Functional Medicine Steps to Reversing Depression and Mood Disorders | Podcast #382
In this video, Dr. Justin and Evan talk about depression. Depression is a common mental disorder characterized by persistent sadness and hopelessness. Treatment options include anti-depressant medication and mental health practices such as therapy. Recent research suggests that factors such as amino acids and gut health may also play a role in the development of depression.
Another approach to treating depression and mood disorders is Functional Medicine, which focuses on identifying and addressing the condition’s underlying causes. This approach may include addressing nutrient deficiencies, addressing gut health issues, and identifying and addressing any underlying chronic health conditions contributing to depression or mood disorders.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
00:26 – Depression
03:12 – Amino Acids
10:14 – Gut
28:17 – Key Takeaways
Dr. Marchegiani: Hey guys it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani, today we are here with Evan Brand. Excited to have a nice conversation with you, man! How’s it been? It’s been a little bit! What’s cooking, brother?
Evan Brand: Yeah, not too much is cooking. I figured that over the weekend, I was looking at statistics, and I thought, okay I wonder if things have changed since a year ago or five years ago, or 10 years ago when I really got interested in the topic of depression.
Turns out nope nothing’s changed, depression is still the number one leading cause of disability in the United States. That’s shocking! and…
Dr. Marchegiani: Isn’t that crazy?
Evan Brand: This affects everything! This affects your marriage, the way you treat your kids, the way you treat your co-workers if you’re an employer, the way that you’re treating everyone. And so our job today would be to provide Solutions and maybe some testing strategies that someone who’s suffering from depression or other mood issues. What could they do at home from the functional medicine perspective, and how could you actually reverse it? Is it actually possible to reverse it?
And I would say yes, it is because we see it all the time and I’ve suffered tremendously but I’ve made massive strides in my mood over the years by slowly and systematically fixing little pieces of things that have been wrong with me from parasites and gut infections and mold and lyme and tick-borne issues, all of these add up it’s not just “Oh he’s in a bad mood!”, There are literally underlying causes you can fix so let me just jump into that first and say that from the Psychiatry model of depression, let’s talk, what about your childhood?
Well, what’s your relationship and how do you feel, and how does that make you feel? And it generally stops there. Maybe there’s a prescription given but they don’t ask “Hey when’s the last time your basement flooded?”, “Oh, I saw you had mold growing around your window trim let’s talk about that.” They don’t go into that. They don’t go into your environment, or how your environment may be contributing to it from a biochemical biotoxin perspective and that’s a huge missing piece of the mental health puzzle.
Dr. Marchegiani: Oh I agree! I mean, you know, there’s a study that just came out last year we talked about it, I think, in a previous podcast that looked at antidepressants, and they’re essentially not being effective right? And kind of that whole Serotonin model as being kind of an antiquated model. Right, so a lot of these older medications, they block these reuptake ports where Serotonin would come back into that presynaptic neuron and essentially go back into the neuron and be used up again.
And so essentially, that model of causing the Serotonin to accumulate in between the synapses, so we have a neuron, that’s the presynaptic neuron, this is the postsynaptic neuron, Serotonin would hang out in this area called the Synaptic Cleft. And essentially, the Serotonin will then go back up into the presynaptic neuron, and the medications would block that, it would block that port, so then it would accumulate more in the Synaptic Cleft. And so they’re kind of saying this model is kind of more antiquated. It’s not quite necessary that’s what’s happening.
And that’s interesting because this is the kind of drugs that have been talked about and used in this area, and this mechanism for, you know, 20 to 30 years and so, there’s also some nutrients that you use that are similar. We talk about, kind of 5- HTP, and some of the cofactor nutrients that we use on the amino acid side may plug into that model or maybe it’ll be a little bit different than that. Can we kind of talk a little bit more about the amino acids?
Evan Brand: Yeah, well, first what we do is we look at the urine. And you can measure the metabolites of your neurotransmitter, so Dopamine, Serotonin, Endorphin, you can measure these metabolites. Think of it, the analogy I’ve been using lately is to prove that there was a bonfire, you look for the ashes. So we kind of look at those ashes, and we’re like okay, look at the evidence here, there was a fire burning, so we measure the urine in the same way where we look at these breakdown products of those brain chemicals, and we can infer what the level of brain chemistry may look like.
And we often see low Serotonin in people that are anxious, depressed, irritable, they have trouble sleeping, and so we will plug into that amino acid pathway with things like Tryptophan, or Five Hydroxytryptophan, we’ll combine that with B6 which is a necessary cofactor for Serotonin and then for Melatonin and people feel better. So I think it’s crazy to think about how many hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds and millions of prescriptions were given out if truly those drugs don’t work! I mean are people going to go ask for a refund now? I mean that’s crazy!
Dr. Marchegiani: I know, right
Evan Brand: Like, what a disappointment really that model was the model, and what we’re seeing is totally the opposite. We’re seeing massive success with amino acids you and I’ve talked about free-form amino acids, these certain blends where if there’s low Serotonin and low Dopamine, we may sprinkle some Tyrosine in there, or DL-Phenylalanine and these people can make a recovery within just a few weeks.
We’re talking if you’re on a scale of one to ten, your depression is a 10-max like you don’t want to live. You could knock that down by half, I’d say, in as little as a month if you’re doing all the right steps.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, I think part of the reason why we see clinical benefit using some of these amino acids or nutrients, so number one, the medications are working differently. They’re not actually adding building blocks, they’re blocking the reuptake of that. The problem with when you block the reuptake of these neurochemicals into the presynaptic neuron is you increase the recycling, right?
It’s kind of like these neurotransmitters go back into that synaptic neuron to kind of hide out from the cold or from the harsh weather, if you will because the longer they’re outside the more they get depleted and so the whole goal of these medications is they block that reuptake but then they end up depleting and impacting a lot of the Serotonin long term. That’s part of the reason why doses have to be increased over time. So there is that mechanism that’s part of the reason why we see side effects with these drugs.
Number two is we’re actually adding building blocks, and we’re also adding the important cofactors that are needed for synthesis. B6 needed for synthesis, we’re providing the amino acids. Also, we never see a patient that has mood issues and we just say “Hey, here’s B6 and 5HCP.” We’re making changes with their diets. We’re reducing inflammation, we’re managing Dysglycemia that means preventing these high and low blood sugar swings.
We’re maximizing protein, we’re making sure we’re breaking down our protein, we’re making sure the fats are good that’s important because every single cell in your body has a healthy lipid bilayer and these lipids if they’re rancid, junky, Omega-6 processed vegetable oils that have been oxidized, that’s going to create stress within your cells and so if we’re using good healthy fats that are Omega-3, fish oil, good healthy saturated fats from pasture-fed eggs, grass-fed meats, you know, wild game organ meats or grass-fed butter or tallow.
These fats are going to make healthier cell membranes, less oxidative stress, and so we’re fixing the Glycemia, we’re fixing the nutrient density, we’re fixing the healthy fats, we’re fixing the digestion, we’re adding in cofactors and so then when we add in different amino acids whether it’s 5-HTP, Tyrosine, different cofactors, Calcium, B6, Folate, B12, these are important cofactors as well so we’re never just giving one nutrient in isolation.
Another problem with a lot of the studies, they’re going to be like “Hey this amino acid without making any changes in this person’s health, didn’t really create that therapeutic effect.” And we’re like “Yeah, well, we never would just do that anyway.” So that may be true that’s why science and functional medicine is hard because science wants to deduce all the variables and just do one thing at a time but we just control 20 different variables right there by getting their diet right, they’re water right, their sleep right, their supplements right, their environment-mold right.
So you know all these things that’s like 20 variables, and so that’s kind of where medicine and functional medicine have a hard time because there’s too many variables that can’t be isolated when we see patients.
Evan Brand: Yeah it’s really not fair too because you’ll see this one headline, this amino acid or natural medicine for depression is BS, it’s snake oil, it’s pseudoscience it’s like okay, well, take Johnny, who loves his wife, loves his kids go for a hike every morning, gets plenty of sunshine, clean house, eats great, no gluten, no Dairy, and he takes it and he does amazing and then you have Betty over here she starts her morning with donuts and she watches negative news, and she sits in the dark she gets no natural bright light in the morning and she takes it and she hates her life, and she hates her kids, and she’s divorced and lonely and smokes a pack of cigarettes and she takes the 5-HTP and it doesn’t work and therefore it’s BS.
So yeah, I agree with you it is hard because what we’re doing is 20 to 30 variables all at once and then we’re not even addressing the part that we talk about too, which is trying to get the Limbic System dialed in because if you’ve been stuck in a chronic state of fight or flight because of your depression, you want to get out of this hole, you feel trapped in this home, you’re trapped in this job, I mean this could be a three-hour mega podcast but the long story short of it is all these other variables those change, how your brain processes, stress, fear, and that all can lead to more depression too. So we’re always trying to implement some sort of mental health practice.
I love doing meditations. It used to sound crazy to me. I used to hate to sit there for five minutes and be quiet but now I look forward to it. Now I’m like “Oh! I’m turning back into the real me!”, versus this busy version of me is different so I think you have to be miserable enough to listen to us when I say and I know that our friend and Mentor Kayla has said this for years something like if you don’t have an hour to meditate you need two and I was guilty of that because I was like I’m too busy. I’m too busy to slow down, I’m too busy to relax and think and now I’m like no I need that time so that I am clear-headed and not depressed during the day because I’m less overwhelmed because I’m more clear-headed.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yes, so when we talk about a lot of things here different factors, just take it with a grain of salt you can find studies you can find people that have had benefits or not, the issue is we’re not going to ever just take and do one variable at a time. There’s going to be a lot of things, and the more leverage you move and the more you set that foundation of health up, the more a supplement or a nutrient or an herb or a Botanical or a hormone could potentially provide a therapeutic effect even though data out there isn’t supported because we’re setting a foundation and moving a lot more variables than these studies are. It’s important to note.
Evan Brand: Yeah, we hit the organic acid test also, if you are having mood issues at all. You need to look into your gut as you and I know there’s a huge correlation between gut infections and mood disorders, whether that’s anxiety, bipolar, depression even panic attacks, this could be coming from the toxins released by the overgrowth of the microbes in your gut so to me a stool test would be a critical component of a mental health workup.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, so in general that’s super important because 80%, 90% of all the neurotransmitters come from the gut now. Some of the data says hey these neurotransmitters don’t cross the blood-brain barrier but either way the amino acids that we take in those do have to get through the gut into the bloodstream and then those would then either get converted in the gut or go past the blood-brain barrier the astrocytes in the brain and they would get converted in the brain so the whole idea of like 5-HTP is those can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and go to the brain but we need to have good health, good healthy gut function to be able to break down and absorb these things and then also the newer model of depression looks at the brain’s inflammation.
They’re saying, hey a lot of the inflammation in the brain could be what’s causing problems. The problem is we know a lot of conventional medicine’s way of addressing inflammation tends to have side effects. We know NSAIDs kill about 20 000 people a year with gut and liver issues. We know Vioxx from the early 2000s killed 60 000 people with strokes and cardiovascular issues. So when you start to inhibit and stop these uh Cyclooxygenase the Cox Pathways. Cox-1, Cox-2, Cox-3 they can have impacts on reducing inflammation but those enzymes are also really important for rebuilding other tissues so you’re kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
And so conventional medicine, they have a lot of tools that may have a lot of side effects and so we know this new model of brain inflammation and mood is real and I think that’s why we can move the needle so much when we fix the gut because so much of the inflammation is in the gut. Whether it’s from food dysbiosis, endotoxin from bacteria, mycotoxin from fungus, or colonized yeast or mold, H. Pylori, parasites, just not breaking down foods and having larger food molecules of of dairy, Casein, wheat right grains and so all of this inflammation in the gut can be easily driving inflammation in the brain.
Evan Brand: Do you think you can eat your way out of this because that’s a common thing that just spreads on social media like wildfire is this idea like if you just get your diet perfect, all your problems go away and I already have my answer but I want to hear it from you because 90 plus percent of people that come to us are already doing something to improve their diet and they still have these issues.
Dr. Marchegiani: The more chronic the problem is no because I give an example of a patient, right? If you’re driving down the street and you get a flat tire right and now your car is not driving well, if I change that flat tire that day, do all my problems with my car go away? Yes because it just happened that day. But if I were to drive around on that flat tire for years and then be like well the root cause was that flat tire if I just change the flat tire I’m addressing the root cause the car should go back to normal like it drove three years ago well now you have collateral damage because you drove the car now aligned for years now the front end, the axle the suspension the shocks, the steering, everything’s jacked up and so just because you fixed the underlying root cause collateral damage happen in other places in the body.
And so then now you have to come in there and fix all the other collateral damages that occurred.
Evan Brand: Yeah that’s a great analogy. I mean the sound bite makes it difficult for us because then we have to explain that to people because people say oh well I heard from so and so if I just eat this, if I do kefir, if I do grass-fed Meats I’ll just be fine. That’ll fix my SIBO, that’ll fix my infections, that’ll fix my health issues and if you could eat your way out of this, if everyone could eat their way out of this then you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah and a good history is really what tells you because usually with a good history, you can kind of see where the first shoe to fall was right. you’re like going to the person’s history their diet was good their lifestyle was good they had a mold issue in their basement because of a flood that wasn’t addressed and it’s like oh okay that screams to me this is an environmental thing or you can go back and see there was emotional stress and then there was some diet issues and then antibiotics you’re like okay.
So the history kind of can tell you you know how things started to unfold just like if I told you my history about my car and I told you three years ago I got a flat tire, you could say Okay, I see how that kind of unfolded. So this is where a good history you know really makes a lot of sense and then you want to also go into it not thinking it’s just one thing. It’s just the mold, It’s just you’re the gluten, it’s like no no. So when you have people that are like just dietitians, the problem is all they have is food. So all they’re looking at is food as being the underlying issue and that’s the problem.
You have to have a broader tool belt because then you’re like okay, food definitely is blood sugar, definitely is. But then other things could be as well and you want to combine everything.
Evan Brand: It may be a little harder for us to explain that and we’ve done this for a decade plus now which is that we have to be generalists and specialists at the same time like if you go to just the diet guru he’s going to convince you everything that you do diet wise is going to fix all of your problems and then you and I go wait a second you take 20 depressed people that come to us there’s going to be 20 different clinical outcomes and 20 different clinical protocols for this people here.
Dr. Marchegiani: And diets too!
Evan Brand: It could be this lady here, it was the death of her husband, it was an illness, it was moving out, it was Trauma from her children and it was mold exposure and dysbiosis and she was on XYZ medication versus over here lady just had thyroid issues. Okay easy fix that depression, this lady here gut infections, fixed that, that depression is gone. So the problem with the mental health space is it’s like okay depression and everyone thinks they have the same flavor of depression. You can have 20 different flavors or 20 different little small rivers that all end up at the same symptom depression but not everyone is getting there the same way the same path.
Dr. Marchegiani: Bingo! 100 percent! And even with diets right, I see some patients and they’re super sensitive to vegetables. They can’t even handle vegetables; some have to be on an elemental or even a carnivore diet. Some are just okay with the Paleo template, some need some level of variation between an autoimmune or an SCD or low oxalate or so there’s always a different variation depending on what’s going on.
