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 Top 5 Causes of Chronic Headaches
Today we are going to be talking about the top underlying reasons why you may be having a chronic headache. I had a patient come in today who had headaches for 25 years, monthly and chronically, and we were able to get to the root cause and there are many different root causes for every person. Let me lay out the common ones that I find to be a major vector of my patients.
So we have headaches and head pain or migraines where you kind of have that aura and sound sensitivity. There are a couple of different major reasons why headaches may happen.
1. Food Allergens
Most common food allergy is gluten and dairy. There are some studies on gluten affecting blood flow up to the brain. We have these garden hoses on the side of our neck called our carotid arteries. When we have inflammation especially caused by gluten that can decrease blood flow and blood profusion to the frontal cortex, and when you have less blood, you’re going to have decreased performance of the brain. You can see that manifesting in a headache. People don’t know but headaches are actually an issue with vasodilation in the brain. Caffeine can help as caffeine actually causes constriction and brain’s typical headache signal is caused by vasodilation.
2. Food Additives.
These could be things like MSG, aspartame, Splenda or various artificial colors and dyes.
3. Blood Sugar Fluctuation.
We want to have healthy proteins and healthy fats with every meal. If we skip meals or we eat foods that are too high in carbohydrates and refined “crapohydrates” and sugar, and not enough fats and proteins, our blood sugar can go up and then drop. This is called reactive hypoglycemia. We react by putting a whole bunch of sugar in our bloodstream because all of these carbohydrate sources break down into sugar — processed sugar, grains, flours and acellular carbohydrates. These type of flours and refined processed carbs get converted to glucose in our bloodstream. When glucose goes up, our pancreas goes, “Holy smokes! We got a lot of glucose there. We got to pull it into the cell.” It spits out a whole bunch of insulin and pulls that glucose right down, and we have his blood sugar going up with a lot of insulin driving that blood sugar back down. When that blood sugar goes back down, this is where we have cravings. This is where we have addictions, mood issues, energy issues, jitteriness, and cognitive issues. Our body makes adrenaline and cortisol to bring that blood sugar back up. Most people literally live on this high insulin where they are making fat, storing fat and engaging in lipogenesis which makes us tired. Then blood sugar crashes which makes people jittery, anxious, and moody. Most people live on this reactive hypoglycemia rollercoaster and that can drive headaches.
4. Gut Infections.
Patients with a lot of gut inflammation, gut permeability, and infections whether it’s H. pylori, SIBO (small intestinal, bacterial overgrowth) or fungal overgrowth have gut stressors can create inflammation in the gut. When we have inflammation in the gut, we have gut permeability. So our tight junctions in our intestines start to open up and undigested bacteria, lipopolysaccharides, food particles can slip through and create an immune response. You can see histamine along with that immune response and histamine can create headache issues.
5. Hormonal Issue.
A woman’s cycle is about 28 days and in the middle is ovulation. Some women have it during ovulation and most have it right at the end just before they menstruate. This is called premenstrual syndrome that is right before menstruation. A lot of women may also have it during menstruation, too. What happens is progesterone can drop out early and that drop in progesterone can actually cause headache manifestations and also the aberrations in estrogen can also cause headaches as well. We may also see it with excessive bleeding too. So if you’re bleeding a lot or too much, what may happen is you may lose iron and that low iron may cause oxygenation issues. That low level of oxygen may also cause some headache issues as well. Because if you can’t carry oxygen, that is going to be a stressed-out situation for your mitochondria and your metabolism. For menopausal women who have chronically low hormones and they’re not in an optimal place, that can create issues. Progesterone and estrogen can be very anti-inflammatory. So if there is inflammation in the brain, progesterone is a powerful anti-inflammatory and that can really help a lot of inflammation in the brain.
4 Herbs That Give You The Upper Hand Against Viral Infections
Let’s talk about four herbs with antiviral properties.
Click here for a consultation with a functional medicine doctor before taking herbal supplements!
Olive Leaf
As part of a Candida protocol, we’ll have a couple of herb combinations that will have olive leaf combined with monolaurin. Stack those two right on top of each other. Monolaurin is a lauric acid coconut extract. It has been shown to be very, very potent as an antiviral. With olive leaf, the main compound in it – oleuropein – and that actually prevents the virus from attaching to the cells. We kind of talk about mechanisms a lot and people ask why does that matter. It is because some herbs may prevent the replication of viruses. Things like olive actually prevent the virus from attaching to healthy cells. So if you have multiple herbs, you’ve got multiple mechanisms. You’re just making yourself even more resilient.
Astragalus
They help with either immune modulation, natural killer cell, antibody modulation which is the infantry that comes in afterwards, or it is going to help with viral replication. Typically, it’s going to modulate the inflammation from the immune response.
Usually it is hitting things in about three to four different ways, and most are going to fall into that category. That is kind of the mechanism how they are working.
Cat’s Claws
We use Cat’s Claw or Samento a lot with biofilms. They work really well. These are protective shields, bacteria and critters use. We also use it with a lot of Lyme and various co-infections, but Cat’s Claws is great at the immune system, helping with viruses, and really enhancing the body’s ability to deal with infections. Again, everything we are talking about is not necessarily to treat anything. A lot of the time it is just to support our own immune response to what’s happening, because our body is really the ultimate fighter in all of this. Everything we are doing is just trying to give our body’s immune system an edge to address the issue to begin with. The body has dealt and humankind has dealt with viruses since forever.
Echinacea
When we are doing a lot of these herbs, a lot of times we want to make sure the whole root is present. A lot of times with Echinacea, you will see a lot of flower present. I want the whole root. I find that it has a lot more of the immune-modulating alkaloids that really have the immune benefit. It is excellent in how it reduces virus levels. It inhibits the growth of bacteria. It inhibits the growth of viruses. It is also going to modulate with the inflammation caused by that immune response and caused by the cytokines and interleukins.
What can you do to try to gain the upper hand?
These things are just going to improve your resilience. It’s important to have the right mindset. A lot of people are selling like cures or solutions and that is not going to be the case, but it is really going to be our body to begin with. Even antibiotics, when an infection gets cleared, it is still not the antibiotic. It is the antibiotic lowering the level of the infection and then the immune system can kind of come in and play. It is like if we are using a lifting analogy, it really gives a very helpful spot when you’re kind of low in that bench press, it really gives you that little spot to kind of get it up through that sticky point.
Gut Irritation & GI Testing
What are the contributing factors to the gut inflammation we’re seeing and what are the contributing factors to the secretory IgA being low? Why does this happen?
So first things first is we have to do an adequate history. How did we get here? That’s like the first question that everyone needs to be asking themselves and their functional medicine doctor needs to be kind of reviewing with them. So a lot of people there’s usually a history portion that reveals this. So when I come in and I do a history, I do a timeline history. I try to figure out how the person got here.
So there’s 2 scenarios. There’s either the person got this position where they’re sick and not feeling well acutely, i.e. I was in Mexico. I ate some bad food and now I’m sick. Or most of the time, there is a chronic insidious bit to it where there has been some stress—emotional stress, physical stress, chemical stress, bad foods, poor digestion, and then the kind of stress has been going in a downward pattern, health symptoms have been getting worse over time and then boom! They get sick acutely but it’s not really acutely. There has been a downhill, kinda spiral the whole time. So number one, there is totally acute, feeling great, now they’re not. Number two, it’s this chronic downward decline. Boom! They get sick! And I’d say number three is it’s just chronic and there’s no timeline. There is no event at all. It is just a gentle downward slope. So 3 ways that kind of health symptoms unfold. One, very acute. Two, a downward decline, followed by an acute episode and it could be a couple of acute episodes by the way. It may not be one and a lot of times there could be autoimmune flare involved in there and number three, it’s just a gentle downward decline with no acute episode.
So those are the big three scenarios. So we have to really look at, “Hey, when was the last time you remember yourself feeling good? Walk me to the timeline over the last 10, 15 years, when did things start to go sideways? Was it when you were eating some bad foods, some gluten? Was it when your diet was poor? Was it when stress or sleep was poor? Was it when you started going through menopause of having some hormonal issues? Was it when you had a thyroid flare? What was going on when all these stuff happened? And those are the important questions because we have to connect the dots to the root cause so when we ask questions about symptoms that are downstream, we are actually looking upstream to the root cause that cause these symptoms to manifest. So there’s a different mindset most clinicians and doctors are looking at. “Hey, what medication can we do to cover up that symptom or even what supplement or nutrient or herb can we use to cover up that symptom?” But we’re actually—we may be looking at that, too, but we’re also looking upstream as well.
A couple other triggering factors. Divorce is huge. So any issues with marriage, whether someone just had a bad marriage and needs the divorce but they haven’t yet. They did get a divorce like I had a woman last week who developed Hashimoto’s. She developed thyroid antibodies after her divorce. She had bloodwork done before. She had no antibodies. She went through crazy stressful divorce, fighting over who gets the kids and all that and then boom! You look at the labs and then there are the antibodies that showed up. It’s sort of a response to the major stress. Ideally, when you deal with marital stress, ideally you are on top of it and you’re seeing a counselor to help because it’s always easier to mend it than to walk away. In some situations you can, some you can’t but we always recommend getting some kinda counselor there to help on that side of the fence. And then of course, you know, death of a loved one is gonna be a big one. Even things like moving and a lot of times, moving may be tied to a promotion or a good thing but believe me, it’s very stressful. We look at what’s called a social adjustment questionnaire. Moving, death of a loved one, death of child is even more, you know, affairs, divorce, anything on the relationship side is really big. So those are gonna be important things you wanna look at from an emotional stress standpoint because those can be a big thing and they put stress on the adrenal glands.
So, hey, we just wanna make sure that we’re addressing it. We’re processing it. We’re seeing a counselor or seeing therapist, someone to work on it. Maybe there’s subconscious stress. Maybe we’re working on EFT or NLP or EMDR techniques to deal with the PTSD from that trauma. So we have things like that, right? And then of course, like in your timeline history, we’re also gonna be looking at was there a leak in your house? Was there any mold exposure? Things like that because that’s a big environment pull. Hey, do you feel better when you leave your house for a week, you know? Barring the fact that you may be on vacation and stress is lower, if you just leave your house for a week, do you feel better? So we like to have those kind of timelines because that can set you up for a whole bunch of gut issues.
So when we talk about gut testing, it’s never just the gut myopathy. We’re trying to connect the gut to underlying stressors that have been accumulating for years if not decades that got you to this position to begin with.
Candida Maybe Causing Your Mood Issues | Podcast #270
Welcome to Beyond Wellness Podcast! For today’s episode, we have Evan Brand and we are going to go through Candida issues, how these affect our mood, different approaches on treatment, and a lot more. Go through this informative podcast below.
In this episode, we cover:
1:27 Addressing Candida Issue
9:23 Drug Medications
16:31 Spiraling Issues
30:33 Dietary or Stressor Issues
34:46 Chronic Candida Issues
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan brand. We were talking in the pre show we are going to be chatting all about Candida and mood issues. today’s gonna be a phenomenal chat, Evan, how are you doing today, man?
Evan Brand: I’m doing really well. We were having some fun here looking through some studies like we always do. And we found some interesting things which will challenge the conventional treatment options for Candida. Why don’t we start right out of the gate here. We’re going to get into the whole background of like, what is Candida? What kind of mood issues what contributes to Candida, we’ll get into that, but let’s just go straight to this. This because this kind of blew my mind, which is that fluconazole which is a antifungal medication commonly prescribed to treat Candida. It was found in a study here that when you use this fluconazole that it actually causes the Candida to basically go into it’s an a sexual critter basically and it produces reproduces by cell division. And when you get exposed to that fluconazole the Candida goes Holy smokes, and then boom, it switches to sexual reproduction mode, therefore making your problem worse, which is why what would you say thousand plus people have come to you and I between us plus more than that, that have already done fluconazole needs still had candida overgrowth? Well, there’s your reason why.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% I think number one is you need like a really good working kind of model and how you address Candida or any infection and it’s not just we throw some herbs at it. It’s number one, we started out with the right dietary changes, but we also have to make sure the foods not creating a stress because healthy foods not digested appropriately, are going to be hard on the body, even if they’re really good paleo template kind of foods. Number two, we kill it. We wipe it out. We have to get the body and the stress handling system and the immune system ready for that because it can be stressful on the body. And then number three, we crowded out. Renaculate repopulated out. And as you go through that kind of three step approach to killing various infections or Candida one it reduces inflammation to it supports the immune system in three, it helps barrier gut barrier integrity. So we’re not just kind of coming in there trying to target and you know, Search and Destroy, so to speak. There’s a whole multi faceted approach with supporting the hormonal system, supporting digestion, addressing food allergens, improving immune barrier integrity, and then going after a lot of the critters on the backside. So it’s really a multifactorial approach. Now, you highlighted one thing with the fluconazole and how it stimulates reproduction. Now so someone say about herbs. Well, what happens with herbs now herbs are a little bit different than medications. Here’s why. Medications no kill various microbes, right fluconazole will target more fungus. The difference is when you have like, let’s say oil of oregano, there’s multiple active compounds in there. So it will regen now you have karmakar, which is like the x active compound in there, you also have five all right fireball is going to also help kill microbes. Now, the thymus also has a compound to it that helps support the immune system and it protects against toxins. And there’s also Rose meramec acid, which is a derivative of vitamin E, which is also going to protect against oxidative damage and the free radical stress of the microbes dying. So you have oxidative support, you have immune support. So there’s a lot of other compounds that are thrown into the mix that are modulating and supporting the body in a different way than an anti fun will may not by itself.
Evan Brand: Very cool, well, I just want to point out what you just said, which is that there’s an antioxidant potential for this meaning when you go through a protocol, you don’t have to feel worse many people think and their practitioner has incorrectly educated them that they must feel bad and you’re going to have all this die off and that’s the bugs and you just got to push through Be tough and pain is weakness leaving the body You know, there’s all these like memes about pain and die off and things. But that’s actually something that can be totally prevented. And oftentimes our protocols are designed to be so smooth that people don’t even know they’re on a protocol, meaning they’re only getting symptom improvement. They’re not having a worsening downhill slide before they even come back up. Generally speaking, we try to meet people where they are and just elevate, elevate, elevate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% So first off, let’s kind of just back up a little bit. So Candide is a type of fungus right type of yeast. So like fungus is like the big umbrella and kind of various molds from water damage kind of fits in the fungus kind of mold umbrella can get as a type of yeast and there’s Candida is the main kind of yeast that you see in the body. I mean, you could see the microsporidhia, rhodotorola right the the Candida krusei, but all the cans Candida albicans is the major one we see now. How do we test that we’re going to test that in a stool test, like the GI are for one a stool test. Now even the more genetic sensitive stool test, they’re going to miss Candida sometimes. So we’re going to look at clinical symptoms, some horrific dermatitis, that kind of crusty thing on the scalp, we’re going to look for tinea versicolor, kind of a blotchy skin kind of rash. We’re going to look at, you know, jock itch, we’re going to look at toenail fungus, we’re going to look at thrush, that white coating in the mouth so any of these clinical indications that there’s more than likely going to be a systemic fungal issue. Again, once you get the fungus in the nails, that’s kind of a localized infection and you really need to hit that topically so a lot of times you can hit that internally but it may not be enough you got to get there topically. So that’s kind of how we’re looking now. We may be doing the inorganic acid to look at [INAUDIBLE] to assess it because the stool test may not be enough. And we look at the clinical indicators will look at [INAUDIBLE] on organic acid Marco we may look at Candida antibodies IGG IGA IGF one a blood test if there’s systemic Candida issues. Those are kind of a couple of ways of how I’ll look at it and assess it.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you’ve got some other markers there, too. You’ve got like carboxy citric acid, you’ve got tartaric acid, there’s a bunch that are that are really similar to colonization and fundraising. oxalates, too. Yes, that’s very true. Yes. You know, a lot of people, when they hear about oxalates, they think, Oh, my God, I just need to stop eating vegetables. No, you may just actually need to treat your can do growth and go. We’ve seen that a lot. I mean, I’m talking, you know, we’ll see oxalates it like a level of 400 on the Oh, which is really, really high. And then the person is freaking out. And I’ll say just hang tight. Let’s work on the Candida and guess what, on the retest, oxalates always go back to normal. So that’s a really, really cool thing that the Justin I’ve seen clinically that your average person or your average person talking about nutrition, they don’t have a clue about the connection there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% Evan, now a couple things I want to highlight. How do we end up with a Candida infection? So we kind of talked about the testing and assessing. And I’ll just tell you straight up most conventional medical people, they’re not going to really acknowledge Candida as as being a big deal. I mean, oh, the other issue would be like a yeast infection like a vaginal yeast infection kind of thing. They’ll be dealt the other one. That’s going to be typically it right. A vaginal yeast infections typically acknowledged maybe an oral thrush issue, maybe a toenail issue, but for the most part, Candida as being a major problem in your health is very rarely going to be acknowledged by your mainstream medical practitioner Most definitely. Go ahead.
