and you certainly can’t comprehend the future. You get stuck living in the day, the hour, the minute with that stress and when you say close the loop, I think that resonates for a lot of people, but many people are afraid to close the loop because this means that they have to end a friendship that’s toxic. They have to end a marriage that’s failing. They have to, you know, fire someone that they don’t like. They have to quit their job because they have a bad boss. So.You know, closing the loop sounds so simple, but this could be a huge roadblock. You know, for people, and I’ve seen it, where you’ve got a woman eating perfectly. She’s doing amazing with her supplements. But for example, here’s the case study. She’s in an open relationship and she’s miserable and she hates it. And she’s jealous and her husband’s with these other women and she doesn’t want him to be. And so there’s issues there. I don’t freaking care how much ashwagandha this lady pops. She’s not going to supplement out of this situation. That’s intense. And there is a place for closing the loop. And you can’t supplement your way out of a situation like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. In relationship, it’s always good to have healthy boundaries, right? It’s like good fences make good neighbors, right? Having good emotional boundaries and how were relationship operates, right? If your families asking 10 times of you, then, then you, then ten times of you, then they help you on the backside, right, this kind of Arctic give and take that. So you always have to have clear boundaries. I think that’s a really, really important one. There’s an awesome book out there. Um, by Henry Cloud called boundaries. That’s a really good woman. I see patients in relationships. They may not even be a relationship with their spouse. It could be a relationship with family or friends where they’re just kind of a parasitic element of people asking many multiples from that person. Then that person’s providing back and there should always be a give and take. Right. I always tell patients like when you play catch, I throw the ball, you throw the ball, right. Emotionally, there’s a give and a take and it’s back and forth and it’s equal. When I start throwing the ball, you don’t throw it back. I run back over, get the ball, come back, throw it again, that, that, that’s, that’s you know very depleting, right? You missed the give and take, and so you gotta make sure your good, healthy boundaries are there. Also, with relationships, it’s always better to try to restructure. Kind of reboundify the relationship, then just exit. I think exiting a lot of relationships is just, uh, it’s an easy way out. It’s, you know, you just go somewhere and end your and go on to your life. I think it’s always better to see if you can repair or give people an opportunity to repair and get on the same page and see what happens from there. But either way, right, you have all these emotional issues. Get healthy. If you’re afraid to deal with these issues right now, put them on the back burner. No, you have to deal with them. Adjust your expectations of healing and try to get healthier so then you have better energy, better focused, better calmness to address whatever the problem is.
Evan Brand: This is great advice and it’s uncomfortable and there are situations that are going to be intense, but I would encourage you just to go face first with those now if you have trouble making eye contact with these people. Some of that’s related to brain chemistry too. I see a lot of people that when they get in a stressful situation.They just shut down. They look down, they look away. They can’t face the person and therefore they can’t fully express themselves. That’s usually tied into low GABA, and so we can’t measure GABA on the organic acids. But we can measure serotonin, we can measure dopamine, we can measure endorphins. So before you and I go into a few of these studies and solutions, you know, let’s just give a little back story on some of this. And so, you know, when I had gut infections down in Texas, I had tons of anxiety. It wasn’t me, it was not my personality. It was the gut bugs. And when we looked in my brain chemistry, my serotonin was low. My dopamine was low. I had issues to fully get myself motivated. I still push through, but I didn’t wake up necessarily with that spark like I wanted, and so I know personally and you and I have seen it 1000 plus times clinically the low brain chemistry problem, it’s epidemic and it’s only gotten worse even in the last 10 years. You and I have been looking at these labs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so again, there are some people that have been on board here with us for years listening and they’re super advanced. And so just kind of out of the gate, we’re going to just give a brief overview of foundational things. OK. So first thing out of the gate is an appointment my phone because I just changed my whole house water filtration here, and Evan and I were talking about it earlier today. So check this out. I’m gonna hold up my phone. So you can see here.The clean one on the left, that’s a brand new filter. And that all the way up to the webcam.
Evan Brand: We can hardly see. Go closer. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So the one on the left, right, the white one. That’s the new one.That’s the one that was in there for the last three months. I mean that is just nasty, dirty and gross that again that sense. That’s a post filter. So it went through a massive pre filter, went through the huge carbon based filter and then went through that afterwards. And it was dirty. It is nasty. I actually have it over on my on my bar countertop over there. So pretty pretty freaking gross. So, what does that mean? It means, prioritize good clean filtered water. If you don’t have a high water filter water filter system, we’ll put some links down below to the ones that we personally use, but in general, at least get a good quality glass water Topo Chico, Cheryl Steiner, a Perrier, a mountain valley one out of a good glass model was gonna be excellent during the day and then I definitely recommend getting a whole house water filter once you’re in a in a place where you can do it. Some people may be in an apartment, then maybe a temporary housing. You can always get an under the counter filter. There are even some temporary ones that actually go on top but still filter water out pretty well. But that’s pretty nasty. And so 70% of your body’s water in regards to all the liquids. So you need good clean filtered water without all the junky chemicals. Maybe drugs, maybe pesticide runoff? Bull run off, who knows. So the first thing is kind of get your water right. Comments there, Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, this is important because when you’re stressed, you’re gonna be dehydrated. You’re burning through everything. You’re burning through hydration, you’re burning through B vitamins. You and are looking at papers on B vitamins and magnesium for helping with stress. So we know that when you’re burning the candle, and most people in the modern world are.You need good water and the tap water. You can look up EWG and put in your zip code. It’s scary. I mean, almost every single city has insane high levels of trihalomethanes which are carcinogenic as you mentioned pesticide residue, pharmaceutical drugs like heart medications, beta blockers, anti anxiety, antidepressant medications. You know what’s scary? There are studies now being done on bays, some of these inland bodies of water. And there was one down, I think it was in Florida near Miami. Biscayne Bay is one of these most famous bays. They have an issue now where all of the fish. I’ll see if I can pull it up.They now have drugs in them. And it’s because of the runoff from people. So let me pull this up because this is.This is pretty crazy. This was, this actually came out over the summer this year. And I think it’s pretty shocking and most people don’t have a clue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, there was that famous study on atrazine up at UC Berkeley showing the frogs were essentially having reproductive organ issues like a major. I think they were almost becoming like asexual and their sex organs were like switching some kind of weird dynamic what’s happening. Based on the hormone, like disrupting compounds in these pesticides. And that was atrazine.
Evan Brand: Did you, did this pull up my screen here? Oh yeah, the screen share, I’m going to share with you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Go ahead.
Evan Brand: Alright, yeah. So here it is. Pharmaceutical drugs showing up in fish from South Florida waters. Yeah, so it’s Biscayne Bay and I know you’ve got 2.5 million Miami residents and a lot of those people are on pharmaceutical drugs and then they’re peeing that out and then some of that runoff is ending up in the water supply and then that runs off into the Bay and then the fish then accumulate those drugs. So they did a three-year study.They found the Valium. They found antibiotics. They found blood pressure medication in the blood and tissue of bone fish. One fish showed 17 different drugs. So here you are thinking you’re getting your fish clean. I’m gonna eat fresh fish. It’s like well. You know you’re looking at antidepressant treatment, medication, narcotics, pain relievers. That’s insane. Now they’re saying good news is that this is a catch and release species. But, what about the other fish that people are eating? So move. I don’t know. Just tuna fish.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So I mean, getting your water clean, getting your food quality clean, organic food. Here’s the atrazine study. And they were talking about it here at UC Berkeley Press release back in 2002. But it was April 16th in the National Academy of Sciences, UC Berkeley, essentially what happened here, the frogs were developing, they were becoming hermaphrodite. They were heading both sex organs. So you could see testes here, ovaries, ovaries, and you could see abnormal gonads and male exposure to this type of frog.The frogs have become hermaphrodites. Both male and female due to the hormonal exposure. So you can see because the atrazine environment basically an uncontrolled experiment this would be no atrazine free environment talking about because herbicides been used for 40 years of 80 countries. It’s effect on sexual development and male frogs could be one of many factors in the global decline of amphibians. So crazy, right? Now we’re talking about lowest levels of 0.1 part per billion. So this is real. So that’s why I’m saying out of the gate, easiest thing out of the gate. Clean water, good water filter, organic food, organic food. And then outside of that, right then we could talk about blood sugar, stability, at least a pound worth of protein at every meal. I think it’s a really good making sure you have good fats that aren’t all pufa-based fats. Seed, nut oil based fats, refined vegetable oils, you know keeping it good healthy saturated fats, coconut oil, avocado, olive, you know cold press. You know most of your good quality fats coming from more stable.Had accelerated fat sources. This is great. And then after that you just adjust the carbs for your activity level and kind of your metabolic type, meaning do you need to lose weight? Are you kind of a skinnier person? Are you really active right? The more active and the more at an optimal weight you are, the more carbohydrates you can handle. So you got to adjust it. It’s not a one-size-fits-all on that.
Evan Brand: Let’s transition. Talk about cortisol. Yeah. This is important for stress. When people think stress, most people think cortisol and you and I’ve run so many of these, probably more than anybody, I pulled up my screen. If you want to pull it up. This is a Dutch panel. That you and I run on almost everyone in regards to hormonal health and what you’re looking for is really the health of the cortisol pattern. So you can see here this particular female, she was absolutely exhausted. You could see for people on audio, you’re missing out, but you could go back to. Uh Justin Health YouTube channel and you can watch this video if you’re listening on the audio and you want to see the the the some of the screen shares. But you want to basically charge your smartphone battery first thing in the morning, get a full charge and that full charge last throughout the day, but in this case this woman, her cortisol pattern was completely shut. She was below range the entire day except for night time. She perked up just a little bit, and that could have been like maybe she was on her phone, she was watching a horror movie or a scary TV show or something an artificially boosted her cortisol. But this is the real issues. So no matter how clean your water is, if your cortisol pattern looks like this, you’re gonna be absolutely exhausted and you were gonna deal with stress terribly. You’re not going to deal with stress. How many people are you seeing like this now versus maybe 5 Years ago, do you feel like it’s becoming more common or no?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s always tough because we’re, I’m seeing a large percent of the population that are have chronic health issues, right. So I’m always gonna get that, that slice that’s going to be significant. But yeah this type of pattern is, is a big deal, right, because not only is this a sign of you being chronically stressed and depleted, but this is a reverse cortisol rhythm, so you’re gonna be tired during the day and it’s gonna be harder for you to relax at night and recharge. So it makes it really difficult to get that good regenerative sleep wake cycle going. And so these are the people that have.Hard time sleeping at night and getting and reestablishing those good healthy lifestyle patterns that should be in place. That’s what makes it really tough. One thing if you’re just tired, but you can work on getting sleep and and recharging if we can’t. And then also this person, I guarantee you there’s there’s stress handling capacities gonna be at Max, so they’re just gonna like flip out on their kids, flip out on their friends at the simplest thing, or they’ll just be an overwhelmed and they’ll just be in flight constantly ignoring and sweeping all their problems under the rug because they jerked their capacity so low.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and I know this particular female here was incredibly histamine intolerant. Someone in the comments said, let’s talk about histamine. So there is a component to that. And in her case, she was sensitive to everything, chemicals, fragrances, EMF food. So this was a, you know a pretty sick middle-aged woman, but I mean everything was completely crashed here and so you and I wanted to talk about some of the herbs. Now if we jump right into one of these papers on. What’s called Magnolia and Phellodendron? This is a blend, actually. And it’s usually under the patented name Relora. Some of the professional products you and I use contain Relora. Now. This is a good option for reducing stress and anxiety, but the problem is you really don’t just want to start taking supplements without the clinical data because if you look back at that woman and the cortisol pattern is completely crashed, if we were to go to something like Relora, I would say this is not an appropriate thing to use because if you look at the results of the study of supplementing Relora for four weeks, the salivary cortisol was18% lower in the Relora group. So what that means is they saw less stress, less tension, less depression, way less anger, less fatigue, less confusion, and a higher mood. But would you say in her case that’s not appropriate because she was so crashed already. We don’t want an 18% reduction in cortisol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now the question is what type of people were in that group, because a lot of these adaptogens, if someones low like ashwagandha for instance. There’s studies on Ashwagandha on helping to lower cortisol as well as increased cortisol. So I would say that the adaptogens are probably not like a drug where they’re gonna suppress. If someone’s already low, they’re probably gonna more help that HPA access kind of adapt. Now there are certain adaptogens like ginseng or licorice that may be more stimulatory even if someone’s high, it may still over stimulate. So you gotta be careful with over stimulating ones, but usually ones.like holy basil Holy basil, Magnolia, Ashwagandha tend to be more adaptogenic, so I’d be curious about that. What that sample size was? Were they kind of higher cortisol people? If they were higher cortisol people, then that would totally make sense that the herb was working to kind of bring things back into balance. Does it say it all in that study?
Evan Brand: We assess salivary cortisol and psychological mood in 56 subjects, 35 women, 25 or 35 men, 20 21 women. They were screened for moderate stress, so that would have been interesting if they would have came in and did a cortisol panel on all these people and showed the before and after, but that’s OK because you and I have seen this a lot clinically and as you described, we’d like to just give the nutrients to let the body do what it needs to do. Meaning we’re not coming in with Cortef necessarily and cranking her up. We’re giving HPA access support and the body can figure this out on its own in many many cases.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the fact that a lot of these symptoms improved. It’s probably not a low cortisol person making their cortisol lower because that those symptoms would get worse, right? They would actually, you know, they wouldn’t be improving, right. So the fact that they’re coming down, there’s probably an improvement. So imagine these people had higher cortisol patterns.To begin with. And that would make sense. But that’s why we don’t even go all in on just any herb, right? Or making these diet changes. We’re getting the inflammation down. We’re increasing nutrient density. We’re also providing all the cofactors to help your adrenals function better, whether it’s vitamin C, whether it’s pantothenic acid B5, whether it’s B6, I have one study in here talking about B6 and Magnesium actually works better than magnesium alone. And part of that is unique cofactors for these nutrients to work better. And a lot of your brain chemicals actually have cofactors for a lot of these conversions of serotonin and Dopamine and norepinephrine to happen, you need a lot of cofactors. And then we can kind of go more into the category of like, well, if your diets crummy and you’re eating a lot of sugar or inflammatory foods, you can actually deplete those pull factors more. Or if you have mold exposure, you may deplete, you may be depleting your B vitamins in your in your in your folate and your B12 and your B6 for methylation purposes. Because that mold exposure is revving up those methylation pathways, you may be utilizing more of your acetylation and glucuronidation pathways for glutathione and acetyl cysteine right. You’re sulfur aminos may be depleted as well and also chronic stress does deplete sulfur because you need sulfur to actually activate dopamine to norepinephrine. And so when you look at those pathways, the more stressed you get, you will actually deplete sulfur and when you don’t have enough sulfur if you have mold exposure coming in.You see how you have a toxin on this side and then you have stress over here and you’re kind of burning that candle at both ends.
Evan Brand: Yeah.Let’s hit Ashwagandha. And then I like B vitamin magnesium when it’s pretty interesting. So ashwagandha, we hear a lot about it. I’d say it’s probably the most popular adaptogenic herb. I mean, you see it in grocery stores now at the checkout counter, I’ve seen Ashwagandha gummies and Ashwagandha pills, which I think in general is good, I have seen at the high dose and I have seen chronic usage in some people. It gives them a little bit of flatness where they just don’t have as much emotions. I’ve just seen, if you look on Reddit, there’s several threads if you type in like ashwagandha at Hedonia, this is basically just the loss of pleasure in life. So there’s some people that are reporting either high dose or long term use of ashwagandha. They just sort of become numb. So I think you need to watch out for that. But in general, you and I are cycling on and off of these things and we’re rotating. Now out of protocols and not necessarily, always in isolation. Just for a couple months, if they have excessive fatigue, maybe we’re adding in some rhodiola, so we’ll look at that in a minute too. But the Long story short is many, many papers on Ashwagandha. This is just one. But you’re always gonna see an anti anxiety activity and you’re always gonna see anti stress. It’s going to improve symptoms of depression and insomnia and it’s going to help primarily by modulating the HPA access and also the sympathetic adrenal medullary axis, as well as GABAnergic and serotonergic pathways, meaning that it may help boost GABA, which calms you down. It may help boost serotonin, which helps you become less irritable, less anxious, and you may sleep better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I just swallow some Gabba and some glycine right now, some amino acids that also help with stress. Love, Mike.
Evan Brand: I took some right before. Yeah, right before we jumped on. I told you about those gummies and my wife. And so I had a couple. It was like Ashwagandha, Rhodiola I think it might have been some Maca too, but, so that was good. So here’s another paper on ashwagandha. This was a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled, which is the best, the best type that you want. And they said, compared to placebo, significant reduction in what they’re calling the Hamilton Anxiety rating scale. So significant reduction in that. In a near significant reduction and the depression, anxiety and stress scale. Also reductions in morning cortisol testosterone levels increased in males. So you and I didn’t mention that but. Stress.Those surprise stress is going to negatively affect your hormones too. Stress is going to reduce testosterone. That’s going to affect your sex drive. So when you see that Viagra is being passed out like candy, now you wonder what all’s going into the stress is a big component.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, we just saw a major study come out last month looking at the effectiveness of antidepressants. And they’re showed to be, you know, no long term benefit with a lot of these antidepressants. I think that was a Lancet study out of the UK and so we kind of look at a lot of the antidepressants, we look at the mechanism that’s happening there. You know, we know there’s data on things like tryptophan and five HTP and B6 helping. So there’s definitely like, there definitely is like a depletion theory where people are chronically stressed and then as they are stressed, they do deplete their serotonin, they deplete their dopamine. We see that in organic acid test. But the medications for that are blocking these reuptake ports, trying to accumulate more serotonin in between the synapses may not be the right school of thought. And there are a lot of doctors and people and pharmacologists looking in the direction of just brain inflammation. And so everything we do in functional medicine is about reducing inflammation. So when we give this nutrient with this herb we’re doing so many things in the background, diet and lifestyle wise to reduce inflammation. There’s so many variables we’re moving so it’s so hard in functional medicine world to do a double-blind placebo control trial because in those trials you have to typically control a variable or two at once. If you control 10 variables at once, 12 variables, there’s just too many things moving in one Direction to know which one was the deal breaker and like in this one, study over here. I’ll show you. Where they look at tyrosine supplementation. And or stress for cognitive demands. I’m going to pull this trial up here. So this is interesting right here. And this is kind of why we like to test and not guess, right, assessing over guessing. So they looked at dopamine, tyrosine which is a building block for dopamine, right. It goes, it goes phenylalanine and tyrosine and then it goes L DOPA dopamine and then under stressed dopamine can get converted to norepinephrine.Then you actually use a lot of sulfur. From dopamine to norepinephrine. But they talked over here that the potential of using TYR supplementation to treat clinical disorder seems limited and benefits. But then it talks about down here tyrosine does seem to effectively enhance cognitive performance particularly in short term stressful and/or cognitively demanding situations, we conclude tyrosine is an effective enhancer of cognitive function, but only when neurotransmitter function is intact and dopamine or norepinephrine is temporary or depleted. So if we have some functional deficiencies and we may see that based on a stress profile or you know functionally, we may see it on a cortisol rhythm test and we may see it with an organic acid panel, looking at vanilmandelate, looking at Homovanillate and we may see some of these markers either go overly high or overly low, which shows that there’s some significant depletion going on here. And so you can see that this the nutrient tyrosine tend to work better when people actually had a depletion.
Evan Brand: Well, you made me think of something and we’ve probably talked about this before, but how crazy is it to think about trying to do a proper, supposedly double-blind placebo-controlled study? Because, think of Sally who woke up and had a GMO Gluten bagel with vegetable oil. Instead of real butter for breakfast, she takes the antidepressant. Or she takes the herb and they’ve got Johnny over here who had a grass fed rib eye for breakfast and he took the same medication. They’re going to get totally freaking different results. So you and I were talking about this before we hit record, but it’s so hard to actually look at and appreciate a study that’s going to give you that outcome because like what time do they go to bed? Are they all going to bed at 10:00 PM or Sally staying up till 2:00 AM? No wonder she didn’t get relief from the antidepressant or the antidepressant herb or whatever. So it’s like, my God, when you really break apart using the functional medicine lens, you break apart the sleep, the stress, the diet, the family relationships, like how many of those people are going through a divorce during the study? Those are the seven people that didn’t get relief from depression, right? So it’s very difficult. And I think that’s why you and I can look at these studies and there’s other people that will talk about studies on podcast, but the reality is when you have the clinical experience that would, that’s what makes the difference because we’re coaching people through some of the lifestyle measures, the sleep, the nutrition, the water, we’re not just throwing the herb and saying good luck. It’s just not going to be that effective.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also like we just mentioned earlier. We got a test, right? We don’t wanna guess, we want to assess. And This is why someone may have, you know, no experience with this supplement and say it’s it’s joke it’s it’s snake oil and someone’s like no i had a really great experience because there’s one you may Had a really great experience because there’s one you may not need that nutrient as much if you need something more than someone else, right? Then you may have a better benefit, but also a lot of nutrients work synergistically, right? So this one study looks at magnesium with B6 and they found that this study that, right here, many civilizations regard subjects with severe extreme stress study provides clinical support for the greater benefit of magnesium combined with B6. So both groups did well. They had a magnesium group and a magnesium with B6 and they found the magnesium with B6 actually did better and so a lot of nutrients are synergistic. I mean, I think anyone, most people will benefit from magnesium just because a large percent of the population are depleted in it. Our food supply becomes less and less on it. It’s one of those core nutrients it’s hard to get enough of. So I think it can’t hurt to ever take some of these core nutrients, but a lot of these nutrients are synergistic and so magnesium is very important for stress and relaxation. But B6 also helps with, it’s an important cofactor for all of your brain chemicals to work. Very important cofactor and it helps a lot of your neurotransmitters like serotonin and GABA and dopamine and adrenaline all work and convert in the brain. So it’s important that you can’t just ever rely on one nutrient, you got to look at the whole thing and it’s always better to assess versus guests too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and when you click on the podcast and it says helping with stress or feeling overwhelmed, you may think of us talking about meditation and float tanks and scheduling massages and getting manicures and pedicures.And take it a vacation and taking Fridays off and hugging your kids more and having more sex. All those things are great too. But we’re really trying to get geeky here with you guys, because most people that come to us, as you mentioned, they’ve already been to 5 10-15 20. They done the massage and they’ve been through the talk therapy and they’ve been to so many other practitioners. They need the nitty gritty granular stuff like this. It’s really going to get them better. So if you guys are listening for the lifestyle stuff, we try to integrate that and that is important, but ultimately most people are doing a lot of that, and they’ve tried and they’re still suffering. Let me pull something up on Rhodiola. This is pretty cool. I told you years ago how Rhodiola changed my life. And this is a paper that just concludes that Rhodiola is a very effective potent herb for treating mild to moderate depression. And we’re talking in six weeks. So this is not a long thing. Like people think it’s gonna take years and years and years.I’m not saying that if you’ve got mold, you won’t still be depressed. If you’ve got Lyme, you’re still going to be depressed like that. That can happen. But what if I can just give you a tool, which is gonna boost you. Let’s say it reduces your depression by 30%, enough for you to get back into the gym. And now you’re exercising. Now you get the natural endorphin boost, and then you feel more confidence. Now you go on a date with this woman you’ve been wanting to go on a date with, and now you have more fun and oxytocin cause your bonding. But at this this whole snowball effect happened all because I just gave you this herb to pull you out of a dark place. So that’s really what we’re trying to do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So we talked about some of the Earth, some of the nutrients, some of our big favorite ones. Of course, movement is going to be helpful. Again, you got to figure out where your level is. If you’re chronically inflamed, movement maybe too much, too stressful and puts you in a more catabolic place because you’re breaking down tissue. Figure out where you’re at if you’re at a good place.You can lift some weights, do a little bit of interval sprinting, whether it’s a walks, walk, run, walk, Sprint, you can do a rower. We like rowers because of, you know, the extension and also there’s less impact on the joint. So if you’re already inflamed, you’re not going to create more inflammation. You can start with some bands or some gentle lifting of weights to kinda you know find that 8 to 12 you know rep 8 to 12 you know, Rep movement, that’s going to give you a good muscle breakdown, give you a little soreness. That’s good. You know, getting 10,000 steps today, these are all simple strategies. Strategies. We don’t have to overthink it. You don’t need to super crazy customized plan out of the gates. Just get some good movement. Make sure you’re, you have good form. If you’re not sure, you can always start with walking or yoga or something more gentle and you can always check out some YouTube videos and do some band work or some cable work or I like the new tonal that’s another good at home device for lifting is really good so you know just get get enough movement in there to get your muscles a little bit sore.
Evan Brand: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got my roll machine right here. I just try to put it on this heavy of a setting as I feel confident with it’s not gonna injure me where I can still go. And I almost use it like a sprinting device. I don’t necessarily just go slow and steady, I try to just kind of sharp relatively fast. Kind of like a Sprint row movement and I tell you it, it can be depleting, but man, I’ve heard many people talk about this, like when you want to get out of your mind with your ruminating, if you’re worried, if you’re thinking negative, you’re going through all these bad things in your life and bad symptoms and all. I’m so, you do these pity parties for yourself when you’re exercising physically. It almost shuts that brain off completely to where you could just focus on like how hard this exercise, how hard this movement is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% great 100% now outside of the gates here right? There could be some hidden issues that were not addressing and you have to see a good functional medicine provider over there could be you may need to look at your adrenals. Your adrenals could be more depleted like that patient Evan just show where they have significant kind of reverse cortisol pattern. It’s good to know your adrenal pattern because if you have chronic issues, you want to know, hey, this is where I’m at one it gives you a timeline of how long it may take to heal that person may look at look like a 6 to 12 month journey on that. Also it gives you the ability to have, you know, realistic expectations, good timeline, also something like that. We’d probably wanna do a retest on someone that’s that out of balance to make sure they’re back in balance, but also want to look at hidden stressors that could be behind that, whether it’s mold, whether it’s pests, whether it’s, you know, toxicity issues that aren’t being addressed. Whether it’s gut issues we talked about, a lot of these nutrients have to get eaten, so for our diets poor there’s a problem. But also what if it’s good now but we’re not breaking down and absorbing it? That’s where we’d have to do deeper testing on the functional medicine side to see how you’re doing digestive wise with HCL and enzymes. See if there’s any gut bug issues.And then we can also do other intracellular nutrient tasks for their organic acids or nutrients, look at other kind of intercellular nutrients. So there could be some other hidden stressors going on there. I always say just kind of start from the ground and work your way up, start with the low hanging fruit. Keep it simple because that provides a good foundation anyway, but you know if you have chronic issues, you definitely want to reach out to someone like Evan evanbrand.com or someone like myself,Doctor J justinhealth.com for the deeper issues and we’ll put links down below so y’all can reach out. Evan, anything else you want to add before we wrap things up?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I think for people that are, in a short term, acute stress, they have to travel for a wedding. They’re maybe going on a honeymoon. Sounds fun, could be stressful. Travel, new food, new water supply, their new parents. They’ve got small children, those are situations where you may come in, not small children cause those are long term stress, you and I can attest to that but you know, honeymoon, you know, new marriage, whatever. So, so those acute stressors, you could probably do some of these formulas whether it’s Tongkat or Magnolia or Ashwagandha,Rhodiola, holy Basil, there’s many, many options. Extra magnesium, B6, GABA, taurine and acetone. These things are great, but if you have been stressed and feeling overwhelmed for 1,2,3,5,10,20,25 years and beyond, you really don’t just want to go try to get rhodiola and get your way out of it. It’s not going to happen. I’ve tried. I took so many supplements when I was sick and it helped me to stay alive and it helped me to continue to work and be up on my feet but.I knew that ultimately I was missing something, and it wasn’t until I really cleared the parasite, cleared the H pylori, my energy started to come up like I was on Rhodiola while I had parasites.I was still tired. I was less tired, but I was still tired. And I think the problem is like naturopathic medicine. So naturopaths specifically, they may come in and instead of, you know, quartet for cortisol, they give you licorice and ashwagandha, which is great, but then it stops there. So you really have to ask the question why? Why did I get myself into this? How did I get into this? Was this the bad relationship? The moldy apartment? The college dorm? That got me sick? And I think people need to just ask why a few more times. So, like, I’m tired. OK, here’s rhodiola. But it could be. Hey, I’m tired. Well, why are you tired? Well, because I’m stressed. Why are you stressed? Because I’m in a bad relationship. OK? So we need to work on that. And if people keep asking why, usually you’re going to uncover some stuff. And I just encourage people, don’t be afraid, to look in those dark spots. Don’t, don’t be afraid to look in those corners where there’s some cobwebs of things that you’ve been emotionally shoving away, as you mentioned, dusting in a way or putting it under the carpet. Yeah, eventually those things are going to weigh you down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, someone in the chat talked about a Epstein barr virus kind of plummeting their energy recently. Well, when it comes to Epstein Barr and some of these viruses like Epstein-barr said cytomegalovirus, it’s very rarely the virus just comes out of blue, comes out of the blue and just knocks you on your pot, right. Usually there’s some level of depletion going on and it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back and so. There’s different supports we can do to address viral issues, whether it’s silver or Monolaurin or Rishi, right? Different herbs and nutrients cats claw. But you’ve got to look at how did your body, how did your immune system become so compromised and susceptible to it. And you tend to have to work backwards and fix all of those issues that led up to this point. It’s very rarely something just coming out of the blue and doing all of it. It’s usually a level of susceptibility that you incurred and then this virus came in. So you have to really address everything, never just one thing.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ve seen that too, and I’ve seen it with a lot of things that are probably still controversial on YouTube, but we’ve seen things that people put in their bodies that all of a sudden reactivate Epstein Barr and other problems. We’ve seen this in celebrities, we’ve seen this in clients. So yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. But guys, we want to give you actionable information. A lot of people out there, it’s just like sales, sales, sales, market, market leave you kind of hanging. I want everyone to kind of listen and be like, all right, here’s some foundational things. When we’re talking and doing a long podcast, it’s super easy to get overwhelmed. So just pick one or two things, execute, execute, execute action, action, action. And then if you’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed that you want to take next steps, you have Evan and I for resources. It’s all about educating. It’s all about empowerment. So we’ll put links down below where you guys can reach out and work on taking the next steps. But worst case, just continue to take action. We’re here to help.
Evan Brand: Absolutely. So go take a bath, do your lavender, your Epsom salt and all that. Get your mind right. But then ultimately you gotta figure out what’s under the hood.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Very good. Evan, wait. Great chatting with you man. Glad we’re back in the saddle.
