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
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The Root Cause and Solution of Your Stomach Burning and Upper Left Quadrant Pain | Podcast #355
Pain in your upper left (UL) abdomen under your ribs can have a variety of causes. Several vital organs exist in this area, including the spleen, kidney, pancreas, stomach, colon, and lung. One of the most common origins of these issues is due to digestive problems. Heartburn typically happens when acid comes back up from the stomach into the esophagus. It can result in discomfort and a burning sensation in your chest. The pain can feel burning, sharp, or cause a tightening sensation.
Additionally, Gastroesophageal Bowel Disease, commonly called acid reflux, is a condition that occurs when you experience heartburn more than two times each week. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is also a chronic condition that involves a group of intestinal symptoms that usually occur together. The symptoms can differ in severity and duration from person to person. Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) also includes any disorder that can cause inflammation in your gut; the most common of these conditions is Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Dr. J and Evan emphasized that having your daily food and environment checked. Possible modification is a basic essential thing to do to avoid gut issues that can compromise overall health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:32 Stomach Burning and Irritation
8:48 Causes of Stomach Cancer, General Inflammation
14:27 Herbs
19:26 Bacterial Overgrowth causing Stomach Problems
27:41 Mood, Stress, Depression and Anxiety Conditions
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan brand. Evan, how are we doing today, my friend?
Evan Brand: I’m doing great. You ready to dive in and talk about heartburn? One of the most common issues one of the trending issues that’s always trending because us as a modern society, we have a lot of issues with hypochlorhydria, which is the technical term for low stomach acid. And so you and I are going to break down some of the reasons some of the root causes some of the triggers, and then some of the solutions. So where do you want to start?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s a great question. So out of the gates here, we’re chatting about what h pylori stomach burning stomach irritation, so there’s a lot of root causes here. I would say out of the gates here, let’s hit H. pylori first.
Evan Brand: Let’s do it. So I had H. pylori. So I’ll tell you from personal experience, and you and I clinically have seen many, many, many cases of H. pylori, let’s start with a conventional approach to it. So first of all, the testing for H pylori is not very good in the conventional world. And there’s an issue with false negatives. Luckily, the DNA stool test that we use is very effective, and we can find it very accurately. And conventional treatment is going to be what’s called triple therapy, or sometimes quadruple therapy, which is three or four antibiotics at the same time to try to kill this helicobacter infection, which if you look at the microscopic photo of it, it kind of looks like a jellyfish, it’s got this creepy little look to it with a creepy little tail. It’s not a pretty little bugger, but man, it causes damage to those parietal cells which secrete stomach acid. And this is something that was very controversial for many times until the researcher actually infected himself with H. pylori and gave himself an ulcer. Right? You and I talked about that story before.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that was Dr. Marshall. I think in the in the mid 80s. He couldn’t get funding for his research. So he’s like, hell, let me be the subject. And so he just infected himself with it. And h pylori, like you mentioned, is that he had a co shaped helix shaped kind of bacteria that kind of burrows into the gut lining. This it’s controversial because, well, I shouldn’t say it’s controversial, we know that it can cause ulcers and stomach inflammation, we know that it can affect acid secretion. Now, a lot of people complain that it’s an increase your acid levels, H. pylori tends to actually decrease acid levels. It creates an enzyme called urease, which takes the metabolite from urea protein metabolism, it turns it into co2, and then also ammonia and ammonia is got a pH of 11. So in the typical urea breath test for H pylori, they give you a bunch of urea. And the whole thought process is if you have h pylori, you’re going to have more of that urease. And that urease is going to convert that urea into ammonia and co2, then thus a positive co2 level is going to be give you the H pylori indicative for a breath test. Now that ammonia has got a pH of 11. So it will start to neutralize and start to move your stomach pH in the more alkaline direction. So kind of one to six is going to be your acidic scale, okay? One is going to be 10 times more acidic than two, two times 210 times more acidic than three, and then you get to seven, which is going to be neutral, that’s your water. And then everything above that base are alkaline, right? And so ammonia is that 11. So you’re taking that pH in your stomach that should be around one and a half to two and a half and you’re moving it more neutral. And so of course, that can affect a whole bunch of problems in your stomach from indigestion, dyspepsia, you’re not breaking down your proteins, you’re not activating your enzymes. And also H. pylori can thin out that gut lining. So part of the reason why people feel like it creates more acidity is because your gut lining gets thinner, your gut lining gets thinner that’s making you more sensitive to acid in your stomach. It’s kind of like if I got a sunburn, right? If I got a sunburn, and I went out the next day in the sun, did the sun get hotter? Well, it feels harder when I’m in the sun with a sunburn, right? Did the sun get hotter? No, it is your skin’s more sensitive. That’s when you’re out in the sun. It feels like it’s 150 degrees out but it’s not. It’s the same thing with your intestine you got a sunburn got that feels more irritated. Thus that acidity the acid that you’re putting in there may cause some irritation just like going out with a sunburn.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s great analogy check your microphone to it sounds like it may switch to your headset, make sure it’s on your USB and I’m going to riff on h pylori for a minute because my personal experience with it was not fun. I lost a lot of weight and I was kind of freaking out honestly like I lost so much weight and I couldn’t stop it and no was no shortage of calories. I was eating plenty of good meats and good fats and I just kept losing weight and I think h pylori is really one of those big stepping stones or maybe the better analogy is the domino effect. And once the age polarize there, as you mentioned, it kind of in activates your enzymatic process. So your pancreatic enzyme function, the release of the stored bile from the gallbladder is going to slow down or be reduced. So this is what I think leads to a lot of the SIBO or the bacterial overgrowth dysbiosis problems that you and I see clinically because when we find h pylori, we go down to page three of the stool tests and then boom, now we see Prevotella and klebsiella and Pseudomonas And all these other bacteria that are thriving so many people have heard of SIBO because it’s trendy, and they’ll come in and they’ll do SIBO protocols. But if they don’t get rid of the H pylori, I’m convinced that’s one of the smoking guns that allows the dysbiosis to take place. So, long story short, if you’re someone listening, if you’ve treated your gut before using antimicrobial herbs, or possibly even antibiotic therapy, and you didn’t get better, or maybe you got better and you relapsed, consider that you’ve missed one of two things mold toxin, which is weakening the immune system or number two h pylori, and it could be coming from your spouse. So if your spouse is not being treated, they could have reinfected you and that’s why you’re on the merry go round and you can’t get off.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So h pylori is one of the first things now, people say, well, a large percent of the population has h pylori, and that that is true. And so the question is, are you immunocompromised with that h pylori is an issue we’re not. There are a lot of people that can survive on four or five hours a night sleep. But once you become stressed, and your adrenals become dysfunctional, and your diets been poor for a while, that four or five hours of sleep may not be enough. So you have to look at the context of the person for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. It sounds decent. It could just be the bitrate or something I do believe you have it on your USB now. It just sounds like it’s a little grainy, but it I know on our local and it will be just fine. So it’s, it’s plenty good enough for today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, excellent. All right. So out of the gates here, just kind of hitting all the right things that we’re chatting about. So we talked about the susceptibility for H. pylori, right. h pylori is going to be one of these things that may be a problem in people that have symptoms. So if you have symptoms, if you have issues, we want to look at that and the gates for sure. I think that’s gonna be a top priority. Anything else you want to highlight regarding other infections? I know SIBO was another one that could potentially affect digestibility and your stomach cebo is going to hit more of your small intestine, but some of that bacteria overgrowth can move its way and migrate to the stomach as well for the gastric area.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well, I think H pylori is probably the biggest smoking gun but like you’re not talked about many times, you can have permission to have multiple things wrong with you. Right? You said that so it’s funny because we’ll see Candida will see bacteria will see H Pylori, which is bacteria will see parasites will see worms. So the cool thing is when we come in with the testing, we’re often using full spectrum herbs. And what I mean by that is we’re going to try to knock out Candida bacterial overgrowth, the H pylori, the parasites, often we can do it in one fell swoop. And it’s really fun to do this in children or young adults, because they tend to get better faster. Like if I see a five to 15 year old kid and we’re working with them. It’s amazing how much faster they get better than like a 70 year old adult, for example. It’s something that I think shows the immune system being weak long term, this can be a bigger problem. So when you hear about stomach cancer, and the ulcers and esophageal problems, and GERD and some of these more scary diagnosis, these, these are likely more long term infections, or it could be the virulence factors, which are something that we test for if you look into the research, H. pylori by itself is not going to cause a ton of problem in the short term. But when it has these virulence factors that essentially strengthens the disease, the way I think about it is like the little whale shark, or actually, whale sharks are huge, but the whale shark with the little fish that kind of swim under its fins, to me, those are the virulence factors, they kind of strengthen the main host there, they’re allowing the H pylori to thrive, they’re allowing that shark to do what he needs to do, they’re helping to maybe eat parasites off of the shark, so they’re kind of helping him hang around. That’s how I think of these virulence factors. It doesn’t change the protocol much, but when we see a ton of inflammation or when we see a ton of gut damage, it’s good to be able to link that back to a stool test.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% here, the virulence factors are going to look at those cytotoxic proteins and it’s a genetic susceptibility of this H. pylori is going to produce more toxins that are going to increase your chance of ulceration increase your chance of stomach cancer, increase your chance of just overall general inflammation. So it’s nice to look at the virulence factors. Now we have a couple we have like Virdi, VagA, iSay, these different virulence factors, these are cytotoxic proteins. And so it’s good to look at that. Now one of the things we’ll also look at in regards to intestinal inflammation to kind of make correlations is we’ll look at calprotectin. Calprotectin is another systemic marker that’s excellent to look at, because it plays a major role with inflammation in the gut as well. And so that’s a really good one. So it’s like a C reactive protein for your gut. CRP is a basically an inflammatory marker for the body. C reactive protein. calprotectin is a protein produced by the white blood cells in the intestine. So when there’s more inflammation, more cytokines, more interleukins, nuclear factor, Kappa beta, all these inflammatory presence, it’s going to give you more of a window that that’s happening now. It doesn’t tell you what the cause of it is. So you need to do detective work and get to the bottom it’s going to be usually one to four or five things. Something of infection, some type of food allergy, some type of immune stressor, whether it’s exposure to mold or heavy metals, okay? It can also be gut permeability where things are getting into the bloodstream and you’re having this, I mean, a logical reaction, those would probably be the big four out of the gates. And then I think, also just if you’re eating a lot of junky inflammatory foods, omega six grains, a lot of pro inflammatory foods, those could also drive it too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I would say there’s probably an autoimmune component to right if you’ve got Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis or something like that, that may elevate that. And I know some of the stuff we talked about, if you try to take our conversation and put it in front of your GI doctor, they may not follow us on some of this stuff. But they will follow us on the calprotectin. I mean, that’s a pretty common marker that it’s going to be tested in conventional gastroenterology. So if you’re trying to like educate your doctor, if they’re willing, enable cool, you know, send them this podcast, hopefully, they’re open to integrating some of these things into their practice. But often, we’ve had many people that have been the GI doctors, 5 10 15 doctors before they come to somebody like us. And unfortunately, they’ve had very poor testing, and they’ve had very poor treatment. That’s why they’re still needing help. And we’re usually at the end of the rope, which you would think puts a ton of pressure on us, but I think you and I are used to and I actually enjoy it. Because in contrast, what we do makes the other people look silly, and our success rate is so good that it’s really it’s a blessing to be able to have some of these tools on hand. And it’s really fun and inspiring to be able to give people hope. And some of these chronic gi issues like heartburn or reflux or GERD, or some of these esophageal problems like what they call like issues with the LES to lower esophageal sphincter that can become very traumatic. And people think that surgery or drug is the answer. But we don’t have to go there in the majority of cases.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also, when you start to have you know, a lot of dyspepsia, that’s like the bloating, that’s the nausea, the burping the belching, when you start to have that, right, that lack of acidity in the intestines, if you have a lack of acidity, you also have a lack of enzymes more than likely because acidity is an important trigger for enzyme activation, right, because a lot of our enzymes are pH sensitive. So if you don’t have a nice low pH, they’re not going to activate and also that bacterial overgrowth, and you can look at bacterial overgrowth in the stomach usually be a glucose breath test. Now, the conventional breath test that we use for like SIBO is we’ll use a lactulose blood test, or lactulose breath test where you swallow a lactose solution. And then you’re gonna, you’re going to blow into a bag, and you’re going to get a baseline and then you’re going to swallow the lactose solution, and you’re going to blow every 20 minutes. And you can sometimes see an increase in gas that first 20 to 40 minutes, usually being reflective of the stomach area, usually in that first 120 minutes gives you more of the small intestine. And if you do a glucose breath test, that’s going to give you more of a window into what’s happening in the stomach. Now, typically, what we do is i’m doing more of a store test and I’m getting a global look at bacterial overgrowth in the intestinal tract as a whole. Obviously, when we’re testing stool, it’s all moving through the intestine. So you can’t say Oh, that bacteria is in that part of the intestine or that part of the colon or that part of the stomach, you can’t really do that because it’s all moving its way out and getting mixed up, right. So a breath test could be helpful for that. Now, for me, it doesn’t necessarily change a lot what I’m going to do, because if I see him does a lot of klebsiella or citrobacter, or I see some h pylori or I see a lot of organic acids showing him parade or fenzbenzoate right are two three phenolacetate, right different markers indican. And that tells me we got some problem especially indicate indicates one of those bacterial overgrowth markers that also has to do with more increased putrefy protein. So that’s going to be a good indication that there’s some stomach issue going on and dyspepsia issue going on. So if I see that that’s going to gear me in that direction to be focused on addressing the stomach. And when we do herbs, guess what you can’t just target one part of the intestine, when you give these herbs is going to move its way through. Some of these herbs are going to target things more specific to h pylori like mastic gum or bismuth. But obviously, some of those are still going to have general antimicrobial benefits that will move down the entire intestinal tract. And some even have anti parasitic benefits too. So it’s hard to just target things we do know there’s a history of herbs that tend to be more selective to certain things in the intestinal tract.
Evan Brand: Yeah, great, great, great segue to into the herbs. So let’s go into that now. And we’ll be providing some links, we’ll put them in the show notes. We’ll put them in your podcast app. So if you’re listening on your iPhone, you should be able to check if you’re on Justin’s podcast listening, you should see some links for his products. If you’re on mine, you should see mine we have custom formulas that we’ve created in partnership with professional healthcare company so we don’t use any kind of consumer manufacturing. Most supplement companies, they gather products from around the world and they just label them up in a warehouse and ship them out. But they’re not professional. So there’s typically not as much tests. If any testing at all purity potency, those kind of things are not well tracked, we’re very anal about what we do, because we have to get results clinically. And if we don’t, then people don’t get better, and they don’t come to us. So we have a legitimate reason we have to be of the utmost quality. This is stuff that you can’t get through consumer, like Whole Foods, places, or Amazon, these are professional so that that’s, you know, just a little bit about quality. But in terms of the stuff we’re using, as you mentioned, we have different blends. So sometimes we’re going to go with more of like a mastic gum, clove berberine, Wild Indigo blend, these are things that can be both anti inflammatory, anti microbial, anti antifungal, anti parasitic, and then we have some where we’ve got a little bit of gut healing nutrients, like we might throw in a little bit of some dgl into the blends. So now we’re doing two things at once, which is great, we’re killing but we’re also soothing the gut lining, which is probably so irritated, as you mentioned, this thing is thinned out from the infection itself. And then we go into more of the antifungals, too. So we may stack. If we see on the organic acids, you’ve got an anti fungal need, then we’ll throw that into on top of the anti microbial need. And that’s where the magic really happens. There’s a synergistic effect. So rarely Are we going to come in with just oregano oil or just garlic, we’re likely going to use a combination of possibly 510 or even more herbs. And then if you want to comment on that, and then let’s get into the the question of like, where do probiotics fit into this equation? What about digestive enzymes and increasing stomach acid? Where does that fit into this equation? So if you want to hit on the herbs at all, then let’s transition.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, so first off, I think people come in with stomach issues saying, Hey, I have an H. pylori issue. And that’s it. So I think, one you have the right to have more than one infection or gut imbalances happening at the same time. So it’s really important don’t get myopically focused on one infection, there’s probably multiple issues. You could have h pylori, you could have some level of bacterial overgrowth that involve other types of infections, like klebsiella, or Pseudomonas or citrobacter. You could have a fungal overgrowth, you could have a parasite infection, as well. So all those things can be present. And also, you’re probably going to have a lot of dyspepsia where you’re having bloating, nausea, indigestion because you’re not breaking down your foods adequately. So you’re going to need to follow my six R’s right and moving the bad foods and again, that could be different for everyone. Some people that could be a paleo template, others it could be an autoimmune, it could be a low fodmap template as well could be a low histamine could be a gassers SCD template. So there’s different templates we’re going to plug in, depending on how sick or how chronic this issue is. And then number two, we’re working on enzymes and acids to really work on digesting things better. And again, acids tend to be anti microbial. Also, bile acids, which are produced by your gallbladder are also anti microbial. So if you have biliary insufficiency, you’re not breaking down your fats, inadequate levels of bile salts will create a a more hospitable environment for bad bugs to grow. So that’s the second are placed enzymes, acids, bile salts, third are repairing the gut lining and supporting the adrenals and the hormones because the adrenals help really provide a good anti inflammatory environment. So if you have imbalances in your cortisol function, you may have a lot of inflammation that’s not being managed by your adrenals. And then of course, on the repair side, you kind of hit it earlier. Some of the repair nutrients that we’re going to use maybe glycine could be L glutamine, it could be zinc. Zinc is very helpful. A lot of studies showing that to be very helpful with gut permeability. I would say DGL licorice, aloe okra, vitamin A. These are really important nutrients that come down the gut lining early I also like ginger and manuka honey. Manuka is used in hospitals in burn units, because it’s very anti inflammatory. So I like a little bit of manuka honey, and my ginger juice tea recipe is wonderful. Any comments on that?
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s delicious. I’m a huge fan, too. And the good news is, depending on what’s going on, you could start soothing the gut a bit early. So as you mentioned, there is kind of an order of operations. But depending on the case, if someone’s in real bad shape, we may come in with some of those soothing nutrients early. Let’s talk about probiotics, too, because this is a confusing one for a lot of people. They just hear online, a podcast, a blog, a website, they’ll hear probiotics, probiotics, I think it’s time to just throw it in. And a lot of people have a bad reaction to that. I think we actually did a whole podcast on this, like when and why probiotics may make you feel worse, but why don’t you give us just some sparknotes on that, when and why and how do we integrate probiotics entities.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So people tend to have stomach issues in general because they have this bacterial overgrowth in the gut, that’s going to affect the esophageal sphincter from closing. They also have a lack of enzymes and acids. So the food’s rotting, it’s putrifying, and transfer defying and creating lots of different gases as a result. Now, people tend to have a lot of bad bacteria in their gut, they tend to be very sensitive to fodmaps fermentable carbohydrates, fructose, oligo, disaccharide, mono and polyols. And again, probiotics tend to have fodmaps in it because probiotics are inherently fermentable right fermentation breeds bacteria, good bacteria growth, they can also breathe bad bacteria growth, right? And so if you’re consuming a lot of probiotics and you have a lot of bad bugs, it can really create a feeding frenzy just like throwing chum in the water. When there’s sharks around. It creates a feeding frenzy. If you go to your local Lake, I go down to Lake Austin and start chumming the water, right? Well, there’s no sharks down there. So you’re not gonna see any sharks come in, right. And so think of probiotics and a lot of fermented bowls. They may be reasonably good and healthy for you. But if you have sharks in that water, and you chum the water, you just create a feeding frenzy.