Evan Brand: And let me ask you what you mean by that. So So you’re saying if you go to the the conventional Doc, and you’re like, Hey, I’m anxious, I’m depressed. I’ve got joint pain. I’ve got bad breath. I’m craving sweets all the time. I think it’s Candida. They’re probably going to blow you off. So what you’re saying?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, unless you have like an isolated specific infection, or Candida tends to be a major major issue in immunosuppressed people. So someone that has like HIV or AIDS or someone who’s cancer patient who’s battling on chemotherapy and things that have kind of wreak havoc on their immune system. That’s where you see Candida, you know, actually being lethal work and kill you, right? But those are specific isolated situations. So I think most medical doctors are kind of like it’s beaten in their brain. As you know, these Candida issues and fungal issues are only a problem and these kind of people, but it may be kind of a more subclinical stressor in someone who’s not HIV positive or dealing with cancer, it could be you kind of be in a subclinical place, and then Not to mention, birds of a feather flock together. So you have a Candida infection, you may have an H. pylori infection or another H. pylori, or a bacterial infection or parasite infection along with it, so it could be multiple things at the same time. For sake of simplicity, we’re going to just focus on the Candida piece in this podcast though.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s just talk about a number though. Real quick. Just just for the curious mind listening to the podcast. I want to get your number I’ll tell you my number which is I would say 90 to 95% of people with Candida. Have some Another infection at the same time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I agree. Yep. It’s very rarely just Candida. I see a lot of people to think it’s just Candida. But like you said, I think that’s in the minority. You know, I like the credo principle. So at 20, maybe 20% for me, is just Candida, but right in that area, I think it’s pretty reasonable.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Alright, so let’s get back to cause this year. So drugs are like the biggest umbrella but let’s break some of those down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So number one, medication is going to be antibiotics, right? antibiotics are going to knock down bacteria to us to a very, you know, miniscule degree, but then you have what’s called the rebound fungal overgrowth. And a lot more of the doctors are actually starting to get in tune with this will they’ll actually use specific probiotics and even Saccharomyces boulardii which is a beneficial yeast that prevents Candida from over growing so a lot more of the cutting edge. medical doctors who understand the side effects of these drugs are recommending probiotics and Anna probiotics and specific beneficial yeast preventatively. That’s number one. So it’s going to have that rebound overgrowth. Ideally number two is make sure you really actually need the antibiotics a lot of times is a natural alternative that you can go to that will be just effective and more safe. So there’s that. And I’d say the next thing after that I see it very frequently with women on birth control. birth control pills tend to more have an alkalizing effect on the urinary tract and the vaginal canal. People think, oh, alkalinity is good. Well, not really because probiotics like the major probiotic that we know of is lactobacillus acidophilus. What does that mean? acidophilus literally means acid loving. So there’s various acids that are produced by beneficial bacteria. And those acids make it harder for yeast to grow. So when you start to alkalize, that urinary tract and vaginal canal, it actually makes it easier for yeast to grow because the acids are assets have natural anti microbial effects. So when you decrease the natural anti microbial environment, it’s easier for critters and yeast to grow.
Evan Brand: Well, it sounds like what you’re saying is In that case then proton pump inhibitors, acid blocking medications would also further increase Candida because now you’re dropping down stomach acid.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. And that here’s kind of like another component, right? So we know birth control pills are going to typically drive up estrogen they definitely going to promote estrogen dominance. We know estrogen dominance is also going to do what to our gallbladder, it’s gonna make our bio more sludgy, and not flow as well. And what is bile have a bet bile has a natural antimicrobial effect as well, right? Various bile acids, right? So if we don’t have enough bile, now, we don’t break down fat and then the bile acids aren’t in our digestive system to help provide an antimicrobial environment. So now it starts to allow SIBO to grow as well. So now, bacteria starts to overgrow. So you can see how these things can really spiral out of control.
Evan Brand: Yeah, we got a few more drugs to talk about. But then also I want to try to circle back to the gallbladder even just someone who doesn’t I guess I’ll say it now just to get drove with someone who does Have a gallbladder. We’ve done many podcast on bile and increasing digestion and improving digestion. But it sounds like along the same vein here, someone without a gallbladder, they’re going to be at a much higher risk of a Candida overgrowth.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And then if you’re a female and you have estrogen dominance, right, and you know this because you start to have maybe excessive bleeding or a lot of symptoms, leading up to your period, breast tenderness, mood issues, back pain, cramping, the whole nine yards, that’s a sign that you’re moving in the direction of estrogen dominance. And then there’s going to be potentially sludgy gallbladder bile flow, which then opens you up to more Candida issues on the backside. So it’s like everything’s kind of connected. So when you’re people are listening is if you’re working with a good functional medicine doctor, you want to make sure that they’re going upstream and trying to connect all the different dots because if you’re just seeing someone that’s, oh, I’m just putting Candida on my cross here and all I’m focused on Candida, and I’m not looking at the upstream effects, bile flow, HCl foods, medications, other infections. You could really miss them it really important barriers that would help with healing.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So the goal is not run out to Whole Foods or wherever your doctor’s office and grab your oregano oil and start popping it. That’s not going to be the strategy here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So obviously next thing we could talk about, we mentioned the medications. We mentioned birth control pills. I would just say refined sugar. refined carbohydrates are going to be a big one. I mean, some people are getting really nuanced. And talking about ketones being a driving factor of Canada. I typically am not seeing that as being a driving factor. I can see that a cellular carbohydrates are much easier to process and much easier to fuel, Candida and yeast, is it possible ketones could generally speaking 99% of patients I see with Candida or yeast overgrowth, there’s a history of a lot of refined processed carbohydrates leading up to it.
Evan Brand: Yeah, there was several other drugs. I mean, we could go on and on about drugs. I’m sure we don’t have any papers on it. But like the fluconazole we talked about how that made Candida problems potentially worse. The funny thing is that’s exactly what people are getting treated with. And so it’s almost like the drug is making this problem worse. And now you have this phenomenon of the anti fungal resistance that the Center for Disease control’s warning people about, which is the same thing we’ve seen with bacteria. So now you’ve got all these anti fungal resistant strains running around. So I just want to hit on the drug piece, just one more time and then and then and then stop talking about it, which is the fact that the very treatment you’re getting is potentially making this worse. So if you keep going back on die flew, can I Staten fluconazole, that could be part of the reason you’re not getting better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and then also, we live in an environment where people are just more inflamed, right? So if you go to your conventional medical doctor with symptoms of inflammation, what are they going to typically prescribe, they’re going to prescribe corticosteroid medications. Well, those corticosteroids one they’re catabolic. breakdown tissues, so they’ll probably make your problem worse if you use chronically acutely and maybe okay, but what do corticosteroids do to your blood sugar? They increase it. And then when your blood sugar, your blood glucose goes higher, what does that fuel more of? It fuels more Candida. So being on corticosteroids chronically will actually increase your chance of more youth issues as well.
Evan Brand: Did you know The Center for Disease Control, they actually made what they call emerging infections program, and candy does in that emerging infections program because they’re saying that the Candida is becoming more virulent, it’s creating more problems, they’re seeing more resistance. So Candida, like you kind of mentioned that it’s really kind of ignored, and maybe you’d get blown off if you brought that up. It’s becoming more and more mainstream now because we’re seeing the rise of it and we’re seeing so many more people in hospital settings, like for example here and talking about that. Each case of a Candida infection in a hospital setting- it It’s estimated to result in an additional three to 13 days of hospitalization and an extra 6 to $29,000 in healthcare cost.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Makes sense. And then you throw c diff on top of that, right? Because the longer you’re in the hospital, your potential increase the first C. diff goes up to mm hmm. So it’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of potential vectors that can they can happen.
Evan Brand: Not a good place to be a hospital, some place you might come in and never come out. So Candida could be one thing part of that it’s just not a not my favorite place.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Now, there’s a couple of issues that now spiral, okay, these are called the spiraling issues. So as soon as you start having Candida issues, you may start having poor digestion, so you may start seeing more intestinal distress. And the infection now starts to create more stress, which is going to lower stomach acid and lower enzyme levels. Now that’s going to make it way harder for you to extract nutrients from your B vitamins or minerals, which are really important for mood and energy, right. So it’s possible that also a lot of Candida and yeast may be eating up some of those nutrients, they may be consuming some of those nutrients. So you can see now you’re starting to have a tug of war fight with the microbes in your body, and then the healthy digestion and the healthy absorption of nutrients as well.
Evan Brand: Well, this is titled something about Candida and mood issue connection. So let’s get into that. Now, you mentioned this robbing i think is the perfect time to transition and talk about that. So you mentioned that you’re getting your nutrients stolen basically by these microbes and fungi. So the mechanism there at least the mechanism that comes to mind for me is this that you don’t have the amino acids to manufacture neurotransmitters, but what else is going on? What Why else? Do you think the Candida issues are contributing to mood issues?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so you’re going to have the, the competing of nutrients and amino acids and some of your minerals that are really important. Number two is you’re going to have mycotoxins produced by the Candida, just like you have mold produce various mycotoxins okra toxin and such, you’re going to have mycotoxins produced produced by the Candida in your gut and those mycotoxins can increase gut permeability. And the more gut permeability there is, the more that can stress out your immune system and it can also allow undigested compounds and mycotoxins to cross the blood brain barrier and hit the brain. And then as soon as things start crossing the blood brain barrier, you’re going to see an activation of your micro glial cells, right, your astrocytes are what make up the blood brain barrier. Once these things go past the astrocytes, you’re going to see an increase in the microglial activation. And that’s going to now cause more cognitive issues, because your immune system is now trying to fight a war against invaders entering the brain.
Evan Brand: The problem is the immune system is suppressed because a specific mycotoxin that there’s different species of fungi like Aspergillus can create glio toxin but Candida has been found it was kind of this. It was like a it was a debate basically in the medical medical community does candy that actually make glio toxin and it turns out it does. And glio toxin is an immunosuppressive toxin. So you’re talking about how you’re trying to gain the upper hand. But you literally can, that’s how smart these things are, is that Candida is suppressing your ability to overcome it by producing a toxin that damages the immune system. I mean, it’s just a, it’s a very, very smart thing. Like if you’re a fungus, the best thing you can do kill somebody’s immune system, so they can’t get rid of you. I mean, it’s it’s very, very smart.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% now, I have one study here, one article here that’s really interesting on silence daily, where they’re seeing a correlation or connection between Candida and people with schizophrenia. And obviously, it’s schizophrenia is going to be like the ultimate mood disorder where there’s hallucinations and various you know, bipolar where you’re manic and then depressive, you’re on a high you’re on a low, but the fact that Candida is associated with these kind of severe mental health mood issues, is isn’t really important. So let me just kind of go through it. So when this study at the … Health System. They had 277 controls, and they took blood samples from a group of 808 people between 18 and 65. And I think 261 individuals with schizophrenia and 270 with bipolar disorder, and the researchers use blood samples of itG Candida antibodies, which indicated a past infection. After counting for factors like age, race medication, they looked for patterns that suggested a link between the infection and mental illness. And it found no connection between the presence of Candida mental illness overall. But when the investigators looked only at men, they found that 26% of those with schizophrenia head can dieta compared to the 14% in the control group. So in men, it seemed to be a much higher, a higher link with women, it was about the same, so not as much with women, but very interesting and also men with bipolar disorder had a clear increase in Candide as well. 26% Verses 14 and the control. So that’s really, really interesting.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s crazy. I’ve noticed a huge link where Miss just clinically, right I mean, the papers could say what they say. But what we’ve seen is a lot of people that have short fuses, they’re irritable with their husband, they’re snapping at their kids. They’re saying, Oh, I yelled at my kids I shouldn’t have it wasn’t that big of a deal? Time and time again, we notice when we address these type of issues, especially Candida, people will report Hey, I’m much more calmer. My husband likes me better. He says I’m more pleasant to be around. The kids are hanging out with me more. So this is huge. And let’s mention one other talks to we talked about glio toxin, but also with Candida you’ve got acetal aldehyde, which is very similar to an ounce of [inaudible]. So you’ve got these people that are report that they feel kind of drunk or they may slur their words or they may have issue with talking like their tongue. That doesn’t work. It’s like they can’t get the words out of their mouth. Sometimes that just low blood sugar, right if your blood sugar’s real low You start to sweat a little bit, but if you have a Candida problem that could also make you sick.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and also, this is really important. So if you look at acid aldehyde, and then you look at cell sahlan, also sonars really interesting. So this is a compound that’s made from acid aldehyde. Remember acid aldehydes made from or Candida and yeast can make that and they found that cell sahlan all has a negative impact on the substantial niagra which is the part of the midbrain that produces dopamine. This is important why is dope means important for focus, it’s part of the reward neurotransmitter it helps you feel good when you make good decisions, right? You check your your social media, you get a little like on Facebook or Instagram, little drip of dopamine, right? So it’s part of that reward center, and acid aldehyde and cell sahlan all have a negative impact on that compound, that neurotransmitter being produced.
Evan Brand: Wow, that is mind blowing. Okay, so now you got all these people just going on Instagram. Then they go to Twitter, and then they go to Facebook that all this dopamine seeking behavior, they may just have some candida overgrowth. Maybe they’ve got other issues too. I mean, those apps are designed to be addicting, right? They’ve got like, you know, brain scientists working at these companies to make these things addicting to pull you in. But you think of all the people like if you go out to a restaurant, no, you see the same thing. But, and everybody listening sees the same thing. You go to a restaurant, everybody’s on their phones, it used to not be like that, or you think about like a concert. You know, like, if you see an old concert video on YouTube, nobody’s on their phones are just paying attention to the musicians. Now it’s everybody’s on their phone, that it’s like they just can’t get enough. They can’t get enough dopamine. So it’s interesting to think that one of those underlying reasons would be Candida who would have thunk?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, there’s one interesting study talking about, you know, chronic candidiasis and a possible contributing factor to idiopathic Parkinson’s. Now, the mechanism that I mentioned is the one through Candida then Producing acid aldehyde and then producing cell saw it all. And then cell phone I’ll having that negative impact on the midbrain that produces dope mean. So it’s important. I mean, are these things cut and dry and are guaranteed if you have Candida, you’re going to have Parkinson’s or have these type of neurological or mood issues? No, no, it’s definitely not that way. But there could be a connection. And in functional medicine, it’s very rare that this is causing 100% of your issues. It’s normally there’s a couple of maybe four or five or six things happening, maybe 15%, contributed by this, maybe 20% over here, maybe 5% here, and then we just kind of do our best to do a really good audit and be able to figure out what the levers we need to move are and in what combination and what timing, those should be moved. Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: Yeah, it does. Here’s the thing I always kind of debate about in my head, it’s like, Are we just getting better at recognizing these type of health issues with people or is it that these type of health issues didn’t exist? So for example, Parkinson’s, I mean, I don’t know if we have any evidence on this. But before we were using before we created antibiotics before we created glyphosate, which is killing the good bacteria and allowing Candida to thrive, you know, before we had processed sugars, you know, if you look at 100,000 year old specimen, a human specimen, where they having candida overgrowth, are they having Parkinson’s were they having issues with dopamine? I mean, it seems like we’ve introduced so many new variables which have contributed to all these things. It’s like we’ve done it to ourselves
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% Yeah, and there’s a lot of different things like for it’s on this little abstract I have here they talk about like Parkinson’s being an enigma, they talk about oxidative stress being a factor environmental toxins being a factor, genetic predisposition, obviously with autoimmune stuff, you know, gut permeability is a big one. We know food, you know, infections, there’s a lot of different variables. So when someone comes from like the conventional medical world and the functional medicine, they’re used to like, Hey, I have a sore throat. Oh, I did a culture it strap antibiotic gone like it’s like a Hundred percent the cause 100% the effect gone variables isolated, right. And in functional medicine world with chronic health issues, there’s a lot of different factors. And it’s really hard to go from this isolated, you know, cause and effect model where results are instantaneous, to a model where there’s a lot of different inputs affecting the output.
Evan Brand: Yep, it’s just, it’s gotten a lot more complex, we wouldn’t have had to have these conversations maybe 1000 years ago. But now we’ve got a lot of new things that are damaging it. You’ve got the whole brain connection to with like, if you look up Candida and autism, for example, you’ll find some papers on developmental and behavioral issues probably just due to the same mechanisms right these toxins damaging the gut barrier, that intestinal permeability, allowing more toxins in blood brain barrier getting affected. So it all it all makes sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I consider like conventional medicine for chronic health challenges is like checkers and then functional medicines like 3HS, because there’s lots of Different things that are happening. It’s never just one, you know? Yeah, conventional medicine is the easiest when there’s an acute issue because the cause is isolated. You don’t you don’t need to know the cause when there’s a car accident cuz the car accidents done, it’s not happening every day, you know, and it comes to these chronic health issues. They are happening every day, and they’re happening at a subclinical microscopic level where you can’t even see it.
