Hey, it's Dr. Justin Marchegiani here, bringing you some essential insights on how gut health can impact your energy levels. We dive deep into the science behind how nutrient malabsorption, inflammation, and a disrupted gut microbiome can leave you feeling drained. We also explore the profound effects of gut health on sleep quality and how it's closely linked to your mental well-being. It's fascinating how chronic stress from gut issues can lead to adrenal fatigue, and we don't overlook food intolerances either.
Don't miss out on this comprehensive breakdown – subscribe, and hit that notification bell for more on functional medicine and holistic health. As always, I'm here to empower you to take control of your health, one video at a time.
In this episode, we cover:
00:58 – Adrenals and Energy
02:17 – Thyroid and Autoimmune Factor
05:58 – Sleep, Circadian Rythm, and Fatigue
08:16 – Study on Fatigue on Post-CV-19 Patients
13:53 – Meditation to Remove Fatigue
18:34 – Toxins-Occupation Connection
21:09 – Q & A
21:54 – Gut Infections
25:38 – Junk Food to Bad Bacteria
26:30 – Adverse Effects of Stimulants for Fatigue
28:26 – Nutrient Deficiency in Foods
29:20 – Food Intolerance
33:06 – Summary and Takeaways
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Justin Marchegiani here with Evan Brand today we're going to be chatting all about gut issues and how they can make you tired. Evan, how are we doing today, man? What's going on?
Evan Brand: Hey, I'm doing well. I was tired when I had gut issues, but I was anxious too. So if you missed the last podcast, check that one out because it was about the gut-anxiety connection. I would encourage you, before you get on anti-anxiety meds, get your gut looked at. But today is about fatigue, being tired physically. This could be mental too. So hopefully, you and I will break that apart.
Because when people say tired, what do you automatically think? I think, like they just want to sit on the couch. But this mental fatigue, this mental tiredness, that's a problem because if you have kids, you got to be on your best game. If you're an entrepreneur, you got to be on your best game. So if you have mental or physical, it's literally affecting your income if you're tired. So… (100% fatigue) This podcast, we can market it is literally this episode may help you make more money.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So when you look at the gut, we can put the gut in the middle and connect it to the different energy systems in the body. So we can look at out of the gate adrenals, right? The adrenals are important because they produce cortisol at a circadian fashion. Cortisol is a glucocorticosteroid, a big word. You break it down, glucose meaning it pertains to blood sugar and energy. Also, the end part is corticosteroid, which means it's an anti-inflammatory.
So let's break that up. So the more stressed and the more inflamed you are, you're going to deplete cortisol. And if you deplete cortisol because you're stressed and inflamed, that can also decrease the gluco part, which is going to help with blood sugar and energy. It's part of the reason why, like when your doctor puts you on prednisone or a corticosteroid because you're inflamed, you may notice your blood sugar go up, right? Like they'll say diabetes, and you may notice you get a little bit of a jittery jump in energy if you take it too late because it pertains to energy in your sugar.
And when your body has lots of sugar flowing through it, unless you're very insulin resistant, that tends to get people a little bit more energy because that fuel is right in their bloodstream ready to go. Again, if you're insulin resistant, it's a little different because it's harder to, your body is more going to be a sugar burner and will be storing that sugar if you aren't burning it. So if you're tired already and that sugar is going through you and you're not burning it, guess where it's going? It's going right to your fat cell.
So the first connection is the adrenals, and then obviously the thyroid can kind of plug in there too because your thyroid controls your overall metabolic activity. So if you're tired because your thyroid's low, you may also be cold, fatigued, have poor circulation as well, hair growth, poor nails, and skin. And so we have the thyroid and the adrenals, and of course, different nutrients play a major role with the thyroid and also most thyroid issues are autoimmune in nature, and guess where 80% of the immune system is? We can plug that back to the gut.
And so if we have autoimmune stuff, we have to look at the gut. And then so we have adrenals, we have thyroid, the last area will be the mitochondria, and all the nutrients that plug into that: B vitamins and carnitine and CoQ10 and a lot of the new nutrients that are so important, B vitamins play a big role with that, and we can kind of go into each system more in-depth, but I just wanted to lay that those things out.
Evan Brand: Yeah, heck yeah. And then also, we'll layer in the malabsorption piece. We'll get into that soon. But thyroid, if you could only pick one marker to run on thyroid, what would you pick? Well, if somebody says, hey, you're only allowed one biomarker to look at thyroid because as you know, conventional Endocrinology, it's TSH, and that's it, and that sucks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, if I only could run one, I would run at least T3 because T3 is that's the major metabolic component there. Now it's nice to see thyroid antibodies because that's going to tell me is there an autoimmune component, how bad is it? And that gives me the ammo to say, okay, we got to look at the gut. Maybe there's an infection, H. pylori, fungal overgrowth, parasites. Maybe that's all driving gut permeability.