Evan Brand: Wow. And that you’re saying, with probiotics, you’re not necessarily even talking about prebiotics?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Again, people that have more extreme fodmap and SIBO sensitivity. That’s where probiotics start to become more of an issue. You can still have some SIBO and fodmap sensitivity, and you may not get rise to the level where probiotics are problem, right? So people that are out there and having problems with their kombucha or their sauerkraut, you know, it could also be a histamine issue, because probiotics and fermentable are also high in histamine so they could dovetail and be a couple of different things happening at the same time. Either way, if that’s the case, we still have to work on fodmap restriction, because when we deal with gut bacterial issues, we starve on one side with diet changes. We kill on the other side with specific antimicrobials, and then we crowd out and overpopulate on the last component so we we starve kill and crowd.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s great. And then the saccharomyces comes into the equation too, right? Which is kind of marketed and sold as a probiotic, but technically is a beneficial yeast, I love saccharomyces it’s something-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It crowds out it crowds out so it has beneficial effects of crowding out and also is shown to be very anti cdiff. Anti h pylori, anti blasto and it has immunomodulating benefits increasing IGA levels too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, we love saccharomyces it helps them mycotoxins too. I’ve seen it in a lot of people. And when I talk with Dr. Nathan, who is a guy who treats a lot of mold patients, he talked about saccharomyces being great for specifically, I think it’s actually metabolizing, or changing the structure of the mycotoxins to make them more water soluble, but there may be sort of a crowding out effect with the mole too. So it’s just a great overall thing. So if you’re working on a gut healing protocol, and you haven’t used saccharomyces, that may be something to chat with your practitioner about, it may be something great to add in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, I like it, that makes a lot of sense to me. So when we have that upper left quadrant pain, right, your stomach for the most part is going to be just right in usually this area here. So this is kind of your, this point right here is your HCl point. And this points more of your enzyme point. So like pancreas, small intestine is like really right here, stomach’s usually going to be right in this area here. And then you have the esophagus, going up here, obviously, right, and then this esophageal sphincter can stay open. When we don’t have enough acidity and we have bacterial overgrowth, then you can have a lot of that regurge of that reflux happening when we have inadequate levels of assets. So one thing if you kind of take your hand right here, and you follow the sternum down, right, we’re kind of tucks into the left, if you rub it a little bit, and it’s a little bit sensitive. That points normally sensitive anyway, but if it’s really heightened, is a chance there’s inadequate levels of HCl in the stomach. So that’s a good little kind of pressure point there.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and people listening that can’t see he’s showing this down right there at the sternum, and then you can follow the rib line down to the left, or you could follow it down to the right, and you could check both sides. That’s a really cool thing that you can do in person when you’re working with the practitioners, you can palpate these points. And I remember when I was in one of my schooling lessons, we were with the teacher, and we had a lady who lay down on the table and everybody was coming up and palpating and man, this lady about jumped off the table when we hit that HCl point. So of course, we didn’t have a stool test on her but man, I bet she had some infection going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and it’s good to rub that and then you can kind of rub a couple other spots to see if it really is heightened and then you can also start start treatment. Right, make diet changes, add in support, right? start addressing microbials down the road and see if that changes but again, the biggest thing I really want to highlight for people listening, we live in this antibiotic culture today, right you have an infection, antibiotics, antibiotics, antibiotics, and so what tends to happen as people are in kind of my six are step right the fourth are is moving the bugs right? replace the net or remove the bad foods replace the enzymes and acids and bile salts, repair the gut lining and the hormones remove the infections, repopulate good bacteria, pre probiotics, retest that fourth Rs a movie infections, people go to this first. We live in this like, antibiotic generation people are programmed Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it’s the biggest mistake you can make. Some people can get away with it. If you’re really healthy and you don’t have an overabundance of inflammation, you can get away with it. Most can’t. And they end up creating a whole bunch of problems. And I tell my patients the first rule of functional medicine right the first rule of Fight Club is don’t make yourself more sick. It’s really important So that’s why that fourth R where that remove that second remove right the first removes the food. Right. The fourth R the second remove is removing the infections, we do it in that order, because we’re trying to calm down the immune system, trying to support our anti inflammatory system so they can deal with inflammation and stress better. We’re working on digesting and breaking down our food or working on motility that allows us set the table so we can come in there and wipe out the bad bucks.
Evan Brand: Yeah, he kind of alluded to it. But just to make it clear, you’re actually improving your immune system by clearing out these infections. And some of these herbs we’re using may have immune supportive benefits too. So that’s just the real joy of what we do is you’re boosting the immune system, you’re letting the gut heal by removing the infections. It’s just amazing. And when you get the spouse involved too, like if you’re seeing a rebound case where husband feels great and then the wife sick and back and forth, you know, they may be passing the H pylori between each other even children who I mean I was sharing water bottles with summer my daughter when she was two, I tested her when she was two she had real high H. pylori. So I’m convinced I may have given it to her, I don’t know. But luckily, we did herbs and she’s in good shape now. And when we retested her the H pylori is gone. So I’m glad that we’re able to get it resolved. But this is a problem that affects kids. So like when someone hears heartburn, they automatically picture old Betty sitting in the wheelchair with the gray hair and she’s got indigestion she’s got her santech in her hand. No, it’s not just her. I mean, this could be two years old, this could be 10 15 20 30 40 years old. So don’t discriminate. This bacteria does not care what you look like and how big or small your or anything. This is a bacteria that affects all people across the population. So if you have these issues, get tested, don’t guess. And if you need help clinically reach out we work on this issue all the time, it’s one of my favorite things to do is work on these gut infections. So if you need help clinically, we work around the world with people we send testing to your home, you do the labs, we get them back to the lab for reporting. And we jump on a call like we’re doing now and we talk about it and we help you make a protocol help you fix your issues once and for all. So if you want to reach out to Justin, you can have his website, JustinHealth.com. If you want to reach out to me, EvanBrand.com and like I mentioned, we’ve got some links, we’ve got some gut healing products and some things that we’re okay with you guessing on, there are a couple of things you could do out of the gate. But ultimately, you need to know what you’re up against. Because as we alluded to, you may not have just h pylori, you may have other infections. So coming in with the glutamine, the zinc carnosine, that lm that kind of stuff that kameel, the ginger, the Manuka, it’s awesome. But that may not be the right order of operations, it may help you by some time, but you got to clear the bugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and there’s a lot of studies out there looking at H. pylori, for instance, with a lot of mood and stress and depression and anxiety related conditions. And they find that when a lot of the H pylori is addressed, some of these changes occur as well with these issues improve or they talk about antidepressant drugs working better now. Now, why is that happening? Now, I believe the reason why it’s happening is because when you address some of these bacterial overgrowth, you’re absorbing your nutrients better, you’re absorbing your protein, you’re absorbing your fat, and in some cases, probably absorbing their drugs better, so they work better because they’re in their system. Now, I personally believe if you’re not breaking down your proteins and your fats, these are functional building blocks for your neurotransmitters, that you’re going to have some issues in regards to your mood and your cognitive function and potentially energy because a lot of the nutrients and minerals and B vitamins have to get absorbed that way too. So if you have issues with your gut, don’t just think hey, this is just a gut issue. Therefore my only symptoms are dyspepsia bloating, gas, nausea, constipation, depression, diarrhea, you could have fatigue, you could have cognitive issues, you could have mood issues, depression, anxiety, sleep, right. So we have to get kind of outside of the we have to go into the extra intestinal world meaning symptoms outside of just your gut related symptoms. And so it’s possible if you’ve h pylori, you may only have fatigue and mood issues, and sleep and it’s very possible. So you don’t want to just get hung up on the digestive symptoms thinking I’m okay. You could have things outside of the gut area.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and you don’t even recognize it. And the psychiatrist is certainly not going to suggest that our anxiety and depression is an H pylori infection. And that was it for me. I mean, I had panic attacks and anxiety. I mean, I was a wreck when I had gut infections. I will tell you personally, and clinically, I’ve seen the link between mood issues and gut issues. And I had a lady that I had maybe the last two months, I did not give her any anti depressant herbs at all. All we did is work on her gut and within six weeks, she said her depression was 90% better. And she just said it kind of nonchalantly and I’m like you said you were depressed for 20 years during our initial call or you’re not realizing what we’ve done in six weeks just by working on your gut. We’ve as you self reported a 90% reduction in depression which you’ve had for 20 years. That is insane. That should be on the Billboard. That’s Beyond the headline news, but I think there’s just some ignorance about the link between gut and mood issues. So hopefully the psychiatric world and the gastroenterology world can start to get more integrated because right now they’re still very, very separate which is no good for the population.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, here’s an article in the get the Journal of gastroenterology research and practice. It’s called the rule of H. pylori, and regulating hormones and functional dyspepsia. So if you get right to it, it says H. pylori strains have been shown to affect the secretion of several hormones including five five hyphen ht or five HTP. That’s the serotonin melatonin precursor ghrelin which affects mood and appetite, dopamine gastrin, which affects HDL levels. So and then has, it might be the cause of psychological disorders of functional dyspepsia. So, essentially, there’s a strong connection with H. pylori hormones, and a lot of the neurotransmitters and appetite regulating compounds so really important, right, H. pylori, we have to go above and beyond just thinking this is a digestive issue. It can affect mood, energy, sleep, and of course, hormones as well.
Evan Brand: You and I talked about this kind of like we’re just like tying our shoes and cooking some breakfast. Would you have for breakfast today? Oh, I had some pastured eggs and bacon and sausage. What about you? Oh, yeah, handful of some avocado because, like we talked about it, like it’s just so nonchalant. But I mean, if this were to be the headline news, like you and I, this podcast we just ate if this were to be like, the trending thing of the week and 300 million people heard this. I mean, we could put a huge dent in the world, I think we’re doing a great job. We’ve got good numbers, but my God, if this was like the trending interview of the week, I mean, just imagine people would have so much more hope for their mental health, their physical health, their heartburn. This is empowering stuff here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And don’t expect your conventional medical doctor to know about this stuff unless they’ve gone through more integrative kind of nutritional, natural, functional type of continuing education. Most dermatologists don’t even understand that your skin has a direct connection with your diet, right? They still have pamphlets in the dermatologists office saying what you eat has nothing to do with your skin. Most people that have eaten crappy and change their diet to be much more healthy, they can tell you one of the benefits you see is your skin, right? We know inflammation, and oil secretions all have a major effect with inflammation, grains and six junky carbs. While Same thing with our gut, there’s that same level of disconnect all throughout medicine, because each, let’s say medical specialty only knows their thing. And you know, when you’re working 60 to 80 hours a week, you’re not going to have the time to really keep up with the literature and what’s happening. And, you know, if you’re relying on your medical school training, well, typically that information has to be around for 20 or 30 years before it gets into a medical school curriculum. So what you’re getting in medical schools, and they’ll be 20 to 30 years behind probably at least 20 years behind time. So don’t expect your doctor to be in the loop on this thing. So you got to really go outside of the box and, and educate.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, I’ve got a very close family member who has a nanny for a well respected neurologist, and the neurologist home is filled with frickin mold. And no wonder the kid has a lot of issues and no wonder the mom has gut issues and the dad has brain fog and everyone’s exhausted and they don’t sleep good and they have skin issues. It’s like your neurologist, those are mycotoxins. Those are killing your brain. Do you not know it? Nope. She doesn’t know. It’s crazy, man. So hopefully we can continue to do good work like we’re doing and spread this word because man. Yeah, we’re still in the stone age’s and a lot of aspects.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, no, I think we’re on top of it. Well, if you guys enjoy today’s podcast, we really appreciate it, head over to EvanBrand.com or JustinHealth.com. You can subscribe to our email list. You can become a patient we work with patients all over the world happy to help you. Especially in the day and age the last year how things have gotten more virtual. It’s great to have access to good clinicians and doctors, virtually so we can provide that for you. And if you enjoyed today’s podcast, write us a review. Click Below the link you’ll see a link for a review, write us a review. And also share this with friends and family. We appreciate it Sharing is caring. If you enjoyed it today, apply one thing, share it with one person that you love that could help them. Evan anything else?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. You did a great job and we’ll be in touch next week. So take it easy and have a good one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Have a good one y’all. Bye now.
Evan Brand: Bye bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
Recommended products:
International DSL GI MAP Genetic Stool Test
Genova Organix® Dysbiosis Profile
Collagen Diet: Collagen-Rich Foods for Healthy Joints, and Skin
We know collagen is going to help with the joints because we know half of your bones are protein. We need good building blocks for our cartilaginous tissue and ligamentous tissue. Frankly, most people get most of their protein from muscle meats. That’s a problem because they’re not getting the knuckles, the bones, and the cartilage, as we would from old-fashioned soups. So, if you’re doing a lot of soups and bone broth soups, that’s great. If not, we really want to add extra collagen.
I do 20 g of collagen in my coffee every morning. I think it’s amazing. I do my true collagen with some MCT oil and grass-fed butter. I love it. I think it’s excellent for skin, hair, nails, and just for overall prevention of bone loss and cartilage loss. We know the wear and tear that most people experience in their joints throughout the year, especially if they do a lot of long-distance cardio. You really need more building blocks to help prevent and mitigate the wear and tear, so you don’t have knee and joint replacements later in life. Collagen can really help decrease some of that wear and tear.
How do you take collagen?
I like adding collagen in my coffee in the morning because it has a nice little kind of creamer-like effect. It gives that little bit of frothiness which is wonderful. I also do it before bed. Sometimes I’ll do a little bit of collagen (glycine), magnesium, and vitamin C because vitamin C is a really important building block for making collagen. I find magnesium has some very good calming effects as well where there are plugs in the GABA or it’s just a natural beta-blocker as well. It can calm the heart and bring the heart rate down a little bit. I think magnesium does work on some of those GABA pathways as well and, of course, magnesium helps with blood sugar. You’ll get deeper sleep and better REM sleep when you have good magnesium. So, I love combining collagen and magnesium at night.
Where can you get collagen from?
You can get collagen from food via bone broth. Chicken skin is super rich in glycine, roughly 3.3 g for 3-1/2 oz. If you make chicken soup, throw the whole chicken in there. Get a rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods and or get the fattier cuts of the chicken at least with the bone and the skin, so that way you get the best of both worlds if you’re going to do it from a whole food source. Regarding seafood, wild salmon is going to be the best source of glycine.
The Top 5 Reasons Why Your Estrogen Levels are High – Men & Women!
Let’s talk about the top 5 reasons why your estrogen levels are high. We’re going to break them down today.
WHAT ARE ESTROGENS?
First, let’s look at the 3 major kinds of estrogens: E1 or estrone, E2 or estradiol, and E3 or estriol. In a woman’s regular cycle, it’s usually estradiol we’re talking about. When you start shifting to more menopausal and the ovary stops working, you start getting more estriol. The adrenals help in kick in a lot of DHEA and you make more estriol. Estradiol is more of the growth factor type of estrogen and estriol is a weaker estrogen.
WHERE CAN WE FIND ESTROGENS?
- PLASTICS. You’ll get it when the plastic is warm like in a microwave or out of a plastic water bottle especially if it’s in the car and the sun is hitting it or it’s outside. That’s why you want a good stainless steel or glass water bottle if you’re going to go outside or leaving it in the sun. The microwave heat and the radiation is going to cause a big release of plastic chemicals there, the xenoestrogens. One of the big ones are the phthalates but also BPA. There are other types of BPAs that are new which are supposedly safe but there are still estrogen-like compounds there as well. These plastics can affect women and men as well. Men are actually going to be more affected by them because men aren’t used to having estrogen in their environment and getting a whole bunch is going to be a problem.
- PESTICIDES. These tend to have an estrogenic quality to them and if you’re eating foods that are not organic, you’re definitely going to be getting organochlorines and various pesticides in your environment.
- PHYTOESTROGENS. These are found in soy. For example, I had a vegan-vegetarian patient. We ran a Dutch sex hormone panel on her and her estradiol was through the roof and really high. Phytoestrogens can be a big one, so soy may be a problem. With vegan-vegetarian, there’s a lot of phony protein consumption like fake meat kind of stuff such as the Beyond burger where there are a lot of soy and estrogen-like compounds in there. There are also hormones in meat. You have to make sure you get antibiotic-free, hormone-free, and ideally organic and pasture-fed or if you’re on the Whole Foods scale, step 4 or step 5 is ideal. Step 2 is at least pretty good. Organic means no pesticides, no hormones, and also the food they’re eating has no pesticides or hormones, too.
- HIGH LEVELS OF INSULIN. Too much carbs drive high levels of insulin because insulin responds to a high level of blood sugar. The blood sugars in your bloodstream go up and your pancreas comes in. The beta cells make a bunch of insulin to bring it down and bring it into the cellar and converted to fat. So, high levels of insulin upregulate an enzyme in men called aromatase that converts testosterone, the male hormones, to estrogen which becomes a problem. Now, in women, a similar thing happens but it’s the exact opposite or the big switch. Their estrogen is converted to testosterone. So, women can actually get more androgen-like issues which results in weight gain, acne, hair growth, and sometimes you can see some libido enhancements on that. So, that’s the difference between men and women.
- POOR GUT HEALTH. In the gut, we make healthy good bacteria in our gut that help us absorb a lot of nutrients. A good healthy gut function helps us break down protein for good HDL levels and good enzyme levels. We need these to break down protein into amino acids which are really important for helping us to detoxify. So, detoxification helps us to excrete estrogens that we’re getting exposed to in our environments such as the pesticides, plastic, or something that you don’t even know you’re getting exposed to. Good healthy detoxification will help your body eliminate that, so that’s a good backup plan.Also, if we have a lot of dysbiosis, SIBO and bacterial overgrowth, we can make a lot of what’s called beta-glucuronidase. This is an enzyme that’s made by bad bacteria and it makes it harder to detoxify estrogen. The beta-glucuronidase takes conjugated estrogens and binds it to a protein that helps us excrete it out the body. It takes that protein and it pulls it apart. It takes the handcuffs off that protein, so that allows that estrogen that’s been deconjugated to go back into the body in the general circulation. So, if we have gut issues, that could be a major concern.
HOW DO WE ADDRESS THE PROBLEM?
We need things like cysteine, glycine, glutamine, sulfur amino acids, and things that help us methylate like B12, B6, and folate. So, these nutrients we have to get them in our diet via a good diet. We need to be able to break down and absorb those nutrients, so we need good digestion to get those things in there.
So, in general, we’ve got to make sure we have a good gut bacteria balance. Even fungal overgrowth can cause problems and H. pylori that can lower stomach acid and make it harder to break down nutrition on one side and then it can create this bacterial overgrowth enzyme that makes it hard to detoxify estrogen. These are really important components. If you have any issues with estrogen, you’ve got to look there.
Now, we may want to do things to help detoxify like make lifestyle changes, food changes, pesticide changes, make the changes in regards to plastics, and make in in regards to your diet, your glycemic load, and your gut. That’s a good first step to get to the bottom. There are also different things we may do to help upregulate detoxification to help get that estrogen. It may be activated charcoal or various soluble fibers. It could be things like bentonite clay. We could use things like DIM or Calcium D-Glucarate or glutathione, sulfur amino acids, and vitamin C. They’re all helpful in different situations. We would recommend them based on what’s happening but at least make the diet and lifestyle changes out of the gates.
Top 5 Warning Signs of Hormonal Imbalance
Let’s talk about hormones. I’m going to dive into a couple of clinical pearls that I see in my practice from working with hundreds of female patients and male patients which have a major effect on modulating and supporting hormonal balance.
These are my top 5 hormonal balancing strategies:
- One of the first things in regards to hormones that’s very important, and this may be common sense but I try to give a lot of knowledge guided by experience, is nutritional building blocks for your hormones. Healthy cholesterol from animal products are very essential. Fat soluble vitamins like A, D, K are very important. Lots of good protein are also very important. We have steroid-based hormones that are going to be more cholesterol-based and we have peptide-based hormones that will also be protein-based. So, a lot of these protein, fat-soluble vitamins, and cholesterol especially healthy animal cholesterol are very helpful for hormonal building blocks. If you have a vegan-vegetarian diet or if it’s very nutritionally poor or there’s a lot of processed food, that may set you up with a deficit out of the gates for just hormonal issues. Remember: Make sure the food is nutritionally dense, anti-inflammatory, and low in toxins. That’s vital.
- Now, if you’re having a lot of good nutrition in there, the next thing is we have to make sure we’re able to digest it and break it down. So, if we have a lot of chronic acid reflux, poor digestion, constipation, or bloating, we know we’re not quite breaking down our food and our nutritional building blocks. That could tell us that we may have hormonal issues because we’re not breaking that down. Therefore, those nutrients can’t get into our body or get in our bloodstream and be taken throughout the body to be used as building blocks. So, if we have a bottleneck in the nutritional side, that could be a big factor.
- Stress, whether it’s emotional or chemical stress. If we’re eating foods that are inflammatory or we’re nutritionally deficient and we have a lot of emotional stress, what tends to happen is our hormones kind of go on two sides. We have an anabolic side which are the growth hormones — testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone — that kind of help deal with growing. Then we have anti-inflammatory hormones which would be cortisol and are catabolic. I always put progesterone in that category because progesterone can be used to make more cortisol. So, we have our anti-inflammatory and then our anabolic. In some, they kind of cross over. Insulin, growth hormones, and testosterone are anabolic. The more inflamed we get, we could have high amounts of testosterone because of PCOS and because of inflammation. So, some of these hormones kind of interact and cross over. With men for instance, the more inflamed men get and the more stressed they get, that can actually cause an upregulation of aromatase and could increase their estrogen. So, see how these things kind of cross react. Your hormones are going to be either pro-building or anti-inflammatory to reduce stress. So, for chronically and stressed out state, cortisol is going to rip up your protein and kind of decrease your muscle mass. As a woman, you’ll see your progesterone level start to drop and that will start putting you into an estrogen-dominant state because if we normally got 20 to 25 times estrogen than progesterone, that ratio starts to drop. Even if you still have more progesterone than estrogen, that ratios is going to throw you off and that can create breast tenderness, cramping, mood issues, excessive bleeding/menorrhagia, infertility, a lot of mood issues, back pain, and fluid retention. All those are possible situations.