Evan Brand: Right. You know what we didn’t mention? I mean, it’s so so low hanging fruit, that’s probably why we forgot to mention it is alcohol, and how alcohol would be contributing to these issues in the gut. And not only damaging the gut barrier, making leaky gut worse, but also feeding and making Candida worse, like we’ll have people that clearly you’re going to feel bad and dizzy and drunk if you’re drunk, but you could have a small amount of alcohol like a sip of a cider or a sip of a beer and get symptoms from it. And that’s likely because you’ve just added that on to the fire and possibly that Candida is just flaring. I don’t know if it’s creating more toxin. I mean, what would you think when you have somebody that says, hey, I can drink a tiny bit of alcohol and I get very, very sick or drunk or symptomatic.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, so the kind of alcohol is gonna be important because some alcohol is very, very low, low sugar to almost none. And some is much, much higher, right, especially if you do one of these mixed drinks. So it really just depends. There’s always going to be Candida present in your gut. So the idea that we’re going to have candy, the hundred percent gone is kind of a misnomer. But we’re going to have it knocked down significantly where it’s not a problem, right? And if you don’t have all the other things lined up that we already mentioned, with food and your immune and other infections under control and gut permeability and good bacteria, yeah, you may be more prone for a flare for something simple like alcohol. I mean, the goal should be we get you healthy enough for in the future. Yeah, if you choose healthier sources, hopefully there won’t be a problem. Right, that that’s our big goal. But just to kind of piggyback on top of what other mechanisms of why you may have mood issues is the acid aldehyde from that alcohol or from the Candida is actually going to impair oxygen carrying capacity from your red blood cells. So you have less oxygen to your brain. What does that do? Less ability to regulate inflammation in the brain. And also alcohol or acid aldehyde, which is produced by the Candida inherently causes a b1 deficiency. And you chronically see low levels of b1 and alcoholics, but you’ll also see it with chronic Candida issues as well be one’s really important for brain and neurological health. And then if you have b1 issues is also a chance you can be six and be six is really important for synthesizing your neurotransmitters, serotonin, dopamine, etc. So you can see how these things can spiral out of control pretty fast.
Evan Brand: Well, you know, there’s a condition of the elevated crypto pyrole, this issue of pi leiria that many people talk about, you’ve got walls and some of these other guys talking about these major mood issues. Like you mentioned, schizophrenia, bipolar, you’ve got anxiety problems, OCD problems, a lot of those are linked to issues with low B six, low magnesium, low zinc. So if you’re getting robbed your guts messed up, you know, you may go after, like a lot of people will go and just treat pilots I’ve had practitioners, I won’t mention the names but people who go to these practitioners who specialize in like the walshy and Peiffer protocols where you’re working on copper and zinc ratios and you’re doing this B vitamin and that B vitamin, but they’ve never worked backwards. It’s just Hey, take this basics, take the zinc, but they don’t ask the question why? Why did this issue happen in the first place? So here they are stuck on this long term protocol, and they have no clear next step. I always ask the question, well, what did they tell you? What was the next step with x protocol? And they said there was none. It’s just take the zinc, take the basics and just enjoy your life.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of going all in on one thing. And even though that one thing is there, other issues have to be present the fact that that one thing is the driving factor and that there aren’t other dietary or stressor issues. is you really going all in you know, I consider it to be like rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship. It’s just okay, like, I guess you’re doing something but it’s not really fixing the underlying issue. So if we ever see hey, Potential mood issue. Do we see markers on the organic acid test that show issues with B vitamins especially be six, like, well look at [INAUDIBLE], we’re going to automatically supplement a foundational baseline of those nutrients just with general multi support. And if we see other markers, we could always just say, hey, let’s try giving a little bit more zinc. Let’s try giving a little bit more of these B vitamins and see what kind of effects we have. That’s the easiest way to do it without having to go down kind of a rabbit hole, so to speak. And then also just in general, fixing the digestion fixing the gut, you’re going to be absorbing more of this stuff from your food anyway.
Evan Brand: Well said, coconut oil is pretty awesome. We found one paper here that was about using coconut oil to control overgrowth of fungal pathogens, aka Candida albicans. And this was just talking about you know, in comparison to the antifungal medications that coconut oil reduced it wasn’t just the it wasn’t just the the Candido itself. It’s not that just the the coconut kills the Candida No, it’s actually reducing the colonies of it. So you can have this phenomenon that will see on the test where you’ve got colonization, meaning you may have yeast and and mold hiding in a biofilm. And now you’ve got to address that you can’t just get the toxins out of this bucket, you’ve got a whole nother bucket of biofilm where this stuff’s living in coconut oil was shown to reduce that colony. So very, very cool. I think using coconut oil as a supplement to help this but also just in your, your daily life is wonderful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and you can even use some of it. Obviously just cooking your foods and such and and the main lauric acid that you get in coconut oil, it’s anti microbial, guess what? It’s in breast milk. So you know, you have moms that have kids with fungal or yeast issues, right? The breast milk is a really great natural solution as well as you know, some good Saccharomyces boulardii as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’m sure there’s a huge link. I don’t have any papers pull up right now, but I’m sure there’s a huge link where you see infants or young children breastfed versus non breastfed and candida overgrowth. I would say the kids that are breastfed probably have less risk of Candida overgrowth just based on that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also with the mom has to have the mom has too much goes too heavy on the carbohydrates and refined sugars. You know, she could potentially you know, be passing that down as well. Yep, yep, absolutely. Well anything else Evan you want to highlight today that we did a good job I mean, I just I think if people are listening in they’re trying to wrap their heads around it in number one kind of make the foundational diet and digestive changes you know, follow my six R’s remove the bad food replace the enzymes acids repair of the hormones and the gut and if you’re having a hard time doing testing and assessing what’s going on under the hood feel free to reach out to Evan Evan brand calm or myself Justin health calm his book now button for you can schedule with us and we see patients all over the world. But start with some of the foundational things so much that moves the needle. If you have chronic health challenges, I recommend you not just kind of throwing in some of the herbs because sometimes you can feel worse, especially if you don’t set the foundation. And if you don’t get a good window into what other microbes or infections could be present alongside.
Evan Brand: Yep, Well said, No, I don’t really have any other messages. Besides, you can fix this. You can reverse this, you can get this thing under control you already made. The great point about the goal is not eliminate Candida we kind of point you know, painted it as somewhat of an assassin here creating so many problems. It can be, but we’re just trying to restore balance. It’s all about balance. It’s not the ocean. It is the balance. And that’s, that’s the goal. And it is possible. So we love working on this issue. This is something that could change your life. If you have this out of control. Here’s the free test everyone can do right now. If you’re in your car listening, make sure you’re at a red light first, don’t wreck pull down your little mirror and stick your tongue out. Do you have white coating on your tongue? Do you see more white than pink? If the answer is yes, you may be on to something so you may need to look deeper.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then also one last thing is if you having chronic Candida issues and you’re not able to knock it down, one, make sure you take a look at mycotoxins and mold in your environment because it’s possible that you’re just going to expose a lot of mold toxins. That could be really setting up Candida growing in your body from just the excess amount of mold and that kind of depleting your immune response too. So make sure you get your house at least tested. We’ll put some links below where you can get access to some of the mold testing kits. That’s probably a good next step. And then you want to say what that Evan,
Evan Brand: I know that Yeah, you’re opening the can of worms on me here. So now I’m going to start part two, we’re going into another hour here. I would just say, pets are also a really common source of Candida as well. Meaning you let the dog out into the backyard the dog picks up candy to spores brings it into the bed, you let little Fido lay in your bed. We’ve seen countless people do the plate testing well, they’ll do what they call a tap test, where they’ll go tap tap tap onto the, onto their bed or onto their carpet. And guess what? Tons of candy that comes up. So the the source of the Candida may be actually from your house, from your pets, from your blankets from your couches, from your cushions from your carpets, and we’ll actually see Candy to show up on these plates, meaning that you could literally have your diet dialed in, you’re on all the good supplements and all that. But your we’ll call it the microbiome, the microbiome of your environment, you’re breathing this stuff back in, its then colonizing sinuses, colonizing the gut, and then boom, you’ve got Candida overgrowth. So this is why you really want somebody to help you because you could go and think about yourself as just as little robot and you’ve got this, you turn this knob and turn that knob and throw that supplement, but you forgot about the you’re part of a big ecosystem. So this is, you know, maybe part two, but that’s that’s the sparknotes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, I think that’s a good part two. All right. But yeah, if you have chronic health issues or chronic home issues with water leaks and mold and damage like that, definitely make sure you have that wrapped around. Take a look at my two podcast where I interview Jeff Bookout and JW on this topic, that’s going to be a great starting Compendium for you all. And if you guys are enjoying this content, thumbs up, give us a share. Let us know your experience with Candida in the notes below. And also, we appreciate a review on iTunes, JustinHealth.com/iTunes, EvanBrand.com/iTunes we appreciate the review and getting the word out. You guys are helping people take control of their health by spreading the good word. Anything else?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. You all take good care of yourself. We’ll be in touch soon.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Have a good one. Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/candida-maybe-causing-your-mood-issues-podcast-270
Recommended product:
Nature As A Remedy for Stress
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
You know the wave of peace and other positive feelings that wash over you when you spend time at the beach or taking a hike in the woods? There is science to explain why we feel so good when we are connected to nature! Today we’re going to take a look at how we can utilize the natural world around us to benefit our mood with techniques such as forest bathing and earthing.
Why Are We All So Stressed Out?
Our ancestors has a stress response that literally worked to keep them alive. The familiar fight-or-flight state was a crucial part of human evolution. But now in our modern day and age, there is a disconnect. We get a bad email or a bad text message, and our ancient wiring system puts us in a sympathetic state–the same state our primal ancestors would have been in upon coming across a hungry lion!
When we get stressed, our body thinks that there is imminent physical danger putting our survival at risk, and it acts in the same way as it would have in our hunter-gatherer ancestors. While technology and society have quickly advanced, biology evolves much slower.
Nature As A Stress Solution
Human beings evolved in contact with the earth, though in recent times we have lost this connection. We can give our body a “reset” by going out into nature and experiencing the healing effects of mother earth.
Forest Bathing
To forest bathe is simple: find a local forest or nature preserve and simply take a walk or a hike. Forest bathing is both an incredibly powerful and an incredibly simple way to calm and rejuvenate the body. Researchers in Japan have been studying “shinrin-yoku” as it is known overseas for quite some time. In fact, Japanese doctors will often prescribe forest bathing to their patients to heal from a wide variety of health problems!
Science-backed benefits of forest bathing include:
- Boosted immune system: Forest bathing has been shown to increase the number of natural killer cells, a type of white blood cell which plays a vital part in the immune system. NK cells are also major players in preventing tumors and killing viruses.
- Calming the nervous system: Studies show forest bathing reduces cortisol–the stress hormone–and increases heart rate variability (HRV). The higher your HRV score is, the healthier your nervous system is. Forest bathing’s ability to take us out of the stressful sympathetic state and put us into the calming parasympathetic state which improves mood, elevates calmness, and reduces blood pressure and stress.
- Improved self-confidence: Forest bathing increases blood flow in the brain in such a way that it calms an overactive mind, and prevents overthinking and self-conscious thoughts.
There is no need to run or hike strenuously for the benefits of forest bathing: simply walking at a leisurely pace, even stopping to sit and rest, is just fine. It is enough to just be present and allow the forest to bathe you with its healing powers.
Earthing
Earthing, also called grounding, is a way of connecting to the earth, usually by being barefoot. Human beings are electric–we are made of atoms which either have a positive, neutral, or negative charge. Man-made electronics like wifi, microwaves, cell phones, and refrigerators can affect our electric field to the detriment of our health.
When we spend too much time indoors surrounded by artificial frequencies, it can cause inflammation, brain fog, sleep problems, and more. Chronic inflammation is often called the root of all modern disease. When our bodies have an injury, your body sends help to the site of the injury. When our body lacks electrons, the cells that are sent to clean up the injury release free radicals that have no choice but to steal electrons from healthy cells. This causes chronic inflammation that can eventually lead to autoimmune diseases and neurological degeneration.
By going outside barefoot, we can soak up free electrons from the earth which put an end to the cycle of inflammation. Earthing has been shown to expedite wound recovery, improve sleep, reduce PMS, lower cortisol, and regulate hormones.
You can get grounded by going outside barefoot, by using an earthing sheet to keep you grounded while you sleep, or by wearing earthing shoes that keep you in connection with the earth even when footwear is required.
Takeaway
Sometimes the missing component is much simpler than we would ever think. Technological advances have conditioned us to think each new gadget is going to help: that new app or fitness watch. But if we take a moment to turn inwards and acknowledge that our biology changes much slower than technology, we can benefit from ancestral health habits that have been keeping humans happy and healthy for thousands of years– and are completely free.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5580555/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17903349
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27493670
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579495/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Li+2009+phytoncides
Functional Medicine Tips to Survive the Holidays | Podcast #262
Happy Monday! It’s the holiday season and everybody is feeling the holiday rush. As much as we are excited for the holidays, it is also important to keep our body sane and healthy. Today’s chat will be all about functional medicine tips and tricks to keep our health, sanity and stresses down in the holiday season. Check out this episode to learn more.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
00:40 Portable IQ Air
5:35 Stave off stress during Holiday Season
14:38 Nebulizing
25:04 Air and Water Filtration for travels
31:34 Tips on Traveling
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live it’s Dr. J here in the house, Evan, how we doing today my friend?
Evan Brand: Hey man, Happy Monday. I’m glad to be back. I took a week off and felt like a month off. And I was like, God, I can’t wait to get back to work. So I’m glad I’m here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally man, I hundred percent agree. So that’s good. We got the holiday season. We are here in the thick of it. I know you were off in Florida this last week trying to get some sun and some good rays. Let’s kind of chat a little bit today about you know, functional medicine tips and tricks that we can do to keep our health and our sanity and our stress down in the holiday season.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so why don’t we start talking about just the travel component and then we could go wherever you want in terms of like herbs to help the immune system and nervous system. I think there’s a lot of cool directions we can take this but I’ll just start out with the air travel because I just got off the plane yesterday. Right? And it wasn’t terrible, but I’m not a huge fan of air travel for many reasons. And one is just The air pollution the fact that you’ve got, there’s no fresh air on airplanes, they’re pumping the cabin full of the research related or recycled air from the exhaust of the engines. And so it’s just really not a good place for fresh air. So what I did and some may say, Oh, this is extreme or whatever, but that’s why you’re listening to us because you want to be the best and you want to be the healthiest you can be. So what I have is the portable IQ air. It’s pronounced autumn, but it’s spelled atom at em. It’s like a desk It looks like a little UFO. And it’s a portable air purifier. We have one in our car that hooks up to the 12 volt outlet. But then we also have another one that we can take for travel and they have a portable battery pack that they sell with it and it fit inside of my backpack, no problem on my carry on bag. And I put this little portable half the air purifier on my tray table on the plane ride with the battery pack and cranked it up on high and you couldn’t even hear it because of the engine noise of the plane. And my my two daughters and my wife and I all got fresh hepa pure air Right in our face, we just angled the vent of it. So it pumped our direction. And the air was noticeably cleaner and more pure. And we’re not talking just filtering jet fuel, you know, you’re filtering potential mold on the plane, you’re filtering out the neighboring people’s perfumes and colognes and all that. So it’s just one simple way to try to reduce your exposure to toxins. And if you’re weak from an immune perspective, hopefully that’s filtering out some bacteria and viruses and other things like that. I mean, I remember, I don’t know if it was this year, last year, whenever it was, I think it was when you went to Mexico and you came back and it was like you picked up a cold from the plane because the plane was Germany or something. So it’s like, I’m not going to say this is a cure all, but I think it’s a good preventative medicine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like it. So the IQ air the ATEM. Okay, cool. We’ll put some links below. And that’s a good portable one, huh?
Evan Brand: It’s gorgeous to It’s very pretty. You can control it from your phone if you want to. You can you know Turn up the speed turn down the speed, there’s blue light on it that you can turn off. So overall, it’s a very, very good portable setup. And when we were in hotel rooms as well, we would just unplug the battery pack and plug up the wall outlet. And then we would just crank it on high in the hotel room and then boom, by the time you step back in your hotel room, you’ve got real fresh air in there as well,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: that says absolutely great. And then did you use the atem desk or the atem car or?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, good question. So the car is better, because there is an extra layer of carbon or something involved in the car versus the desk. So I only recommend buying the car version and then you can just use it inside your home as well. That is great. That’s awesome. And then you can bring that with you on trips and then you have that extra bit of air filtration. That is awesome. And could you use it in like a kid’s bedroom or a bedroom? Oh, totally. Yeah, I mean, it was the perfect white noise to for the kids to take a nap. We just cranked it on high and it’s just a nice white noise but then you know the kids are breathing in pure air too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And can you keep all the lights turned off to?
Evan Brand: yep on the app. You can just go boom, and then the blue light turns off. So it’s just a completely dark air filter.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. Awesome. I like the ones that are small and portable. Some of the ones that I have by the Austin area great, but that, you know, they’re not quite as portable, you know?
Evan Brand: Yeah, you can’t put it in a suitcase, you know, and like, you know, other people, Dr. mercola, he had promoted these like neck things where it’s like a portable ionizer that you wear on your neck, I bought one those things are garbage. This thing is way better. I mean, it’s a hepa filtration versus, you know, people try to say, oh, here’s a negative ion generator that you wear on your neck. It’s like, No, those are so stupid. This is way, way better and more functional.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what does it cost to change out those filters?
Evan Brand: I got an extra filter when I bought it. I think the extra filter was maybe 100 bucks. Don’t quote me on that. Okay, good. And you can monitor the filter life from your app. So it’ll say, hey, you’ve got 89% left of your filter, and then it’ll give you a notification when the filter needs to be changed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, God, that’s cool. So I like the air filtration aspect of I think it’s powerful because Air Quality is important, especially on the airplane. I mean, you know, I think you may only be able to do so much because you have so much recycled air coming through. So, in general may not move the needle too much, but I think it’s really cool to have it in your hotel room, especially people using whole bunch of cleaning products that you know, aren’t as nice. It’s nice to have that good quality air filtration at least in the room. That’s great.