Evan Brand: You too. Take it easy. Talk to you soon, brother. Take care everyone. Bye now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye y’all.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/how-to-deal-with-stress-and-feeling-overwhelmed-podcast-376
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The Root Causes of Anxiety – A Functional Medicine Approach | Podcast #370
Conventional medicine labels anxiety as a neurotransmitter imbalance and relies on pharmaceutical drugs to dampen the symptoms. Although, prescription medications can be a helpful and even necessary tool in periods of overwhelming anxiety. But we have so many more tools at our disposal than just medications!
Dr. J and Evan explain that they recognize that anxiety is often the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” in functional medicine. It’s the clear and present warning that something is going on below the surface that needs our attention. Our current circumstances may have been the breaking point, but the anxiety manifests in underlying issues. That’s why rectifying these issues is necessary to make anxiety more manageable or even eliminate it!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:06 – Acute and Chronic Stress
4:06 – Amino Acids and Herbs
11:24 – Gut Issues
16:26 – Functional Medicine Approach
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the root causes of anxiety, a functional medicine approach, and how to get to the root cause. Really excited about this topic. We see many functional medicine patients with these exact issues and we always want to get to the root cause of why that is so. Evan, how are we doing man?
Evan Brand: I’m doing good. You know the anxiety story for you and I talking about anxiety goes back literally eight years. It would have been late 2014 when I was in my luxury apartment in Austin and I was calling you and I was saying, “dude, I can’t stop this”. My heart is pounding. I’m freaking out. What the heck is going on and you said, “man, if you go to the emergency room, all they’re gonna do is they’re gonna give you some sort of anxiety medication. So why don’t you go and take about a gram of magnesium and see what happens.” And so, that’s what I did. I think I might have had some pharma GABA or some other tools on hand, maybe some passion flower and luckily, I calmed it down but little did I know back then that I had some of the big root causes of anxiety that were unresolved which included mold toxicity, Lyme, Bartonella, some of these tick-borne infections that drive up the nervous system, unfortunately. Now, knock on wood, anxiety’s been a minimal to non-existent part of my life and It’s incredibly freeing because anxiety can be so debilitating that people become housebound or they become afraid to travel, they become afraid to go on planes. They become afraid to seek the raise at their job. They just want to live in this little cocoon because they’re so afraid and anxiety is also very debilitating for children too. It affects their confidence and their self-esteem and their motivation for school and how they get bullied and so, I mean, we could do an hour on this but think just to open this thing up with a bang, I would say that infections are a big driver of anxiety so whatever that is a tick-borne infection like a Bartonella, Babesia, Lyme situation or gut infections like we’ve talked about a thousand times in the last 10 years together which is parasites, bacterial overgrowth, worms, Candida, anything that’s gonna release a toxin or aggravate the immune system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100%. So anytime you look at anxiety, you always have to get to the root cause, right? Obviously, if it’s unresolved emotional stress, your body is designed to create anxiety for a certain situation, like if you, I don’t know, if you have lived in a forest across the street and there are bears, there should be a healthy amount of anxiety so you know, don’t leave food out and you’re just a little bit more careful with your habits so you don’t get attacked by a bear, right? There’s a healthy bit of anxiety there which is good to kind of keep you on edge so you are alert and you make good decisions. We’re talking about things that are, you know, unhealthy amounts of anxiety where you don’t have those types of emotional stressors, right? Obviously, if those emotional stressors are there, kind of take inventory of them and figure out what that corrective action is you need to kind of close the anxiety loop. I always say close the anxiety loop. What is that action? You have to take that allows you to feel confident that you are not ignoring the reason why there is anxiety there. If you did that, great, awesome. Check that off your list. The next thing is like you mentioned, obviously, any type of chronic stress or acute stress can create anxiety, right? And so, chronic and acute stressors do different things to your body. They’re going to cause B vitamins to get recycled and used up at a higher rate. They’re gonna cause magnesium to get used up at a higher rate. They’re gonna put you in a fight or flight position, where your body goes into fight or flight and then that’s gonna cause increases of cortisol, increases of adrenaline and it’s gonna cause your brain to get hyperactive and obviously at the same time it’s gonna affect digestion too when you’re in fight or flight. It’s gonna decrease your body’s ability to make stomach acid and enzymes and it makes it harder for you to break down your food. And so, and then of course, the more stressed you are, now you’re gonna start craving more processed foods that increase dopamine and increase a lot of those, uh, feel-good brain chemicals to buffer that but so, I always look at like what’s the constructive vehicle to fix this, what’s the destructive vehicle. Destructive vehicle feels good at the moment but creates problems down the road. Constructive helps at the moment. May not, maybe not quite as fast but then actually gets to the root cause over time. And so, some of our constructive vehicles like you already mentioned, magnesium, right? Theanine, right? B6, B5, right? And I always look at nutrients first, like nutrients are in the hierarchy before herbs so nutrients first and then, in the hierarchy coming down would be herbs, Ashwagandha, passion flower, Valerian. Those things are nice herbs that kind of activate and stimulate GABA. So, GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. So, it’s the brake pedal on the nervous system. So, think of the gas pedal as adrenaline, as cortisol. That’s the fight or flight nervous system response and the gas pedal is gonna be GABA and the things that are gonna help with GABA are gonna be Taurine, Theanine, GABA in and of itself. And then on the herbal side, things like Ashwagandha have multi-adaptogenic effects. They can increase cortisol and increase stimulation when things are too low but they can also tamp it down when it’s too high. I like my wife. She was really stressed the other day. We are getting our kids out for an easter party and she’s like, “you have something to give me? I am so stressed.” And I’m like, “here you go”. And I gave her a bunch of GABA, Taurine, and Theanine and magnesium, some B5 and vitamin C and some Ashwagandha and she looked at me like two hours later, she’s like, “what the heck did you give me. I’m on cloud 9.” I’m like, yeah, you know that, the better living through chemistry right there.
Evan Brand: That’s great. Yeah, and motherwort. I love motherwort too. It’s great for the anxiety when you’re having, like, heart palpitations, blood pressure type issues as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hyperthyroid too. They use it on hyperthyroid, as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah. That makes sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Too high thyroid, it can also be. It can help dampen that down, as well, which is nice.
Evan Brand: It’s great for grief too so like the cool thing about certain herbs is they can be an emotionally calming tool but they can be a nervous system calming tool too. So, like, as you mentioned, there could be an emotional thing like a bad boss, a bad spouse, a bully. You know that type of emotional anxiety driver but it could be a chemical driver too, meaning like a toxin driving the nervous system to be ramped up. Also, we should talk about blood sugar. I know we’ve done podcasts on this before but you know there’s a big impact on issues with blood sugar. Thank the Lord, my blood sugar is so good now, I could eat dinner at five and not eat till 1pm the next day and I’m stable, like, I can fast for extended periods of time as needed and I don’t have any issue but however when my gut was a wreck which I want people to pay special attention to, if your digestive system is compromised, you’re not gonna be tolerating fasting that well because you’re already so likely nutrient deprived because of the malabsorption due to the infection. So, years ago when I tried doing this type of fast, I would have major anxiety and that’s low hanging fruit so do what you got to do but you got to get your gut tested and then fix the infection first.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, just kind of looking at a bunch of different things. So, on the emotional side, right? If it’s unresolved emotional trauma that’s creating anxiety, you know, someone wrote about DNRS, that’s great. You know, this NLP, where you kind of visualize a stop sign or something to kind of do a pattern interrupt. That’s excellent. EFT, EMDR with eye movement or different tapping on meridian points to kind of dampen down that sympathetic nervous system response. And again, these are gonna be good, you know, uh, more chronic issues. Yeah. If it is an acute issue, you know, a lot of times, just get to the root underlying issue where that issue is acute.
Evan Brand: I was on a plane one time and the turbulence was so bad and I started tapping on the plane. That really helped. I’m like okay. Even though it feels like this plane is about to crash, I love and accept myself and I’m like okay that’s fine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Especially things like that. You don’t have control, right? There’s nothing you can do outside of just sitting there and getting through it. And so, it’s better when those things are kind of the case but you know, it’s kind of like, I’m just trying to think of you know an example, it’s kind of like, you go upstairs and don’t turn the alarm on for the house or like maybe did I leave the front door unlocked, right? And so, there’s a natural bit of anxiety. You start going down to bed and that little bit of anxiety kind of creeps in, you’re like, I’m not gonna be able to get to sleep fast if I don’t at least just check on the front door, right? So, let me make, oh good, it’s locked. Oh good, the alarm is on. Good. Now, that anxiety can go down because it’s there for a reason, right? So, if there’s a root cause, act on it, right? If there’s isn’t a root cause, right, but it’s more emotional, you can do some of the tapping and you can work with a practitioner to get to the root cause on that and then of course having better biochemistry will get will make every bit of anxiety better because you’ll be able to adapt to it and deal with it better. And so, of course, like we already talked about with cortisol, chronically high levels of cortisol and adrenaline are gonna be big so you have to get to the reason, the root cause why. And again, foods could be a reason why like gluten, too much processed sugar that can drive up that anxiety. Again, you already mentioned blood sugar fluctuations. If you’re on this reactive hypoglycemia roller coaster ride where blood sugar goes up because you ate too much processed carbohydrate, refined foods, junkie, vegetable oil, omega-6 fats. Blood sugars up and then it can crash right back down. The crashing is where you tend to get a lot of adrenaline cortisol stimulation and on the way up, you get lots of insulin so you get this insulin-cortisol-adrenaline kind of tug of war happening and that can be very stressful on the body. And then, of course, if your blood sugar is chronically high and you’re making tons of insulin that can also be a problem too. High levels of insulin can cause all kinds of problems with hormones, especially in women, it can cause issues with ovarian cysts and testosterone problems. And then, high levels of blood sugar deplete a lot of your B vitamins and magnesium. And so, if we have poor levels of B vitamin and B6 and B5 and B1 and B2 and B3 and folate and B12 and magnesium is depleted, that’s gonna cause more stress and more cortisol issues and it’ll be harder for you to deal with and adapt to that.
Evan Brand: And I would say, if you have anxiety longer than the week, I would almost consider that chronic. I mean, it’s crazy to me, how many people you have and I’ve talked to over the years who’ve had anxiety for a decade or longer and sometimes as one person commented that anxiety and OCD together is terrible. A lot of times OCD does come hand in hand with anxiety. We’ve done podcasts specifically about amino acid therapy and we use amino acid therapy in our clinics but if you have OCD, anxiety, low self-esteem, worry, negativity, depression, disturbed sleep, those are all symptoms of low serotonin. So, what you need to do is to get an organic acid test so we can measure this and look at the brain chemistry because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing. So, when you’re listening to this conversation about anxiety, I swear to you, you’re never gonna find a psychiatrist that’s gonna say, “hey, maybe we need to run an organic acids test, maybe you have low brain chemistry because you have bacterial overgrowth. So, we’re also gonna run a stool test. If they’re out there, send them our way, we’ll do a podcast with them but I doubt your psychiatrist is ever gonna consider running functional medicine testing on you to investigate this. I don’t care if you do lorazepam or the klonopin or whatever. It’s not the root cause and it’s gonna dig you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Any benzo
Evan Brand: Yeah. Any benzo is gonna dig you further in the hole because now you’ve got this dependency issue and now you’ve got his issue of withdrawal and I don’t know if you’ve read some of the stories on this but my God if people try to acutely stop those benzodiazepines, there’s major major major side effects. So, it’s just not around
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Especially, if you’re on doses, you know, above one milligram or so on a benzo, it can be harder to get off and sometimes the taper can be, you know, six months to a year coming off of it. If you’ve been on it for a while or been on a higher dose. Yeah, you need to kind of do a slower type of taper for sure.
Evan Brand: And there’s so much, I mean, just think of how many millions. I didn’t look at the numbers here but how many millions of people are on prescription anxiety medication and they never ever get to the root cause. It’s so sad to think about someone that’s been on like a Lorazepam or another benzo for 20 years and they’ve never once asked about the gut. The question came in, how does dysbiosis cause anxiety. What are the mechanisms? Well, I think, one, right out of the gates is gut inflammation. Number two would be nutrient malabsorption because as you mentioned, a lot of these B vitamins are necessary for many processes in the body including energy production so sometimes you have anxiety and chronic fatigue and that sucks too because now you’re too tired but you’re anxious so that’s not a fun recipe either. What else would you say about the gut anxiety connection?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, so anytime you have chronic gut inflammation whether it’s from food, whether it’s antibiotics. Antibiotics are creating rebound yeast or bacterial overgrowth. We could put H. pylori in that category, and other infections, as well. That’s a one you and I already mentioned, creates malabsorption just from indigestion, right? Not enough enzymes, not enough acids, not absorbing things well. Two, you’re gonna have exogenous production of lipopolysaccharides which in and of itself are a toxin, right? They’re produced, they’re part of the gram-negative bacteria in the gut and they’re stressful on the liver and there’s also can go to the blood-brain barrier. And when they’re in the brain, they can create mood and anxiety issues as well. So yeah, lipopolysaccharides, you could have acetaldehyde and mycotoxins from fungus. You could have issues with the parasites producing their own type of internal toxins for sure. Of course, your body also produces through healthy gut bacteria, a fermentation process to make its own B vitamins, vitamin K. Those kinds of things. So, if we have dysbiosis, we typically are gonna have low levels of beneficial bacteria so we don’t have that good endogenous production behind it. And then, of course, that’s gonna over activate our immune system. So now, we have all these toxins kind of slipping through our bloodstream. We have undigested food particles, getting through our bloodstream. Now, our immune system starts becoming hyperactive and that can suck up energy. That can suck up resources. So, there’s studies on for instance H. pylori creating mental health issues, mental, emotional issues, depression and anxiety partly because of the lipopolysaccharides and endotoxins are the same thing by the way. LPS or endotoxins and obviously nutrient absorption problems too.
Evan Brand: Man, when I had H. pylori, I was super anxious. I don’t know if I was depressed as much but I was definitely anxious and you remember how skinny I got, I mean, I lost so much weight too. So, a lot of people, you know, they look at anxiety on the surface right. And everyone looks anxiety is just like this mental thing and you just need to watch some hoorah motivational video and just get over your fears and that I was like no anxiety goes way deeper than that. You just eloquently illustrated this, the aldehydes from the yeast and the fungus toxins and the bacterial toxins and the parasitic toxins and the mycotoxins. You guys, this anxiety is not in your freaking head. It’s not. It may manifest in your head but the root cause is not in your head unless you’re describing like, this toxin getting across the blood-brain-barrier but beyond that, the gut I would say is the biggest driver of anxiety. I’d say, if I had to pick one place to look, it would be the gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So, when we look at this, what’s kind of the hierarchy of addressing this? So, of course, you fix the foods, right? Because the foods are one. You’re gonna decrease inflammation from the foods. And the inflammation in the foods is gonna cause gut permeability so you cut out the gluten, the dairy, the processed refined sugars and flours, the junky omega-6. You focus on good high-quality animal-based fats, good healthy proteins, you know, more carbohydrate from fruit and starch, especially if there’s blood sugar issues and then from there, then you work on digesting it. So, make sure enzymes and acids and good digestion are there. Get your gut looked at especially if there’s any type of chronic bloating or motility issues or indigestion, unadjusted food in your stool, diarrhea, then you get your gut looked at and of course if this issue is more chronic, you want to look at your stress handling system so the interplay sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system in your body and your nervous system is your adrenals and so you can get your adrenals looked at cortisol rhythm wise, you can do a cortisol panel. Look at your cortisol in the morning and throughout the day. Make sure it’s not too high or it’s reversed. On a good organic acid test, we can look at neurotransmitters like Vanilmandelate which looks at adrenaline. We can get Homovanillate which looks at dopamine, right? We can get the DOPA which looks at dopamine. We could also get 5-hydroxyindoleacytate to look at serotonin and then of course we can look at B6 like a kind of urenate or xanthurenate, right? We can look at brain inflammation markers like picolinate and quinolinate so there’s inflammation in the brain that gives us more indications. We can look at oxidative stress markers like 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine. There are good markers out there to look at these different things to give us a window of what’s happening so you know, we work on the food, work on the lifestyle, sleep. Make sure we’re digesting and breaking things down. Look at the nutrient deficiencies, look at the gut, look at the infection, look at the digestion and then of course, you know, we can always branch out and look at mold or mycotoxins or heavy metals or more toxic burdens down the road. That’s the foundation first and then I would say on top of that, if there’s any type of chronic pattern where there’s an emotional trauma involved that’s more unresolved definitely bring in a good practitioner, you know with some tools in their tool bag of NLP or EFT or EMDR or hypnosis. Anything that you want techniques to get into the subconscious but again the healthier you are the better the emotional stuff is to resolve so if you’re doing EMDR and EFT and NLP and you’re eating processed food and crap, it can still work, but it’s gonna be better when your brain chemistry is healthier.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah. Amen. Well, think about all the people that are in talk therapy and then they go and they go eat a subway sandwich for lunch, thinking that they’re doing themselves a good favor by eating turkey on wheat bread with processed cheese and then they get mayonnaise or sweet and sour sauce on it or whatever the heck they’re doing and then they feel like crap, I mean.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m not a big fan of talk therapy in the long term. I think, talk therapy is good did you kind of just consciously process something like how did this happen maybe you’re learning some tools to enter into your life from a habit standpoint to fix whatever that issue was but then most of that trauma sits in the subconscious area of the brain which is where 90% of all your thoughts are subconscious and so that’s where you want some of these techniques like we talked about but I think talk therapy is good to acutely process what you’ve observed whatever your experiences are and then talk about, hey what can you do, you know, as a person today as an adult today, um, you know, from a habit standpoint to address it but then after that then you gotta, you know, if you’re in talk therapy months and months later and you’re still just ruminating over the same thing then it’s a subconscious thing you got to work on next.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and look, don’t let me talk people out of doing it. I’m not trying to do that but what I’m saying is I’ve had people that said, “oh yeah, I’ve been with this therapist for 3 years and I meet with them every week or every other week”. And I’m like, “okay and what do you do with this therapist?” “We talked.”, “Okay and what else do you do?” That’s it. It’s talk therapy and I go, okay, you’ve been doing talk therapy every week or every two weeks for 3 years and you still have anxiety that’s this bad. We got to dig deeper. So, like I said, there’s a role for that but it’s not gonna get you out of the woods. The person who commented about the dysbiosis and anxiety question, they also commented in here said they did have a stool test that showed H. pylori. They have extremely high Morganella which is one of those bacteria we’ve talked about and calprotectin which is gut inflammation over a thousand. Fatigue and anxiety were the main symptoms. We see this everyday all day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Exactly. I’m familiar with that case for sure. And inflammation in the gut can definitely create those types of issues and get to the root cause of it too. And then, someone writes in, about Accutane too, I mean, this is super common if you get into the dermatology world. I mean, dermatologists, they either cut something. They burn it off with a laser. They freeze it off or they use some type of antibiotic, topical or internal or they use some kind of like, synthetic vitamin A. That’s it. That’s the dermatology world you know in a nutshell and they tend to not get to the root, you know, we’re talking like more chronic acne, chronic skin stuff. They tend to not ever get to the root cause of how or why that’s even there. Diet, sugars, junky, omega-6, poor digestion, poor fats, poor proteins. They don’t really get to the root cause of what that is and so, they recommend synthetic vitamin A, which is Accutane, which again, will decrease the amount of oil produced by your sebaceous glands which can be helpful in the short run if they’re producing too much oil but they can create chronic skin and eye dryness in the long term and they’re not even getting to the reason why your skin’s producing too much oil to begin with. Usually, it’s too much insulin. Insulin is a huge driving factor of excess oil and then of course, you have different food allergens, gluten, dairy, too much sugar. That can also cause a lot of problems with the skin cells.
Evan Brand: And not to mention, the connection between people that have anxiety and acne. Guess what, they’re both linked to the gut. So, if you have acne and anxiety, you gotta investigate your gut. Please. Please. Please.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100%. And again, you know, outside of that, you know, we look at different toxins down the road. If we look at heavy metals, there’s different tests. We can look at, to do a challenge test on your metals with a DMPS or some kind of a challenge agent. We can definitely look at mold if there’s mold in the environment that’s important to look at. And again, if you’re in an environment where you feel better leaving that environment then there could be some mold in there, especially, if a history of water damage that was unresolved, definitely want to get your mold looked at or just your home looked at too, especially if it’s something that the whole family is dealing with just get the home looked at to start. It’s usually cheaper and more effective out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah. well said. And, heavy metals too. I’m glad you brought that up. You know, mercury and other heavy metals that can stimulate the nervous system and cause issues. So, if you have a bunch of silver fillings in your mouth, you’ve got to consider that. May not be your number one smoking gun, sometimes it is but heavy metals are a big problem and even detox too can make people feel too sick. I mean, you and I have seen this many times. Other practitioners that have handled people before they come to us or they’ve done something too aggressively with chelation or other detox methods and then they’ve ended up worse. So, there’s like a tight rope and that’s where the art of medicine comes in. Everything is not just like cookie cutters. So, too much is a problem. Too little is a problem and that depends on gut and detox and beta glucuronidase and liver and all of it. So, like if your friend got better and you tried what your friend did and you didn’t do well, that might not be your right protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Exactly. And then, just to kind of highlight the nutrients in, compared to talk therapy, Julia Ross is out there. She’s like a family therapist person but she’s done a lot of books on amino acids and diet and she had different clients that she used to use talk therapy for years and years and years and said, “hey, let me just try adding in some amino acid therapy to their protocol and let’s see how they do with their talk therapy when we add in the amino acids”. She started to do that and then these patients would come the next week and they’d be like, “Yeah, just, I’m just good. I just don’t even feel the need to talk about it. I’m over it”. And it’s like wow so it’s like it gives people the equipment to kind of, like, process these issues and again I think talk therapy acutely may be fine. It’s just when you’re talking about the same thing for years and years and years, you’re probably not getting to the root cause, right? This is probably just covering up something else, you know. Now, I think it’s better than being on a drug, right? So, if it’s helpful and you don’t need a drug that’s great but, in the end, you know, if you can do some of these nutritional things along with it, you may find that you can just deal with the issues better you know I, the analogy I get patients is, try dealing with difficult problems around the home and not having slept for a couple nights. You’re gonna lose your patience with your wife with your kids. You’re not gonna be able to think right, you’ll be foggy, get some good night sleep and then wake up and deal with the problem. It’s like you’re gonna be way more equipped to deal with it. I think that’s kind of how brain chemistry works when you’re dealing with these stressors.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I remember in that book too, talking about how, like, amino acids were administered, right? At the beginning of a session and then the people would just immediately like, smile or loosen up or relax and so it’s amazing no matter how much you talk. Long story short, I know we’ve beat the drum on this for a minute but last thing, no matter how much you talk. It’s never gonna change your levels of serotonin just by talking it out. If you have a gut problem that’s affecting your nutrient absorption which is affecting the tryptophan and the conversion with the B6 over to 5HTP and then over to serotonin and then to melatonin so sleep issues too. So skin, sleep, anxiety, they’re all connected depression. We’ve already talked about that. This person here’s putting a bunch of question marks like they’re mad at us. What is the connection between Accutane and depression?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s just a side effect. It’s a side effect of the drug.
Evan Brand: It could be a side effect. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Just the side effects of the drug. That’s all it is. Yeah. So certain drugs, you know, are gonna have side effects. Ibuprofen can cause ulcers and liver issues, right? Just a drug side effect.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well, we got to wrap this thing up. But if you need help clinically, you can feel free to reach out. We work with people around the world. We send these functional medicine labs to your door. We have an incredible logistical team on both sides where it’s incredible. We can help people in literally every part of the globe where people like us don’t exist or maybe they do but we’re better. So, if you need help, you can reach out directly to Dr. J, that’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani at justinhealth.com for consults or me, Evan Brand at evanbrand.com. We’re happy to help. You guys, don’t give up. We’ve been through it. We are warriors ourselves and we’ve worked on our health for years and we love what we do and we love helping people and there’s so much possibility when you can beat an issue like anxiety. So, like I said in the beginning, whether it’s seeking that raise, that new promotion, that new job, that new spouse, you know, that partner, that relationship that you want to grow but you can’t because you’re held back by anxiety. This is a huge huge problem and you can overcome this. So please don’t give up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. If you guys enjoyed it too, look down below, you’ll see a little link where you can write us a review. We appreciate the review and if, also, it’s benefiting you, feel free to share with family and friends and there’ll be links where you can reach out to us directly to get that extra bit of help. All right guys, have a phenomenal day. Take care. Bye everyone.
Evan Brand: Bye-bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
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Top 5 Reasons You Are Losing Muscle Mass | Podcast #369
Muscles are essential to everyday movements, and if you noticeably lose muscle mass — especially without knowing why — it can be alarming. Losing some muscle mass is normal as you age. However, losing muscle mass quickly or atrophy, especially in the context of other symptoms, can indicate an underlying illness.
In this video, Dr. J and Evan discuss the top reasons you lose muscle mass aside from aging. Preventing a loss of muscle mass can also be achieved by exercising regularly (such as functional strength training) in conjunction with a balanced food template of lean meats and proteins, fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, and whole grains.
However, if the loss is due to an underlying illness, it must also be addressed and mindfully managed with a trusted healthcare professional or your functional medicine doctor.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:33 – Functional movements
3:37 – Infections
7:21 – Vegan-vegetarian
9:35 – Autoimmune digestive disorders
12:21 – Hormones
15:06 – Types of muscle building
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today, we’re gonna be chatting about the top five reasons you are losing muscle mass. This is really important. All right. If you’re losing muscle mass, it’s gonna be essentially an all-cause predictor of mortality, increased mortality. So, we gotta make sure that we’re keeping our muscle mass and or improving our muscle, especially as we get older, we need good muscle to support and stabilize our body so we don’t get hurt, we don’t slip, we don’t fall, we don’t get injured. We don’t slip a disc so to speak. So, we have to make sure that we are keeping our muscles strong and functional. Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Doing really good. I talked with a guy actually this morning where his mother, due to age and related muscle loss, fell, broke her hip, got in the hospital, had to get surgery, got an infection, died. So, I’m not saying everyone is gonna end up like that. But my God, look at how quickly something just like a fall due to lack of muscle strength and mobility could turn into something scary where you’re hospitalized, you’re getting surgeries, you end up with a hospital acquired infection then you’re on antibiotics then you go septic, I mean, this is crazy and so I hope we can help people prevent. This is such a common story. I mean, how many times have you heard, like, old granny falls, breaks her hip and that’s the end of her. She never recovers. It’s like, that’s not good. And so, fortunately, in the past, up until the past couple years, both of my grandparents right around 80 years old, they were playing tennis and they were still active in mobile so I just encourage you guys, just because you’re getting grow older that doesn’t mean that you need to become a couch potato. Even some of her friends that she’d played tennis with are in their mid-80s, still playing tennis, still moving well on the court. So, I just encourage you to find something that you love first and foremost. Use exercise as a side effect of having fun, meaning, if it’s pickleball, if it’s tennis, if it’s ping pong for all I care, I mean, basketball, volleyball, I mean, whatever you can do it. It doesn’t have to necessarily be intense. That’s all fun stuff, maybe competitive, fine. But exercise is a side effect of it. But if you’re just trying to depend on willpower to go run a mile, I think that’s a terrible long-term strategy and I don’t think you’re gonna like to continue with it, like my row machine, you and I both, we have the same row machine, we love it. You can go on there, and you can do little games, you could do just row, you could pick like, oh, I’m gonna, I wanna burn 10 calories or I wanna grow 500 meters and you have this like goal that motivates you to do something, but at the end of the day, all this physical performance is gonna pay dividends.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No. Exactly. 100 percent. So, when I kind of, when I lift weights, I’m always trying to do functional movements, I think as you get older, especially as you know, you move into adulthood, you want muscles, right, you want to look fit or lean or trim right? You wanna feel solid but you wanna have functional muscles. One that allows you to do housework or click pick-up your kids easier and feel more confident or do well at your sport or just be able to enjoy life and feel good like if you think about, like, getting into a car, right? You get into a car, it’s like a one-legged kind of squat, right? So, I’m a bigger fan. As you get older, trying to do more unilateral body movements, meaning like a one-legged squat, a one-legged lunge or a lunge obviously with that, you know, you can look at discrepancies in your body. If you’re doing a squat, you know, you have other sides that you can compensate for but when you’re doing one-legged movements either a dead lift or a squat or a lunge or a step-up, it magnifies imbalances in the body. I like that because most of the time, when you’re moving, you’re actually on one foot in a sense and so it’s good to do movements like that so you start to develop a lot of the stabilizer muscles that support you when you’re moving so you don’t get hurt.