So food always is important, so when we look at food, we’re looking at nutrient density, anti-inflammatory, low Toxin and we’ve got to make sure that you can break the foods down that’s super important and then the next part on top of food is that we don’t have enzymes acids in bile support, dial then and you can’t break that food down that food’s going to be a stressor inside of your body. And then, of course, all those nutrients to run our brain chemicals and pathways have to come from that food so if we don’t break them down and absorb it then that’s a problem too.
Evan Brand: So let’s make that visual for people so this is a 52-year-old woman, she’s had digestive issues for 20 years and she has depression. She was told if she does go autoimmune or she does go animal-based, she’s going to be fine. She does it, now she has diarrhea, she doesn’t know what to do, she’s confused. How do we approach that and break that down?
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, so I mean, the first thing is we have to look at her gut because even a healthy diet and healthy enzymes and acids there could be infections and stuff inside the intestinal tract that could be creating stress and inflammation so we’re going to work on the enzymes, we’re going to work on the acids, we’re going to make sure she’s breaking down her fats, we’re going to make sure the food is dialed into to whatever degree we think we need to based on how severe the issues are and then we’re going to be testing, we’re going to be looking at what’s going on with her microbiome and her and dysbiotic bacteria and yeast and bacteria and potentially colonized mold. This colonized mold from the living arrangement for where you live could be impacting things as well so we’ve got to look at everything.
Evan Brand: Yep, Candida could be in the puzzle too so people blame the food and they’ll say oh well I don’t feel good with meat like I’ve tried that I don’t feel good I’ve tried to increase fats I don’t feel good and then they may give up and we’re like okay it’s not the food that’s the problem it’s everything else that’s in your bucket that’s making that a problem. You should tolerate this, you should feel fine with it, it’s just a matter of getting your nervous system calmed down.
Someone in the comments has a vagus nerve yeah I mean your nervous system is a piece of it, we were talking about the limbic system. You know if you’re stuck in fight or flight all the time that you know that’s going to impair your ability to digest your food I mean how many times have you been in an argument at the dinner table you get done with the meal and you don’t even remember you’re still hungry. You’re like did I even eat? Like that’s what we’re talking about here.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, when you’re activating your amygdala and or your limbic system, this is kind of your fight or flight response, that’s going to go up the vagus nerve or your parasympathetics go down it’s not a seesaw. So as the limbic, amygdala, brain stem right that’s the back part of the brain these are all primordial reflexes for fight or flight and survival okay. So very very important and the problem with that is if this is over activated the parasympathetics which are really that’s the vagus nerve, that’s this whole entire nerve cascade that helps with rest digest, activates the frontal cortex so you can make decision making, you can see the outcome of poor decisions and actions and then you can stop acting in a bad way right.
Most crimes and people doing bad things it’s because they’re thinking from their amygdala brain stem and not their frontal cortex, and so the more stressed you are that can create problems. I also saw, I read an article one time where a lot of things like road rage and like serious crime done like impulsively, was done from people that were hypoglycemic, so very low blood sugar. Because the low blood sugar kind of creates a stress response, and that activates the frontal cortex I mean, everyone can have that response of like dealing with their spouse and they haven’t eaten all day, and they’re just like, “Oh my God! I just need to eat like I’m just, I’m angry!” right.
So things like nutrition and blood sugar could easily impact that kind of brainstem response now outside of that there are different programs and things you can do, like you mentioned earlier in meditation or there’s different programs like DNRS or the Gupta program or NLP or EFT or EMDR. These are different programs that help get at the subconscious, limbic system, brain stem response kind of calm down which then brings up the parasympathetics and brings up the vagus nerve.
Evan Brand: Yeah and this was a critical step for me I mean I didn’t realize I was stuck in fight or flight until I downshifted from it and then I’m like, “Oh wait a second, man I was running running running like a little rat on a wheel”, and then finally I kind of snapped out of it, and I was almost running on autopilot I’m like wait a second I need to be more conscious with what I’m doing my actions and all of that.
So sometimes you have to say no to be able to say yes and what I mean by that is if you’re a people pleaser, you may end up as a depressed, anxious person because you’re constantly trying to satisfy everyone’s needs. This could be for your children or your spouse or whoever. If you’re a people pleaser we find this a lot. Those people are the ones that end up more burnt out, more anxious, more depressed, whether it’s a caretaker role as any sick family member or a sick parent or aging parent or just trying to please people in society.
So it’s okay to say no if you’re too booked up, if you’re too tapped out, you can say no to someone. Get your mind right, sit down, get your functional medicine labs done, get your work up done, so you can see what you’re up against. When you’re so stuck in fight or flight, you’re dealing with blood sugar crises, you’ve got toxins, you’re worried about your house, you got to get the plumber over to fix the leak, you got to separate from all that if you need to go sit out on the front porch and watch the birds fly for a minute to get your mind right that’s what I would do.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah you kind of mentioned the people pleasers. I grew up with some of those and it’s interesting right? Because you think people pleasing comes from a place of like, you know this is good, I want to help all these people around me. The problem is there’s also on the other side of the people-pleasing spectrum is a lot of resentment, because people pleasers will do a lot for this person XYZ, family, friends, kids, etc.
But then there’s this unspoken kind of goal or agreement that they’re kind of making that person is also going to make them a priority at some point and help them and if they don’t, it’s totally unspoken, this is where the resentment comes in. “Hey, you didn’t do this for me but I did this for you.” It’s like “Well, wait a minute. I didn’t realize I had to pay you back on that. I didn’t realize that was something I had to like to be indebted to you. I thought you were just doing that out of kindness.”
So it’s really important that you know, one, that you make yourself a priority that’s important because only you know what you need. Only you know the rest you need, the self-care you need, the things that you love, the hobbies, the time that you need right? Only you can put food in your mouth and get to bed on time. I can’t ever force you to do that.
And then you’re kind coming from a place of abundance where your cup is filling over and then, the spilling over is what you give away to friends and family and obviously, this is different if you have young kids right because they can’t take care of themselves but as kids get older and family gets older right it’s kind of more of that cup running over and that’s a much better mindset than having a low cup where you just give away and then your cup super low to begin with.
So just kind of make sure that you’re making deposits into yourself and then using the abundance to help others around you after the fact.
Evan Brand: Yeah and this could be something simple, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a supplement, this could be you taking a hot bath, you could be scheduling a massage, you’d just leave the house, go take a little drive, if you got to get away hopefully your spouse is supportive. If you say “Hey, gotta get my mind right. Gotta reset, go for a drive honey.” Perfect! These are the small steps that allow us to think clearly about our next action step but if you haven’t looked at your underlying issues, it’s time to look.
If you’ve done the diet, you’ve done the lifestyle, get the data because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yep and anyone that has young kids, you have three kids, I have two young kids. We know kids, their needs are insatiable and they will never fully be satiated where like, you go do this activity, you do this, you give them this treat, you have this meal, you have this experience, the kids will never say “Mom and Dad thank you so much for this great day. You go take care of you now.” That never happened, it’s like “Now we’re on to this! And now we’re on to that!” right? There will never be that closure of like, “Great job Dad, thanks!” It’s like “Now what’s next? Now what’s next? Now what’s next?”
So you have to have that like all right, “Now it’s Mom and Dad’s time.” We’re gonna get a sitter, we’re gonna have a date night, we’re gonna have, I’m gonna schedule a time to go for a drive or go for a walk or meditate or exercise right so you have to kind of have that boundary within yourself and know that no one’s gonna just probably pat you on the back and say “All right, you go do you now,” probably not going to happen.
Evan Brand: Yeah and that’s not really a sexy advertisement that’s going to come from the media or anywhere else. There are benefits to society being caught up in this Loop and when you can step back from that it really helps change your perspective and even just that perspective change alone can help improve your mood so this topic is all about depression but as you see there’s a million different little spider webs. Yeah little inputs here and I think this is a totally reversible condition, yes there are genetics involved, yes there are environmental pieces, biochemical pieces, nutrition, lifestyle, digestive, all of it adds up but you really have to just plug and fix each little hole in this happiness bucket.
If you think you’re happy I think of it almost visually this bucket of happiness, default that’s what it is like my baby she’s default happy but as you age you get inflamed, you get infections, you get nutrient deficiencies because the soil’s depleted. Even if you eat an organic orange, you gotta eat 20 of them to equal the orange of 1920’s,
Dr. Marchegiani: Exactly
Evan Brand: Well, that’s a hole in the bucket. And then it’s, you’re overworked, okay that’s a hole in the bucket. This is why tribal societies, you ask them, they rarely have a word for depression because all the inputs they’re getting are keeping that happiness bucket full or set another way, they don’t have as many holes in their bucket that we in the modern world do so try to plug those holes, fill that bucket and you can totally reverse from this to where your life is something you look forward to, rather than you dreading your life and wishing it away.
Dr. Marchegiani: I love it! I love it! And so outside of that, if you have like previous trauma, whether it’s sexual abuse or issue with marriage or kids, get the support you need on the counseling side, behavioral therapy or if it’s like some kind of a subconscious trauma that’s there from the past, you know, EFT, EMDR, NLP, these are techniques that really work on that kind of subconscious stress, just make sure you have support for that if that is a thing or not and then everything else that we’re going to recommend is going to be customized because I could have a patient with really really high cortisol and all these nutrient deficiencies, we got to get that cortisol in check because that’s going to be causing limbic system problems.
And if I see these neurotransmitters off or important cofactors like Folate, B12, and B6 off, that could be a bigger deal for someone that maybe have normal markers for that. And so a lot of the rec like, these are things that could be wrong, but then we like to have that individualized approach so we’re not guessing, we’re assessing. So this is where we’re going to do organic acids and nutrient tests, this is where we’re going to look at the hormones so what we’re going to look at blood sugar and diet.
Just causing dysglycemia issues can cause massive problems so you can go get like a Freestyle Libre Three, put it on your shoulder, connect it to your phone, and test your blood sugar for two weeks, see how you do, see how you feel, monitor that, creating awareness, check, track your sleep, track your HRV, see how you’re doing in regards to your recovery and your parasympathetic response. These are some cool kinds of devices that you can do to kind of monitor and bring awareness to what’s happening.
Evan Brand: Yeah absolutely and I would say for someone that is on the verge of giving up and they have no hope, have hope, just reach out to someone, talk to someone. If you are obviously suicidal, you know call The Suicide Hotline. Don’t kill yourself over this, it’s not worth it. There’s too many people ending their lives that they could have been fixed. I mean just a famous recent case of suicide was, it was the either president or there was someone high up in Texas Roadhouse. It was a, there’s a restaurant chain that was headquartered in Kentucky where I’m from, and the guy, post virus, had tinnitus, and of course he got depressed from that and ended his life.
It’s like, well, there’s a million things we could do to help with tinnitus, like if he could have had a functional workup, he might have been able to fix that and would have ended his life. So there’s so many different situations that lead to someone doing that but I’ve even had clients where in the beginning they feel like they’re at the end of the rope and by the end, they think, “Why did I ever think that?” “I’m totally out of that mindset now.”
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, the last thing you want is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, right, that’s what suicide is. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. We gotta have that solution-based mindset, okay? And again, the healthier you are, the more adaptable to stress you become, right, the more you’re going to think with that frontal cortex, the more you’re going to be able to problem-solve and get to the root.
So I think we have some good things here, that we kind of laid out. Again a lot of this will be individualized again if you guys want to dive in deeper, head over to evanbrand.com. Evan has research and resources for y’all, sees patients worldwide, and you also can head over to justinhealtstg.wpengine.com as well. We do functional medicine support worldwide, so you can reach out to either of us. We’ll put some links down below of different supplements that we like, different labs that we, like highly recommend work with a practitioner so you can have a guided approach.
Again it’s not just if I gave you a recipe right and I said, hey these things are, this is what you need for the recipe, but I didn’t give you the right order, and I didn’t customize it for you you’re gonna have a bunch of slop because if you put the eggs in after you baked it right it’s just not going to taste good and so the order of operations and that customization approach is so important that’s how we get patients better so just kind of FYI on that. Anything else Evan you want to leave a listen with?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I appreciate the website and we are some of the best guys out there. We don’t say that just to toot our own horns, we say it because we’ve been through our own struggles, and we’ve helped thousands of people worldwide.
I’ve confirmed with the labs that we work with that we are in the top 10 worldwide of practitioners running the most labs, and from that, we see a ton of data, and with that data, we can help people the average person has been to 5, 10, or even 15 different practitioners specialist, other functional medicine people, naturopaths, conventional doctors, neurologists, cardiologists, and then somehow they wind up with us, and we give them good results so if you do decide to work with us we’re going to take great care of you, as he mentioned, Dr. J at justinhealtstg.wpengine.com that’s justinhealtstg.wpengine.com or me Evan Brand at evanbrand.com.
We’re happy to be there for you guys, and we’re always willing to look someplace that someone else hasn’t looked at, that’s why we don’t give up. We’re just ruthless for the pursuit of health and happiness, so thank you all, and take good care.
Dr. Marchegiani: Excellent! If you guys found value in this, please give us a share with friends or family, write us a review, put a comment, give us that five star on iTunes we really appreciate it. Thanks, guys! Have an awesome day!
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The Root Causes of Anxiety – A Functional Medicine Approach | Podcast #370
Conventional medicine labels anxiety as a neurotransmitter imbalance and relies on pharmaceutical drugs to dampen the symptoms. Although, prescription medications can be a helpful and even necessary tool in periods of overwhelming anxiety. But we have so many more tools at our disposal than just medications!
Dr. J and Evan explain that they recognize that anxiety is often the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” in functional medicine. It’s the clear and present warning that something is going on below the surface that needs our attention. Our current circumstances may have been the breaking point, but the anxiety manifests in underlying issues. That’s why rectifying these issues is necessary to make anxiety more manageable or even eliminate it!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:06 – Acute and Chronic Stress
4:06 – Amino Acids and Herbs
11:24 – Gut Issues
16:26 – Functional Medicine Approach
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the root causes of anxiety, a functional medicine approach, and how to get to the root cause. Really excited about this topic. We see many functional medicine patients with these exact issues and we always want to get to the root cause of why that is so. Evan, how are we doing man?