Evan Brand: Yeah, filters out the voc right. So yeah, if you had you know, we did request fragrance free hotel rooms and made sure they only clean with vinegar and all that. So it helped a little bit but filter would help reduce or remove any other voc if you’re sensitive like I am.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. And we’re really diving into the functional medicine and natural health kind of principles to stave off stress during the holiday season and when traveling and such that’s really the title and the topic of today’s chat. So off the bat we also can be utilizing natural antioxidants to help deal with stress when we’re flying to. I’m always a big fan of when flying or travel or vacation starts. I’m going to be adding in include a phone and or glue to find precursors. This is kind of our body’s natural, very most powerful antioxidant to try peptide antioxidant. And we’re going to use this at higher levels to deal with stress from travel, just the radiation you’re exposed to and traveling. We’re also going to do maybe natural medicinal mushrooms or herbs like a strapless and geographics. akinesia. We’re going to be doing things like this to help bump up our immune system in my supplement line at protocol them, you know, Supreme, and that’s powerful that has a couple of different herbs in there, some medicinal mushrooms and it has some of the stragglers and akinesia that kind of get your immune system right ready. So it’s just kind of getting those natural killer cells up and ready on attention. So if we get exposed any viruses or bugs, we’re more likely to stave off an attack. So herbal support medicinal mushrooms, Reishi, [inaudible], ekenasia, these are going to be very powerful and then of course things to new actually deal with oxidative stress which could be glued, if I own high dose vitamin C, which is going to help include if I own as well. I’d also say you could even add in some natural anti inflammatory support like curcumin, but I’d say if you’re going to keep it simple, high dose kluth iron and vitamin C is going to be very, very powerful.
Evan Brand: Good advice. You know a lot of people post articles and snippets and all that about top 10 ways to naturally fight the flu or top 10 ways to naturally fight a cold, it’s like, well, wouldn’t it be better if you could just keep your immune system on alert, like you mentioned and up regulate these immune system pathways as opposed to getting sick and then now you’re trying to read an article on how to get yourself sick like just if you are on these herbs and your immune systems up regulated, you may not even have to go to the top 10 Natural Ways to fight the flu because you never got the flu because your immune system was so strong
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% so on the vitamin C, you know we’re going to do a couple of grams, so anywhere between two to five or six grams and the vitamins See, again, typically just below bowel tolerance is ideal. So a lot of people will start getting loose stools around six to 10 grams or six to 10,000 milligrams. So somewhere in that two to five, two to six gram dosage range is probably good. You may have to feel it out to see where you sit. And then in regards to Reishi, you know, I’ll go anywhere between two to five grams a day, probably closer to two to three if I’m just trying to like, get my immune system upregulated and I’m not fighting something probably like two to three grams just to be like, Okay, I’m ready to go. And then acutely, I’ll go off to three to five if it’s really acute. And then I would say what the gluta Island probably you know, up to a gram or so a day on the glue to die on and get my immune system kind of hyper regulated and ready to go.
Evan Brand: Yep. And talk about the nebulizer. We spoke about this a few episodes ago, I said, hey, you’ve got to try it. And you’ve tried it. So what’s your what’s your feedback?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so this is a very powerful tool and a means to get Certain compounds into your lungs and into your bloodstream fast because we know when we get sick a lot of times, you know, we have the ability to control essentially our hands by washing our hands. And we have the ability to control not quite as much what we breathe, maybe if we have a mass, that’s probably the best that we can do. But in general, a nebulizer allows us to take compounds in my favorite two things to us are going to be silver, and we’ll choose a 15 ppm to a 10 ppm or less of silver. And we’ll nebulize that and we can breathe it into our lungs. So we have all of the silver in our lungs, in our sinuses, and that’s going to help kill any bugs or biofilms that we may be getting exposed to so I like nebulizing silver, acutely, especially after a flight or after any exposure to someone because you get the silver in your lungs, and it’s anti viral as well. So the problem is, number one, you don’t want to be using antibiotics prophylactically but number two will not touch a viral issues. So the best thing with the silver is you can knock down some of the virus stuff. And the second thing is cluded I own concluded I own really helps with inflammation. And it really is increased so much more especially in your lungs when you do it when you nebulize it and you break it down to really tiny particle. So with nebulize go to dial and you can do that as well. One you’re getting the Bluetooth ion to help with the oxidative stress. But number two, it’s also going to help with inflammation and it’s going to help modulate your immune response. I’m a big fan of nebulizing the silver and nebulizing the Bluetooth ion is a couple of good nebulize that are out there I have one that’s really small and recommended to me there are two really two or three really good small ones. I’ll do a separate video on this and you take the nebulizer and essentially you use some sodium chloride kind of a nice taylean solution that sterile and then you’re going to add anywhere between a teaspoon of silver of there or you’re going to do about 200 milligrams of glutathione and a sodium bicarb form so it’s an a breakdown. And then you can nebulize that 200 milligrams a load of biome, or that one teaspoon of silver, and you get it directly into your bloodstream and the nebulize go to die on significantly increases in your bloodstream and in the lungs even more than oral when it goes orally. It has to kind of go throughout your body. But when you do it in your nebulizer, it goes right into your lungs, it’s going to help with things in your sinuses, it’s gonna help with all the inflammation in your lungs. So you get it right there. It’s fast and it increases your blood sugar levels so much faster.
Evan Brand: Yeah, not to mention, you can cross the blood brain barrier when you’re breathing something in like that too. So I got to give credit where credit’s due. This whole idea of me getting interested in nebulizers and Bluetooth ion and then trying in and then you and I talking about it, Stephen Buner. He’s like one of my favorite herbalists. He’s written a lot of really great books on Lyme disease and co infections. I believe he’s personally suffering from COPD and, of course, many people out there suffering with COPD so he actually came up with this COPD protocol. And I just took a couple pieces from his protocol which was the nebulizer with the sailing and the glue to die on. Now he’s talking about, I think it’s frankincense and some other essential oils. And he’s doing a lot of these other like Japanese herbs and Chinese herbs and mixing all these in a combination as this big old 20 to 30 p COPD protocol. I don’t have COPD. So I just took the pieces that I thought would help me the most from that protocol and then implemented it and then I had had watched the I don’t know if it was a webinar, what it was about, it was a guy speaking about using silver hydrosol which same thing Colloidal Silver silver hydrosol is the is the right name, and he was using this for lung cancer. And he was putting the silver into a nebulizer for lung cancer and I thought okay, that sounds pretty cool. And then I just mixed them I just thought why don’t we mix silver mixed Bluetooth ion. And as you mentioned, it’s the one with the bicarbonate added so it doesn’t burn your lungs or anything, and it’s a very smooth process I get, and I don’t know if it’s placebo or what but I feel like I get a little bit of a head rush after I do it. Like I feel a little bit more mentally clear, you know, Bluetooth ion is, is said to increase energy levels to right because you’re increasing your detox ability and a lot of times that helps increase energy. So after I do it, it kind of hits me like a wave. It’s like whoosh, and then I feel good for you know, a couple hours after I haven’t had any bad side effects. I don’t know if you have I haven’t had any headaches. I haven’t had any like detox reactions from it. Overall, it’s been very, very good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Also, I find it very helpful with kids that don’t want to swallow supplements or take supplements. The nice thing about it is you can don’t even have to put it over the face, you can kind of keep it a couple inches away and just let them read it for a few seconds, and they’ll get it into their system. So I like it because if my son may have gotten exposed to something, I can just give them maybe a minute with a silver, just kind of reading it in or I can give them a minute of the Go to File and I can at least get some good antioxidant support which does help with the immune system, Bluetooth Iowans a really important immune system modulator. And I can also get the silver up there which will help with viruses and biofilms as well. So it’s pretty powerful to have that, especially with kids. And especially with just being around people that are sick, I can get stuff into my respiratory tract fast. And I’m not sure if any studies in this but you know, there’s a lot of times it’s like a one or two, one or a week or so latency period on getting an infection and it manifesting. So I’m curious to know, you may have an infection, it may be an latency period, and I wonder if just doing that preventatively would prevent that infection from manifesting?
Evan Brand: I think it would, right I mean, think about if it’s sitting in the nasal cavity, maybe it’s found a way to hide in some biofilm and the nasal cavity or the sinuses and then the silver comes in and kills it. You know, I think yeah, I think you’re right. I think it could kill it. While we’re on the topic of the nasal cavity area for the holidays. You know, this would apply for people going to a family member’s house where they’ve got air fresheners or plugins are, you know, if you’re a smell smell sensitive person like I am, even if you’re not and you just don’t want that crap in your sinus cavity, you and I really like the x layer, which is the stevia based nasal rinse, or is it Earth return those xylitol, I’m sorry, it’s xylitol. You know, if you squirt that up your nose, I wonder if you could just add some of that mixture to the nebulizer. I mean, it’s the same thing right? You’re squirting it up your nose versus nebulizing I don’t know, maybe overkill, but at least you could use the X ray or nasal spray, boom, boom, a couple sprays each nostril and spit it out. If you end up getting some drainage,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: what I think is even better, what I’ve been doing is I’ll do the Neti Elixir packet so it’s actual packets and and I mixed it with four ounces of water, clean, filtered reverse osmosis water, and then I squeeze it up one nostril and it goes all the way up my frontal sinus and then back down and I do have about two to three seconds of flow. Then I blow my nose, clean it out and then to the other side. Two to three seconds, and then blow. And then what I’ll also do is if there’s any kind of infection that I’m thinking about, I’ll do the Neti actually or packets because you only can spray, barely anything with the spray. But if I can do the packets, I get constant flow for two to three seconds. And then number two is I’ll add a teaspoon of silver. I’ll add a teaspoon of silver as well to it. So then I’ll have the Neti Elixir with the xylitol in there, and then I’ll see it has the minerals in there to make it more you know, sensitive against the mucosa. And then I’ll add the silver and then the silver goes up and can really kill any viruses or pathogens or biofilms as well. So that’s a double whammy. That better Yeah, and then afterwards, then you can do if you want to nebulize some silver because that way it goes in your bloodstream because it’s not going to really go into your bloodstream, right? But when you nebulize a silver now it’s in your bloodstream and in your lungs. So if there’s any incubating viruses That’s where it’s going to be really, really helpful because then I’m really work on knocking and killing that down. And then you could also nebulize the Bluetooth icon, which I don’t think is anti viral, but it will help with inflammation, and it will have an effect on modulating your immune response for the better.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’m using the nebulize glue to find to get mycotoxins out of my brain. If you just go into PubMed and you just search okra toxin. Okra toxin is a really common mold toxin that we see. If you type in okra toxin cerebellum, you can read that okra toxin has an affinity meaning it likes it goes to that part of the brain, the cerebellum and so you can literally detox the brain. When people say detox the brain. It sounds like it’s like trendy or buzz worthy or something. But no, it’s real. You literally can detox the brain because that’s where okra toxin can can damage it can create damage in that part of the brain. So all right, well, let’s move on. I think we’ve talked about the sinuses all day,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ll do a video I’ll do a video of myself kind of dealing with the issues. So I’ll break On the nebulizer and kind of the solutions and, and we could talk about it and go over what those look like. That’s perfect. All right, good. I think those are powerful tips. And then obviously, we have low hanging fruit, which could be getting sick from food. So of course, we’re going to use things like activated charcoal, which is going to be a really good binder. We typically say take activated charcoal away from food and supplements, when you’re using it for like a detox protocol for mold or for bug killing. But if we’re eating questionable food, or we’re getting exposed to things like alcohol, we may want to actually take it with the alcohol or the questionable food. So you kind of have to just draw a line and say, Hey, is this an acute exposure issue? Or is this more part of the long term protocol? If it’s acute, and it’s food or alcohol or just you know, partying, then we’re going to take it with that food.
Evan Brand: That’s a good idea. I mean, think about it. You’re going over to Uncle Jerry’s house. You know, everybody’s going to be drinking wine and cocktails and whatever. There’s going to be bread There’s going to be all kinds of food allergens and dairy and, and who knows what else cornbread and pumpkin pie. I don’t know what all you’re eating that’s not good for you. But, you know our clients report this every year they say hey, I’ve got off my diet on the holidays and now here it is January and they feel like crap, you know, so we’re trying to help prevent some of those calls.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So I like that. Also bug killer so my line I have a product called gi clear 4 which I have found to be the best for me. And for most patients with food poisoning issues, it just works amazing. And it could be food poisoning from a bacteria like e.coli or Campylobacter or salmonella. It could be food poisoning from an infection. Right Giardia. Cryptosporidium H. pylori, maybe a parasite like blasto and this works really good at knocking it down. So I like my gi clear 4 which is very high in Golden seal, which is a really good bug killer, very high in berberine, which is great for SIBO. It’s also very high and all of which leaf which has antiviral properties, and burdock which is really Good for the lymph and the lymphatic system. So my gi clear 4 is good avid has some ones in his micro biome line that are similar to. So you know, we love a good bug killer in case we get exposed, and you can stay on a low dose of those preventatively to like I’ll do, I’ve got one that’s got all of leaf in there, which is just a good antifungal, and it’s been said to take antifungals while you’re detoxing mold, so for me, I’ve just been doing a little bit of a low dose of some antifungals just preventively. And the good thing is with something like olive leaf, that’s an antiviral as well. So you can have that’s the cool thing why we love herbs so much is because you can have as you mentioned, bugs is kind of a generality, bugs could be viruses, bacteria, parasites, you could have an herb that can be antimicrobial, antiviral, antifungal, all in one so we love these anytime of the year but especially if you’re around like you said potential bad food that who knows what if they didn’t cook the shrimp cocktail good enough, right? Or if it was all shrimp and and you got a exposed to something there. Yeah, so if you’re on vacation like let’s say Mexico or somewhere where the food may be a little bit different than what you’re normally used to people that go to Bali or Mexico or sometimes other countries, they’re exposed to things they’re not used to. So going on like a preventative dose, like one capsule with each meal, a lot of times can be super helpful. We may also do, I always recommend my patients flying with a full bottle of probiotics too, because that can really help with food poisoning as well. So we can do like one probiotic capsule every hour or two. And that can acutely address any food poisoning works phenomenally.
Evan Brand: So I like doing that to help with any food poisoning too. Beautiful and of course acid and enzymes deserve a mention up to just because you mentioned the travel. You know in theory if your stomach acid levels are good enough and you’ve got your gallbladder releasing store bile, you’re breaking down your fats good. Hopefully everything’s okay but it wouldn’t hurt to add in some extra enzymes and acids to hopefully neutralize any pathogens you could expose to
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: one Hundred percent. I think it’s vitally, vitally important. Probiotics clearing herbs we talked about gluta time we talked about silver, these are all really, really important modulating things, HCl enzymes, digestive support, kind of as needed, just so we can digest and break down our food. I think those are all very, very, very powerful things. Next, I think will be sleep support. So you could always do something like a sublingual, melatonin and just kind of do that. Once you get your schedule back on track, you can take it maybe at sunrise the next day. I’m sorry, you could do it at at nightfall. So as soon as the sun goes down, you can you know, as it gets dark, you can take it as it gets dark to kind of reset your cycle. And then when the sun comes up, you could do some kind of the caffeine with some light exposure and grounding can be very helpful to get your circadian rhythm back on track. You take a little bit of a caffeine or a mild stimulant. As the sun comes back up. You do a little bit of grounding your feet on grass or some kind of a stone while getting light exposure to the sunrise. That’s a great way to get your circadian rhythm restarted. And then at nighttime when the sun sets, do a little bit of melatonin, you know you can do anywhere between like a third of a milligram, very small those couple hundred micrograms to it sublingually and that can kind of get your circadian rhythm kind of back on cycle for your time zone again if you’re traveling to Mexico or something or the DR and then you’re only a time zone or two off, or even the same time zone not a big deal. You travel to Bali or maybe Hawaii or Europe then you’ll You know, you’re going off maybe 5678 hours that you may have to do a significant reset there.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good advice and of course light pollution at night always trying to address that a lot a lot of hotels luckily these days have pretty good blackout curtains and such but you know, we had several places where the outside light was still trying to sneak in so we would take extra blankets or towels or whatever else you got to do unplug alarm clocks, cover up lights, take out light bulbs, you know whatever you got to do to to cover it up. We had One room we had had a smoke detector that had a super bright green light and green light can suppress melatonin just like blue light can at night. So I just took a pair of swim trunks and threw them over the smoke detector, boom, we had darkness. So sometimes it’s tricky to get a nice dark room.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One thing I will travel with his electrical tape, black electrical tape and any lights like that, I will literally just take a piece tape, put over light,
Evan Brand: that’s easy, that’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So just a little bit of tape. And then you can just tape up all the lights and then you want to make it black so blocks out the lights a little bit thicker, you know a little more opaque blocks the light out better. And I always call ahead and say hey, you know do you have dark shades or blackout shades? I think it’s really important. I stayed at one place that didn’t and I couldn’t believe it. I’m like, man, your sun goes up at seven o’clock you’re up at seven it’s like this, you know, that’s just you know, forget sleeping in. So I always try to call ahead and make sure I do have blackout shade options if not, you know get A blanket, tape it up against the wall. That’s your best bet. It’s kind of Yes. But yeah, go ahead.
