The good bacteria in our gut are the ones responsible for the chemicals in our brain. Inflammation or anything that can affect your gut especially when it comes to digesting nutrients can cause a big impact on your brain chemicals. But how does really your gut affect or cause anxiety? Find out more!

Today’s episode talks about giving importance to the gut health which is the one responsible for the digestion of our food and vitamins that are needed by our body. One deficiency in the vitamins needed by our body can already affect our brain chemicals, thus creating mood issues and cause anxiety. Listen as Dr. J discusses the topic together with Evan Brand which gives his own personal experience to highlight the importance of gut health. Continue to find out that anxiety is more than just anxiety. Stay tuned.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani 

In this episode, we cover:

00:35    Effect of Various Medications, Digestion and Brain Chemicals

08:12    Lab Testing

11:05    Bad Bacterias

12:22    Home and Environment

19:44    Seeing the Whole Picture

16:55    Adrenal Testing

24:48     Thyroid Issues

26:24    Blood Sugar Level Optimization

Evan Brand: Yeah man, me too. So I’ll just start with my personal, and I don’t know if you experience much anxiety. I don’t think you’ve ever really said “Hey, I’ve had anxiety” but I definitely did, when I had gut infections. When I had ___[0:35], when I had parasites, when I had bacterial overgrowth, when I had candida overgrowth and when I had kind of a quadruple ___[0:43] that I really think stemmed from me during a round of antibiotics after I got my wisdom teeth and my 12-year molar extracted, you know I had a round of antibiotics after both of those procedures. I think that’s what led to the candida and then probably started to tore away, uh, tear away my gut barrier and then I ended up getting leaky gut situation. You go swimming Barton springs a few times, you swallow some creek water, you get some parasites down in your gut and then all of a sudden everything falls apart and you’re anxious for no reason. So that was at least my, my story, my unusual experience with anxiety ‘cause I’m not an anxious person by nature, but that made me anxious when I had those gut bugs.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally makes sense. I mean gut health is so important because all of your nutrients get absorbed through your gut. So, just a kind of review of physiology because we wanna connect the physiology and the biochemistry to why you feel the way you feel. That way you’re not just taking doctor’s orders, you’re understanding how these things are working. So, so we have our stomach, where we chew up our food, we swallow, it goes down our esophagus into our stomach. Digestion starts when the mouth gets chewing so just chewing up our good proteins is gonna be huge. That starts the digestion process and increases the surface area for hydrochloric acid, and enzymes in the stomach. So we increase hydrochloric acid in the stomach that lowers the pH it makes it more acidic, like ‘cause pH is lower. And that activates certain ___[02:07] enzymes in our stomach like ___[02:08] which starts that protein digestion process, that nicely enters, that enters into our small intestine, which then triggers ___[02:16] so we start breaking down the fat, fats are important because vitamin A, D, E, and K have instrumental effects on our physiology. Fats ___[02:25] vitamins especially, uhm, you know vitamin d for example, for instance has some effects at helping with mood as well. And we also know vitamin K, and vitamin A are really important for, uh, thyroid function and we know thyroid can have a major implication on mood as well, so low vitamin A, low thyroid. But in general all of these proteins and amino acids and even these minerals, these tranquilizing minerals, like magnesium, help our body relax. They chill out our heart, they chill out our mood. ___[02:55] amino acids get broken down in our stomach. They get ionized in our stomach and get reabsorbed again our small intestine. So we know that digestive processes are so important for these nutrients getting to where they need be is important so we can feel good.

Evan Brand: Talking to your microphone go close like this.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.

Evan Brand: I’m not sure if that’s – I think you might be using your built in microphone.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh lemme double check that.

Evan Brand: ‘Cause I sounds a little echoey. Go on, uh, go on your little gear box on Hangouts there, see if you see

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yep, you’re right. How about now?

Evan Brand: Much – a million times better.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, I apologize for that everyone. So we got a better mic up and ready to go, ex-

Evan Brand: We, we still heard you but, now we’ve got that show, that studio quality gone.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it.