- Xenoestrogens from the environment and foreign estrogens. They can come from plastic components, pesticides, herbicides or rodenticides, mold toxins, and heavy metals. They are going to disrupt our hormones. The easiest thing is eat organic, avoid plastics, and avoid a lot of the chemicals in the water because a lot of times you can get pesticide runoff or hormone runoff in the water. So, clean water and clean food, and then make sure it’s organic avoid the plastics as well. That’s a big, big thing. Plastics are probably okay if they are in a refrigerator or in a cold environment but ideally if you’re heating stuff up or it’s going to get exposed to light, you want some kind of a Pyrex or a glass container. It’s much better and really important.
- Last but not the least would be just making sure our detoxification pathways are running well. So, if we have good hormonal balance but we can’t detoxify it, then a lot of times we can reabsorb it. So, if we don’t have good sulfur, good glutathione precursors, good B vitamins, good methylation, N-acetylation and glucuronidation, we may have a hard time eliminating. Hence, we are re-absorbing a lot of our hormones. So, being able to break down your proteins, break down your amino acid and your B vitamins is going to help with your body’s ability to eliminate a lot of these toxins.
Summary:
Blood sugar, digestion, stress, xenoestrogens, and toxicity are really big. Those are the big 5 across the board. Try to apply at least one of these things.
The Root Causes of Constipation & Slow Motility | Podcast #331
Wouldn’t it be easy if you could blame your constipation on one thing? While that typically isn’t the case, your irregularity could be pointing to either one or multiple causes. Let’s watch and listen to Dr. J and Evan here, helping you learn what your gut may be trying to tell you, and what you can do about it.
Dr. J and Evan emphasized to make a few changes to your lifestyle and see if they result in any positive bowel changes. Such as more high-fiber foods in your meals: fruits, vegetables, whole grains. These steps will help you observe health changes – what works and what’s not via tests results as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:56 Slow Motility, Bowel Motility
8:06 Detoxification
15:57 Food for Detox
22:00 Vegan Honeymoon
27:40 System Approach, Solutions
30:51 Conventional Side
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today we are going to be having a podcast all about constipation and bowel motility issues. This is a topic that we deal with all the time with our patients, especially when we’re dealing with and addressing potential infections. This can be a common side effects. So we’re going to dive into the underlying mechanisms and what you can do what we do about it with patients. Evan, what’s going on, man? How we doing?
Evan Brand: Doing really well. If someone listening is still embarrassed to talk about their poop, then I would encourage you to shed that shit shed the shame or embarrassment. We talk about poop all day. We love it, we enjoy it. This is part of being a human number one being a healthy human number two, because if you’re not pooping, you’re reabsorbing toxins, whether that’s xeno estrogens from environmental exposure or pesticide and herbicide or mold toxins, I mean, how we get rid of our toxic waste and chemicals and things we’re making internally and that we’re exposed to is peeing and pooping. And so when you look at someone who feels bad, they have dark circles under their eyes, they have skin issues, they’re irritable, they’re fatigued, they have headaches, a lot of times constipation is one of the underlying issues with those people. And if we can just get them pooping properly good amount in good shape, good size, good consistency, good frequency, we can really increase their productivity, their energy, their mental cognition, we can get rid of sugar cravings. I mean, there’s a lot that can happen when you just regulate the bowels. So we’re going to dive in today on some of the big root causes root triggers, I’m going to go straight to number one for me, which is going to be gut infections. Now, you and I were just talking before we hit record about different gut bugs and how some people with IBS, they’ll end up IBS constipation, others end up IBS D diarrhea. And so depending on what type of infections you have, your bowels may become dysregulated.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so, when you have different gut stressors, slow motility can easily be a result. So you can easily see on the on the fast side, motility is too fast. Our body doesn’t have the ability to reabsorb water and electrolytes in time, because usually electrolytes and water kind of follow each other. So as the colon kind of pulls out the electrolytes, usually the water comes out with it. And so when we have slower bowel movements, right, they’re usually harder, more compact kind of stools. So if we look at like, for instance, the Bristol stool chart, I’ll pull that up on screen. So anyone that’s watching the podcast can take a look at it. The Bristol stool chart, the chart that’s used by gastroenterologist and such, but it’s just a way of kind of assessing where you’re still fit. So the typical number four is like the poopy policeman. And that’s like just a really good solid looking snake, like not overly hard not overly soft stool. That’s number one. If you go to the actual number one on the Bristol stool chart that’s like kind of the rabbit poop, right, the rabbit pellets really hard, hard to move. And then number seven is just pure liquid. So four is kind of right in the middle, and in between. So let me just show you what I’m talking about here. So you guys can visualize if you’re watching the podcast video along with it. So here is the Bristol stool charts that you guys can see. Okay, so number one, right separate heart clubs, nuts hard to pass. This is like the rabbit poop, right? That’s type one. And then it gently progresses back to two and three, right? where it starts to get more sausage shaped like it says except it gets more smoother, and that as it goes to three. And then step type four is the perfect poopy policeman kind of more of a sausage like more smooth, not overly cracked or not overly soft. And then you can see as you go to five and six, it becomes more liquid and then seven and just entirely liquid watery, no solid. And so that gives us a pretty good window. And so we usually when we have when the guts really inflamed, and we have usually a lot of toxicity in the gut, we can usually see it go to number seven where it’s pure liquid. And that’s because the body is just trying to flush things out. And when things go a little bit slower, you could still have inflammation and have type one right so you could have h pylori, that’s lowering stomach acid, you could have a lot of cebo that is meth that’s producing a lot of methane based back gases. And how do you know it’s methane is you have a lot of foul smelling gas or flatulence that’s a sign that there’s a lot of methane present. And methane can easily screw up that migrating motor complex and make the bowels go more on the slow side. But you can have the same level of infections like h pylori, or maybe histo or Giardia. And that could also cause it to go on the diarrhea side. So it just kind of depends. Everyone’s a little bit different. But we always you could have cebo you could have h pylori, you could have low enzyme and low acid levels that can easily be causing type one. But for someone else, those same infections could easily be driving steps type seven, right where it’s pure liquid. So you got to look at everyone as an individual on that. And really, you know, come up with the right plan.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and it can Alternate to write. I mean, that was my situation when I first had gut issues and I was losing weight uncontrollably when I had H. pylori and parasites and bacterial overgrowth and Candida the whole nine yards. You know, there’d be some days the gut was good. And most days the gut was not good. Luckily, I’m over that now. But man, I’ll tell you, I have a lot of empathy for people that, you know, you never know what you’re going to get, you kind of wake up and it’s like, Is today a good day or not a good day. And now that I’ve learned so much, you and I, both over the past few years about mold toxicity, that’s a big trigger for gut issues, too. So I’m get constipated, but a lot of diarrhea. And I think that’s the body’s way of trying to get rid of the toxin, but also the gut is so irritated. And you can have leaky gut from mycotoxin exposure, that that can be a factor too. So eventually, we’ll get into the gut healing phase of our conversation. I think that’s critical to healing constipation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so on the constipation side, there could be issues with obviously, the bowel motility has to be slow. So what’s constipation. So if you’re not having a BM, you’re not passing about 12 inches of stool in about a 24 hour period. That’s typically constipation. And there are millions of people in this country that aren’t able to have a BM every day. Now, once you start going 2 3 4 5 6 7, I see some patients that go up to seven days about a BM, that’s a problem because half of your stool is going to be bacteria. The other half is going to be you know, fiber and such. And within that stool, some of that bacteria and toxins needs to leave your body. If you’re not having that pass through your intestinal tract into the toilet, your chance of reabsorbing a lot of those toxins goes up really high. That’s definitely not good. Because those toxins get reabsorbed into your body. There could be xeno estrogens, there could be mold toxins, there could be a whole bunch of junk in there that you could be reabsorbing, and that could be really stressing out your body. So the first thing we talked about with detoxification is people talk about Detox Detox Detox, right? Well, if you’re not pooping every day, and that’s because of a gut infection or not chewing your food well enough or having insufficient hydrochloric acid or enzyme levels, or having some kind of a h pylori or SIBO issue. All of those things can easily affect your detoxification people are really focused on detox. Just by getting your digestion and your motility better. That makes a huge difference on your liver, and all your detoxification pathways, your lymphatics, your immune everything.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s funny, you’ll see women on Instagram, they’re all done up their hair and their makeup and their lipstick, and they’re like marketing, hashtag add hashtag detox hashtag tea. And they’ve got these like, I don’t know, you know how it is like, these ridiculous products that they’re marketing and they’re not talking about poop. To me, that’s the best way to detox is get poop out. I’m not going to buy detox tea, maybe like a little bit of dandelion or some who knows milk thistle, blend it in. Yeah, I mean that that’s part of it. But unfortunately, detox has kind of gotten co opted by the marketing industry. And so most people don’t even focus on that, though. You know, they’ll poop once a week, but then they take a detox tea and they think they’re doing it correctly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, my whole take on detoxification out of the gates is very simple. Okay, first, get enough good clean water in your system, to make sure you’re digesting your amino acids and all your nutrients. Well, remember, sulfur based amino acids run the majority of your detoxification pathways, along with B vitamins, right. So we need good B vitamins, good antioxidants, good sulfur amino acids. So if we’re breaking down those nutrients, well, there’s not a bottleneck with HDL levels or enzyme levels. We’re getting enough good clean water. And we’re not overly stressing our sympathetic nervous system because remember, the more we overly overly stress the adrenals the sympathetic nervous system decreases that migrating motor complex, which are the wave like contractions that move stool through your intestinal tract just like you kind of roll up the to pace roll at night, I get that toupees moving through to get your toothpaste out to brush your teeth. your intestines do the same thing. So if you can do those top three things, right, you’re on the right track. Now there may be extra things where we need extra sulfur or extra antioxidants or compounds or binders to help with mold or heavy metals. That’s true and that that would be addressed down the road but a lot of toxic patients detoxification happens hepatobiliary liver gallbladder back into the intestines and then out the intestinal tract. So we need to have really good motility and really good absorption of nutrients and a lot of good clean water to help fuel that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good point. Good point. Yeah, so we both manufacture our own custom blends of supplements that are professional grade, and we both have a liver support that has some gallbladder nutrients built into it. That can be really helpful because, as you mentioned, with sluggish bowels, a lot of times there’s also sluggish bile production. So just helping to thin the bile, whether it’s using supplemental ox bile or muthoni, taurine, beet powder, whatever else we could do to increase bile flow that’s going to be helping and then why don’t we hit on the diet piece. I mean, I think this is the low hanging fruit that you’re having. American is still really really blowing it on, which is just the fact that they’re not doing enough good meats, good fats, good veggies, you know, your average, American might wake up and I don’t know, do a piece of toast and maybe in 2020, or 2021, it’s an avocado toast. But still, you know, that’s not the optimal thing for good poops.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, so inflammation in the diet can easily mess up the intestinal tract, inflammation in the diet can easily create inflammation in the gut. And that could either move the body more to diarrhea or more constipation. Now, for the sake of this podcast, if we start moving more to constipation, not good. And of course, you know, these foods can stress out the intestinal tract. And then when we start creating inflammation in the intestinal tract, and then we already have indigestion, and we don’t have adequate enzymes and acids, so we’re kind of burping a lot after our meals, food sits longer in our tummy, right, and we’re not in a lot of gases are produced because the foods are not being broken down properly, that’s a problem. So we got to really make sure we’re masticating and chewing our food very, very, very well, we got to make sure that increases surface area for enzymes and acids to work, we also have to make sure we’re not overly hydrating with our meals. So hydrate 10 minutes or more before meal. And then if you’re consuming a little bit of liquid with a meal, just do it to kind of help with swallowing pills, don’t do it for hydration purposes. Because water has got a pH of seven, your intestinal tracts a pH of 1.5, or two. So if you start adding a whole bunch of seven, Ph to a to a pH of two, you’re going to move that pH more in the alkaline direction away from the acid at direction. And we need good acidity to help activate our enzymes and our acid levels very important. So that’s low hanging fruit is chew your food up well. Second, is make sure you’re not overly hydrating with the food do all your hydration two minutes before.
Evan Brand: I’ve got my grandfather so many times till this drink liquid with almost every bite of his food, held his Drink, drink drink, like take a bite of food and wash it down with liquid. I’m like no, like you’re literally just pouring water on your digestive fire don’t do that. So yeah, it’s it’s easy. And it actually does make a difference. I mean, you know, I’ve probably talked about that before. But it does make a difference. Like if I, I’ve got a mason jar here, my goal, if I sit at the dinner table, I will try to not have it more than like two ounces of liquid. You know, if I have a full cup, I’m more I’m liable to drink it. If I’ve just got a little bit I know, hey, this is the only liquid I have if I need a little help with the meal. Otherwise it just food, no liquid with the meal.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, for me, as soon as I know, like a meal is coming, I’m gonna go just maybe take two mason jars, add some sea salt to it, I’m going to down them and then I’m good. And then you know, 510 minutes later, I can start the eating process and I chew my food out very well. So then that gets the digestive juices rolling as well. So on top of that another low hanging fruit is let’s say you eat good quality proteins or fats, and that makes you constipated. That’s almost a surefire sign. You’re not making enough enzymes or acids. So some people they really do poor with enzymes, and acids, and it reveals itself through animal products. Now, a lot of people when that happens, guess what their natural tendency is, unfortunately, either going to go vegetarian or yeah, oh, it’s the meat that’s so bad for my gods, the meat that’s in my intestinal tract for days and days. It’s rotting in there, you know, yeah, documentaries, I have to cut out the animal products. Well, it’s just a sign that your enzymes and your acids are really poor. And the meat is revealing that now what’s the solution? Now in the meantime, you may want to drop down some of the meat that you’re doing, or some of the protein or fat you’re doing, just to kind of lessen some of the stress off the intestinal tract. But the first thing we’ll do before that is we’ll add in some HCl and some enzymes, maybe even some bile salts, we’ll see how much that starts to correct it. And then if we need then we can drop the animal protein and fat down a little bit if we need. Now, if your intestinal tracts really messed up, you may have to do an elemental or a bone broth faster, or something more liquid based to make it easier on your intestine. So everyone’s a little bit different. And we have a lot of clinical experience about being able to meet someone where they’re at so we can get optimal results.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and it’s sad that the meat gets the blame, you know, and like you said, all these documentaries that will pop up on Netflix, they’re all like, majority, you know, anti meat vegetarian vegan documentaries, and then you kind of have to help clients because sometimes we’ll get clients that have not listened to enough of us where the we haven’t convinced them to get back on me actually had a vegan or ex vegan client come to me last week. She said she was vegan for six years. And she got back on me with the help of listening to our podcasts. And she says she feels better than she ever has, which is amazing. She was able to transition back onto me without necessarily a bunch of supplemental enzymes, but in most cases, yeah, we’re going to come in due to and people may say why why do I need the supplement? Well, we don’t live in a world where you’re sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking a river valley with no stress. And you know, hunter gatherer average work 18 hours a week. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re working 40 60 hour work weeks. We’ve got kids, we’ve got technology we’ve got Got smartphones taking our attention away, we’re scrolling in Bowling at chipotle looking at our phone while we’re eating, or we’re stressed from bills and mortgages and obligations and whatever and age, by the time you’re age 40 50 60, you’re not making hardly any enzymes and acids compared to when you were younger. So all those factors add up that is the answer of why why do you need enzymes to support you? And how do enzymes help you poop? Well, because when that food is digesting better, your body’s going to be able to get rid of what it doesn’t need. And if you have a lot of malabsorption problems, you know, you may see on digested food in the stool. And over time, I’ve noticed people just adding in a handful of berries a day was all we needed to really clear up their their issues. Once we got all the gut infections enzymes in, you know, infections resolved, enzymes put in if they still needed help, we’ll go into a couple other things you want to get into. But handful of blueberries, I mean, that does a lot.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it just kind of going back to some of the the vegan stuff. So I always tell my patients will in general, ie more non starchy vegetables, most paleo people eat more non starchy vegetables than vegans do. Most vegans I find have lots of processed carbohydrate, they have lots of grains, lots of lentils, or legumes and they don’t typically eat tons of non starchy vegetables, it’s it’s difficult. On the vegan side, most don’t do it right now, if you’re going to be a vegan, you need to do lots of good fats from avocado and coconuts. And you probably need some kind of an amino acid supplement from rice or pea protein or some kind of some kind of an algae kind of protein source because most aren’t doing it right if you’re going to do it that way. But number two is sometimes the vegetables can jack you up to especially if they’re raw, because a lot of that fiber or if the vegetables are higher in fermentable, carbohydrates, some can be like garlic and onions and, and broccoli and asparagus, they can be higher and fodmaps. And fodmaps can be fertilizer for a lot of the SIBO base bacteria. So if you have a lot of bad bacteria that’s producing maybe more methane, and some of those vegetables start to feed some of that methane producing bacteria that may make you more constipated too. So I’ve seen some patients do better more with the meats than with a lot of the plants. So I’ve seen it go both ways. And you know, it’s hard because if you’re let’s say you’re one person, and you had an experience where you went vegan, and you felt great, well guess what, you only have your experience, I see patients that have gone carnivore and felt great. And so because we have this perspective, where we’ve seen dozens of people do great from different things, that allows us to form a unbiased clinical recommendation on what we think is best for the patient, because we’ve seen successes work from both sides. And the question is, we don’t have a dogmatic belief in Oh, well, this is what does it well, this is why it would do it for this person. And this is maybe why it doesn’t for you. And we’re going to we’re going to move the levers around because the goal isn’t to do this thing is to get you the result. So it’s really important that if you’re working with someone, you know, kind of talking to patients that are out there, you want someone you want to work with someone that’s results driven, not process driven, meaning, hey, this, you have to do this diet, this is the most important thing, this should get you the results versus Hey, no, I want to get you these results, we’re going to try pulling some of these levers and see what happens as a result. And then we’ll we’ll go backwards from there. So just really important. You want to make sure you’re working with someone that’s results driven, not necessarily, you know, dogma driven, if you will.
Evan Brand: That’s another great soundbite. You’re just rolling out these things. I love it. This is exactly the point that we needed to hit on. Because in this day and age, unfortunately, everything is kind of a soundbite. So you go to the lectin guy, you’re going to get the lectin diet, you go to the carnivore guy, you get the carnivore diet, you go to the vegan guy, you get the vegan, and you and I don’t really have any labels for us, we’d like you said we were results driven. And so we’re able to be more flexible. I love that we’re not in a box, like these people, because once you write the carnivore book or the lectin book, you’re kind of that guy, and then you’re stuck in that box. And it’s like, oh, wait a second, I’ve got all these other people doing really good with some cooked lightly steamed veggies and blueberries over here. But you told me I need to be carnivore. So what the heck, and then it just blows your credibility. So I yeah, I don’t want to be in a box.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now I tend to lean more on the Paleo template, but I use the word template, not diet, so I can have flexibility. And there’s some patients that I’ve seen that haven’t been able to tolerate any meat, we’ve had to just lean on free form amino acids, with some good vegetables or starches that are easy to handle. And I’ve had to go to that extreme with some patients. And if my dogma was no, you must eat animal products all the time. While I may not have been able to help that Paris person so we try to have the levers that we work with. We kind of have like a foundational bias, but it’s a bias that is flexible and that we can adjust according to the patient.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And eventually I would argue that that person you’re referring to could probably get back in and they may have been able to get back here forever later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Not the case, not a forever thing. It’s kind of a starting point where, hey, you break your ankle, you probably may have to be in a wheelchair out of the gates. And then we progress you to, you know, some crutches and they put you on a boot and then you just maybe Walk slowly, you don’t run and now you start jogging and majesty, right, there’s a progression and how you how certain things heal? Well, it’s the same thing, the four year digestive system that’s not quite as outward, it’s inward, right and how it looks and performs. But you can feel it just the same as an outward injury to your foot or hand.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’m gonna keep this thing going a little more philosophical than action based for a minute, just to to further this conversation, which is that let’s say someone goes to the bookstore. It’s funny, everything’s changing with society, isn’t it now it’s the Amazon bookstore, the Kindle bookstore, it used to be the real physical brick and mortar, there’s still a need that exists out there. I know there are some. So you go into the store, right, and you go to the diet section, and then someone picks up like, the, like I said, the Paleo book, The lectin book, The carnivore book, they do that, and then they get different or weird results. And then they kind of just give up, and that’s why they get so opposed to the word diet, or they get so opposed to the idea of changing the way they eat to change their symptoms. But the problem is, all these people writing these books are missing all the other root causes. So just because Jane didn’t do well, with a lot of meats, she might give up on meats, like you said, or she saw the documentary and give up on meats, but she never worked with somebody like us. So when we have these clinical tools that we have, where we’re going to be measuring the stool measuring the urine and looking at different infections. If we could just resolve those for Jane, get some of the enzymes back in clear the infections, guess what now she does great with the meat. So it’s sad, because there’s so many people that may have tried stuff like this, but they got so turned off with the non amazing results that they thought it was the diet to blame. But it wasn’t it was just the root causes. And like you said, the indicator is it sort of for us, it’s a clue Oh, that happens when you do meets, that doesn’t mean give it up. That means let’s figure out why. And the H Pylori could be the big one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s true. And I call it the vegetarian or vegan honeymoon. A lot of people that do go vegan, they can feel great their first year, it all depends where they’ve come from if they ate a lot of processed food or crappy food. And they’re eating lots of organic vegetables, and maybe some good healthy or plant fats like olives, or avocado or coconut oil. And they’re just getting a lot of organic food in their system, they may feel a lot better now over time is essential fatty acids and amino acids start moving more in the deficient side. And a lot of those fat soluble vitamins like a d k start moving downward, they’ll start having more problems over time. And that’s kind of I call it the vegan honeymoon where they’re kind of chasing that honeymoon. They’re like, I don’t feel as good as I did last year. And they kind of get stuck. And usually it’s a protein, fatty acid kind of issue, or maybe even a carbohydrate issue too much carbs. And then you got to look deeper. So getting back to the constipation part right, we have the six hours that I used to work with my patients. And we kind of start with that as a framework, removing the bad foods, or placing the enzymes and acids to the first two hours. And we adjust the diet accordingly. So it could be cutting out cutting down a lot of the fiber or a lot more cooking or going lower fodmap. or cutting out salicylates or females or going on to a moon, it could be a combination of all of that could be an elemental diet, of course, adding in enzymes and acids. And bio, especially if the stools are floating more, that’s a sign that we’re not breaking down fat, so we may adjust those first two hours. And if we’re having bowel movement issues, I may add in things like ginger, or bitters or D lime any, we may have to even add in some natural things like trifle or magnesium to really get the bowels moving. It just depends. I don’t like to add in bow movers unless I really can’t move the bowels with those first two hours, right. If I can’t move the bowels with those first two hours changing the diet and changing enzymes, acids and bile support, then we may lean on things to kind of get the ball moving. But I always want to see how the body responds before we have to add those things in first.