Evan Brand: Let’s get into the functional stuff, like the functional medicine stuff, not functional movement but like functional reasons, I’m gonna go ahead and say, number one as a category of infections and you and I can break this down as much as you want. Yeah. I’m gonna say infections because you know my story, you saw me, I lost like, 25 pounds without trying and some of it was related to H. pylori. I think the parasite also wrecked me so I would just say infections as a whole.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah so when you have inflammation in the gut, right, it can be cause by infections like a parasite like Cryptosporidium, Giardia, Blasto, H. pylori, bacteria in that category, SIBO, general dysbiosis, bacteria imbalances, right? It creates inflammation in the intestinal tract, right? Whether it’s small intestine, large intestine, if you look at where these nerves sit on the spinal column, they sit in the lower thoracic to lower lumbar spine, and you know, let’s say t10 to L5 or so. Maybe even, maybe even S1 and when you have inflammation in the intestines, it’s on a two-lane nerve root highway from your intestines to your spine back to the muscles, right, so we have what’s called a visceral somatic reflex. So this Visceral means organ, somatic means muscles. So inflammation in the organ can actually take that signal of inflammation put on that two-lane highway to the muscle and it can actually create that muscle to shut down or not be fully facilitated or active and so with inflammation in the intestines can cause that. Now, women know this just think about the average women that has PMS and has PMS symptoms of back pain. It’s their ovaries having inflammation or hormonal imbalance that’s then refluxing to the muscle, right, visceral organ, somatic muscle. So, women know that if they have PMS or if you ever had a gallbladder issue, you feel it in your shoulder, if you have appendicitis, you feel it in that lower right hip quadrant, right? If you have a heart attack, you feel in the jaw down the left side down the left arm so we know there’s this organ muscle connection so a lot of people can have muscle issues because their core and their back gets very weak due to inflammation in their intestinal tract and the more inflammation there is the less likely you’re wanna, you’re gonna, wanna lift and want to do one of them, you know put resistance on your body because you’re just more inflamed and you’re more likely to get hurt and injured.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So, if you, now, not all people lose weight and I’ve seen many women who gain weight magically 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds, sorry ladies, sometimes it happens that way. It’s where you gain weight due to infection but for me and I’ve seen other men the same, you lose weight, so I don’t know, I would just say this, any fluctuation whether it’s weight gain, including muscle loss so you could gain weight and still lose muscle right. You could gain body fat and lose muscle so whether it’s a significant, let’s say 10, 20 pounds or more weight loss or weight gain with no explanation, I would definitely look into the gut, start looking for infections and as you mentioned, the strength is important and people don’t want to get strong if they feel like crap and so for me, luckily, my gut’s much better and now I feel good with resistance training whereas before I was just so depleted. So, let’s go into reason number two, I’m gonna say nutrient deficiencies, now, this ties directly into infections right because in the case of H. pylori, if it’s reducing stomach acid. Now, if you’re eating this good grass-fed steak, you’re not really getting as much nutrition from that and so these nutrient deficiencies compound over time because if you don’t have the amino acids being cleaved off the meats to produce muscle mass that also creates a big problem so nutrient deficiency and we could go any direction you want with this even vegetarian vegans, we could talked about the deficiencies there and how they’re gonna have trouvle with muscle mass.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100%. So, of course, if we have vegan vegetarian, we’re not gonna get enough carbohydrate, we’re not gonna get enough protein, typically or if we get enough protein, right, let’s look at the combination of rice and bean which is a pretty common one. Well, you end up getting 70 grams of protein to 15 grams or so of carbohydrates so you get a lot of carbohydrates. Now, if you’re not that active or you’re more insulin resistant, you know some, most people are gonna need probably a minimum of half their body weight and in ounces of protein so if you’re like 200 pounds that’s 100 grams of protein. Well, do the math if you’re getting 15 to 20 grams of protein per 70, 75 grams of carbs that’s you know, 75 times five, you’re looking at like 340 to 400 grams of carbohydrates. Obviously, you can fix some of that by doing, like, a protein shake, like protein or hemp protein, you know, you can fix some of that. But again, you’re still relying on artificial sources, not whole food sources. Now, the benefit of the animal product is you’re gonna get all the protein, none of the carbs and you’re typically, if they’re grass-fed and pasture-fed, you’re gonna be getting excellent good fatty acids along with it and you won’t be getting a lot of the excess omega-6 fatty acids like you’re not gonna get on the vegetarian vegan side. So, you have this nutritional density that you get on the animal side which is wonderful and as long as we’re choosing you know, avoiding the factory farm, you know, we’re doing grass-fed pasture-fed, you’re gonna be in great shape and the next thing after vegan vegetarian is low stomach acid so if we have achlorhydria, low stomach acid, and that typically connects with low enzymes too, we may have a hard time breaking down a lot of that proteins. So, I know when you had some of your gut infections years ago, I think you had what Cryptosporidium, Gardia, H. pylori, that’s it Three Amigos, right? And so, when you had this gut infection, you also had lower stomach acid, lower enzyme levels. So, supplementing the enzyme and the acid so we can break down those amino acids and then also adding in or cutting out the bugs is helpful and then sometimes adding in some amino acids in a free form can be helpful because 40% of the Energy that you get from the protein actually goes into digesting the protein. It’s like having a credit card with a 40% transaction fee, right? Very expensive. So, there is some benefit by doing amino acids, if it’s already broken down but we still wanna make sure the whole food is dialed in and that we’re getting enough, uh, we’re getting access to the whole food nutrients via hydrochloric acid and enzymes too.
Evan Brand: All right. Moving on to another cause here, and this is inspired by a comment here from Teresa, she said that she has muscle wasting from my colitis. So, we could just say, any gut issues and that one include autoimmune gut issues, right? So, colitis or what’s called pancolitis would be the whole colon, even celiac, Crohn’s, I mean, any of these autoimmune gut issues oftentimes that’s gonna create a lot of muscle wasting that ties directly into what we just said though which is nutrient deficiencies and infections. A lot of these people with major gut issues, like this, there’s usually a trigger. Now, in the case of like, celiac, obviously, that may or may not have a parasite infection involved but this is still part of the equation and we can use gut healing nutrients to work on this, you can put some of this stuff into remission but you know what, I don’t want people to do, you know, what I don’t want people to do is like eat clean all week and then they go eat garbage on the weekend.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Yep. 100%. And so, of course, if you have colitis, right? Whether it’s microscopic or ulcerative colitis, you know, it’s an extreme irritable bowel disease, you gotta look at the foods and then sometimes the foods could even be in vegetables it could be in the oxalates, the phenols, the salicylates, the FODMAP, so sometimes even healthy foods on paper could be problematic and then of course, you know, the grains and the dairy and he refined carbohydrate and the omega-6 fats of course those right. So, getting the inflammation via food is super important, we talked about dysbiosis, we talked about SIBO, H. pylori, of course is super common because H. pylori is notorious for lowering stomach acid and so of course, if we’re just taking stomach acid and enzymes and we’re not fixing the H. pylori, you know, that may not get to the root cause. So, if we’re taking supplements like hydrochloric acid or enzymes or bile support, we also got to make sure we’re getting to the root cause of any additional bugs that could be present and if we’re chronically stressed like the adrenals if we’re in sympathetic fight or flight the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system tends to be more catabolic than anabolic. So, anabolic is building back up, healing, recovering, getting stronger. Catabolic is breaking down. So, from this fight-or-flight state, our bodies always tend to be it. You know, running versus, building and growing and so if you’re catabolic from the adrenals being over active with cortisol, that’s gonna make it hard to build muscle, you’re gonna be breaking down the muscle instead, making glucose out of it and it’s also gonna be harder to digest because your body’s hard wired to take blood and bring it to the extremity so you can fight, flight or kind of run versus to the organs so you absorb and break down. So, that fight or flight is really important in fir digestion, for where the blood goes and also and how it allocates nutrients. It’s more likely to break down muscle than build muscle back when that fight or flight is really active.
Evan Brand: That’s a good call. That’s exactly where I was gonna go next is hormones, I was gonna talk about maybe low testosterone. We’re seeing that in men in their 20s, 30s, 40s, I mean just low hormone levels and women need some level of testosterone too. So, if you do hormone issues whether that is adrenal related cortisol, thyroid hormone, maybe you can riff on that for a minute because I think people are focusing on gut gut gut, which is great but there’s also this other connection of the hormone piece and I will tell you my cortisol was completely depleted when I did a salivary panel years ago. My cortisol was flat all day and it was really tough no matter how much I tried in the gym, I was weak. Like, just my God, I could not make progress, fortunately better now, but man I’ve been through it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Some people, they may be high with their cortisol and we have to use adaptogens to calm it down of course, like good diet and lifestyle things, some may be low and typically you don’t just go low all of a sudden. You ten to be on the higher over stimulated side for a while and then you ten to crash and that’s where that low cortisol kind of comes together and with that chronic cortisol, a lot of times we see low DHEA, and DHEA is important because that’s gonna be a precursor to a lot of men and women’s sex hormones and so women will go more down the estrogen side. Men, it will trickle more down testosterone. These are both anabolic hormones and so if we have lower DHEA, that tells us the adrenal issues that are going on are more chronic and DHEA will go downstream to more of these anabolic building up type of hormones so very important to take a look at your DHEA because that could tell you if you’re more catabolic inflamed place. And also too, if you do exercise, I get it if it’s like your first couple of movements, It’s like a new exercise kind of thing, you may be a little bit torqued. It’s new but you shouldn’t be overly sore after your workouts. If it’s a new thing, fine, or it was really you know, an acute hard workout but in general you shouldn’t be overly sore, you know, more than two days or so later. You really shouldn’t, you should still be able to function like maybe you feel it like it feels like you did something but it’s not overly sore if you are um and it was a reasonable amount of exercise, it wasn’t like you did too much you’re probably in a more catabolic state, and it’s also you could be over exercising too. So, you gotta make sure you’re not over exercising.
Evan Brand: Yeah or I’m thinking like what about lactic acid build-up too due to gut bacteria or a mitochondrial issue due to some sort of toxin where they’re just depleted, they’re not recovering well, they’re not performing well. So, maybe not directly related to muscle mass but I think mitochondrial issues could be something to look into. You and I measure this and look at this on an organic acid test and we often find a lot of issues, I mean we’re in a toxic world with a lot of chemicals, metals, pesticides and so these things damage the mitochondria which to me would directly impair your ability to perform. Is it directly reducing muscle mass? If your mitochondria are damaged, I’m not sure on that. I’m sure we could look into it but it makes sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Absolutely. So, a couple different types of um ways you can build muscle, right, we talked about resistance training is obviously gonna be my favorite, right? So, we can do resistance training that kind of acts like cardio so if we do let’s say three or four movements back-to-back to back-to-back that kind of acts like cardio like or instance if I do like bicep curls, right, this is resistance training, you’re probably not gonna see a big bump in your heart rate which is bicep curls, right? So, there’s resistance training where you’re not getting a cardio effect and it’s resistant training where you’re actually getting a cardio effect. So, just like, people think cardio, like, oh, I’m gonna try them all that’s cardio. It’s well no, you can do exercise that’s resistance and still have a cardio effect. So, if I just did like bicep curls or tried extensions probably not a big cardio effect. Now, if I did like bicep curls and then I paired that with the next exercise, let’s say kettlebell swings, right and then the next exercise being some type of full body row or a lunge, you can see how you start getting more muscle groups involved. Your heart rate starts to go up significantly. So, that’s nice because there’s some benefit if you look at some of the zone two exercise theories that are out. With zone two exercises, essentially, when you’re working at about 60 to 70 percent of your max heart rate so if you’re at typically like you know, typically around if you’re like max heart rate for most people in their 40s or so will be like maybe around usually, it’s 225 minus your age and so if you’re like 40 that’s like what 225 minus 40 would be like what 185 and so you do 185 times 60 or so that should give you then you’re around like typically around 120 or so for your heart rate so they want you to stay around 120 for about 30 minutes. Now, you may find that you kind of have that zone 2 type of benefit while you’re actually doing lifting, if you kind of do it in a circuit fashion, then you choose movements that are more compound, you may find your heart rate stays that high. Now, the benefit of zone two is you get this really nice drop in your resting heart rate. There’s a lot of people that are reporting a lot of their data from like their fitbits or their or rings where they just have a significant drop in the resting heart rate that they wouldn’t necessarily see for like interval training or I’m sorry like a type of a tabata training where you’re like high intensity low, right? So, this kind of steady state thing for 30 minutes, you know, could have some cardiovascular muscle benefits and you may also be able to get some of that like if you do circuit movement so you can, you know, get one of these fitbits and measure your heart rate while you’re doing it and see if you can stay around 120 for that 30 minute phase that kind of put you in that zone two category around 120 or so.
Evan Brand: Very cool. There was a comment in here from Selena, what about muscle wasting with chronic Lyme? Yeah. 100%. Unfortunately, I’ve dealt with Lyme with co-infections from many tick bites over the years and that’s a big big factor because Lyme loves collagen. It really likes to eat up your collagen reserves and then the inflammation it creates, that invites other things like the Bartonella to move in and create more inflammation in your joints. I’m sure that is a big big factor for you. I think you can get better from it. I’ve certainly gained muscle mass even with the infections, I would still throw it in the infection category though. I think the gut infections are a big one too so don’t go all in online and forget the gut bugs because if you’ve got H. pylori, I think that’s a bigger smoking gun for your digestion. Lyme could still wreck you and cause you to lose muscle, I know one of the girls that I used to work with, I saw her recently at a park and she was so skinny, skeleton skinny and she’s had Lyme for like a decade so I know it really affected her in that way but I do think some of that is reversible if you work on the bugs and get your gut better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also, people that have Lyme, it’s very rarely it’s just Lyme. It’s like Lyme but then they have, like a ton of dysbiosis, really poor digestion, so it’s usually people are already in this kind of not so great state and then Lyme comes in there and it’s the straw that breaks camel’s back and because it was the thing. They pushed them over the finish line. They just look at Lyme as being the culprit for all of it and therefore, I think it’s all then all they do is focus on that one thing because they think, oh well this is the root cause because this is what happened when everything went sideways and they get myopically focused on just that and then they’re on these crazy herbal antibiotic protocols for years and they don’t fix the other thing so still get back to the basics with your digestion with your, you know addressing the guts, um, really addressing all the stressors, the adrenals, make sure all of that’s kind of dialed in. Also, how did you do with collagen, I mean I found collagen it’s just great for building up that connective tissue because even like in today’s day and age, we’re getting a lot of muscle meat from our protein source, we’re very, we’re not getting enough of our connective tissue or skin or hide or those type of things like the soups and bone broths probably our ancestors used to do. We’re not getting a lot of those amino acids which are really important for connective tissue.
Evan Brand: I do good with it. I do it every day. I do collagen protein every day so it helps man. I don’t have any elbow problems anymore, my knees are better so like my joints are like so much better, my skin is probably better, hopefully that’s helping with the muscle too. She commented that she did have Bartonella and Babesia. So, yeah, that’s a triple whammy, I mean, you gotta keep working on it, I’m not a fan of the antibiotics, this is a topic for another podcast but you had mentioned that you were doing antibiotics and you know that typically causes the Lyme to go into like a cyst form where it hides from the immune system and a lot of people rebound and relapse on that so I prefer herbs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also, if you go look at all the antibiotic side effects, they all match Lyme as well and so it’s like joint pain, fever, malaise, and so there’s like you see a lot of these conventional or should I say more natural minded medical doctors like oh that’s just
Herxheimer, that’s like but it’s like you literally are giving something that has the same side effects of the disease you’re trying to treat and so that’s why we tend to like herbal treatments that are more gentle and we’re trying not to hurt and we’re trying to kind of choose a low dose of herbs that are gonna allow us to support the immune system, still have an antimicrobial benefit, we’re still providing a lot of antioxidants and nutrients in the herbs which is the benefit of the herbs and they don’t cause as much mitochondrial damage while we work on everything else. So, we’re still not gonna ignore everything else and we’re gonna find a treatment that makes sense and doesn’t make you feel sicker and have this self-fulfilling prophecy that the side effects actually match the disease that you’re taking.
Evan Brand: No joke. I mean, we do a whole podcast. Let’s do one sometime on this but she said that she was tired of antibiotics, it’s been three years. Yeah. I mean, that’s affecting your gut which is affecting digestion. We know antibiotics damage the mitochondria so if someone had muscle mass and they had done antibiotics, obviously, you got to look at the gut so I would recommend that you do a stool panel. Do organic acids, try to uncover it, somebody said I look like Arnold Schwarzenegger with the beard, I hope that’s a compliment. Thank you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. There you go. I like it. Very good. So, I hope this helps everyone out of the gate here. I mean, just kind of like start from the basics like all right, so to keep your muscles strong you have to have one not be stressed, right? So, do not put yourself in a catabolic state. Think of like, your adrenals being an overdrive, think of like good sleep, good hydration, good food, allowing yourself to be in a parasympathetic nervous system state. Deep nasal breathing, right, appreciation, gratitude, right, make sure we have good digestive support enzymes, HCl, we’re eating a really healthy anti-inflammatory, nutrient dense, low-toxin template, again, I have some patients that have autoimmune conditions where they have to be even more carnivore because they’re really sensitive to the plant nutrients then after that, looking at all the bottlenecks that could be absorbing things or causing absorption problems in the gut, right, like Evan mentioned, Evan had three Amigos, right, Giardia, Crypto, and H. pylori. And then looking at any of the other bugs there and then of course what types of movements are you gonna do, right? You can start out with just walking if that’s kind of a foundational level then you could start off with some type of a you know circuit training, picking three or four movements and going back-to-back-to-back. You could do some kind of a zone two cardio thing where you do about 30 minutes or so at 120 beats per minute and you can do something non-impact. I like rowing because rowing devices you’re using upper and lower body and you’re putting your body into extension or most of the times on like cardio, you’re kind of like hunched over and like doing your elliptical or you’re running like this or you’re kind of in this flexion state where a rower you’re kind of opening up so that’s kind of cool so those are a couple of tools you know to stimulate the muscles and to um make your heart work as well as make your muscles work.
Evan Brand: I love the rower. Hiking too. I mean, hiking is so easy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Hiking is great.
Evan Brand: I really love it because there’s a lot more variability in your movement as compared to walking on a flat surface so I’m having to like bring my leg up more to go over that rock to go over that tree root like it’s a lot of more leg involved than a flat surface so I love it as long as I’m not getting a tick bite, I’m happy in the woods.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And my favorite functional movements would be like a one-legged squat, uh, it’s excellent and you could just have a chair underneath you where you sit, touch and come back up and you could put up like a phone book on it or something so you don’t have to go all the way down to parallel, uh, a single leg deadlift is excellent and step up. I know, right. I know you can just grab whatever book right. I’m thinking up like the thickest book I could think of right. You know something like that. And then, you could do that and then you could do a step up which is great like on a plyo box and step up. That’s what this is.
Evan Brand: How about, I mean the jumps? Obviously, that’s more intense but man those jump boxes, my God, that’ll, you talk about workout, that’s intense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Yeah. I mean those plyo boxes are wonderful, I mean, I like is that
Evan Brand: What it’s called the plyo like p yeah how you spell that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Like P-L-Y-O like a plyometric box
Evan Brand: That’s where you’re jumping up and down up and down?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I actually like going on top of those and then just jumping off and then get into a squat because then you’re teaching your body like I’m generating all this force and I’m trying to absorb it so you’re teaching your body to be a shock absorber like just soak up energy which is great.
Evan Brand: To think about that, that hurts my knee. Thinking about jumping off, I used to, I screwed up my knee years ago though you know, I was jumping off loading docks like behind warehouses when I was a kid with a skateboard and when you bail off the skateboard I would land flat on the concrete, my God. That hurt. That was done.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No. Totally. But yeah, if you’re putting your joints in that kind of intensity, make sure your form is good. Some people say don’t go knees over toes, there’s a whole knees over toe guy on I think Instagram that talks about knees over toes but if you do that just make sure your form is good and you’re not causing any inflammation. Make sure you have enough protein and collagen, amino acids on board as well so you’re dialed in.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And if you need help please reach out, we work with these issues all the time. We’ll help you investigate what’s going on. You may have this root cause, you may have that root cause, you may have multiple root causes but we’re happy to help find the puzzle pieces because you can’t fix what you can’t find so that’s where we come in, we’re happy to help you with this issue. If you want to reach out clinically, we work around the world with people we’d love to help. You can reach out to Dr. J directly at justinhealth.com and there’s consults available everywhere, lab testing, we can get it to your door. It’s no problem. If you’d like to work out with me, not physically but work out with the labs, let’s do it at evanbrand.com. So, justinhealth.com, evanbrand.com, we’re happy to help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We’re here to help and we’ll put some of the products that we talked about like collagen and some of the nutrient support, we’ll put them in the description below so if you wanna access some of the things that we recommend for our family and patients and take ourselves, feel free and access that. All right guys, hope you have a phenomenal day. Take care of you all. Peace.
Evan Brand: See you. Bye-bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/top-5-reasons-you-are-losing-muscle-mass-podcast-369
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The Top 5 Causes of Bloating | Podcast #364
Abdominal bloating occurs when the gastrointestinal (GI) tract is filled with air or gas. Most people describe bloating as feeling full, tight, or swollen abdomen. Your abdomen may also be swollen (distended), hard, and painful.
Dr. J and Evan describe that gas is the most common cause of bloating, especially after eating. Gas builds up in the digestive tract when undigested food gets broken down or when you swallow air. Everyone swallows air when they eat or drink.
On the other hand, they also talk about different components of why you may be having to bloat that you may not notice. Plus, available testing and lifestyle modifications you need.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:57 – The role of acid-pH level in the digestive system
5:01 – The link of depression and anxiety to bloating
10:02 – The benefits of probiotics and effects of stress to digestive health
18:17 – Functional medicine strategies and testing to find the root cause of bloating
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really excited to have a podcast today. We’re gonna be diving into a couple of different topics. The big one here is gonna be bloating – one of the big root causes of bloating. We’re gonna talk about it from a biochemical functional medicine perspective. Evan, how are you doing man? What’s going on brother?
Evan Brand: Doing pretty well, excited to dive in and talk about gut infections. I think that’s probably the first place to start because you and I have run thousands of urinary organic acids and genetic stool tests over the years. And years ago, you know, we used to use a three-day stool test. Now, with technology improvements, we could do a one-day one sample stool test and we can uncover so much. So, I’ll just kind of riff on things. I know we like to title things just for marketing purposes and call it top five but we may go into 15 by the time we’re done because just right off the top of my head here, high gut inflammation like how calprotectin may be an issue, low pancreatic enzyme function, bacterial overgrowth, where we’re gonna measure the dysbiosis, H. pylori infections, parasites, worms, specifically Clostridia and Candida can cause a lot of issues with bloating. So, in general, I would just say any gut infection but we can break that down as much as you want to. It could be a huge cause of bloating. And, the problem is this, when you go to a conventional medical doctor or a gastroenterologist and you get some sort of bloating remedy or some sort of digestive aid, maybe an acid blocker, antispasmodic medication. Obviously, these are not addressing these infections. You could take acid blockers for the rest of your life and never clear the H. pylori that’s driving the low stomach acid which then drives the fermentation in the gut which then drives the bloating. So, I just want people to have in their heads a clear mindset of what are you taking, is it actually fixing the problem, are you just masking your symptoms. And in the case of an acid blocker, you’re actually putting yourself deeper in the hole because you’re taking low stomach acid that’s driving heartburn or an infection and you’re making it worse.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, you know, the first catalyst for good digestion is a nice low pH. That good acid pH, we need good hydrochloric acid to make that happen. So, we need essentially hydrogen ions to bind to chloride in our gut and so we need chloride from minerals. So, we need good minerals, good quality sea salt that helps make stomach acid on our own. Now, if we’re under a lot of stress and our adrenal glands are in stress overdrive, it could be cortisol high or low imbalances, as well as adrenaline issues, right? It could be high or low cortisol stress issues that could put us in a fight or flight state and that sympathetic nervous system stimulus is gonna negatively impact our body’s ability to start with making stomach acid and digestive secretions and of course that stomach acid is almost like an antimicrobial. Think of like using lemon or apple cider vinegar is a natural cleaner right. They recommend these online. You can make natural cleaners usually some kind of acid as the foundation of the formula because acids are antimicrobial and so think of acids in your intestinal tract as being antimicrobial. They also, some kind of help tighten the sphincter, the esophageal sphincter from the stomach into the esophagus. It gets tightened with good acidity and so part of the reason why we get bloating and a lot of these gases rise up to the esophagus is inadequate levels of acidity and that keeps the esophagus open and then what happens when that esophagus is open over time, the fermentation acids that occur can actually, eventually irritate the bottom of the esophagus because we didn’t have enough acids to trigger that good closure in the beginning.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. So, then you’ll get these, what are called silent reflux issues sometimes it’s called GERD. And once again, prescription drugs are what’s the common remedy but once again it’s not the root cause. It may reduce the symptoms because if you have that backwash it’s gonna help slow the backwash down but it’s not gonna fix the sphincter so we might come in with extra betaine hydrochloric acid or if you’re extremely inflamed which is that someone can’t tolerate a low dose of it but then we could do something like apple cider vinegar with a meal sometimes bitters. I personally don’t do bitters, I just do HCl and enzymes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We can always test it with ginger. We can always test it with an acid like lemon, lime, or apple cider vinegar, start with a teaspoon of that and mix in a couple ounces of water and then kind of work our way up from there. So, acidity is a really important first step. Of course, if we have inefficient, um, inefficient acidity levels we can almost guarantee, we’re probably gonna have poor enzyme levels and probably gonna have poor bile acid levels, right? Bile acids are important because they help break down fat and bile acids are also slightly acidic, right, in the name of bile acid and it’s also antimicrobial. So, just like we talked about the acids having an antimicrobial benefit on the HCl side, also, bile acids have an antimicrobial benefit. We see in SIBO, a hallmark of SIBO is bile aids insufficiency and so with SIBO we don’t have enough acids there on the bile side so then we have a hard time breaking down fat and then a lot of times that fat will create indigestion, petrification because it’s not being broken down. Now, when we run certain stool tests, we’ll see increases in a metabolite called steatocrit, which is a breakdown of the fat that means it’s not being broken down in the stomach. It’s coming out at higher levels which means we’re not breaking it down. So, steatocrit is a big deal because steatocrit, if we don’t have good fat digestion, we probably have some protein digestion issues, we probably have some enzyme and acid issues and we probably have, um, some gas issues, bloating issues because these things require good digestion and if they’re not being broken down well, we’re probably getting some methane or hydrogen gases kind of rising up from that.
Evan Brand: And you know, we’re taking on the subject of bloating but it’s very common that someone with these issues you’re describing, they’re also gonna have issues with energy and probably mood like anxiety and depression because you’re mentioning this issue with fat digestion, protein digestion. Now, you’re not gonna get the aminos that you need to fuel your neurotransmitter so it’s very rare that somebody’s gonna come to us and say, hey I’m just bloated and I have nothing else. Usually, along with that bloating, you’re gonna have these tangential symptoms too like anxiety, depression, fatigue, and so I encourage people, you can focus on one smoking gun like bloating as your big thing you’re coming in for but you gonna make sure you understand there’s a bigger, deeper connection to your mood issues too. So, this is the person who’s on break, uh, someone just commented about severe brain fog. We could hit that too, uh, but somebody might come in and say, hey I’m bloated and then you tease apart their case and you go, oh so you’re actually anxious too. You’re on antidepressant and an acid blocker and this happens every day, all day. So, just to clarify, number one, we hit a low stomach or we hit infections first. Number 2, low stomach acidity, you mentioned low bile in the gallbladder. Also, let’s give a shout out to people that don’t have a gallbladder, what about these poor people, they’re gonna need a lot of supplemental help for the rest of their life. And so, unfortunately, this is a very very common procedure done in the U.S., where the gallbladders are removed and so these people are gonna need some purified bile salts forever in my opinion. Well, what’s your…?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely! They’re definitely gonna need bile salts and some extra enzymes like lipase but again, you gotta get to the reason why that gallbladder issue even happened. Now, most people, it’s women in their 40s who have an overweight issue and so what tends to be driving, that is usually food allergens whether it’s grains or inflammatory foods but also estrogen dominance. So, if you have an imbalance in estrogen, estrogen is gonna help promote more fat storage so you obviously have more estrogen more fat storage. A lot of times you’re gonna have PMS issues too so you may be moody, irritable, um, sleep issues, uh, you could have fibrocystic issues, uh, tenderness, a lot of pain around PMS time. So, you gotta get to the root cause of that as well. So, we started out with just bloating but you can see how then this estrogen issue can affect bile levels and good bile flow because estrogen causes everything to get really stagnant and not flow well and then you’ll start having mood issues and PMS issues and maybe even fertility issues. So, you can see how you start at one point which is bloating, which is the topic of the video but then it can spiral down this other kind of tangential pathway.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Not to mention two, let’s just say it started out with heartburn, I just want people to kind of visualize this. So, let’s say it starts out with heartburn. You go to the target and you buy Prilosec, which is over the counter acid blocker medication, you reduce your stomach acid even more but you feel some relief from the heartburn and let’s say your spouse had H. pylori, you guys pass that between each other, so now you’ve got even more reduction of stomach acid levels, you’re on the acid blocking medication. Now, you’re anxious, you’re starting to get depressed, you’re getting a bit of fatigue. As you mentioned, now, you’re getting some hormonal issues, some hormonal issues like breast tenderness or PMS or ill ability, you’ve got this dysbiosis growing in your gut so you have this bacterial infection. It could be multiple things, Strep, Staph, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, Bordetella. And now, you’ve got beta-glucuronidase issues. Now, you’re recirculating all this estrogen. You’re creating more problems with the gallbladder. Maybe, you get the gallbladder removed. Now, you’re in really big trouble then that leads to the diet so then you read some guy on the internet who says, you need to be doing 70 – 80% vegetables. So now, you’re doing all these veggies and you’re even more bloated and you’re even more gassy and you don’t know why. So, you’re eating broccoli, you’re trying to force all these leafy greens down, a lot of vegetables. Maybe, you’re doing a lot of avocados, these higher FODMAP foods that are fermenting in the gut. This is the case where you’ve got a really, to me, the best, most beneficial thing I’ve seen for these cases, get the diet very simple, focus on good quality animal proteins and for a time being minimize your vegetables so that you can let the gut rest.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Absolutely. From a solution standpoint, yeah, good proteins, good fats and then if we’re gonna do vegetables, make sure they’re cooked steamed, sauteed, maybe use an instant pot and try to make sure they’re on the lower fermentable side. Now, that being said, next, what’s another driving factor of bloating? increase in fermentable vegetables. Now, people are hearing all kinds of things about probiotics being helpful. Well, they are. There’s a lot of good benefits to probiotics and the microbiome and the endogenous nutrients they produce. They, um, whether it’s vitamin K2, whether it’s different B vitamins, really helpful. It also produces acidity which helps keep a lot of bugs and bacteria from growing in the gut, totally helpful. Now, if you already have a lot of bacterial overgrowth and bad bugs growing, sometimes, these extra good bacteria can actually cause more bloating, more gas. And then, of course, because they’re fermentable they can also create histamine too. So, the histamine may create more brain fog or headaches, more destruction there. So, you may have more histamine symptoms, you may have motility issues because they’re producing hydrogen methane gases maybe and that may cause either diarrhea on one side or maybe more constipation on the other side, definitely possible.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. Good call on the histamine. And so, some of these bacteria on your gut, they’re gonna be releasing histamine too. So, if you’re combining high histamine foods, you’re doing leftovers, let’s say, last night, you made a steak, you’re cooking that leftover protein. That’s gonna be higher in histamine. Combined with the histamine being produced from this bacterial overgrowth problem, yeah, you mentioned brain fog, skin flushing, rashes. So, once again, here we are talking about bloating but we’re trying to elucidate this big spider web of other symptoms that may be going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Evan Brand: Um, also, what about a stress component meaning someone just simply not chewing enough, they’re rushing through their meals. I think this from a mechanical perspective. If you look at your average person, I mean I saw somebody on the highway the other day, I don’t know if it was a donut, a piece of pizza, it was some kind of junk. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was but either way there’s still people trying to do makeup, scrolling on their smartphone, eating a piece of pizza, all while driving on the highway at the same time and we wonder why they have digestive problems. So, maybe we talk about the impact of not being settled when you are eating and this sort of like, this parasympathetic process that digestion is supposed to be our ancestors, they didn’t have that level of stimulation while they were trying to eat. I mean, maybe there was a wolf trying to come, get their bison killed but beyond that there wasn’t this big sympathetic stress underneath all of our meal times.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We kind of started out the video talking about the parasympathetic-sympathetic balance and how important that is because the parasympathetic is part of that rest and digest that gets the digestive secretion going. It stimulates all the blood flow into the organs, the intestines. So, of course, setting really good boundaries for your meal, you know, I recommend kind of kind of go into a meal five times or ten minutes, just kind of relax, do some deep breathing, have some appreciate, appreciation about your day, the food in front of you, you know, just whatever blessings you have in your life, just try to really get to that parasympathetic state with just good breathing in the nose, right, four to five nasal breaths in and out. Focus on whatever’s good in your life, appreciation. Whatever you have to do, whatever kind of resonating prayer to put you in that state when you just feel better and then go into that meal keep it quiet or if you want to listen to something that kind of allows you to feel good and feel rested or relaxed, that’s fine. And then, go into that meal and make sure you chew your food really well. Try to avoid a lot of hydration with the food, you know, a couple of ounces of water for swallowing some pills or digestive support is fine but try to get into that meal, like, I just had to have a good routine. Get some good hydration ahead of time, try to go into some kind of meditation or prayer for five or ten minutes ahead of time to really get that parasympathetics going and then go into your meal and really just try to chew things up pretty well too, you know, about 30 chews per bite of food on the average, kind of get your food chewed up to about an oatmeal like consistency so it’s really broken down well that’s allow the enzymes and the acids to work a lot better too.