Evan Brand: And also on the on the traveling thing too. We talked about air filtration. I travel with the water filter as well. I mean, you can buy bottled water for drinking, I’m talking about for bathing. So you know, a lot of places, a lot of cities really heavily chlorinate the water. And so of course, chlorine is like a natural antibiotic. So first of all, if you’re drinking water with chlorine in it, you’re killing your good bacteria and your microbiome. But regarding the skin, chlorine, I just doesn’t agree with my skin. It makes your hair nasty. It makes your skin nasty. It smells bad. It’s it’s toxic. It’s a neurotoxin. So I personally use the Berkey there’s other brands out there. Yeah, Berkey makes a really good shower filter. And I forgot to travel with my wrench. But luckily the shower head on the hotel was loose enough I could unloosen it. Put on the Berkey shower filter and boom, you got super pure water and for the little kids for my little girls. I don’t want them bathing and chlorine. So Guess what we do we just turn on the shower to fill up the bathtub and now you got a perfect chlorine free bath.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, that’s definitely a good option. Also, if I’m staying at a hotel in the states you know, I’ll just instacart for Amazon Prime now good filtered water, you know, couple bottles, couple dozen, maybe a dozen bottles of Pellegrino or or Voss or Fiji water, try to buy it in bulk or if there’s a whole foods nearby, just buy a couple of gallons and just leave them in the hotel room. So I have clean filtered water, you’re not paying an arm and a leg for the hotel price. But that way you can get some good clean water. Ideally, if you can get like a bunch of Pellegrino dropped off and glass that’s an awesome class may not work especially if you’re traveling a lot and you have young kids, you may have to do classes just for the convenience of it not breaking. So those are good options for you in the states try to use instacart or prime now or they can drop off within an hour to attend to be super helpful. And then I’ll also stay at a lot of places in the states that have a like a little kitchenette. So then I’ll just have a couple of dozen eggs dropped off maybe a pound or two again. again so then I have breakfast covered every single morning at least eggs or bacon and that way you’re set you could at least start the first meal out of the day pretty good and you can control the quality of it and I just try to make sure if I can there’s an instant Carter prime now service available where I could have it dropped off.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s what we did. We did we didn’t do the delivery. We just stopped at Whole Foods, but we did have a kitchenette. So we did bake and we did eggs. We bought some frozen fish. We had a freezer and we had an oven so we were able to bake some fish for a couple nights that was great. And we did find a couple good restaurants luckily they had some grass fed steaks and such but we tried to mix it up 5050 because you know you go on vacation you don’t want to be doing dishes three times a day either my wife’s like I’m doing dishes again what’s going on so like Okay, let’s go to a nice place get you a grass fed burger. And that was a good break from from dishes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: yeah, I actually was able to find so what I believe the country I like going to Mexico for vacation because number one you get, you know, nice little warm retreat, but it’s not far. It’s only just a couple hours from Austin. It’s easy nonstop flight virtually the same time zone. And when you get There, I found a resort The brand is charisma. And if you let them know I sent you over, but I found them because they were one of the only gourmet food brands meaning they grow all their food on site, super high quality. And they cater to food allergens. So really good quality food, lots of good restaurant options, all inclusive so you don’t pay anything extra. You get what you pay, and then you have unlimited access to the food. And then you can you know, you can get gluten free options. They really cater to the food allergen and you get better quality food. And it’s even you know, local locally raised right there on site.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I know you live like a king when you go down there. It is pretty cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s nice because there’s a couple there’s a of like maybe 16 maybe 20 different hotels in the charisma brand, but it’s KARISMA just type in Karisma hotels, but they have a bunch of hotels couple doesn’t have a gore main line and that the formula This the food quality is five star so you have great quality food, organic, and you have lots of options and they cater to food allergens. That’s one of the best things about it.
Evan Brand: That’s beautiful. You know, I actually on my searches for hotels, I came across this website called pure rooms. PURE which was supposed to be this. It’s basically a company that works with different hotels, Marriott and whoever else and they basically put in water filters. They put air filters in the room, they use no fragrance, they take out any feathers for any allergens to like down comforters and such. The problem is every hotel I call they said oh no, we don’t do that anymore. Probably because nobody was ever booking the rooms and they didn’t want those rooms just sitting there wasted. So I called like three hotels and they’re like, Oh, yeah, we had the pure room, but we don’t have it anymore. So I don’t know if it’s somebody had to request in advance. But if somebody super sensitive, you know, you could look up your room and there’s basically a directory on the planet on the whole world where you can look at a hotel that would have a quote, pure room available for you to book.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, the nice thing is a lot of hotel rooms You know, they’re they’re getting better because people are more hypoallergenic people smoking is kind of a more taboo so they have non smoking rooms, I think just the big thing you can do is just try to request in advance, you know, not all the harsh cleaners or harsh smells, or just get a really good air filter like you have kind of drop it off, plug it in for a couple of hours, get the room kind of cleaned out, and then you’ll probably be good to go.
Evan Brand: Yep, that’s what we did. We put it on full blast, took a walk to the beach came back the room was was much better, still not optimal. I mean, I’d rather be at my house with my big ol nice air purifiers, but you know, you got to make the best of it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And then when I travel when I choose vacations, I want to come back on a vacation feeling good. So I don’t want to be eating crap the whole time. I want to be eating quality foods. When I come back. I’m not like bloated and inflamed and feeling like crap. So I want to food quality is a big deal for me. Number two is I don’t want to spend a day on the way there and a day on the way back traveling. So I try to choose places that I can go in a non stop and ideally be there within three to four hours on a non stop. I don’t like to get my sleeping all day. jacked up. So I don’t want to be up at like 3am leaving. So ideally, I try to find flights that I can leave at, you know, you know, get up at six or seven, get to the airport, leave at nine or 10 and get to where I want to be by, you know, three or four at the latest, you know, just because I don’t want to waste the day on each on each side and I want to feel relatively rested. So Mexico, Dr. Jamaica, you know, if if you’re like trying to go somewhere more tropical. Those are pretty good places because you get the tropical feel you can get an all inclusive access, and it’s not going to be too far or too expensive to get there.
Evan Brand: Yep, yep. Good advice.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. So anything else on the travel side, you want to highlight? I mean, the only thing I could say is, if you know you’re going to be eating more crap, we talked about glutathione. I’m sorry, we talked about activated charcoal. And you can always want if you know you’re going to be having gorging yourself, you can always intermittent fast the next day to compensate. You can always do a little bit more movement before after whether it’s interval or resistance training just to deplete glycogen and to get your metabolism up on that way. The extra alcohol or sugar won’t hit yes hard. Those are all other good options that you can kind of add in.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I would just last thing just in general is some type of good adaptogenic herbs to help cope with the stress. So ashwagandha would be great. I know you love ashwagandha I love it too, but you could use it at night. You could use it during the day for stress, you could use it at night for sleep you could do you already mentioned the the the reishi mushroom for immune support, but that’s also kind of an adaptogen. Basically, you’ve got rhodiola which can help boost your energy. I took a mitochondrial support that I have. So that’s like a B vitamin combo that can be helpful because the stress of traveling burns up your bs B as in Bravo. So mitochondrial support can be helpful. Vitamin D, hopefully you’re going somewhere sunny. You don’t need vitamin D, but that’s also important for immune function. We talked about the enzyme piece, I would say liver support I did take some liver herbs to just some milk this old and some other basic stuff methionine tarin. I think That’s it. I mean, I’m sure we could riff on more but that’s that. Oh, yes. Oh, this is important. So anybody that has like any travel anxiety, which I don’t know if I have traveling anxiety, I just get stressed travels is stressful for me, especially with two kids and is the kid hungry and Okay, and the diaper and you know what I mean? So, what I took is just a blend of some calming herbs. So I took like some other war. I took some skullcap I took some Valerian some thenI, and just had a combo in tincture form. So we’re at the airport, you got 1000 people in front of you, you’re waiting to get past I just boom, boom, boom. Shoot a few squirts of some calming herbs in my system, and I was cool as a cucumber the entire time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Love it, man. Yes, smart. You know, try to do it the right way. Like you said, That’s why I try to do nonstops in and short flights. But if you’re going to Europe or anywhere else, that becomes a little bit tough. So like you mentioned, the adaptogens are helpful. That’s where definitely bringing the melatonin to be helpful. Some of the extra Bs, the B vitamins to help with stress, I think they’re going to be really helpful as well. Anything else you want to highlight or add today, Evan?
Evan Brand: I don’t think so I’ll just make a comment. You know, it’s so interesting. You see all these people that get on the plane, you can tell some people, they’re nervous and they order alcohol from the flight attendant, and they’re trying to drink alcohol to calm themselves down. That’s the worst thing you could do. The elevation of being on the plane causes dehydration. It’s like being on top of a mountain, the stress of it is depleting. So, I mean, if you need to calm yourself down, a glass of wine on the plane is not what you want. I’m not judging you. I’m just saying Would you rather have something awesome? Like, you take a few squirts of some passionflower and ashwagandha then your your nervous system is going to be calm. You’re not gonna have any crazy blood sugar swings on the plane, you’re not going to be dehydrating yourself. So I just, I just, I think in five to 10 years, maybe we’ll see more people like shooting adaptogens down their throat on the plane versus taking alcohol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. I think number one, if you are going to consume alcohol, let’s say you got the upgraded seats and they cover a nice drink. Like when I go to Mexico, I think it was like I think I was I got the ability to upgrade to first class like 50 bucks. I’m like, heck yeah, you know, an extra foot a leg room. And so when I go to Mexico, I think I’m going to be going in February, I will be doing a glass of champagne on the flight because it’s complimentary. But what you do is number one, when you get to the airport and you have time, get a nice like, get a nice bottle of Pellegrino or something, hydrate before the flight where you know, so you have the good minerals in your system. And then if you’re going to drink then just have a nice, bringing a couple activated charcoal with you. So then you have that just kind of go back and forth. And if you are going to drink, just try to space out one drink one glass of mineral water, one drink one glass of mineral water. That way you don’t get too dehydrated, you get the extra minerals in the water, so you won’t be getting to deplete it. But I think that’s really a good important points.
Evan Brand: Perfect. Well, let’s wrap this thing up. If you do want to reach out clinically, we work with these gut issues that we’re talking about detox problems. You know what we do? We love helping people get to the root cause of their problems. You know, we were used to someone being through 510 15 practitioners before they get to Dr. J. Or me And we kind of like being I’ll speak for Justin as well, we kind of like being in that position because it allows us to show them what we do differently. And oh, here’s why you didn’t get better. It’s because you didn’t you didn’t do this or you didn’t look in that ballpark or you did it in the wrong order. So we love and some, sometimes it comes with the territory of our jobs to be in the in the cleanup crew category. We’re cleaning up somebody else’s mess. And that’s fun. I love that and we’re both very grateful to be able to serve you well. So if you want to reach out to Justin clinically, please do so his website is Justin health. JustinHealth.com. My website, EvanBrand.com. And thank you for listening. We appreciate it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. I think next week is was next year, next week, next month in New Year’s Eve. Yep. So I think I’ll be here next Monday as well. So I’m excited to chat with you again. How about you Evan? Will you be here?
Evan Brand: I’ll be here. I ain’t going anywhere.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: All right. Excellent. I love it. You’re back from your vacation. You’re supposed to be refreshed. So yes. Excellent. All right now great chatting with you put it thanks for all the information on the product. We talked about or recommended. We’ll put them in the references links below. Evan, great chat with you have a phenomenal week. Will you take care bye bye. Thank you, everyone. Bye
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/functional-medicine-tips-to-survive-the-holidays-podcast-262
Recommended product:
Xlear Rescue Nasal Spray with Xylitol
Austin Air Health Mate Junior Plus
https://justinhealth.com/water-pitcher
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Mood Imbalances and their Root Causes | Podcast #250
Depression, being the #1 cause of disability in the US, has tons of other mood issues that come along with it. Some psychiatrists are not telling what are the things that caused us mood issues,and what should we do to lessen it.
For this podcast, Dr. Justin and Evan Brand talks about root causes to mood issues. Also, learn through this podcast the importance of blood sugar maintenance, sleep, diet, and a lot more.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
01:15 Moods and Diet
03:40 Blood Sugar
09:00 Sleep
12:20 Chemicals in Food
14:40 Progesterone and Estrogen
Evan Brand: I’m doing very well. This is an exciting topic because depression is the number one leading cause of disability in the US and there’s a ton of other mood issues that come along with depression and your psychiatrist is not telling you that you need to detox heavy metals and get infections out of your gut and stop eating pesticides and all the other things that are causing a mood issues. They just give you a drug to treat it and give you a Band-Aid which has save lives but it’s not the root cause so we always love root cause.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% So let’s talk about some root cause foundational mood stuff first and we kind of have the Nuance nitty-gritty stuff and then we have the foundational stuff. So the first thing is just your diet, right? We need a nutrient dense anti-inflammatory low toxin dietary template and I I like to talk about diets me template. It provides a lot more flexibility and then we have a framework premise and why we recommend the things that we recommend part of it is foods that are evolutionarily appropriate Foods. We had enough time to adapt to eat, food that are going to be low in toxins, whether it’s anti-nutrients are oxalates are five dates or natural plant Oxalis plants have claws and feet to run and Fun Run and fight so they have berries toxins, right? So we want to make sure were using cooking methods and avoiding toxic plants, especially the more got issues we have and that anti-inflammatory, right? We know foods have the ability to move us to an anti-inflammatory environment good healthy, omega-3 fatty acids good healthy saturated fats of the more process refined omega-6 that are more fragile and they can move it move us more in that Pro in from inflammatory State and then of course the nutrient density foods are going to be super nutrient dense B vitamins minerals. Obviously the food quality is now a big deal because you can have the same kind of meat on on your plate. Looks totally different under a microscope because of the hormones because of the feeding practices cuz the medications and the and the drugs given to the animal while they were having their life and growing so to speak. So we have to look at nutrient density anti-inflammatory status and hormones and toxins are the big things off the bat.
Evan Brand: I’m glad you about this before but we could just bring it up briefly which studies done on prisoners and when they were giving Omega-3 supplements basically fish oil supplements, they had less violence and less just crazy behavior overall and there’s been some like Psychiatry studies looking at just overall like homicidal rage and suicidal thoughts and those things in there directly correlated with a deficiency of omega-3. Fatty acids
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Omega-3 is really important. Also blood sugar stability. There’s also data on the fact that’s Information I should say. Are you able to see me hear the screen?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I see you perfectly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Good excellence. All right, so there’s information showing that. Mood issues anxiety and depression is a result of inflammation in the brain. And we also know that anytime low blood sugar environment can happen right refined carbohydrates blood sugar Spike followed by a drop that’s called reactive hypoglycemia. Those kind of those kind of situations are going to create mood issues and this data on the fact that a lot of violent crimes are committed in a hypoglycemic environment and some of the data on that is because of the fact that low blood sugar and are making shutdown activation of the frontal cortex in the frontal cortex is the part of the brain that’s going to predict the outcome of an action so it can say Hey, you know that person that just pissed you off. I want to go hit him or go call him out. And then that frontal cortex has that like 20 milliseconds of hey, you know, if you do that you may get arrested and it can dampen the impulse so to speak so the more you have good activation of that frontal cortex through reducing inflammation. And then also maintaining good blood sugar and part of that as we become more fat burners and that fat burning environment put logs on our metabolic fire was future blood sugar from going up and down and then avoiding a lot of a refined carbohydrate which tends to make our blood sugar go up and down as well.
Evan Brand: Well, this is part of the reason people make bad decisions when they go out to a bar into a club and they drink alcohol and go home with somebody that they don’t want to partial partially due to what is alcohol. I mean, it’s basically correct liquid. It’s basically liquid sugar. It’s going to crank up the blood sugar but it’s also going to crank up serotonin and then the serotonin is going to just flat line and when you run out of Serotonin, you can’t make decisions that are smart. And so if you are somebody who is struggling with mood issues alcohol needs to be out of the picture completely for multiple reasons that we just met-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Blood sugar or I should alcohol actually lowers your blood sugar can create a hypoglycemic and where I might just go take a for instance a shot of vodka and just test your blood sugar your blood sugar. Drop restaurants do this on purpose because they know if they can get you some refined carbohydrates and pretzels and some bread and then they can get you some alcohol pretty fast. They’re going to cause a reactive hypoglycemia environments and you’re going to be ordering more food and getting more carbohydrates may be ordering a bigger desert whether or not they understand the biochemistry of it all they understand that if they do these kind of things in the beginning of the meal they can create a larger bill for you at the end of the meal.
Evan Brand: Should have clarified like margaritas and things that have like agave syrup and all the sugary stuff mixed with the alcohol. That’s when your blood sugar is going to go crazy, but I haven’t tested the Vodka by itself. That would be cool to see on a glucose monitor.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly yup 100% you can really create some significant significant issues of significant stressor 100%.