Evan Brand: Well, you make a great point. And even clinically, the things you would recommend to be used directly for moving the bowels those things are still a hell of a lot safer and more effective than some of the conventional stuff you’re going to get. So I mean, if you go to your conventional doc and they refer you to the GI doc and you’re diagnosed with let’s say IBS, C constipation, IBS type issue, there’s going to be some type of a pharmaceutical involved and there’s likely going to be side effects with that. And once again, it’s not the root cause so in your case like you mentioned clinically, you may not go straight to the magnesium hydroxide to help move the bowels by adding water to the bowels However, there’s so many people deficient in magnesium anyway that you could be actually fixing simultaneously fixing an underlying mineral deficiency plus helping to move the bowels. So the cool thing about what we do, is there a positive side effect so we can kill multiple birds with the same stone?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, I’d much rather use a nutrient than like an abrasive herb like Cena or Cascara Sagrada, right? No one has a deficiency of that, but they may have some deficiencies in some of these magnesium so that can be helpful. Now if I get bowels moving out of the gates, usually one or two months in, I’m going to try pulling back on some of these compounds to see if the bowels can move on its own. So it just depends, right? We’re getting the body hydrated, we’re chewing better. We’re working on eating and a non stressful environment, we’re getting enzymes and acids better. We’re cutting out the inflammation. And we may be changing some of the format, the building and the food. So all of those things are moving so many levers. So when I work with patients, patients are like, want to know like, what’s the solution for this? What’s the solution for that? It’s like, I don’t know, I’m going to just give you what I’ve seen to work. And we’re going to do eight or nine or 10 things out of the gates. And we’re going to see what works. But in general, to know exactly which one it is, it’s really hard because you’d have to like make one change, wait a couple of weeks, make one change, wait a couple of weeks. And it would take patients years to get better versus weeks and months. And so we make a whole bunch of changes at once. And then we monitor and we check in on those changes.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good point. So just to give a little more clarity, somebody who’s listening, like what does that even mean? Eight or nine changes. Oh, my God, that’s overwhelming. No, I mean, it could be Hey, look, we’re going to give a little more enzymes and acids, we’re going to pull this food out, we’re going to get you to do a little bit more water and a cleaner water source, we may throw in a little bit of this extra mineral, or maybe a little extra vitamin C, you’re going to do a handful extra of some blueberries, you’re going to make sure you’re getting enough adequate movement because you’re a sedentary job. So we’re going to get you a standing desk. And now you can stand up and move around, we’re going to get you to do a 10 minute walk a day, we’re going to get you to you know, take a couple deep breaths, we’re going to get you to chew your food better, we’re going to make sure that you’re not sitting in, I don’t know a crazy loud restaurant with like, you know, speakers blasting, you know, techno music in the background, we want you to just settle down, we want you to go to bed on time. I mean, yeah, those things give you 5 10 15%. And then by the time you add it all up, you’ve got really good success.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you’re not chewing your food. I’m sorry, you’re not hydrating when you’re eating right? All these things matter. And maybe getting a little bit more sunlight, right? All these things matter. And so that’s why it’s so hard to be like, well, what’s the solution? for this? It’s like, well, there’s a lot of things that can be a contributing factor, it could be 10%, for this 5% for that 20%. For that it’s very rare that this one thing is at 90 100%. Sometimes you get big, like you just make one simple change. And you the next week you check in with the patient. They’re like, well, I’m 80 or 90% better, it’s like whoa, that’s a home run, that can happen too. But we don’t count on it. And that’s why we do things kind of in a systematic fashion of what’s going to be the low hanging fruit and then we kind of move up from there, right? You got to build up the foundation of the house once the foundation solid, now you can you can build up, the foundation is not solid, then you have a whole bunch of problems that have happened with with the building of the house as you start going up.
Evan Brand: Good point. Good point. And this is the whole reason that we do a workup and we run people through a sort of a system. You call it a system approach. Because if you come in and you go to the doc, hey, I’ve got constipation. Pharmaceutical laxative, see you later. If you come to us constipation, it’s like, Huh, Interesting. Interesting. Okay, let’s figure out why. And if you ask why enough and you do the proper testing, you’re going to get to that why. So I just want to make sure we’re always comparing and contrasting because you ask, you know, Bobby, who hasn’t pooped all week what he’s going to do for his constipation, he might go to Walgreens, he’s going to go to the laxative section. Oh, I found this laxative. This one looks good. Let me drink some of this stuff. Oh, yeah, I poked Problem solved. It’s like, huh, yeah, you solve the constipation problem, but you didn’t solve why that’s happening in the first place. So I just, it shouldn’t have to be revolutionary to think root cause, but it still is not the mainstream. So until it’s the mainstream, our job is not done.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And so when for most conventional, like gastro people, for instance, they’re just like, hey, motility support, here you go laxative support, here you go. It’s very rare, you may get one that say, hey, let’s do a Siebel breath test, maybe that, and then what after that, maybe they’re gonna just recommend, hey, you know, do this quick little diet thing, because a lot of the conventional fodmap diet still have a lot of grains and other crap in there. So you may not change the inflammation. And they may throw some Rifaximin or neomycin at you, boom. And then now maybe you have a fungal overgrowth or something on the backside, because they don’t do or address the gut bacteria, right? And then that can create other rebound overgrowth down the road. So let’s say you have a very progressive kind of forward thinking gastro Doc, maybe that’s what happens that I just mentioned, but most that’s going to be hey, here’s your motility enhancer. And you know, you got to just learn to relax and meditate and hey, maybe taking antidepressant a lot of time. That’s it. So you’re kind of stuck. And that’s just the insurance space model. When you have three to five minutes with a doc, that’s typically all they’re going to recommend for you. They don’t have enough time to really dive in deeper. And that model doesn’t give them the ability to dive in deeper. So you really need to see a functional medicine doctor to really have the ability to go deeper and get to the root cause.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I get so frustrated with that term, integrative it just makes me angry because I’ve had so many people and I know you have to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clients and patients that have said I’ve worked with this angle. Right of guy, Mike Oh, integrative What did he do? And you know, they kind of market it as it’s like so forward thinking, but like you said, it may be the Rifaximin at most. And then guess what a lot of these people they have antibiotic resistant infection. So we’ll test them and guess what the SIBO situation is still going on. Maybe they have parasites or like you said, there’s a fungal overgrowth component to it as well, their guts leaky, their guts inflamed. Now they’ve got all sorts of other problems as a side effect of hitting this Rifaximin. In some cases, it can help maybe play whack a mole a little, it may knock some things down, but they still have enough problem when they come to us that we need further work. So I get frustrated with this integrative idea. Because and I know there’s good intention behind it. But as you mentioned, with that model, the way the model exists, it doesn’t doesn’t allow enough time and there’s not enough advanced testing, like we’re doing to to fully get to the bottom of it
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. And once you kind of talk to your conventional medical doctor, and you say, hey, walk me through your thinking on what you think the root cause of this could be. Usually it kind of reveals their that they really don’t know. Because if you’re just providing a drug to treat the symptoms, well, obviously, they’re not worried about the root cause because it’s Band Aid down below, right? So we kind of look at everything in my line, kind of as the SSS approach, right? You have the underlying stressors here, could be physical stress, chemical stress, emotional stress, food allergies, bacterial overgrowth, sibo, right, all of these stressors, increase our stress bucket, and then the body systems start to dysfunction, hormones, digestion, immune detoxification, as the system starts to dysfunction, then you have all this, the symptoms happen down below. And so conventional medicine just band aids, these symptoms down below, they don’t ever go upstream. So you got to have conversations with your doctors that talk more about the upstream issues. And so we try to nullify all of the underlying stressors, make sure foods good chewings, good, hydrations. Good. And then we’re going to do tests that look at the function of the systems. So it’s a lot different of approach. So if you’re working with someone, you know, you want to be able to ask the right questions, what do you think the underlying root causes are, and as a patient, make sure you walk into it with an open mind that there’s probably not one underlying issue, it’s probably a bunch of things that are spread out, that are part of the underlying cause, from a stress standpoint, and the body system standpoint that are emanating the symptoms downstream?
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said Well said, that’s a great, great visualization, and you have permission to have 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 things going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s the key, that’s that that’s the missing assumption, you could have a lot of different things. And then as you walk through with the clinician, and you’re making changes, you need to not go into it as Oh, I made this diet change and the supplement, I don’t feel better yet. It’s okay. There’s always a plan B, a Plan C, a plan D, a plan E. And if the answers down here, and E and F and you, you quit and get discouraged that B and C, then you never get a chance to kind of go deeper. So just as patients are listening here, always make sure you have that ability to kind of just like, have a good attitude and keep on progressing down the line.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and you can’t blame them on me. This is the way that people have been conditioned over decades and decades of conventional medicine, but it still does frustrate me when someone will approach us whether it’s a friend or a family member or something and they’ll say, Hey, you know, I’ve got autoimmune. I’ve got sjogrens or I’ve got alopecia or I’ve got, you know, diabetes type two. What’s wrong with me? Like, why did this happen? Where did this come from? It’s like, Where do I even start? You stay up till 1am? You posted a picture the other day on your Facebook page? Have you eating an ice cream Sunday? Yeah, never get exercise. I know what you do. You sit all day, you don’t get outside and you’ve never had a tan in your life. So you’re afraid of the sun. If you do go outside, you lather yourself in sunscreen chemicals. You don’t eat organic, you’re super stressed. I mean, you know, so when people ask, well, what’s wrong? Why is this happening? It’s almost like, Oh, are you ready for this? Because I’m about to open up Pandora’s box here. And I’m going to tell you 20 things of what’s happening, I’m gonna tell you 30 things of why this has happened to you. So it’s just a reeducation really, of telling people look, it’s there’s not a one smoking gun, rarely to you and I find one smoking gun.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, I 100% agree. It’s nice every now and then where you kind of get a home run and functional medicine, when you kind of make a couple of changes. And it’s like boom, and you blast it out of the park. It’s always a good luck little ego check. Because you know, you work with a lot of difficult patients over over time. And so it’s nice to get a couple of home runs every now and then. But if you work with a good clinician that has the right algorithm and kind of goes through the things goes to the options that give you the greatest chance of success out of the gates, and then work to the things that give you the less success at the end, then you have the greatest chance of success as a patient early on. And you set the foundation for greater healing over time. So I think that’s really the most important mindset is clinically go with the high percenter options.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and I’m not being a bully here. And I’m not making First of these people, I’m just saying, we really need to re education. You know, you you people eventually come out of the woodwork at at you when you and I do what we do and they’re not ready for the red pill. They’re not you know, they’ll ask what’s wrong me? Why do I have diabetes? Or why do I have this headache? It’s like, ah, are you ready? Are you ready? Because there’s there’s a lot to uncover. There’s a lot to unpack.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think most people once they’ve kind of gone through the conventional medicine model, and they’ve kind of said, Hey, all right, well, I just don’t want to be relying on laxatives or enemas my whole life. What’s next? Usually, once there’s, they kind of have this level of like, okay, these are the only options I have from conventional medicine. There’s a level of openness that occurs from that, where they’re like, Alright, what’s next? What’s next? I’d see functional medicine and nutrition is helping people all the time, what’s next outside of this because they just kind of have this yearning that there’s got to be something more. And I think that’s creates a level of openness and readiness to.
Evan Brand: Good point. Good point. Yeah. I often say people have to hit rock bottom or they have to be miserable enough to listen, I mean, you and I’ve heard countless stories of husbands and wives that are stubborn and they want to eat the pizza while the other spouse has to eat the grass fed steak and sweet potato that grass fed steak sweet potato tastes better anyway. So I don’t know what they’re doing. But But anyway, they’ve got to have their own issue right? And then finally, once the other person once they get miserable enough, then finally they’re they’re willing and you don’t have to drag them into this whole thing as much.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, I totally agree. Well, if you guys are listening, and you enjoy the podcast here, put your comments down below. Really appreciate the thumbs up and a share. We also reviews are great JustinHealth.com/iTunes, EvanBrand.com/iTunes. It’s great. If you feel free to head over to EvanBrand.com you can schedule an appointment with Evan anywhere in the world. Vice versa with myself Dr. J at JustinHealth.com. We’re here to help y’all. And I appreciate you guys listening and just feel free to share this content with some friends or family that can benefit. Again, we’re clinicians that have had 10s of thousands of patients experience kind of combined, and we want to provide actionable information with y’all so you can take action and get your health back in your hands. So we really appreciate you guys being listeners and attending.
Evan Brand: Take great care yourself. We’ll be back next week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-root-causes-of-constipation-slow-motility-podcast-331
Natural Solutions to Address POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome) | Podcast #329
POTS is a known blood circulation problem indicated by two elements: a specific group of symptoms that constantly happen when standing. A heart rate suddenly increases from horizontal to standing (or as tested on a tilt table) of at least 30 bpm in adults, or at least 40 bpm in adolescents, measured during the first 10 minutes of standing.
Management for POTS should be specific to each individual since the symptoms and underlying conditions may vary. Most patients can control the situation with food templates, exercise, and medications. In this podcast, Dr. J and Evan emphasize the importance of the quality of food that we eat and seek medical attention, and undergo tests that will find the disease’s root cause for better understanding and achieve a healthier body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:15 What is POTS
10:56 Adaptogenic Herbs
15:15 Addressing POTS
24:43 Detox and Sauna
27:14 Other Natural and Organic Tips
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s got the J in the house here with Evan Brand really excited to have a excellent podcast on the topic of POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which is has to do with blood pressure and dizziness. And there’s a strong connection with POTS and the adrenals we’re really excited to dive into that today, Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Doing really well. I feel like I started every story or every podcast by like complaining a little bit, but that’s okay. Because we learn from our personal struggles. And that’s what makes us better practitioner. So I was telling you before we hit record that when I had the, you know what virus, I had a lot of POTS types symptoms, I was really dizzy, I was really faint. I was having some lower blood pressure. I was having some heart palpitations, I was having some mental confusion just fell out of it. And so dealing with it personally, I definitely tried a lot of different things. So you and I are going to try to go into it. You and I were talking about the adrenal piece. So why don’t you just start telling us about that? What do you think the connection is? You think it’s a more of a low cortisol deal? A high cortisol? Do you think it’s just adrenal weakness? The whole HPA axis is functioning as a whole, or do you think there’s any specific part of adrenal problems that’s causing this?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great, great, great question. So first off, you know, what is POTS? Right? So essentially, there’s like dysautonomia happening, right? The autonomic nervous system that controls heart rate, and blood pressure, sweating, all of these different things, the symptoms are over exaggerated now. So when you change body positions, you may get very dizzy lightheaded, right, your heart rate may be really up, energy fatigue, maybe up, right, conventional medicine, they’re going to use a tilt table test to kind of simulate that change of body position, and they’re going to test your heart, they’re going to test your blood pressure, okay? Now the typical response you want in, in natural medicine, there’s a test called the raglans test, which looks at blood pressure and correlates it to adrenal dysfunction. And so the raglans tests, basically test your blood pressure when you’re sitting or laying down, and then you stand up or change body position, you want your blood pressure, actually to go up about five to 10 points, okay? People that tend to be more on the pot side, where they have a lot of those symptoms on changing their body position, they tend to actually have a drop in blood pressure. And that’s important, because when you change body positions, now, if you’re like more horizontal, well, guess what, it’s easier for your blood to flow to your brain, right? Because blood flows downhill. And if it’s level than that, that works too, right? soon as you get up. Now, you really have to pump blood uphill, if you will, to get to your brain. And so if you have a drop in blood pressure, you’re not going to have enough pressure to perfuse that blood nutrition and oxygen to the brain. So that’s a big thing. So you may have symptoms in regards to your heart, in regards to dizziness, right? body awareness, all those different things because you don’t have adequate blood pressure. And so that’s a common sign with adrenal issues. And it’s possible to be on the POTS spectrum, where you have that change in body position, you have that change in lower blood pressure, but you know, your conventional medical doctor may not be able to diagnose you with POTS because it’s not severe enough. So like anything, there’s a there’s a continuum on a diagnosis, right? disease, allopathic kind of criteria is here. And then we have optimal health here. And usually there’s a spectrum of where you may sit where you’re kind of in no man’s land. And so most of our POTS patients, right who are on that pot spectrum where there’s blood pressure issues, on the lower side or the change in body position causes lots of disturbances cognitively cognitive wise heart issues, whether it’s faster or or beating through the chest kind of things, or abnormal rhythm. All of these things are connected to adrenals. And adrenal is are of course connected to blood sugar. They’re connected to your minerals, your sodium, your chloride, your magnesium, your potassium, blood sugar, cortisol glucocorticosteroids. And then of course, your adrenals eventually have a connection with your sex hormones. So you can see chronically lower dapa back can create other lower or more sex hormone imbalances that can create more issues, whether it’s PMS, low progesterone, more anxiety, more depression, poor sleep. So you can see how an adrenal issue can easily spin into a sex hormone issue, partly because the adrenals really are one of the backup generators for the sex hormones. And so especially if you’re a female, you’re going to rely on those adrenals to pump out dapa sulfate. And that’s going to be a major building blocks. So as you transition into menopause, you’re going to rely more on those adrenal. So as you hit your 40s, it’s common as those ovaries aren’t supporting the hormonal output like they used to that you may start to lean more on the adrenals. And more of those POTS type of symptoms may show up.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said, well, you pointed out something really interesting. I never thought about it like this, but you and I clinically we kind of operate in the no man’s land, meaning that people may have not been extreme enough, as you mentioned, to get the clinical diagnosis. I mean, the same thing happens with celiac, right? They’ll say that you have to have some In crazy, like 95% tissue destruction in the intestines to be considered celiac, but if you’re like 94%, they say you’re not celiac, go eat some bread, it’s fine. So it’s very interesting point you made. And we’ve actually had clients report this to where they’ll say that their pulse rate or their heartbeat only increased by maybe 20, or 25 beats upon standing. And they were told clinically, it had to be 30 beats. So if you’re 28 beats, you’re still not pods, if you’re 30 beats, increase your POTS. And so that’s the problem is there’s this huge in between area where people have these symptoms, but then they go to their doctor, and they’re basically going to get told that everything is fine. And there’s really nothing we can do for you or possibly what they’ll do. If it was moderate enough, but maybe not clinically diagnosed on paper, maybe they do a beta blocker, because they say, Okay, I understand you’re standing up, you’re having heart palpitations, you’re having chest pain, let’s go ahead and do this meta pro law or other beta blocker to try to calm the symptoms, but then you never actually fixed the adrenals you never support the hormones, you never fixed the minerals. And all of that still goes unaddressed. And then of course, you get the side effects of the drug, and then you create more problems. So you see how this could be a really big slippery slope. And then also one thing I want to mention too, because I experienced it personally was you mentioned like the the dizziness and that kind of stuff, but also just mental fog. I mean, if you don’t have enough nutrients, enough blood flow, you just feel kind of spacey. So if you’re having trouble with focus, a lot of times you and I are looking on like an organic acids test to try to look at dopamine or other neurotransmitter problems. But this whole dysautonomia POTS thing could also create brain fog. So that’s just something else that we’re going to be looking for and trying to address.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so typically with POTS is you’re gonna have a combination of a drop in blood pressure, right? So conventional medicine diagnosis is looking at a 20 millimeter drop in mercury on the blood pressure cuff on the systolic, that’s the top number, and then about a 10 or more on the bottom number. So if it’s normally 120 over 80, you know, you got to be at, you know, below 100 over 70, if you will, okay, and that’s in the first couple of minutes of that change in body position. And then typically, as the blood pressure drops, now you’re not able to move as much blood. And so what has to happen is your heart rate has to increase to compensate for the lack of pressure. And so as the heart rate increases, that’s where you start to see the increase in heart rate, that’s where the, the postural orthostatic that’s the change in body position, tachycardia, that means faster heart rate. And so that’s where you start to feel your heart beating out of its chest. Okay, and so then you have the drop in blood pressure on one side, and the increase in heart rate on the other side. So the first thing we look at, from a functional medicine perspective, where are we in? Where are we at with hydration? Okay, are we getting enough water and hydration in? Number two? Is that full spectrum mineral water? Are we getting a really good mineral water? Are we getting? are we adding additional minerals to it? And then number three, where are we at with diuretics, coffee, tea, things that have caffeine because coffee or tea number one will increase adrenaline, right? And adrenaline is part of this whole POTS cascade, so increased adrenalin, increased, cortisol can always increase the heart rates. But it also acts more as a diuretic where you pee more water out, that drops your blood pressure. And then when you drop the water, you drop the minerals and your heart needs sodium and chloride and magnesium and your minerals to function. Remember, magnesium is a natural beta blocker. And so if we can get the minerals in that brings the blood pressure up because water follows minerals. And if we can get minerals in that relax the heart because magnesium is a natural beta blocker, right. And so that can really help start to relax the heart, but you got to fix the underlying issue. And so you got to really get and that’s just a couple of lifestyle, diet strategies out of the gates, we’ll talk more specifically. But anyone that has POTS or POTS symptoms, we have to really look at the adrenals. And you may not necessarily have an Addison’s issue where your cortisol is pathologically low, right, or Cushing’s where it’s pathologically high, it may be some kind of an imbalance in between. That’s why we use the word adrenal dysfunction because some people are high in the morning, low at night, and vice versa. So it may not be high throughout the day or low throughout the day, you could be somewhere in between. And so we really got to look at these things and test it and quantify and see exactly where you’re at.