Evan Brand: So here’s the deal. Everything you said makes a perfect sense, assuming, you’re actually digesting and assimilating all these nutrients and breaking everything down like you said. And so where the domino goes bad, I mean for a lot of people, it’s just being prescribed in acid blocking medication. So you may think, well, how in the world does anxiety tie in to me being ___[02:55] or some acid blocker. Uhm, the way Justin described it, it was perfect. You take all these amino acids from your dietary protein, assuming you’re eating those. You know for eating a bagel, and, you know, cream cheese for breakfast, that’s not gonna cut it, you know. We’re eating a good, you know, we’re eating a good quality meat, a bacon, a sausage, you know handful of pecans, uh, half of avocado, you know, some blueberries, that’s a hell of a breakfast. If you’re eating that, you’re gonna beginning some amino acids that can be broken down and therefore turned into, for one, create muscle tissue-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: ___[02:55]

Evan Brand: Uh, create neurotransmitters. But, if you’re on an acid blocker because you had heartburn and you in one visit with your doctor and they say “Okay you need to be on an acid blocker” you could start that whole domino effect against your health just from something that simple and then you end up with anxiety so then you get referred to your psychiatric doctor and they put you on Xanax and, and, and it’s not a Xanax deficiency, it was the acid blocker messed up our digestion, your digestion issues created the inability for you to absorb your amino acids and make brain chemicals. Now you’re anxious and depressed, so then you get put on anti-depressants. So before you know it in three seconds you’re on an anti-depressants, an anti-anxiety, and on acid blocker. And then maybe you can’t sleep good because just as mentioned you’re breaking down these relaxing things like you’re getting magnesium from your diet. So if you don’t have enough of that, or let’s say you don’t have enough B6 to convert serotonin to melatonin, now you’re not sleeping well so then you get on the fourth med which is a sleep drug. I mean this is how what happens, this is why an average person is on multiple pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and I don’t even think you talked about uh, cholesterol medications on there as well, right?

Evan Brand: No I didn’t.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because cholesterol is gonna be the building block for all your hormones so then you have, maybe your cholesterol’s starting to creep up because of inflammation or you’re doing too much carbohydrate which stimulates insulin, insulin jacks up your cholesterol inflammation will also do it too, so for eating inflammatory foods that could do it. And then now your cholesterol’s high, you’re prescribed to ___[05:58] and then the ___[05:59] gonna decrease your, uhm, ___[06:01]  production so now your  ___[06:02] lower. Your building blocks for your hormones are lower and we know ___[06:05] have other conitive mood side effects as well so that’s gonna create more issues. And then from there after that you’re on a libido medication like a viagra, uhm, or something like or xalexa to help with ED and that’s create more side effects and more issues and then God forbid you got some mood issues. You go, if you’re a female now, you got top your conventional doctor, their typically gonna recommend birth control pill or even ___[06:33] on top of that, then you’re just screwed. Because stacking one medication on top of another medication and then all these medication have various side effects that you treat with other medications. And then these medications also create nutritional deficiency. So birth control pills will lower Magnesium, Zinc and certain B vitamins which are really important in ethylating ___[06:55] your neuro transmitters so it’s just really important especially Magnesium for calming and relaxing your heart. For helping, let’s say, be the shifter between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Meaning, parasympathetic, relaxation. Sympathetic, stress, go, go, go. We need the ability to downshift from sympathetic of stress and go, to the parasympathetic, relaxation and chill out.

Evan Brand: Well let’s add one more drug to the mix, that are hundred, that are hundred million Americans are on which is blood pressure medication. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -Right.