Evan Brand: So we could spend time and talk about this isn’t for today. But I mean, there’s like a traumas for example, you know any trauma that’s left over in your body, you know physical mental abuse or anything like that yet. You must address promise. I don’t want somebody listening and thinking if they just perfect their diet and get rid of alcohol. Their mood issues will go way there could be super deep traumatic issues that need to be addressed but no we were trying to focus on more like the biochemistry aspect the blood sugar affect adrenals hormones thyroid got those things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% Yeah. I totally totally get that for sure. So in general we have the inflammation components to so of course gluten to be a big one there the main mechanism how gluten is in a create more mood issue is going to be through inflammation and it can create gut permeability and that gut permeability can allow various inflammatory cytokines and Undigested food particles to get in the bloodstream that can create more of an inflammatory response and then create leaky brain as well. And then a lot of these inflammatory compounds whether it’s lipopolysaccharides or just inflammatory foods that are unprocessed that you have that immune response these particular can get into the brain but through the astrocytes which of the blood-brain barrier and then that can activate our glial cells in our brain and that can create more cognitive issues more information in the brain and some of the newer families of antidepressants that are coming out very soon. These medications are actually working more on inflammation in the brain problem is like any medication is going to be at have inherent side effects just because of the fact that Any medication does when you block and inhibit various enzymatic Pathways other things happen as a result, like the old vioxx days with these cox-2 inhibitor medications the cox-2 enzyme the cyclooxygenase to enzyme that was being blocked by some of these medications like vioxx. Well, those enzymes also have beneficial effects on recovering liver heart and gut tissue to then you had a lot more stroke and cardiovascular incidences. When you were on this medication. Do you know they worked at enzyme and other important roles outside of just blocking paint.
Evan Brand: Where they pulled from the shelves. I mean, that’s like long gone, isn’t it? Maybe I should look it up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah that was pulled like 10 years ago. I make more cat a massive lawsuit around that I think it was on record of killing 60,000 people. Yeah. Yeah. I know really sad but we are going to do you know?
Evan Brand: All right. So let’s talk about the Sleep aspect like for example 3rd shift workers much much higher incidence it personally when you’re working a third shift. You’re messing up your circadian rhythm your serotonin in your dopamine your melatonin your cortisol all these hormones and neurotransmitters that can act as both neurotransmitters and hormones. They all have a circadian rhythm. And if you’re not going to bed with the sun and getting up with the sun, you’re probably not going to be optimally happy now. There may be a few people listening. So I work 3rd Shift for 20 years and Im as happy as a lark. Okay, Mike, maybe you’re unique but as a general human rule going against the sun is not going to result in Good Moods. It’s that simple.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, 100% shiftworks a big one. We know that I can definitely Cradle by The Moody she’s partly because we are hardwired to kind of be on a natural circadian rhythm Right light stimulates cortisol cortisol stimulates, you know alertness and and being awake and then that cortisol drop throughout the day and a Miralax at night and darkness stimulates melatonin antioxidant information helps you recover. So yeah, that’s a really important step into this. Equation for sure. So they sleep component, the food the nutrient density component think it’s really big. Lets go to the next low hanging fruit– digestion. Okay, great. Were eating a really good diet. But now we got to actually break down those nutrients those nutrients so we gotta make sure what you and our food up. Well, we got to make sure we have enough acid and enzymes to break down those amino acids. Those fatty acids those cholesterol compounds cuz they are building blocks for a brain is cholesterol and saturated fats are hormones are building blocks from cholesterol as well. And then our brain amino brain chemicals. They’re all going to come from amino acids, which come from protein. So all of our brain chemicals norepinephrine dopamine Gaba serotonin serotonin than Converse the Melatonin which is our sleep hormone and our antioxidant for the brain, they all come from protein. So we really have poor digestion and their studies actually on H. Pylori for instance cant create mood issues. And what’s the major mechanism? My opinion, the mechanism is the fact that you have poor digestion you have less stomach acid. You have less breakdown of these important building blocks and then hes building blocks can be used to make these healthy brain chemicals that allow you to feel good sleep good and deal with stress.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I agree. I was depressed when I had h-pylori could attest that my mood was not good and I lost a lot of muscle too, I mean you looked at me and you told me Evan man. I remember seeing a picture of you you had some muscles what happened to you. I was so skinny. Luckily. I’ve regained a lot of that muscle back but mood issues are definitely related to gut infections and I just want to talk about kids for a minute because a lot of parents blame their children or just being kids and that’s why they have a bad mood. I’ll tell you as a father of two mood issues are totally related to what’s going on with your kids diet as well and your kids got so if you send your kid to school with crackers and goldfish and other garbage that’s going to be inflammatory. But also it’s going to affect your blood sugar and they’re not having good protein with their lunch. It’s no wonder they crash. I have bad moods and then they are getting in trouble in school in the teachers calling you saying hey, you know Johnny hit another student today. What would have happened if his blood sugar was well regulated and go ahead.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I saw my son a picture of him. it’s snack time last week. It was really funny. All the kids are there had their lunch box is open and you could see he had like some green apples that were cut off. He had this like grass-fed organic, like beef jerky. They’re just really easy and Ill kind of cut off and he had I think some little bit of almond butter is a hit a really nice snack and he has seen a lot of the other kids. You see the Goldfish. You see a lot of sugary drinks. I’m like oh man, and these kids are just really getting their blood sugar on a roller coaster ride, and they’re not going to be as good I mean, don’t get me wrong nutritions not going to make your one or two year-old a three-year-old who is developing be a perfect angel but it’s going to significantly improve things and make it much much better and it’s in a provide the building blocks. They need one to heal in to grow their nervous system and connect all these synapses in the brain. All these neural connections from all these new skills that there that they are using but two are keeping a lot of the inflammatory dies and chemicals and Foods out that could make things even worse as well.
Evan Brand: There’s been countless studies on the artificial colors and flavorings increasing the risk of ADD and ADHD. And a lot of these behavioral cognitive issues that are deemed as common so the teachers, you know, well just recommend that the parents speak with the doctor in the doctor puts the kid on Ritalin and that calms the kid down but that’s not the root cause he there’s a root cause of that and this is not hey, you know, Justin and I are awesome in our kids are better than you but I’m just telling you I’ve seen it my daughter hanging out a plate at a playground versus other kids where other kids in the same age group are having emotional breakdowns and they’re crying and rolling on the floor and screaming and just acting out like not how you think a kid would act out just not in control. Where is my daughter would be controlled or emotions would be controlled. Does she still have outburst and cry? Over silly Small Things. Yes, totally. But she’s three years old at the time of this recording. So I’m just saying that as a general rule, but also the chemicals to write when Im just talkin food. Were talkin that you and I both are you’re giving your son detoxification support. I give my daughter detoxification support. We’ve given both of our kids herbs to help treat gut infections and bacterial and things like that in the gut too. So maybe if the diet is dialed in but you’re not seeing any progress Improvement this applies for adults, but also children since were on the subject run a stool test on your 3 4 5 6 10 year old 15 year old kid and you may find gut infections like the H pylori just to mention as another root cause of the mood issue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly plus it’s probably incidences where maybe some not-so-great food or more refined processed food slipped in with your child at all. And then you probably saw an outburst or behavioral issue, you know, we had an incident. I think on a birthday. We gave him a little bit of gluten-free cake and there’s a little bit of a crash afterwards we could see that in this by observations from you. So it’s all wrong with it. Right now. We definitely want to provide the hormone environment where it allows our kids to grow in NBA Staples possible think it’s really really important. We hit the the food component the digestion component. Let’s talk about four months. So obviously blood sugar has a major effect on our hormones the more I blood sugar goes up and down the more cortisol and adrenaline to get call to the rescue to to bar for that out to the mortgage Reno stress gets put on our body in archery know our stress handling system and the adrenals are a part of the hormonal system is connected with the sympathetic nervous system. So the sympathetic nervous system is the part of the nervous system that deals with fight-or-flight stress running fighting, fleeing confronting and that part of the nervous system the more it gets turned on or flare the more adrenaline and cortisol and stress hormones that are catabolic the break tissue down or going to be secreted and the adrenals also produce a significant amount of sex hormone precursor. So the more we’re stressed and dealing with the catabolic stress side last week and allocate resources to the anabolic repair and Recovery parasympathetic size. And then it makes it harder for us to recover put on muscle feel good turnover on neurotransmitters and just be able to deal with and adapt to stress. So there is that on one side and the adrenals affect the kind of men and women relatively equally but then women have their hormonal side from the ovaries that cycle throughout the month and that part of the Cascades a little bit more unique because cortisol, which is that major stress hormone that we talked about can also be made from progesterone. And so the more we are stressed, the more we can pull from the progesterone. I was thinking create more estrogen dominance so are relative ratio of progesterone estrogen which is typically 20 to 25 to 1 on average for progesterone Dash inserts asked you and this condition called estrogen dominance starts to occur with a percent of that returns coming up and this can create more mood issues more PMS kind of issues breast tenderness cramping back pain in the mood components of they want irritability anxiety depression. All those symptoms can happen as a result of that. So the more we can take away that up and down with our cortisol in the movie that takes out of that the less estrogen dominance will kick in.
Evan Brand: I just want to point out one key Point you’re speaking about ratios a lot of women come to us and say I’ve got so much estrogen. I’m so estrogen dominant know he’s not saying that you have tons of estrogen you saying in relationship to your progesterone. So it’s not that the estrogen is literally overwhelming and you have more estrogen than progesterone. that’s not what’s happening. Correct, correct?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it could be that your estrogen is actually really really high. Im seeing with a lot of my female patients is progesterone is low really low acids also low, but the ratio is still skewed. So Im seeing it like if you are as progesterone, right and he is estrogen what’s happening. Both are low, but progesterone is even lower. So it’s like that.
Evan Brand: Are you saying estrogen overwhelmed progesterone or would that be like an extreme case?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That being extreme case and almost all the time with cases like that. There may be an exhausting is pit Ashton being taken right? You’re definitely would see on the birth control pill side. You may not see it come back like that because a lot of egestion metabolites me to come back on the test cuz youre not, you know the actual the actual estradiol or estradiol hormone. They’re like the analog that it’s a metabolite that has still in that shouldn’t affect but it’s not coming back in the lab. So we just know the fact that if these levels are that high cuz you’re taking it then the warm out there going to be Might as well.
Evan Brand: OK make sense would be a mechanism to cuz if you had like yes High B6 recirculating all those hormones hormones would just make it works. Right if your recirculating hormones.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: correct Plastics that I have seen no estrogen kind of facts whether [inaudible] egg. And then of course, you’re going to have hormones in the states right to give it a lot of estrogen type of hormones to make them fatter and kind of woke up. So to speak to the farmers can make more money on the slaughter there is that too. So that’s why you have to mitigate the toxins in the hormones and all the food and then you have to look at detoxification pathway. So well run on the docks tested a little gas gauge in the bottom left-hand corner of stop H3. it’s called the two methoxy hydroxy acid metabolites panel, or I should say reading and it’s a little gas gauge you want to at least in the middle, but you’ll see a lot of decreased methylation so it’s way to the left and that’s a sign that were not metabolizing are Estrogen.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s important. So you have to address hormones and were not saying hey, you just go on thyroid medication. Like that’s not you know, this is a whole system here adrenals are connected to your thyroid thyroids connects. The brains involved. You mentioned the sympathetic nervous system. So if you’re somebody whos working 70 hours a week or not taking days off in your nervous system is so revved up. You can eat a paleo-diet and still have mood issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Yep. that’s very possible. So we have those kind of hormone issue is and of course any women listening to it mood maybe one component of that. It could be other things as well could be the energy you could be back pain and cramping breast tenderness fluid retention. It could be all the above.
Evan Brand: We should talk about toxicity and liver and chemicals and metals and stuff for a minute. But why don’t we just briefly mention autoimmunity and the role that I could play in hormone. So if you’re someone who has autoimmune thyroid, isn’t it possible that if you’re going from hypo to hyperthyroid, you may have some mood issues associated with that autoimmune attack or some day is the immune system is bang bang and then some days he knew system is not.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So we look at hormones. it’s either ATM or ATF and it’s not you know, the ATM where you get money or the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms government agency ATM is Adrenals Thyroid Male Hormones, ATF is Adrenal Thyroid Female Hormones. So we already talked about the adrenal and the female and the adrenal and the mail. Yes the same mechanism are as we complete DHEA and we kind of lets just say deplete our sex hormone precursor from the adrenals testosterone can also drop and then testosterone can have a significant mood depleting fact as well. So same on the men the little bit less has less pronounced because women have a hormone cycle that that rhythms up and down throughout the cycle or manner kind of like a flat kind of Foghorn. So to speak there isn’t quite as much rhythmic activity. Therefore it’s harder to knock that off so to speak but now with the thyroid issues women are going to be five times more prone to But men still listen because if you have symptoms, we definitely want to rule out the thyroid like you said just having low levels of thyroid hormone can create anxiety for sure and also having high levels can also create anxiety and irritability and also having Hashimoto autoimmune flares which would eventually end with low thyroid but like you mentioned that autoimmune flare can flare up your thyroid autoimmune response was Canaan cause more hormones to dump in the system, which can then create mood swings and irritability and anxiety difficulty sleeping and that can create issues as well. So you really want to look at autoimmune markers for the thyroid TPO thyroglobulin antibodies. You want to look at your thyroid levels because high or low or going to be significantly driving a lot of mood issues most of the time it’s going to be low because low is The Chronic place that people tend to end up but you will see with a cute flares that it will go high or more in the hyper side again in general. it’s going to be harder to catch that but if we see Levels of antibodies we can definitely assume those level of flares may be happening whether or not we catch the high-level on the test. If we know High antibodies are there then it makes sense that’s possible. And then of course some graves for sure, graves will be the other condition where were making antibodies. Where is thyroid receptor site antibodies are TSI with your thyroid stimulating immunoglobulins those can cause thyroid to make more hormones and that’s an autoimmune condition as well. Get ninety-five. 99% are going to be Hoshis, Hashimoto’s 1% grave. So in general, it’s more plausible. If you’re gambling person that you’re going to go on the Hashi side Less on the graves, but you know, you’ll typically were not going to ever run for Graves antibodies unless we see very high levels of thyroid levels like very high levels of T4 and T3, then we’ll definitely say, okay. Lets run TSI. Lets run thyroid what receptor antibodies.
Evan Brand: Your endocrinologist would probably even run even if you beg them. So a lot of times were ordering Special Labs because the primary doctor that someone may have the working with us. We may try to push them. Hey, you don’t try to get your endocrinologist to run this and they just won’t they’re very stubborn. Even when it comes to the TPO and TG antibodies despite the mass of massive increase even just the past 5 to 10 years of autoimmunity with thyroid. You would think that it’s like part of standard procedure and protocol now, but it’s still not my grandfather got his thyroid Labs run. It was literally just TSH and T4 and maybe like T3 uptake, but still nothing else and it’s just crazy. So what are they doing? They they modified your drug based on TSH, TSH one up. Lets give you a little bit more synthroid and people just don’t know why they’re not getting better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly and then conventional medicine will look at the graves thing and they’ll just say, okay. Well if you’re not in any hormone the right when you come in and your TSH is buried meaning it’s very low and let’s say below point 3.2.1. Then they may want to look Downstream at them some of those antibodies right? They may look at T4 and then I’m a look at TSI in the thyroid receptor site markers, but outside of that unless they see that they’re probably not going to do much.
Evan Brand: Yeah, hopefully that’s what they do. But in some cases they may go straight to hey, we need to do radioactive iodine and try to just kill your thyroid off because youre youre over your thyroid overactive. I’m sorry that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If they saw grave markers, that would be the next logical step. They didn’t want a thyroidectomy or they give u p t u or more time is all the shutdown of the thyroid activity or they give the radioactive iodine to just kill the thyroid to begin with.
Evan Brand: Not pretty.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No it’s not so thyroid flares because of Hashimoto’s well that may never come back on the TSH may never come out of balance enough for it to be an issue and your TSH may still be relatively in range, even though your antibodies are going up and down and your T3 may be low or could be going up or down to so you may not even see a problem with that.
Evan Brand: Alright so let’s talk about that was a good diversion. So I just wanted to make sure we hit. Community Casa del Carmen and no pesticides damaging the gut barrier damaging the blood-brain barrier. Even if you’re a vegan listening, please eat some meat but if you’re not, you know the vegetables or not benign neither you can still get a different herbicides pesticides excetera that still damaged your good gut bacteria and create leaky gut, even if youre saying everything I don’t need hormone me. Okay? Well the plants could do at 2 and then also the heavy metals, you know, we’ve seen a lot there’s just Google it look it up on PubMed your Googles evil because they’re suppressing a lot of help people. So use another search engine like one called ecosia ecosia. They plant trees every time you do a search every 10 searches the plant a tree for you so search on a Ecosia, PubMed Mercury depression or you know Mercury anxiety and any like bad mood something that you type up you can find a correlation with a various heavy metal.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. I think it’s really really important. So heavy metals various pasta sides various toxins Roundup glyphosate. These are all going to be potentially stressors on your nervous system on your immune system on your brain. I told easiest thing is one just decrease the toxic overload. Just be eating organic higher-quality food. Drink really good clean filtered water. And then number two we can always give support to help run our Phase 1 Phase 2 and R2 toxification Pathways, that’s really important. We could do simple things like activated charcoal with you give sulfur-based Obito acids, we can get glutathione straight into liposomal former reduced form. We can get back Extra B vitamins and antioxidants like milk thistle with cumin and Resveratrol and really powerful things to help with inflammation and in donating antioxidants anything else. You want to highlight their on the detox.