Of course, that gives me the per the ability to make more drastic, strict diet changes, going full Autoimmune-Paleo. But you know, it's good to know that, but I always come into any thyroid case assuming there is autoimmunity, no matter what. That way I can never mess up and be too lenient on someone's diet, but I'll also come in there and just look at a basal temperature. I'll just go have someone get a fertility thermometer off of Amazon, and we'll check their first morning body temperature and see where it sits. Because low body temperature gives you a kind of an indirect window into someone's metabolism as well.
Evan Brand: And how low are you talking when you are like, oh, something's there?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I mean, I like to look, you know, 97.8 to 98.2 for axillary, that's your armpit, and then 98.2 to 98.6 for your mouth, and that gives you a pretty good window where you're at. Do it first part of the morning before you even getting out of bed that way, you can, you kind of have a resting metabolic window. You're not up and at them or you know, getting out of the covers and then cooling off. So it gives you a pretty good window what's happening under the hood there.
Evan Brand: Cool, that's neat. Yeah. So get a full thyroid panel looked at if you're fatigued. That's going to be easy, and I mean, you're talking maybe 200 bucks to do a really good blood panel and blood's not that expensive.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% not that much at all. So that's nice to look at. And then if we see the aberrations in temperature, like usually more than a 0.3-degree Fahrenheit or more in regards to the temperature from one day to the other, that tends to mean there's a lot of adrenal issues. So we can have this up and down aberration. So if it's low, let's say below 97.8, maybe like let's say it's in the 90 upper 96's and then the temperatures also bumping around but still low, then that kind of gives me a window. There's probably some thyroid and adrenal issues going on. So it's nice to look at both.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. Okay. So do you want to talk about solutions for it yet, or do you want to just run through the rest?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think let's, so we talked about the adrenals, just really important because the adrenals also kind of kick into other things because you have a circadian rhythm with your adrenals and cortisol is produced at a certain time frame in the morning, higher and then lower throughout the day. And so if the adrenals start to become an issue and become stressed because of inflammation because of chronic stress, emotional, or chronic nutritional stress or toxicity, that's going to throw off the Circadian rhythm potentially and create this HPA axis issue and maybe cause a reverse cortisol pattern where the cortisol maybe starts to go up at night and that can impair sleep.
And then also if we don't get good sleep, then that also compounds more fatigue, right? So you can see how like you start with the adrenals, but then if that goes off, that can spiral one to sleep, right?
Evan Brand: Oh yeah. Yeah. I was there. I had insomnia, but then I'd be drained during the day. So I'd be tired and wired at night. And then, you know, just not functioning well during the daytime, and I had a lot of gut issues, so it definitely added up. At the time, I was using adaptogenic herbs, but it definitely couldn't get me fully out of the woods. I was using Maca, Tribulus, Rhodiola, all sorts of different ginsengs, Ashwagandha can help, did some Magnolia for a while, throwing in GABA to try to calm the nervous system.
So I used a lot of the adaptogens, but if you stop there, you're really not going to get fully out of the woods because I still have these different gut issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bingo. Yeah. So it's good to look at, you know, kind of everything holistically. And then not to mention, we talked about the Sleep Rhythm, but if we're chronically inflamed, that's also a big one too because chronic inflammation is going to cause a lot more immune activity, more cytokines, more interleukins. And if there's like kind of autoimmune stuff happening going on, that can create more inflammation. And there's kind of this correlation where the more cytokines and interleukins that are present, that can also drive fatigue.
And think about it, right? If your immune system is so overactive because it sees what's happening as a stressor, that imagine, you only have so much energy to pull from with your body to run your different systems. And if your immune system is overactive, cytokines, interleukins, these chemical messengers due to inflammation, that's going to pull from all of the energy you have to run your body systems as a whole.
So that in and of itself can make you fatigue. Same thing you have these same kind of cytokines, interleukins present when you get sick, when you get a virus or a bacterial infection. And what's the hallmark that happens when you get sick? Because you get tired. You get tired because your body wants you to be like, hey, lay up, stop doing stuff so we can fight the infection. And so that's a big one too with inflammation, cytokines, immune, and then also fatigue.