Evan Brand: Yeah. You know, what’s interesting is a lot of people are kind of pressure into these business meetings like with their boss or with their co-workers, there’s this like work-meeting-lunch deal where people are going out with people they probably wouldn’t associate with outside of the workplace and they’re going and eating with those people. And so, I would just tell you, if you don’t like it and that’s not your vibe, don’t do it. If you feel more comfortable, more relaxed eating by yourself, don’t do it. I mean, I remember, l had some stressful conversations over lunch and dinner tables before with people over the years and I leave feeling like I didn’t eat anything and that my mind was so focused on even if it wasn’t a negative conversation. If it was on some sort of business deal or the state of the world or something and then I’m eating. I would get up from the table. I’m like, oh crap, did I eat and I didn’t process that and it would sound maybe like unnecessary advice but I think a lot of people need to be picky of what they talk about it at the dinner table.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think anything that’s gonna keep you in that parasympathetic state is great, you know, save the more stressful things before or after and I think, also, just have good boundaries. Try to make sure you get at least 20 minutes for a meal, um, to yourself, you know, I mean, if you don’t have 20, if you can’t put 20 minutes in your schedule for you to consume some good food and put yourself in that parasympathetic state then you got some boundary issues and you got to really work on roping in your schedule and getting some control over it, at least so you have that 15-20 minute to yourself and you can really process that food well. And again, I’m not saying there won’t be some exceptions or some stressful days here or there but on average try to make sure 80 to 90% of the time, you really have control over your schedule to that degree.
Evan Brand: One of my favorite things to do even in the wintertime here, if I’ve got blue skies. I’m taking my shirt off, I’m going to sit on my front porch where I’ve got a nice comfy front porch patio chair and that chai is warmed up by the sun so I just take my shirt off sit there barefoot and in the chair and eat my bison burger for lunch and the sunlight is a mast cell stabilizer so I noticed the sun helps me if I have any kind of food reactions, the sun will stabilize that, obviously there’s nitric oxide benefits. There’s likely some nervous system benefits circadian rhythm benefits. So, for me, if you can get fresh air on your lunch that’s great and what the heck does sunshine have to do with bloating, well, I mean there’s even some studies on sunlight improving the diversity of your gut and we’re outside all the time now. So, if you just type in like sunlight microbiome, you can read the papers on this, it’s in a microbiology journal about how exposure to the UV rays can improve the gut diversity so it’s no surprise that all these people in offices buildings all day, they got poor diversity. Obviously from other things but lack of sunshine is a negative factor for your gut health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, also, there’s other bugs that are out there I think we already kind of talked about H. pylori because that can affect the stomach and that can decrease, um, acid production and thus when acid production is down, we know enzyme production is also down and then that can also affect biliary function, biofunction, so we know H. pylori is a big thing. Other bugs can be problematic, right? We already mentioned SIBO, which could be a whole bunch of different bacteria that are overgrown in the small intestine that could be Citrobacter, Prevotella, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, Morganella, right? It doesn’t really matter the actual bugs but if there’s an overgrowth there, they can definitely disrupt digestion creating different gases on the methane and hydrogen side and that can create obviously more bloat. Other parasites can cause problems too. So, we see things like Blasto, Blastocystis hominis, right? E. histo, D. fragilis, Giardia, Cryptosporidia, these are all other bugs that could be problematic. Then even things like fungal overgrowth like Candida overgrowth, whether it’s a Rhodotorula species, Albican species, these types of imbalances can cause problems. So, it’s good to test and really make sure that we look at the whole microbiome and see what’s out of balance or not and then from there food wise, I mean, of course, general refined sugar, refined grains, right? These processed foods, excess fiber, lots of raw vegetables, uh, fermentable carbohydrates, right? These things are gonna be on the list, as well. And so, we’ll kind of add those. There are a lot of different things that we have to look at so I kind of gave you the top five or six on this list. Anything else, um, Evan, you wanna add to it?
Evan Brand: Well, I would just say that if you’re coming into this conversation, you’re listening, maybe you don’t have much background and listening to people like you and I talk about functional medicine strategy. Some of this may just go right over your head. You may just tune out because you’re hearing these things which sound exotic and they sound rare, like H. pylori. I don’t have that. Giardia, what the heck is that? Blasto, though I don’t have that. You know, I just have bloating. The reality is these are very common things. The problem is the testing that’s used in the conventional gastroenterology world is very outdated and very insensitive, meaning there’s a lot of infections that go missed and even if these infections are tested for, it’s not likely that you’re gonna find an accurate result. And so, what we’re talking about, these are not rare situations, you and I, between us both, we’ve seen several thousand clients and patients across the world over the last decade and we can tell you that these issues are something we see every day, all day. So much so that in fact when I see a whole big list of infections on the stool test, I don’t get shocked by it. Yep. Uh-huh. That’s it. That’s what we’ve got. So, if you’re listening to this, you’re like, ‘man, that’s not me. I’m just bloated and tired.’ Well, there’s a reason for that. And so, I highly recommend you get tested, figure out what the heck you got, going on because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing and if you’re going and taking probiotics or random enzymes and you don’t feel better or you’re confused about what you should actually taking and not taking and you’re building up a supplement graveyard. It’s time for you to get tested and figure out what the heck you’re up against. And so, if you need help, you can reach out clinically, Dr. J is at justinhealth.com. you can reach out and do consults worldwide. So, we jump on a video call just like we’re doing here, Zoom, facetime, skype, we can look at your labs that you run at home and we can figure out what’s going on and make you – a game plan to get better. And if you need help for me, it’s Evan, evanbrand.com and either one of us, Dr. J, justinhealth.com, evanbrand.com, we’re here to help you and the cool thing is you can reverse these issues and you can get to a point where you don’t even recognize your gut health. I mean, if I look back at myself even 10 years ago, I had such severe IBS. I did every diet under the sun and I made some progress but it wasn’t until I looked at my gut that I really made the magic happen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so, just to kind of highlight a couple of things out of the gates, um, we’ll put some links below as well to some of the lab tests that we recommend, whether it’s the stool testing, whether it’s the organic acid testing which does look at bacterial and yeast metabolites. I love the organic acid because it’s very good at picking up Candida and yeast overgrowth, where a lot of times those tool testing will miss that and of course the, um, breath test will not touch any yeast overgrowth. So, it’s nice to have whether it’s stool test, whether it’s the GI map, whether it’s an organic acid, whether it’s a conventional lactulose, breath test, these are all good tests. We’ll put links down below. So, if you guys want to look at getting some of those to start out at the gates, you feel free, you can. Also, I like to compare and contrast like what we do versus the conventional gastroenterologist. So, most gastro docs, they’re just trying to rule out significant pathology, significant disease and so they may cross off the list by doing some kind of an endoscopy, which is camera down the mouth to look at inflammation in the stomach or esophagus and if they see esophagitis or gastritis, you know, what they’re going to do, they’re gonna recommend some type of PPI or Gaviscon or some type of a coding agent to kind of help reduce the inflammation but they’re not gonna really fix the root cause. Most of the time, they pull you off acids, which may be helpful in the short run but it’s forever altering your ability to break down protein or fat and it also can shift your bugs in a negative direction because now you don’t have the good acidity to keep the microbes down. You need the acidity to activate enzymes, you need the acidity to activate your bile salts. So, someone’s jumping in on the questions here saying that hey they feel better on keto but now they’re feeling more constipated. Yeah, super common because what’s happening is you’re cutting out a lot of the foods that are causing problems but you haven’t fixed your digestion, you don’t have enough acidity, enzymes, bile, there may be some bugs that are still impacting digestion and this is why being on good proteins and fats can be helpful but they also reveal weak links in your digestive chain if you’re not breaking down food well. So, just kind of getting back on the gastro doc kind of bandwagon, they’re gonna be looking at pathology inflammation in the stomach, you know, ruling out the big things like blood, um, in the ulceration in the stomach, you know, usually you’re gonna know that because you’re coughing it up but you’re seeing it in your stool. If you have irritable bowel disease symptoms like Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, usually, you’re gonna have significant inflammation in the stomach, usually significant diarrhea, blood in the stool, they’re gonna rule that out and then what and then for the most part, once the big pathology things, ulcerations, cancer, massive amounts of inflammation are ruled out, they’re gonna typically give you like IBS diagnosis, whether it’s IBS-D for diarrhea or IBS-C for constipation and they’re gonna just manage whatever symptoms whether those symptoms are with different drugs. So, if it’s constipation, they’ll use laxatives. If it’s diarrhea, they’ll use things like Imodium or Pepto Bismol or anti-inflammatories. They’ll just modulate the symptoms with drugs and that’s it and they’re not gonna really get to the root cause. They’re gonna just try to spot the treat and then that’s where people come to us because overtime, those drugs will become less and less effective, you have more and more side effects, you’re not fixing digestion, you’re creating more nutritional deficiencies, maybe more gut permeability issues, maybe more autoimmune stuff and so these patients then come to us because they’re just tired of putting band-aids over band-aids.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. I forgot to mention the endoscopic procedure that is super common, uh, they wanted to do that on me, years ago, when I had IBS and I denied that because I even back then I had read about these infections that people were acquiring from getting scoped meaning the last person that they put the tube down, they didn’t properly clean or sanitize that so then they stick it down your throat and then you leave the hospital just to investigate and as you said, the only thing that’s gonna come out to that is they may say gastritis which is super generic. It doesn’t tell you anything about these infections and they’re not gonna give you an herbal protocol to address the infection causing the gastritis. But now, you’ve left the hospital with Clostridia or some other possibly antibiotic resistant infection that’s involved to evade the sterilizing and cleaning procedures. So, I’m all about non-invasive, accurate, functional medicine testing and that’s why we love what we do because there’s a very rare, maybe one every five years, yeah, is there a case where I’m like yeah, you need an endoscopy because there’s something crazy here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Usually, with an endoscopy or colonoscopy which is gonna be going up the rectum to look in the colon. Usually, there’s gonna be blood in the stool, some type of significant inflammation, whether it’s excessive diarrhea, excessive inflammation, excessive blood in the stool, excessive weight loss. It has to be at the extreme ends for that to make sense. Most people just have inflammation and a lot of times the tests won’t kind of tell you enough about the root cause, they’re just gonna put you on medications to manage the symptoms and that’s where you’re kind of stuck in between. Now, a lot of my ulcerative colitis, IBD patients, they’ve already done that. Yeah, so then, it’s like all right, they’ve kind of already crossed that off their list any weird cancers, ulcers, it’s already done, they know, they’re just being managed with Lialda, Prednisone, a biologic and then it’s like, now what, right? And so, we still have to get to the root cause of that and get the immune system chilled out and figure out what stressors are there so we can get on top of that too.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I mean, I know you and I have seen countless emails being sent to us with pictures of colons and you know different things from these scopes like hey there’s my scope results, you know, what do you have to say about it and the answer is always the same. Okay, there’s something there, let’s work on the infections. And so, uh, yeah, someone in the chat, uh, shelly said, yes that they all recommended me, every time, I go to the doctor. So, yeah, that, I mean that’s all they’ve got, they don’t have the stuff that we’re using maybe in 20 years from now you can go right down the street and get done what we’re talking about but for now you’ve got to seek out somebody like us that’s gonna be able to help you, uh, there’s one person in the chat too asking about a viral impact on the gut, it’s real. I did a whole section of that in my better belly course about that virus in the gut and so it’s definitely a big factor.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and just to kind of, uh, speak, kind of on the line here, so, um, we can, we don’t get censored, there’s certain viruses that are out there, right? There’s an ACE2 receptor site that gets impacted in these different viruses and the ACE2 receptor site, there are a lot of them in the gut and these receptor sites are really important for absorbing amino acids and so if you have any of these maybe chronic viral issues, one of the good things that you can do is actually extra free form amino acids to allow these receptor sites to absorb these amino acids easier, right? I think the free-form amino acids are already broken down. So, if you have this chronic immune stress and you’re having a hard time recovering from the immune stress adding in some additional free form amino acids can be very, very helpful on the healing side.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot and there’s papers on this too but I’ve seen it clinically too. People post viruses that will look at their stool, there’s gut inflammation, there’s low secretory IgA, so we can see there’s been some damage and so we have been able to resolve it. So, yeah, we’ll wrap this thing up but if you al need help, please reach out clinically, we mention the websites one more time, Dr. J, that’s justinhealth.com, me evanbrand.com and we’re here to help you guys, so you can reach out and we’ll get to the bottom of this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And sometimes, we’ll even use some kind of an elemental diet with people that have chronic digestive issues just because it can be hard, breaking protein and fat down and these are really good, important nutrients but sometimes we just got to break it down for them and using some kind of an elemental or a modified elemental, where maybe you make the first four to six hours of the day, really easy to process in some kind of smoothie or shake that has most of the amino acids in free form, maybe the fats more easy to process like in an MCT oil or something like that and then we use a lot of the vitamins and minerals all broken down. That could be very helpful and give the digestive system a chance to rest and some people they notice this because they just feel really good when they fast and so if you fast and you feel really good that’s excellent but you’re still not fixing the problem of getting nutrients in the system so that’s where using some kind of an elemental type of shake can be really helpful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. Well, I’m done. I feel like we’ve covered a lot of good stuff here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Yeah. I mean someone asked one question about flour substitutes. It just depends on where someone’s at, so flour, it’s a processed food so out of the gates, if someone wants, um, like a starch, um, I recommend maybe a greener banana, maybe yucca, cassava, maybe a Kabocha, spaghetti squash. Just look at some of the fibers, uh, non-starch, I should say, more starchy carbohydrates that are gonna be grain-free, see how you do with that. And then, if you want an actual flour, you can look at it like an arrowroot or you can look at it like a cassava is pretty good because it’s still grain-free but it’s still gonna be on the processed side. So, ideally, try to keep it grain-free so you don’t have extra gluten sensitivity connection with those.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Definitely. That’s what I was gonna say too. Potatoes, rice, a lot of these things can still create problems for people. I’ve had many people feel like crap on some of these gluten-free breads. So, yeah, it’s still processed garbage in my opinion.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And then, someone wrote in about the, um, the onions there. Onions are very high in FODMAPs and that can be a problem and so if you head, your gut feeling a lot better and you can come back in and you’re noticing FODMAPs are creeping into your diet and causing a lot more bleeding definitely kind of, you know, rain that back in and see how much that back in and see how much that kind of brings you back to homeostasis.
Evan Brand: Yeah. This person told, uh, they said that they’ve had similar issues with cabbage, brussels sprouts, and other similar veggies. So, yeah, I mean I would go more animal-based. See how you feel with just some meat and some berries for a little while. Maybe if you tolerate a little bit of some organic pecans, if you want to do a little bit of nuts but do like a bison burger and a handful of blueberries for lunch and see if you feel better. I suspect you will.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. At least, just try, you know, cutting out the higher FODMAP foods because when you address microbes, right? You starve it on one side with restricting certain foods that can feed it, you can kill it with certain herbals and then you crowd it out with probiotics. And so, sometimes, we have to go back to the killing side and kill the microbes out a little bit more but I always just see how much the starving kind of works. Get the starving going again and then if you have to kind of return to a protocol, where we knock down the microbes with herbs, we can always do that too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and we’ve made these protocols a lot. It’s really fun to combine and mix and match and get the synergistic effect of this herb plus that herb. I mean, that’s where the magic really happens and there is an art to this too like you said when to cycle things on when to cycle them off, so there’s not just this one cookie cutter thing that you have to do. You really got to just work with the person. Certain herbs are used for certain parasites, certain ones we use for bacteria, certain ones we use for fungus. It depends on what you got, most of the time it’s a combination of all these bugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Hey, Evan, great podcast today. Hope everyone at home listening enjoyed it. Feel free to share with friends or family. Put your comments down below. Let me know what things that you guys have tried at home that have worked well or haven’t. Really appreciate the conversation. Evan, have an awesome day man.
Evan Brand: You too, take it easy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye.
Evan Brand: See you. Bye-bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-top-5-causes-of-bloating-podcast-364
Recommended Products:
Genova Organix® Comprehensive Profile
International DSL GI MAP Genetic Stool Test
Post Viral Immune Support To Improve Energy | Podcast #363
What you eat after a viral infection, when symptoms of fatigue persist, can have a marked impact on your speed of recovery. Dr. J and Evan discuss that specific foods need to be avoided or included in your diet to improve your immune system. So what are the truth and the evidence about diet and post-viral immune support?
The good news is that most people will benefit from some considerations when recovering from illness or infection. Having post-viral fatigue means that you will not have your usual energy to think, shop, prepare or eat as before. Be very practical and kind to yourself. Dr. J and Evan added that diet modification is vital in your recovery.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
1:57 – The role of acid-pH level in the digestive system
5:01 – The link of depression and anxiety to bloating
10:02 – The benefits of probiotics and effects of stress to digestive health
18:17 – Functional medicine strategies and testing to find the root cause of bloating
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J in the house with Evan Brand. Evan, how you doing man? How are your holidays? How’s everything going brother?
Evan Brand: Everything’s going pretty good. I’m trying to start 2022 off with a bang. I suspect it’s gonna be a better year than 2021. People are becoming smarter. They’re becoming more educated. They’re becoming more resourceful. People are waking up. There’s a lot of, we’re in the great awakening and so I think, this is an important time to be alive and an important time if you’re a parent, if you’re a husband, a wife, if you’ve got kids, if you’re a teacher. It’s important time to keep your eyes open and keep your ears to the ground because stuff changes quickly and you got to be like a little speedboot. You got to be able to take turns quick, you don’t want to be the titanic right now, you don’t wanna be slow in taking big turns, you gotta be nimble in these times and so what I’m alluding to is just you got to be able to navigate the world of health which is quickly evolving and that’s true. What we’re trying to talk about today is post viral fatigue and really that’s just the title but this really could apply to bacterial infections and parasites and mold exposure but we just wanted to try to zoom in a little bit specifically on post viral fatigue and things like Epstein Barr virus, many people are familiar with and there’s a lot of people that report their chronic fatigue, picking up after something like EBV, we’ve seen it a lot with the virus going around now which would probably get flagged and censored so we won’t say it but you know what it is and there’s a lot of post, uh, viral fatigue going on from that and so you and I have dealt with some of that, you’re still going through the thick of it right now but I think you’re coming through pretty well, you’re still working and obviously you’re on your feet right now literally standing so that’s exciting and yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For the listeners, I had COVID last week, actually symptoms started on Wednesday. Really two hard days of symptoms, I was able to work the whole time though, I mean I think that the symptoms for my COVID that were, um, tough was I would say achiness and then like sensitivity to cold like it was like 45 degrees out and it felt like it was minus 10. So, I would say sensitivity to cold and then also getting really hot at some points, getting out where I would sweat through my shirt. So hot and cold, achiness/ headaches and then like easily out of breath but I mean for me I mean, it was still fine where I could work and still do the things I had to do. So it wasn’t that bad, I mean, I had a flu in 2013 where I was literally laid up for over two days and I couldn’t do anything so I know laid up feels like it wasn’t even close to the flu of 2013 for me, that was really hard. So, definitely, um, not as bad, I actually was my own worst enemy because on Friday I was feeling like really good like 80-90% better and did like 2-3 hours of housework like cleaning my house like doing all this different stuff because it was a beautiful day and I’m like all right let me get on top of some work, work 3 hours probably walk like 15,000 steps and that next day there was a major relapse in how I felt. It was probably like I went backwards 30-40%. Here I was at 80% probably going backwards to 50. I was like whoa what happened and so then I just kind of got in the straight and narrow and just said okay I gotta really make sure I kind of make sure I kind of keep it easy until I get back to 100% because, you know, um, it just you didn’t realize how much, uh, things could go backwards so fast so you really gotta wait till you get a 100% on things and so overall I mean the only thing lingering for me right now is a slight bit of um out of breathiness and, uh, this little lingering deep tickle cough like right now you can feel it like someone’s tickling the back of your throat with your finger and you want to cough to scratch it, kind of like that and so that’s where I’m at now. That’s like kind of makes it feel like I scratch it right there, right. So, I’m doing some ginger tea, I’m doing with the Manuka honey that soothes it like that helps with the irritation. It’s not knocking the cough down. Doing some, Elderberry, um, doing some thieves, uh, natural cough drops with essential oils, um, also doing some nebulizer so I’m doing some glutathione nebulization so those are couple of things I’m doing and then obviously sinus flushes, the amount of mucus that is coming out of me is out of control so sinus flushes are really, really important because if you do not flush your sinuses, the amount of stuff that stays inside of you, oh my God. So, flushing my sinuses out 3-4 times a day, you know, really good saline reverse osmosis with a little bit of silver in there to kind of keep things flushed out is helping a lot. So, that’s kind of where I’m at but honestly feeling pretty good, um, the whole family got it purposefully, my wife had it and I’m like come over here honey gave her a big kiss and then I kissed all my kids, I’m like we’re done. We’re gonna get this thing all together, be done with it all that way we’re not, you know, I get it next month and then I’m isolating for two weeks and then my kids get no we’re gonna get it all at the same time and surprisingly my kids’ symptoms were 80% less than the adults, super, super minor. I couldn’t believe how minor it was for the kids, so very interesting. So, that was kind of my experience with, uh, with the big C, uh, so to speak. And also, the big correlation I was listening to someone talk about this, the, a lot of the post C symptoms that we see after, right, people that have dysglycemia, and blood sugar issues tend to be a big driving factor of a lot of these post viral symptoms afterwards. Talking about post-viral fatigue, one of the big things is make sure you manage your glycemia, meaning you’re having good protein, you’re having good fats, you’re not eating a bunch of refined sugar, grains, those kinds of things. Make sure you put good metaphorical logs on the fire, good proteins, good fats to really work on blood sugar stability.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll I’m glad that you’re coming through it. Regarding the shortness of breath, I would kind of put that in the same category as the post viral fatigue because that shortness of breath can create fatigue and the best thing that’s helped me and has helped many clients is doing the color oxygen. So, ChlorOxygen, you can get that on amazon, it’s readily available. And it’s just a, it’s a liquid chlorophyll extract. So, when you do that within probably 5-10 minutes, you can feel a difference, so it’s like C-h-l-o-r-Oxygen, ChlorOxygen. I would probably do 10-20 drops up to 3 times per day. That thing is absolutely incredible. You can go as high as one tablespoon in 20 ounces of water and just sip on that throughout the day. I had one guy in New York, major, major issues with shortness of breath in the acute and the long term and that ChlorOxygen literally just turned his situation around. So, I’d get some of that stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, it’s C-h-l-o-r Oxygen?
Evan Brand: Yeah, ChlorOxygen. Yeah, and it comes in a little bottle tincture and it’s incredible. Also, something I’ve used personally, I’ve used with several clients too is Ailanthus. Ailanthus is three of heaven which is an invasive tree. I see a lot of it in Kentucky but you can buy Ailanthus tincture and that one is also really, really good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Is this the one, right here, Is the ChlorOxygen?
Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s the one. Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Cool.
Evan Brand: Get you some of that but should help because that’s the problem is, you know, the shortness of breath was pretty bad for me and I felt better, you know, I got infected a long time ago. It was like August 2020 and then six months later that’s when I started to have some shortness of breath which I was like, holy crap and so luckily, I was able to knock it out, uh, with Demectin and uh, yeah, Demectin really helped me and then the nebulizer and the ChlorOxygen, I would say that combination was an absolute game changer, luckily, I haven’t had any issues since then. But what we are seeing is that the mitochondria have a role in this and some of this post-viral fatigue we’re seeing is due to mitochondrial damage so I’ve been fortunate enough to see a few dozen people now. And in terms of organic acids testing after the virus, and we are seeing that the mitochondria definitely showed dysfunction. You and I talked about this many times on other podcast about the mitochondria. We can measure the dysfunction and so what we’re doing is we’re coming in with mitochondrial support nutrients so CoQ10, we’re coming in with carnitine, ribose, a lot of these amino acids and B vitamins like riboflavin which can help fuel the krebs cycle and then also we can use things like PQQ to help get the mitochondrial biogenesis going, meaning we’re literally making new mitochondria so we can measure this on paper. So, if you guys are suffering, you know, one of us can reach out or you reach out to us rather and then we can get the urine looked at because we can measure this. You don’t have to guess where is this fatigue coming from. If it’s a mitochondrial induced problem, we can measure that. Now, you have permission to have multiple things wrong with you so there could be a dopamine problem, there could be a mitochondrial problem, there could be toxin problem. So, rarely is there one issue causing this fatigue but the goal is for us to try to get as many puzzle pieces laid out in front of us and then make an appropriate protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I’d say, the worst thing about COVID for me right now, coffee tastes bitter like it tastes bitter, almost a little bit sour, does not taste like coffee. I’ve almost been like I’m not even gonna drink it right now until this thing gets better because it does not taste that good but for me I’m just alright, I got, you know, 20 grams of collagen in there, I got some good fats, I kind of look at it as like a meal replacement for me. So, that’s probably the worst thing the whole time. For me, it kind of felt like a cold. I’d say a mild, mild to middle of the road cold. The only thing that really surprised me was that, that back swing where I was like 80% better and then went backwards that was the hardest thing.
Evan Brand: And, it could have been you overdoing it for sure, I mean,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: oh, you totally did.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I mean I did have a little bit of that too where I kind of felt like I was better, overdid it and then I heard it again, so.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100%. So, excuse me, anything else you wanted to highlight on that so far? I would say post-viral stuff, the things that I’m doing right now and I recommend people do, in general, are gonna be Adaptogens and I like medicinal mushrooms. So, Shiitake, Maitake, Reishi. Reishi is great. I love it because it does deactivate viruses. It does build up and support the natural killer immune cells so I do like that, uh, any type of ginseng, Ashwagandha, these are things that help support energy production, support the adrenals, help buffer the HPA excess. So, any of these types of things are gonna be, uh, helpful too.
Evan Brand: You need to get on some Lion’s Mane too for your taste because what I’m finding is that the nerves are damaged and that’s affecting the sinus. So, the sense of smell, sense of taste, some of that is related to nerve damage. So, I would probably hit Lion’s Mane, maybe like two caps twice a day. That’s been helpful to restore the sense of smell and taste in some people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s probably not damaged. It’s probably just more inflammation, right?
Evan Brand: Well, the long-term stuff, I’m talking to people just long-term. I’m talking to people that you know 6-8 months later say, I still can’t taste or smell. Bringing in Lion’s Mane, like 2 caps twice a day. It takes a few months but you know it does increase nerve growth factor and so I think that’s the mechanism.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s interesting. Yeah. I do have some Lion’s Mane. I’ll definitely add that in. I mean, I think medicinal mushrooms are gonna be really good to, um, be on top of, uh, just supporting your immune system and like helping with, um, the body regenerate and heal better.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Gabe was asking a question in the live chat on YouTube. How did you guys catch it? I don’t know, I mean I work from home. You know, I’ve got a home office, uh, Justin has a home office as well, you know, I do go out, uh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Personally, it’s the new variant. The new variant has an R-naught of seven, which is that’s equal to, uh, measles so the delta variant had an R-naught of 2 or 3 so that means for every one person that gets it, it can be passed to 2-3 on average, right. The new omicron variant, it’s seven, so you can literally pass it to seven people so I think my wife was in a yoga class with three people and they were like spread out across that broom like they were like way you know spaced apart, you know, for just all the safety reasons and it was still able to get it so my whole take on omicron, it’s very, um, I think the symptoms are milder than delta for sure. That’s what everything’s been reported but, um, it’s way more contagious. Everyone’s gonna get it at this point, you just gotta have your plan and, um, be ready ahead of time, right? People don’t have a plan and then when they get it then they get stuck and they feel like they have to go to the hospital and you don’t have as many options there so try to have a, um, outpatient plan ready to rock and roll but yeah, you’re gonna get it because the, um, our knot on this thing, right, is that seven which is at a level close to measles so it’s right there. So, if you haven’t got it yet, you will. Anything else you wanna highlight on the immune side, on the post-viral stuff obviously I’m a big fan of ginger, I think ginger is nice because it’s anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, uh, helps with lymphatic. So, if your kind of like have a lot of like stagnant lymph in the chest area or in the neck I really keeps the lymph moving all that’s very helpful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. There was, uh, one person that commented if you’ve had delta you should have some memory T cells that will help if you get infected. Yes supposedly. Supposedly, um.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. You definitely should have memory T cells as well as memory B cells, right? So, even if you were to get sick again, um, you’re gonna be able to recruit antibodies way faster, right? Normally when you get sick if you’re first time getting exposed to an infection it takes about a week or so to really get those antibodies ramped up and so even if you were to get sick twice, you’re gonna be able to make those antibodies inside of, you know, 24 hours or so. So, you’re gonna be able to bring those antibodies to the table a lot faster and so that’s, um, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty helpful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Other strategies, uh, post-viral fatigue hyperbaric oxygen has been helpful. I’ve seen several clients that luckily have lived in a city where they’ve had access to do hyperbaric oxygen. Essentially, what it is, is it’s replicating being under water under water about 10 to 12 feet so that pressure is helping to get oxygen deeper inside of you. So, some of these tissues may have been starved of oxygen. This sort of mild hypoxia or hypoxemia, you know, you can basically reverse that by getting the hyperbaric oxygen. There are some people that can do there’s oxygen cans, little portable oxygen shots, if you will but it’s nothing compared to an oxygen concentrator with the hyperbaric oxygen so that’s good ongoing, I mean, I’ve had clients with Lyme that have done hyperbaric we know that’s incredible for traumatic brain injuries and concussions and that sort of thing. So, even if this is just a long-term fatigue problem, not related to viral issues at all, you know, hyperbaric is another good tool, you’re looking at probably around 100 a session but, you know, what, what’s your health? What is your health worth? So.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. One thing I did was very helpful was use my infrared sauna the last couple of days. That was helpful, just getting a really good sweat in felt very good, you know, raising that body temperature up can be very helpful just at um at your body knocking down viruses. That’s part of the reason why you get, um, chill while you get the nutshells but, uh, why you get a fever right. It’s part of the reason your immune system is actually knocking down some of that bacteria and or viruses by doing it that way so using an infrared sauna can be helpful too.