Evan Brand: I started over the weekend doing some glutathione and a nebulizer. there’s actually a brand out there which I can tell you about a bluetooth ion this mixed with a sodium bicarbonate that you can make Saline solution. I’ve read a Stephen Buhner, the herbalist that you and I love because of his work on Lyme and co-infections. He made a COPD protocol for people suffering with asthma and other lung conditions and came up with a nebulizer protocol with essential oils. And so I’m doing the nebulized glutathione by itself and you just need to put the face mask on you got the nebulizer and I just took a of 200 mg of glutathione intranasally and I tell you my brain yesterday was so clear like, amazingly clear and I’ve actually spoke with some of these people at the company who’ve gotten their patients off of IV glutathione and onto the nebulizer because they don’t have to drive anywhere to get poked with a needle is much cheaper and the results are being seen much better because it’s getting through the blood-brain barrier when you inhale the glutathione vs. IV is not so that’s like my new development on detox and I haven’t done it enough yet to to give you the full, you know the whole story but for right now, My story is very positive.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Very good. So I think we talked about some of the toxic things. And again, it’s pretty simple. it’s like you just got to look at the food. Look at the environments try to increase sweating the infrared sauna good clean hydration could get a grill to go clean water filter JustInHealth.com/water or the ones that I specifically used Evan probably has some as well EvanBrand.com and you can look at his shop as well. But that’s kind of things. I actually use and I recommend personally clean water organic food being able to digest your food and then we talked about some of the various binders that we can do like chlorella for that some of the heavy metals activated charcoal as it’s a really good multi-tasker for a lot very spent the night Clays or folded minerals are really good too. And then they also you know from what we may also do things like Z light or maybe even Coley star means to help that bind up some of that mold as well that could be there environmentally if that’s the case then well have to do some testing on the house and and look again. Is the root cause of that Dilantin I have a guest that were going to get on just a few minutes. It will talk all about that in the next podcast. I will be right after this show.
Evan Brand: Yeah, we got to wrap it up so that you all can chat about mold. it’s going to be fun. But the sauna would be the last thing I would add animal wrap it up the sauna and I love sweating sweating is the key and you can look at if you just look up PubMed typing like ochratoxin sweat. You can read that mold toxins. In fact do come out when you sweat so there is proof behind that and there’s a reason that our ancestors did like sweat lodges and some of these ceremonial practices they sweat their butt often those things and they were probably detoxing too good thing for them as they did not have any of the hundreds of thousands of manmade modern chemicals that we have today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s important. that’s great. Awesome animal today was a great chat as always. Hope everyone enjoyed the podcast in the interview before you put your comment down below. Let us know things that you have used to help you detoxify good experience that you had and if you enjoy today¡̄s show, give us a share. We appreciate it, and you can write a review at EvanBrand.com/iTunes and JustInHealth.com/iTunes. We appreciate ya¡̄ll. Everyone has a phenomenal day and we’ll talk real soon.
Evan Brand: The clinical websites. If you want to reach out to Joe is clinically, please do so at his sight JustInHealth.com. You can reach out around the world. We can send test kit’s to your door. You don’t have to drive anywhere and wait in a boring dirty doctors office and read People magazine. You can do it from your house. So JustInHealth.com, and then my side is EvanBrand.com. We look forward to helping you were very grateful for the opportunity.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it, excellent. Awesome Evan, have a phenomenal day great chat with you is always will be back next week. Thank you. Everyone.
Evan Brand: See you later. Bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye. Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/mood-imbalances-and-their-root-causes-podcast-250
Recommended Products:
https://justinhealth.com/water-pitcher
Get to the Root Cause of your Headaches | Podcast #246
Headache causes pain and discomfort in the head, scalp, or neck. It may appear as a sharp pain, a throbbing sensation or a dull ache. Headaches can develop gradually or suddenly and may last from less than an hour to several days.
Today’s podcast episode is one of the most common complaints that we experience in our day to day life. We are going to talk about different types of headaches, what are the do’s and don’ts, conventional vs functional alternatives, and a lot more. Have an overview of this very interesting topic in today’s talk.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
01:15 All About Ibuprofen medicines
07:33 Other Migraine Medications
09:28 Food and Diet on Headaches
17:49 Electrolytes
21:20 Essential Oils, Effects on Technology
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house. I’m hitting record. Give me one sec and we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house really excited for today’s podcast. We’re gonna be chatting about headaches and natural solutions to get to the root cause of why you may have a headache. We’ll talk about different kinds of headaches– from allergies to migraines to cluster headaches and we’ll go from even from die off from killing gut gut bacterial infection so we’ll go over the gamut. Evan how we doing today man.
Evan Brand: I’m doing wonderful. Let’s begin this thing talking about the conventional solutions usually we do that later in the podcast. But let’s go straight to the crap, the stuff that unfortunately works but we don’t want to depend on like your ibuprofen is the brand name ibuprofen is it. Is that aspirin or is that Naproxen? I need to look that up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ibuprofen is basically going to be your typical end said right. That’s ibuprofen it’s also a Meloxicam I think as well. And then you’re gonna have like your Advil and then you’re going to have like your aspirin. Those are your big two or three right there there’s some different kinds I think Advil is the same as ibuprofen, Tylenol is going to be I think you’re acetaminophen. I’ll look those all up and I’ll get the all the typical common anti inflammatory is for headaches. We’ll dive in a little bit more specific on the on the medication side. We’ll go over the natural support side as well. On what’s typically used and we’ll go over all the root cause so in general we have a couple different headaches right. We’re going to have a tension headache which is a primarily happened with just stress and pain. A lot of these muscles here in the shoulder in the neck get tight and that can really cause trigger points and create headaches that are more musculoskeletal and soft tissue base. OK we’re going to have cluster headaches where you’re going to be really really severe you’re going to feel it behind the eyes. They’re going to be very very piercing pain and there’s different reasons for why those may happen. We’re going to have potential sinus headaches this can be from antigens or foreign allergenic material if you’re in Austin it could be Cedar etc. and this could get into the sinuses create inflammation and there’s different things that we do to it to decrease inflammation to decrease histamine and also flush a lot of this stuff out. And then we also have headaches that are more migraines based where we kind of have like an aura that open book kind of feeling we may be nauseous blurry vision and these could be hormone based. They could be blood sugar based as well and then we could also have different types of mixed headaches as well. So that kind of gives you a general idea of the different types of headaches and also know seeing patients in our clinic that we deal with mold detox or dealing with gut bacterial detoxification or gluten exposure we can see a lot of headaches from these aspects too as when we get rid of toxic debris a side effect could be headaches and we see that from time to time in the office too.
Evan Brand: Yes. So the prescription I was thinking of in my head it was actually a combo like Excedrin it’s a combo of acetaminophen and aspirin and caffeine. And that was the one where I’ve had many many people just dependent on the Excedrin. You know though even go for extra strength reliever for further headaches. I had one lady I remember I was actually when I was still working at the chiropractors office this lady said she had migraines headaches almost daily for 20 years she was pretty much debilitated by it and we were just getting into the very early stages of nutrition with her just getting her off gluten and dairy and that’s all we did and her headaches went away. I got anything after going to magnesium officially on all these supplements I thought we were going to do all we did to get rid of gluten and dairy and the headaches went away. She was like Oh my God I wish somebody would have told me it was this easy 20 years ago.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly right. Totally. So just to kind of give people a bunch of the different families of medications we have our acetaminophen medication which are primarily going to be like our Tylenol for instance and that’s going to be the acetaminophen then we have the solicit acid will be more of like your aspirin your baby aspirin that’s going to be white willow bark type of extract and then we have our various and says that are going to be ibuprofen Maloxica type of of medications that are more on the Cox 1 Cox 2 type of pathways that kind of gives you a pretty good idea. There are some medications that are more prescription based. All right. But those are the big ones that you’re going to see mostly over-the-counter Advil kind of falls into the same category as ibuprofen and then like you mentioned the other ones that are kind of combined with the caffeine that are going to be more of your migraines pain relievers typically they add the caffeine in there partly because migraines for instance part of the mechanism is Vasodilation and caffeine actually does create some vasoconstriction. And so you would think that more headaches are caused by vasoconstriction and that caffeine or stimulate would make it worse for most of the time it’s days of dilation and the caffeine actually does a little bit more constriction and does help with the headaches.
Evan Brand: Yes the drug that you’re talking about the prescription people end up on is called Topamax. It’s like an anti seizure medication but a lot of people end up using that for migraines as well and that’s what this lady this whole 20 years of migraines that’s what she was on I remember it like yesterday. She’s been on it and it helped her but she had a lot of side effects from memory issues and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’ll see whether or naproxen as well. Kind of similar things you’ll see you’ll see it with those as well some of the pain relievers that kind of have the ibuprofen slash caffeine kind of combo in there for sure and some of these medications work but they may not get to the root cause we really want to make sure we get to the actual root cause of why these medications are needed in some people they may need it every now and then as a quick kind of stopgap but if we can get to the root cause number one we’re going to need less of those medications because we know for instance ibuprofen does kill people 20,000 people a year on the low side. So we know it’s not going to be the best medication to use long term if it’s a short thing here or they are fine. So what we want it to be a kind of a last ditch stopgap measure not something that we’re using daily. And then number two you know other things like for instance Tylenol for instance you know it notoriously decreases glutathione as well where ibuprofen didn’t really decrease gut function and liver function to Tylenol will hit the liver as well. So a lot of these things really do play good at iron. So then if you’re getting exposed to mold, toxins or you just need your body’s detoxification systems to be upregulated to deal with whatever stress is in your environment. It’s gonna be harder to detoxify your body and get rid of these toxins.
Evan Brand: Yeah I remember when my daughter Summer she had a concussion and she you could tell I mean she wasn’t to the point where she was talking as good as she is now at age 3 but she you could tell right headache she wasn’t feeling well. So we talked to the pediatrician we go well what do we do. You know we don’t we don’t want to just depend on topical magnesium etc. Maybe she needs something a little stronger. And she said well go for ibuprofen because you really don’t want to take that hit. It’s like a 30 plus percent hit of decreased in glutathione with the acetaminophen. So she said you really have to choose your battles when it comes to pain relievers and Ibuprofen is generally the better choice over the acetaminophen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly yeah. And then also there are other ibuprofen or other let’s say I like Imitrex and there’s also other migraine medications that are SNRI medication that are selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors as there’s a lot of let’s just say data that dopamine and serotonin can play a big role with migraines so I’ll see a lot of people that have migraines that have issues with their serotonin doped me and we’ll work on supporting some of the building blocks of amino acids to boost up some of these precursor nutrients to make serotonin and dopamine in their brain. That’s a big one. Also stress depletes a lot of these things. So we want to fix the underlying stress that may be causing a lot of the neurotransmitter depletion. Then we’ll work out supporting some of these nutrients along with B6 as well and that can play a huge huge role. We’ll also do extra magnesium along with that because magnesium really helps with brain inflammation. Any of the micro glial cells that have an unregulated due to brain inflammation magnesium can really help relax them B6 is also very important too and we may also do herbs like feverfew and ginger which can really help attenuate and relax a lot of brain inflammation decrease headaches for sure.
Evan Brand: Good call in the amino acids. So in terms of a testing standpoint looking at inorganic acids of someone who has headaches can be very fruitful because you may see the B6 deficiency you’ve talked about. We may see low serotonin like you’ve talked about issues with dopamine and endorphin balance. We’ll look at vitamin C as in Charlie you’ve got B12 on there as well so there’s a ton of data that you can get that way you’re not just guessing and checking. We think it would be fine to just go and take some extra magnesium but if you don’t get better from that it could be an amino acid brain chemistry based problem or in my case it could be gut related. You know I had gut infections and I had headaches all the time and once I got rid of my gut bugs I think partly due to the liver stress that the gut bugs created I had headaches and once I got those taking care of supported deliver headaches were gone.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep 100 percent. So there’s different medications that are out there there’s different nutrients that are out there. One of the big mechanisms that I see that are going to drive headaches is going to be gluten. All right gluten and grains there are some mechanisms out there that they can decrease blood flow to the brain. And if we’re decreasing blood flow to the brain we’re not going to have good oxygenation we’re not going to be able to carry nutrition and our frontal cortex and our brain needs oxygen to work. So it’s possible that decrease constriction or should they increase constriction which will cause decreased blood flow to the brain can really drive up pain in the brain and isn’t to make it harder to get rid of the inflammation and have healthy cognitive function. So getting the gluten and grains under control isn’t the big that’s an all out better perfusion or blood flow up the garden hoses on the side of your neck called the carotid arteries. That’s very important.
Evan Brand: Yep. Great call. How about we talk about maybe beet powder. I mean you you hit on this issue with blood flow. I wonder if you throw in some beet powder. I take it all the time so it’s not like I wait until I have a headache and then do beet powder but I wonder if beet powder could be a good solution if you had an acute headache and then you take some I guess I could experiment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah well there’s nitric oxide that can be increased from the beetroot which could definitely help with vatal dilation so there’s different data out there like migraines are supposedly caused by like I mentioned more days of dilation. Therefore some of the medications that have caffeine that cause more constriction can help with migraines and there are some headaches that like stress headaches they may already be more of a slow constriction there and some of these things may actually make it worse. So like I mentioned earlier that’s more for migraines with the vatal dilation but other more tension headaches. Could there it could be actually more constriction so that’s why magnesium things that help relax the body can be helpful. Soft tissue work especially in the area of like the skeletons or like the elevator scapula all these muscles in the back they all connect in the Oxo port area in the back of the neck the ligaments and nuke and just that that Nucor ridge in the back of your neck all those muscles attach there. So if it’s really tight you could really create a lot of tension and getting good cranial cycle adjustments could be helpful getting your C1 and C2 adjusted in the neck getting making sure your spine is moving well making sure postural things are good because the more your posture goes forward these muscles get really tight here. Is to create lots of stress down your temporals and your master part of your head which can then create trigger points and those trigger points can refer and create headache like pain in the referral process.
Evan Brand: People that are listening and don’t see the video. What he was doing. He turned to the side and he was doing this kind of turtle head forward. Like most of us do when we’re sitting on a computer on our smartphone. We’re kind of turtle head sticking out and you see the whole posture change just kind of falls apart. So you didn’t directly say it but you basically said hey go to a local chiropractor for headaches that can be very helpful too to get adjusted. I’ve had several different adjustments that have helped me with headaches.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Anything that’s posture related and or soft tissue related a good chiropractor up a cervical chiropractor or someone that does active release technique or a good massage mile Fascia release therapist or trigger point therapist can be really helpful on the structural side. Then we just kind of have the the more let’s say chemical based type of headache that could be from M.S.G or aspartame. It could be from mold exposure. It could be from breathing in a whole bunch of benzene exhaust products from petroleum byproducts. It could be from abnormal levels of estrogen and your cycle or a premature drop in progesterone. This is for female hormone female patients now so hormone imbalances can can really dry out especially if your estrogen is kind of up and down and there’s estrogen dominance that can really drive a lot of headaches too. And then of course we have nutrient efficiencies like magnesium and B6 and some of the serotonin and dopamine based amino acids like five HTP and Tyrosine and B6 can be really important for headaches too. And then of course anytime we have inflammation in the gut inflammation in the gut can create whatever inflammation we’re.
Evan Brand: Definitely in the brain.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the brain. Yeah and that’s part of the reason why I think Ginger helps or curcumin helps serve as various relief and help anything they can pour CBD oil can help anything that can really help drive down inflammation really makes a big difference the difference is some of the over counter over-the-counter medication like your Tylenol or your Advil or your acetaminophen or your solicit gas and like aspirin some of these things have side effects that you have to weigh out the side effects and it’s always better doing something more natural even if it’s not getting to the root cause because at least it’s not going to have side effects that will increase your chance of dying in the future or decreasing your body’s ability to make load of iron which is your master antioxidant and help a detoxification.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So let’s just paint a picture of how you could go down that rabbit hole robotic as you mentioned toxin exposure like car exhaust mold exposure you’ve got all these toxins. So then you take acetaminophen for your headache you deplete your body’s ability to detox the chemicals that cause the headache in the first place. You see how you can get stuck in this loop because now you’re just trying to manage the headache you’re further depleting yourself depleting yourself becoming more toxic and more toxic. Getting rid of the hormone you need the antioxidant you need to detox it gets nasty. So in some cases extra glutathione could cause headaches too. If you move out too many toxins I know when I took a double dose of glutathione I remember I called you one night it was like 10 o’clock. I’m like dude I messed up. You like what you do. Like I took a double dose of glutathione my head is killing me. And so eventually it settled down after a few hours so you got to you’ve got to have somebody helping you with this because you could just take magnesium and maybe it goes away but if you’re having a recurring problem like this there’s probably a root cause that hasn’t been addressed. So getting the testing done like the organic acids getting a stool test done to look for these gut infections like you mentioned SIBO can’t eat or overgrowth parasites all these bad guys are going to release toxins into the bloodstream to make you feel bad so that they can still feed on your food and then when you try to kill them they may release more toxins and create this die off. And that is designed to make you feel worse. So you stop using the herbs that are gonna fix the problem but so it’s always a matter of balancing killing versus supporting deliver the lymphatic the adrenal. It’s kind of this seesaw balance that we’re always trying to work on with people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly and let’s kind of review the medications one more time the conventional ones are gonna be your Tylenol which is your acetaminophen and that’s going to have big glutathione decrease with it then you’re going to have your more ibuprofen. This could be like the Meloxicam or Motrin or Advil and these are worked very well. But you know long term they’re going to have negative impacts on the gut alterations in your liver. And then we have Aleve and the proxen which are kind of very similar to ibuprofen and these could help with migraines to again similar side effects. And then we have your your bufferin or ascriptin which are essentially very similar to aspirin. And then we have your more migraines ones which are the aspirin acetaminophen and caffeine combined. So it’s kind of like your tylenol with your aspirin in caffeine and that’s like you’re Excedrin and that’s going to induce the vasoconstriction that we talked about because a lot of migraines are driven by these are violations of the caffeine added. So it’s basically a Tylenol and aspirin and caffeine to create the constriction which will help with the migraines which are typically associated with these vasodilation the brain opening up.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Let’s go back to diet real quick. We’ve talked about gluten we talked about dairy being an issue. I think we should also mention nice shades just as a whole. Tomatoes peppers potatoes those can sometimes be issues with headaches high histamine foods can be issues as well. So like fermented foods in some cases can be a problem. Kombucha can be a problem for some people. Avocado. You know I love avocado I did one every day for a long time and then I started to get migraine headaches from it. I stopped the avocados for about three to six weeks. I added them back in. No more headaches. So I think it’s important to look at a high histamine food list like coconut Amino so. Very good option as opposed to soy sauce but super high and histamine. So you may need to try a low histamine plan for a little bit to see if that can Congress symptoms down way of working backwards.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100 percent. Also alcohol can be a big one. So anytime you drink alcohol you’re going to inhibit ADH. ADH is your anti pee hormone. So when you have when you have anti pee hormone that means you’re going to pee more. Right. And you have less of your Anti pee you’re going to pee more so then you lose a lot of your minerals. And that’s why I’d recommend always having one glass of alcohol to one glass of a Topo Chico or a Pellegrino to get the minerals in there and you can always add some minerals into your water like a Redman’s Real Salt. Those are excellent ways to get the minerals and because minerals are part of how your nervous system works and if you’re sodium potassium pumps aren’t working adequately and then your cells aren’t going to be able to communicate and have adequate action potential to work neurologically. So sodium potassium magnesium chloride very important minerals and they will get more depleted with alcohol.