Evan Brand: And Valsartan and all these commonly prescribed blood pressure medications are all getting recalled now due to containing carcinogenic chemical, you know. There’s like, this type in Valsartan cancer, you can look the research yourself, and these people get put on blood pressure medication because they can’t regulate their blood pressure because as you mentioned, you lose that parasympathetic-sympathetic balance, you’re depleted in Magnesium because you’re not digesting, because you got gut infections or you’re on acid blocker. So now you’re  acid blocker, antianxiety, antidepressant, you’re on like you said, Xalexa, and now you’re on blood pressure, and then you’re on  ___[08:01] at all the same time. None of that is gonna, you know, none of that is gonna contribute to a long healthy life.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, none of it will, man. So really important, we’re trying to get to the root underlying cause here. So, let’s shift gears on the lab testing. There are some lab testing we go to see what’s going on. Number one, just looking at your digestion. Just doing a comprehensive gut test, look at inflammation in your gut. Inflammation in our br- inflammation in our gut will create an inflammation in our brain. That activates the cell called microglial cell, which are essentially immune cells in our brain. When they are activated, they will create a, you know, brain fog. So you know, you know obviously that the more foggy you are, the more anxious you could feel as well. So inflammation in the gut could create inflammation in the brain. So we gotta look at gut functions. We wanna look at a comprehensive gut test, that’s gonna assess inflammation in the gut, like ___[08:50]. Wanna look at your IGA, your immune levels, because your immune system is over active, that could be a sucking up a lot of resources, right. So, for instance, the more your immune system is overactive, that’s like the equivalent of you, let’s just say, leaving the water on in one of the guest bedrooms in your house that you never go to. Water builds huge, and you don’t know why, because you’re not using a lot of water but there’s water being used in the background, it’s kinda like that. You have all these immune resources that are being used in the background, cause your immune system is chronically firing off, so your immune function. Next is looking at various candida overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, which have a huge effect because they produce various acid ___[09:32] and toxic byproducts. And they also create chemicals that makes you crave a whole bunch of sugary stuff. So it becomes harder to stay on a good diet to your template. Next would be SIBO or various bacterial overgrowth. Whether it’s ___[09:44 – 09:48]. These are all bacterial overgrowth that are despotic meaning bad, so we have more of the bad stuff and less of the beneficial probiotics like lactobacillus ___[09:55] and then we have various parasitic infections. ___[10:00 – 10:06] various parasitic infections. And ___[10:08] h pylori which is some kind of bacterial infection too, or worms.     

Evan Brand: I’ve seen a lot of crypto the last few weeks, it’s very interesting because during the winter I didn’t see much crypto so I don’t know if that’s because people, for their self maybe are like, Texas, Florida, California clients maybe they’re getting back in Creekson rivers or streams or lakes for the season or what. But I haven’t seen much crypto and then over the last three weeks I’ve seen, I don’t know, probably fifteen to twenty people, including children, even as young as age 2 or 3 years old,

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: (Crosstalk.) Wow.

Evan Brand: Those cryptosprodium, I tell you for personal experience it causes a lot of stomach pain, nausea, it can cause appetite swing, or sometimes you sit down at the dinner table you just can’t eat, you’re just not hungry and obviously, anxiety belong with that because now, if you’re getting robbed of your nutrition because of crypto, you’re not gonna be absorbing your amino acids, and then you can’t make your ___[11:01] for example. Now, you’re tired, you’re wired, you’re stressed, and you just don’t know why. So, um, you did a great job on talking about stool test, you mentioned the candida, we, you find candida on the stool test when you and I look at that. However, we often find it more accurately on the organic acids panel because we’re gonna measure the gases that candida produces rather than the actual candida itself. So in the stool, we’re trying to find the DNA of candida which is a little harder to do, so we often see a lot of false negatives on stool testing. So this is why, we just can’t quickly compare or contrast your conventional gastroenterologist that you get referred to. They’re not gonna be running these type of tests, maybe on ten or twenty years, that could be the whole standard, for right now they’re not running these tests. So even if they did they called it “stool test”, their stool test could not be probably as intensive as the technology we are using because we are kinda on the bleeding edge here. So that being said, the organic acids’ profile, we’’l look at the gacids. And when we look at the gacids, you can also look at the other fungus too, so we can even look at the things in their environment like mold, because on page 1, of the ___[12:05]  there’s different markers that hide in candida but there’s also different markers that we’ve found that indicate ___[12:11] of mold. So you could have mold in your sinus cavity as so close to your brain it can go to the blood brain barrier and that will cause anxiety too. So now we’re talking about, fixing someone’s sinus infection as well as fixing their gut infection, and fixing their home environment. Their home environment because potentially as we’ve seen people like in Florida had one client who shits too much candida in their house. We did this little petri dishes for her house, she shits so much candida in her house, so much anxiety and we fixed her gut and three months later she’s got a white tongue again. The candida comes back and so we give her herbs again, her gut gets better, and then candida comes back. Say we need to test your house, so we test her house, the candida in her house is off the chart. So now what we did is we did the fogger, we fogged her house with the essential oils and the candida in the house is gone. So now she’s staying free and clear of the candida overgrowth. So, this is why you gotta take a step than even the functional medicine people saying “fix the gut, fix the gut, fix the gut” now you gotta fix the home, microbio home as well as well as your internal microbio home. You can’t just cherry pick.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and for every person this may not be the root issue but it’s important. Yeah especially if we can do history and you feel bad or coming out of the house or we can even just start with a decent play testing. And even from the ___[13:26] micro toxin collection after that and if we can see, we can put a check in each one of those boxes ___[13:34] confidence that what we have to start dealing with the home environment right?