Evan Brand: I’m doing good. You know the anxiety story for you and I talking about anxiety goes back literally eight years. It would have been late 2014 when I was in my luxury apartment in Austin and I was calling you and I was saying, “dude, I can’t stop this”. My heart is pounding. I’m freaking out. What the heck is going on and you said, “man, if you go to the emergency room, all they’re gonna do is they’re gonna give you some sort of anxiety medication. So why don’t you go and take about a gram of magnesium and see what happens.” And so, that’s what I did. I think I might have had some pharma GABA or some other tools on hand, maybe some passion flower and luckily, I calmed it down but little did I know back then that I had some of the big root causes of anxiety that were unresolved which included mold toxicity, Lyme, Bartonella, some of these tick-borne infections that drive up the nervous system, unfortunately. Now, knock on wood, anxiety’s been a minimal to non-existent part of my life and It’s incredibly freeing because anxiety can be so debilitating that people become housebound or they become afraid to travel, they become afraid to go on planes. They become afraid to seek the raise at their job. They just want to live in this little cocoon because they’re so afraid and anxiety is also very debilitating for children too. It affects their confidence and their self-esteem and their motivation for school and how they get bullied and so, I mean, we could do an hour on this but think just to open this thing up with a bang, I would say that infections are a big driver of anxiety so whatever that is a tick-borne infection like a Bartonella, Babesia, Lyme situation or gut infections like we’ve talked about a thousand times in the last 10 years together which is parasites, bacterial overgrowth, worms, Candida, anything that’s gonna release a toxin or aggravate the immune system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100%. So anytime you look at anxiety, you always have to get to the root cause, right? Obviously, if it’s unresolved emotional stress, your body is designed to create anxiety for a certain situation, like if you, I don’t know, if you have lived in a forest across the street and there are bears, there should be a healthy amount of anxiety so you know, don’t leave food out and you’re just a little bit more careful with your habits so you don’t get attacked by a bear, right? There’s a healthy bit of anxiety there which is good to kind of keep you on edge so you are alert and you make good decisions. We’re talking about things that are, you know, unhealthy amounts of anxiety where you don’t have those types of emotional stressors, right? Obviously, if those emotional stressors are there, kind of take inventory of them and figure out what that corrective action is you need to kind of close the anxiety loop. I always say close the anxiety loop. What is that action? You have to take that allows you to feel confident that you are not ignoring the reason why there is anxiety there. If you did that, great, awesome. Check that off your list. The next thing is like you mentioned, obviously, any type of chronic stress or acute stress can create anxiety, right? And so, chronic and acute stressors do different things to your body. They’re going to cause B vitamins to get recycled and used up at a higher rate. They’re gonna cause magnesium to get used up at a higher rate. They’re gonna put you in a fight or flight position, where your body goes into fight or flight and then that’s gonna cause increases of cortisol, increases of adrenaline and it’s gonna cause your brain to get hyperactive and obviously at the same time it’s gonna affect digestion too when you’re in fight or flight. It’s gonna decrease your body’s ability to make stomach acid and enzymes and it makes it harder for you to break down your food. And so, and then of course, the more stressed you are, now you’re gonna start craving more processed foods that increase dopamine and increase a lot of those, uh, feel-good brain chemicals to buffer that but so, I always look at like what’s the constructive vehicle to fix this, what’s the destructive vehicle. Destructive vehicle feels good at the moment but creates problems down the road. Constructive helps at the moment. May not, maybe not quite as fast but then actually gets to the root cause over time. And so, some of our constructive vehicles like you already mentioned, magnesium, right? Theanine, right? B6, B5, right? And I always look at nutrients first, like nutrients are in the hierarchy before herbs so nutrients first and then, in the hierarchy coming down would be herbs, Ashwagandha, passion flower, Valerian. Those things are nice herbs that kind of activate and stimulate GABA. So, GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. So, it’s the brake pedal on the nervous system. So, think of the gas pedal as adrenaline, as cortisol. That’s the fight or flight nervous system response and the gas pedal is gonna be GABA and the things that are gonna help with GABA are gonna be Taurine, Theanine, GABA in and of itself. And then on the herbal side, things like Ashwagandha have multi-adaptogenic effects. They can increase cortisol and increase stimulation when things are too low but they can also tamp it down when it’s too high. I like my wife. She was really stressed the other day. We are getting our kids out for an easter party and she’s like, “you have something to give me? I am so stressed.” And I’m like, “here you go”. And I gave her a bunch of GABA, Taurine, and Theanine and magnesium, some B5 and vitamin C and some Ashwagandha and she looked at me like two hours later, she’s like, “what the heck did you give me. I’m on cloud 9.” I’m like, yeah, you know that, the better living through chemistry right there.
Evan Brand: That’s great. Yeah, and motherwort. I love motherwort too. It’s great for the anxiety when you’re having, like, heart palpitations, blood pressure type issues as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hyperthyroid too. They use it on hyperthyroid, as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah. That makes sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Too high thyroid, it can also be. It can help dampen that down, as well, which is nice.
Evan Brand: It’s great for grief too so like the cool thing about certain herbs is they can be an emotionally calming tool but they can be a nervous system calming tool too. So, like, as you mentioned, there could be an emotional thing like a bad boss, a bad spouse, a bully. You know that type of emotional anxiety driver but it could be a chemical driver too, meaning like a toxin driving the nervous system to be ramped up. Also, we should talk about blood sugar. I know we’ve done podcasts on this before but you know there’s a big impact on issues with blood sugar. Thank the Lord, my blood sugar is so good now, I could eat dinner at five and not eat till 1pm the next day and I’m stable, like, I can fast for extended periods of time as needed and I don’t have any issue but however when my gut was a wreck which I want people to pay special attention to, if your digestive system is compromised, you’re not gonna be tolerating fasting that well because you’re already so likely nutrient deprived because of the malabsorption due to the infection. So, years ago when I tried doing this type of fast, I would have major anxiety and that’s low hanging fruit so do what you got to do but you got to get your gut tested and then fix the infection first.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, just kind of looking at a bunch of different things. So, on the emotional side, right? If it’s unresolved emotional trauma that’s creating anxiety, you know, someone wrote about DNRS, that’s great. You know, this NLP, where you kind of visualize a stop sign or something to kind of do a pattern interrupt. That’s excellent. EFT, EMDR with eye movement or different tapping on meridian points to kind of dampen down that sympathetic nervous system response. And again, these are gonna be good, you know, uh, more chronic issues. Yeah. If it is an acute issue, you know, a lot of times, just get to the root underlying issue where that issue is acute.
Evan Brand: I was on a plane one time and the turbulence was so bad and I started tapping on the plane. That really helped. I’m like okay. Even though it feels like this plane is about to crash, I love and accept myself and I’m like okay that’s fine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Especially things like that. You don’t have control, right? There’s nothing you can do outside of just sitting there and getting through it. And so, it’s better when those things are kind of the case but you know, it’s kind of like, I’m just trying to think of you know an example, it’s kind of like, you go upstairs and don’t turn the alarm on for the house or like maybe did I leave the front door unlocked, right? And so, there’s a natural bit of anxiety. You start going down to bed and that little bit of anxiety kind of creeps in, you’re like, I’m not gonna be able to get to sleep fast if I don’t at least just check on the front door, right? So, let me make, oh good, it’s locked. Oh good, the alarm is on. Good. Now, that anxiety can go down because it’s there for a reason, right? So, if there’s a root cause, act on it, right? If there’s isn’t a root cause, right, but it’s more emotional, you can do some of the tapping and you can work with a practitioner to get to the root cause on that and then of course having better biochemistry will get will make every bit of anxiety better because you’ll be able to adapt to it and deal with it better. And so, of course, like we already talked about with cortisol, chronically high levels of cortisol and adrenaline are gonna be big so you have to get to the reason, the root cause why. And again, foods could be a reason why like gluten, too much processed sugar that can drive up that anxiety. Again, you already mentioned blood sugar fluctuations. If you’re on this reactive hypoglycemia roller coaster ride where blood sugar goes up because you ate too much processed carbohydrate, refined foods, junkie, vegetable oil, omega-6 fats. Blood sugars up and then it can crash right back down. The crashing is where you tend to get a lot of adrenaline cortisol stimulation and on the way up, you get lots of insulin so you get this insulin-cortisol-adrenaline kind of tug of war happening and that can be very stressful on the body. And then, of course, if your blood sugar is chronically high and you’re making tons of insulin that can also be a problem too. High levels of insulin can cause all kinds of problems with hormones, especially in women, it can cause issues with ovarian cysts and testosterone problems. And then, high levels of blood sugar deplete a lot of your B vitamins and magnesium. And so, if we have poor levels of B vitamin and B6 and B5 and B1 and B2 and B3 and folate and B12 and magnesium is depleted, that’s gonna cause more stress and more cortisol issues and it’ll be harder for you to deal with and adapt to that.
Evan Brand: And I would say, if you have anxiety longer than the week, I would almost consider that chronic. I mean, it’s crazy to me, how many people you have and I’ve talked to over the years who’ve had anxiety for a decade or longer and sometimes as one person commented that anxiety and OCD together is terrible. A lot of times OCD does come hand in hand with anxiety. We’ve done podcasts specifically about amino acid therapy and we use amino acid therapy in our clinics but if you have OCD, anxiety, low self-esteem, worry, negativity, depression, disturbed sleep, those are all symptoms of low serotonin. So, what you need to do is to get an organic acid test so we can measure this and look at the brain chemistry because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing. So, when you’re listening to this conversation about anxiety, I swear to you, you’re never gonna find a psychiatrist that’s gonna say, “hey, maybe we need to run an organic acids test, maybe you have low brain chemistry because you have bacterial overgrowth. So, we’re also gonna run a stool test. If they’re out there, send them our way, we’ll do a podcast with them but I doubt your psychiatrist is ever gonna consider running functional medicine testing on you to investigate this. I don’t care if you do lorazepam or the klonopin or whatever. It’s not the root cause and it’s gonna dig you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Any benzo
Evan Brand: Yeah. Any benzo is gonna dig you further in the hole because now you’ve got this dependency issue and now you’ve got his issue of withdrawal and I don’t know if you’ve read some of the stories on this but my God if people try to acutely stop those benzodiazepines, there’s major major major side effects. So, it’s just not around
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Especially, if you’re on doses, you know, above one milligram or so on a benzo, it can be harder to get off and sometimes the taper can be, you know, six months to a year coming off of it. If you’ve been on it for a while or been on a higher dose. Yeah, you need to kind of do a slower type of taper for sure.
Evan Brand: And there’s so much, I mean, just think of how many millions. I didn’t look at the numbers here but how many millions of people are on prescription anxiety medication and they never ever get to the root cause. It’s so sad to think about someone that’s been on like a Lorazepam or another benzo for 20 years and they’ve never once asked about the gut. The question came in, how does dysbiosis cause anxiety. What are the mechanisms? Well, I think, one, right out of the gates is gut inflammation. Number two would be nutrient malabsorption because as you mentioned, a lot of these B vitamins are necessary for many processes in the body including energy production so sometimes you have anxiety and chronic fatigue and that sucks too because now you’re too tired but you’re anxious so that’s not a fun recipe either. What else would you say about the gut anxiety connection?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, so anytime you have chronic gut inflammation whether it’s from food, whether it’s antibiotics. Antibiotics are creating rebound yeast or bacterial overgrowth. We could put H. pylori in that category, and other infections, as well. That’s a one you and I already mentioned, creates malabsorption just from indigestion, right? Not enough enzymes, not enough acids, not absorbing things well. Two, you’re gonna have exogenous production of lipopolysaccharides which in and of itself are a toxin, right? They’re produced, they’re part of the gram-negative bacteria in the gut and they’re stressful on the liver and there’s also can go to the blood-brain barrier. And when they’re in the brain, they can create mood and anxiety issues as well. So yeah, lipopolysaccharides, you could have acetaldehyde and mycotoxins from fungus. You could have issues with the parasites producing their own type of internal toxins for sure. Of course, your body also produces through healthy gut bacteria, a fermentation process to make its own B vitamins, vitamin K. Those kinds of things. So, if we have dysbiosis, we typically are gonna have low levels of beneficial bacteria so we don’t have that good endogenous production behind it. And then, of course, that’s gonna over activate our immune system. So now, we have all these toxins kind of slipping through our bloodstream. We have undigested food particles, getting through our bloodstream. Now, our immune system starts becoming hyperactive and that can suck up energy. That can suck up resources. So, there’s studies on for instance H. pylori creating mental health issues, mental, emotional issues, depression and anxiety partly because of the lipopolysaccharides and endotoxins are the same thing by the way. LPS or endotoxins and obviously nutrient absorption problems too.
Evan Brand: Man, when I had H. pylori, I was super anxious. I don’t know if I was depressed as much but I was definitely anxious and you remember how skinny I got, I mean, I lost so much weight too. So, a lot of people, you know, they look at anxiety on the surface right. And everyone looks anxiety is just like this mental thing and you just need to watch some hoorah motivational video and just get over your fears and that I was like no anxiety goes way deeper than that. You just eloquently illustrated this, the aldehydes from the yeast and the fungus toxins and the bacterial toxins and the parasitic toxins and the mycotoxins. You guys, this anxiety is not in your freaking head. It’s not. It may manifest in your head but the root cause is not in your head unless you’re describing like, this toxin getting across the blood-brain-barrier but beyond that, the gut I would say is the biggest driver of anxiety. I’d say, if I had to pick one place to look, it would be the gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So, when we look at this, what’s kind of the hierarchy of addressing this? So, of course, you fix the foods, right? Because the foods are one. You’re gonna decrease inflammation from the foods. And the inflammation in the foods is gonna cause gut permeability so you cut out the gluten, the dairy, the processed refined sugars and flours, the junky omega-6. You focus on good high-quality animal-based fats, good healthy proteins, you know, more carbohydrate from fruit and starch, especially if there’s blood sugar issues and then from there, then you work on digesting it. So, make sure enzymes and acids and good digestion are there. Get your gut looked at especially if there’s any type of chronic bloating or motility issues or indigestion, unadjusted food in your stool, diarrhea, then you get your gut looked at and of course if this issue is more chronic, you want to look at your stress handling system so the interplay sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system in your body and your nervous system is your adrenals and so you can get your adrenals looked at cortisol rhythm wise, you can do a cortisol panel. Look at your cortisol in the morning and throughout the day. Make sure it’s not too high or it’s reversed. On a good organic acid test, we can look at neurotransmitters like Vanilmandelate which looks at adrenaline. We can get Homovanillate which looks at dopamine, right? We can get the DOPA which looks at dopamine. We could also get 5-hydroxyindoleacytate to look at serotonin and then of course we can look at B6 like a kind of urenate or xanthurenate, right? We can look at brain inflammation markers like picolinate and quinolinate so there’s inflammation in the brain that gives us more indications. We can look at oxidative stress markers like 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine. There are good markers out there to look at these different things to give us a window of what’s happening so you know, we work on the food, work on the lifestyle, sleep. Make sure we’re digesting and breaking things down. Look at the nutrient deficiencies, look at the gut, look at the infection, look at the digestion and then of course, you know, we can always branch out and look at mold or mycotoxins or heavy metals or more toxic burdens down the road. That’s the foundation first and then I would say on top of that, if there’s any type of chronic pattern where there’s an emotional trauma involved that’s more unresolved definitely bring in a good practitioner, you know with some tools in their tool bag of NLP or EFT or EMDR or hypnosis. Anything that you want techniques to get into the subconscious but again the healthier you are the better the emotional stuff is to resolve so if you’re doing EMDR and EFT and NLP and you’re eating processed food and crap, it can still work, but it’s gonna be better when your brain chemistry is healthier.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah. Amen. Well, think about all the people that are in talk therapy and then they go and they go eat a subway sandwich for lunch, thinking that they’re doing themselves a good favor by eating turkey on wheat bread with processed cheese and then they get mayonnaise or sweet and sour sauce on it or whatever the heck they’re doing and then they feel like crap, I mean.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m not a big fan of talk therapy in the long term. I think, talk therapy is good did you kind of just consciously process something like how did this happen maybe you’re learning some tools to enter into your life from a habit standpoint to fix whatever that issue was but then most of that trauma sits in the subconscious area of the brain which is where 90% of all your thoughts are subconscious and so that’s where you want some of these techniques like we talked about but I think talk therapy is good to acutely process what you’ve observed whatever your experiences are and then talk about, hey what can you do, you know, as a person today as an adult today, um, you know, from a habit standpoint to address it but then after that then you gotta, you know, if you’re in talk therapy months and months later and you’re still just ruminating over the same thing then it’s a subconscious thing you got to work on next.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and look, don’t let me talk people out of doing it. I’m not trying to do that but what I’m saying is I’ve had people that said, “oh yeah, I’ve been with this therapist for 3 years and I meet with them every week or every other week”. And I’m like, “okay and what do you do with this therapist?” “We talked.”, “Okay and what else do you do?” That’s it. It’s talk therapy and I go, okay, you’ve been doing talk therapy every week or every two weeks for 3 years and you still have anxiety that’s this bad. We got to dig deeper. So, like I said, there’s a role for that but it’s not gonna get you out of the woods. The person who commented about the dysbiosis and anxiety question, they also commented in here said they did have a stool test that showed H. pylori. They have extremely high Morganella which is one of those bacteria we’ve talked about and calprotectin which is gut inflammation over a thousand. Fatigue and anxiety were the main symptoms. We see this everyday all day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Exactly. I’m familiar with that case for sure. And inflammation in the gut can definitely create those types of issues and get to the root cause of it too. And then, someone writes in, about Accutane too, I mean, this is super common if you get into the dermatology world. I mean, dermatologists, they either cut something. They burn it off with a laser. They freeze it off or they use some type of antibiotic, topical or internal or they use some kind of like, synthetic vitamin A. That’s it. That’s the dermatology world you know in a nutshell and they tend to not get to the root, you know, we’re talking like more chronic acne, chronic skin stuff. They tend to not ever get to the root cause of how or why that’s even there. Diet, sugars, junky, omega-6, poor digestion, poor fats, poor proteins. They don’t really get to the root cause of what that is and so, they recommend synthetic vitamin A, which is Accutane, which again, will decrease the amount of oil produced by your sebaceous glands which can be helpful in the short run if they’re producing too much oil but they can create chronic skin and eye dryness in the long term and they’re not even getting to the reason why your skin’s producing too much oil to begin with. Usually, it’s too much insulin. Insulin is a huge driving factor of excess oil and then of course, you have different food allergens, gluten, dairy, too much sugar. That can also cause a lot of problems with the skin cells.