Evan Brand: So I’ve got some electrolytes in my mason jar here. That’s what I was drinking since I went out this morning in the sunshine and I started to have a headache come on maybe my electrolytes are imbalanced. So it’s not going to hurt to play with this and hopefully that will help me to replenish myself.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, with you being on the boat and being really hot it just probably some mineral issues. Your body’s probably just sweating a little bit and you’re losing a lot of those minerals and you probably just needed to bring on board some extra water with with extra minerals on there. So it’s good that you’re on top of that question came in right now what’s the best way to cure your headaches. Should you do something like Gatorade. Here’s the deal guys what you see right now with Gatorade over the counter is just a commercial version of how it actually came to be. I think it was the 1969 or 1970 see their Orange Bowl or Rose Bowl. Right. College football championship. And I think it was the Florida Gators. This is how we got the name Gatorade. I think it was someone in their science department created this electrolyte formula and it honest to god tasted like rat piss. It was really bad it was actually called Gator lights gator lights not Gatorade. And then I think Pepsi or Coke bought it then 20 30 years later made a marketable drink out of it. That is nothing like the original formula. But basically it was just loaded in a hope we had it loaded in electrolytes and they weren’t that nice tasting they added them to the water and then neurologically and muscular wise they could just perform way better because in that kind of heat you’re just losing so many electrolytes and they had a huge advantage. So what you’re seeing now has lots of excess fructose lots of excess food coloring and dyes and more than likely a lot of GMO corn as well. So you’re much better off just getting those minerals in your body by itself. There are different formulas that are out there that we both use. I mean you can do a Redmond’s real Salt’s great trace mineral formulas makes a couple one called Endura one called forty thousand volts. That works could we use another product called potassium HP and then obviously I’ll use nuke salt and Redman’s real salt and we’ll work these in as well. These are great first steps and then also making sure we’re getting enough potassium on top of that avocados to be your best source. If you don’t the histamine issue we can also do a lot of green vegetables. We could do sweet potato squash etc..
Evan Brand: Yeah the potassium huge I think I probably still don’t get enough. I try really hard. But you said the RDF potassium is what like close to four grams around four grams for.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Forty five hundred forty seven hundred milligrams today. So it’s hard to get enough. You need one full avocado six servings of vegetables and maybe one piece of squash or sweet potato when you’re close to it. Right. Cause you at about five to seven hundred milligrams a serving of each of those of you doing six times five for vegetables around 3000 an avocado you’re at 1000 if it’s a good size one maybe a sweet potato squash around forty seven hundred. So that kind of gives you a good step in the right direction and then if we need we just would add in some new store that would add in some of these trace mineral support formulas that we use.
Evan Brand: Well you want to talk about essential oils for a minute. I have essential oils on hand. I put them in the diffuser. I’ll put them on topically. I’ll mix them into epsom salt and put that into a mineral bath. Lavender is my favorite. So what we did is we just got fraction a coconut oil mixed it with some lavender and put it into a little roll on. So we’ll just keep it in the backpack with the kids. So if something happens to them or something happens to us could just be anxiety. Rub it on the insides of the wrist or if it’s a headache you know you could just rub that roll on the temples or on the back of the skull. It’s a Band-Aid but it’s a pretty darn good one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. I mean with headaches I mean essential oils we can do peppermint really anti inflammatory can do Rosemary which is very high in vitamin E we can do a lavender which really helps relax the muscles. We can do eucalyptus or chamomile and a lot of teas before beds so we can easily do that. There’s some good blends out there by essential oil companies. But you know just kind of one off thing. That’s kind of how you can do it and you can delude it in a carry oil or MCT or a little bit of coconut oil you can rub it on your on your temples or on the back of your neck wherever it feels tight and that can really help relax the muscles and help relax your nervous system too.
Evan Brand: Yeah something to have on hand. You know we always keep like a bottle of adaptations a bottle of some sort of essential oil and a bottle of enzymes enzymes that I say enzymes first enzymes essential oils can adaptogens. Those are the three things that we carry and travel with no matter where we go.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent. I love it. Very good. I think we’re hitting some really good aspects and then also a lot of patients that see us we’re maybe in the middle of a detoxification protocol or we may be doing some killing gut issues or see bar bacteria sometimes headaches can happen from that and if that happens it means you’re going to fast slow it down a little bit. We may also add in some binders so we can taper things up a little bit better. You may also add in things like glutathione and or ginger tea to help one with you know the effectiveness of the killing what to to help with the limb and three to help provide extra anti inflammatory support as well.
Evan Brand: How about heavy metals we didn’t talk about that but we should mention that heavy metals could be a cause or source of mercury lead cadmium arsenic. We’ve done many things with binders and chlorella and other things to move metals out but mercury can be a big trigger of blood pressure problems headaches ears ringing et cetera. So you may need to investigate heavy metals and then EMF You know it’s not super common that we have someone that says hey I’m actually sensitive to EMF but I had a woman in London who she found out that her Wi-Fi router was causing her headaches. And how do we know. Well because when she turned off the router at night the headache would go away. And so I said well let’s just try putting hardwired in and get rid of that Wi-Fi completely and the headaches were gone. So she had mold in a bunch of other issues as well. But I think the EMF for someone who’s already compromised could be enough of a trigger to cause headaches.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah possibly could be. I mean I have to jump to that extreme ongoing hardware I just put your put your wireless your Wi-Fi on a Christmas tree timer. So it goes off maybe around 11 or 12 whenever your bedtime is and then it goes on maybe when you get up or a little bit later that way you kind of have your whole entire night without any EMF gone. That could be a good option to me.
Evan Brand: When my wife first got pregnant with our first daughter we did the timer thing with the Wi-Fi. Then I started sleeping better and I thought well if I’m working from home during the day what am I missing out on or what am I sacrificing in terms of like focus and clarity. I didn’t really need Wi-Fi which is convenient. So we just went all hardwired and and I don’t miss it now that it’s gone.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I mean it just depends on how sensitive you are with today’s day and age. I mean you can go to your Wi-Fi network especially if you live in a big area you’re going gonna have Wi-Fi and 5G and 4G everywhere. So I don’t know how much you can get away with it now but the key thing is the healthier you are the more nutritionally fed and rested and you take care of your body the better chance you have to adapt to it. So the people that are more sensitive you know do your best to limit your exposure. But in the end, right now it’s really impossible to get away from it just make sure you’re not living next to a cell phone tower or one of these new 5G towers is to do your best and keep all your antioxidant reserves and you’re good at glutathione and your nutrition up as best as possible.
Evan Brand: Yeah and there are canopies too. You know there are silver canopies you could sleep in there’s like some sleeping bags on the market bed canopies that look like a mosquito net that can protect you if you’re into super urban area. Luckily my my closest neighbor and they probably use Wi-Fi but it’s maybe like five or six hundred yards away.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I haven’t thought about how sensitive you are. Right. Most people I find they aren’t that sensitive or if they are once they fix their diet and they fix their gut they become less sensitive to it. Very rare that I find let’s say EMF is the root issue. Yeah it’s usually one of those things lower on the list that becomes bigger when everything else is an address. But when the top things are addressed then it becomes less of an issue.
Evan Brand: Yeah totally. So that lady once we got her on some binders and detox mode the sensitivity went away she said she was able to go back into town and go to the grocery store where they have Wi-Fi blasting. And she did not get headaches.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah yeah that’s good. Most important is you know these try to control it when you sleep. That’s a pretty good way to do it. And then next is just do all the nutritional things and mentioned earlier we talked about heavy metals and headaches. The biggest thing with headaches and heavy metals is get your gut work and don’t come in and go after heavy metals until you know your guts working. Work with a good functional medicine doctor tend to do things to help bind it up and to give you nutrition help support phase 1 and Phase 2 maybe give you some extra glued iron support as well just to make sure that we’re collating things in a very slow methodical way and the guts working well is we’re not reabsorbed a whole bunch of toxins deliberate.
Evan Brand: And if you’re someone who went and got your Mercury amalgam fillings removed by a conventional dentist assume you have mercury poisoning and you need to get that taken care of. If you did not go to a dentist who does the smart protocol to safely remove the amalgam that’s silver quote which is 50 percent or more mercury got drilled out and you breathed in the vapor and it’s in your brain and it is in your bones. It’s everywhere. So it takes a while to get it out so zeal light other binders can be used. We had some lady like send us an email like oh my god you said zeal I don’t you know zeal light increases aluminum in the body. No it doesn’t. That’s not true. There’s plenty of data on companies using professional zeal like clinically we’re testing and retesting aluminum levels and they only go down not up. So natural binders are very very helpful for.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I haven’t seen zeal like go up having tested this I have not seen aluminum go up with Zola. But again you know it all depends on the quality. This probably cheap zeal like you can get from China that may have aluminum in it. Right. So just try to make sure you have good stuff. And also we would never just gives the lie by itself abysmal lighting and some other things as well and we’d be supporting glutathione and we never would just go all in on one thing.
Evan Brand: Yep exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great. Anything else you want to dial in or kind of reassess today?
Evan Brand: I would just tell people to get some information get some data. If we always say if you don’t test you’ve guessed. So could you take magnesium and lavender and feverfew and B6 and trip the fan. Yeah you could but do you know what you’re doing do you know what you’re going after what’s your goal what are you what are the puzzle pieces get the puzzle pieces you’re going to save money and you’re going to save time by getting the data upfront and if you want to reach out. Justin I work with people around the world we can help you get some of these functional medicine tests done on yourself so we can get to the root cause. So Justin’s website is JustInHealth.com. My website is EvanBrand.com. We love helping people we’re grateful to be in the position we are to help change lives. So please share the podcast. Send it to somebody you know I guarantee somebody you know has headaches and they could benefit from this podcast more than the new advertisement on the nightly news that says hey here’s this new medication for headaches this is better content than that advertised.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent that we’re really working on the root cause. Hope everyone enjoys it. And if you do put your comments down below what have you all done to help improve your headaches or improve anything related to your neurological health. I’m just curious to know what supplements what natural strategies we want to be able to share that with the listeners. Would love to respond back. And if you guys are enjoying this. Sharing is caring. We’re gonna have a good MP 3 audio version as well. Click below to get the podcast version with a real high quality audio and transcription and if you’re listening to us on the podcast and you want to see the video version that will be down there below. We really appreciate you guys being participate you know the kind of engaging. We get a lot of questions coming in we try to wing it kind of add in some of the questions into the Q and A here that come from that like you and I. Which is wonderful. And if you guys enjoy it head over to JustInHealth.com/YouTube or JustInHealth.com/iTunes to write a review as well as EvanBrand.com/iTunes getting reviews out there really help our kind of rankings in the podcast world that go up which then allows more people to be able to see our information and then they get help as well. Evan and I always thought that 99% of the people that hear our message never actually see us which is in some way amazing because they are getting great information and improving their health. And then if they want to get to the next level this information down below. Hey Evan great podcast today man. We’ll be in touch. We’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand: Sounds good. Have a good one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You take care bye now.
Evan Brand: Bye bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/get-to-the-root-cause-of-your-headaches-podcast-246
Recommended Product:
https://justinhealth.com/water-pitcher
Natural Remedies for PMS
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
75% of women are affected by premenstrual syndrome (PMS), the effects of which range from physical pain to emotional distress. While it is a common belief that PMS is just an unfortunate consequence of being a menstruating woman, the truth is that while PMS is common, it is not normal. In fact, when taking a holistic approach to health, PMS is completely preventable!
Common Symptoms of PMS
While PMS is different for every woman, the following are some of the most common symptoms. They tend to appear in the week before a woman begins her period, and she can experience any combination of the following physical and psychological symptoms.
Physical Symptoms:
- Bloating
- Fatigue
- Food cravings, especially for sweet & salty foods
- Headaches
- Low sex drive
- Constipation or diarrhea, IBS-like symptoms
- Cramps, aching muscles
- Breast tenderness
- Oversleeping, or insomnia
Emotional/Mental Symptoms:
- Depression
- Anger, irritability, aggression
- Anxiety
- Mood swings
- Trouble concentrating
- Social Withdrawal
PMS Causes
There are several factors to take into account when assessing the possible causes of PMS. Largely, bad PMS symptoms are caused by hormone imbalances. However, diet, allergies, stress, thyroid disorders, and external toxins all play a part in PMS as well. The following are some easy changes you can implement to reduce PMS:
Click here to consult with a functional medicine doctor for help balancing your hormones!
- Avoid toxins: Household cleaners, GMOs, the pesticides on non-organic foods, and pollution in the air are all toxic. Birth control and beauty products also contain artificial fragrances and chemicals that mimic hormones and disrupt the body’s natural production.
- Eat the right kinds of fat: When cooking, opt for coconut oil and organic animal fats. Avoid inflammatory omega-6 oils (canola oil, vegetable oil, margarine, etc.), which are suspected to contribute to endometriosis and PCOS.
- Minimize sugar and refined carbohydrates: Sugar and carbs cause inflammation, a major trigger for cramps. They can also provoke mood swings, irritability, and headaches.
- Watch your caffeine intake: Caffeine is dehydrating and may contribute to headaches and mood swings.
- Avoid inflammatory foods: While sugar, alcohol, dairy, and grains are inflammatory for most people, it is important to know your personal allergies and sensitivities so that you aren’t unintentionally aggravating your inflammatory response and making symptoms worse. In several cases, simply cutting out all dairy and grains has helped women’s PMS disappear!
- No soy: Soy in its many forms (soy milk, tofu, soy based margarines, etc.) is a major hormone disruptor!
Natural Remedies for PMS
There are several supplements and herbal remedies that can be taken to help resolve PMS. Some work to reduce symptoms immediately, while others help balance your hormones for permanent relief.
Vitamin B: B vitamins are critical for our health. They metabolize our food and provide our cells with energy. Vitamin B6 is connected to estrogen metabolism.
Vitamin D: Vitamin D is actually more of a hormone than a vitamin, and is very important for not only balancing hormones and PMS, but also for overall health! The best vitamin D is getting it straight from the source (the sun), but a high-quality vitamin D supplement does the job when catching rays isn’t possible.
Maca: Maca is known for its effect on libido, but it is also powerful for balancing hormones. Less symptoms of PMS and increased fertility are other reported results of taking maca.
Magnesium: Citrate or Glycinate. Magnesium is known for its muscle relaxing effects, and assists in balancing estrogen.
Pregnenolone: As “mother of all hormones,” pregnenolone is a precursor to all steroid hormones (including progesterone and estrogen, the big 2 that can cause PMS). Pregnenolone decreases as we age, and is also depleted by stress. Taking pregnenolone can help balance hormones and reduce PMS.
Red Raspberry Leaf: A tried and true remedy for PMS cramps, red raspberry leaf is commonly consumed as a tea, or it can be taken as part of a blend created specifically for PMS relief, such as Cycle Relief.
Vitex (Chasteberry): Promotes the balance of progesterone and estrogen, the two major hormones that are associated with PMS. For some women, this herb alone can alleviate all symptoms!
Bonus: Researchers in Taiwan studied the effects of yoga for PMS, and found that yoga practices reduced breast tenderness, cramping, and overall discomfort associated with the participants’ periods. Light exercise, getting enough good quality sleep, and meditation for mitigating stress have all been shown to reduce PMS.
Takeaway
PMS is not natural, so stop suffering needlessly each month! By supporting healthy hormone balance through a clean diet and proper supplementation, it is possible to make “that time of month” as comfortable as any other day.
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21171936
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962262/
https://www.webmd.com/women/pms/premenstrual-syndrome-pms-symptoms
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMHT0024719/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0022866/