Evan Brand: Yeah, speaking of cytokines and all of that, there is a paper that just came out relatively recent. This was looking at post-COVID-19 patients. So even one but, even two years after infection, there's still massive fatigue happening in people. So this study breaks it down further, but the long story short of it is if you feel like you never fully recovered, you got the virus, you never fully recovered, you still have fatigue, well, they're seeing even after two years that's still happening.
And when you mention cytokines, you and I have seen you can measure some of this on blood, and then also you can measure the mitochondrial impact on the organic acids. And I know because I've seen people either during infection or right after infection we've looked at their oat test and there's a massive change. We see a change in nutrient levels. We see a change even in the stool test in terms of gut inflammation, intestinal permeability markers, and so this is another factor that we have to throw in. And you can use Herbal antivirals.
I don't know what the latest is on the word so we'll say IVM. The interview that I did with the Pierre Corey that should tell you everything you need to know, but I'm still implementing some of these tools to get people out of this fatigue hole.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And so what's the mechanism of that? So the mechanism of that my thinking is you have this “spike amino acid”, we'll call it that just for the sake of the conversation, this amino acid that has a spike component to it. And when that's floating around for prolonged periods of time, most times when people have that type of spiked amino acid, it's cleared through the body through different mechanisms.
And so what you're finding in a lot of these chronic fatigue people is this spiked amino acid is hanging out in that bloodstream way longer, and there's a difficulty. It's difficult for the body to eliminate some of those spike amino acids. And so some of the things that can be done is and so some of the things that can be done is N-acetylcysteine. That can lower the load of that and then using these amino acid compound, I'm sorry, are these enzyme compounds like serrapeptidase, like nattokinase.
I would even say like these high-dose bromelain or pancreatic enzyme compounds on an empty stomach can start to break some of these spike amino acids down and that's going to decrease in my opinion some of the immune stress and so that's a good thing to look at there out of the gate and I think also modulating your oxidative stress pathways, IEV, glutathione, and that can be done with glutathione exogenously or it can be done endogenously via N-acetylcysteine in your body helping to make it.
And then I would look at things like vitamin D and things that plug into the mitochondria. Things like CoQ10, things like NADH, nicotinamide adenosine dinucleotide, NAD, NADH plus. These are good compounds. I like creatine or carnitine or ribose, things that plug into these energy pathways to support the Krebs cycle, the citric acid cycle, mitochondria function as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah I mean there's probably a billion people suffering. I mean if you look at the numbers of infection, you look at the percentages if you kind of extrapolate these studies and you look at the percentages of people suffering still one, two years later, it would probably sum to a billion plus people worldwide. So this is a massive problem that's also leading to long-term brain fog. So, it's a whole tangent for another show.
We could do like a like a long-haul show if you'd like. I did one on my own like a solo and it got pretty well received, but but let's go back to the gut. I just wanted to point that out though because that that paper kind of came across my desk and I thought man this is crazy. Think about the brain fog, the fatigue, the infertility, the hormone disruption. The joint issues, the heart issues, pots, long-term pots, so so that's playing into the fatigue as well too, right?
Some of these people are exhausted and then when they try to exercise, now their blood pressure your and or their heart rate is going up so now they're afraid. So now they're tired but then they get a personal trainer or something they go for a run, and now they have all this pots. So if you're if you're adding in mitochondrial support nutrients like you mentioned well then I may also throw in the adaptogens but then we also may throw in some heart support too like I love doing some Motherwort tincture it's one of my favorite herbs.
I literally, I don't know if you know this, but I literally have a bottle of Motherwort in the car. So everywhere I go I have this little stash bag. I have some homeopathics and then I have some Motherwort tincture in there just like if I have a crazy reaction to something. Hearts racing, you get in the car wreck, who knows you never know when this might need to come into play. Motherwort's great for emotional things so grief, trauma, anxiety, but massively helpful for fatigue and pots to stabilize the heart rhythm.
So if you're someone who let's say you're out at the grocery store and this is a true true story. But you know I have clients who they're worried they can't shop because they're so tired that they don't think they can get through the entire grocery store experience. I'll tell them, “Hey take five drops of Motherwort before you go in and that'll prevent you from getting into this pots episode where you feel like you're gonna faint, you feel woozy, you feel light-headed. I don't want you doing that.”
So obviously keep them on the mitochondrial stuff, the adrenal stuff, make sure you had stable blood sugar and then let's integrate some of the heart herbs so maybe we throw in some Hawthorne as well to try to help the heart out. That tends to be really good and then ultimately, I think also you have to integrate the brain into this fatigue piece too because I interviewed the guy Ashok Gupta, to talk about the brain retraining. And what I've noticed is if you can get people doing some sort of like a compassion-gratitude-contentment type meditation.