Evan Brand: And not to mention, the connection between people that have anxiety and acne. Guess what, they’re both linked to the gut. So, if you have acne and anxiety, you gotta investigate your gut. Please. Please. Please.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100%. And again, you know, outside of that, you know, we look at different toxins down the road. If we look at heavy metals, there’s different tests. We can look at, to do a challenge test on your metals with a DMPS or some kind of a challenge agent. We can definitely look at mold if there’s mold in the environment that’s important to look at. And again, if you’re in an environment where you feel better leaving that environment then there could be some mold in there, especially, if a history of water damage that was unresolved, definitely want to get your mold looked at or just your home looked at too, especially if it’s something that the whole family is dealing with just get the home looked at to start. It’s usually cheaper and more effective out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah. well said. And, heavy metals too. I’m glad you brought that up. You know, mercury and other heavy metals that can stimulate the nervous system and cause issues. So, if you have a bunch of silver fillings in your mouth, you’ve got to consider that. May not be your number one smoking gun, sometimes it is but heavy metals are a big problem and even detox too can make people feel too sick. I mean, you and I have seen this many times. Other practitioners that have handled people before they come to us or they’ve done something too aggressively with chelation or other detox methods and then they’ve ended up worse. So, there’s like a tight rope and that’s where the art of medicine comes in. Everything is not just like cookie cutters. So, too much is a problem. Too little is a problem and that depends on gut and detox and beta glucuronidase and liver and all of it. So, like if your friend got better and you tried what your friend did and you didn’t do well, that might not be your right protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Exactly. And then, just to kind of highlight the nutrients in, compared to talk therapy, Julia Ross is out there. She’s like a family therapist person but she’s done a lot of books on amino acids and diet and she had different clients that she used to use talk therapy for years and years and years and said, “hey, let me just try adding in some amino acid therapy to their protocol and let’s see how they do with their talk therapy when we add in the amino acids”. She started to do that and then these patients would come the next week and they’d be like, “Yeah, just, I’m just good. I just don’t even feel the need to talk about it. I’m over it”. And it’s like wow so it’s like it gives people the equipment to kind of, like, process these issues and again I think talk therapy acutely may be fine. It’s just when you’re talking about the same thing for years and years and years, you’re probably not getting to the root cause, right? This is probably just covering up something else, you know. Now, I think it’s better than being on a drug, right? So, if it’s helpful and you don’t need a drug that’s great but, in the end, you know, if you can do some of these nutritional things along with it, you may find that you can just deal with the issues better you know I, the analogy I get patients is, try dealing with difficult problems around the home and not having slept for a couple nights. You’re gonna lose your patience with your wife with your kids. You’re not gonna be able to think right, you’ll be foggy, get some good night sleep and then wake up and deal with the problem. It’s like you’re gonna be way more equipped to deal with it. I think that’s kind of how brain chemistry works when you’re dealing with these stressors.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I remember in that book too, talking about how, like, amino acids were administered, right? At the beginning of a session and then the people would just immediately like, smile or loosen up or relax and so it’s amazing no matter how much you talk. Long story short, I know we’ve beat the drum on this for a minute but last thing, no matter how much you talk. It’s never gonna change your levels of serotonin just by talking it out. If you have a gut problem that’s affecting your nutrient absorption which is affecting the tryptophan and the conversion with the B6 over to 5HTP and then over to serotonin and then to melatonin so sleep issues too. So skin, sleep, anxiety, they’re all connected depression. We’ve already talked about that. This person here’s putting a bunch of question marks like they’re mad at us. What is the connection between Accutane and depression?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s just a side effect. It’s a side effect of the drug.
Evan Brand: It could be a side effect. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Just the side effects of the drug. That’s all it is. Yeah. So certain drugs, you know, are gonna have side effects. Ibuprofen can cause ulcers and liver issues, right? Just a drug side effect.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well, we got to wrap this thing up. But if you need help clinically, you can feel free to reach out. We work with people around the world. We send these functional medicine labs to your door. We have an incredible logistical team on both sides where it’s incredible. We can help people in literally every part of the globe where people like us don’t exist or maybe they do but we’re better. So, if you need help, you can reach out directly to Dr. J, that’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani at justinhealth.com for consults or me, Evan Brand at evanbrand.com. We’re happy to help. You guys, don’t give up. We’ve been through it. We are warriors ourselves and we’ve worked on our health for years and we love what we do and we love helping people and there’s so much possibility when you can beat an issue like anxiety. So, like I said in the beginning, whether it’s seeking that raise, that new promotion, that new job, that new spouse, you know, that partner, that relationship that you want to grow but you can’t because you’re held back by anxiety. This is a huge huge problem and you can overcome this. So please don’t give up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. If you guys enjoyed it too, look down below, you’ll see a little link where you can write us a review. We appreciate the review and if, also, it’s benefiting you, feel free to share with family and friends and there’ll be links where you can reach out to us directly to get that extra bit of help. All right guys, have a phenomenal day. Take care. Bye everyone.
Evan Brand: Bye-bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
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How to Get Your Energy Back Post-Infection | Podcast #365
When people start to feel better after an infection, it is often tempting to return to previous levels of work, leisure, and social activities. However, too soon, trying to do too much can often be counter-productive. It is easy to get caught up in a ‘boom and bust cycle of activity that can prolong your recovery.
Dr. J and Evan discuss that if fatigue and other symptoms persist, it’s important to remember to allow yourself time to recuperate by finding the right balance of rest, relaxation, and activity for your circumstances. It is essential to listen to your body and gradually build a physical and emotional recovery plan that can help you get back to your life and stay on track without experiencing too many setbacks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
5:11 – The essential vitamins to boost your immune system
10:12 – What is the goal of the Krebs Cycle?
14:06 – Mitochondria and microbiota dysfunction in viral pathogens;
17:12 – The role of mitochondria, oxidative stress, and the response to antioxidants in chronic fatigue
20:08 – The neurotransmitters from amino acids and tryptophan pathways in B6 deficiency
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: With Evan Brand, really excited today. We’re gonna have a nice conversation on how to get your energy back post-infection. This is the topic that we’ve been getting a lot from our patients and again a lot of our inspired podcasts and videos come from real life clinical work with patients. So, we’re excited to bring you the real-life actionable information here to improve your health. Evan, how you doing today man? What’s cooking?
Evan Brand: Hey. Doing pretty well, uh, cooked some bacon this morning and that was about it with some organic blueberries and so I’m feeling good. my brain is clear and I look forward to helping people on this energy conversation, you know, so many people have chronic fatigue post-infection and they’re not fully bouncing back and so, I think that there are some easy low hanging fruit strategies that we can talk about but I’m just gonna jump straight to the big smoking gun which is looking at your mitochondria. We’re seeing a lot of issues with mitochondrial dysfunction or mitochondrial damage. I’m also seeing issues with neurotransmitters. So, I think, if you are to pick one and only one functional medicine test to look at to investigate yourself after this infection and fatigue, it would be the organic acids because you can get a great window into not only your gut health. We know that with infections, it does damage the gut, we know that there are ACE2 receptors in the gut so people that are ending up with irritable bowel or diarrhea or other problems during and post infection, we can look at that. A stool might be smart too but if you had to start with only one thing maybe the window into your gut via urine organic acids would be good enough. But more importantly, I want to see what the heck is going on with mitochondria and what kind of damage do we have because once you have the data then you can put together a protocol to fix it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% agree. So, we know with chronic inflammation, especially like, post-viral inflammation. We know one of the biggest drivers is gonna be oxidative stress, right? So, oxidation is nothing more than your body losing electrons, right? And one of the big things that helps oxidation within any type of infection pre, ideally, we’re doing these things pre to mitigate al of the oxidative stress that’s happening at the mitochondrial level but simple low hanging fruit, out of the gates, is gonna be glutathione, vitamin C, these are really powerful antioxidants. Vitamin D even kind of fits in that category, right? Your big antioxidants are ADEK, um, I’m sorry, no, those are your fat-soluble vitamins but E is gonna be an antioxidant A is gonna be an antioxidant, right? I would even say E and K would for sure but your B and C are gonna be your water-soluble kind of more antioxidants for sure but the big are gonna plug in, you know, post-viral oxidative stress and/or pre is glutathione and vitamin C, out of the gates. And we can also look at low-hanging fruit on the mitochondrial side, which plugs into the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain is gonna be B1, which is thiamine. I would say B vitamins as a whole was great but B1 has a major, major role and I’d even say B5, as well, pantothenic acid. So, you have thiamine, B1, right? You have Riboflavin, B2. You have niacin, B3; Pantothenic acid, B5; Pyridoxine, B6; biotin, B7; folate, B9; B12 is your methylcobalamin or hydroxyl or adenosine. And so, we’re talking B1 and B5 are gonna be big when it comes to post-viral fatigue. Those are really, really important nutrients that we can add in out of the gates and, why it’s all of this oxidative stress that’s happening when this infection is present. And so, the more you can do things like hydrate, keep inflammatory foods down like the excess Omega-6 fatty acids, um, keep the carbohydrate and the sugar in check, right? That’s gonna play a major, major role in not adding fuel to the fire if you will as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and you can do oral glutathione. So, we have a combination product, which is an acetylated glutathione along with an acetylcysteine. So, you can give your body the nutrients to make more. You can give the precursors but then you can also take just straight glutathione. There are some liposomal versions. There’s reduced glutathione. There’s a nebulizer version that you can take so you can inhale glutathione if you feel that there was some lung involvement. You may consider doing both. I personally did both. I did oral and I continued to do oral glutathione daily and then, also, during the acute situation, nebulized glutathione with silver. And then, you mentioned B vitamins and you can measure all this, right? So that’s the important thing is, you know, you’re shouting out all these different names but people can look at this, right? We can look at this on organic acids. We can look at the various B6, B12. You can’t look at every single nutrient in the body but you can look at a ton of nutrients from one urine sample. So, it’s pretty awesome. And then, vitamin C, believe it or not, we’re seeing a lot of issues with viral infection and acute scurvy, which is pretty interesting. If you just put it some of this data and scurvy into the research, I guess, it’s due to the oxidative stress. It’s happening quickly and every single person I’m seeing post-infection is showing low vitamin C. So, we’re just keeping people on 2 to 3 grams every day. We’re doing a powdered version with a mixed ascorbate. So, you probably don’t want to do just straight ascorbic acid and you probably wanna do like a sodium ascorbate, magnesium ascorbate, if you can get some citrus bioflavonoids in there too and just take it ongoing. Don’t wait until you’re sick. We, as a family, we just take vitamin C ongoing because we know it’s important for the health of your capillaries and all that. Can you speak on that for a minute? Like vitamin C and skin and collagen, I mean there’s a role in other things. People think vitamin C, immune, but there’s other benefits to see, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Vitamin C plugs into making collagen, which is all of the connective tissue for your skin, uh, hair, you know, cartilage, vitamin C is really important for that. Vitamin C is a very similar molecular structure as glucose, right? Don’t quote me but it’s similar to I think C6H12O6 or O8, it’s right in that molecular area, looks very similar. So, what does that mean? That means, vitamin C has a docking site on the macrophage that actually goes and gobbles up bacteria and potential viruses and it’s gonna use that vitamin C that docks onto that macrophage to deal with the oxidation. So, I kind of think of it as like a firefighter going into a house and the vitamin C is like that fire fighter bringing that hose to squelch that fire, to squelch it, right? That’s kind of what I see vitamin C as, right? And, it’s almost like with the macrophage, it has a docking site and that glucose can actually come in there because it looks very molecularly similar to vitamin C and it can almost dock on that receptor site on that macrophage and take that vitamin C where to be used. It’s almost like giving the fire fighter a water hose, taking the water hose out and giving him a gas hose and he doesn’t even know. It’s almost like that and that’s why glucose and high levels of glucose and when it comes to a lot of these post-viral illnesses, you’re gonna see people that have very high levels of blood sugar, insulin resistance and even the extreme on the diabetes side are gonna have most of the side effects of most of the issues partly because of the oxidative stress, partly because of poor levels, you know, when you have insulin resistance that’s gonna affect oxygenation, right? Because, you’re not gonna have good blood flow and when you have poor blood flow and poor oxygenation, we need oxygen to plug into that mitochondria as well. It’s part of, you know, the key nutrients, right? We talked about B vitamins, B1, B5, very important to plug into the Krebs cycle. Well, guess what, when you have a high level of blood glucose and you’re on that pre-diabetic to diabetic side, right, 110 to 126mg/dl on the blood glucose side, your body has to process that and if you just go pull up, you know mitochondria, Krebs cycle and nutrients, right, you’re gonna see all the nutrients that are involved in that Krebs cycle to process that glucose because how it works in the Krebs cycle, everything gets funneled down to acetyl CoA, right? So, you have glucose comes to acetyl CoA, fatty acids come to acetyl CoA, they can also go this way into ketones and then you have protein coming down to acetyl CoA. Acetyl CoA pumps around the Krebs cycle twice and if you look, there’s gonna be nutrients that have to come in there to help that acetyl CoA to come around and a lot of those nutrients are gonna be B vitamins, magnesium, amino acids and so, if you’re coming in with lots of glucose and you’re not bringing in a lot of nutrients to funnel down to the acetyl CoA side, you’re gonna run that Krebs cycle twice and you’re gonna be using more B vitamins than you’re coming in. So, you can actually create a lot of nutrient deficiencies and oxidative stress when you consume a lot more glucose because it’s a transaction fee for your body to process energetically.