Evan Brand: Yeah, exactly yes. The home, you know, like, like you said it’s not everyone. Like, I’m kinda over paranoid about the issue now so I’m checking some of the houses. But I’m only finding maybe 20% of the people were testing their home or showing up with the problem. There’s a lot of people coming out, their home is perfectly fine and I just say you know what for a hundred fifty bucks US it’s worth the peace of mind. Work the plates, check your numbers, and worst case scenario I’m wrong and your home is not contributing to your anxiety or other health problems.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I hundred percent agree, and also uhm, one of the things that you brought to my attention is very interesting is that you may have no history of water damage or no apparent water damage in your house at all but you may just have a high amount of moisture in your house because of the climate you live in, and one of the things that you did was you invested in a good quality dehumidifier attached to your ___[14:29] to pull the humidity out of the air. Which then makes harder for mold to grow because mold needs that humidity over fifty percent in the house for it to grow so you were able to decrease the humidity because there’s certain times where you may not have an air-conditioner on. Uhm because you know it’s, it’s sixty or seventy degrees out or fifty degrees out but the humidity still high even though the temperature’s low and that’s one of the benefits that you have of having a cool house to humidifier attached to your ___[14:56] to suck out that moisture which prevents the fuel source for this mold to grow.

Evan Brand: Right, and in the spring you’d love to have the windows open right so actually we did this over the weekend, we opened up all the windows. There was one day we have like seventy, seventy-two degrees out so it’s perfect. We opened all the windows up but then I go downstairs and I heard the dehumidifier’s running just in overtime and I go look at the percentage and their up to fifty two percent. So people they opened up their window and mold grows on fifty or above. When you’re like oh, the weather’s beautiful, let’s leave the window’s open for a week straight, you know, or let’s leave the windows open all night or let’s leave the windows open every day all day. That’s allowing all that moist air from outside, assuming that’s the climate’s moist, to come inside, and that’s increasing the humidity in the home. I love the idea, you know, open the windows, ten to fifteen minutes a day, let fresh air come in, wash out from all the ___[15:46], wash out from all the VOCs in your home, but, you don’t wanna do it all the time. A friend of mine, a mutual friend of our’s, Daniel Vitalessi, who lives up in Maine, it’s so moist up there. Uh, I can’t, I don’t remember the full details but I remember him saying about having a mold problem on his previous houses, and it might consider at the podcast, he left his windows open all the time. ‘Cause he like to live in the woods, and he love the sounds of nature and all that so he had his windows open all the time. But I mean all that moisture was just forming on his window sills and so you gotta, you gotta think about the building materials that we’re using. Like our ancestors they were outside all the time, you know, but they had like a buffalo hide, they had bison hide, you know, they didn’t have dry wall, and uh, you know, treated wood and all those sort of stuff. They didn’t have the same building materials that we used today. So, try to compare, “Oh my grandma she lived in the summer and she have air conditioning and her windows are open all the time,” yeah, but her house wasn’t probably made with modern dry wall. So those materials could withstand moisture, our modern day materials are more moisture sensitive.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Yup, hundred-