And they're essentially just turning off the sympathetic. I find the fatigue actually can go away so it's almost as if the fatigue is a protective mechanism like you've been running from this invisible bear. This threat, the virus, the gut pathogen, whatever it is. It's almost like the body wants to slow you down but then just by simply, we'll just call it downshifting the nervous system, (Yeah) all of a sudden you have energy and it doesn't make sense because essentially you're just sitting still focusing on your breathing. You're going to your happy place and all of a sudden you have energy from that. It sounds counterintuitive.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh I agree. I mean I think what happens is the nervous system is trying to put you in a place where it can consolidate energy so it can work on healing. And then the first time someone starts to develop a little bit of energy they're like, “Oh I need to go out and do this and do that!” Now it's like, “Well, no.” That's like saying you have this like ten thousand dollars in debt you finally put up an extra one to two thousand in your emergency fund on your way to ten thousand and you're like, “We'll just spend it all!”
Well it's like that's not, you know you have to kind of accumulate that and not fritter that energy or fritter the money away that's extra. So people have to look at that in that kind of context and I think in National Group does work he's talking about like the amygdala and that fight or flight response, and these people that have that overactive amygdala, that overactive brain stem, these are the ones that are just sensitive to everything the smallest stress.
Every supplement, every food, and getting that kind of brain stem fight or flight response calm down is essential so they can actually add in new foods, add in supplements which then helps support your physiology and healing.
Evan Brand: Yeah I mean you saw me go through it it was not not fun so luckily I'm in a much much better place now. Ketamine really helped me too. I've done probably eight, maybe nine hours worth of ketamine that really turned off…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: When was this? That's news to me! I didn't know that!
Evan Brand: Yeah, did I not tell you about it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, tell me about it.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so it's amazing. There was a local clinic here. They have several different, they might even have one up near you. I'll have to check. I think it's worth you experimenting with it because it turns down inflammation so much. Your brain is so clear afterwards and there's a lot of cool papers on PTSD, all sorts of trauma, anxiety, depression. But, In Neil Nathan's toxic book about mold, he gave a whole section actually. It was another doctor who wrote a segment about ketamine. I thought, well I should try this. It turned down my chemical sensitivity by at least half, like maybe even 60 or 70 percent I think just via the inflammation reduction.
This sounds like a tangent for fatigue but it's because the limbic system is so dysregulated when you have toxins. So, if there's gut infections, mold, lime, Bartonella, all the stuff I've been through. When your nervous system gets stuck like that, that also causes fatigue. So for me, after the session, this is done via IV, so there's one-hour sessions and then I did a two-hour. The two-hour was incredible. I was very, very deep and you're still aware so you can still talk. I mean you could have a perfectly flowing conversation just like we're doing now but it's definitely hallucinogenic at that dose.
So, I was like 60 to 70 milligrams per hour so it ended up being about 120 to 140 milligrams for two hours and then when you come out of it, I mean you feel like you could take over the world. You're a little nauseous, a little dizzy, but once it gets out of your system, you feel totally rejuvenated like you could literally do a high jump eight feet in the air.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I know it's used in anesthesia in the anesthesia world. I know they use it in like horse anesthesia as well. I look at a lot of that, I see it having palliative benefits. I'm not sure how much it addresses the root cause of what's going on but if it can give you that edge to move in the right direction while you incorporate other good things, I think that can be a helpful thing.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah get you unstuck, get you unstuck. So I'll probably go back soon and do another one. I just, the nausea is kind of hard. So what I ended up doing was taking a ginger beforehand and then doing a ginger after and then doing some Berber Panela after to try to clear out the brain because you're a little, a little fog- a little like kind of foggy, I don't even like to call it foggy. Your mind is clear but your body is a little woozy from it. It is a drug, I mean it's not natural.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean it's an anesthetic that's why I always like to draw a line when people talk about things like is this getting to the root cause like do you have an Ayahuasca or a LSD or a microdose of mushroom type of deficiency. I can see the benefits of it modulating the stress response maybe improving perspective on what's going on maybe helping to activate the parasympathetic nervous system but we got to make sure other things are in place to promote healing and I know obviously you're checking all those boxes off so that makes sense.