Evan Brand: Nice. Nice. That’s a great way to put it. And, the truth is people are coming into this infection with nutrient deficiencies already due to bacterial overgrowth problems, Candida problems, maybe post-antibiotic therapy, you know, they have issues with the gut now and they’re not making enough of their nutrients in their gut. And so, a lot of people will just depend on diet and they’ll simply, well, can I just get enough on diet, can I just eat liver and grass-fed steak and all that and get enough nutrients from that and I’ll say, look I’ve tested and I know, you have too. Over a thousand people and many of those people were already dialed in with their diet for years before they got to us. Paleo, carnivore, autoimmune, paleo, we’ve had people that have been doing an incredibly job with nutrient density and they still show up with nutrient deficiencies and so I would love if everyone could just eat their way out of this situation but I just think with the modern stress that we’re under we’re dumping a lot of those Bs. You’re mentioning all these that are fueling this cycle. We’re so depleted and burned out emotionally, physically, chemically, we’re exposed to toxins. We’re just not living in Paleo time, so Paleo, you can’t just like paleo your way out of this and you know, that’s why I used to call my podcast years ago ‘Not just Paleo’ and then I got rid of it, just call it Evan Brand now but, um, that was my whole thought at the beginning. It was like, man, if everybody could just eat their way out this and get enough Bs in the diet then you and I wouldn’t be needed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Let me just kind of break this down for people just so they can get a better understanding of what’s happening here. So, when we have oxidative stress, oxidative stresses, we’re losing electrons. What’s the whole goal of the Krebs Cycle? The whole goal of the Krebs cycle is essentially gathering up electrons. Okay, so, you have fats like I mentioned before, they’re all funneling down to Acetyl-CoA. Proteins all funneling down to acetyl-CoA, right? Then you can see on the carbohydrate side like I mentioned, look at a lot of the nutrients that are involved in funneling the carbohydrates down to acetyl-CoA, different B vitamins, okay?
Evan Brand: Zoom in so,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: B1, B2, B3, magnesium, all play really important roles and then look at the carbohydrates, look at the amino acids that are involved. Cysteine, that’s a major precursor of glutathione, serine, really important for stress. Glycine, that’s your major amino acid in collagen, right? This is why, when you’re stressed and you’re sick, it’s why your grandma tells you to have chicken soup, right, especially with the whole bone in there because you’re getting a lot of these amino acids in a liquid form. So, if your tummy doesn’t feel good and you’re nauseous, right, because the infections tend to really cause nausea because your energy is going to fight an infection versus digestion. So, it’s trying to shut that down. That’s why your grandma said chicken soup, right? Ideally, we keep the noodles out now. Now, look at the fats, right, look at where the fats can go so the fats go down to acetyl-CoA but it can also go and create these ketones, right. This is beta-hydroxybutyrate. This is a ketone, okay? Now, really important here. So, we have this acetyl-CoA, right, this is kind of our energy currency that everything gets converted from our three major macronutrients, fats, carbs and proteins. And again, if you’re listening at home, there’s a video version of this of me going through it. I know, it’s a little confusing but I’m going to try to make, break it down. Acetyl-CoA comes around this citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle. It’s the same thing. It goes around twice, okay? And you can see GSH that stands for glutathione. Fe stands for Iron. So, if you’re a female and you’re very low iron or you’re anemic or vegetarian vegan, that could be a problem.
Evan Brand: So, let me pause there, really quick, because I want to point out something. You’re showing here on this cycle that you’ve got to have not only glutathione but you’ve got to have iron so you gave a shout out to the anemic women and what I want to point out is that the women that came into this infection, anemic, which is extremely common. Women have hormonal imbalances. It’s an epidemic problem so many women have heavy periods or maybe post childbirth, their period was screwed up and they’re having heavy menstruation. So, they’re coming into this anemic or they’re coming into this with low ferritin and then that’s compounded by maybe a mold exposure where now they have low glutathione levels. The way you’re showing this cycle here, if you come in with low iron and low glutathione, you’re in big trouble.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re in big trouble. And, women are more predisposed because if they have hormonal imbalances, guess what happens to their period, they get heavier. Heavier period, they’re just gonna lose that iron. Now, men on the other side, men have it, you know, they can have increased iron. They can cause oxidative stress because iron is like, you know can be like gasoline on the fire if it does get too high, right? But you can see glutathione, iron, you can see B vitamins, you can see magnesium, you can even see manganese here and you can see different B vitamins. And, what they do is you’re creating NAD and FADH and they’re grabbing hydrogen, they’re grabbing electrons, okay? So, typically comes around here twice and you get usually two NADHs and one FADH2 per cycle and then essentially all of these things will jump into the electron transport chain next. If I could find that section here, but the electron transport chain is the next big step for that kind of gathers nutrients but for really, for today’s talk, this is the really most important thing and then just kind of highlight, you can see some of these toxins over here that come in, right? You can see fluoride, Hg is Mercury, As is gonna be, uh, arsenic, Al is gonna be aluminum. So, you can see some of these toxins, how they can kind of come in there and sabotage some of these things. And, to kind of highlight one thing, this is an article we saw here. Mitochondria and Microbiota dysfunction with post-viral issues, you can see how the gut microbiome also plays a certain role and why is that? Well, I think, because 80% of the immune is in the gut so if you have a pathogenic or dysbiotic microbiome, it’s gonna affect toxins being produced, right? It’s gonna put you right here in a hyperinflammatory state, right? We already have a lot more cytokines being produced if we have an illness and so we have to be able to calm down our immune system’s inflammation to what’s happening from an immune stress standpoint. And so, the microbiome plays a big role, iron dysregulation, reactive oxygen species, right? Vitamin C plays a major role here. Vitamin, uh, glutathione plays a major role there as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, right there, look at that one, the mitochondrial, the heightened inflammatory oxidative state may lead to mitochondrial dysfunction and so this is what we’re seeing on paper. We’re seeing this in the stool test. We’re seeing this in the organic acid test, this issue with the gut with the mitochondria.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. It talks about platelet damage too which is important because what do platelets do, those are your clotting factors. And so, if we can have increased coagulation cascades, that means more clotting, right? And, you can see more clotting events, more thrombosis is that’s a blood clot, right? And so, you can see furthermore, mitochondrial oxidative just make, may contribute to microbiota dysbiosis altering coagulation and fueling inflammatory oxidative response leading to vicious cycles of events. So, this is really important and so things that we can do to be on top of the fatigue is gonna be the same things that we can do to help mitigate a lot of the inflammation. That’s gonna be keeping blood sugar in check, adding in some of these additional B vitamins, um, adding in anti-inflammatory anticoagulants. What do those look like? That could be ginger. That could be curcumin, which has anti-inflammatory and anticoagulation effects. That could be adding some extra Cod liver oil that has more vitamin A in it, which is a really powerful antioxidant but it also has natural blood thinning aspects because of the extra omega-3s in there. So, there’s different things we can do to really help reduce a lot of that inflammation. Any comments on that, Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah. On the more intense side of supporting hypercoagulability, lumbrokinase is gonna be your most powerful. That’s your earthworm-based enzyme, which is just a cool, cool thing. Natto, there’s also serratiopeptidase, so there are other enzymes that you can use and I personally take those. I take lumbrokinase, one per day just ongoing and it’s been very helpful. I also did a podcast with Dr. Thomas Levy, all about vitamin C IV and he’s got some dark field microscopy photos of people that we’re having blood clotting issues and the vitamin C along with ozone and IV was like a game changer and vitamin C can help energy too, so I don’t want to get too deep in the rabbit hole of blood clots but we’ll just say that the vitamin C is helpful for energy also.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I want to show you guys one other journal article here, role of mitochondrial oxidative stress and antioxidants when it comes to chronic fatigue and so one kind of thing here, it talks about the known role of oxidative stress and how it can relate to essentially fatigue, as well as, potential, uh, specific therapeutic treatments for the mitochondria so that’s really powerful. And, you know, here are some of the big things, they’re gonna talk about vitamin C, talk about B vitamins, talk about glutathione and then also some of the more natural anti-inflammatory things but you know, each study is going to find out focus on a couple of their major things but, people in the literature are looking at these things. It is real and, um, we’re seeing it in our patients and we’re trying to apply some of these things to get people’s health back.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So, the way you look at this is what you can do to protect against oxidative stress, we covered that glutathione. What can we do to help support the Krebs cycle? We talked about B vitamins. You’ve also got just things that are gonna help the mitochondria in general, like CoQ10 and then also you can do things like PQQ and there’s other nutrients that actually create what’s called mitochondrial biogenesis where you can literally make new mitochondria. And so, I don’t think it’s in that paper, it does mention CoQ10 there but
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right here in the mitochondria, there are enzymes and coenzymes such as vitamin E, CoQ10 to remove ROS, that’s reactive oxygen species to prevent DNA damage. So, these are really powerful things that we can add in. For example, low CoQ10, they’ll see an increase in damage, so Coq10, PQQ, you know pyro quinolone, right? Vitamin E, and then, you know, we try to give Coq10 with vitamin E together for that same reason to prevent a lot of the oxidative stress while fueling the mitochondria. Any comments on that?
Evan Brand: Yeah. Look at the next part there too, talking about exercise. People that come in with chronic fatigue and how they’re having an increased oxidative stress after exercise and that’s a problem that we’re seeing a lot too is people that now are having, uh, post-exertional fatigue, people that are crashing. Even athletes that were really high performing people that now their performance is just in the tank and a lot of that is just this ongoing oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage that’s not, that’s not been supported and you can’t just exercise your way out of this and I get kind of annoyed when I see like those motivational videos of people that are really sweaty like you just nee to suck it up, you know, pain is weakness leaving the body. It’s like, no, you’re wrong, you got to fix the mitochondrial damage. I hate those like raw-raw videos because it’s ignoring all the nutrients. That video really needs to be talking about, hey get your glutathione up, get your ribose up, get your CoQ10 up, come on people, like that’s what he used to say.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this is a similar marker that we use on the organic acid test, the one that we use 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, this is very, very similar to that. But this is a marker for oxidative stress so we’ll actually use the same marker on a, um, on a mitochondrial test on the organic acid. So, we’ll look at some of these things to get a window of how stress these pathways are so that’s very powerful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Ribose is amazing. Carnitine is amazing. Acetyl-L-carnitine is amazing. Also, you know, let’s hit the, let’s go up a little bit like that picture there was a like a neurotransmitter picture there that you had. Maybe, we should talk about that a little bit because it’s not directly gonna be a mitochondrial support, yeah, right there, but I think, that’s cool to point out too, which is that, if we’re coming in with nutrients like phenylalanine or tyrosine, eventually some of that may convert over to your neurotransmitters but then also your adrenal hormones like epinephrine and I think a lot of people and I know you see this too, a lot of people are showing up with just low brain chemistry across the board. And so, I’m thinking out loud with you that like, the real magic remedy is the mitochondrial support plus throwing in some of these neurotransmitter supports as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, that’s why we talked about B vitamins and I kind of went to the gamut, look how important B6 is in regarding the synthesis of tryptophan to serotonin, really important so you can see how B6 deficiency is really important in this process to convert this inflammatory product here, quinolinic acid, uh, back to tryptophan, it needs B6 or to avoid that whole thing it needs B6 so that’s really important. So, B6 is really important in the synthesis of amino acid tryptophan to serotonin, very important.
Evan Brand: And so, vegetarians, vegans, obviously, you’re gonna be at increased risk of issues and your recovery is not gonna be as good as someone who’s getting these good animal proteins because you’re gonna be getting adequate tryptophan and other nutrients from your animal-based products. So, even if we could get these people on eggs, if we could get these people on organ capsules, if we could get these people on even like a protein like, I’ve got one we call carnivore collagen, which is a like a beef peptide, I mean something you gotta supplement at some level if you’re not eating those foods. So, please, if you’re a vegetarian vegan and you’re exhausted then look at some of this and hopefully we can convince you to change and improve your diet a bit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. No, I totally agree. I think that’s really important. I want to see if there’s anything else here, I want to highlight now because that’s enough, that’s powerful enough. Anything else, you wanted to highlight there?