Evan Brand: It’s a bit of a tangible. Let’s go back to the testing. So, we didn’t talk about adrenal testing for anxiety, I mean that was one of my problems too is, uh, I would feel pretty good during the day but then at night I would feel anxious before I would go to bed, and I have that night time spike of cortisol that we often see.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so what we do is we look at the cortisol rhythm throughout the day and then the cortisol rhythm gives you a window to how your cortisol, how the outer part of your adrenal glands are doing. So we look at this high to low to lower to lowest type of taper. These tapers are important because it’s set by our HPA access. So we start to see these regulations lower by the morning or higher at night or it’s kind of bouncing around like we call the pinball effect. It’s pinballing that could create mood issues number one. Number two, we also look at the inner part of the adrenal glands called the medulla which make a lot of adrenaline. Adrenaline or no adrenaline, same thing as epinephrine and norepinephrine, medicine uses a lot of words to say the same thing. So, we’d also wanna look at that, ‘cause if we’re really stimulating a lot of adrenaline or no adrenaline that’s helpful to know so we’d wanna run a good cortisol rhythm test to look at free and total cortisol which is great. We’d also wanna look at some of the uh, amino acid metabolizer or some of these neurotransmitters. Like, we’d look at vanilmandelate  to get a window at adrenaline metabolism. We’d look at homovanillate to get a window to dopamine metabolism. And also you’d wanna get a window into B6 because B6, especially at folate and B12 are really important for methylation. And a lot of these brain chemicals like epinephrine and adrenaline, ___[18:28] they need to get methylated. So we, we need these carbon hydrogens to bind it to methylated, to activate it and that requires sulphur amino acids so if we’re excessively stressed or really methylating our brain chemicals ‘sause we’re making a lot of adrenaline, we’re gonna be burying under a lot of sulphur amino acids as well. And we need sulphur amino acids also to detoxify, we may not have a lot of extra sulphur left over to run ___[18:58] we may not have enough of these sulphur compounds to run these other accessory pathways which are really important for what? Detoxifying us from mold, heavy metals, various organic chlorine, pesticides, or stressors in the environment so that’s why it’s really important to look at these other accessory nutrients that are involved in the stress handling response. 

Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s take what you said. Let’s dig further. So now you’re deficient in sulphur, you’re not detoxifying properly. You do get exposed to pesticides, go out to a restaurant with your family on a weekend and have a good dinner knowingly eating pesticide and that’s gonna kill off good bacteria in your gut. Those good bacteria are supposed to make your brain chemicals so now we go back all the way to anxiety again. So it is this kinda self-repeating cycle. So this why you can’t just focus on one aspect of your body. You can’t just put all your eggs on the gut basket, all your eggs on the adrenal basket. This is why Justin and I don’t really say, you know, you know, word expert at adrenals, word expert at gut, or word expert at this or that, because if you go in with the microscope and you’re just looking with this one problem, like you could see the thyroid, and see that there’s a problem with the thyroid, that could cause anxiety too, right? Like if you have Hashimoto’s you’ve got antibodies that attack the thyroid and you get a little bit of hormone into the bloodstream that could cause anxiety for sure.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: (Cross-talking.) Yeah.

Evan Brand: I mean we didn’t talk about that extensively. However, if we just focus on thyroid, okay we’ll gonna give you ___[20:24] or something else to calm the thyroid, did we fix the problem why the thyroid is auto immune in the first place. We fixed the immune system attacking the thyroid by looking at adrenals, and gut and chemicals, all that. Or we just give someone herb to calm the thyroid and that was all we did.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: (Cross-talking.) Right.

Evan Brand: Because if we did just that, then we fail.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct, and I’m seeing this more and more with various functional medicine doctors that are out there. What I’m seeing there are people, just the thyroid functional person, just the gut functional person. There’s nothing wrong with that marketing stampone, and like I’m gonna market to those people but I’m gonna look at everything once they’re in there, I get that. That’s kinda where my focus is. You wanna reach out the people so they ___[21:06] with you but you’re still looking at the whole thing. I’m seeing people, I’m seeing people only focusing on just the thyroid. Or only focused on just the gut. And then I’m looking at their labs, I’m seeing these people coming to me as patients and I’m like, oh its’-it’s really too bad because had an anemia and anemia was missed because this person was only focused on the thyroid or hey, this person had an adrenal issue or other issues going on and they were only focused on the gut, they didn’t fix those other things. Does that make sense?

Evan Brand: (Cross-talking.) It does.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So just be careful. A lot of people out there are focused on, you know they’re focused on, they’re reaching to functional medicine practitioners that are marketing one thing and another for their anxiety but they may be missing in the treatment a whole body system that’s so important. So, when people are out there looking for functional medicine doctors, you know, if you find someone that you like that’s great, just make sure when you interview them, when you talk to them make sure they’re gonna be looking at all the underlying systems, not just focused on one system like the gut or one system like just the adrenals. Make sure you’re looking at the whole thing.