Evan Brand: For example, like there was a firefighter that came in and this guy was doing an eight-hour session. Imagine being on that for eight hours. And he had chronic pain, chronic fatigue, etc., and it's like, well this guy needs detox. So I told the clinic I'm like hey, they've actually referred some people to me since. “Hey, this guy, I mean Ketamine might help his pain and all that but he's got chronic fatigue as well because he's so toxic because he's been in burning buildings breathing in toxins.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: All the VOC and who knows, asbestos or other types of plastic compounds. Maybe it's an old building, it could have lead in the paint. It's all going to be aerosolized. I mean it's just a lot of toxins there for sure.
Evan Brand: So I'd like to just call out some of the occupations that may be suffering from this. This could be anything from teachers, pilots, librarians working around a lot of moldy books. You could say first responders of any kind so EMS, police, fire. Any of you guys could be exposed to different toxins that then affect your ability to make cellular energy. So if you're a chronic fatigue person in the military, you know there's a lot of issues there whether it's injections they're getting or chemical exposures, jet fuel. I mean I've worked with some pilots. Those guys are off the charts toxic in terms of jet fuel, gasoline additives, all sorts of things. So, it's sad because the people we look up to the most, they end up being the most toxic. The most infected.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, first thing we can do on that, we can use infrared sauna to help detoxify out our skin and into our gut. We can use N-acetylcysteine and glutathione and different B vitamins and sulfur amino acids to run our phase one, phase two detoxification. We can just make sure we're drinking really good, clean, enriched mineral water during the day. The solution to pollution is dilution. That's super important.
Let's get the inflammation down in our body. With the foods and getting all the junky excess Omega-6 linoleic acids from processed vegetable oils, get more healthy saturated fats, more healthy mono unsaturated plant fats as well. Coconut or coconut's more saturated but all of an avocado are going to be on the mono-saturated side. Those are all good options for you for sure.
Evan Brand: Macadamias, Mercola had a great article the other day that was looking at all the different fat contents and different oils and seeds. Macadamia is like your best bet. So if you're eating like grass-fed butter, ghee, tallow, the next one up on the list it's still going to be really low, it's going to be Macadamia. So good quality in terms of fat. I love some macadamias, you know put a little bit of salt on those bad boys and that's a great snack. All you need is a handful or two and you're good, you're satiated.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love that. I'm gonna make sure I pull that one up that's awesome. Love it.
Evan Brand: Now there was a question that came in from John. We could hit it because we hit on adrenals. The question was about the Dutch test. Does it show the fatigue caused by chronic gut problems and you eluded in the beginning about adrenals. So that would be something we would use.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, we would look at, so the question again was, it would give us a good window into some of the nutrients that could be at play. The DUTCH Complete would tell us about that. If there's a lot of chronic depleted cortisol or overly high or rhythm issues, then we look at all the physical, chemical, and emotional stressors. We look at the gut, we look at everything. So, I would never expect the DUTCH to tell me the complete story, but it would give me a really good important piece and it would tell me kind of other directions to look at. And of course, you know, you combine that with a good health history, you're going to be able to know what's going on.
Evan Brand: We kind of alluded to gut infections, but we didn't break them down. Why don't we break them down real quick? So H. pylori, infamous fatigue thing. I mean for me it was fatigue, it was depression, it was anxiety, it was skin issues, my sleep was terrible. Like H. pylori really took a toll on me and you know, I appreciate you pushing me through to get that fixed because you were kind of hitting it over the head like, hey, there's got to be more gut, more gut, and there it was. There was the H. pylori. And then also the parasites. Parasites are going to make you tired as well.
You don't have to travel to some exotic location to get parasites, there's many, many people like me living in the U.S where I've had parasites from freshwater lakes, rivers, creek streams, doing all the fun outdoor stuff I like to do. You're going to get exposed to these things. So if they take residence, you're going to have fatigue from that. And you just have to pay attention. Like if you have diarrhea and fatigue, there's probably something there. If you have skin issues and fatigue, you got to start thinking gut, gut, gut.
Don't just take the Accutane, don't just take the caffeine or the coffee or the Adderall or the Vyvanse or some other like methamphetamine derivative stimulant medication, you can fix this. So, quick story, and then I want you to riff on the gut piece too, but our kids are going to swim lessons and there was another mom there who was talking to me about her kids and how they went to this summer camp.
And this was like kind of off the grid, like in the woods, camp that she took her kids to. And she said, “You would not believe the medication line.” So you're talking kids like ages maybe 8 to 12 or 8 to 14 or so and she said the medication line for all these children was like a mile long. I'm like, “My God, is that what we've become now?” Like, she was one of the only parents who had an unmedicated kid. That's scary.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see it all the time with my kids and, you know, the nutrition that I see other kids their age have. My kids will eat, you know, good quality bacon or sausage or eggs in the morning. They get good supplementation. They get, you know, if they do a smoothie, it's coconut milk with collagen. I mean we try to really be on point with their blood sugar and their good fats and good proteins.