Evan Brand: Well, we hit the urine, we hit the stool. Looking at the gut, you showed the study about the gut changing, we’ve seen that, I mean, you and I were talking about that march of 2020, I mean that was 2 years ago. We were talking about being affected. And so, obviously, our message is the same that it’s always been is get your stool looked at so we can see what kind of dysbiosis do you have going on because if you’re taking all these supplements, you’re doing all these foods but you’ve got malabsorption or you’ve got gut inflammation. You’re not gonna, you know, people say you are what you eat but you really what you digest from what you eat. So, if you have all these other issues in your gut, the grass-fed steak is not gonna be as valuable to you. Now, I’m not saying stop eating it, I’m saying still eat it but we’ve got to improve the digestion and assimilation of that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110%. And one thing here, I just want to highlight here, just to kind of this article, it’s talking about mitochondrial function in infections in the gut because we’re trying to talk about mitochondrial and energy post-illness, that could be a viral illness, it could also be a gut illness, right? Because, it’s talking right here, even virus dedicated virulence factors and talks about downstream of an infection. It’s fascinating that a plethora of immune responses but, uh, be it against viruses, bacteria or LPS. LPS is lipopolysaccharides or endotoxin, this can come from H. pylori, this can come from SIBO, or dysbiotic bacteria and they strongly impact tht mitochondria which is really, really important because they’re toxic, they kind of throw a monkey wrench in how the FADH and the NAD is kind of moving around the Krebs cycle, collecting hydrogens and then bringing into electron transport chain. It talks about, um, governed by the mitochondria can be translated into active therapeutics to boost immunity against pathogens to over immune responses under control in the case of inflammatory disorders. So, essentially, the more you have these infections there, the more inflammation your immune system creates that can actually impact your mitochondria. Again, when you have a lot of these illnesses, it’s not just the stress from the illness, it’s the immune response from your own immune system that creates inflammation that can actually disrupt your energy pathway. So, sometimes, you’re just fighting against yourself. And so, using nutrients to help modulate the immune response i.e., glutathione, Vitamin D, vitamin C, right, really important nutrients there. I’d also say, you can do things like curcumin, or resveratrol as well. You can have immune modulating effects. These are powerful. So, it’s good to kind of get your immune system in check. Most people that are having longer term, we call it kind of long haulers type issue. It’s typically their immune system has over responded and it’s just creating so much inflammation. So here, this illness, they’re no longer testing positive for whatever this illness is and they’re prolonged 2 to 3 months out and they’re feeling like crap still, it’s because they really didn’t get their immune system’s inflammatory cascade in check afterwards.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. So, a couple comments. Number one, you can improve your energy by simply fixing your gut and that’s exactly what that data is showing and that’s exactly what you and I have seen and done clinically, hundreds and hundreds of times. People that were exhausted coming in, we give them a gut protocol, sometimes, not even giving them energy supplements because on paper they look good and all of a sudden, their energy level doubles and all we did is fix their gut so that’s the number one comment. And then number two comment is that, people need to stop waiting for some illness like this to take them down before they take this stuff serious. I mean, you and I are all about preventative approaches meaning getting your mitochondria, you gut, your brain chemistry getting all that stuff optimized now so that you’re a warrior on a daily basis so that when you do come across something like this and there probably will be more things like this that you do to get exposed to, you’re ready and you’re able to handle it and you’re not coming in so sick and looking for this emergency therapy at the end stage, it’s, in some cases, it’s too late. I think, a lot of times you can turn it around but you should have been working on your health years ago before you got this stage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And a lot of it is, you know, anytime you have some type of illness coming up, the more you can be on top of a lot of these key immune modulating anti-inflammatory nutrients ahead of time and or during versus coming in at the end when the inflammation is super high. It’s like coming in when the fire is a little baby fire and knocking it out versus having a full five alarm and trying to stop it, right? That’s kind of the analogy. So, I always recommend telling people have a couple of nutrients. You may not be taking it everyday but they may in your medicine cabinet is kind of like a, um, you know, last ditch kind of effort to kind of come in there if you start to feel a little bit ill so on my line, we have Immune Supreme, which is nice because you have some green tea in there, you have some echinacea, you have some medicinal mushrooms, you have some antioxidants and some immune modulators, that’s kind of cool. Have that in your medicine cabinet. You start to feel the tiniest thing, start taking that to get that immune system, obviously, you can ratchet up, vitamin D, vitamin C. These are easy first line things, if you have any NAC or glutathione, we can ratchet that up. These are easy things that we can do to kind of take charge of our health and prevent our immune system from throwing us off.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. And, if you need help clinically, we do offer one-on-one consults around the world with people so we’re very blessed to be able to help so many people by getting the proper testing done, making the proper protocol to get you better. So, if you don’t test, you guess, you got to see what you’re up against first, look at your Bs, look at your gut, you know, once we get the data, we can help you more accurately and you’re gonna save a lot more money, a lot more time and a lot more suffering and you’re gonna get out of the dumps out of the trenches, out of the depths of hell, depression, whatever you’re dealing with. You’re gonna get out of that faster if you’re using clinical data and you have a tour guide to your body. So, if you need help clinically, you can reach out to Dr. J at justinhealth.com for consults worldwide or me, Evan Brand at evanbrand.com and we’re here for you guys. So, we look forward to helping you out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I appreciate it. Yeah. Anyone that wants to reach out, Evan already gave you the links, really appreciate it. Comments down below, I really appreciate your feedback on that and also, we’ll put links down below with some products that we chatted about. We have different ones that we recommend in our line. Just wherever you go, make sure you get them from a professional grade company because raw material does matter in the supplement world. You can buy, you know, the equivalent of the grass-fed steak from the local farmer or you can get it from McDonald’s, right? And so, we want to get the high-quality raw material that’s tested to make sure there’s no impurities and just building blocks are excellent. Evan, excellent chatting with you man, really appreciate it. Guys, um, have an awesome week and we’ll talk soon. Take care you all.
Evan Brand: Take care, now. Bye-Bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
References:
Recommended Products:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/how-to-get-your-energy-back-post-infection-podcast-365
Collagen Diet: Collagen-Rich Foods for Healthy Joints, and Skin
We know collagen is going to help with the joints because we know half of your bones are protein. We need good building blocks for our cartilaginous tissue and ligamentous tissue. Frankly, most people get most of their protein from muscle meats. That’s a problem because they’re not getting the knuckles, the bones, and the cartilage, as we would from old-fashioned soups. So, if you’re doing a lot of soups and bone broth soups, that’s great. If not, we really want to add extra collagen.
I do 20 g of collagen in my coffee every morning. I think it’s amazing. I do my true collagen with some MCT oil and grass-fed butter. I love it. I think it’s excellent for skin, hair, nails, and just for overall prevention of bone loss and cartilage loss. We know the wear and tear that most people experience in their joints throughout the year, especially if they do a lot of long-distance cardio. You really need more building blocks to help prevent and mitigate the wear and tear, so you don’t have knee and joint replacements later in life. Collagen can really help decrease some of that wear and tear.
How do you take collagen?
I like adding collagen in my coffee in the morning because it has a nice little kind of creamer-like effect. It gives that little bit of frothiness which is wonderful. I also do it before bed. Sometimes I’ll do a little bit of collagen (glycine), magnesium, and vitamin C because vitamin C is a really important building block for making collagen. I find magnesium has some very good calming effects as well where there are plugs in the GABA or it’s just a natural beta-blocker as well. It can calm the heart and bring the heart rate down a little bit. I think magnesium does work on some of those GABA pathways as well and, of course, magnesium helps with blood sugar. You’ll get deeper sleep and better REM sleep when you have good magnesium. So, I love combining collagen and magnesium at night.
Where can you get collagen from?
You can get collagen from food via bone broth. Chicken skin is super rich in glycine, roughly 3.3 g for 3-1/2 oz. If you make chicken soup, throw the whole chicken in there. Get a rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods and or get the fattier cuts of the chicken at least with the bone and the skin, so that way you get the best of both worlds if you’re going to do it from a whole food source. Regarding seafood, wild salmon is going to be the best source of glycine.
Natural Herbs and Foods to Help Fight Stress
When you’re stressed, what are the important things? Blood sugar stability is really important because most people get on a roller coaster when they get stressed, meaning they’re overly gravitating towards alcohol and towards refined sugar. Their blood sugar goes up and then it crashes down, and then it creates more nervous system stimulation via adrenaline, epinephrine, and cortisol being stimulated to bring the blood sugar back up.
So, I find just keeping it really simple and really easy with your meals. You may be more nauseous when you’re overly stressed because stress hormone does cause you to feel nauseous. So, this is where you may want to do a soup or a simple smoothie, something really easy where there’s not a lot of digestion but you’re still getting some proteins and fat in there, whether it’s some collagen and some coconut milk or just sipping on some bone broth. Something like that’s going to have some good fat and good protein, and it won’t be hard to digest. So, if you feel nauseous, just still know you should probably be eating but just try to make it something very easy on your tummy.
Then think what are some of the nutrients your nervous system is going to need when you’re more stressed. So, the low hanging fruit, B vitamins. B complex is going to be very essential. Magnesium is going to be excellent. GABA and L-theanine are good things that are going to help you relax and wind down. Valerian root or passionflower, which are all connected to GABA and that inhibitory neurotransmitter that helps you just relax a little bit. It kind of puts the clutching gear and disengages the gearbox, so you can downshift so to speak.
I always go to nutrients first and then I go to my favorite adaptogenic herbs second. So, Ashwagandha is one of my favorites. Rhodiola is excellent and there’s holy basil, which are my favorite very relaxing and tonifying herbs.
If you want to learn more about herbs for stress relief, click this link to schedule a chat with me!
Nutrients to Help Make Serotonin to Help Improve Mood and Sleep
In today’s blog, I am going to share with you the natural ways to boost your serotonin levels and other alternatives. Let’s talk about nutrients to help support serotonin levels.
Serotonin is a really important neurotransmitter. Its building block comes from protein and amino acids, particularly 5-HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan) but serotonin has a lot of important roles in regards to mood, well-being, sleep, stress reduction, and happiness. So, all these things play a major major role in helping you feel good. If we have inadequate serotonin levels, that’s going to create a whole bunch of things. Once you start having sleep issues, mood issues, or stress issues then stress starts to hitch a little more. You don’t quite sleep as well. You don’t adapt to or deal with stress, not quite as resilient as well, and then a lot of times you’re just not going to heal and recover well either because serotonin is a precursor to melatonin. Melatonin helps you sleep and it’s also a very powerful antioxidant. So, a lot of good benefits there.
Serotonin is made from tryptophan and/or 5-HTP which is 5-hydroxytryptophan. Now, I personally like using 5-HTP better because there is an enzyme that’s kind of a governor on tryptophan converting downstream into serotonin. The 5-HTP bypasses that enzyme, so you can therapeutically bump up serotonin a little bit better with 5-HTP. So, we use 5-HTP and B6 that can really significantly improve serotonin levels. Anywhere between 100 to 600 mg per day can be very helpful. There are important cofactors that will also add. B6 is an essential B vitamin that helps with the synthesis. You may also want to throw in B12 or methylcobalamin, ideally methylated because these neurotransmitters need to be methylated. B12 makes a huge difference.
In the podcast, we talk about a study where they used antidepressants, not that I’m a huge fan of those, but they found that an antidepressant plus a methylated B12 improves depression symptoms by 20%. So, we know B12 and that methylation process is very important for your neurotransmitters. Also, we can throw folate in there because folate works a lot like brother and sister with B12. So, B6, B12, and folate (or B9 for short for folate) are really important. Those are your key methyl groups in regards to your B vitamins. They have a lot to do with methylation.
Of course, vitamin C can be very important because the adrenals play a major role in serotonin and stress. In that sympathetic fight or flight nervous system response, the adrenals play a big role in making cortisol and/or adrenaline to help manage or deal with or adapt to that response. So, for chronically firing our adrenals, whether it’s cortisol and/or adrenaline, and we start have HPA access issues meaning brain-adrenal communication feedback issues, that can make it hard for us to kind of calm down from stress and/or even ramp up to deal with stress. So, it’s kind of like it being really cold out, you put your heater on and you can’t quite mount the heater or mount enough of a response to create heat and warm your house up or vice versa if it’s cold. You need to be able to adapt and modulate to our environment. So, we need healthy adrenal function. A lot of times, I’ll add in things like various adaptogens like Rhodiola, Ginseng, Ashwagandha, and Eleuthero. These are great adaptogenic herbs to help us modulate and deal with stress better.
And then, of course, a good healthy diet is essential because inflammatory foods, food allergens, processed junk, grains, and refined foods are going to stress out our body. The problem with refined processed foods like grains and sugar is they can, in the short run, increase our serotonin and allow us to feel good. So, people say, “Oh, I’m an emotional eater.” What are you doing? You are essentially trying to artificially boost your brain chemicals up with junk food. It’s like whipping a tired horse to perform better. It’s like trying to drink coffee at midnight to get work done. It’s going to just throw off your sleep and you’re going to be tired the next day.
So, of course, there are always what I call constructive vehicles versus destructive vehicles. Destructive vehicles provide a short-term gain and long-term destruction if they are habitual. Constructive vehicles are not quite as an impactful short-term gain but long-term restoration, long-term healing, and long-term performance enhancement. So, that’s good digestion, eating protein, balanced blood sugar, and we can utilize amino acids like 5-HTP, B6, folate, B12, vitamin C, and adaptogenic herbs. These are very helpful in modulating our stress response. They also modulate how we perceive stress. The more you can perceive stress better, you don’t mount as much of a cortisol or adrenaline response because your perception of it is much better.
Things like magnesium can also be very helpful as magnesium kinda plays into GABA. GABA has a major role in the inhibitory neurotransmitter. It’s the downshift or it helps hit the brake, so things like GABA by itself and things like L-theanine are excellent. Adaptogenic herbs like passionflower or Valerian can be very calming. Even things like Kava or CBD could also have a very calming effect. So, there’s a couple of different things that we can throw in there.
When I’m working with the patients, I’m always saying to myself, “What’s the root cause?” Let’s set the foundation and make sure the root cause is supported. Let’s make sure able to break down and digest and absorb all the nutrients and make sure there are no underlying bottlenecks in regards to low enzyme, low acid, and gut infections. Let’s make sure we’re managing our lifestyle stressors and we’re doing our best to sleep good. Food is good, food quality is good, and hydration is good. I make sure those foundations are solid and then we can kind of get in there with other supplements and nutrients to help support those pathways.
If we wanted testing for neurotransmitters, I’ll do things like organic acid-based tests. Then we’ll look at a lot of the metabolites for these neurotransmitters, whether it’s serotonin where we will use 5-hydroxyindoleacetate (5HIAA) or we will use Vanilmandelate which is a marker for adrenaline or Homovanillate which is a marker for dopamine. Again, dopamine is a precursor to adrenaline, so it’s phenylalanine, tyrosine, dopamine, L-dopa, and then it can go down to epinephrine/norepinephrine or adrenaline/noradrenaline. It’s the same thing. So, these are catecholamines and they can convert a lot of these upstream neurotransmitters down. There’s some overlap in dopamine and serotonin symptoms. A lot of people that think they have serotonin problems may actually have a dopamine problem. So, it’s good to get tested as well. It’s good to look at the symptoms, make sure the foundation is set, and then you can dive in deeper to look at a lot of these nutrients.
Now, in my supplement line, we use things like Brain Replete which has an excellent 10:1 ratio of tyrosine or dopamine to serotonin. That’s a good combo product. It has all the precursor nutrients, too. Also, I use a product called Serotonin Replete which is excellent with 5-HTP with B6. I have a product called Dopa Replete which is just a tyrosine product that is nice for lower dopamine issues and for higher dopamine, there is a product called Dopa Replete Plus and that helps bump up dopamine more. It has got Macuna pruriens in there plus a couple of other compounds that are very helpful. It has L-dopa, tyrosine, EGCG, and of course, B6.
The Top 5 Reasons Why Your Estrogen Levels are High – Men & Women!
Let’s talk about the top 5 reasons why your estrogen levels are high. We’re going to break them down today.
WHAT ARE ESTROGENS?
First, let’s look at the 3 major kinds of estrogens: E1 or estrone, E2 or estradiol, and E3 or estriol. In a woman’s regular cycle, it’s usually estradiol we’re talking about. When you start shifting to more menopausal and the ovary stops working, you start getting more estriol. The adrenals help in kick in a lot of DHEA and you make more estriol. Estradiol is more of the growth factor type of estrogen and estriol is a weaker estrogen.
WHERE CAN WE FIND ESTROGENS?
- PLASTICS. You’ll get it when the plastic is warm like in a microwave or out of a plastic water bottle especially if it’s in the car and the sun is hitting it or it’s outside. That’s why you want a good stainless steel or glass water bottle if you’re going to go outside or leaving it in the sun. The microwave heat and the radiation is going to cause a big release of plastic chemicals there, the xenoestrogens. One of the big ones are the phthalates but also BPA. There are other types of BPAs that are new which are supposedly safe but there are still estrogen-like compounds there as well. These plastics can affect women and men as well. Men are actually going to be more affected by them because men aren’t used to having estrogen in their environment and getting a whole bunch is going to be a problem.