Evan Brand: Yeah, great points. And on the testing, you made another great point, too, which is that if you do work with conventional medicine, they may say that your problem is not bad enough to be pathological. So we’ve had clients that will do just a morning cortisol sample via blood, and their doctor says, Well, your cortisol levels are fine. And it’s like, okay, yeah, you took an ATM blood sample. And that’s it. That’s just not enough tensional data, you have no, maybe you have a better analogy, but my analogy is you’re you’re touching the sidewalk to estimate the forecast. You have no idea what’s going to happen throughout the rest of the day with that rhythm. So if you’re having your POTS episode at 2, 3pm, you’re crashing, well, what’s going on from a cortisol perspective at that point with that 8am blood sample and that’s it. You don’t have a clue. Let me let me mention a couple things too. So I know that a lot of people with mold, just looking at Dr. Shoemaker and his big list of symptoms, POTS is sort of thrown in to some of these symptoms for mold exposure, and then also lyme. So when you’re trying to find root causes adrenals could be a factor, but there could be another layer deeper. So if you’ve had any kind of take issues, coinfection issues that could be a problem. And so, I know Stephen Buner, I talk about him a lot. He’s a really great herbalist who’s written a lot of books, he discusses using Hawthorne. And so I’ve experimented with some heart formulas myself, like mixing CO, q, 10, and Hawthorne. And I’ve had really good success with it. And so I think those are two, two good herbs that you know, two good nutrients that could help. And then also gingko could be helpful too, because gingko is going to help with blood flow and microcirculation. We use it a lot for brain problems. But I do believe that it can be helpful for POTS. And then let’s talk about the adaptogenic herbs. So I guess it really depends on what you’re looking like. But in general adaptogens are going to help modify you either way. So I would say something like rhodiola, or maybe a good ginseng, like an eleuthero is going to be probably the top top choice on adaptogens. What would you say? Oh, what about licorice? Should we talk about that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so a lot of these herbs out of the gates, you know, they’re nice, because they’re going to help with blood flow. A lot of these herbs like gingko, or Hawthorn, they tend to be used more on the high blood pressure side, right. And so they may help with blood flow. But remember, I think with POTS, there’s definitely more of a blood, low blood pressure kind of kind of thing. So we have to kind of, you know, make sure we support all of the other underlying issues. Because, you know, a lot of times, if we’re not getting to the root, then we may not get lasting results. Plus a lot of times the medications that are used, what are the big medications that are used out of the gates, is it just beta blockers out of the gates, I know they do some things like floor enough, which can be helpful, which is basically a pharmaceutical version of aldosterone, which helps to hold on to sodium, which helps increase blood pressure. You kind of alluded just a minute ago, licorice does help mimic that. And so we can use things like licorice, that non diglycerides meaning not licorice, that’s diglycerides de glycerides. licorice loses that aldosterone stimulating effect, and it’s more for gut healing. But if we’re using licorice that has not been de glycerides, non dgl, licorice that can have very powerful effects on low aldosterone levels, and it can help hold on the minerals better. So for adding more minerals in there, that’s helpful. conventional medicine typically only talks about it from a perspective of sodium and sodium chloride, they kind of forget about the magnesium and the potassium part of it. So magnesium and potassium are also very important. Also, they’re using a lot of beta blockers, right? So beta blockers, guess what they reduce the heart rate, but they also can reduce the blood pressure. And they have effects of creating nutritional deficiencies. And it can it can lead you can lose some of those same minerals, magnesium, etc, that are also very helpful for the heart in general. So the problem with a lot of the medications, they can actually make some of the problems worse in the long run, because they’re not fixing the underlying issue.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said, here’s here’s a couple other drugs, you’re asking what drugs, here’s a list of them. There’s one called Ivabradine. It’s a drug that acts on the heart to slow the heart rate, but it slows the heart with without affecting blood pressure. And then there’s another one here, underneath, it’s hard to even pronounce it Pyridostigmine, the brand name Mestinon, this is a drug that prevents the breakdown of acetylcholine. So that’s pretty interesting. It’s like an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, I guess.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hmm, interesting.
Evan Brand: It says they use it for. Let’s see here. Myasthenia Gravis.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s an autoimmune condition that affects the postsynaptic neuron where acetylcholine plugs in.
Evan Brand: So they’re using that drug for POTS also, I guess it’s kind of an off label deal. And then SSRIs for some reason, it says here that, you know, people I guess they’re saying practitioners suspect that the fainting spells may be related to serotonin or some other neurotransmitter so they also use SSRIs. But once again, none of this is root cause and as you mentioned, the conventional like Web MD stuff is all about sodium, sodium, sodium, like you should just be frickin eating spoonfuls of like iodized salt all day, which is just ridiculous.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And there’s different kinds of salt right? And there’s some salts that we like that like real salt or Redmond Real Salt or Celtic salt or Himalayan that are gonna have sodium and chloride but a bunch of other minerals as well, which is great. The problem a lot of the medications for instance, beta blockers are notorious for depleting CoQ 10. And we need coq 10 for healthy heart function. So problem with a lot of these medications is you’re kind of robbing. You’re paying your credit card debt from last month with a new credit card you open this month. And so you can only play hot potato like that for so long before that bill becomes due.
Evan Brand: We made the point about the potassium to I think we talked about that for a minute because you’re saying even if we do bring in some of the Celtic or the mineral salts You may get some trace amounts, right? But you’re not going to get a significant amount. So you’re thinking possibly supplementing, like we have. I know you and I work with a couple electrolyte formulas where there’s some potassium added in there. So something like that would be better than just straight salt.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so how I look at it with patients is first thing first is drink enough water. Make sure that water is clean, filtered, no crap, not tap water, number one. Number two, avoid the diuretics. Right. avoid caffeine. avoid alcohol, avoid teas, right. So that way you’re not peeing out extra water and minerals. add extra minerals to your water. So good. Redmond’s real salts Celtic sea salt, half a teaspoon teaspoon twice a day is great salt your food very liberally hydrate you know, 20 ounces or so before each meal 1015 minutes before drink in between meals. It’s great. If you’re drinking a really clean reverse osmosis water which is fine. Just make sure you add extra minerals back to it. definitely avoid any distilled water. And then if you want to drink like a really good clean mineral water throughout the day, my favorite here in Texas Topachico’s wonderful, right? It’s the Pellegrino of the South Pellegrino is also wonderful good mineral sulfate drill Steiner, Evian, Fiji, Fiji has got a lot of silica in there really excellent out of the gates love those. I would say also, you may need to have more potassium and magnesium than what you’re getting in mineral water and in the salt, because you need about 4700 milligrams per day. So I recommend everyone, head over to JustinHealth.com/cronometer, put the link below, run your macros run a typical day through there, right put your age, your height, your weight, your activity level, and you’re gonna find you need about 4700 milligrams per day. And that’s the [inaudible] daily recommended intake, most people are only getting two to three grams 2000 to 3000 milligrams, and you’re probably have a deficit. And then you also have to factor in when you’re stressed. And when your adrenals have issues, you may need a couple extra grams on top of that, because you’re losing extra minerals. So you got to factor that in. So take a look, see where you’re at, see how low you’re at. And out of the gates, you know, you want to supplement additional potassium, whatever that recommended intake is if you’re at 2700 milligrams, you want an extra 2000 milligrams to meet the needs. And then from there, you really want to work with a functional medicine practitioner because if you go too high in potassium without enough sodium to support it, you can actually you can actually lower sodium by doing too much potassium so you got to keep that sodium potassium in check. Now if you’re doing Redmond’s Real Salt, like I mentioned, along with the potassium, you’re probably okay. But if you have any POTS issues at all, you really want to be working with a functional medicine doctor like us, you want to be looking at cortisol, like Evan said earlier, a blood test is only going to look at your serum cortisol, your protein, it’s not going to look at any of your free cortisol, it’s not going to look at it throughout the day. It’s not going to add it up throughout the day. And then we also run organic acids that look at the catecholamines the adrenaline, the epinephrine again, adrenaline, catecholamines, and epinephrine. It’s all the same thing, right? Medicine uses these words to confuse the heck out of you, adrenaline, catecholamine, nor epinephrine, all the same thing, okay. And so we have to test those and we use organic acids, we’ll run tests for Vanilmandelate and Homovanillate, which gives us a window into your adrenaline precursor. So if we’re burning up adrenaline, we gotta support the amino acids, we got to calm down the adrenals to really help the body. So we’re not creating all this extra stress because that stress causes you to dump minerals. And so if you’re dumping minerals, we have to replace what you typically need. Plus a little bit on top of that, plus, we got to fix and calm down the whole nervous system, right? That autonomic nervous system, that’s the automatic nervous system that controls heart rate, beat, these are things you don’t typically think about. You don’t think about beating your heart, it happens automatically. So we got to help calm that down.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so even some of the lifestyle strategies can get involved too, right? I mean, you could take all the adaptogens. But if you’re just a type A personality or a go getter, you’re not resting, you’re not taking breaks. So I would argue, some music, I would argue meditation, guided meditation, maybe a float tank, deep tissue massage, may be myofascial relief, anything that you could do to try to basically downshift your nervous system. Because yes, you mentioned something several times, which I think really kind of just ding ding ding hit the bell for many people, which is the the variable of stress. And people that are more stressed are going to have this problem more, you’re likely not just going to be sitting on an island, you know, getting, you know, spoon fed pineapple and you feel POTS. Now, this is going to be people that are really under the gun. They’re in the middle of a lot of transition there. Maybe Who knows, maybe they lost their job. Maybe they had a viral issue that really took them down like you had a post viral type POTS Come on. So stress, I think is the big variable and that’s where the adaptogens come in and help the nervous system self regulate. However, I’ve done adaptogens for years and I can still be stressed so I still have to focus During the lifestyle stuff, take the kids for a bike ride, go ride the skateboard, go for a walk, go for a hike, just sit out in the sun and listen to music. So you got to come in with the lifestyle stuff too. You can’t just go take the magic pill and you know, eat the salt and be cured. I think at a certain point, you need to come in and evaluate your lifestyle and figure out do I have toxic people I need to cut out am I working too many hours? Am I able to delegate some of the work I’m a you know, financial advisor and I’m too stressed I’m working 60 hours a week, can you delegate Can you reduce the workload reduce the stress, because in a vacuum, the stuff that we’re talking about, it won’t get you fully out of the woods with this, I do think you have to do a good life evaluation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% got to look at all of it right. And that’s super important. Now, in general with with a lot of things we may want to get, you know, a couple extra, you know, grams of good quality sea salt. So you can start with you know, an extra gram, the 10 grams of high quality sea salt, I typically recommend starting with a half a teaspoon to a teaspoon, two times a day, put it in your water, shoot it down. You can also salt your food very liberally, you know to taste throughout the day. You can also add a little pinch in your water just enough so you can’t taste it, you shouldn’t be able to taste them. You can also drink a good quality quality mineral water right mentioned a couple of these brands. And then you can also work on doing all the right things to reduce stress. So I already mentioned a couple things out of the gates. Blood Sugar is a big thing, the more your blood sugar goes up and down on a roller coaster ride your surging adrenaline and cortisol when your blood sugar goes hypo when it starts to go low. And when you start surging adrenaline, it’s going to create more mineral depletion, because you’re going to pee it out, right? So we The more you can kind of come down that blood sugar and make it more stable part of that by being more fat burner right? healthy proteins, healthy fats and dialing in the carbs, less refined, refined grains, keeping it more to vegetables. And low sugar fruit in those kinds of things play a big, big role in keeping the blood sugar rollercoaster smoothed out. The less blood sugar roller coaster, the less adrenaline the less dumping of minerals does play a huge role across the board.Evan Brand: And this is a new problem. By the way, the blood sugar issue that you’re mentioning this is in terms of modern history, right? Because if you look at like a hunter gatherer, for example, maybe they’re gonna find a beehive and get some fresh honey every once in a while. But never in human history. Have we had access to the processed carbs, the fructose, the processed sugar, these major nations have processed grains, yeah, flowers, any of the stuff that is screwing up our blood sugar. These are all relatively new problems for humankind. So if someone’s sitting back and they’re listening, like God, why is it so complicated to be a healthy human? Well, because we’ve screwed it up with the diet, the lifestyle, the sedentary, the stress, the the schedules, the work hours, I mean, modern life has contributed to this problem. So, you know, I know it’s a little frustrating. And thank God, why is everything complicated with health? Well, because the diet is a big part of it. And I certainly know that when I had blood sugar issues, I had a lot more unstable blood pressure, too. So there is definitely a big connection there. The good news is once you get your diet dialed in, and you are a fat burner, you’re going to feel so much better, you’re going to feel so much more stable.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I remember early on when I was looking at your diet law, we were chatting, I think you were having some of these POTS issues with a lot of the heart racing, right. And I remember looking at your diet and there was like an eight hour gap. In the day where you weren’t eating, I think you were trying to do a little bit more intermittent intermittent fasting, things like that. I’m like, wow, you know, you’re not going to be able to do those things because the fasting is too much of a stress on your body, your your physiology is not strong enough to be able to adapt to that stress. And so if you are doing a lot of intermittent fasting, you really got to be careful of that, you know, so kind of my checklist out of the gates is definitely be more of a fat burner. Avoid the refined flours, grains, high blood sugar types of foods that add in the extra minerals, half a teaspoon, teaspoon high quality, sea salt per day, work with a functional medicine doctor, get your magnesium, your potassium dialed in half your body weight in ounces of water. Clean, filtered water is excellent good quality, reputable brand mineral water during the day. All of these things are vitally, vitally important. Good breathing, good movement, don’t over exercise where you’re sweating too much. You know, make sure you’re doing all the right things and get your adrenals tested, get your organic acids tested to look at your adrenalin as well. I mean, we can always dive in deeper. If you have a lot of gut issues and absorption there. There always could be a bottleneck with the gut as well. It’s always possible, but those are kind of your first steps out of the gates, Alaska with the low hanging fruit, start with low hanging fruit, and then work on finding a good functional medicine support practitioner to get in your corner.
Evan Brand: I wanted to bring this up before you wrapped it up. So last thing, detox and sauna. So I do notice that some clients and me included if we go too high, we do too much. We do too frequent with sauna and or detox support, especially binders, we can run into some trouble. So just like you mentioned On the exercise not doing too much. Same thing with sauna I think you got to be careful with it if you’re already adrenally depleted, if you’re glutathione deficient if your detox pathways are not working, you can overdo it quick. So I would say the average person could hopefully handle twice a week, maybe 135 to 140 degrees for about 20 minutes but if you start to feel woozy, you feel faint, you feel like you’re gonna pass out in the sauna just get out, you’re probably dehydrated, your mineral are off your adrenals are too weak, so don’t push it, don’t push it. And then on the binder piece, work with your practitioner, but in general, sometimes less is more on the binders. I remember when I was doing like eight charcoal per day, I started to feel pretty woozy and it could have been like a detox reaction, but I think it may have been some mineral stuff too. So I was doing some fulvic acids and some salts to try to help balance it, but I still overdid it with binders. So those are just two other notes I wanted to share.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So if you’re going to do a sauna, make sure if you already have kind of POTS symptoms, one don’t do it right after exercise, probably too much stress. Okay, do a sauna session by itself. Number two, take an electrolyte support a balanced electrolyte support product before you go in and have a good mineral water while you’re there sweating. So then any water that comes out, you’re replacing it as it comes in with mineral so supplement before and then good mineral water during and that should be and then try to keep it under 20 minutes and make sure you’re not feeling any bit woozy or any bit worse in regards to your symptoms while you’re in there. I think that’s a good kind of general way of of hitting.
Evan Brand: Alright, here’s my shameless plug. And then we can wrap up My Hydration Essentials is an electrolyte formula that I drink, I just do a scoop of it. I mix it with water and drink one scoop a day. And it does have some ribose it does have potassium, some taurine, some of the other nutrients outside of just your sodium. And I also drink that in the sauna and I give it to my kids. And I like to actually mix it with beet powder. And we use just an organic beet powder. And I add it to the electrolytes because it really increases nitric oxide. So my hands, my feet, everything gets warmer, circulations better and I sweat, like 25% more sweat in the sauna, if I mix the electrolytes with the beet powder and drink that. So that’s called hydration essentials.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that’s great. And other natural thing that you can do on top of that celery juice is wonderful. You get about one gram of potassium in a cup of celery juice. So celery juice is excellent. Very good. It’s kind of your it’s Mother Nature’s natural Gatorade, right problem with Gatorade ton of sugar, a ton of high fructose ton of dyes. So it’s basically crap. You know, Mother Nature’s gatorades coconut water. But the problem with coconut water is a lot of sugar in it. So you really only want to do a post workout. So the best type of natural low sugar gatorades in the me celery juice, that’s a great option for you a lot of good minerals, a lot of good potassium. And if you do any green juices really avoid any carrot and or any fruit in there because when just juice it, the sugar concentrates really high. And that can create this reactive hypoglycemic drop blood sugar was a fast comes down hard. And this is kind of what feeds into the all the pot stuff. Right, it creates more cortisol aberrations and more adrenaline, noradrenaline stimulation, so just be careful that really good we’ll put links to the some of the products that Evan mentioned and some of the things that I mentioned as well. Anything else you want to highlight, Evan?
Evan Brand: Great call on the carrots. You know, when you think of eating a carrot, like in a beef stew, you don’t think of it as being necessarily sugar. But I have had some clients do what you’re describing, which is they’ll get into the green juices with the carrots and will track their blood sugar. Man, that stuff screws up their blood sugar almost as much as a soda does.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, if you’re gonna have a carrot, eat it whole. Once you juice it, it becomes a problem. Now if you’re doing like, if you’re just using like one carrot, and you’re relatively healthy, probably not a big deal. But if you have blood sugar issues, I stay away from any carrots if you’re gonna have a carrot habit and your salad eat it raw. I think that’s a good way to do it. Still nutrient dense. But yeah, you gotta you don’t want to throw too much blood sugar on that blood sugar rollercoaster. And beets too.