But most kids don't get really good proteins or good fats at all and so they just go from blood sugar swaying to blood sugar swing which has major effects on cognitive function and mood and behavior. My kids are already hard enough, they're strong-willed enough to deal with and anytime you let them have too much sugar, it's like, “Okay, this is what it would be like every day if we were on top of things.”
Evan Brand: I know, and do you notice that out in public too? Like at the grocery store or church, just random public places? Do you notice seeing fatigued children? Because it's hard for me and I'm sure for you too as a practitioner, it's hard for me not to want to help everybody. Because like I saw a kid yesterday, this girl, she was maybe six or seven, cute little blonde girl, did it kind of look like my daughter, and you could just see the fatigue in this girl.
Dark circles under the eyes, the skin was pale. I'm like, God, this girl needs help. But, you know, I just, like, “What am I gonna do? I can't just stop everybody and start throwing probiotics at them.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I mean the big issue I see is parents are kind of zombifying their kids with iPads. And don't get me wrong, that serves an important place. My wife and I went out to brunch today, and it's like, okay, we have 30 minutes to have a peaceful conversation and not be interrupted. So we pull out the iPad for 30 minutes, right? But everything else it's like, alright, it's Magna tiles, Legos, physical stuff, right? Go play baseball, go do a sport, play catch.
So we try to keep the technology down to an absolute minimum and use that as kind of like a life preserver, kind of when we need it for more for our little peace of mind, so we can have a conversation and not be interrupted. Any parent listening can probably empathize. But, if you have these technology things with your kids, try to keep that down to a minimum. It plays a big role because the more your blood sugar's off, guess what? When it goes up and down, you're going to be eating processed food, junky food. Guess what that does to your microbiome? It's going to cause a lot of dysbiotic bacteria overgrowth because the bad bugs prefer the easy digest processed sugars.
And so it's going to feed a lot of that bad stuff. And then the more those bad bugs are up, it's more likely to impact your endogenous nutritional supply. Meaning, bacteria in your gut, good bacteria provides nutrients, bad bacteria actually adds more toxins, more lipopolysaccharides, more endotoxins. And so, essentially, bad bacteria is going to poop more toxin, excrete more toxin, while the good bacteria is going to excrete more nutrients. And so, good bacteria plays a big role in having good endogenous nutrition supply.
Evan Brand: Yeah and not to mention too, you're also helping to manufacture different vitamins in your gut and if that gut is disrupted, you're literally not going to be producing adequate levels of your Bs and therefore you're going to be more fatigued. Your amino acids get thrown off if you're not eating or digesting your proteins well. This is not a rare problem.
I know sometimes the stuff you and I talk about, it feels like it's off the beaten path. But this is happening all day, everywhere. It's just people aren't recognizing it, they don't know where to start. Their kid's tired so they take them to the doctor and the doctor puts them on a stimulant so he can pay attention in school.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. That's a problem because the problem with that is it's going to fry your adrenals. It's a methamphetamine, it's a pharmaceutical version of meth and we don't know what's going to happen to your kid's brain when they go through age 7 to 15 or 20 on a methamphetamine, what it's going to do, there's primate studies showing malformation of the brain, certain areas not developing like they should. Just keep it very general. Now, again, what does that mean in the regular population?
All kinds of problems could happen, so it's always better off trying to get to the root cause, get the diet dialed in, get blood sugar dialed in, and use nutrients in place of drugs. And also, it's just, you know, the expectation that you're going to get a seven or eight-year-old boy to sit at a desk all day is probably an unrealistic expectation. So you could bring some of this conversation into a public schooling standpoint.
It's like, how do we have wrong expectations, at least for boys? Even girls, too. Girls tend to do a lot better at following instructions and sitting still compared to boys. But I mean, obviously, you're gonna have problems with kids as a whole, and just that whole parenting issue and schooling issue of kids being expected to sit there is going to lead to more of these medications that can impact stress and impact the gut, too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and this is all being compounded by mineral depletion, yes, and lack of nutrients that's even accelerated since you and I were kids. I mean, if you look at the latest U.S. FDA nutrient panels where they study apples, I mean, the apple of 30-40 years ago was better than the apple today if it's not loaded with pesticides. So…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, yeah, I had Joel South on my podcast that would test his farm-raised, pasture-raised eggs against the conventional egg, and he said he had 20 times more folate in his eggs compared to the grocery store egg.