- PESTICIDES. These tend to have an estrogenic quality to them and if you’re eating foods that are not organic, you’re definitely going to be getting organochlorines and various pesticides in your environment.
- PHYTOESTROGENS. These are found in soy. For example, I had a vegan-vegetarian patient. We ran a Dutch sex hormone panel on her and her estradiol was through the roof and really high. Phytoestrogens can be a big one, so soy may be a problem. With vegan-vegetarian, there’s a lot of phony protein consumption like fake meat kind of stuff such as the Beyond burger where there are a lot of soy and estrogen-like compounds in there. There are also hormones in meat. You have to make sure you get antibiotic-free, hormone-free, and ideally organic and pasture-fed or if you’re on the Whole Foods scale, step 4 or step 5 is ideal. Step 2 is at least pretty good. Organic means no pesticides, no hormones, and also the food they’re eating has no pesticides or hormones, too.
- HIGH LEVELS OF INSULIN. Too much carbs drive high levels of insulin because insulin responds to a high level of blood sugar. The blood sugars in your bloodstream go up and your pancreas comes in. The beta cells make a bunch of insulin to bring it down and bring it into the cellar and converted to fat. So, high levels of insulin upregulate an enzyme in men called aromatase that converts testosterone, the male hormones, to estrogen which becomes a problem. Now, in women, a similar thing happens but it’s the exact opposite or the big switch. Their estrogen is converted to testosterone. So, women can actually get more androgen-like issues which results in weight gain, acne, hair growth, and sometimes you can see some libido enhancements on that. So, that’s the difference between men and women.
- POOR GUT HEALTH. In the gut, we make healthy good bacteria in our gut that help us absorb a lot of nutrients. A good healthy gut function helps us break down protein for good HDL levels and good enzyme levels. We need these to break down protein into amino acids which are really important for helping us to detoxify. So, detoxification helps us to excrete estrogens that we’re getting exposed to in our environments such as the pesticides, plastic, or something that you don’t even know you’re getting exposed to. Good healthy detoxification will help your body eliminate that, so that’s a good backup plan.Also, if we have a lot of dysbiosis, SIBO and bacterial overgrowth, we can make a lot of what’s called beta-glucuronidase. This is an enzyme that’s made by bad bacteria and it makes it harder to detoxify estrogen. The beta-glucuronidase takes conjugated estrogens and binds it to a protein that helps us excrete it out the body. It takes that protein and it pulls it apart. It takes the handcuffs off that protein, so that allows that estrogen that’s been deconjugated to go back into the body in the general circulation. So, if we have gut issues, that could be a major concern.
HOW DO WE ADDRESS THE PROBLEM?
We need things like cysteine, glycine, glutamine, sulfur amino acids, and things that help us methylate like B12, B6, and folate. So, these nutrients we have to get them in our diet via a good diet. We need to be able to break down and absorb those nutrients, so we need good digestion to get those things in there.
So, in general, we’ve got to make sure we have a good gut bacteria balance. Even fungal overgrowth can cause problems and H. pylori that can lower stomach acid and make it harder to break down nutrition on one side and then it can create this bacterial overgrowth enzyme that makes it hard to detoxify estrogen. These are really important components. If you have any issues with estrogen, you’ve got to look there.
Now, we may want to do things to help detoxify like make lifestyle changes, food changes, pesticide changes, make the changes in regards to plastics, and make in in regards to your diet, your glycemic load, and your gut. That’s a good first step to get to the bottom. There are also different things we may do to help upregulate detoxification to help get that estrogen. It may be activated charcoal or various soluble fibers. It could be things like bentonite clay. We could use things like DIM or Calcium D-Glucarate or glutathione, sulfur amino acids, and vitamin C. They’re all helpful in different situations. We would recommend them based on what’s happening but at least make the diet and lifestyle changes out of the gates.
Top 5 Warning Signs of Hormonal Imbalance
Let’s talk about hormones. I’m going to dive into a couple of clinical pearls that I see in my practice from working with hundreds of female patients and male patients which have a major effect on modulating and supporting hormonal balance.
These are my top 5 hormonal balancing strategies:
- One of the first things in regards to hormones that’s very important, and this may be common sense but I try to give a lot of knowledge guided by experience, is nutritional building blocks for your hormones. Healthy cholesterol from animal products are very essential. Fat soluble vitamins like A, D, K are very important. Lots of good protein are also very important. We have steroid-based hormones that are going to be more cholesterol-based and we have peptide-based hormones that will also be protein-based. So, a lot of these protein, fat-soluble vitamins, and cholesterol especially healthy animal cholesterol are very helpful for hormonal building blocks. If you have a vegan-vegetarian diet or if it’s very nutritionally poor or there’s a lot of processed food, that may set you up with a deficit out of the gates for just hormonal issues. Remember: Make sure the food is nutritionally dense, anti-inflammatory, and low in toxins. That’s vital.
- Now, if you’re having a lot of good nutrition in there, the next thing is we have to make sure we’re able to digest it and break it down. So, if we have a lot of chronic acid reflux, poor digestion, constipation, or bloating, we know we’re not quite breaking down our food and our nutritional building blocks. That could tell us that we may have hormonal issues because we’re not breaking that down. Therefore, those nutrients can’t get into our body or get in our bloodstream and be taken throughout the body to be used as building blocks. So, if we have a bottleneck in the nutritional side, that could be a big factor.
- Stress, whether it’s emotional or chemical stress. If we’re eating foods that are inflammatory or we’re nutritionally deficient and we have a lot of emotional stress, what tends to happen is our hormones kind of go on two sides. We have an anabolic side which are the growth hormones — testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone — that kind of help deal with growing. Then we have anti-inflammatory hormones which would be cortisol and are catabolic. I always put progesterone in that category because progesterone can be used to make more cortisol. So, we have our anti-inflammatory and then our anabolic. In some, they kind of cross over. Insulin, growth hormones, and testosterone are anabolic. The more inflamed we get, we could have high amounts of testosterone because of PCOS and because of inflammation. So, some of these hormones kind of interact and cross over. With men for instance, the more inflamed men get and the more stressed they get, that can actually cause an upregulation of aromatase and could increase their estrogen. So, see how these things kind of cross react. Your hormones are going to be either pro-building or anti-inflammatory to reduce stress. So, for chronically and stressed out state, cortisol is going to rip up your protein and kind of decrease your muscle mass. As a woman, you’ll see your progesterone level start to drop and that will start putting you into an estrogen-dominant state because if we normally got 20 to 25 times estrogen than progesterone, that ratio starts to drop. Even if you still have more progesterone than estrogen, that ratios is going to throw you off and that can create breast tenderness, cramping, mood issues, excessive bleeding/menorrhagia, infertility, a lot of mood issues, back pain, and fluid retention. All those are possible situations.
- Xenoestrogens from the environment and foreign estrogens. They can come from plastic components, pesticides, herbicides or rodenticides, mold toxins, and heavy metals. They are going to disrupt our hormones. The easiest thing is eat organic, avoid plastics, and avoid a lot of the chemicals in the water because a lot of times you can get pesticide runoff or hormone runoff in the water. So, clean water and clean food, and then make sure it’s organic avoid the plastics as well. That’s a big, big thing. Plastics are probably okay if they are in a refrigerator or in a cold environment but ideally if you’re heating stuff up or it’s going to get exposed to light, you want some kind of a Pyrex or a glass container. It’s much better and really important.
- Last but not the least would be just making sure our detoxification pathways are running well. So, if we have good hormonal balance but we can’t detoxify it, then a lot of times we can reabsorb it. So, if we don’t have good sulfur, good glutathione precursors, good B vitamins, good methylation, N-acetylation and glucuronidation, we may have a hard time eliminating. Hence, we are re-absorbing a lot of our hormones. So, being able to break down your proteins, break down your amino acid and your B vitamins is going to help with your body’s ability to eliminate a lot of these toxins.
Summary:
Blood sugar, digestion, stress, xenoestrogens, and toxicity are really big. Those are the big 5 across the board. Try to apply at least one of these things.
The Benefits of Collagen and Glycine on Your Health | Podcast #322
Collagen is rich in numbers in our bodies. It is an essential part of connective tissues that make up our tendons, cartilages, and muscles. Also, it functions to give fair skin structure, smooth hair, healthy nails, and bone strength.
On the other hand, glycine is an amino acid that your body utilizes to create proteins. It is also responsible for maintaining the connective tissues and making other substances, such as hormones and enzymes.
Dr. J and Evan Brand emphasized that glycine and collagen provide outstanding health benefits. Our body needs glycine to make essential compounds such as glutathione, creatine, and collagen. Also, collagen helps promote muscle mass, relieve joint pain, and reduces wrinkles and skin dryness.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:44 Glycine Benefits
5:16 Collagen
7:20 Fixing Root Causes
10:40 Natural Supplements from Food
17:36 Detoxification
20:05 Vegetarians
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Evan, how are we doing today man? What’s going on?
Evan Brand: I’m doing good. I’m feeling better. I don’t think I even told you about this off the air. But I had a bat house on the side of my house.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A bat house?
Evan Brand: Yeah, bat house. Yeah, to try to get to try to get some bats to basically, you know, take take residents there. So they would eat all of our mosquitoes. And they never came. And I was up on the ladder. I don’t know, this may be two months ago now. And I was up on the ladder. And I was unscrewing the bat house from the house. And as soon as I did that, I noticed it was a wasp nest in there. And as soon as the, as soon as I saw that, a wasp landed on my hand. And last time I got stung, it hurts super bad. And so I wasn’t thinking straight, I thought, okay, there’s a wasp on my hand, I’m gonna get stung, it’s gonna hurt, I might shake my hand and fall backwards off the ladder, this is really bad. So I just turned around and just jumped. And it was probably not crazy high, but maybe eight feet up. And I just jumped and just tried to like, you know, cushion my fall as much as I could and kind of roll after I landed on the grass. But ever since then, man, I’ve had a little bit of some cervical, I probably need to see a chiropractor. I haven’t yet but I’ve had like some cervical tightness. And if I sleep the wrong way, it like flares up the cervical tightness. And so I’ve been using some herbal anti inflammatories and nutrients that we can dive into to help me. But I wanted to tell you that and see if you had any other suggestions of things I should be doing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s really great. Yeah, so we’re going to be talking all about inflammation. And we’ll be talking about natural herbal support to kind of help her natural functional medicine support to help kind of reduce that inflammation. Now, structurally, in your situation, there’s probably some level of inflammation directly to that area. So some level of soft tissue, whether it’s active release technique, or myofascial just to kind of help with that tissue. Because when it gets strained or damaged or inflamed like that, it can get a little bit fibrotic, you can get some scar tissue, it can maybe lose some blood supply and oxygenation. So getting some good movement in that tissue to kind of help with oxygenation, make it more pliable, helps making sure those joints are moving well. So really good chiropractic adjustments through there to make sure everything is moving well, alignments, good. So those are the first things out of the gates that I’d be pursuing. Outside of, you know, just some good soft tissue support in your own like a good massage guns helpful just kind of day in day out. And then seeing good massage therapists, maybe some red light to kind of reduce inflammation, too. I think that’s great out of the gates. And of course, you know, we can kind of go into all of the different natural anti inflammatory, inflammatory support that we use typically in practice, and we’ll talk about what what you’re using already as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I appreciate it. I need to get back in touch with my myofascial lady. I just haven’t reached out to her yet. But I think she left town for a while. So she’s still around. I should probably try. I just got fearful I thought, Oh, god, what did I do to my spine? Am I screwed forever? You know, you hear about these people having like car wrecks. And you know, my wife used to work in a chiropractor’s office, and she would see people that were injured from 20 years ago. And I’m like, ah, why, like, surely it doesn’t have to be that way. And I think we have some good strategies that can definitely shorten the recovery timeline. Let me just talk about the topical aspect first. This one thing’s been very beneficial. It is a company called Ned. Hello, Ned is their company. And they actually just send it to me like a year ago, just as like a free Hey, we want you to sell our products. Here’s some free stuff to try out kind of thing. But I loved it so much. I bought more of it, but it’s called a body butter. And it’s just loaded with CBD oil and frankincense and a bunch of other essential oils. It has Arnica in there. So this is just a topical body butter. And I tell you, if I put that stuff on, it’s a significantly reduced pain. And my range of motion is almost 100% if I’m using that topically, so CBD Arnica frankincense, you know, something like that a good blend, or if you like by that body butter, that might be a good option topically.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like that. That makes a lot of sense. So out of the gates, what’s the first thing so more than likely you get some kind of a mini whiplash? I’m guessing you kind of fell more into flexion. Right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you probably had a little whiplash because you probably went forward and then your body had to like kind of seize up to kind of stuff that forward flexion and so it probably just strained you probably had a little spray sprain strain in those back ligaments in the neck. And so getting some good soft tissue out back there will help making sure that joints are moving appropriately will help the problem with like ligamentous tissue, it’s more a vascular, right, you don’t get great blood supply. Or like if you strain your muscle like a muscle belly issue, right, it’s going to heal a lot faster because that tissue is just more vascular, it’s got a lot more blood flow. So anytime you have a vascular tissue, you really need good soft tissue support to really help break down and break down fiber optic tissue, scar tissue and then help that will improve oxygenation and that will improve blood flow. And of course, you know, soft tissue and or red light therapy are all going to be amazing things to really work on the on the blood flow and the inflammation reduction aspects. So that’s good out of the gates. And of course like my good thing in my line, we use something called curcumin supreme. Which is a liposomal curcumin, I like that. I think that’s excellent because it has natural anti inflammatory pathway. So like the big inflammatory pathways that you’re going to see a lot of the medication use are going to be the Cox pathways right cyclo oxygenase pathways. And so like cyclooxygenase, two and cyclooxygenase one are going to be some of the big ones right? Now we can do natural herbs to kind of help produce Cox one and Cox two. So Cox one typically will be reduced by things like aspirin or n sets the problem with these things that can be a little bit more irritating to the liver into the gut. So maybe acutely, it’s okay, but chronically not the best, right? And then we have Cox two as well which these were like the old fashioned, like Vioxx drugs, remember, those, like 15 years ago, caused a lot of stroke and heart issues. Those are like our Cox two pathways. So Cox one and Cox two are some pretty good ones, that major pathways. And of course, we have like our prostaglandin e two, which is an inflammatory pathway as well. And prostaglandin e two is what drives constriction. And it’s what causes more platelets and more stickiness to happen. And so we want to work on reducing some of those pathway. So we want to knock down prostaglandin e two, what’s the best way to do that? Well, high dose fish oil or fish oil in general, of course up a really good whole food, pasture fed kind of paleo templates, it’d be great. And you’re going to reduce a lot of inflammation coming from conventional meats. Again, healthy grass fed pasture fed meats better, right? Less arachidonic acid, which feeds that PG net prostaglandin to pathway, of course, keeping the insulin and the grains and the refined sugar, all that crap in check, all of that inflammation feeds these Cox two and Cox one. pathways, right. And so we want to inhibit those pathways, we want to block them. So more Cox one, Cox two, the more inflammation is going down those pathways. So all the dietary crap sets the table, like my analogy is, imagine you walk into a kitchen and the gas is on the burner. Okay, let’s say it’s been on for a couple hours you smell it? Well, let’s say you pull out your lighter, right? Just a little spark, boom, how’s it gonna explode? Okay, but if you did it without the gas there, no explosion? Well, it’s the same thing. If you have the gasoline going, that’s a systemic inflammation from all of these things we chatted about, that allows the little spark of an injury like that, to set off this whole inflammatory cascade, that’s going to be a lot more, let’s just say amplified in the wrong direction, if you will.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s, that’s a great analogy. So let’s kind of spotlight some of the the key ingredients that we use here. Now some of these we can provide to our clients and to me personally in blends, and then some of them we can do in isolation. So I think the the best one or kind of the best combo for me is really some of the enzymes and then plus tumeric and the boswellia I think that’s been kind of my game changer because I noticed that when I added some extra serapeptodase into my system, I have a blend, I’m using the has some in there, but when I added extra serapeptodase, and also some lambro kinase, my issues, definitely, I would say I felt definitely more mobile, like I have more blood flow. And then of course, my hands and feet were warming up too. So I just know from like a circulation standpoint, that that’s also helping and then we know that tumeric has like an anti coagulating ability. So whether it’s like a tumeric tea or like you mentioned a life was almost a product or even just like a standardized curcuminoid product, something like that is going to be awesome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I like it. So if we kind of break things down by Cox one, Cox two, there’s also the locks pathway that’s like the the leuco trying pathway or the light bo oxygenase pathway. Alright, so lipo oxygenase versus cyclo oxygenase. These are both going to be inflammatory pathways. So if we start with like the Cox, one pathways, things like ginger are also going to be very helpful in that. So ginger is really good. Excellent. You can also do things like you mentioned lumberg kinase, or serrapeptase, that’s gonna just sit in your bloodstream, you’re taking it away from food, it’s not like a digestive enzyme. And that’s going to help hit all these inflammatory chemicals that are in the bloodstream, it’s going to start breaking them down and digesting them. And we already talked about the fact that we have a lot of platelet aggregation. So what that means is over time, those platelets are going to increase scar tissue and in decreased blood flow. So what are the enzymes are going to do is they’re going to break up those platelets isn’t help improve blood flow, improve oxygenation and improve nutrition. So and it’s also going to decrease scar tissue formation. So part of the enzymes are helping blood flow. They’re reducing. They’re increasing oxygenation, and they’re reducing scar tissue so then it helps a lot of the other nutrients also work better. So we already talked about like, some of the Cox one stuff is going to be ginger. We talked about that already. Some of the Cox two things are going to be things like curcumin, lipids, omo curcumin, and my line I have one called Curcumin Supreme, which is a really good one. And then you already mentioned a couple things earlier like Frankincense or boswellia. That’s also going to be another cyclo oxygenase ACE inhibitor and the thing I like about boswellia or frankincense, it’s the same thing. By the way, guys, frankincense is the essential oil version of that frankincense, you can kind of put topically on it. And then you can also take boswellia internally, so you can kind of hit it from both ends, which is really good.