Evan Brand: Yeah, I think over the next five to ten years this is gonna be a bigger problem just because of the Internet. The Internet allows us do what we do, and we are very grateful for the opportunity. But that also allows other people to go pick up some high profile credential and then market a specific flavour of functional medicine. Like, I’m gonna be the hormone girl, and I had a woman last week and she went to this hormone functional medicine specialist and the lady’s loosing hair, in clumps and clumps and clumps every time she takes a shower, and we look at her blood work, and she’s never been – she goes to this hormone lady, I don’t know how, a hormone functional medicine never tested her, never tested her blood, didn’t look at her ferritin, ferritin level was a six. The lady can hardly catch her breath, she’s got major anxiety, she’s losing tons of hair. Like, look at your ferritin, like, if you don’t fix that, you’re not gonna get your hair back no matter what this lady tells you about your bio identical hormone plant. So, it’s just that, it’s – I think it just comes with the territory of this because as you say people are trying to market, but you gotta make sure that they’re turning over all the rocks.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: (Cross-talking.) Yes.

Evan Brand:  ‘Cause last thing you wanted to do is go spink like two to three thousand dollars and then now you gotta start all over because you didn’t address the other stuff.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You want the complete picture. Let’s connect this with some other things. Obviously we have female hormone issues like progesterone, low oestrogen or oestrogen dominance if you’re a cycling female. Obviously we have the menopausal kinda side where the hormones could just be low across the board, and we’re starting to have a lot of menopausal symptoms, from low progesterone, low oestrogen, because now our follicles, our ovarian follicles are used up. And then we have obviously on the cycling side, where we’re having a lot of PMS, a lot oestrogen dominance and we have lower progesterone, and that could be another component because progesterone is a GABA Chloride channel opener. So it opens those GABA Chloride channel in the brain, and allows us to relax. A lot of people could have a lower progesterone, oestrogen dominance, or just lower hormones across the board if you’re on the menopausal side. And the crazy thing is, we can also have similar symptoms if our thyroid is also low. This is why it’s so important to why you cannot just, just create a market and for one thing but it’s really important that you look at the whole component to make sure, other patients were hey, thyroid was the missing key to their anxiety, some it was low progesterone, some it was a combination of the two. And unless you’re treating and looking at it, and also treating it, then you know, you’ll know from you know, from experience what levers is moving what.

Evan Brand: Yeah, and I briefly hit on the Hashimoto’s, I think we should talk about it for a second because this is such a common issue. We’re seeing women with all sorts of different levels of thyroid antibodies. From the tens to the hundreds to the thousands. When the immune system is going after the thyroid, the first thought is, well, we’ve gotta calm down the immune system, we’d better try to stop this attack on the thyroid, but really, it’s fine at the first thought, but really what we’re seeing is we have to be addressing the other causes, if you give someone like a thyroid multivitamin, like it’s got your Selenium, and your Chronium, and  and ___[25:18] and all those stuff. That’s good on a theory but you could stay on a thyroid multivitamin for five years and still never get to the root cause.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. All the thing that I would think is at the low hanging fruit perspective ___[25:30]. So of course gluten sensitivity can create GAD antiobodies and GAD is glutamate, uh, glutamate decarboxylase enzyme which is the enzyme that helps make, uh, uh, helps make GABA in the brain and GABA is that nice inhibitory relaxation chemical, so GABA’s important, gluten’s a strong component in that ___[25:50] response. But also gluten can drive, uhm, Hashimoto’s and that you will see increase in thyroid peroxidase and thyroglobulin antibodies. And these antibodies are gonna stimulate attack on the thyroid, attack the thyroid, and you may spill out hormone and as that hormone spills out to rev up the metabolism create swings of anxiety there as well.  

Evan Brand: Have you ever experienced that, I mean you talked about your story with Hashimoto’s. have you ever had a day or a week or a time in your life where maybe a stress or, you know, uh, when you first had your son you’ve had like high in stress  did you ever feel like “Oh my God” like “My Hashimoto’s is kicking in”  did you feel that or-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I definitely had episodes where I felt like blood sugar fluctuations and that cortisol adrenaline blood sugar swing ___[26:39] issues in the past and I feel that potentially previous gluten exposures have potentially revved up the thyroid and had created some of those symptoms as well. Yeah I have in the past for sure. I tried to medicate that as soona s possible-

Evan Brand: Yeah, but it’s not fun the blood sugar piece you implied you hit them. Let’s, let’s – I know we hit that kind on Anxiety Part One, but with the blood sugar, you know in terms of testing, right? We talked about hormones; we talked about gut, organic acids, etcetera… Blood sugar testing, how simple and easy is that? If you’re feeling anxious, I mean I had a time where I had impending doom. I thought my god, the world’s gonna end, something bad is about to happen. I don’t know what it is, I checked my blood sugar, it was a fifty nine.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: (Cross talking.) Yeah, yeah.