Evan Brand: Sorry. Well, last thing. So I talked about the beets. So the one that we use and carry is a non hybridized beet powder because apparently just like with strawberries, and pretty much every other fruit in the in the modern world, everything’s hybridized now to be bigger, brighter, sweeter. So most beets are hybridized even if they’re non GMO, they’re hybridized and so they’re gonna cause a big blood sugar problem. I have some clients that are just way too blood sugar unstable to handle beets but if it’s a non hybridized version, it is a little bit more well tolerated. So just keep that in mind if you feel kind of woozy. If you do the beet powder thing I’m talking about you feel weird. It could be messing with your blood sugar, you could always test it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent really good. Hey, if you guys are enjoying today’s content and how you support us feel free click down below look at some of our links. Sign up for our newsletter. If the information that we’re talking about resonates Feel free to schedule a call with with Evan or myself we have colleagues and support teams ready to help you out if you want to dive in deeper. We’re here to help you take control your health. 99% of people may not take that step. Use the information. Take Control your health, you’re ready for that next step we are here for you. Share this content with friends or family. Put your comments down below. I want to know what your experiences are with POTS or any of these POTS like symptoms. We’re here to help and appreciate you guys all engaging. Have a phenomenal day.
Evan Brand: Take care now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care y’all. Bye now.
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Detox with the Correct Binders | Podcast #324
Dealing with toxic substances can be an overwhelming experience. With that in mind, it helps when things are simplified and made into relatable terms. Intestinal binders are a crucial part of any detox protocol. When the liver processes toxins, they get excreted through bile and into the small intestine. If the toxins are not bound to anything, most of them will get reabsorbed in the gut.
It is important to note that certain health conditions may make binder types more or less desirable. Having a good practitioner help determine those choices for you is always advisable. Also, there are some circumstances, such as in autoimmune disease and infectious conditions, that require the use of precaution and targeted choices with binders. Proper sourcing is critical as with all supplements, as each of them can come with unnecessary risks if they are not high-grade/quality.
Binders are like free hall passes! In using a binder, your body is spared the work required to process a toxin through the liver and gallbladder and is, instead, excrete from the body. Check out this podcast to know more about what suits you!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:18 How Binders Work
8:38 Binders’ Mechanism
15:11 Detoxifying
21:20 Different Kinds of Binders
29:44 Detox as a Side Effect
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan brand. Today we’re gonna be talking about using binders to help detoxify, exciting podcast because we are utilizing all the things that we are chatting about with our patients every week. And we’re excited to share with everyone else, some of our natural strategies, Evan, how you doing, man?
Evan Brand: I’m doing really well excited to dive into this. This is something that you and I got into several years ago. And it’s been really helpful for our practice, because we’ve been able to take people that were not tolerating protocols, and then we were able to get them to tolerate the protocol. And so when you’re coming in and working on something like gut infections, whether it’s h pylori parasites, bacterial overgrowth, Candida, sometimes, if people have been sick for a really long time, they may not tolerate the protocol we’re giving them. And that doesn’t mean the protocol that we’re giving them is incorrect, or there’s something wrong with it, or there’s an herb reaction or I don’t know, like a, you know, a supplement, it’s not working well for them. That’s not usually the case. In fact, that’s extremely rare. But what rather is happening is that the process of killing off these toxins, I kind of use the analogy of like a bad breakup. And when you’re kicking out the girlfriend, she’s taking off the pictures off the wall, and she’s breaking them and there’s a bunch of glass shards in the hallway as you kick her out. It’s not a clean breakup. And so when you’re killing off these bugs, they don’t want to die, they don’t want to leave. And so they may release toxins that make you feel bad in an effort to get you to stop killing them. Hence, that’s where binders will come in, and they’re acting as the janitor, and they’re going to come sweep up the glass shards that the bugs left behind. interesting way of looking at it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like it, like the analogy that I typically give is imagine you got a trash barrel right in your home, well, it may not be a big deal until you go buy a whole bunch of groceries. Now imagine you got a smaller trash barrel. Well, once you throw it away the egg carton and all the other trash from everything else it’s going to overflow. And that overflowing is where you start dealing with die off. And a lot of people, people that are more sick tend to have smaller trash baskets to begin with. And so essentially giving yourself a bigger trash basket or increasing the frequency that we take it out, right, empty it out, is going to help. So I think either analogy works. So in general, I think the first thing I want to highlight off the bat is well, I like to prepare patients to get there you know, to get killing done in the right way. So I’m always working on hormones and adrenals and diet and blood sugar indigestion first, I find that is the most important component to all this. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So before you go in and start having to do all this killing and and use binders, first, get yourself ready for it. And most people do not like that they want to go in there and Kill Kill, kill, kill, kill, but preparations and be really important.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and it sounds really attractive. And people, they get really excited when they find pathogens on a test. So we’re going to run a comprehensive stool panel, we’re going to run an organic acids test. And we’re going to be jumping on a call with someone to discuss the lab results. And then they’re going to say, Oh my god, I have to get this stuff out of me. I knew I had parasites. I knew I had this. I knew I had that. And then they’re ready. But we kind of have to pace people, you know, when we’ve done this thousand plus times between the both of us. So we know that, hey, based on their constitution, how do you pick up on that as a practitioner? Well, it all goes into stress management? What’s in their bucket of stress? Are they going through a divorce? Are they moving cross country? Are they a teacher? Are they working overtime? Are they a CEO? Are they not sleeping? Well? Are they doing too much alcohol? Those things are going to make us say, Hmm, well, you know what, we probably can’t go full strength with this person. Or if we do, we’re going to need to come in and bring in the binders. And the binders are these tools that they can be used in isolation. And we often use those in isolation. However, the majority of time we’re going to be using them as just part of a protocol, meaning maybe during the day, we’re going to be killing bugs. And then maybe at night, we’re going to be using binders or maybe first thing in the morning when they’re fasted and we know fasting increases the excretion of toxins, including mold and mycotoxins. Maybe we have someone do a binder first thing in the morning at six or 7am when they wake up, and they don’t eat until eight or nine when they take their killing or something like that. So there’s a lot of ways to work these into the protocol. And that kind of depends on the person. It depends on the Constitution. It depends on whether it’s a kid or an adult. But these are amazing tools. And we’ll break it down here in a minute.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, I like that. I think it makes a lot of sense. So one of the first things we can do to help it die off as decrease inflammation. We know agglutination happens or cells become really sticky when there’s a strong inflammatory environment. So like imagine walking in your kitchen and like the floor is really sticky. It’s like you’re like creeping around that icky feeling on your feet. That’s kind of what happens when you’re inflamed and you start doing detoxification, your body is just all inflamed, things aren’t moving, things are sticky. And we want to keep things loose and flowing and slippery. So the first thing kind of in preparation For all this is getting the inflammation down. So one of the things that I love doing for die off support, we talked about it before. One we’ve already worked on the diet, right inflammations down food allergens, our digestion is better. We’re working on sleep, we’re working on hydration. Getting your hydration up is super important, right? Every time you consume water, you’re diluting the amount of toxins in your body, alright significantly. And so solution to pollution is dilution, high quality, filtered water, reverse osmosis or some kind of really good filter spring water, maybe add some extra minerals in so that you’re getting some minerals to add in some ginger tea. Ginger is natural anti inflammatory, and it’s also a natural anticoagulant. So prevents things from sticking, you could do ginger tea, burdock teas also really good, that’s a good starting place. And then things are moving, your cells aren’t clumping up and sticking together. And then from there, that’s where it’s a good place to maybe add in some binders. So a good first binder would be a really good activated charcoal, especially ones that are kind of more coconut shell based at bedtime, two hours after food and supplements. So it’s kind of in your bloodstream, it’s kind of filtering things out. It’s not getting binding up to all your food and all the nutrients in your food, unless you want to because you’re eating some bad food. That’s a good first starting point to kind of get you moving.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s break down charcoal just a little bit. So people understand what it is they hear it but they’re picturing maybe the charcoal, you know, petroleum based block that your dad used to put lighter fluid on and burn them down and put them in the grill. And then you cook some hot dogs as a kid or something.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, totally.
Evan Brand: That’s not the charcoal we’re talking about. So basically, what they’re going to do is they’re going to heat these coconut shells, that’s going to be the best. And that basically, they’re decomposed coconut shells. So they’re at a very, very, very high temperature. And then they’re going to combine it with oxygen to, quote, activate the charcoal. And then what happens is, if you were to look at it under a microscope, you’ve got millions and millions and millions of what they would call micro pores on the surface of the charcoal. And it’s when people say bind, it sounds like a magnet, but it’s really not, you know, it’s called an adsorbent agent. And so you’ve got just make sure you had it right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it’s not like a sponge. It’s more like a magnet.
Evan Brand: Yeah, right. So it’s like you’ve got but it’s a weak magnet is my point about the magnet is, is it’s weak, meaning that you actually can create a hurts if you do too much charcoal, for example. So I did it personally, when I went really high dose like 810 capsules, several times a day of charcoal, I actually, I started to get just a little off like I was detoxing too much. And so I found Yes, it is kind of a magnet, but it’s a weak one. Meaning that if you picture like the lava rock, that’s probably the best example in in a big form that people can visualize as those lava rocks. Maybe you had though, that was like old school landscaping. I know as a kid, we had lava rocks in the front of our house. Yep. And so the lava rock, you saw these tiny little holes in it. And that’s kind of the charcoal but but at a bigger level. And so let’s say it’s mycotoxins or heavy metals or pesticide, whatever else is kind of in those little holes. But remember, you still have to move this microscopic lava rock with the, with the toxins on through the intestinal tract. And if you have a leaky gut, some of those things can kind of fall off the law of rock and then go back into the bloodstream, which is why you can hurt even from binders alone. And so this is a really important point I want people to know because more is not always better when it comes to binders. So sometimes you can only handle one cap of charcoal three times a day, some people can handle more than that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% so you kind of highlight a couple things. What’s the mechanism? Well, there’s gonna be an adsorbent mechanism thing absorbed more magnet absorbed more like a sponge, right? absorbent sponge adsorbent more magnet. Again, we want to take it after food and supplements. We don’t bind up nutrition. I like starting in a bedtime. So it’s working overnight because a lot of how we detoxify happens around one to 3am. So I like having it in the intestinal tract when the liver and gallbladder dump. That way, it’s there binding stuff up and we can excrete it better. Now, one of the big side effects of activated charcoal on binders is constipation. So I always tell my patients Make sure your bowel movements are regular before you go into killing and use any binders because if we’re adding things that could slow down the motility more well that’s that’s a problem. Now, it’ll at least help pull toxins in but it’s still going to be slowing down your body’s ability to get toxins out of your intestinal tract. So that’s not good. So if that’s the case, we’re going to be adding in things to help move our intestinal tract and make sure we’re passing all of our bowel movement out in 24 hours or less 18 to 24 hours. So we have that effective mechanism of elimination working. So first thing is first check is like hydration. Second check is making sure your bowel movements are working and then if they’re not, we’re going to be adding things in to make sure our intestinal intestinal tract is moving appropriately before we add in binders. And if we have Side effects of constipation with the binders, we’re going to be adding more support to keep the bowels moving.
Evan Brand: And it’s honestly pretty easy. I mean, it’s a very common kind of gut reaction, oh my god, charcoal, constipation. But I’ll be honest with you, it’s rare that it’s something that requires special attention. Because a lot of times we’re doing extra vitamin C, because most people are low in that most people are deficient in magnesium. So we’re doing extra of that already. A lot of times the herb formulas that you are using for gut infections, those may have some extra bow moving support in those and just by clearing out infections you and I’ve talked about, in the past how bacterial overgrowth can create certain gases that will slow the transit time down, just by eradicating those infections, the bowels can return to normal. So yes, constipation can happen. But it’s usually not a huge wrench in the gears. And we can overcome it pretty easily with minor tweaks if needed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, exactly. So it can go either way. Some people when they get inflamed, they’re pulling a whole bunch of water in to flush things out. If you’re more prone to be constipated, you just have to be mindful of it. That’s why when we’re adding in binders, we’re doing it like one capsule at a time. So there’s no big jump, where people get into trouble is they just kind of come in there with a higher dose or they jump too fast. And that’s where the problem comes in. And again, like Evan mentioned us some of the herbs that we give may have a really, you know, good laxative effects are really healthy intestinal migrating motor complex work well, if not, I’ll be using special special things like magnesium and things like that to keep the intestinal tract moving. Ginger is a really good pro kinetics. So we’ll be adding that in and really just helping to support the natural migrating motor complex of the intestinal tract while adding some binders now, once we start adding some binders at nighttime, we may do it sometime midday as well that way we kind of have coverage within a 12 hour timeframe. So we have some coverage at night, some coverage during the day. But I always start at night first, partly because that’s when we were dumping a lot of toxins at night.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let me just address this concern real quick. And then we’ll move on to my next favorite binder, which is chlorella. So just like oh, charcoal, constipation, people go Oh, charcoal mineral depletion. I’ve talked with a guy named Neil Nathan, who wrote a great book called toxic. I often recommend people buy that to look into binders. He has worked alongside a guy named Dr. Michael gray, who’s a toxicologist, I believe he’s out of Arizona, he’s a guy who’s been working on treating mold. For decades, this guy has been using, I’ve heard insane numbers like 50 to 100 grams of charcoal per day, we’re talking literally 8090 100 capsules of charcoal a day for years. And there’s never been an issue of mineral depletion, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. So his kind of argument after I probed him on that question was, well, what about mineral depletion? He goes well, so what if you lose one or 2% of minerals? If you’re getting 98% of your nutrition and minerals, still, the the pros outweigh the cons in the sense that you’re removing toxins that are affecting hormones, the brain, the liver, the kidney, so he’s like, yeah, maybe you lose a couple percent. But it’s never been something that’s called like a heart attack. Because you’ve lost so much potassium or anything crazy like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you’re just going to be taking it away, you’re going to be just taking it away from it. So that’s going to mitigate most of it. If you’re taking activated charcoal with your food all the time. Yeah, maybe you have a problem. But you’re going to be one you’re going to be kept getting a lot of minerals in your water and food throughout the day. And then you’re going to start by taking it at night when you’re not, like overly hydrating anyway, and to at least two hours after you eat and so it’s not that big of a deal. And so yeah, as long as you time it up, right. I just think that’s a moot point for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. All right. So let’s let’s go into chlorella, because I really love chlorella, and I didn’t know too much about it. Besides that you’d see like little chlorella tablets, it always comes in these little green looks like a little Pez or something and they’re kind of hard to chew, but they’re a little awkward to swallow. And then Luckily, I found a couple companies that make micronized liquid chlorella, and that’s what I often use. chlorella is an algae. But it works amazing as a broad spectrum. So a lot of people kind of market it as a heavy metal detox because it has a really unique ability to bind on to heavy metals like mercury and lead and cadmium and arsenic and aluminum things that every modern human has, whether it’s from breathing and car exhaust, to having amalgam fillings in their mouth, but it’s awesome. And I’ve seen I could show you several case studies on pesticides, herbicides, and mold toxins, and chlorella being used to pull those out. We’ve got in fact before and after results of seeing even little kids, 234 year olds that I’ve worked with where they had major, major major pesticides. These were kids that were diagnosed autistic, are on the spectrum. We give them as high doses we can go with chlorella, we retest after three to six months and guess what the pesticides herbicides are gone. And oh my god. I mean, sometimes it just almost makes you cry because it’s like, wow, how is something like this so beneficial, but you’re not hearing about this on the nightly news?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing we can do to detoxify I always tell patients is stop adding toxins in. So first stop adding toxins in so look at your pesticides right? Look at the food that you’re eating, make sure it’s organic, no GMOs, you know, make note, no added hormones, don’t consume foods and plastics. If you use plastic, you know, try to keep it in the fridge out of the sunlight out of heat out of the microwave. Excellent clean water, filtered water, clean water, if it’s aro, no big deal, add some minerals back in there, I see a lot of people complaining about our water, hey, I rather have my water cleaner, and then add minerals back in and have water that’s more toxic, because you can’t, you can’t add things into the water that make it more or less toxic. It’s either got to be filtered from toxins, and then you can add minerals back in on the flip side. And that’s totally okay. And then from there. And then from there, that’s going to kind of give you that the first foundation because your food’s good, your water is good. And then all your hygiene products make sure deodorants and skincare and soaps were free of toxins there. And that way when we add in binders, there’s going to be just less things that have to be binded. So our body can work on binding up more things that are released from our tissues that are more stored toxins versus toxins that are coming in every day from our environment.
Evan Brand: That’s a great point. I even forgot to mention that which is duh. Why did people have to get into the situation where they need binders in the first place? Well, it’s they’ve been exposed to toxins. Now, some people they weren’t exposed to toxins on purpose, it was just they ate organic, but then they, you know, stayed a month in a moldy Airbnb or something and they got exposed that way. So it’s not always your fault. But you’re right, you got to empower people and say, hey, look, you can make a choice, you can either eat organic, and not get exposed, or you can eat conventional. But now you’ve got to do the cleanup work. And it’s much better to stop it before it gets in than having to remove it once it’s already in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Now, outside of that we can do things that help our livers function better, we can work on phase one detoxification support, which will take a lot of these fat soluble toxins and convert them into water soluble. Now these toxins are mobile. So the activated charcoal really works great when toxins are now mobilized, if they’re not mobilized, these binders aren’t going to really work well because everything’s kind of be in the tissue kind of stored up so to speak. So it’s gonna be hard to really grab it. So getting phase one detoxification support dialed in B vitamins, antioxidants, these are going to be key nutrients, maybe liver tona fine herbs like milk thistle, or dandelion or artichoke root. I have a supplement called liver supreme or antioxidant supreme are both my phase one detoxification support that gets things mobilized. Now if they’re mobilized now we can come in there with binders and we can soak it up a little bit.
Evan Brand: Yeah, phase two is important to now a little involved, I would suppose with the with the binder conversation, because if phase two is not working, you know, phase one can be up regulated. But if phase two is not working, it’s like you’ve got a fire hose going into a garden hose and the backup can happen there. And I’ll tell you personally, and clinically, when I start to use nutrients to fuel phase to like some of the amino acids. I’ve taken it too far like with everything, you know, because I’m a guinea pig. But I’ve noticed massive, massive improvements just by helping out phase two. And then if I ramp up phase two too much, I’ll throw in binders and then the binders will kind of help mitigate the hurdles from up regulating phase two. So it’s a it can be a little bit of a seesaw sometimes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Evan Brand: All right, what else what else should we hit on? We should hit on the the Clay’s a little bit as well. You and I love clays that are awesome. You’ve got zeolite you’ve got bentonite clays, those are kind of your top big ones you’ve got like green clays and such clays are awesome. I find that they are really good at heavy metals and molds and will often use it in a blend. So we’ll use a little bit of clay a little bit of charcoal a little bit of chlorella all at once. And they’re well tolerated. I haven’t seen that many people who works from clay so I don’t have any, you know, evidence beyond clinical with this, but I would say that you seem to have less hurting with clays than you do like chlorella or charcoal. I find you can go too much with the others.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, yeah. So just to highlight a couple of things here regarding the sulfur. NAC. glutathione glutathione is a tri peptide anyway. So that’s made from glutamine, glycine, cysteine, right, taurine, MSM, alpha lipoic acid, just getting a lot of our sulfur nutrients on board is going to be huge. That’s going to help provide a lot of the building blocks for phase two. And that way we’re going to be able to, you know, and acetylation, glutathione, conjugation, methylation, right, these are going to involve a lot of our phase two nutrients and so Phase One, like methylation will evolve, like b 12. And full eight, right? So we want to make sure all those things are working if we need Now, some people, we’re not going to be pushing the toxification directly, we’re going to just be, it’s gonna be there more to help pick up the dead debris from things that are being killed in the gut. But if the activated charcoal still not enough, we may have to push more of those phase one and phase two, just to make sure those toxins are releasing, and then the binders will be there to catch things a little bit as well. So a little bit of a push catch, if necessary. If not, we’ll just be doing more of a catch and the push will be more from the killing side. So everyone’s a little bit different. And I tend to a lot of times this isn’t a problem when you have the foundation built in first.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the funny thing is going into this podcast, I thought, oh, wow, this will be you know, pretty easy to explain. But the more we dive into it, the more this thing gets a little tricky. And so case specific because some people, they don’t tolerate up regulating phase two that much, and other people they have trouble with the binders. So we try to make this stuff as simple as we can. But keep in mind people this is not This podcast is not designed to replace one on one functional medicine care. So if you really want to get to the bottom of these issues, you need help you need us to help guide you through this because I don’t want you to go in and just pop in a bunch of charcoal and you feel bad. You don’t know why. And then you’re confused about what you’re going to do next.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% So let’s talk about some binders. So activated charcoal, you mentioned the heating like that the you know the which is going to really have a big binding effect. It’s also going to help with mold as well. We have things like bamboo, bamboo binders are excellent as well. We have things like citrus pectin, which are shown to be very helpful for lead. We have zeolite binders which are very helpful for mold. I think activated charcoal is also very helpful for mold. We have things like beetroot powder, which has some natural binding effects for mold as well. Obviously, we have the medication coolest I mean, which is a really good mole binder. There’s some side effects, though, which can lower your sex hormones fulvic minerals, which have some mold and some binding effects to any comments on the different kinds of binders having chlorella, more on the metal side more for Mercury, though more in the intestinal tract. Anything else?