Evan Brand: So, look at your mitochondria, get your organic acids test done, we can measure that and look at mitochondrial function come in with specific support whether it’s B vitamins, adaptogenic herbs like Rhodiola, you mentioned, Siberian ginseng or Eleuthero. There’s medicinal mushrooms like cordyceps which there is some benefits. There are some papers on cordyceps and athletes and improving blood flow. There may be some level of oxygenation that happens with cordyceps too. So, cordyceps, reishi mushroom, I think the Lion’s mane for the brain and for the nerves would be beneficial, the ChlorOxygen for any of the shortness of breath along with the fatigue, rest, I mean just getting good quality sleep, making sure you got to do whatever you can to get good quality sleep. So, all the same sleep hygiene habits we’ve talked about for a decade together apply in regards to candling down at night if you need some passion flower. Even melatonin, there’s some really cool studies on melatonin. We know, it’s a very powerful antioxidant and we are seeing higher doses of melatonin be beneficial. So, in general, somewhere around 5 milligrams but there are some papers going wat up 30 – 40 – 50 milligrams and beyond. I don’t know a ton about the high dose so I’ll just tell you that the regular dose standard dosing is better than nothing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It was that melatonin?
Evan Brand: Melatonin. Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Usually, it’s like the higher dose is like 10 milligrams and that’s gonna help with the oxygenation and then 30 – 500 milligrams for the arginine that’s to really increase the oxygenation.
Evan Brand: Yeah. The arginine for like nitric oxide production. Beet powder, you know, beet powder would be good too. So, anything you could do to create some vasodilation is gonna be smart.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Anything else you wanna add, Evan?
Evan Brand: I think that’s it. If you need help, reach out, get tested, hopefully you get back on the full mend here so, keep, keep rolling. You’re doing a great job and hope everybody is doing well and we’ll be in touch next week. If you need help clinically, please reach out. You can reach out to Dr. J at justinhealth.com or me, Evan Brand, at evanbrand.com. We’re happy to help you guys. Keep your head up. keep moving forward.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think the big thing out of the gates is to make sure you have time to sleep, rest. Don’t overdo it. Just know your body still needs more time even when you, when you’ve gotten through the whole thing to recover. Don’t overdo it. That’s really important. Keep the foundational nutrients dialed in so that would be like zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D, you know, you can keep those things in there. You may not have to use them at such a high level that you did with the infection but keep some of those nutrients. Don’t go from something to nothing. Keep something in there the whole time, find a medicinal mushroom that you like, find an adaptogen that you like. Maybe keep a little bit of ginger tea going. Something that has some antiviral support and um, you know, try to get a little bit of movement but if it’s making you feel winded then just try to do just enough where you can feel like you’re doing something but not where it’s overly taxing you. I think it’s really important to kind of meet that right in the middle.
Evan Brand: Last thing, two last things, a low histamine diet is generally pretty helpful because there are a lot of issues with mast cell activation being triggered from this. So, a lower histamine diet, fresh meat, and no leftovers is very important. And then, histamine support. I’ve got a product called histamine support but essentially it’s quercetin plus some other nutrients so anything, you can do to stabilize your mast cells that’s gonna be helpful because muscle activation can cause fatigue, meaning, after the viral issue was over, the immune system can sort of have PTSD for lack of a better terminology and the immune system will go into this crazy state where it will shut you down so that fatigue trying to rebuild that energy back up is re-regulating the immune system so like the quercetin, other mast cell stabilizers are very helpful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Love it. Love it. Makes total sense and again not everyone’s gonna have that issue but you know, it’s kind of good to know if you fit into that camp. Those are a couple of strategies out of the gates. Anything else, Evan?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. Take it easy. If people need help, reach out justinhealth.com and evanbrand.com will be available.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We’re here to help you guys. I’ll probably be back later on today here. So, keep a lookout, comments down below. Let us know your thoughts on the topic, we appreciate a review. We appreciate shares to friends and family. Really helps us get the word out. You guys have a phenomenal day. We’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand: Take it easy. Bye-bye
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye you all.
References:
Recommended Products:
NeilMed Sinus Rinse Complete Kit
Genova Organix® Comprehensive Profile
Genova Organix® Dysbiosis Profile
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/post-viral-immune-support-to-improve-energy-podcast-363
Natural Solutions to Address Eczema | Podcast #361
If you live with eczema, you know what it’s like to search for relief from red, itchy skin. You’ve probably already tried a variety of products. Unfortunately, some items can leave your skin feeling drier and even more irritated.
Dr. J and Evan emphasize not giving up hope yet! In addition to medications, there are many options you can try at home to help with your symptoms. They talk about drugs and natural remedies that may help replenish moisture and protect your skin’s natural barrier.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
4:29 – What is Eczema and Its Signs and Symptoms?
6:51 – The Comparison between Eczema from Rosacea
10:38 – What to eat and not to eat when you have eczema
16:20 – Helpful products that can help avoid and or alleviate Eczema
19:25 – The link of glutathione in skin conditions
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: In the house with Evan. Today, we’re gonna be talking about natural solutions to address eczema at the root cause level. Really excited to chat about this topic here today. Evan, how we doing my friend?
Evan Brand: Hey, doing better. I was super stiff over the weekend so I thought, my God maybe we’ll do a whole, like stiff neck podcast but for now I’m mobile and I’m on my feet so that’s good and excellent. We’re recording this in December and winter is usually a time when people start coming of the woodwork with more skin issues and I think a lot of it is because they’re indoors more than in spring, summer, fall and so if they’re indoors and they don’t have good indoor air quality, they’re gonna be exposed to more dust, mites, molds and other toxins which may aggravate or irritate the skin. Also, in general, when you start to kick on the heater, you’re gonna be drying out your home and so generally your humidity level in your home may be like in our house it’s give or take 10% lower than it is in the summer so with the whole house dehumidifiers, I keep our house at 40% in the summer but in the winter with the heater on, man, we’re down into the mid20s, 25, 28% humidity. That’s pretty dang dry so sometimes it could just simply be an environmental change like that but I think some of it is also related to the toxins that people are getting exposed to. And now instead of playing outside with their kids, now they’re inside all day with their kids and their skin is reacting to those toxins so you’re really got to get your air quality dialed in and the winter to me just exposes the poor air quality that people have.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, 100%. I mean especially this time of the year, we have our humidifiers on, it has a tiny bit of moisture into, um, the ventilation system because it’s like, you know, in the upper teens, low 20s so just adds a little bit in there just to take the edge off, I mean that can be helpful to add a little more moisture to the air obviously, you can do more moisturizer on the skin. Remember that is gonna be your internal moisturizer. So high quality coconut oil, grass-fed butter if we can tolerate those things. That’s gonna be the best way to do it but obviously we can add more moisture directly onto the skin but we wanna always internally moisturize with good fat and again hydration as well that’s the carrier for that moisture to the skin so that’s a really important thing. I remember in college, just having chronically dry like my legs were really dry all the time and I realized, you know, at that time I was trying to be a little bit lower fat because I thought that was healthier and I started kind of understanding okay more coconut oil, more saturated fats, I’m like all right and then I noticed the dryness really improved and went away so fat consumption is really important thing for natural moisture to skin.
Evan Brand: You know, what is interesting now that you mentioned that, I mean, years ago, like my wife and I first got together, I mean, we were eating grass-fed beef but I wasn’t really prioritizing the fats, I wasn’t necessarily seeking them out, I was just maybe cooking with a little bit of butter but I wasn’t intentionally going for good fats and I remember in the wintertime having to put lotion on, man, I don’t use lotion at all anymore. I literally don’t need it, my hands are perfectly dry, they’re not itchy, they’re not patchy like it’s a miracle and you kind of forget where you’ve come from. Once things start to improve, you forget that that used to be a problem where I used to have to put a lotion on. Imagine how much of a hit to the lotion industry you could create if you could simply get everyone optimizing the strategies we’re talking about today, I bet we could reduce the need for lotion by 80%.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, totally, 100%.
Evan Brand: And to mention conventional lotions are actually one of the big triggers of eczema because when you look at conventional lotions and some of these products that are advertised, you’re getting into propylene glycol, you’re getting into artificial fragrances, you’re getting into many, many synthetic toxic chemicals that people are lathering on their skin just to supposedly fix their skin but they’re actually making their skin worse so you mentioned like topical coconut oil. There’s many good, like, organic shea butter type lotions out there, like Dr. Bronner’s, they make a really good lotion, um, the everyone brand, I know they make a good soap, I believe they make a good lotion too. Trader Joe’s, they had a pretty good quality, low priced lotion that was really clean ingredients so that’s the problem is like people are trying to do things to fix their skin but they’re actually making it worse with these topical toxins.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Now, when it comes to eczema, eczema does have an autoimmune component, right? So, eczema is a type of dermatitis, just to be 100% clear. So, think of, you know, dermatitis, think of, like skin inflammation, essentially dermatitis, the derma, that’s the second layer of the skin, epidermis first. Derma, um, dermis is the second layer and then essentially, um, titis is inflammation and so you have different types of dermatitis. Okay, so you have atopic which is kind of the one that eczema, uh, falls into. Atopic is the major one that you’re going to see there. There’s other kind you’ll see contact dermatitis which is kind of what poison ivy kind of falls into. There’s this dyshidrotic eczema, where you get more blisters. There’s hand eczema, there’s neurodermatitis, which is another one as well. Uh, there’s nummular eczema as well and then there’s one last one called stasis dermatitis. Those are the big ones. So, atopic is gonna be where eczema falls under and there’s an autoimmune component, there’s all kinds of studies showing that people that has celiac, Crohn’s, irritable bowel disease issues, lots of different autoimmune issues, there’s an increased risk of eczema, so there’s an autoimmune component there and if you look at a lot of the medications that are used to address eczema, you’re gonna typically have like your anti-inflammatory steroids like cortisone which are gonna be topically rubbed on that area. The problem with that is, it tends to not actually fix it. It just calms it down but it can also thin out that skin and make it more prone to have a flare-up later on so it can be helpful in the short run but you’re kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? And then you have other medications like, um, Eucrisa or Elidel that are, like, kind of more on the calcineurin inhibitors. They’re kind of an immunosuppressant so there’s definitely like an autoimmune component there because you’re coming down the immune response to kind of like chill out, um, the eczema and it can be helpful, those kind of medications could be helpful if you’re working on fixing the underlying root cause, the problem is most people don’t address the root cause and they just rub these medications on and then the problems continue to stay at the root level and so over time it’s gonna come back and get worse and worse and worse because you can’t just suppress the immune system in the long run and expect for a lasting solution. So, these medications may be okay if you’re working with someone to really get to the root cause so that’s pretty much what conventional medicine has for options. It’s gonna have those things. Now, just kind of highlight, um, you have eczema, you have Rosacea and psoriasis, they kind of have an overlap, all right, there’s like an overlap with these three conditions and I want to just kind of show a comparison guide for this because it’s really important. I want to just highlight this really quickly. Um, okay, here’s what I want you guys to see. All right, perfect. So, out of the gates, right, all of these skin issues are gonna have redness with all of them right, eczema, rosacea, psoriasis, they’re both gonna itch so there’s gonna be similar out of the gates the big thing with psoriasis, you’re gonna see a lot of the silver and white scales. That’s gonna be psoriasis and the difference with rosacea, you’re gonna see a lot more flushing across the skin, all right. Both are gonna have dry skin, both can have raised bumps. Psoriasis sometimes raised here says none. But the big issue is rosacea, more of a flushness with the redness. Psoriasis, more of the silver, um, scaliness. That’s the big difference. Just so, if someone’s like, what do I have, right, um, that’s kind of the big thing out of the gates there. Hope that makes sense. And there’s a couple of things I wanted to highlight with eczema is food components make a huge difference so autoimmunity, autoimmune diet plays a big role, really reducing inflammation makes a big role. Trying to cut out a lot of the scents and fragrances can play a huge role so of course like free and clear types of, um, laundry detergent, you can do all has a free and clear, Seventh Generation has a free and clear. There’s all kind of different brands that have a free and clear, um, all’s recommended by the, um, eczema dermatology association. So, you really wanna cut out all scent’s fragrances, dryer sheets that play a huge role out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s a big, big stressor and it’s a big stressor for people like me that have to smell it, people don’t wanna smell that crap anyway but you’re poisoning yourself, you’re poisoning your children too, you’re sending them off with those synthetic fragrances and those are irritating to the skin but also those can affect the hormones too, I mean, synthetic fragrances, in general, can have some xenoestrogen type compounds to them, meaning that you’re gonna be increasing the estrogen. We’re in a highly estrogenized society and that creates a big problem. Hormonal changes, hormonal imbalances, they are a big factor in skin issues and we see that with a lot of women that have irregular menstrual cycles or maybe heavy bleeding or something that happened especially after childbirth. A lot of times, they’ll be skin issues that would pop out and we fix it in a roundabout way and I want to go back to one thing you said earlier which was the fact that people that have eczema, they may be linked or more common in people to have issues like celiac and that of course takes you to the big gatekeeper of these skin issues which is the gut and so you and I found with hundreds and hundreds, now we’re into the thousands of clients between us that the major way to fix the skin is to obviously do some of the easy low hanging fruit like you said get rid of scented detergents and all that but it’s really focusing on the gut because if you have gut infections, I mean, if you even look at like some of my very, very old earliest YouTube videos, when I have H. pylori and other gut infections, my skin was nowhere to where it is now in terms of my skin health. My skin health in the last seven years has gotten way better and honestly, it’s just been by working on the gut, my diet was already dialed in back then so I just wanna address one thing with people which is that if you’ve already gone polio or autoimmune or keto or carnivore, you’re eating good quality food and you’re still struggle with your skin, you’ve got to dig deeper, it’s time to look in and see if you’ve got these gut infections, bacterial overgrowth, candida, all these things inside your gut are gonna be making toxins disrupting your gut barrier. So, I don’t care how much bone broth you drink, you’re not gonna fix your skin if you don’t fix these infections.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely! I mean there’s two categories, right? Infants and kiddos, right, in the first year of life, they’re gonna be a lot more sensitive because of their immune system, so, I mean, of course, the big thing you have to look at is high quality breast milk and really got to look at what the mom’s consuming. The mom’s consuming a lot of potential food allergens. I recommend an autoimmune diet out of the gates. Sometimes, we even have to look at potentially pulling out salicylates. Salicylates can be anti-nutrients in vegetables. Here’s a couple things out of the gates, right. Salicylates are natural chemicals found in many fruits and vegetables, they’re really good things and so out of the gate, I wanna pull these foods out as a means of calming down and chilling out the immune system. Uh, this is really important so you can see, kind of the negligible, the low, the moderate, the high and the very high. I just try to tell patients to, like focus on the 80-20 because there’s so many foods that are, like, really good for you that are high in salicylates and a lot of times it’s not about being perfect, it’s about calming down, you know, kind of the 80-20. So, what are the 20 of things that you eat the most frequently that are the most high and we’ll try to sub that and put that in the negligible to low category that can be really helpful as well. So, you can see the different vegetables, you can see the different nuts and seeds, you can see the different, obviously, meats tend to be on the lower side unless you’re doing a lot of processed stuff, that’s where you get into trouble there.
Evan Brand: That’s why so many people do so well with carnivore-ish diets. That’s kind of what I say I’m eating carnivore-ish because I still do berries, I still do rice and I feel okay with that, um, I still do on occasion, I’ll do some organic pecans as kind of a treat and those are delicious and those don’t appear to affect my gut or my skin. So, in general, if you’re going for more animal based good-quality fats, you’re knocking out as you mentioned, you’re knocking out salicylates, um, you’re knocking down lectins, you’re knocking down oxalates, you’re knocking down all these things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Here’s my oxalate guy. We may wanna look at oxalates as well. There’s kind of a members area for my patients here. If you’re a patient, you have access to this area, top right-hand corner of my website. And you can see I have a low oxalate handout as well and again I don’t recommend going crazy out of the gates. I just try to look at what’s the 20% of food that you eat the most and let’s try to cut out the high stuff out, right, and then sub that with the lower one out of the gates. That can make a big difference especially if you have a baby who has a lot of eczema issues. If we can really get a good autoimmune diet, kind of get the oxalates and the salicylates down, that could make a big difference. But, like Evan said, we have to look at gut microbiome stuff, we have to look at things you may be getting in contact with in regards to detergents, even essential oils on the skin. Some of these things can be stressful on the body, so we really got to calm all of these things down. Got to look at good bacteria, maybe have to address bacterial imbalances. Again, if you’re not a baby, you’re an adult, we have to look at the hormones because of times if you’re chronically stressed hormonally with the adrenals or you have estrogen dominant issues as a woman that can affect your immune system and that can make you prone to having some immune imbalances and your immune system is kind of hyper responding and overly sensitive and of course we definitely test the gut because we have SIBO, bacterial overgrowth, dysbiosis, H. pylori, fungal overgrowth, right, fungus and candida can actually produce oxalates too so you can have endogenous oxalate production via candida. These things can stress out your body thus stressing out your immune system. So, really looking at the adrenals, looking at cortisol, looking at the female hormones, estrogen and progesterone dominance, really looking at the gut are you able to digest and break things down, are the anti-nutrients in vegetables a problem. Again, I hate cutting out the anti-nutrients in vegetables, if we don’t have to because there’s a lot of good food there. So, cooking these foods down can help but it’ll lower it a notch. It won’t take a high food to make it a low food. It may not make a high food, maybe like a medium food. So, cooking obviously, avoiding a lot of the raw salad steaming sauteing can help a little bit and kind of lessen that load for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. Detox is important and detox can get screwed up by your gut infections. We’ve talked about this before but there’s a pathway called glucuronidation in the body and this gets impaired due to bacterial overgrowth. So, sometimes we’re coming in and fixing the gut but then we’re also trying to upregulate these detox pathways so that could include specific support for the liver that may include binders that may include liver gallbladder combinations, maybe there’s some acid and enzymes that we throw in. You know, when you look at someone’s face or just their skin in general, to me, it’s really the window into their gut, into their immune system. So, if you see somebody with just major, major issues with their face generally, there’s a gut problem, I had a woman, she was young when she first started with me, I think she was around 20, 21, and we got on facetime together and my God, her face was so terrible, she hardly wanted to be seen on facetime but she said, I think, it’s important for you to see me, to see how bad this is, I’m like, yeah, I appreciate you showing me this, and man by the time we got through working through some of the tests and the gut protocols her skin was flawless and I even had to ask her like do you have make-up on, I just want to clarify and confirm do you have makeup. No, I don’t. so, it’s amazing to see what you can do and timeline wise, I mean, we’re talking maybe a few months but within a couple of years, I would say you could completely reverse many of the skin issues that people are suffering with and that’s actually a really short timeline, I mean, we’ve seen people that have had skin issues for decades and as you mentioned they’ve been on these topical steroids or other medications for a very long time and not once has the dermatologist ever said, hey maybe you need to go animal-based with your diet and see how that goes. I’ve never heard that conversation, if you’re a dermatologist out there practicing like that let us know maybe we can chat with you, but in general, that conversation is not happening at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m in a lot of eczema groups online, on Facebook and it’s amazing how resistant parents are and I just, people are, in general, to change in their diet when it comes to eczema. It’s unbelievable. They’re like oh, I’m gonna go get this food allergy test from there, like, dermatologist and like most of the time that’s just like an IgE kind of skin prick test and then again IgE stuffs, you know, it’s okay, but it’s, that’s kind of more on the anaphylactic side that tends to not be the massive driver of course, you know, if you have any IgE stuff like environmentally like dander and cedar in Austin, obviously we can get a really good high quality HEPA filter with a activated charcoal filter as well to kind of filter a lot of this stuff out to keep the indoor environment good. I’ll put, we’ll put some links down below for the recommended air filters that we use with our patients. Cutting out all of the scents and fragrances in detergents in laundry, everything, no dryer sheets, all that stuff makes a big difference. Keeping the skin moist does help because if the skin’s already dry, you’re more prone to itching, if you itch it, you increase the inflammation, it’s this vicious cycle and the problem is if you’re kind of naturally oriented a lot of the things that may have like an essential oil or something in there that may be more natural that you may think is helpful because the immune system is already hypersensitive that may actually flare it up and make it worse and so one of the things that we’ll use, it’s just a really clean super hypoallergenic moisturizer. I’ll put a couple in the links down below that I found to be successful, there’s a couple off the back of my head, I could think of, um, uh, Vanicream makes one called Vaniply, that’s a really excellent one. There’s one by a La Roche-Posay, it’s a Lipikar Baume, that’s another really good hypoallergenic one. Aveeno makes one that’s decent with a little bit of oatmeal in there, the colloid and the oatmeal can be helpful but keeping that skin moist can be helpful so you’re not scratching. It won’t fix it though, right, there’s no magic solution but it will at least help to calm it down and then I find like if you’re a mom and you’re breastfeeding your kid, you have to change the foods that you’re eating because that is going to get passed down to your child and can stimulate their immune system and so typically for a good month or so and then we do a very methodical reintroduction, I know with my wife, eggs were a big trigger for a while and now she can do eggs and like my kiddos can do eggs but for a while, they couldn’t and so we had to keep that really under control for a bit and probiotics did help as well and really helping to support good bacteria help but we had to really do everything kind of full cycle and we did use a little bit of that Elidel calcineurin inhibitor, just a little bit to calm it down but it’d be like foa a day or two and then we would do all the other things and salicylates were a little bit problematic as well so we did try to cut some of those things down and it’s like the, imagine the immune system’s all wound up and we’re just trying to calm it down, calm it down and once you have it below a threshold so to speak, you kind of have a little bit more wiggle room but until you calm it down to that level, you don’t quite have that ability to move.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. Well said. There was one other paper too we were looking at on glutathione and this was just a, it was a quite old study but still very, very timely in terms of like glutathione. We have it in our conversations all the time and depressed glutathione levels were observed in patients with psoriasis, eczema, dermatitis and other skin issues and so we know that glutathione is gonna be depleted when you’re exposed to toxins whether it’s chemical whether it’s mold toxins or other things, we often see glutathione levels depleted and this is one of your master antioxidants and so you may need to work into the detox protocol, sometimes that can aggravate people so you just gotta work with the practitioner on this because I’ve taken too much glutathione and reacted poorly to it before so you got to go slow and steady with it, sometimes it’s gonna flare people up if they’ve got a big toxic load and it starts mobilizing things that may overwhelm your system and you may feel worse or have some sort of like a die off or what feels like a Horkheimer reaction. What about zinc too? Do you want hit on like some nutrients for skin too?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So, I think, out of the gates, like probiotics are really helpful. Omega-3 plays a really great role in anti-inflammatory. Vitamin D plays a good role in modulating the immune system. If you’re doing glutathione and you’re breastfeeding mom, be careful because you don’t wanna overly mobilize toxins out of the breastmilk, so you may wanna go really gentle on that or maybe a little bit of NAC and just kind of naturally, you know, increase that very slowly as long as you don’t have any die off, you’re probably okay. I would say zinc is also gonna be excellent as well, it’s gonna be a good building block for the skin, really good building block for the immune system so is selenium, so some of these may just get in a really good multivitamin, uh, some you may get from eating high quality grass-fed meat, fish, some green vegetables, seafood. So, a lot of these may come from whole foods sources, as well as, supplement sources as well. And then, you know, we have some really good anti-inflammatory things that we can do whether it’s curcumin, resveratrol, these are kind of plant-based antioxidants that are very powerful, also, there could be a histamine connection as well. And so, histamine from the environment, from allergens, you know, good air filtration is excellent and then we can do things to help modulate the immune system, like quercetin, like stinging Nettle. These can be very helpful and very calming on the immune system in regards to the histamine response. Anything else you wanna highlight there?
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. I think it’s a good start olive lead, we use a lot too and some of the gut protocols and that may help some of the skin issues too. So, it really just depends. I don’t want people to just go out and buy everything we just mentioned and assume it’s gonna fix their issues, I think it’s really important to try to get a good work-up and figure out where your issues are coming from, I think it’s great to be able to look into some of the topical stuff, get rid of your conventional shampoos and conditioners, go high quality organic products with your skin care but beyond that you really need to get some investigation done and figure out what the heck is going on because for years I was doing good clean products topically but I still have skin issues and it was all because of my gut. So, I really encourage people to reach out if you need help. Dr. J and I work with people around the world so we can get at home lab testing done to where we can investigate the root cause of your skin issues and often, we’re gonna be using urine and stool. Those are probably the two most common things you’re gonna be looking at and these are far more effective than what you’re gonna get run from a conventional doctor. We’re gonna be able to tell you what the heck is going on. Your dermatologist is not running stool tests but they should because the issues they’re seeing in their clinic would certainly be improved if they could fix the issues that we’re finding on these stool panels so I think it’s really important to test not guess, figure out what the heck we’re dealing with because you could take probiotics for your whole life and never fix these infections.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. Yeah. I agree. And again, if you go to the dermatologist, it’s pretty typical, right? They may recommend like oatmeal bath or a diluted bleach bath or Eucrisa or a corticosteroid or Elidel. They may recommend these things but that’s not gonna be the solution. Again, some kids naturally grow out of it because their immune system evolves, gets better, their gut becomes less leaky naturally, um, maybe they start making healthier food choices as their parents become more aware of what’s going on, right? There’s a lot of different things that can shift and things can just, kids can grow out of it, and if you’re an adult that probably may not be that way. It’s a little bit different there. So, you’re really gonna have to make changes and you really have to look at the root cause and not just get hyper obsessed with just something topically that’s gonna fix it and that’ll be it, probably not the case. And so, you really have to look at the gut, you really have to look at stress, you have to look at how digesting and breaking down your foods, you have to look at the nutrients that modulate your immune system like zinc and selenium and vitamin D and glutathione, you have to look at gut bugs that can have a negative effect on your immune system and also beneficial bacterial balance. These play a massive role and again you may have to get stricter with the diet, like some people, a paleo template may be enough. Some have to go to way more extremes like autoimmune, cutting out salicylates or at least being salicylate and oxalate conscious that may have to happen as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and the good news is this stuff is in general pretty reversible, I mean, like I said, we’ve seen amazing before and after, working with people, and it’s just a wonderful thing because there’s so much of your confidence level that comes from having good skin, I mean, in regards to seeking new jobs getting a raise, finding a date, finding a spouse, I mean, your kids, wanting your kids to not have any, uh, self-confidence issues so I mean, I just tell you just the impact of skin, it could change your income if you don’t feel attractive enough, may be you’re not gonna seek that higher paying job or maybe you’re not gonna seek that raise, If you have self-confidence issues because of your skin or maybe you feel like you can never leave the house without making makeup, I mean skin is one of those things that really is important to address so sometimes it seems like a vanity-based thing but that vanity really does turn into success and so I think it’s really important for people not to feel self-conscious and just you know that you can fix this thing so no matter how down in the dumps you are you gotta keep digging.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And skin can be a really good sign if you’re healthy or not and it’s a lot of times, it’s gonna tell you if you have gut issues, gut, uh, food allergy issues, microbial imbalances, also, consuming good fats, good collagen, good proteins, this is the building block of your skin, so you really wanna make sure you have good dietary, nutritional foundations and we chill out a lot of the food that’s gonna throw off our gut bacteria. Now, topically, there’s a couple of things you can do topically, I mentioned some of the moisturizer that can be helpful to provide moisture relief which then helps decrease the itching, which then decreases that perpetual inflammatory cycle, there’s some soap that you can do that are descent, um, I find just a 10% sulfur soap can be excellent. It’s been used in dermatology for decades but just 10% sulfur soap unscented works wonderfully. Usually, the sulfur comes from like volcano ash or some type of, uh, soil that’s very high in sulfur but sulfur has an anti-inflammatory quality to it. It can have some anti-fungal, anti-bacterial quality so that it can be calming. You don’t wanna lather it on too long because it can be very drying to your skin. But sulfur is good and again, it’s just one part of the equation. There’s no magic solution, magic soap, magic potion, that’s gonna fix it but it can be very helpful as long as you’re plugging in all the other things to the big equation.
Evan Brand: I wonder if that’s because it’s helping with detox support on the skin or something, I mean, if you think about glutathione and the sulfur connection there. I’m mentioning topical sulfur that’s pretty interesting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Topical sulfur, I mean it’s a lot of different data on it being very helpful for acne, I mean with that it can be very cleansing for the pores, cleaning out the sebum, there’s also the anti-inflammatory effects to it, very helpful with like seborrheic dermatitis, psoriasis, eczema, so I think it has some anti-inflammatory qualities, um, to it, I mean it’s been used in dermatology for decades so it’s natural so I kind of like it.
Evan Brand: Very cool. Well, I think we’ve covered everything I wanted to cover.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean I think a lot of it too, with the sulfur is. There could be a fungal, bacterial imbalance issue, right? And I do think sulfur does have antibacterial, anti-fungal, it also helps break down a lot of the keratin, excess in your skin, so like if you have, um, a keratosis pilaris (KP), where you kind of feel like the bumps in the back of your arm, it can kind of help break down those excess keratins that form in the pore so the back of your arms don’t feel as bumpy, so that’s really good too. I know, a lot of women have that. Of course, you know, getting your omega-3s up can also help that too, omega-3s and zinc.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I was gonna say, my kids had a little bit of that early on. We just bumped up the omegas and then boom, we knocked out the keratosis pretty easily so that’s, that’s probably one of the easier things to address. Sometimes, this thing gets tricky, like you mentioned, there’s no magic bullet or potion, a lot of times it’s a combination of us getting small gains and different categories of the body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s nice. Just get a nice 10% sulfur soap and you know lather that up, put it on your kids for like 30 seconds, rinse them off, it can be a very helpful kind of cleanse out that keratin, keeps the pores really healthy and it’s totally natural. So, I’ll put some links to the ones that I like, uh, down below on the ones that I personally use.