Evan Brand: I believe it. Well, luckily, I'm seeing a lot of stuff now where you can get pretty much pasture-raised, on pasture their entire life, eggs at the grocery, even like not at Whole Foods, like just your average Joe grocery now you can get pastured eggs. So, you know…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%, which is good. People, you know, companies will basically respond to people's desire and what their demands are, so I think it's good to keep on pushing that. Makes it easier for all of us to access good quality foods. I think that's important. And I just wanted to highlight the next thing I would say on the gut side is just food intolerances.
Just so many kids are getting exposed to grains, gluten, casein, dairy, processed sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and then the glyphosate residues that are within those that cause more gut permeability, all of the food allergies, and then the glyphosate that compounds that because we know glyphosate is the major pesticide that makes up Roundup, right? It's a glycine molecule that chelates, and that is going to increase gut permeability. It's going to decrease the brush border, which is going to impact the absorption of nutrients in the small intestine.
So all these things play a major role as well, and so you have the foods, you have the pesticide residue, then you have stress, and then you have all the bugs that you either get exposed to via the environment, water, poor food, or just through antibiotics, just because you go to the MD with every little issue, they prescribe antibiotics like it's candy, and that creates dysbiosis because no one's coming in with probiotics to reinoculate on the backside.
Evan Brand: Well, it's easy when you get afraid, right, especially if you have kids, too. If you see something wrong with your kid, you think, “Oh, they're kind of tired. They've got an earache. Let's go get them… their ear hurts. Let's get them antibiotics.” Throw off the gut, then the kid ends up fatigued. So hopefully, people see the domino effect of complaint visit to whoever, antibiotic, gut issues, mitochondrial issues, fatigue, anxiety, depression.
So that's literally how this cascade can happen, and then you end up with several prescriptions because now you go to the psychiatrist for the anxiety, and now you're on something for that too, but this all started from the antibiotic. And I'm not saying that I wouldn't take it if I was dying. I probably would, but luckily, knock on wood, the herbal antibiotics have done so well for me with so many different issues, in my family, so many clients. I know between you and I both, we've got probably three, four thousand clients now between us, if not more, and the herbals are incredible tools.
So if there is dysbiosis, parasites, H. pylori, Clostridia, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella, any of these kind of scary infections that you hear about, that you read about coming out of hospitals, you know, “outbreak of Pseudomonas,” you see those things like “outbreak of crypto at a swimming pool.” It's like, I don't get afraid by that. I mean, when I see that on a test result, I feel very happy that we found that in someone because now I know how to fix it, and I know that they're going to have significant improvement in their fatigue, their sleep, their stress, their mood, their food sensitivities will even calm down if we can get that gut in better shape.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, we were on the lake a few weeks ago, and one of my kids got pink eye, and we think it's because of the water, because of the bacteria count in the water, and we were with a couple, and they're like, “Oh, you have to go bring them to get antibiotics and all this,” and we're like, “No, we got this. Watch.” And we just did two days of colloidal silver drops in his eyes, gone, cleared right up. We texted them back, we're like, “No, it's all good. We just used colloidal silver, nano-silver compound. It's 99.9% saline, and we just cleaned the eye out, no issues, done.”
Evan Brand: You know, my favorite because we had that happen, too. I don't know what it was from, maybe school or, you know, how kids are, they're in the dirt…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They're gonna wash their hands, and they just touch their eyes, rub them.
Evan Brand: My favorite is this Opticare, I don't know if you've played with this one before…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Homeopathic, or what is it?
Evan Brand: No, it's got honey in it, so it comes from India. I have to buy it directly from India. I can never find it locally. It's honey and rose. It's kind of cool. I think that's it. I think it's literally just those two ingredients, honey. (Oh, cool.) But nothing… I mean, you're talking, like, I got a pack of ten. I had to order it from… you know, a pack of ten from India. I think it was, like, 20 bucks for 10 bottles of the stuff. So, I mean, I need to start passing them out to people on the street corner, like, “Hey, I see you have red eyes, like, here you go,” because it's good stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, especially when you have palliative issues from, you know, rubbing your hands or from the environment or from, like, the water, that's… it's nice to be able to have something that's palliative, right? So, I think that's good. Excellent.
Well, just to kind of wrap things up, just to kind of summarize on some of the big issues that we hit today, we have our adrenals stress-handling system. We have our thyroid, metabolic health, which a lot of that connects to the gut via autoimmune. Most of our immune responses from the gut, I would say, are having a disrupted microbiome. You've got imbalances, whether it's dysbiosis, SIBO. You can throw parasites, H. pylori, fungal overgrowth in there. We have our circadian rhythm being off and sleep, just kind of that chronic brainstem, amygdala kind of response, having that overactive sympathetic nervous system response.