Evan Brand: Yeah, the colas. darmian is strong stuff. I used it. And, man, I tell you it works. But I do believe that it affected my gut negatively. I do believe that. Now I don’t know if I don’t know if that’s a direct influence, or is it a byproduct of dragging mycotoxins out of the system? I’m not too sure. But I would try to tell people don’t use the prescription binder unless you absolutely have to. And you’re just so miserable. You can’t get yourself out of the rabbit hole with it. Because for me necessary for most. Yeah, for me, I just I really struggled. And I was doing the natural binders for months. And I needed a little extra help. So I did it short term. But I would try to stray most people away the natural binders can be really good if you have enough patience and time to resolve the issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you’ve like for you it’s more of a mold thing. So we’re kind of talking for binders for most people is more in the killing side. Right. So for that you had no problems with it. Right? It was more on the mold side, correct?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then you find you fit on the mold binding side, you found that which is better for you when you had what more glutathione and more so for support in along with the binders? Was that true?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, the glutathione definitely helped as long as I didn’t do too much. And then also helping the glucuronidation pathway that’s also part of this whole conversation. And so calcium D glucose rate did great things for me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, calcium to glucose. It’s good. And that’s a estrogen binder as well as a mole binder.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, it really helps with z, what’s called [inaudible], which is something we test for on the urine. So, you know, like we’ve talked about today, you can have a kind of a broad spectrum approach, but we really try to dial it in if we can, if we see specific mycotoxins, we’ll try to give a little more specific.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So I think that’s really important. Anything else you wanted to highlight on that?
Evan Brand: I think that’s it. I would just say the first step is really trying to get the data, right, because, you know, people hear the word detox and like, yep, I need some of that. And it’s kind of trendy, which is, I guess, good, but also bad because people just jump into detox not knowing why or what they’re doing or what they’re after. So my recommendation as always our philosophies test, don’t guess and figure out what do you have that you’re detoxing? Do you have a heavy metal burden? Let’s find out. Do you have a mycotoxin burden? Do you have pesticides and chemicals? Do you have all that? Okay, great. Now, let’s make a plan to go after these things. So, like I said, Don’t just run to Whole Foods, buy coconut charcoal and take it if you don’t know why you need it. I prefer people have a reason.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% I totally agree. So a couple things, right. So number one, people say toxification. Right? Well, number one, you’re always detoxifying. The question is, are you detoxifying at 100%? Are there enough toxins and stressors in the environment that are impairing your detoxification? where certain toxins are accumulating in your body more than are being eliminated. So number one, you’re always detoxify. Number two, it’s more optimizing your detox vacation systems. Also number three people that talk about cellular detox. That’s marketing garbage. Okay. detoxification is happening at a cellular level. It’s called their cytochrome p 450 oxidase pathways that’s happening biochemically at a cellular level. amino acids, vitamins, minerals, nutrients, these pathways are being upregulated all the time that’s happening at a cellular level. So when people talk about cellular detox, that’s just marketing hooey. Anything you do to help detoxification just drinking more water, guess what you’re enhancing, so detoxification just by you, decreasing inflammation. You having really good nutrition in your food, you’re enhancing the certification. Okay, so don’t get don’t get caught up with a lot of these marketing buzzwords.
Evan Brand: Yeah, unfortunately, detox is probably the most what would you say? Maybe sleazy snake oily type part of functional medicine?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it is for sure. I think a lot of the time it is because people come at it from that’s the first step. So they’re taking people and they’re just trying to upregulate these pathways right out of the gates. And people have gut issues, and they’re being nutritionally deficient for a while. And there have a lot of toxins that they’re consuming food wise, or in their life. Yeah, they can really feel crappy and sick. So it’s probably the last thing I do out of the gates again, specifically, right, we’re always detoxifying. So if I see a patient and I don’t hit the toxification, specifically with those nutrients, but I get them drinking better, cleaner water, and get them going organic, and get them pooping every day. I am enhancing their detoxification, like, tenfold just doing that alone. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s just funny, I guess, it gets a little-
Evan Brand: Cheesy, because that’s one of the few things that your average person who knows nothing about functional medicine knows about is the word detox. They probably heard it before their friend drinking detox tea or something silly like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? And then you have like the master cleanse detox, right, which is, hey, that’s cool. You’re giving your digestive system a break, and you’re not necessarily detoxifying. When you when you do that, I mean, you’re not enhancing nutrition, you’re enhancing fasting and autophagy. And, and that can help with stem cells. And that can help detoxify a little bit, because you’re, you’re fasting. So detoxification is a little bit higher there, but you’re not specifically pushing those pathways. Most of those benefits happen because you’re not consuming a whole bunch of food allergens. People feel better doing a Master Cleanse, it’s typically because their diet usually isn’t that great. So when they go on a Master Cleanse, they’re avoiding a lot of those foods that are inflaming them all the time. The more healthy Your food is, when you go to a cleanse, you’re kind of like, Oh, well, it isn’t that big of a deal, because your food’s already really high quality.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. silica is on the list, too. There are small nutrients. I mean, there’s there’s boron, there’s trace minerals. Or you may be helpful. Yeah, molybdenum can be helpful. So I think we hit on a lot of the big ones, though, a lot of the big tools that you mentioned the pack, then I’ve done packed and I’ll be honest, I haven’t noticed much from it. I do use it in combination with some other binders. But I’ve never done just like a pectin trial by itself and notice any significant difference, meaning I haven’t taken it. And my head’s clear, like with charcoal, if I’m kind of fuzzy, I’ll take a little charcoal and then boom, you know, I’ll notice the clarity. I don’t know if it’s pectins different maybe it’s not binding on to the type of toxin that’s causing the head drunkenness in the first place.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s better for lead I think and Merc, okay, yeah, we’re for the heavy metals, but it’s still helpful, you know, ya know, if you’re gonna be detoxifying, it’s not gonna hurt having that in there. It just wouldn’t be the only thing you’d have in there.
Evan Brand: Right, right. Yeah. And so, and maybe heavy metals, they don’t have as much of a quick turnaround time on your symptoms, whereas mold does, like, I know, if I’ve taken a mold hit, it’s like, Whoa, it’s a pretty quick symptom reaction. Whereas, hey, I breathe in a little car exhaust, I’m probably not going to feel anything right away from that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Exactly. Yeah, totally. So anything else you want to add? And I think we really went to town on all this stuff. I mean, I think the key thing I want to highlight for everyone listening, if you’re having a lot of issues or hormone issues of detoxification issues, you know, do the foundation’s out of the gates. But if you’re still struggling, you want to reach out to someone like myself, and Evan, so we can help you all out. We’re available worldwide, and Evan’s at EvanBrand com. I’m at JustinHealth.com, you can click on our schedule buttons, and we can support you and help you during the process. If you need that extra help. We’ve helped thousands of patients together. So we have a lot of experience. And a lot of people have other issues going on, like gut infections, like hormone imbalances, like inflammation issues like other thyroid or autoimmune issues that are part of the issue. And just supporting detoxification by itself won’t be the fix for that. It’s part of a bigger broader plan. Yeah, on the fence. Feel free to reach out guys.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good point. And some of our mentors that said you really have to kind of market to people for what they think they need, but give them what they truly need. So a woman may say, Oh, I need detox. Okay, so I’m like, Okay, yeah, we can help with that. But hey, guess what, detox is not your number one priority based on these labs, we really need to do this. And as a side effect of working through this, yep, we’ll detox you as well. So, don’t always assume in your head, you’ve got it all figured out. Because there may be a different set or of priorities or a different order of operations.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s always interesting when patients come in, and they kind of have an idea what they want. But then the question is, I’m gonna try to give you what you need. And I’ll try to connect the dots. Because if your goal is to get better and address these issues, then we’re totally in alignment, you just may be, you may think this is what you have to do to get there. But as long as you’re open to guidance, then hey, we can adjust that for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s always a fun process. So Justin mention the links I mentioned a moment of time, Dr. J at JustinHealth.com. available online. And me, EvanBrand.com. And that’s it. So we’ll be back next week. take great care. If you have questions, concerns, comments, you know, write us a review and tell us what kind of topics do you do you want us to cover we’re happy to dive into all of it. We live we eat, we breathe this stuff every day, all day. I mean, this is our life. So we’re very passionate and we would love to hear what you want to hear about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. And we’ll put a link down below under references for products that we specifically use and formulate to help support some of the pathways and the objectives that we chatted about in today’s podcast. So if you want to support the show, you can also purchase those products that which we believe in personally use for ourselves, patients and family. Awesome, everyone. You guys have a phenomenal day. It was great chatting with y’all. Take care now. Take care.
Evan Brand: Bye bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/detoxing-with-the-correct-binders-podcast-324
Methods To Encourage Good Bowel Movement
You see women on Instagram. They’re all done up with their hair and makeup, and they’re marketing #ad #detox #tea. They have these ridiculous products that they’re remarketing and they’re not talking about poop. The best way to detox is getting poop out. I’m not going to buy detox tea. I’ll get a bit of dandelion or some milk thistle blended in and that’s part of it but unfortunately, detox is co-opted by the marketing industry. Most people don’t even focus on that. They’ll poop once a week but then they take a detox tea and they think they’re doing it correctly.
My whole take on detoxification out of the gates is very simple.
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- Get enough good clean water in your system.
- Make sure you’re digesting your amino acids and all your nutrients well.
Remember: Sulfur-based amino acids run the majority of your detoxification pathways, along with B vitamins. We need good B vitamins, good antioxidants, and good sulfur amino acids. For breaking down those nutrients well, there’s not a bottleneck with ACL levels or enzyme levels. We’re getting enough to clean water. - Not overly stressing our sympathetic nervous system.
Remember: The more we overly stress the adrenals, the sympathetic nervous system decreases that migrating motor complex which are the wavelike contractions that move stool through your intestinal tract, just like you roll up the toothpaste roll at night to get that toothpaste moving through to get your toothpaste out to brush your teeth. Your intestines are the same things.
If you can do those top three things right, you’re on the right track. There may be extra things where we need extra sulfur or extra antioxidants or compounds or binders to help with mold or heavy metal. That’s true and that would be addressed down the road but a lot of detoxification happens hepatobiliary, liver, gallbladder, back into the intestines, and then out the intestinal tract. So, we need to have really good motility and really good absorption of nutrients, and a lot of good clean water to help fuel.
Supplement Suggestion:Use one for liver support that has some gallbladder nutrients built into it. That can be really helpful because with sluggish bowels because a lot of times there’s also sluggish bile production. So, just helping thin the bile whether it’s using supplemental ox bile or methionine, taurine, B powder, whatever else we can do to increase bile flow. That’s going to be helping.
Detox and Diet
This is a low-hanging fruit that your average American is still really, really blowing it on which is just the fact that they’re not doing enough good meats, good fats, and good veggies. Your average American might wake up and do a piece of toast and maybe in 2020 or 2021, it’s an avocado toast but still that’s not the optimal thing for good poop.
Inflammation in the diet can easily mess up the intestinal tract and can easily create inflammation in the gut. That could either move the body more to diarrhea or more to constipation. If we start moving more to constipation, that’s not good. Of course, these foods can stress out the intestinal tract and then when we start creating inflammation in the intestinal tract, then we already have indigestion meaning we don’t have adequate enzymes and acids. So, we’re burping a lot after our meals, food sits longer in our tummy, and a lot of gases are produced because the foods are not being broken down properly. That’s a problem.
We’ve got to really make sure we’re masticating and chewing our food very, very, very well. We’ve got to make sure to increase the surface area for enzymes and acids to work. We also have to make sure not overly hydrating with our meals. So, hydrate 10 minutes or more before meal, and then if you’re consuming a little bit of liquid with a meal, just do it to help with swallowing pills. Don’t do it for hydration purposes. Because water has a pH of 7 and your intestinal tract has a pH of 1.5 to 2. So, if you start adding a whole bunch of pH 7 to up to a pH of 2, you’re going to move that pH more in the alkaline direction away from the acid direction. We need good acidity to help activate her enzymes in our acid levels. That’s very important.
If you have any issues with detoxification, please reach out to a functional medicine doctor.
Remember:
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- Chew your food up well.
- Make sure you’re not overly hydrating with the food. Do all your hydration 2 minutes before.
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Does Eating Healthy When Stressed Make You Feel Better? | Podcast #315
Eating a healthy diet can reduce the negative effects of stress on your body and a healthy diet builds a solid, more enduring foundation for your body by reducing oxidation and inflammation and by helping to reduce weight gain. So in this video, we have Dr. J and Evan talking about how we can handle stress while trying to stay fit and healthy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:30 Why is it hard to eat healthy?
7:01 Eating unhealthy junk
17:19 Avoid stressing out on eating healthy
25:51 We all have different journey
29:11 Get the momentum
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here today’s podcast is going to be all about is your health making you stressed and anxious? Again, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of energy to be healthy. And we want to make sure that those goals are not making you sick and stress at the same time, Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Doing awesome. Let’s dive in. First of all, when you say that, why, why does it take so much effort to be healthy? Is it just the modern world, the circumstances, the toxins?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So my first step out of the gates, it’s all about habits, right? It takes no more effort to get what you want than what it does to get what you don’t want. It’s all about pattern of behavior. And so I always tell patients, the first month is typically the hardest because you’re creating new patterns of behavior. So there’s like, there’s four levels of competence, right? There’s the conscious or unconsciously unconfident, meaning you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re just totally clueless right? And then you’re unconsciously or then you’re, you’re, you’re basically unconsciously competent, where you kind of know that you don’t know something, right, you kind of know that you don’t know something. And then you’re consciously competent, where you know it. But you really have to be focused on the habits, choosing the right things, doing the right things. So usually, it’s the unconscious incompetence, these are people we’re not able to help, because they don’t even know there’s a problem. Once they go from unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent, they know that they don’t quite have the skills, that’s where we’re able to help them in stage two. And stage two to stage three is the hardest because this is where we go from, you’re consciously competent, you have to focus, you have to think about every little thing you’re doing right. What’s my analogy, anyone that’s driven a standard transmission car, it’s tough, like you’re driving a car, now you’re putting your left foot on the train on the on the clutch, you’re shifting gears, maybe you’re looking down and make sure you don’t go from first to third, right. But at the same time, you still got to fear and keep your eyes on the road. So it becomes this, you may be able to do what you’re grinding the gears, but it’s a lot of stress and you’re consciously competent, that’s kind of where most people are at with their health changes. And then there’s unconscious competence. That’s where we’re at, where we’re literally on cruise control, because we’ve done things thousands of times in regards to the clean filtered water that we’re drinking, eating good healthy proteins and fats, taking supplements, avoiding toxins, using health devices that help improve air quality and water quality and EMF and all the things that we’re doing. It’s unconscious, there’s literally no effort for us to continue to do or very little effort, right? Kind of like driving once you have a stick. It’s like no big deal. You’re like shifting gears, your eyes are on the road, you’re down shifting No problem, right? Is that a good analogy?
Evan Brand: Yeah, that makes sense. And a lot of people, they get overwhelmed, and then they just give up or they get pressured by their family members or their friends like you and I were talking about before we hit record, oh, just have some gluten. It’s not going to hurt you. You know, I’ve had family members joke like when we’re giving them the salt shaker at the dinner table. They’ll say, Oh, can you pass me some gluten? And they’ll try to like joke, like they’re pouring gluten on their meal. It’s like, Oh, come on. So you know, you get people like that that will try to influence you. And it may be a joke, but sometimes, I want to say weak people. But when I say weak, I mean people that are symptomatic people that are ill. They’ve been trapped in those habits for so long, they may actually fall off the wagon, from Aunt Betty saying, hey, try one of my famous cookies that are loaded with sugar and gluten, they may go for it Betty’s cookie when they know they shouldn’t. But I think number one, I think you have to suffer enough to be able to be more compliant. I don’t know if you agree with that or not. But like for me, I’ve suffered enough to where I don’t feel that I want to make those choices anymore. Like, I know that that case would be so friggin delicious. But I don’t want to pay the price with my skin. I don’t want to pay the price with my gut. So for me, I’ve suffered enough to be able to make the choices easier. But if you’re trying to just convince people just to convince them, I don’t think it’s as powerful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So yeah, I have a couple of thoughts on those are all valid points Evan. So off the bat, it all depends where you’re starting, right? The healthier you are, the more adaptable you are, right? So the healthier you are, the more adaptation you are, more adaptable you are, the more you can deal with a stress like gluten like sugar, like being off on your diet, like being off on your sleep. So the healthier you are, you may have a little bit more resilience. And then the question comes down to how do you feel after you eat some crappy food? Right? How do you feel? How long does it take you to get back on track the next day? Is it just you’re okay? And that next day? Maybe you’re a little bit of a slow startup but then you’re good? Or does it take a couple of days or a whole week to kind of get back on track, right? So the healthier you are, the more adaptation your body has, the more you could cheat a little bit. Now there’s different levels of cheating is eating a lots of processed sugar and lots of gluten and lots of food allergens that you know you can handle. Now if you don’t have an autoimmune condition, and you aren’t as sensitive in regards to how you feel afterwards, you may be able They get away with that every now and then not that big of a deal. If you have a diagnosed autoimmune condition like myself, I have hashimotos that I’ve totally manage under control, I always try to choose the healthy alternative, you know, I’m always going to go grain free or gluten free, I’m always going to go gluten free over gluten full, if you will, right. So like for we had Thanksgiving last week, we got some squash pies from trophy, true food kitchen that were 100% grain free and like lower sugar, they were great, right? Good, better best. So I always try to make the best quality decision I possibly can. Because I know I have I have immune issues. And I want to prevent my immune system from attacking my body. Now if someone doesn’t have any diagnosed conditions, and they feel great, they may be able to do more of an 80 20 kind of 90 10. I do an 80 20 90 10. But I still keep it to ideally grain free processed foods or at least gluten free processed foods. And if someone isn’t at a stable place in their health or coming to see us during the middle of their functional medicine kind of onramp well, then we got to be a little bit more puritanical. Off, kind of off the the back. So it all depends where you’re at, in the plan that you’re on.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And even though I’m feeling better, and I could probably get away with more stuff, I just don’t go there. Because I know that I don’t want to say it’s a slippery slope. But I know that if I’m like, Okay, I got away with it once the next week, I may go for it again. And then boom. And then now I’ve got the skin issue again, or now I’ve got the gut issue again. So for me, it’s very easy to stay on track. I don’t feel like I’m missing out. I don’t feel deprived. I think one part of this conversation you you’re titling this, this talk is, you know, being healthy making you anxious or stressed. And I think where people get caught up in it is because they feel like they’re deprived. They look at these other people eating the pizza, and they’re like, well, I want pizza, I’m deprived. This is bullcrap. And then they get stressed that they have to eat their their grass fed steak and sweet potato. But for me, once you feel so good, it’s not a diet of deprivation. Would you agree? This is not a diet where you feel like you’re missing out? I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, anytime you’re dealing with, you know, eating a bunch of crappy food, you have to look at why. Okay? So in general, a lot of times neurotransmitters play a big role. So a lot of people use a big big whack of sugar to artificially boost serotonin and dopamine. And that we call that emotional eating, they’re using a lot of the sugar to get that under control. So with myself, um, if I cheat on anything, it’s going to be like the Unreal, coconut dark chocolate, it’s going to be my keto cups, like, Is it really a cheat? Probably not. There’s barely any sugar in it. But it still gives me that mouthfeel. And not that sense of cheating. Like, like, I’m really eating a whole bunch of bad foods, but it feels good. It feels like a cheat, it feels like a treat, so to speak. So we always try to choose the highest quality one, we try to choose the lowest quality or the highest quality nutrition like good fats, right, avoiding the trans fats good, lower sugar amounts, I try to do more of the organic coconut palm versus, you know, the high fructose corn syrup, maybe with some mercury in there. So we try to choose the better quality types. And how do you feel afterwards, a lot of people, they don’t really look at how they’re going to feel afterwards. So if you’re really bloating, you’re gassy and your skin breaks out and it lasts a week. Like if I have a skin breakout that lasts a week, I am like heck no not worth it. So I’m always gonna, you’re always playing damage control, you’re always making calculated assessments. So when you make a decision to engage in desserts and treats for the holidays, we’re going to be choosing the healthiest quality, the lowest sugar, but still have a great time like Well, my kids, we went trick or treating, what happened afterwards? Well, trick or treating bad with all the candy went away, we actually gave it to the fire station. And then we I got some of the Justin’s high quality dark chocolate peanut butter cups and some of the Unreal, dark chocolate with a little bit of coconut in there. And that was their substitute. And so they got one or one or two every now and then. And it was low sugar, good fats, the fats are important because it stabilizes blood sugar, prevents cravings and swings and actually makes them a little bit satiated afterwards. And we’ll give it to them after a dinner. So we’re not creating this blood sugar rollercoaster of eating sugar by itself. And so we’d always just make these really good calculated substitute because I want to give my kids and myself a chance to enjoy life or have a childhood or do things that are really, you know, they’re like special, but with that with kind of mitigating the the side effects, if you will.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I think it’s easier if the whole family can get on board, like you mentioned, you’re doing this with your kids. So if you got the husband or the wife that’s not on board, that’s going to be really tough. I don’t know if I have many other solutions besides wait until that person is symptomatic enough to get to get on board because they’re really not going to do it just out of choice unless they’re just a very, very supportive spouse and Wow, good job, you’ve got a keeper. But in most cases, like I said, it’s the husband or the wife making fun of the other one, like I’m going to drink the beer, eat the pizza and do the wine or whatever. And you’re going to just go eat your your AIP diet. So try to get family members on board. That’s the best advice I can do because Then it gets exhausting man, you’ve got the husband and the wife cooking double meals, right? They’re making the unhealthy meal, and then they’re making the healthy meal. And then you got double the cleanup. So just from a sustainability standpoint, it’s just really best if you can get everyone the kids on board too, because you don’t want Mom, I had one lady, this is gonna sound crazy, maybe not to you, but maybe to others. We had a lady with hashimotos, where we had determined that the reason that she was having flares is because she was touching the bread making her children sandwiches every day, and that she was basically holding it and there was some kind of like a gluten skin reaction, transdermal kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And so we got her Ah, well, they hit well just quit making sandwiches, or at least go like a grain free bread, if you can find it. And luckily, the antibodies went down just by changing that, because she was already AIP with her diet. And we’re like, Well, why are the antibodies continuing to rise? The thyroid, we worked on the gut. And typically that would help but it didn’t help and then boom, we figured out it was lady making sandwiches. So in her case, it actually benefited her to help her kids as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, most of my patients is the women are tend to be on point, they tend to be 100% on point and to be a little bit more in tune with their health. Also, I think they tend to be a little bit more, let’s just say not supported by conventional medicine, right? Women have hormonal issues, what are they given me, if they’re cycling ages, birth control pills, right, the people are getting a little bit more cutting edge with hormones as they get into menopausal age, but they were doing horse hormones for the longest time and they weren’t fixing any of these underlying issues. And they were just throwing medications that are antidepressants at it. And they kind of most women intuitively knew that something was wrong. Now my other kinds of patients are like my, my, my my guys that are great. They’re like the biohackers. They’re like the guys that are like optimizing cell performance. They’re trying to really get their their level their RPM or performance to a higher level. Those are my two like great patient, my women patients that are really know something’s up and want to dive in deeper, and that my guys that are more on the biohacking side and kind of optimizing performance, they kind of know something is up. Now, when I make recommendations for patients, you got to really get focused on the performance aspect. Like you got to feel that people have this satisfaction, feeling of like their mouth and their taste and all that stuff. That’s a hard feeling to overcome, right? It’s always pain versus pleasure. So you really have to link up a lot of pleasure from the performance that you get from eating great food, whether that is clean skin, whether it’s all day energy, whether it’s good sleep, whether it’s good libido and mood, you really have to internalize the performance enhancements that you get. Now, the more adaptable you get, you can still keep those benefits while you cheat a little bit. Now we just choose the healthiest cheat possible, I already gave you a couple of options. What I do, you can do it going out to eat, you can do it going to steak houses, all kinds of good things you can do when you go to a nice restaurant with steak and vegetables, or if he goes to sushi will avoid the soy sauce. And we’ll do MCT oil and coconut aminos. Right. There’s a lot of substitutes we’re always doing. And it’s hard out of the gates because it’s stressful. But once you kind of make a habit out of it, you kind of have all of those go to substitutes there at your fingertips. Do you have any things that you do, Evan that, you know, maybe a treat for you, but it’s you know, a really good go to?