Evan Brand: Sounds good. Well, if people need help, they can reach out, we work with people online so wherever you are in the world with skin issues, we’re happy to help. You could reach out to Dr. J at justinhealth.com or me, Evan Brand at evanbrand.com, and we’re happy to work with you, help you run labs, figure out what we need to do to get you feeling better, more importantly get your skin looking better. If you have issues, don’t give up, uh, it’s okay, we’re gonna get you taken care of.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. And to be a great functional medicine practitioner to really solve a lot of these things, you have to be a master general practitioner, you really have to understand the gut hormones, diet, skin. You really have to kind of connect everything together. If you’re like a master skin person and but you don’t have the diet or anything else to kind of interweave and connect to it then you’re not gonna be able to help your patients 100% so, it’s really important that you, if you’re working with someone, you find a master generalist that really understands how all the systems connect and you don’t want to just work with the hormone person or the gut person, you wanna work with someone that really understands the connection so that’s really important that people are interviewing their practitioners, really try to make sure they have a full 360 kind of perspective on it and if you wanna reach out, evanbrand.com for Evan, they’re be link there for Evan. And for myself, Dr. J. at justinhealth.com. We are available worldwide to help you all out and we’ll put links down below for some of the recommended products that we talked about today, things that we actually use with our family and patients. Outside of that, Evan, phenomenal chat with you man, you have an awesome week, and everyone listening appreciates your support, comments down below and share with our friends and family.
Evan Brand: Take good care. See you next week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks. Bye you all.
Evan Brand: Bye-bye.
References:
Recommended Products:
Genova Organix Dysbiosis Profile
International DSL GI MAP genetic stool test
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/natural-solutions-to-address-eczema-podcast-361
Why You Can’t Put On Muscle – Functional Medicine Solutions to Avoid Being Flabby | Podcast #357
For most people, Dr. J and Evan state that most of the end goal is to build muscle and tone up. While you may have done your research and watched plenty of workout videos online, many still make a variety of common mistakes that can lead to hampering gains and slowing down their progress.
It would help if you also had protein which contains amino acids, the compounds that help build and repair muscle tissue. While cardio is essential, too much of it can also harm you and possible lack of sleep. Moreover, Dr. J and Evan emphasize that monitoring your diet or food template is vital in the entire process.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
1:53 – The role of protein and diet in building muscles
5:31 – Helpful exercises to stimulate muscle building
12:12 – The gut connection of a flabby body
18:04 – The effect of too much sugar and carbohydrates in muscle growth
30:56 – Helpful strategies and lifestyle modifications to boost muscle growth
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Today, we’re gonna be talking about putting on muscle mass, how to avoid being flabby. We’re gonna be talk about digestion, exercise, being able to absorb and break down protein, also you can work on helping to be, you know, strong, functionally strong, lean, etc. we’re really excited to dive into today’s topic here. Evan, how you doing man?
Evan Brand: Yeah, doing really well and you guys asked for this. We didn’t just come up with this how not to be flabby topic. You guys said this during many so much consultation that Dr. J and I had done personally with people that’s what women say. So, were gonna address that. They say, “I’m flabby and I don’t want to be and what do I do about it?” And if you were to ask like a conventional weight trainer, bodybuilder type person, they’re gonna tell you to probably eat more calories and just work out more harder. And most of the people that have come to us, they’ve already been down that rabbit hole and they’re far more symptomatic and sicker than at the level of where they can just try to hit the gym harder and that’s really to me not the answer because I’m lean. I stay lean. Now, granted I’m not a 50- to 60-year-old woman that has this particular issue, but I don’t have any sort of issue to where I feel like I need to eat less. I don’t count. I don’t measure. I don’t think any of the women and men even listening or watching this, I don’t think you need to count, or measure or weigh. I mean this food obsession. Our ancestors didn’t do this. They’re not out in the past year in, you know, native American times looking at the bison and saying, “oh no, that’s my two ounces of beef, I gotta stop” or “my bison, I can’t go beyond that four-ounce portion that’s too much”. There’s deeper root causes like estrogenic compounds in the environment and mycotoxins that effect your leptin receptors and create this fat storage mode so there is some more modern toxin issues that hopefully we can dive into today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. So, first thing out of the gates, we need to make sure we’re consuming enough protein. That’s really important. So, protein is essentially the building blocks to help out put on muscle and to keep our body strong and so what’s kind of the general sliding scale. Again, it depends upon how much you’re wanting to exercise, what your goals are right. So, as a female, you’re not gonna just be able to hit some lifting and then get overly bulky, it’s just not gonna happen. But, kind of general scale is about half a gram to one gram per pound of body weight is a pretty good rule of thumb so if you’re a guy like I’m six to 215 pounds, I would probably if I wanna really get bigger, I need to be doing at least 200, 230, you know, grams of protein per day, right? Typically, I’m at about .6 to like three quarters a gram per pound of body weight, so like maybe around 150 grams. I’m usually about 5 – 6 ounces of proteins per meal and so that’s kind of where I need to beat at one protein is very satiating, I’m making sure, I’m consuming fat with it, so, then it’s stabilizing blood sugar. It’s providing a lot of amino acids which are, you know, important for brain chemistry, blood sugar stability, mood. Also, adding fat with it which one fat tends to have good high-quality cholesterol from animal products, so, that provide building blocks for hormones, fat soluble vitamins, really good nutrients. And from there, your carbs are going to be dialed in based on your activity levels, that’s where more starch, if you’re more active, if you are pretty lean, you could probably handle more starch. If you’re carrying extra weight, you want to mitigate the starch, go lower on the starch and focus more on non-starchy vegetables, maybe a little bit of low sugar fruit and kind of time that up. The next thing is stimulus. You’re gonna need to more your muscles ideally and it’s not have to be a crazy amount. It depends on your goals are. If you’re just a woman then you wanna have your muscles just feel solid, that could be something like Pelatis, where you’re doing body weight or cable movements, you know, typically finding a movement where you could do about 12 to 15, as a female, reps, um, with maybe 1 – 2 reps the tank. And I like, 1 – 2 reps in the tank, just because it makes it so you’re probably gonna hurt yourself. The more skilled you are, the more you can go right to failure, that’s better. The less skilled you are with the movement, if you don’t have a good trainer watching you, you know, probably leaving one to two reps in the tank will help prevent you getting injured. But, just recommend starting with push-ups with good full-range push-ups. I like having a borrowed push-up because I can go deeper which is great, my face won’t hit the ground, right, so I can go deeper, go all the way down and then go all the way up, so full range. Here, you can get a TRX which is a suspension trainer, put it in the door jam, I have one over here in my gym and you can do a full range pull so you’re working in the push, pull, and of course you can also do, uh, Lat pulldowns like this, or hands facing to you, so pull up, chin ups in the face, do more of the Lats, yeah, chin ups, more Lats, pull up is gonna be more biceps. So, you’re working, trying to work every single range that comes at you and ideally with the pull up you could get some elastic bands that hook around your bar and that go around your knee that gives you that little extra push. So, the key is just to find simple movements that you can do to failure plus or minus 1 or 2 reps in the tank. That’s a really good stimulus out of the gates and the next thing is really dialing in the protein, so we talked about amounts there and then we can go other things like digestion and other gut issues that could be impairing that protein absorption later on.
Evan Brand: So, I can hear a woman saying, “you’re nuts, I’m not gonna do a pull-up, there’s no way I can do a push up, I’m not anywhere close to that fitness level”. And I would say, if you’re not, if you do have access to a gym, if you’re into a gym, I’m not anymore, I used to have a gym membership, I don’t need it anymore, I’ve got a good setup at home, so I feel like I’m great without it. But if you were to have access to a gym even for 10 bucks a month. There’s a lot of good ones like planet fitness that are out there now to where you can do some of these assisted like, uh, type exercises where they have assisted pull-ups or they have like assisted, uh, dips where you have weight that literally pushes you. It like, if you weigh 200 you add 50 pounds that it’ll make you feel like you weigh 150 and you can start there. So, you’re really starting with like a negative weight of your true weight. So those machines are available if you could feel like you’re just so out of shape, you can’t even do one push-up or one pull. And you can just go on your knees too, I mean you could start out push-ups on your knees as needed. You gotta find people, where they’re at. So, if you’re like, ‘man I’m too discouraged, I can’t do a freaking pull-up, I give up, I’m not doing anything’, you don’t have that attitude about it and if you could have one piece of equipment, I mean, I gotta say I love the row machine, I’m glad you got one too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The roller is lovely machine.
Evan Brand: It works your legs, it works your arms, it works your backs, works your arms, your traps. I mean if I could take one thing to an island, some are gonna argue with kettlebell, which probably is more functional, but in terms of enjoyment, I gotta say, I really enjoy and love the rower and I still think, there’s a place for kettlebells and dumbbells, I mean those are awesome, universal things. But for women, that and, and I just know this based on personal experience. Maybe younger females are not gonna be turned away. But I can tell you, if I try to take a kettlebell to a 70-year-old woman, she’s not gonna be interested in swinging that thing around. She’s gonna be worried about hurting her back or swinging the wrong way and it’s a lot more intimidating than sitting down and just simply rowing. So, this is hard to give one universal prescription because there’s different people listening, but I would say rower is very easy, low impact on your joints and not intimidating at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and then what’s the name of the rower that we have?
Evan Brand: It’s called a concept 2.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Concept 2. Yeah. I think I have the D. You have the D as well?
Evan Brand: Yeah. I think, yeah. I think the D is, there’s a little different but yeah concept 2-D, it’s a rower. It’s vey very sturdy. You get what you paid for. So, it’s around a thousand bucks but it’s worth it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s worth it, you could stand it up, so it saves a lot of space too. Yeah, I like that more for my interval stuff, so I’ll do a 30 sec on, 20 sec off, I’ll do eight sets of that. That’s gonna be more of like high intensity, just really good cardio interval stuff. I like that, just for keeping metabolism up, keeping the body a little bit leaner and more functional. I like the fact that you’re doing something that’s on the cardio side that’s putting you more into extension like this and you’re using your hamstrings to pull yourself as you slide right back and forward, you’re using a lot of your hamstrings and then a lot of the back where a lot of cardio stuff like, you know, whether it’s a bike or you’re on Peloton or you’re on elliptical, you kind of hunched over in this flexion position. I love the fact that you’re opening things up and extension. So, I like that. That’s good. That’s definitely on the cardio side. Now, like Evan talked about earlier like, easiest thing out of the gates a TRX suspension trainer is great because you can just change the angle in which you’re at so like, if here’s the suspension trainer hanging, and if I’m like at this position, this is going to be, meaning I’m flat with the ground, I’m like a 90 degrees angle from that suspension trainer, that’s gonna be the hardest. So, you can always just change it so you’re at 45 degrees or less. It’s like the equivalent of like kneeling or doing a wall push up, right, the angle is less, um, less perpendicular, therefore you’re gonna have less force, so you can always just do a TRX trainer and just change the angle so that push up or pull up is gonna be less and then in between you can also even do cables, whether you have cables at a gym or you can get some flexible bands that either wrap around like, um, like let’s say, I have a big, um, squat bar, so I’d wrap it around that and so it would be behind me like this and I would do pushes like this where I could do pulls like that, that’s great. Just, if you’re wearing, if you’re doing cables, if it’s not fully secure, I do recommend wearing safety class. People have gotten those things that have snapped and hit you in the eye, you can get some safety ones that like have like a little protective, I wanna say, like a wrapper around the cable. So, if it does break, the wrapper prevents it from whacking you in the eye. Does that make sense? So protective band or really kind of a safety-based cable that’s not gonna break, um, if it does it won’t whack you. So those are good options for you out of the gates for stimulus, because you need to have the stimulus, right? Push, pull, right, pull in the vertical motion, you can even do a row in that motion, uh, you can do hip extension movement which is the easiest thing there is gonna be like a kettlebell swing, that’s gonna be easy or some type of a deadlift, right, it’s gonna be really an easy one there out of the gates. Anything else you wanna say about just the lifting? I recommend just, kind of, keep it simple. Do primal movements that are just gonna one put resistance in that plane of motion and just work within that, plus or minus, you know, 1 – 2 reps of failure. So, you’re not gonna hurt yourself but you also feel a little bit fatigued the next day.
Evan Brand: Well, just simply moving throughout the day, I mean a lot of people are listening right now, they’re sitting at an office chair, they’re sitting in their car, you and I are both standing up, right now and we both do stand and sit. Sometimes, I’ll put my desk on the very lowest setting to where I’ll just literally be on one knee, like proposing and I will work on one knee for a little while. So, you and I are doing something very unnatural and many people are listening, we’re looking at screens and we’re, um, in a box working on a computer and so that’s very unnatural. So, I try to counteract that as best as I can by trying to either do the row machine on my lunch break and go from sitting to standing to kneeling and just try to do these positions. So, people listening, I’m not saying you gotta stand all day, I did that for a while, they hurt my back, so I think too much of one thing is not good either and if you’re a woman you’re in an office and you’ve got high heels shoes on, you’re trying to do it, obviously take your shoes off, try to go barefoot, you can get a really good like silicone, like rubber mat that they use for like washing dishes at the same time. Yeah, like an anti-fatigue mat, I mean, I would do something like that. These are the simple strategies. Now, would it be more optimal to be out in the sunshine all day, mostly skin exposed grounded, walking the beach 2miles a day and eating grass-fed meat all day and you know having, you know, handsome men, like wave banana leaves and keep you cool. That’d be awesome but people still have to work so I think you’ve got to work in some of these functional strategies with your normal real life. And then let’s go into the more, I guess you would call it nuance but really more of the deeper root causes because I’ve had people lose 50 to 75 pounds by changing nothing in regards to diet and nothing in regards to fitness. These were people that were relatively active. These were people that already had their diet dialed in, they were mostly animal based good quality meats, doing fine on the protein and the fats but they had these other root cause issues and I’d say that the first place would be to go is the gut and you and I have talked about this in other aspects but in other podcasts too but the gut can really be a big place where you gonna become flabby and this is really due to the recirculation of toxins, when you have bacterial growth in your gut, which is an extremely common thing, this is not rare. When you have a bacterial overgrowth, in general, that can create an elevation of what’s called Beta-glucuronidase, which is an enzyme that’s gonna cause you to recirculate hormones and so, you have this personal trainer beating you up and you’re not making progress. If you don’t look at this marker and you don’t fix the gut, you’re likely not gonna have many results and the personal trainer is gonna take it personal. They’re gonna try to hit you harder, they’re gonna try to kill you and I’ve heard this before when women are literally dropping out of fitness classes because the instructor’s just beating, beating, beating and it’s like that’s the definition of insanity. So, you got to get this root causes. If you’ve got this recirculation of these hormones and or toxins like mycotoxins, I don’t care how hard you hit the CrossFit, you’re not gonna get the results that you want.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. And also, just if the fats over that muscle, you’re gonna feel a little bit flabby even though the muscle underneath is getting a little bit stronger. So, you know, I always recommend getting your micronutrients dialed in, getting your carbohydrates in check so you’re not overdoing it, uh, because the more carbohydrates you make, the more insulin, the more you’re gonna be storing your fuel as fat. And again, the more your metabolism is higher, you’re more ectomorphic, you’re leaner naturally, you can handle more carbohydrates, right? The goal is that we individualize things for each person because, you know, we talk about low carb or keto, some people don’t need to do that and some people can be keto and much higher levels of carbohydrates. Some people can be ketogenic at 100 grams, for 200 grams of carbohydrates a day based on their activity and their metabolism. Some needs to be like minus 20 or 30 net. So, everyone’s a little bit different, I think that’s the important. There’s some individuality there. I would say the next thing is we, um, if you’re a female, it’s really important, menopause can really throw women’s metabolism off. If there’s low thyroid or Hashimoto’s that can really throw metabolism off. So, if you’re struggling, you’re having a hard time, we have to look at your thyroid function, look at your T3, your thyroid levels, look at antibodies, make sure that’s under control. If progesterone and estrogen is very low especially estriol and progesterone that can affect muscle building. Progesterone is really important for collagen and elasticity formation. It’s part of the reason why women get a lot of varicose veins is low progesterone, which has a major effect on the elasticity of the veins. So very important there. And then I would also say, um, toxin exposure, right? If you have lots of estrogen, if your estrogen dominant from birth control pills or estrogen from meats or milks or soy, that can put you in more of a fat storing mode because these hormones produce more fat and then guess what your fat also has an exocrine function in regards to producing estrogen. The fatter you get then the more fat you get and the more estrogen your fat cells produce. It’s just like downward spiral that just kind of, is a positive feedback loops that gets worse and worse as you go along. So, you really have to look at toxins in meat, pesticides which are all hormone-based, drugs that are gonna have estrogens in it, birth control pills, etc., milks, plastics, eating your foods out of plastic especially plastics that you’re warming things up on or you’re letting UV light hit, definitely not a good thing out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said on the thyroid too and your personal trainer is likely not testing your thyroid, so obviously, that’s were gonna be doing. And then also you know, we have a lot of experience with fitness. So, we try to educate people and give fitness plans and advice where we can there. And, I think the big people are skipping the foundational pieces. I mean, it’s fine if you just want to sign up for a class and try to get active but really, I would say, get some of these labs run first. Get your gut looked at so we can see what type of bacterial overgrowth you have, as I mentioned this is an epidemic problem. This is not a rare situation and the gut can be one of the big wrenches in your gears. That’s not allowing you to lose the weight properly and like I said, have people literally lose 75 pounds, just by fixing some of these strategies like fixing digestion. Now, for some people it could go to the other way. Some of these issues with females, it’ll cause weight loss and they’re having issues with getting muscle back, you know, building it back. And so, it depends on where you’re at. Some, they lose muscle and they still have body fat but they’re thin they’re like a skinny fat, they call it, you know, you could have a woman who’s five foot two and she’s 140lbs. And then all of a sudden, she gets sick, loses weight, now she’s 120 but she still looks flabby. That could just be because she lost that muscle due to malabsorption due to these infections like H. pylori. You and I’ve talked about the story of me where I lost 25 pounds without trying, I didn’t really have much weight to lose, but I got super skinny due to my gut infections and so it took me literally several years to build the muscle back but the first step to building back was to get rid of the gut infections and then still working on detox. I had a ton of mold toxin issues and that really screwed up my metabolism to where I was very hungry like 2 – 3 hours, I’d have to eat and no matter if it was a grass-fed steak or what. And now, I could literally go from 7am to 1pm without food and I feel like perfectly fine. I feel satiated, my brain works better, I have more mental clarity, so a lot of it’s the as you mentioned. It’s the blood sugar involvement too so you have to fix that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% So like the big checklist out of the gates is don’t do too much carbohydrates. Too much carbohydrate, too much sugar will make you a little bit flabby whether it’s through cortisol, whether it’s through inflammation, oxidative stress. Of course, if you’re eating a lot more carbs, right, you’re not really getting enough protein typically, right? Unless, you are someone who’s higher metabolism and really making sure proteins and carbs are dialed in and you’re doing a lot of activity. Most people, they do too much carbs too much sugar, they tend to not be getting enough protein. So, half of your body weight in grams is usually pretty decent out of the gates and then you can go up to one gram per pound of body weight depending on how active you are. So, some are gonna be good, most women are gonna be good, somewhere between a half to maybe two-thirds to three-quarters. And a lot of male people that wanna get really big, they may want to be one gram per pound of body weight. That’s kind of a good sliding scale.
Evan Brand: Now, in the beginning, I was saying I don’t think people need to count, measure, weigh and then now you’re giving numbers so I just want to clarify kind of where I am with it. I think you can and should, to get a ballpark of where you’re at based on your meals but you should not be obsessing about it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so I keep it really simple, right? And so, what is, um, what is about four ounces of protein is gonna be about 25 – 30 grams of protein, right? And so, for most women, that’s gonna be about a palm to a fist size. And so, when you looking at, picking up, you know, you’re serving yourself a meal, it’s very simple, you know, there’s no weighing or measuring, you’re just kind of like what is about a palm to a fist size in regards to my hand, in regards to that serving of protein on the plate and you just scoop yourself up that amount anyway and that’s your amount. So, there’s no real crazy amount of weighing or measuring, it’s just kind of eyeballing kind of your own anatomy comparatively to what’s on the plate, and that’s usually a pretty good rule of thumb. And you know you did pretty, pretty good it’s because you’re gonna feel satiated after that meal, you’re going to eat about 10 minutes after you finished eating. The goal is we want to feel satiated enough where we can go 4 – 5 hours to the next meal. So, that’s kind of give you enough. We’re not pulling on a scale. We’re not having to measure but you got to know that like in the end, if you’re eating enough, well, what does that really mean? You ate some size amount. What is that size? It’s probably gonna be between 3 and 5 ounces of protein on average and then you can just use your hand as a good frame of reference when you’re serving yourself up. Keep it simple.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that because I said a lot of people, they’re just so brainwashed from conventional dieting and stuff and they get freaked out about food. They have like a PTSD of food portioning and all that and they think they have to do that. And you don’t and once you get clued in with your satiety signals. It’s so easy, you don’t need to think about it and.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s a good frame of reference, right? Because in the end, you’ve gotta serve yourself up something. How do you know to serve yourself up this much versus this much, right? You know, usually, you know, 3 – 6 ounces, 3 – 5 ounces would be pretty good. So, like for a guy, right, I’m 6 – 10-ish, right? I have bigger hands to like I may serve protein amounts the size of my hound. So, go between a palm to a palm, to a fist to a full hand is usually that frame of reference. The more active you are, the more stressed you are, the more act, you know, the more you’re doing exercise, move to a protein amount the size of your full hand. The less active you are, you can go to that palm size. And if you just starting out like you’re coming on board like being like a vegan vegetarian where there’s not a lot of protein. Start with a quarter palm then kind of work your way up. And again, if you have problems with your protein, it typically means you have low hydrochloric acid, low enzymes and you have to really work with a good functional medicine person to get your HCl and enzymes up and you may have H. pylori and SIBO and other bacterial imbalances that are impending your digestion so you have to look deeper if those symptoms come up. It’s not the protein, it’s the fact that your digestive system is weaker and cannot tolerate the protein.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. A lot of people blame the meat, ‘oh, I feel bad when I eat meat, so I’m not gonna eat meat’. It’s like, no. That’s, you’re supposed to be doing that. Like, I have a client the other day that was in South Dakota, super strict vegan. And I’m like, ‘okey how dedicated are you to being vegan?’. Like, well, they’re totally like, ‘I’m total dedicated’. Like, okay, so if let’s just role play, I was like, ‘okay, if there were no planes, no trains, no buses, no semi-tracks and it’s the middle of February and there’s a foot of snow on the ground in South Dakota, are you gonna be able to stick to your diet?’ The answer is ‘no way’. I’m like, ‘what would you be eating that’s in the landscape?’ Animals. So, we don’t have to turn into that podcast but I just want people to know, how important these things are. They really do help stabilize blood sugar. Could you make vegetarian vegan diets work? Maybe, if you try really, really hard. But that’s a whole other podcast. Let’s go back to the mycotoxin piece for a minute because something we’re seeing is something called Zearalenone, which is highly, highly estrogenic mycotoxin and it comes from a mold Fusarium which grows in water damaged buildings. Now, you will get exposed to some of this from moldy contaminated grains but I would say that vast majority, 90% of it, I would estimate is probably from buildings meaning whether your mother had mold and passed it in utero and if you are breastfed, if you went to moldy daycare as a kid, moldy elementary, middle, high school, moldy homeschool, moldy college, moldy dorm, moldy office building. I mean this is an epidemic problem. I see it literally every single day, all day and Zearalenone really screws up your estrogen, actually far more than soy. It’s way more estrogenic than soy. So, we do talk about, you know, the pitfalls of doing like soy protein and that kind of thing. But man, Zearalenone will screw you up way more than soy protein. And this is something you have to use binders to pull it out of the system. So, if you’re struggling with weight loss, you are having these estrogen dominant symptoms. Maybe, you’ve worked on the hormone piece, but you’re still struggling. Maybe you’ve implemented something like calcium D-Glucarate to work on that glucuronidation pathway but you’re still suffering, you may need to look into this and we measure this via urine. So, this is where, like you mentioned, a good work-up comes in handy. We’re gonna do urine, we’re gonna do stool as needed. We can look into these different body systems and find the dysfunction but this is the real root cause, functional medicine strategy to have lean muscle mass and lose body fat. And unfortunately, this is a very, very not talked about discussion. You and I talked before we hit record, there’s a lot of talking heads on the internet. People that will say this study says that and this study says that but none of them are actually doing the clinical work and we wouldn’t be able to do what we do if we didn’t get results. And we get results because we’re running the right labs, we’re doing the right root cause strategy which is getting these toxins out of the system. And I’ve seen it in children as young as five, I’ve seen it in two, three, four-year-old. I’ve seen it in my own kids, we tested their urine and see mycotoxins. So, this is a problem that it does affect kids. Now, you know, obesity in children usually there is diet issues but I have seen in some cases, I have a lady in New York, her 8-year-old was basically eating paleo but she was obese and she had extremely high levels of Zearalenone. Luckily for this little girl, we were able to do binders, she was able to swallow pills which was great because it made it easier and boom this kid lost weight, she didn’t change anything with diet. She just detoxed. So, honestly with so much toxins that we’re up against, I would say detox support for life is really how I approach the conversational people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So, if you’re in a moldy home, you know definitely get your home tested. If you have a lot of mold toxins out of the gate, you know, it depends on kind of where you’re at. If there’s an active mold stress in the environment, I typically recommend work on getting your digestion, your diet, your inflammation dialed in. If there’s no active mold in your environment and then work on dealing with mold detoxification once you have more stability with all your other organ systems and immune function. So, it just depends upon where you’re coming from. If you have like active mold in your environment, that’s the easiest way to detoxify out of the gates is to get the environment kind of more dialed in and we have a podcast on that topic that we can put in the links down below. Evan, anything else you want to highlight for the listeners? So, I mean digestion is really important, HCl, enzymes, bacterial overgrowth, poor digestion, we talked about getting enough protein and again we thought you kind of talked about measuring not measuring but just kind of using your own anatomy as frame of reference because you have to serve yourself anyway in regards to what you’re eating. So, it just gives you a good frame of reference that you know how much to give and then ideally enough so you feel full and that you’ll last about 4 to 5 hours. Now, if you’re working with trainers out of the gates, do enough where you feel sore not overly sore, the next day or two make sure you walk out of the gym feeling more energized than when you started. Make sure you can emotionally repeat what you are doing, you’re not emotionally exasperated and then also that next day or that later on that day. If it’s a morning workout, make sure you don’t feel run over by a bus, make sure you’re doing just enough where your body can adapt to. It’s all about adaptation, can you adapt to it, from it, can you feel better then afterwards. And again, if you’re doing a brand-new movement, you may feel a little bit sore and it’s a new movement so just, you know, try to keep that in the back of your head too.
Evan Brand: And, if you can’t recover then there’s probably some level of mitochondrial dysfunction. We’re also gonna look at that, if we look at chemical profile testing, there’s a marker there. If we look at organic acids, we can look at mitochondria there. So, for me, after I got exposed to mold, I would tell you, my performance and my recovery was terrible. I mean, I used to recover in like a day or two. It was like 3 days, I was still sore, I was like, man, this is not right. Once I got the mitochondria working better, retested, look at it, I confirmed, hey, that was directly correlated. And we’ve talked about this I think briefly before but the issue of bacterial overgrowth and that producing high levels of lactic acid so you could have a high baseline level of lactic acid which creates this soreness even just from the overgrowth in your gut. So, we’ll have a woman that’ll say, ‘oh my God. I’m sore and I haven’t done anything, all I done was go in the garden, why am I so damn sore’. Their bucket was already so full due to the gut infection. So, fix that, test it, and fix it. The last thing I was gonna say was on the environment, which is that you can’t get well in a sick environment. So, whether that’s bad lighting, LED lighting, try to use incandescent bulbs, like half natural lights, like I’m surrounded by a bunch of windows. Getting that bright light exposure to help regulate your cortisol rhythm, making sure you’re using twilight or some other app at night on your phone, if you’re doing blue light at night, because we know that blue light can make you fat through various mechanisms affecting glucose and cortisol making sure your detoxing making sure you’re not wearing synthetic fragrance, I mean there’s so many people we asked this on the intake form. Do you use scented products? I will tell you, I’m very surprised how many people are seeking out natural functional medicine and they still use scented laundry detergent, dryer sheets. All these synthetic fragrances, they can affect your hormones and they’re not good. They are bad toxins. They’re endocrine disruptors. So, go free and clear. It’s not expensive, every mainstream brand has a free and clear unscented version. So, implement that easily. You don’t want to be wearing endocrine disruptors on your clothes all day, you’re already exposed to those. If you go out, even to Chipotle, which I think is one of the best places you could go if you have to eat out. Even their bowls have those non-stick chemicals in there. So, you’re getting exposed to toxins even if you’re not trying, the last thing you want to do is wear those and put your husband or your kids in those clothes. So, go fragrance free please.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And also, by the way, you know, if you show up to the store like my wife got Thai the other day. I went and picked it up for and they like scooped it and put it in like, like this hot coconut, you know, curry in a plastic container. So, I recommend, if you can, you know, keep a Pyrex container in your car, so if you go out to these places, literally bring your own glass Pyrex. Hey, can you please put it in this.
Evan Brand: They might. They might comply. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve done it before. I’ve done it with Thai a lot of times because it’s so hot so I’ll just bring it but like hey can you please have the cook put it in this place.