We have food issues, food allergens, food stressors, right? The food sensitivities. And then we can kind of put nutritional deficiencies in that category, whether it's B vitamins or magnesium or carnitine or CoQ10 or different nutrients like ribose to help our mitochondrial system. And those are a good six or seven kind of steps that we have to make sure that we address so we have good energy through healthy gut function.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the amino acids, too, for the brain, and tyrosine is going to help thyroid as well. So…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: put that in the nutrient category, in the nutrient side. Yep, that makes sense.
Evan Brand: This is a beautiful thing that people can fix, and the timeline of this, even if you've been tired for 10, 20, 30 years, if you get the proper data, you get all the clinical labs you need, you look at maybe some blood, maybe some stool, urine, that's really all you need, and you can significantly change your life. So, I know it's… People start to adapt to their illness because they're so tired, they just don't do sports anymore. They don't go for a walk anymore, they don't go for a run anymore, they don't ride their bike anymore, and slowly but surely, you just turn into a couch potato, and it's not on purpose, it's just you're too damn tired.
But you can pull out of it. I mean, I tell the story… I was embarrassed, but I mean, you know, my last house, you saw how steep my driveway was, yeah, you know, it goes past the pond, down to the mailbox and back up. Now, I could literally… I could literally feel like I was gonna faint sometimes because I had so much combination of everything, but going down the driveway and back up the steep hill, I mean, my heart's racing, I'm boom, boom, booming, I'm tired from it.
I would have this post-exertional malaise, and that's really unmotivating, like if you're trying to get into fitness, and you try to lift, or you try to run, and you crash for two or three days, that's scary for a lot of people, and it just turns them off when they give up completely. So, I was there, and unfortunately, I'm better now, I could just go swimming, like, I have my snorkel on today and just swimming hard, boom, boom, boom, and I'm fine, I feel good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, very interesting, too, there was a… there's an observation that someone made online that was really interesting. I want to see if it adds up, but they were talking about there's a massive deficit of kids hitting driver's age and not getting their driver's license, and it's like, what's going on with this, where there's just this comfort of likely… “I can be home, I can play video games, I have my phone, I can be connected to the world technologically. I don't have to get out there and go out there and do things.”
And so there's this kind of society is kind of causing people to go inward and kind of be reclusive, and this ‘Failure to Launch' thing that's happening, and you see it. I mean, go back to my days of, like, I remember, like, the first day I was eligible to get my wheels, you know what I mean? I'm, like, ready to go so I can get out there and experience the world and be in see places, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, I was living in Vegas at the time. I got my permit at 15 and a half. I couldn't wait to get out on the road, it was incredible. Yeah, I've seen that, you've right, you're right. There was a paper on that about these kids where… oh, God, it's something where even in their 20s, they're still not having driver's licenses.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They're like, “Whatever, we're gonna just stay in Mom's basement and just kind of chill.” And so, this just comes back to, like, you know, getting what, what one having a healthy relationship with technology and kids, the younger they are, you got to put up those boundaries because that creates a whole level of stress, and that can obviously kind of create this culture of poor eating, poor sugar, because we… the nutrition and the gut function is essential for forming healthy brains.
We need the good fats, we need the good protein, we need all the nutrients, we need to avoid all the food allergens to really have good healthy brain function, and that kind of connects back to what we're talking about today.
Evan Brand: Yep, yep, all right. If you need help and you want to reach out clinically, you can do so at our websites. So, Dr. J, that's Dr. Justin Marchegiani at justinhealth.com, justinhealth.com. You can reach out, consults worldwide. So the logistics are do an intake, get some labs run, get some data, make a protocol to get yourself better. So that's the long story short of it. Me, Evan Brand, at evanbrand.com. We're happy to help worldwide. You can also book an intro call with us, so if you want to chat with us, let us know your story, your issues, see if we can help, you can also book those on our site.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, and then we'll put links down below some of the stuff that we recommend to kind of help support some of these things. And guys, when you're thinking about this, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Try to find one thing here that you can take action on, and then if you want to dive in deeper, links down below to schedule where we can kind of walk you through everything, hold your hand, get the history done, figure out what the big stressors are, and kind of go about this very strategically versus kind of doing everything under the sun. We can have a strategic approach of getting to the root cause of what's happening.
Evan Brand: Yeah, all right, good to see you. Excellent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, Evan, great chatting with you. Take care of y'all. Have a good one, guys.
Evan Brand: Bye-bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
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