Evan Brand: Yeah, well in terms of drinks, you know, I think that’s a big one, right? Just getting people off of sugary drinks. So Suja I think’s done a great job with all of their green juices. They have one I want to say it’s called like skin beauty or something. I don’t have the label in front of me. But for me in terms of beverages, I mean, I’m typically doing herbal teas, chamomile, ginger, peppermint tea, and then good clean filtered water. That’s about it. I know you’re super into the total Chico’s and some of the other mineral waters, carbonated waters. Those are great. But for me, I think it’s called beauty scan or scan beauty something anyway. Suja makes it it’s a whole foods. It’s like maybe four grams of sugar, but it’s like lychee juice and blueberry juice. Man, if I just get something like that. It’s a treat for me. And it may have a little bit of stevia or monk fruit in there. Something like that is great for my wife. You know, she had previously used like, you know, we’re talking 10 years ago, she had previously use some of the coffee creamers. I know people really do a lot of sugar in those. They’ll say oh, I only you know this coffee creamer is only two grams of sugar but it’s a gap but you’re putting like frickin five tablespoons. You’re just pouring it in. So for her. She really loves the rebel like the mushroom. Coffee blend.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like that one.
Evan Brand: Yeah, like the coffee with the mushrooms and I think it has coconut milk and stevia. So it’s basically a no sugar. So for us. Those are kind of our treats that make her feel like she’s still getting a good creamy sweet coffee without sugar. And then for me, you know, I used to love as a kid and a teenager man. I love soda. I mean Sunkist and Mountain Dew. I mean, I was into all the garbage for me now if I have that lychee juice, man, it tastes like candy. But it’s Yeah, my palates change. That’s the thing. The palate has evolved for us. So like you mentioned the treats your level of treat like you I think you and I’ve talked about blueberries you’ve done I think you said you’ve done frozen blueberries with like whipped cream and that’s a treat for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s like a dessert and a cream is great is awesome. Do it, it’s a coconut yogurt, it’s all about, okay, you know, try to do the right thing 80% of the time, right. And then a lot of the treats that we do is, it may still be part of the right thing, right? If we’re doing some almond butter, if you can tolerate knots and Granny Smith, apple and cinnamon, or if you can do some, some blueberries and some coconut cream, those still may be healthy things, right. So the cool thing is if we can choose healthy treats, that that feel like a treat tastes like a treat, but still healthy. That’s a win win, because then you can do that more frequently. And that’s kind of a it mixes up the monotony of your routine. And then of course, if we’re going to go and cheat a little bit, you know, when I go to a restaurant, what’s my go to? Well, I’ll get like a really nice, homemade, though a couple of restaurants, I go to their steak houses, they’ll make a nice ice cream that’s kind of a sorbet. Or it’s kind of coconut base, that those are really wonderful and tasty. Or I went to Truffaut kitchen and got a squash pie, which was wonderful. Or like a coconut, like is a restaurant down in Austin called Picnic. They have some wonderful autoimmune dessert recipes that are excellent. So you can try to always mitigate a little bit. And then if you something that’s really special, I don’t know your grandmother makes up especially around the holidays, and it’s worth the treat. Well, that’s fine. You’ve earned it, as long as you can deal with the side effects afterwards. And ideally, we don’t have an autoimmune condition with active antibodies that could be attacking your body. And it’s probably okay.
Evan Brand: Yeah, very, very good. And then of course, we’ve mentioned the enzymes before too. So you’re gonna go get your grandma’s secret recipe, you know, there’s probably wheat and other crap in there, you may just want to do your enzyme, right? So like you and I both manufacture professional enzymes. So if you’re working with us, you’re probably already taking those but that’d be a good, that’d be a good strategy. Oh, you know, another treat for us I just started making these recently, is to take the CFA, the soft tortillas, and make like a [inaudible] out of it. So you do like a little bit of coconut oil, or you could just do butter if you want. And then just kind of put it in a pan for 1015 seconds, heat up the tortilla, and then just a little bit of coconut sugar and cinnamon on it. Oh my god. It tastes like when I was a kid, I’d go to the county fair and go eat the what was it the funnel cake or the elephant ear? Like that wheat Yep, thing with a bunch of powdered sugar on it. Oh my god, I love that I know. But this little, you know, the grain free tortilla with the coconut sugar and sentiment, man things delicious. That’s a treat.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and so you can mitigate. So number one, don’t feel stressed about being healthy. Just kind of know that first month, the two months is the hardest. If you’re coming in to, you know, this new healthy lifestyle and habits with a lot of symptoms. Don’t worry about cheating, worried put your focus on developing habits, right? Many people, they go into this place in their head of like, Oh my god, like, I’m not going to ever be able to eat this again. It’s like a divorce. It’s like a breakup, it’s like they’re literally grieving the loss of this food I’ll never eat again, don’t go into it like that go into it with the mindset of Hey, I’m going to focus on eating nutrient dense anti inflammatory, low toxin foods, so I can decrease inflammation in my body, accelerate healing and feel awesome. And then once you’re at a good level where you’ve kind of plateaued, and you work through some of the programs that we’re on with hormones and gut and your digestion is better, then we can start adding foods back in. And we’re always going to choose the healthiest treat options and the healthiest foods first. And then if your optimal health stays at that great level, then we can you know, if you want to go off the beaten path, here or there, you know, 80 20, 90 10, 95 5, and you’re able to maintain your benefits and it doesn’t take you too long to get back on track. That’s fine as the book out there called the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. And Tim Ferriss talks about a cheat day eating, we’re at whatever you want for a whole day. That is I’m sorry for most people, it’s a terrible idea. Because they go have a cheat day on Sunday, and they’re so inflamed. It takes till Thursday, the next week to get back into homeostasis. That’s a problem. – go ahead and go ahead.
Evan Brand: Let me interject because I think that you may even be underplaying how bad of an idea that is because you and I’ve seen just by looking at thousands of people on test results, we’ve seen you know, gluten antibodies and other antibodies go up for potentially months after certain exposures like that. So you’re mentioning possibly a week to reset it could even be months.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If you have an active autoimmune thyroid issue or active autoimmune issue it could be now you can get your thyroid looked at, you could always do an Array Phi by Cyrax, to look at other silent antibodies that could be there. But if your health is great, and you feel great, and you know you can kind of get back on track the next day, all right, fine, but try to always choose a grain free option for most of your stuff, at least gluten free for most of it. But yeah, so my whole thing is how do you know something’s worth it? You should be able to get back on track that next day, if you’re not back on track the next day, that’s a problem. Now, Evan, you already alluded to what what if those antibodies popped up and we don’t know about it, so if you have an active thyroid autoimmune issue, you really Really want to be testing those antibodies or that ANA, or those autoimmune markers? If you have lupus or sjogren, or something kind of under the surface? I would say really choose the healthiest cheat possible. It’s just not worth it when tissues being destroyed.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. Well said and, you know, for me, we’d like to leverage the lab testing and show like, look how good you’ve done. Look, we’ve got your dopamine back to normal. You mentioned neurotransmitters early on, look, we’ve got serotonin normalized. Now, doesn’t that feel good look at your calprotectin in your gut, we’ve got your inflammation down 1000 points, look at your Secretory IGA that’s starting to come back up because you’re removing the foods irritating the gut. Look at some of these infections, we’ve cleared out because you’re not using the sugar to feed the Candida and to feed the other pathogens. So when we use the functional medicine testing, plus just kind of our pep talks and motivation we give to people it’s a really good one two punch that keeps people on a sustainable path forever. And it really is a lifestyle. You know, we talked about, oh, this is a lifestyle. It’s easy to embrace once you feel good. So I agree with you, you got to focus on Hey, do you want to feel amazing? And then some people will ask the same thing with supplements, right? They’ll ask the same question about diet as they do supplements. How long do I have to do this? on their diet? And I’m like, well, and this might always punch back with as well. Do you want to survive? Or do you want to thrive? Well, obviously I want to thrive. Okay, well then do it forever. Okay, that was easy. So for me, that’s the that’s the default answer. Like when someone’s like, well, how long do I need to dial in my diet? I mean, as long as you want to feel amazing is the answer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, tell patients out of the gates, you may have to be more puritanical. Because you’re trying to make up for lost time. It’s kind of like, if you’re in debt, from decades of poor spending habits, well, we’re gonna have to kind of get you on a really lean budget, and you’re gonna have to be investing and saving a large percent of what you make. Now as you get on top of that, and you’re debt free. And, and you’re feeling great. And now you’re making investments. And now you’re on your way to financial freedom, you can be a little bit more loosey goosey with your spending, right, it’s kind of the same thing with your health, just change the the the money equation to health. And it’s the exact same thing. And so we always try to look at getting momentum getting you on top of your health, reaching the level of conscious competence to unconscious competence, where it’s automatic, because the stress that people feel in that first month or two is just the fact they haven’t made a habit yet. And so if you want to live a healthy lifestyle, you have to make you have to let your brain and your physiology shift into unconscious competence. If you’re quitting before you get there, you’re you’re doing yourself a disservice. Because the amount of energy if you’re thinking, well, it takes me too much energy to do these things. It’s because you’re not in unconscious competence yet, and you will be there just give it a little more time people project their energy is going to be on this conscious competence wavelength the whole life, meaning the amount of energy they have to focus in and project has that will be at that level, but it won’t, it’ll get easier once you make that shift to unconscious competence. Totally, totally. It’s so easy, it’s so much, it’s easy, it’s easier for me to stay on the rails than it is to go off the rails like I would have to be, it would take me effort to go off the rails, I’d have to like seek out bad things like what could I do to try to test myself or destroy myself so it’s a good place to be 100% so out of the gates, we kind of talked about it you know where you’re at, if you’re not a mean person, and you have active issues or active things going on that are significant. Do the right thing, do the right thing be on point get momentum, get your symptoms on hundred percent under control, look deeper under the hood regarding hormones regarding everything else that’s happening in your body. Work with a good functional medicine practitioner and get your blood sugar, get dysglycemia under control, get inflammation, nutrient density, get toxins under control. That means going organic, clean, filtered water, all that good stuff, hormone free, antibiotic free, get your hormone stabilized and worked on whether it’s blood sugar, thyroid, female or male hormones, and then get your gut looked at because the healthiest food. We’ve kind of alluded to it. If you can’t digest it or break it down or absorb it properly, because of stress in the gut, you’re going to have a problem. So of course the next thing is we’re assuming that because you’re eating good foods, you’re breaking it down. The next step is going to be working on the gut. And so we don’t want foods that are full of inflammatory food allergens affecting your gut if it’s not stable yet.
Evan Brand: Yeah, my diet was great, but I had gut infection so my skin was crap. So for me, I put in all the work on the diet and I got frustrated because I thought well, I’ve got rid of gluten I’ve got rid of dairy What is wrong with me? And then luckily the functional medicine testing came in and kind of uncovered some stuff so if you’re more dialed in, you’re still struggling then you know look deeper. And so if you want to reach out to Justin you can do so clinically at his website, JustinHealth.com. That’s Dr. J at JustinHealth.com. Me Evan Brand at EvanBrand.com we work with people over the phone, Skype, Zoom FaceTime, however we need to connect we send the labs to your door. You send those back to the lab, we jump on a follow up call to discuss the results and make a protocol. It’s very, very awesome. And with everything that’s been going on, it’s funny that telemedicine has gotten, you know, 10 x more popular. So it’s really cool that we were actually ahead of this curve. We’ve been doing this this way the whole time. So feel free to reach out and we look forward to helping you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So you guys know where to reach out. And just remember to start with one thing, like, if you’re coming into this journey, I find a lot of people who aren’t doing the right thing, if you’re around them, and you start, you know, being on point and making health changes, sometimes there’s this subconscious pull to pull you down, because you making the changes to improve your health sometimes magnifies their inability or lack thereof to make changes in their life. And sometimes they may sabotage you and pull you down. It’s a threat. Yeah.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you’re saying that you’re saying that by you trying to better yourself, you may piss off other people, and then they’re going to try to come bring you down with them and their misery just eat the cookie.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and everyone’s on a different journey. So if you’re the autoimmune person, and you need to really be on point, because you’re starting this journey, and maybe they’re a little bit more stable, and healthy, you know, it may not even be something where they’re unhealthy and may just be there at a different place than you and they want to indulge this Saturday night, and you aren’t quite there. And that’s okay, you know, you just got to meet and support people where they’re at. And that’s, that’s a good thing to be at. So it’s good to have empathy. And it’s good to understand that we’re all in different places. And some people may not have even gotten out of the gate yet. They may be at that unconscious incompetence. They don’t know there’s even a problem yet. And so we just try to always meet people where they’re at, provide empathy, and understanding from where they’re at.
Evan Brand: Very true. Very true. One last story. So I had a woman. Actually, though, the husband and wife were both working with me and the woman just love baking. I hear the story a lot. The woman loves baking. And so like every Friday, she would make brownies or cookies or cake or something, right? She’s always baking some sweet thing. And then she only wants to eat a piece of it. And then she leaves it left for her husband. And if he tries to throw it away, then she’s like, no, you’re wasting it. You’re wasting our money. You’re wasting it right. So then he feels up, which I don’t know, maybe this is his excuse, maybe not. I’m just sharing the story. I’m just the messenger boy. So he comes in and he goes, Well, she’ll get mad at me if I don’t eat the whole cake. I’m like, Oh, that’s what it is. So you have to eat the whole cake. So she doesn’t get mad at you. Okay, interesting. So now we’re trying to switch her over to, you know, almond flowers and coconut flowers and whatever. So we’re just working better option.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: So we’re just working with them on where they’re at. But it’s funny. He blames her right? Oh, she’ll get mad if I don’t eat the whole cake. It’s like that’s a good excuse right there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we I mean, you got to take accountability. It’s not a valid excuse in the long run, right? You get two people in there and you got to get one to agree. All right, we got to stop this. That’s not good behavior. But yeah, I totally get it. And so outside of that there’s some really good autoimmune dessert recipes and treat recipes and my go to or some of the Unreal or Justin’s dark chocolate brands are pretty good. Or some of the endangered species dark chocolate or just some just some of the berries and coconut yogurt or maybe a hail mary tart, or I’ll just choose something that’s like a baked Apple, like my paleo apple crisp is a really good one. I just I have a couple of go twos. I tend to repeat that work pretty darn well. I know you did the waffles in the morning, which is kind of a nice treat. I’ll do that the keto birch benders waffles. Is there any other go twos that you do? They’re kind of a treat for you but still relatively healthy.
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned SWAPO Yeah, they’re swap foods is the brand of like a waffle but they’re Yuka those are delicious. And then you mentioned earlier the keto cups that’s evolved I think company and then I also like the keto bars there are keto bars that perfect keto makes. Yep. Anthony. He’s a Chiro who makes those are good. Those are like stevia, monk fruit, I believe. And those are like organic almonds or organic cashews. Those are good. I’ve done some of Dave’s bars, the bulletproof bars, with the MCT and organic cashews, those are pretty good depending on if you could do nuts or not. So those are some good treats that are easy and quick. And then also, bison. I like to do some of the epic bison meats like the bison bites, or Tonka makes really good bison meat. So I’ll do those or venison jerky or something like that.
Yeah, and one last thing is for patients or people listening, try to get momentum out of the gate. So really start your first two meals of the day solid, good protein, good fats get momentum. That makes a big difference. If you’re coming out of the gates with crappy food. In the morning, a Starbucks mocha frappuccino with a whole bunch of sugar, a crappy lunch, it’s hard to get on top of your day, from a physiological hormone, anti inflammatory support, it’s really hard. So get momentum out of the gate. It’s kind of like starting a race and you just kind of get out of the starting block at a walking speed that you got to sprint out of that walking out of that starting block. Right. Same thing with your health. So start your day with good habits, right whether it’s a cold shower, or whether it’s clean, filtered water or some minerals, some good protein, some good fat or if you’re healthy enough, maybe intermittent fasting again, people that aren’t healthy I think they need they need nutrition in the morning they don’t need nothing in the morning the healthier you are the more fasting I think provides a beneficial effect just like exercising really hard can be beneficial if you’re already fit right kind of like that. So that’s kind of where I’m at. I think you put some really good points out there EvanBrand.com for Evan reach out virtually worldwide for support JustinHealth.com for Dr. J myself. We are here for y’all. And you guys have a phenomenal day. Take care y’all.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/does-eating-healthy-when-stressed-make-you-feel-better-podcast-315