Evan Brand: That’s awesome. I travel with my own. We travel with our own, you know water bottles, we’ll bring our own stainless-steel cups everywhere we go. So, we’re not drinking water that’s gonna be contaminated with small amounts of pesticide and herbicide and pharmaceutical drugs. You can look up the environmental working group. For people listening, type in, EWG water report. You can put in your zip code. Here in Kentucky, where I am, we have certain chemicals in the water hundreds of times higher than the safe levels that are all highly carcinogenic and endocrine disruptors. So, this is not just, we’re being picky, no, the water in tap water is toxic. So, you need to travel with filtered water and you’re saving your gut. We know that parts per billion of glyphosate damages good bacteria which creates bacterial overgrowth. So, unfortunately it has become more complicated to become healthy. Have you seen those memes, I’m sure you have of like a bunch of skinny people at the beach in the 1960s and all the obese people in the 2020s at the beach and it’s like ‘what happened? ‘. And there was a lot less of that toxic exposure back then than now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, there was also carbohydrates too, I mean there was no trans fat back then. If you look at carbohydrates, if you look at, like, the macronutrients per decade, proteins relatively flat, you’ll see fat drop and you’ll see carb increase. So really, it’s a lot more carbs, a lot less good fat. So, of course, good healthy saturated fats, I mean up until 1988, McDonalds have beef tallow, up until the uh, I think it’s the CSPA whatever one of these vegan groups came in and wanted soybean oil which just disastrous, I mean if you had reasonably non-GMO free, um, potatoes in some beef tallow that’s amazing, that’s actually not even that bad. Um, but they changed it to soy in ’88 so you have a lot more processed vegetable oils, omega-6 that just really damaged, uh, that gets into your cell membrane and really toxifies your cell membrane, and it takes years to come out. So, make sure, you’re consuming really good high quality animal saturated fats and if you’re doing, you know, monounsaturated to keep it like avocado, keep it to high quality cold pressed olive oil and try to get at least half of your fats from high quality saturated fats. That’s important.
Evan Brand: Yeah. The oils are, men, we can do, let’s do a whole like oil special but in general the seed oils and all that are no good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If you guys enjoyed today’s podcast, let us know. Put it in the notes. Put it in the description, please give us a share with your friends or family, also give us a like and a thumbs up that helps the search algorithm. And if you wanna reach out to Evan, head over to evanbrand.com. There’ll be a link where you can click and work with Evan. Head over to my site, justinhealth.com. I’m Dr. J, we’ll put links down below. If you’re gonna work with us, we are available worldwide. We work with a wide variety of patients from the young, from the old, females, men, etc. A lot of hormone issues, a lot of gut issues, a lot of toxicity issues that’s our specialty. We’re here to help you out and if you want to support us, we’ll put down the links below to different products that we recommend in regards to today’s podcast. Evan, anything else?
Evan Brand: Yeah. Last thing I would say, so many people have already tried everything and been to everybody and seen many, many people before they come to us, so I’m not bragging about that but it just happens to be that you and I are the people who are working with people generally somewhere close to the end of their rope and that puts a lot of pressure on us clinically to make sure that we get good results and we come through with that and you can read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of 5 star of our clinic reviews, not just the podcast reviews but the clinic reviews too. So, I encourage people that if you’re like, ‘oh God could these guys really help, I don’t know I’ve already seen this person and that person. I’ve seen a lot of people do what was called functional and was not functional like, ‘oh I went to this integrative doctor’ and she ran one blood test for the hormones and that was it, like that’s not a functional protocol. I’m sorry. You didn’t get anywhere close to the functional workup that they’re claiming. So, functional is becoming this marketing term but there’s so many people that are not truly doing that. And I want to just encourage you and give you inspiration that we’re doing the real deal here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% Really appreciate it. All right guys, if you enjoy it, thumbs up comments below. We’re here to help. Have a good one you all. We will be back again. Take care.
Evan Brand: See you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye-bye
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
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Audio Podcast:
Dr Bernd Friedlander – Immune Support, Extend Life Span, Best Supplement, Perfect Diet- Podcast #353
In this video, Dr. J and Dr Bernd Friedlander talk about immune system in general. Immune system is the natural defense and it’s an complex network of cells, tissues, and organs that band together to defend your body against invaders. Those invaders can include viruses, bacteria, parasites, even fungus, all with the potential to make us sick. They are everywhere – in our offices, homes, and backyards. A good immune system protects us by first creating a barrier that stops those invaders, or antigens, from entering the body.
The immune system can acknowledge millions of contrasting antigens. And it can make what it needs to eliminate nearly all of them. This detailed defense system can keep health problems ranging from cancer to the common cold at bay when it’s working correctly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:20 – The issue behind immune stress
6:25 – Things to know about natural light
17:04 – Who are good candidate for extra glucose?
26:37 – How and when does adding sugar good?
46:46 – The important role of full spectrum light
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Dr. Bernd Friedlander. Dr. Bernd Friedlander has been around, uh, the health space for I’d say more than 50 years. He’s been a health consultant to many professional sports teams and he’s a, let’s just say a quite a figure in the health expansion national health community in the Silicon Valley area for many many decades. Bernd, how are you doing? Welcome to today’s show.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, tell us a little bit more about yourself. You’ve been around the block, I mean professional sports, natural health kind of life extension community for quite a long time. How long has it been and how did you get into the space?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Um, I’ve been sort of like when I graduated from college, I got into physical therapy and I was an assistant physical therapist for about ’72 – ‘78 and I worked with, you know, clients with structural injuries and back problems, neck problems, and physical therapy and rehab and recovery from ‘72-‘78. And then I went back to chiropractic school in ’78 and graduated in ’81 and I started working out at UCLA and I was asked by a number of coaches and athletes to work with them since they found out that I was, my background was physical therapy nutrition, which I picked up in 1972 and my other background was chiropractic. So, it, you know, marriage was perfect and I was also a track and field runner in college and I also played, um, semi-professional soccer. So, I had a very good foundation and tool and so, because of that, I started working with UCLA athletes and then later on, they asked me to come in and start working with the Olympic team and develop them for the ’80 – ’84 and ’88 Olympics and we have people from all over the world coming to us at UCLA to work out with us and to perform with us and to learn about that we have and nutrition and all that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Very cool. So, you’ve been even in this space for 40 – 50 plus years. That’s amazing. Let’s kind of dive in, we have a couple of topics that we chatted about ahead of time that we really wanna dive into. So, immune stress is a big issue that we have today. A lot of immune stressors from our environment from food to different infections, etc. You know, one of the top things you are doing to help improve your immune system, like you know, let’s forget about hydration obviously getting some sunlight, you know, good whole food diet, you know, just kind of all the foundational things. What things that people talk about, um, that you want to add here, people that haven’t, different things, people haven’t talked about enough that you wanna add in that really would help improve people’s immune function and stress?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yeah. Well, the first thing I look at is quality of life they have, how do they sleep at night, how do they get up in the morning, how much indoor activity are they getting in front of a computer, a cellphone, all these EMF is affecting our own system, our immune system. It’s, um, not able to function as well as we want to so I just tell them to get out in the sun in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening, go for walks, just be in outdoor not indoor. You know, we were trained to be outdoor most of our lives. Our ancestors are outdoor. We developed from, uh, from the sun and from nature and from the ocean. And that’s why we got here. And by ruining us by being indoor, we’ve changed the attitude of our DNA and RNA and how it functions and that’s why we’re seeing a lot of people getting sick today. It’s not getting out in the sunshine, not developing natural vitamin D. So, I have to tell them to take additional vitamin D everyday and some vitamin A and E and I always include aspirin at night because that promotes many anti-inflammatory mechanisms and it has a tremendous benefit in our blood, in our circulation, in our mitochondria. And first thing I do, because of my background, I wanted to know who we were, how we did get to this stage, where we are today as humans, how did our brain develop and that’s important and it was all related to four billion years ago. Our mitochondria, an organelle bacterial mitochondrion that created everything and started the living systems life in on the planet earth and plants. Everything is developed through these mitochondria and so I went into it and I wanted to research it so much as I can become a sponge for this one organelle, how it works and how important it is. And there’s a fellow named Douglas Wallace, who wrote many articles and is like the father of mitochondria. So, by researching him and reading about him and also about repeating his work in mitochondria, I started learning that everything is based on this one organelle, how do we improve that organelle that mitochondria efficient energy that’s what gives us energy to every cell in our body. And I wanted to learn everything I can about what makes these mitochondria efficiently. An immune system functions on mitochondria, stem cells function on mitochondria repair, regeneration and all disease and aging is a factor due to this efficient mitochondrial function. And cancer cells also are involved because of the mitochondria, how effective is the mitochondria is producing energy, it’s oxidative metabolism and that’s the foundation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. So, you get put a couple of things out there, I want to just break them up one by one. Some people maybe listening to this saying, “hey I can’t get outside that many times a day, what can I do to improve, uh, healthier monitors, low blue light, low flicker light, full of spectrum lightning”. What can people do to kind of change their office and their house where they’re out all day to improve light, um, um, uh, light activation via says, um, say like I have full light spectrum on now? What can people do inside their home to improve light, if they can’t get outside as much?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Good question, Justin. I see a lot of patients, uh, there are in cubicles, you know, in dark rooms working. The first thing, I tell them is get close to a window or get enough natural from the sun by being exposed to, uh, somewhere that has windows or in condensing lights that are natural lights, you know. We want to bring back the natural state of light closes to the sun, so we can bring. All these LED lights are not natural. We’re not getting the natural lightning and like you said blue light is dangerous and that’s where the computers and cellphones and nighttime television and nighttime to, you know, working on texting or using cellphones for, you know, um, you know, being on it too much is creating problems and neurological problems as well and that’s why people can’t sleep well because they’re bombarded by blue light which is dangerous to our brain.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There are some good monitors out there that are eye care monitors that are low flicker, low blue light monitors. Those are great, I have three big ones in front of me that will help decrease the flicker and the blue light, the lighting I have here are full spectrum, so you can look at investing some full spectrum light bulbs to plug into those sources where you have lighting in your office. That helps a lot. Anything else that you personally, um, apply or do in your home or office?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Well, I also to get them out for several minutes at a time. So, if they’re indoors, just go outside for about 5 – 10 minutes, at least expose yourself to some light and then you can go back to work. Don’t stay indoors all day long without exposing yourself to natural light. Because that what creates mitochondrial function, that’s what creates, um, all that natural biochemical process that we need to perform better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. That’s great. Let’s talk about the mitochondria. You kind of already hit it right? The mitochondria are essentially the powerhouse of our cells. They generate ATP, which is like the cellular currency of our body. Vitamin D or I should say sunlight helps charge it. What about diet? There’s a lot of, I should say, a lot of, um, conflicting ideas about it right? I’ve seen many places where the mitochondria runs off of glucose and creates dirty fuel that we really wanna be using the carnitine shuttle and using fatty acids and being a little bit more ketogenic to run the mitochondria and not fueling up with too much carbs. I know guys like Ray Peat talk about more using orange juice and more refined juices. What’s your take on that? I know you’re a little bit more controversial on some of the carb stuff but go ahead.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Um, well, I’ve been, you know, I’ve been following Ray Peat but I’ve also had a chance to meet and work with, um, Linus Pauling and he was a big advocate of orange juice and he explained to me the importance of orange juice with the flavonoids, the vitamin C is natural in orange juice. And the flavonoids, like Apigenin, Arginine and Naringin and Fisetin. These are very important compounds that increase the electron flow into the mitochondria so there’s efficient ATP production and CO2 is the byproduct of efficient ATP. Lactic acid is inflammatory. It becomes an inflammatory nature, and that’s how cancer cells derived themselves by lactic acid.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is lactic acid a powerful stimulator for growth hormone too? Don’t we make that when we exercise as well.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Um, we do but lactic acid causes inflammation in our body and we get cramps and deterioration and joint problems and we break down cartilage and ligaments and tendons. And just simply I used to do with my athletes, I used to give them baking soda, a quarter of a teaspoon to a teaspoon every day, twice a day to help them recover from lactic acid so they have more energy and their recovery is much faster and they don’t break down as fast and then I started adding the collagen bases, the vitamin D, the calcium, and the vitamin C from orange juice. That all helped. So, what I wanted to look at is how do we increase the oxidative metabolism and reduce the reduction state. So, you have oxidation and you have reduction state. And the reduction state is the byproduct of ATP burning in our body for fuel and energy and we wanna be able to bring back the oxidative state so we have the electron flow that breaks the food that we eat into energy which is glucose and that glucose is the metabolism of the gasoline of our body that fuels us and allows us to produce and function and be able to repair ourselves.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, what kind of glucose sources are we talking in, um, from fruit which is gonna be mostly fructose but some glucose or starch which will be more glucose. I mean we’re not advocating lots of refined sugar or processed grains right. What kind of sources and then would this still be a good idea if someone’s maybe more sedentary and insulin resistant? Are these people from who are more flexible, metabolically flexible and more active, how do you make that prescription?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Well, myself in working with many patients, many athletes, I found that one of the best things I did in the morning for my athletes to perform better and I work with the Rams, Raiders, Lakers, uh, you know, all these, um, Kansas City Chiefs as you can sees in the background, I have Howie Long back there, who was one of my patients, is I found that if I can increase uncoupling protein, increase mitochondria, what increases mitochondria, it’s what we eat and the supplements we take like anything that we, uh, if we have coffee. We did a study and we found out that coffee with sugar and cream, actually the athletes perform better and we saw an increase in mitochondrial function. And if we, did it with tea, we found that if we put sugar and cream of milk, we found the same result. So, it’s that, process of in the morning, have the orange juice, have your coffee with sugar and cream and the same thing with tea, we need sugar to operate on glucose metabolism.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is these for every person, I mean obviously you’re a lean kind of more ectomorphic kind of body type, you’re active. So, for you, is that makes sense but that makes sense if you’re overweight though as well? And you’re more insulin resistant, would that be a good recommendation for them or should we allow some of these people to go off of gluconeogenesis to help convert maybe glucose in their body via protein, which is more time released? How do you make that more specific?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Working with, you know, going back to this ‘80s, ’81, ’82, I wanted to study on performance and recovery. That was my job at UCLA. That was what given a job and I worked n caloric restriction diet, I worked on you know mitochondria performance, uh, with the university. And what I found is that, since we start consuming too much carbs, you know pastas and breads and flours and iron rich foods, we have caused more obesity and diabetes and heart attacks. When the oils came into play, all the seed oils from canola to sunflowers, pollock, cotton, all those, we had an increase in heart disease and diabetes and cancer. So, the two things we saw was, when we start producing grains and pastas and breads and flowers, this is a new part of our diet, you know, it wasn’t in a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, we were a gatherer and a hunter and we ate from the roots and we ate fruits. So, when we changed our diet, we saw a difference in disease stages increasing. And so, people who are, uh, overweight, it has nothing to do with sugar. Its people are not getting enough calcium and vitamin D in their diet, they’re consuming too much phosphorus and there’s a gene called Klotho, k-l-o-t-h-o, and that gene regulates kidney function, biologically all our function is controlled by that one gene, uh, upregulating calcium into our bone. Osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, if we have too much phosphorus, we’re removing calcium out from the bone, and we’re generating as an inflammatory condition in the body and that’s why we have osteoporosis, arthritis, and cancer and heart disease. But if have more calcium in our diet from dairy products, from eggs, from cheeses and predominantly those kinds of foods and they’re higher in amino acids utilization foods. You know, we found that eggs and milk are the two highest in AAU, amino acids utilization, in our body and by consuming those kinds of foods, we found that people are healthier.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, what about, so, you’re talking about, um, calcium is good, we need more of that. What about magnesium? Where does magnesium sits on that hierarchy?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: It is essential. There’s no doubt because of cardiovascular disease and also it helps calcium absorption into the cells, into the bones, into our bone marrow.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And other patients that you would say, you shouldn’t be doing these orange juice, you shouldn’t be doing the extra sugar, who are these people? You’re dealing with a lot of athletes, someone who’s 30, 40, 50 pounds overweight and more insulin resistant, would you say hey maybe be careful on that stuff?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I’ve taken on a lot of patients, uh, since I retired from chiropractic and I have a group of people that I work with and I have a friend at Ohio State University food and science department and he and his mother have diabetes. They’re not active, you gotta understand, so when I started giving them more sugar fructose or sucrose in their diet, I was able to completely reverse their diabetic problems.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, I would, I’d wanna know what was their diet before. Are you reducing the amount of glucose because, we know diabetes has to do with high amounts of, um, glucose in the bloodstream, so there tends to be a resistance to the insulin right and so we have glucose accumulating, so how does giving more of that actually lower your glucose level? Physiologically that doesn’t make sense to me.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Okay. I had a chance, there was a fellow at UCSF and he and I spoke about two years ago right before the COVID came on, we met at, uh, we met and he was doing stem cells for, uh, the pancreas, how to improve, uh, insulin function again, how we repair the body back to natural state where we don’t have to give them diabetes medication and I had, uh, I asked them one thing, would you do me a favor when you do a stem cells, would you do me a favor, increase the sugar intake in the patient. He reported back to me that he double the effects of the stem cells in diabetic patients and we came into conclusion that glucose and fructose improve the mitochondrial function and produces insulin more efficiently. And he was, he didn’t even thought about that, he didn’t even think that glucose was that essential and
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that’s in the presence of stem cells, right? What if you don’t have stem cells because I mean we know that, we know that, um, type 2 diabetes over 20,30 years, we know beta cell function of the pancreas and insulin production actually drop and they become insulin dependent over a long period of time. So, if that theory were to make sense, why are people becoming insulin dependent over decades later.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I want you to go back and study a guy named Peori and Bronk, B-r-o-n-k and Peori is another fellow. One from France and one from England. Ray Peat has it in his newsletters, I reviewed their studies. They gave 16 ounces of sugar to diabetic patients and they give a collagen type of diet with, you know, oxtail soup or a lamb shank, things that were high in collagen. They completely reverse all diabetic patients. I have taken retired athletes, you know, had diabetes and heart issues, okay. I studied their diet, I looked at them and these guys are not like active anymore. They’re not like football players or athletes that they were when they were young. They had all these issues with, uh, diabetes and heart disease and I look at their diet and I stopped them having them have breakfast with just toast and peanut butter or oatmeal or you know, without protein. I asked them to start using orange juice, apple juice, grape juice and sugar in their coffee and tea. I monitored them. I was able to get them off any diabetic medication completely and these about 30 to 40 people I monitored and I have so many people that are, uh, one person came to me, um, that was, uh, a fellow who started, was involved in a company that got the solar technology going especially in one of the ballparks that the 49ers played and he was a retired football player as well and he had diabetic problems and he was gonna be put on insulin and he asked me if I would work with him and I said, absolutely. He trusted me enough because of other people in the family that use, uh, were, you know, using me for nutritional consultation all recovered and one of them was a lung cancer patient who recovered 100 percent. And I put them on this higher sugar diet meaning fruits, orange juice, coffee and sugar and all that and his doctor in San Jose says, a month later, two months he came back and he says all your blood report came back perfect. He’s never seen anybody recover that fast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it’s interesting because I have, I have hundreds of, you know, observations the opposite right? Restricting a lot of those sugars and allowing the body to start burning more fat and then the cells become more sensitive. I guess, the question I would ask is, what was their diet like ahead of time because if someone’s diet’s worse and even though you’re adding all this sugar it could be less sugar and then three would be, how much activity are they getting? Are they burning it all up with their muscles and mitochondria right after they consuming it? Are they sitting all day doing an office job and still, um, maintaining insulin sensitivity while being sedentary?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yeah. No, I got it. I understand, you, uh, nutrition and diet is very important. What I look at, I look at things that causes oxidative damage to the thyroid and to the mitochondria. What are they? High phosphorus foods, unsaturated fats, okay, those and, and overload with iron. Too much iron, causes damage to our blood cells okay. And so, I’m looking at increasing cytochrome oxidase enzymes by increasing copper, by increasing NAD output, so that’s your B3 niacinamide, your B1, B2. All of these are important. Vitamin D and vitamin A and breaking, and having them eat more of high protein, high cholesterol diet. In my study, I did a lot of research in longevity, and the people that I’ve study and I just lost one patient, three months four months ago, it was on national television. She was 114 years old. Her diet was very high in dairy. That’s how I had her on since ’92 and she was eating that before. Her diet was basically milk, cheeses and a piece of bread. That was her diet pretty much and her coffee and sugar and that’s it. And so, I’ve been looking that for a long time, is studying people that live the longest like in Bolivia, in the area of Georgia and Turkey, and what do they consume is they consume mostly dairy products and they consume things that are natural. They don’t eat much of the pastas and breads and grains and oat meals because that’s not their diet. So, I look at their diet, I wanna make sure if I can raise the NAD+ levels, you know, the oxidative metabolism, that’s the secret. How did I do that? I studies with Douglas, uh, I studied with so many of the great minds out their in mitochondrial research and Klotho research, and I found out that glucose metabolism is a secret, how do we increase that and how do we bring down unsaturated fats, increase saturated fats because high cholesterol actually increases longevity and most of my..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s an antioxidant
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yep. It’s an antioxidant. It helps with brain development. It helps with libido and hormones. And I put everybody at not to worry about high cholesterol, I put them in a diet that’s rich in cholesterol, saturated fats, steric acid, all these things that we need to develop with. And I found by doing all of these with my patients and increasing the glucose metabolism and giving them sugar because most of my patients are very fatigued, they’re tired, they’re depressed, they have anxiety issues, and by just changing them, increases some sugar in their body, I’ve been able to see a difference in all of them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But I would imagine though, these people that are already sick though, probably have a lot of sugar in their body already. They’re probably eating lots of processed grains and flowers and sodas. So, my chole rationale on this whole thing, how does adding more of what’s already there, how does that fix anything because they’re already eating a lot of processed grains and processed sugars, how does adding that in a different form fix it?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Okay. You set the magic work. We’re eating too much grains, pastas breads, what is, those are very high of what? Phosphorus foods.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But they’re also going to break down the sugar in the body, they still break down the sugar.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yes. They break it down differently than if I eat a fruit, okay. If I eat a fruit. What is around that fruit? Minerals.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Potato fiber. Fiber as well. Some vitamin C and bioflavonoids.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yes. So, If I’m eating that, I have sugar from a natural source that is not converted, doesn’t have anything to do with phosphorus. Phosphorus is one of the leading causes of diseases today and I’ve studies the Klotho gene from universities, from Stanford, from UCSF, from UCLA and I’ve learned that most of the grains and pastas and breads and processed foods are very rich and high in phosphorus and we’re losing vitamin K, we’re losing calcium in our body and it’s affecting vitamin D levels. And that’s why I agree with you, these processed foods are not our, uh, the foods that we should be eating and they’re not nature, you know, they’re not coming from nature.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Isn’t there a natural ratio too with calcium, phosphorus. So, is it the fact that phosphorus is a problem or is it more that we’re not getting enough calcium to combat the phosphorus?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Both. You hit it both.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, if you’re getting phosphor, because you’re going to get phosphorus in animal products too, right? You’ll be getting in meat so, we’re not saying meat ‘s bad, you’re just saying make sure you get enough calcium to balance it off is that what you’re saying?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I don’t eat much meat anymore. Okay. I’m learning..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How much meat are you consuming but you’re still doing a lot of collagens though, right?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I do collagen but my predominant diet is now shellfish
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. So, you’re still doing animal protein, you’re just choosing on the crustacean side. You’ve got it.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I’m using more copper rich foods in my diet because cytochrome oxidase enzyme, a complex for, is essential for mitochondrial function and we’re not getting enough copper rich foods anymore. We’re getting too much iron, we’re getting too much phosphorus, we’re not getting enough copper in our diet. So, I’m choosing foods that are higher in copper and less in iron and less in phosphorus and I see a difference in myself. You know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But I know for a long time, you were a big fan of grass-fed meat. Are you still a fan of grass-fed meat?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: No. I think, grass-fed beef, if you’re gonna go for meat, grass-fed is the only one because, it is higher in vitamin E and less in unsaturated fats than the hormone or the estrogenic meats that we’re seeing today because of the hormones and they [inaudible]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The hormones. And then also you’re getting a lot of goof fatty acids because these grass-fed cows, they’re essentially bioaccumulating the GLA fats from the grass, correct? So, you’re getting a really good high quality, um, uh, I think saturated fat from a lot the, um, fats that are concentrated from the grass. Is that correct?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Exactly!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, you talked about these polyunsaturated. Why are these fats so bad, obviously, the processing of a lot of these fats whether it’s canola or soy, etc., damages a lot of them, right? And so, once they’re damaged and oxidized, they essentially create our building blocks for our membrane. So now, we have a really crappy cell membrane it’s depleting our antioxidant reserves. So, it’s depleting vitamin E, vitamin C. Is that correct? And these fats stay in our cells for a long time. Can you talk more about that?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Okay. In lipid chemistry at Stanford. I had a chance to meet several people there and at the Back institute. And I was asking them questions about cell membrane and mitochondria, and Linus Pauling Institute. They told me in their research that if it’s not saturated fats, if it’s not mono or medium chain triglycerides, anything that is high in unsaturated fats causes cell membrane oxidative damage to the mitochondria, uh, lipids okay, and they become oxidize and become damage, the RNA and DNA of the mitochondria gets damaged. And so, all unsaturated fats will do that to the, um, mitochondrial lipids, okay? And, um, I read several, major published articles on it and also not only does it damage our mitochondria. It also damages our cells in all other parts of the body and parts of the brain as well. And it causes oxidative damage to the thyroid. The thyroid is so important. It’s the organ that controls metabolic function, hormonal function, metabolism, everything. Polyunsaturated oils damage the T4 – T3 conversion. Okay?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Yeah. Make sense.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: And so, every..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Probably effects the autoimmunity, right? Because most thyroid issues have autoimmune component. So, if you drive these polyunsaturated that are damaged, you’re probably just driving more inflammation, right, and you’re depleting a lor of these antioxidants which are anti-inflammatory as well.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: You’re absolutely right, Justin, that we’re seeing an increase in inflammation due to these fats. In nature, we weren’t using oils from seeds. That’s something else. Seeds were made to grow things. They weren’t made to eat and..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or if we ate them, we soaked them. There was a way that we try to deactivate a lot of these anti-nutrients and lectins via certain methods.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yes. You mean sprouting?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. Exactly. Yep.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: So, that’s the other problem with the, um, with the unsaturated fats and there was a lot of, uh, Gilbert Ling showed that it was causing a lot of, uh, cell membrane issues to and, um, the other thing also not only that but it can, it raises estrogen in our body and estrogen is a promoter of growth of cancer and it’s also an inflammatory marker and lowers oxidative metabolism in the mitochondria. Vernon Stevens at Ohio State university and Cleveland, um, cancer clinic showed that estrogen is a predominant marker of all cancer cells. It’s in the cell membrane of all cancer cells and he showed that in his studies that estrogen leads to all these processes and by reducing unsaturated fats, therefore reduce some of the estrogen. By increasing progesterone and DHEA in our diet, we also lower estrogen. And estrogen can cause many oxidative damages, inflammation and raises serotonin and histamine and we have autoimmune disease from that as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Makes sense. Now, with estrogens, are you also worried about aromatase in men for instance high levels of insulin primarily driven by too much sugar. Are you worried about aromatase causing that high level of estrogen and thus increasing cancer risk n men for instance?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Can we put a hole for a second? I have the people here. Hold on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sure, no problem, we’ll pause it really quick here. Or actually, I’ll just, I’ll keep chatting here while you, uh, jump over. So, it’s a couple of things that we want to highlight here, mitochondria, very important, I mean, I guess some of the things that Dr. Bernd and I may disagree on is about how much glucose a person needs. I would say out of the gates, um, glucose you can get away with more processed glucose and more refined sugars, the more active you are and the more genetically you ten to be more towards an ectomorph, right. Look at Michael Phelps back and I think it was maybe, two Olympics ago, they showed his breakfast or what he ate during the day. It was like pancakes and junk. I’m just saying, it was 10,000 calories, I was thinking, I’m like man, if that guy actually ate 10,000 calories of food that was more nutrient dense imagine how much better he performed. But again, when someone’s that active, they can deal with all the refined carbohydrates and sugars and they can handle it. Now, again, if someone has a gluten sensitivity and, uh, other food allergens such as dairy and cheeses that maybe problematic and that may cause IBS and other types of issues. So, I would say carbohydrate loads should really be dependent upon on how active someone is, um, their genetic predisposition to be able to handle that high level of carbohydrate and also with their what their activity level is. Some people they consume a bunch of carbohydrates bunch of pasta. They are prone to getting tired. Some eat a bunch of glucose and pasta and they actually get more active. Now, I would say also better to do things that are more starchy, squash, sweet potato, an anti-inflammatory because gluten sensitivity is a big deal, uh, the more gluten that you’re consuming and the more sensitive you are to it, the more that may drive inflammation, uh, create gut permeability issues and also, um, increase chance of autoimmunity and so we want to choose safe starches that are gonna be anti-inflammatory, nutrient dense and low toxin. All right, he’s back. I was just chatting with everyone here as we go. So, let’s just kind of dive into the mitochondria, you mentioned aspirin. Now, are you worried about any of the side effects of the acetylsalicylic acid which is essentially is aspirin and then could people also do white willow bark as well if they wanted to avoid the actual pharmaceutical maybe due to the actual bark it said? And are you worried about those side effects?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Not at all. I’ve been using aspirin for I’ve got 40 years for now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For listeners, aspirin is derived from white willow bark. So, if you want to try it, you can also get the actual whole herb, the whole bark, can do it that way too. Go ahead.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: So, about 1984, when I was working with, uh, Olympic athletes then I became, uh, I worked with the Raiders and Rams that year and then Lakers, the following year. I studied from a cell physiologist at UCLA. How to improve, you know, mitochondria, uncoupling protein, energy into the, uh, individual performance. And there was a study that somebody showed me that, um, aspirin helps with coffee in raising uncoupling proteins. So, when I gave people aspirin with coffee, with sugar and cream, they doubled their performance level. It was almost like a steroid they said. It was so much they couldn’t believe it. Not only that, we saw, uh, less injuries in our athletes. Our injuries levels were going down dramatically. So, we knew it had to be what the aspirin as well because weren’t getting the strains and strains of calves and ankles, that you know, in athletes that were performing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, hold on. One second, what does that mean uncoupling proteins. Can you kind of break that down what that means?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: That means your improving the electron flow into the mitochondria. You’re getting more, new, uh, ability to take electrons and oxygen and there’s a chemical reaction in the mitochondria, there’s a spin there that goes on. The ATP spin, you know, that gives us that spin to make energy in the mitochondria.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what’s the mechanism is that from aspirin decreasing inflammation and improving just the flow, it’s improving the blood flow of these nutrients? What’s the mechanism?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: It has to be the combination of the coffee, the caffeine,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The alkaloids
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: the high magnesium and the anti-inflammatory mechanism of the coffee and the aspirin that increased that electron flow through the cell membrane and it created a faster spin, so you’re getting more efficient ATP production. And you know, aspirin is also can lower fatty acid sequences which is a major factor in all cancer cells. It’s Otto Warburg says, if you don’t have sufficient oxygen to, uh, as a respiratory function in a cell, then you’re not gonna have efficient energy and cancer cells don’t have efficient energy. They break down to lactic acid and that’s the problem. Well. Aspirin protects us from the lactic acid production, that’s another factor and helps with raising CO2, carbon dioxide, which is the byproduct of energy and why we train in high altitude is because we want more CO2 which helps us in energy and metabolism and this improvement and quality of endurance because of steel too and so we found that aspirin also helps with raising CO2 levels which is essential form more energy and recovery from injuries and all that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Well, anything else you want to leave the listeners with? And by the way would you recommend just any day generic baby aspirin or do you have any brands that have less fillers or dyes or preservatives in there?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I go and I want you to have. I just get Walgreens brand. Their brand, it’s aspirin Walgreens or any brand that’s not, you know, like bears it’s I see less recipients.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. And if people wanna still get that benefit, they could still try to find some White Willow bark which is what aspirin is made from. So that’s another option natural alternative. If someone wants it to be a little bit more natural in their approach that’s a good option as well.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: About 13 years ago, I was lecturing at an anti-aging conference in Las Vegas and San Jose, and one of the cardiologists, who was also lecturing, we started talking about the importance, there was a lecture on aspirin at the same conference by one of the scientists at Bayer. He showed that aspirin increases a gene called Foxo, f-o-x-o, which is a longevity gene that’s found in longevity people. And aspirin increases this function of Foxo gene to be more efficient and to keep it from burning down or help to over express it. So, we found that it works phenomenally well. And we went to that conference and we saw all the values of aspirin. It helps with bone growth and bone development and cartilage repair and lowers inflammation, increases CO2 levels. The cardiologists, I asked them, how does this work in your sense of understanding of the heart and the blood flow. He says that aspirin protects us, if we take it every night, from developing a clot, from developing a stroke, from platelets aggregating each other, from oxidative damage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But, what would you recommend other things like systemic enzymes or higher dose fish oil, would you recommend other natural things or curcumin or ginger first or do you really think aspirin is just as good or if not better than those natural compounds too?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I have studied every herb out there with Elizabeth Mazzeo. She’s the world leading expert in inflammatory plants. Aspirin was by was far, the only plant, the only natural thing that has prostaglandin 1, prostaglandin 2, which is COX1 and 2 inhibitors. There’s not a compound out there that inhibits both prostaglandins 1 and 2 and many do 1, many do 2, but nothing comes close to doing 1 and 2. Boswellia was the second most powerful under aspirin, Boswellia.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Boswellia, okay, which is essentially Frankincense. And were not putting things like Ibuprofen or NSAIDs in the same category that increased chance of ulcers and liver damage, right? I mean those kill about 20 thousand people taking a year. Taking correctly, they work great but they have some side effects. You wouldn’t put aspirin in that same camp, right?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: No, aspirin by far so much better because it doesn’t cost liver damage and the other, you said something very interesting, all these other ones, they have a problem, they cause a hypometabolic function. They don’t improve mitochondrial function. That was the second thing that we did a study with. In lipid chemistry is what increases mitochondrial function and aspirin seems to be the only one besides Fisetin, which is gonna be the next future, that increases electron flow into the mitochondria. And that’s what we’re seeing and I take 325 milligrams every night before I go to bed. That’s what the cardiologist told me that protects us against strokes, blood clots by, uh, you know, anything that causes platelet damage or anything like that, 325. 81 did not do much at all in that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Okay.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: And then, I have many athletes still that I work with, I haven’t taken aspirin in the morning as a protective mechanism against injury, inflammation and at night and they seem to do better when they’re doing that then their recovery is better, the less injuries. And again, anything that I can raise the oxidative function of our metabolism, our mitochondria is what I consume in foods and also what I do with nutrients like B1, B2 and niacinamide and vitamin D and vitamin K. All the quinones are very powerful that’s what William Coker came up with his cancer treatment. How to increase quinones in our body and it was basically oxidative metabolism improvement.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what was the dose of aspirin again? Was it 350 milligrams?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I take 325. I’ll share with you, there’s a doctor in San Diego who called me up 15 – 20 years ago. I did an article, I did a lecture podcast on Methylene blue, which also helps with increasing oxidative metabolism and increases mitochondria. I got a call from this doctor, he’s very well known in San Diego, very alternative of thinking, you know, he’s not your conservative doctor, but he thinks above the outside the box. And he wanted, he had a patient that had Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. I forgot, I think, it was Alzheimer’s and he saw my, uh, video on podcast from Silicon Valley, and he asked me about methylene blue dosage. He wants to try it on his patient and I told him what to do, how much milligrams per day and all that. Then he asked me, I got a question for you, my father has stomach cancer. So, he asked me what can he do. So, I gave him a hope program and everything and I told him to do a thousand milligrams of aspirin to 2,000 because I saw the research that aspirin and vitamin D3 can reverse cancer. Okay. So, I told him about the D3 and I told him about the aspirin. Six months later, he calls me up wants to know about Parkinson’s and methylene blue and then I realized I was, I realized who he was, I said how’s your father with the cancer? He said, he’s completely cured. I said, “how long did it take him”. “Six months”. “Wow. What did you do with him, I said, “What did I tell you because I forgot it was six-seven months ago”? Yeah. He took a thousand milligrams of aspirin every day, 3 aspirins, morning, afternoon, evening with vitamin K and also baking soda, so he didn’t have an upset stomach. He’s one of the third people that I talked to with colon or stomach cancer that reversed it just by using aspirin. I was amazed, you know, that it just took aspirin to do that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow. That’s great.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Many reports and I went to PubMed and Medline and PLOS and I read of Ray Peat’s articles. Aspirin is a wonder drug and I didn’t realize until that study that we went to the anti-aging conference in Las Vegas, where the fellow from Bayer spoke about the importance of aspirin, not only inflammation but prolonging longevity and other factors that are necessary.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Very cool. I mean, I think anyone listening here, if they’re on the fence that’s an option. They can also jump on the herb, I think also keeping inflammation down be your diet’s probably, you know, probably the best thing out of the gates like you mentioned like vitamin D. Anything else you want to leave the listeners with here, Bernd, that you we didn’t have enough time to get but you wanna highlight it before we go here?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Well, again, like I said, I think the most important is reduce the indoor, you know, climate, uh, get more sunlight, get natural lighting like you said in condensing, full spectrum lighting is important.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct, full spectrum, that makes sense
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: You know, and make sure the most important thing here is what I found in people with weight problems and anybody. I try to get them to have a good breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal. If you’re gonna have it at 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, it is the most important meal and it should be 50 grams, 25 to 50 grams of protein. Don’t have a starch, don’t have a croissant, don’t have a peanut butter sandwich, don’t have an oat meal. Worst thing to do in the morning, you wanna build that thyroid function and you wanna increase mitochondrial function. So, good protein, I love pasteurized, uh, pasture eggs, I love cheeses like Manchego, anybody know or Feta cheese or goat cheese and cottage cheese and I have my orange juice and my coffee every single day. Never have any problems with weight problems or tiredness or fatigue and I sleep like a log every day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Good. Excellent. Well, I appreciate the really good feedback here, Bernd, I mean your wealth of knowledge. You’ve been in this field for nearly 50 years, so I appreciate it the clinical information. Hopefully listeners can take one thing out of this here. I think it’s great, um, again, Bernd website, is it berndfriedlander.com?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yeah. berndfriedlander.com
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: berndfriedlander.com. We’ll put the link down below here for you all. Bernd is a great friend and a wealthy of knowledge. Bernd, thanks for everything. Thanks for chatting here today.