Evan Brand: I mean, whoa.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know, I know. That’s gonna be an issue because low blood sugar will drive a lot of cortisol adrenaline to pick it up. Now again if you’re fully ___[27:30] adapted that’s better because you have a lot more ketones there but I still think, uhm, even when you’re blood sugar’s that low could definitely create some issues for sure.

Evan Brand: Yeah, so if you have anxiety, I mean, don’t automatically think oh it’s Hashimoto’s, it may might not be. It could be something simple like low blood sugar or high blood pressure. You know when I was having some blood pressure swings, I noticed when the pressure was high, a side effect of that increased blood pressure, was anxiety. So do you take anti-anxiety herbs or do you think blood pressure herbs? For me, it was a combination of both. I took, like, inhibitory things to support GABA, you know ___[28:09] etcetera and I also did some hawthorn berry and  some folate and some other things to help blood pressure. I kinda worked on both. That’s why really, people, you know, email us and say “Oh doctor J can you just give me a protocol for my Hashimoto’s?” It’s like, do you see how bad of a question that is? It’s like we have no idea what the heck is going on. Or can you just give me “Doctor J give me a parasite protocol” We have no idea what’s going on. Like, give me an anxiety protocol. You can’t do that because what’s the mechanism? What is the mechanism behind it? So, you know, in the long run you’re gonna spend so much more money knowing the whole foods or in Amazon buying this anxiety supplement bust, you know, stress busting supplement. Like, might help, probably won’t hurt, but, get the testing done. Get the data, get the rocks turned over. I can’t tell you how much time I wasted just taking this random herb for energy, random herb for sleep. And I had no idea what I was up against.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hundred percent. Well, excellent thoughts here today. I think we laid some, some good references for various mechanisms. How we can go down this path and of course how the gut is intimately connected. And I talked about the auto immune mechanism a minute ago, just kinda gonna dovetail on that because today’s podcast is on gut health and anxiety. A lot of that mechanism happens and works because of gut prebio ability. So with leaky gut and gut prebio ability have that mechanism where we have that undigested, whether it’s yeast or bacteria or foods include in our casein compounds get into that bloodstream through the gut lining right. We have our tight junctions, they open up especially with exposure to gluten and casein and potentially other endo toxins and fungus metabolites. They’re gonna open up these things get into our bloodstream and then our immune system is now exposed to it or these things now exposed to our immune system and can really heighten that auto immune system response now. And then that’s part of what’s going on here. So auto immunity is a big issue especially if someone’s anxiety is connected to a thyroid issue, there’s a good chance that thyroid issue is auto immunity nature, and then acts the part of it.

Evan Brand: Yeah. How simple of a thought. Like your, your dinner at the pasta restaurant could be driving your anxiety in your auto immune condition. Well it’s very well possible.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, excellent. Today’s a phenomenal podcast. To everyone listening if you wanna dive deeper with Evan head over evanbrand.com you can schedule a consult with Evan. If you wanna dive deeper with myself justinhealth.com click the arrow we can schedule a consult and dive in deeper. Yeah some of the labs we talked about today we’ll put links down beneath the podcast. You can access some of these labs, uhm, some of the gut tests are really important. Some of the adrenal tests, some of the neurotransmitter metabolite tests we’ll make sure we have links down below as well. Evan, any other questions, comments or concerns?

Evan Brand: I would just say don’t give up if you do need some type of anti-anxiety medication or something prescribed temporarily while you’re working on the root cause. I’m not judging you for that, neither is Doctor J. The point is we want you to get to the root of this and we see so many people that they wanna get off their pharmaceutical medications and they don’t know how. This is your road map to do so keep your head up, keep focusing on “What else have I not done yet? What other rock do I need to turn over My blood test, and my doctor said I’m fine.” Well there blood test probably sucked, get a better blood test, figure out what the heck is going on.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. You guys liked the show here put some comments down below. I love to hear what you think, like to get suggestions on future episodes. Give us a thumbs up or might share as well. Really appreciate it. Evan, today was great man, we’ll be in touch and we’ll talk this week. Take care everyone here. Bye bye.

Evan Brand: Bye bye. 

References:

https://www.evanbrand.com/

https://justinhealth.com/