References:
https://www.drberndfriedlander.com/
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Signs and Solution for Gut Inflammation and Leaky Gut | Podcast #351
In this video, Dr. J and Evan stress the importance of what you eat and how it impacts the rest of your body. However, what you might not realize is how your food is digested in your body, and when it gets inflamed and leaky, how do you fix it?
A lack of digestive enzymes can cause leaky gut syndrome—another unfortunate result of chronic inflammation in the digestive system. Many culprits cause leaky gut, including stress, medications, poor food choices or quality, alcohol, cigarettes, and even hormone changes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
1:08 – Poor Gut Health Connection to Virus.
4:31 – What is the role of bile movement and production?
11:16 – The influence of gut michrobiota on Inflammation and Insulin Resistance
19:29 – General recommendations on carbohydrates and for a healthier gut
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hi! Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the signs and solutions of gut inflammation and gut permeability or leaky gut for short. Really exciting topic. We see it a lot in our patients every single day. Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Hey. I’m doing really well. I can’t remember if we covered this on the podcast or not, this specific study but there was a paper that came out all about leaky gut and worsen outcomes with the virus and so people could put in the, you know, what virus in PubMed and leaky gut and we’re finding that a lot of people with leaky gut that’s actually one of the precursors and that’s what’s leading to worse outcomes so this is more important, It’s always important but this is more important now because we know that there’s a massive link and I’ll actually pull this up here and I’ll show you this, American Society for Microbiology, they did this. Did we talk about this yet or not?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let’s talk about it. Let’s go ahead.
Evan Brand: This particular paper. Let’s bring it up there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me check here. Oh yeah. Let me add it on. Go ahead.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So, there we go. So, poor gut health is connected to severe blank, new research shows and long story short, you can go into this microbiology article but long story short they actually show a picture too. Let me see if I can get to that picture. Here we go. That was the picture. I think, we already showed this picture but forgive me and people listening on audio. Basically, we’re just showing that viral particles with a leaky gut are gonna be able to get into the circulation and that’s gonna increase your inflammatory response so the real goal of today is making sure that your gut is in good shape because therefore you’re not gonna have leakage into your circulation. You’re gonna be far far better if you have that healthy gut barrier. So, that was really kind of the spark notes of that but that’s like a 19 pages paper that you can dive into and many people I think have thought of leaky gut as kind of trendy topic that only people like you and I talk about but this is finally, actually getting into the mainstream. So, I hope gastroenterologists are gonna realize the importance of addressing the gut and I hope they actually start taking it more seriously. Right now, it’s just antibiotics that’s really the only thing that gastroenterologists do for gut, right? I mean steroids maybe and immune modulating drugs in the case of like, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s but beyond that there’s not really much leaky gut conversation going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No. There’s not and again, really, a leaky gut has an effect, right? Or we’ll call it gut permeability, right? If you go on PubMed, a leaky gut is like a slung. If you want to really find it, you want to look at, you know, gastrointestinal permeability, right? These are gonna be the big things, it’s the tight junctions, the epithelial cells and the small intestine, they start to come apart like my fingers here interlocked like I’m saying a prayer, they come apart and then you can see lipopolysaccharides undigested food particulate can slip out. So, this is, um, this is part of the major, major mechanism. Now, with gut permeability, it’s an effect not a cause so I always tell patients, we don’t go in and treat leaky gut, we treat the corresponding vectors of inflammation that drive gut permeability so that could be food allergens, that could be immune stressors like virus, parasites, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, general dysbiosis, poor digestion, antibiotic exposure, creating rebound overgrowth, fungal overgrowth, you know, just poor digestion, lots of stress, increased sympathetic tone and adrenal stress, that’s shutting down the digestive system and making gut permeability more probable. So, these are the big vectors so we always wanna draw a line. What’s the root cause and what’s the effect and gut permeability is in the effect not necessarily a cause.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of, even advertisements now on social media for all these leaky gut healing formulas and that kind of stuff and it always has the word heal involved but you could take as much glutamine and whatever else you want. You could go into an elemental diet and all of that. It’s not gonna get rid of these big root causes and certainly for me, I tried some gut support but ultimately it was resolving my parasite infections. That was the most important thing for me and so, you can test for this. This is not an uncommon situation; you and I personally and clinically see parasites every single week. So, when you hear this idea of like, oh, it’s a third world country problem, you haven’t traveled to Mexico or anything like that. That’s just crap, I see it all the time and I had them and I was not out of the country and I had multiple parasite infections and then that affects your bowel flow, right? Can we talk about the bowel for a minute, what’s the role there, because you and I talked about how you have to have adequate bile to act as sort of a natural antimicrobial but how is this happening. What do you think are the big driving factors for why bile production is just not good?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, first off, we look at the domino rally of digestion. The first thing that has to happen is good, nice aesthetic pH in the stomach. So, we need adequate HCl in the stomach, hydrochloric acid that lowers the pH and again, lower pH tends to have an antimicrobial effect, right? So, if we have to bring the pH down a little bit, that makes it harder for bugs to grow and that pH is also responsible for activating a lot of proteolytic enzymes in our stomach so if we have a good pH, we activate our enzymes, that starts the digestive cascade, we make it harder for bugs to grow and then once all that kind that mixed up food and enzymes and acids and all the stuff in our stomach is all mixed up. That’s called chyme, C-H-Y-M-E, that gets released into our small intestine, our pancreas then produces a bunch of bicarbonate to bring that pH back up to around neutral but that pH being nice and acidic, it triggers bicarbonate and then it also triggers cholecystokinin production, CCK, which then causes the gallbladder to contract so then you get a whole bunch of bile that comes out, you get a bunch of bicarbonate that comes out of the pancreas but then you’re also gonna get a bunch of lipase and proteolytic enzymes, trypsin, chymotrypsin lipase, lipolytic enzymes is coming out of the pancreas as well. So then, you bring the pH back up, you add the fat digestive enzymes, the proteolytic enzymes and then you also stimulate that bile production which then emulsifies that fat. Think of emulsification as you have a nice greasy pan where you cook some bacon on, right? Throw under water, you feel the fat on the pan, throw some dawn soap on there, it emulsifies it. It breaks that up so then you can get it all out the intestinal tract and be able to absorb it, carry on, mycells and be able to use it for lipid bilayer, hair, skin, nail, energy all that stuff. Prostaglandins.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. And though bile is produced by your liver but it’s stored in your gallbladder so people that have had their gallbladders removed which is a very common surgery, a lot of surgeons are very happy to remove gallbladders, I think in many cases, they may have been saved with fixing these other upstream issues but, well, once it’s gone, it’s gone. So, people listening that have no gallbladder, you have to take that into consideration. There was a study here in 2018, it was in the annals of gastroenterology, it found that poor bile flow can contribute to the development of inflammatory bowel disease. So, you’re really setting yourself up and find all the time with people clinically when they come in, they’ve had gallbladder removal, we see a lot of issues, we see massive bacterial overgrowth problems in these people and I think that’s partly due to not having enough bile being stored anymore like you and I have talked about it before, I think you said it was a 10x concentration in the gallbladder, is that right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 10 to 15x. Yeah.
Evan Brand: So, you’re missing out on that when you have just liver production, you don’t have that storage facility. I mean you have some but just nowhere near what you would have had if you had your gallbladder. So, please. Try to save your gallbladder. You got to fix these upstream infections because that’s gonna be and get off proton pump inhibitors with the help of your doctor if you can because we know that, that suppression of stomach acid is gonna lead to the overgrowth which then fuels these downstream issues to not happen the domino effect, it literally gets stopped or prevented by the PPIs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so, we need good, think of bile, it’s an emulsifier, it breaks down fat, it’s also an antimicrobial and so we create antimicrobial environments by having good, nice, low pH by having good enzyme and acid levels that also helps and then also by having good bile output and plus the longer that food sits there and rots and putrefies because we are not breaking it down into its constituent parts, right? Then it’s gonna create future petrification, fermentation, and rancidification. Essentially proteins and fats and carbs are rotting, right? Then you can get gas and bloating and that just creates this incredible breeding ground for bugs to grow. It’s like you can have this beautiful home that you take care of but if you leave the garbage in there like, a week too long it’s gonna get like, stinky and then you’re gonna get a whole bunch of bugs attracted to it, right? Same kind of thing in our microbiome so it’s really important that we stay on top of, you know, those good health practices.
Evan Brand: Let’s hit the symptoms and signs and symptoms because people know most of the gut ones but there are some that you and I find clinically that maybe people wouldn’t think are a gut symptom, right? It might not manifest outside of that so we can cover the stuff like unusual color texture, smell, messy poops, you have floating stool. You have maybe alternating diarrhea, constipation, bloating, gut pain. But, what about like, skin issues and what about anxiety and depression and hormonal imbalances and brain fog. I mean, you and I have seen, we lost count how many times we’ve seen cases where we simply just fix the gut and all the sudden, this depression is lifted. I had one client named Miranda, who she had been depressed for, she said quote 20 plus years, all we did is do a gut protocol. I gave her no antidepressant herbs. We simply just did a gut protocol and when we did a six-week follow-up, she said her depression was 90% better and when she said 90% better, she didn’t even sound too excited and I said, are you realizing what you just said to me. You’ve been depressed for over 20 years and you’re 90% less depressed in six weeks of doing a gut protocol like do you realize how profound that is and she goes oh yeah, I guess that is amazing. Thank you. And, I think people, they get so used to feeling a certain way that when the clouds lift. They’re almost not even ready for it but depression, anxiety, I would put at the top of the list for mental health issues connected to these gut inflammation problems, I will tell you. And, you and I discussed this I remember calling you one-night years ago is probably like coming up on be six, seven years ago was like 2014, 2015 and I was like man, I’m having like a panic episode or something and this was when I was living down in Austin and it was H. pylori. It was driving that because as soon as I cleared the H. pylori, all those weird episodes of panic completely disappeared and I’ve seen that more than just the n equals one, me, I’ve seen it many, many times. So, if you have anxiety problems, you go to the psychiatrist. They’re not going to suggest you have gut infections but that’s something you need to be thinking about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Yep. 110% for sure. Anything else you want to add in that topic?
Evan Brand: If you’ve got mental health issues, look in the gut maybe even look in the gut before you look in the brain. Now, obviously, we’re gonna be doing organic acid testing and other things to look at neurotransmitters so we’re gonna check out dopamine, serotonin. We’re gonna look at what’s called quinolinic acid so we can look for actual brain inflammation or brain toxicity related to gut infections like sometimes Clostridia, we’ll see will drive up the quinolinic acid markers but we still have to fix the gut. So, if you have a family member, they’re anxious, they’re depressed, they’re fatigued. We’ve seen a massive link between chronic fatigue and gut infection. So, there’s another big one that people may not recognize, the gastro doc may not suggest your chronic fatigue is from a gut infection but it certainly can be skin issues as well. My skin was a wreck years ago. I had major acne even though my diet was clean. It was my gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. I also wanna highlight one other kind of variable here. I think it’s really important. I’m gonna pull this on screen here. I think this is really interesting. So, an interesting abstract here and it’s looking at the influences on the gut microbiome on inflammation and insulin resistance so this is interesting because we talk about insulin resistance, right? Consuming too much carbohydrate and refined sugar. All carbohydrates get broken down typically into glucose, fructose or a combination of the two, right? And so, the more sugar that gets released into our bloodstream that gets broken down whether from refined sugar, sucrose which is fructose in glucose, high fructose corn syrup is fructose in glucose 55, 45 concentration and then of course we have starches which get primarily broken down into glucose and then we have fruit which is more on the fructose side. These things all have an impact on our blood sugar and the more insulin resistant we become, we, it drives inflammation. It’s hard to utilize these fuel resources and these fuel sources to get deposited in our fat because our muscles don’t have the ability to store it. our liver loses the ability to store it. We don’t have the activity level. We don’t have the mitochondria stimulation to burn it so we store it as fat. Now, this article is interesting. It talks about obesity as the main condition that’s correlated with the appearance of insulin resistance. Think of this as when your cells get numb to insulin. Now, this is on screen here. People that are looking if you’ve got mental health issues on the audio version, we’ll put the link below for the whole video. Whole bacteria, their byproducts and metabolites undergo increased translocation through the gut epithelium. Translocate, let me give you the translation on that. Here’s your gut. Leaky gut happens, right? Where it talks about gut permeability and things start to translocate meaning move from the inside of the gut back into the bloodstream, right? So, it translocates through the gut epithelium into circulation due to the degradation of tight junctions. This is a leaky gut, right? Here. And it increases intestinal permeability that culminates in inflammation and insulin resistance. So, what this says is the inflammation caused by gut permeability caused by gut permeability caused by lack of enzymes, bile, food allergens, all the gut microbiome issues can actually drive inflammation and insulin resistance. Now, it makes it harder for your mitochondria to generate fuel because you’re not able to get that fuel into your cell and you start to become more of a sugar burner. It’s very difficult to burn fat when you have high levels of insulin, Very, very difficult. So, several strategies focusing on modulation of the gut microbiome using antibiotics, again, we would use antimicrobial herbs, probiotics and probiotic fibers are being experimentally used to um, in order to reduce intestinal permeability, increase the production of short chain fatty acids. Guess what, things like butyric acid, medium chain triglycerides. Those are all very helpful. And again, this helps promote insulin sensitivity and counteracts the inflammation. So, really, really important here. This study, influence of gut microbiome on subclinical inflammation here and this is the 2000, see what’s the study, 2013 study so we’ve known this stuff out for a long time here that the gut microbiome plays a major role on your blood sugar, blood sugar handling and if you’re a diabetic or someone with insulin problems, you need to be looking at the gut. Yeah. look at the diet, look at, you know, getting your diet and your macros in order, make sure your food quality is good and then look at really getting the microbiome dialed in to really help. That could be a missing piece of the puzzle for people that have really changed their diet but not quite gotten the metabolic benefits of losing weight yet.
Evan Brand: Wow. That’s a good point. You know, when I think back, when I had gut infections, my blood sugar was definitely not as good. I mean, 2 to 3 hours is as far as I could go without having to eat a meal. Now, I could fast all morning and not eat till 1 pm and I’m perfectly fine. I think there is an adrenal component too. I think I’m in a lot better place with that but I can tell you that certainly after mixing my gut, my blood sugar and blood stability is much better. So, I think you’re onto something with that paper and how people that even have gone paleo or animal based or keto. That still has issues with blood sugar regulation. That could be a sign of gut issues and I think even If diet dialed in in some cases what like you’re showing here, there could still be issues with the blood sugar. So, sometimes, it’s portrayed as like just fix your diet and everything else falls into place but you have to consider these other factors and also, I’ll throw in at the, you know, 11th hour here, mycotoxins, we know that mold toxins significantly affect the gut barrier and create a leaky gut. They damage the mitochondria, and we know that certain mycotoxins promote the overgrowth of bacteria like Clostridia and Candida. In fact, the lab will tell you that on paper, for example mycophenolic acid, it’s a very common mycotoxin that we see that comes from water damaged buildings. You breathe that in, that’ll then affect the gut and allow the overgrowth. So, if you’re just treating the antimicrobial herbs or fungal herbs and you’ve missed this giant mold exposure that can still affect the gut, still affect the brain and people won’t get fully better. So, that’s really the beauty of what we do is we try to work through all these puzzle pieces and help you because you could have this guy who says everything is gut and you go all the way down this gut rabbit hole and not get fully better or you go all the way down this insulin resistance rabbit hole and you still miss the smoking gun. You got the leaking dishwasher and your whole kitchen cabinetry. We had a woman in Texas last week, her dishwasher apparently leaking for years. Her entire kitchen has to be replaced now. She’s looking at 25k, just to replace her whole kitchen and she’s been to 10 doctors, 10 practitioners and nobody’s figured it out and I’m not trying to toot my own but I’ll just say I kept suspecting something because she said that she would always feel weird while she was washing dishes at her sink. She would get a little bit of a headache, feel a little bit sick to her stomach, said, ‘huh, is it possible that something’s leaking?’ and then boom brought in the remediator and they found it. There was a leaking dishwasher black mold everywhere.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Mold plays a major role in stressing out the immune system. It can create gut permeability within itself and then obviously drives the insulin problems. And also, people that eat this type of diet, I mean, it’s natural when you have microbiome issues to create a bunch of sugar because these foods are from an evolutionary standpoint, things that had a lot of sugar in it ended up having a lot of nutrients in it, right? Oh, a bunch of berries, some honey, right? And they were very rare in society. It was hard to find a lot of these things. Even fruit, you know, back then, tended to be a lot more sour and bitter and we’ve kind of hybridized and you know selectively grown fruits that tend to be sweeter and more, uh, and more plump and luscious now they taste. And so, we have sweeter fruits today and so it’s natural for people to want to crave all the crap that feeds the bad bugs because the bugs are producing chemicals to make you crave these foods. So, you have to be educated and understand that these foods, even though you’re craving them, you need to like not listen to those cravings sometimes and really shift your gut in it. If it shifts your macronutrients in a way to starve out some of these bugs, it can make a big difference.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. I mean, a lot of fruits hybridize now too as you mentioned to be sweeter, so like a strawberry. I’ve seen strawberries as big as my hand sometimes, like, ‘God’, you know wild strawberries, they’re tiny. I mean they’re like the size of a fingernail, if you’ve ever seen wild strawberries out in the yard, very tiny and definitely not anywhere as sweet as the other ones. So, when you hear people talk about fruit, like our modern fruit, like you said it’s not really, it’s more like candy with some, it’s like natural candy as opposed to the more ancient fruits so If I can find like some heirloom apples and that kind of stuff, I’m totally into it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And you know, my general recommendation with carbohydrates, just make sure you earn it, make sure you’re not in a place where you’re inactive and try to get some activity because sugar goes three directions: gets stored in the liver and muscle, okay, so, if you’re working out, you’re always draining that muscle every day, you have a storage reservoir for it a little bit in the liver; It goes to fat or it stays in the bloodstream and gets burned up by the mitochondria essentially. It gets burnt up mitochondria-wise by the muscles etc. So, it’s gonna go either stored, burnt, you know, it’ll stay in the bloodstream but burnt up by the muscles of mitochondria or it gets converted to fat. So, if you’re doing things that allow you to utilize the glucose in that bloodstream, not as big of a deal, but that’s what you really have to look at what activity level is and you have to work with your functional medicine doctor about dialing in those macros and some people they need to starve out certain macros especially the fermentable carbohydrates and a lot of the inflammatory foods especially grains, legumes, dairy. Those things are really, can be, drive a lot of inflammation and that can keep your sympathetic nervous system and your immune system on high alert which just drains a lot of energy from you. Food allergens can make you fat and they can drain energy from you. Yeah. Seeds too. You know, I cut out almond seeds, nut seeds. Yep, even some eggs too for sure.
Evan Brand: I cut out eggs for her while greens, I mean, some people are way overdoing it on the leafy greens. I can’t tell you the last time I ate a salad. I don’t really care. I don’t do leafy greens. I used to but, you know, I see way too many people doing these like kale smoothies. I had a lady doing like a pound of kale a day. Oxalates were off the chart. We know those affect the gut barrier too so there are downsides to plants.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean, it’s all about, you know, how you tolerate it, can you eat and feel good afterwards, how does your stool look? Do you see a bunch of undigested particulates? If so, you may want to work on just chewing your food up more. Taking some enzymes. See if that helps or sauteed it a little bit and see if that moves a needle. Again, there’s almost always a way, we can adjust things so it works but everyone’s a little different.
Evan Brand: If you need further help, you can reach out to Dr. Justin at his website, justinhealth.com. Now, we do worldwide consultations, phone, facetime, skype, whatever it can connect to, we do it. Lab tests are sent around the world. It’s awesome we have distributors to work with. We can get these things to your door. We sign off on it and get you rolling so we can investigate and look deeper. So, justinhealth and then for me Evan Brand, it’s evanbrand.com. You can reach out and we’re both happy to help you. We love what we do. We’re very blessed for the opportunity to be in the trenches. We’re always improving our own health. We work on our families, our children. We work on everybody around us. We’re always trying to improve them and to be able to do it clinically too is just great. We learn so much from you all and we like to be the shining light in a world of darkness where people have been to countless practitioners and the stuff that to you and I is just common everyday conversation, functional medicine stuff. This stuff to some people is like wow why has nobody ever mentioned that to me before. And for us, it’s like, oh yeah uh-uh, we do it with everyone. So, we look forward to helping you uncover your root causes if you have gut inflammation, what’s going on. There’s something under it so don’t give up, keep pushing forward and please reach out if you need help. We’d love to help you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Evanbrand.com, work at Evan. Dr. J, justinhealth.com, works with me. We are here with you guys. And, put your comments down below. Let us know the different things that you guys are applying, what’s working, what’s not and if you get overwhelmed listening to this. Try to take at least one action item out of it. I would say action items from a supplement standpoint. We’ll put our recommended supplements down below. We have different hydrochloric acid and enzyme support products that we’ll put down below for links. That’s always low hanging fruit. Again, diet wise, you know, a good autoimmune, lower fodmap diet can really be a good starting point and I would say for liver gallbladder, you know, we have our different formulas. I have one called liver supreme and again some of the hallmark nutrients in these products are gonna be bile, phosphatidylcholine, taurine, some products will have things like Tudca, which can be very helpful for biliary flow. Beetroot can be really helpful. if I didn’t mention Ox Biles. These are all maybe some milk thistle, very supportive for liver, gallbladder function, liver-gallbladder flow. So, very beneficial, we’ll put the links down below so if you guys enjoy the information and you wanna take action feel free to take a look at some of those links and support the show by grabbing some of those products and Evan will have his links down below as well. Anything else, Evan, you wanna add?
Evan Brand: I think, I said, we give people the links. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you’re listening on apple that’s probably where most people find us if you’re looking up. Justin’s show, make sure you subscribe there or my show, Evan Brand. We don’t care how you’re listening, you know, obviously we cross pollinate. We put these on each other so make sure you’re subscribed to both of them so you don’t miss it and we appreciate it. give us a review too. I think we should probably do a giveaway. I know some people giveaways so we can give away a book or you know free supplement or something but, in the meantime, give us a five star review on apple, we would love it. That’s how we stay up in the rankings so that we can actually share true functional medicine education to the masses because right now there’s still a lot of people that are in the top charts just theory. They’re not clinicians. They’re not in the trenches every day, all day, I mean we look at an exhaustive amount of lab testing that helps us to really dial the stuff we’re saying in. We then sprinkle in some studies and we stay up on the research but you could keep your head in the research all day and totally miss what actually works and it’s all about what actually gets people the results. So, keep that in mind and make sure you subscribe. Give us a review on Apple, we’ll love you forever. Thank you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% All the links will be below for you guys. Alright, thanks a lot. Evan, great chat with you man. Have a good one. Bye everyone.
Evan Brand: You too, take it easy. Bye-bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/signs-and-solution-for-gut-inflammation-and-leaky-gut-podcast-351