Evan Brand: Yeah, also omegas, I am boosting up my omegas, I’m doing about five grams per day of pure omega, that’s my formula. It’s a triglyceride form of omega as it works amazing. And then also, I’m doing extra course attend, just to really help you know, I’ve had some histamine issues after getting exposed to mold. So for me, I do course attend with an enzyme, there’s a special enzyme we use, it’s a course it’s an enzyme blend that I love. And I actually may start manufacturing it soon. But for now, I’m just mixing these. And the course attend for me is a mast cell stabilizer. Now I don’t know about like trauma, necessarily physical trauma, aggravating mast cells and creating a histamine release. But it would make sense if there’s a stress response from the body, you may be pulling out more histamine, I’m thinking of like a, I don’t know, a car crash or some sort of immediate trauma, you’re probably going to have some histamine to really help increase inflammation, but overall, you don’t want that long term.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Yep, that makes a lot of sense. So there’s other pathways you mentioned, right? So the course attend, like you mentioned earlier, that’s going to help with the TNF alpha pathway. So TNF alpha is another inflammatory cytokine. So think of a lot of these cytokines are like inflammatory chemical messengers, we have cytokines, we have interleukins, we have nuclear factor, Kappa beta, we have TNF alpha, these are all these chemicals, signalers. And so when we have inflammation happen, these type of chemical messengers can amplify inflammation, the effects of inflammation, systemically. And the problem with inflammation is it’s helpful in the short run, because it helps drive blood flow and helps the healing repair process. The problem is, is when it hangs around too long, right? So for like an acute injury, it’s probably good. I think part of the reason why that pain and inflammation is there is to keep you on your butt, so you’re not continuing to damage that area. So I think part of it is, it’s Hey, you hurt yourself, let’s kind of like rest a little bit right part of its that it’s also going to aggregate a lot of immune cells to help heal the injury, preventing infection, it’s also there to help with healing the body up, right, because the body is not about performance when it’s injured, it’s about band aiding the crap out of that area. So the problem with that is the body doesn’t care if it laid down a whole bunch of scar tissue. And that area is now going to be less flex, less flexible, and less mobile. It just wants the body to heal. So now you have to say, Well, I’m also interested in performance too, right? So then you have to look at the fact that like, Okay, I’m going to reduce inflammation, I probably should still be more mobile, I’m sorry, less mobile moving less, because my body wants me to move around less. I’m reducing the inflammation, pain naturally. But I still have to make sure I don’t overdo it. So you have to make sure if you reduce the inflammation, you still don’t overdo it because your body’s creating that pain to keep you from not moving as much. You probably want some movement, but not as much to hurt yourself. And then number two, you really want to remodel that inflammatory scar tissue. And that’s where you know, massage, soft tissue work, adjusting, maybe some some rolling, some foam rolling, gentle things like that to kind of help realign that soft tissue. So it’s more functional and structurally stable. That’s better in the long run.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah. Good point. I forgot to mention that. It’s not called the Theracane but it’s similar. I’ve got this wooden like cane from like a physical therapy office like it’s a, it’s a wooden cane basically, and it’s got the wheels on it. I’ve been kind of digging that into my upper mid back area kind of work in my traps. I’ve been just doing some light stretches. I’ve been doing some lateral pull downs, I love lat pull downs, I’ve been doing some seated rows. I’ve been doing my roll machine. So just gently trying to work the area. And I do that after I take these enzymes. And I do notice that it definitely warms up the area and I do feel more loose. So I’m trying to think of you like you and I always talk about you have this stacking effect, right you’ve got the anti inflammatory diet as the foundation, you’ve got the omegas coming in to hopefully help lubricate reduce inflammation. We’ve got the anti histamine anti mast cell course attend. We’ve got the ginger working on the Cox pathway, you’ve got the tumeric you’ve got the boswellia. I mean, that’s just really the synergistic thing here. And I’m not I haven’t taken a single aspirin. So I’m not actually in pain anymore. But like I said, if I sleep wrong, it might kind of flare me up. So I don’t think I’m fully out of the woods yet, but I think I’m 95% there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. That’s good. So in general, we kind of have our Cox pathways right. Now, arachidonic acid can feed those pathways. So a lot of excess omega six junkie, refined omega six excess junkie animal products can definitely feed those pathways that sets the table like I mentioned gas in the kitchen right below spark and can take it off. And then we have our natural herbals like like ginger can help with Cox one. Fish Oil is actually For Cox two at high doses now if you do high doses of fish oil, you can increase what’s called lipid peroxidation. Because fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid, it’s more unstable, right? It’s got a lot of these. It’s got more double bonds in it, right? omega three means three double bonds, the more double bonds that are there, the more unstable the fatty acid is to heat and things like that, the more let’s say it can be oxidized. So having extra vitamin C, or extra vitamin E on board when you’re taking extra fish oil, just to make sure you don’t have oxidation is great. And we already talked about things like systemic enzymes talked about, like, you know, curcumin, liposomal curcumin is better due to the absorption, or something with black pepper in it helps with absorption to already talked about things like Frankincense or boswellia is great, you could always do some white willow bark, which is kind of how aspirin is naturally made, right? aspirin works more on Cox one. So aspirin is going to be your other natural source. And you can do white willow bark, which is the natural form of aspirin, which is great. There are things like Tylenol, but Tylenol works more on the central nervous system perception, right? So it decreases the nervous systems, perception of pain. And then of course, at the extreme example, we have opiates, which block the pain receptors in the brain, the the opiate receptors in the brain, not the best thing because you’re just decreasing perception of pain. Obviously, the opiates are way more addictive, right. But we can block some of these natural pain perceptions with CBD oil. So CBD is another great way to reduce perception of pain. But we got to be careful of, you know, Tylenol, or things like opiates, you know, opiates due to their addictive qualities. And Tylenol actually chronically can reduce gluta file and you can just type in Tylenol and low glutathione level. So if you’re taking Tylenol longer term, you definitely want to take it with NAC and or some cloudify and just to be on the safe side. But in general, we want you to try to do more of the herbals and more of the natural stuff out of the gates because that really, really, really can help reduce inflammation.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. Yeah, and the acetaminophen glutathione yeah, it’s a big problem. So that’s why I stayed away. So people listening, if you’re didn’t jump off a ladder like me, and you’ve got osteo arthritis or rheumatoid arthritis, or sports injury, or you’re just trying to heal up maybe post operation, these things we talked about today may be something to implement. And then obviously, working on all the other root causes too, because you are not just what you eat, you are what you digest from what you eat. So if you’re doing all these good nutrients, but you’ve got some type of malabsorption issue in the gut, you’ve got ridges on your fingernails, you’ve got thinning hair falling out here, you may need to look deeper at the gut and try to find some of these more root cause issues that led you to that amount of inflammation or slow recovery in the first place. So if you need to reach out, please do so. Our websites are JustinHealth.com. That’s for Dr. J. He works worldwide via phone, FaceTime, Skype, zoom, whatever. And then me Evan Brand, EvanBrand.com. So JustinHealth.com, EvanBrand.com please reach out if you need help. We love helping you guys. This is just a wonderful situation that we’re in to be able to help people across the globe get solutions to their health issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. And one last thing to comment is people talk about what we know about cortisone and prednisone injections, right for chronic pain, right? This is a common thing. Well, what’s our natural cortisone? What’s our natural anti inflammatory? Well, our adrenals. So if you have weaker adrenal is going into this stuff, you may not be able to make good amounts of our natural kind of anti inflammatory hormones like cortisol or cortisone, right? This is important. Now I had a family friend come up to me recently, they had chronic pain issues. And it was asking me some questions about things. And they were telling me Oh, I just got a cortisone injection. It’s doing really great right now I said, Well, number one, that’s that’s a really big mistake. I said, you can do a cortisone injection only, only one if it’s really debilitating, and you need that to buy you time to fix the underlying issue. The problem with any injections of steroids is they start breaking down the tissue and the cartilage and the ligaments and the bone in the joint. And actually, over time, they’ll stop giving you cortisone injections in an area after two or three injections sometimes, so then now what now you’re kind of stuck. So the only way ever support a cortisone injection, is if that’s buying you time to do all the other stuff and the pain is so debilitating, you’re just doing that to buy you time because if you’re not figuring out and doing all the other stuff, while that quarter zones working, you’re just going to just repeat its pattern over again three to six months later. And that’s not a good situation. So ideally, you maximize the low hanging fruit, hopefully you won’t have to go to that. And then if you have to go to it, you at least use that time to do more of the right things regarding soft tissue chiropractic work anti inflammatory, there’s another device we we use here we’ll put a link below for the newbie device which is a bio electric device that I have and I use that helps reduce inflammation with special bio electric wavelengths. Electricity wise that reduce inflammation, improve blood flow, help improve the muscle integrity in that area. So the muscles take over the stress the joints and the ligaments and that’s cartilage would normally absorb right we want our we want our shocks to absorb The force not the sensitive material in the in the vehicle so to speak, right we have shocks for a reason. Think of shocks in your body as like muscles. Think of the sensitive tissue as ligaments and cartilage, right? Those are going to be more a vascular right poor blood flow the muscles more vascular. So what’s good let the vascular shocks absorb most of that issue most of the inflammation and for so I’ll put the link down below for that too. So you guys have that for references. Anything else, man?
Evan Brand: Yeah, the sauna. The sauna has been helping me too. I love sitting in there. Yeah, that obviously warms me up to so I have the infrared heaters in the front and then the ceramic around the edges. So I do try to rotate make sure that the infrared does hit my back and it does help me quite a bit. So that’s also another beneficial thing. Epsom salt baths are very helpful potentially using a floatation tank, a float tank with just tons of Epsom salt and their magnesium and that’s that’s also another great strategy. So hope this helps people and take care yourself. Like I said, if you need to reach out please do JustinHealth.com or EvanBrand.com look forward to helping you soon.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We’ll be right over recommended products down below so you guys can see that and take advantage of the things that we use clinically for our family, ourselves and our patients worldwide.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-benefits-of-collagen-and-glycine-on-your-health-podcast-322
Recommended Products:
Ariella Nail Fungus Treatment for Toenail and Fingernail
The Affects of Mycotoxins On Male & Female Fertility | Podcast #318
Mycotoxins exposure from food occurs globally but is more common in hot humid environments, especially in low-income settings, and might affect pregnancy outcomes. However, frequent mold contamination of maternal diet can therefore affect anyone. In this video, Dr. J and Evan talks about mycotoxins and how it can affect men and women’s fertility.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
2:52 Zearalenone, Mold Toxins
11:38 Mold Toxins from Food and Grains
14:32 Binders
21:20 Fertility Issues
27:13 Detox Support
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani in the house here with Evan Brand, Evan, how are we doing today my friend?
Evan Brand: Doing awesome, ready to dive in, have some fun together. So you and I, we don’t really market ourselves as like fertility doctors, fertility practitioners, anything like that. But we’ve both between us had many successful healthy babies not only in our own family but that our clients have had. And it’s interesting because fertility really comes as a side effect of getting healthy. And so that’s the first big key point of today. When you look at the fertility industry, you’ve got the in vitro fertilization, you’ve got all these shots, all these different drugs. They’re not they’re not really addressing root cause in most cases, most cases, they’re just trying to come in and just find a way to sort of short circuit or hijack the circuitry to make a baby happen. But we would argue there’s a better way, which is get someone healthy, and I was looking into I’m doing a mold presentation, and I was looking to do some research on mycotoxins and something that you and I test for via urine are various mycotoxins and there’s one in particular called z everleigh, known z like zebra z everleigh known, and this is a highly, highly, highly estrogenic mycotoxin, far more estrogenic than soy. And people freak out about soy and they should but nobody freaks out about z or linode. And that’s really, to me the bigger issue and so we have a paper here that we found called maternal mycotoxin exposure and adverse pregnancy outcomes, and there’s many many papers on this. This was just a review of them. And it was talking about the different mycotoxins so anything from aflatoxin, to okra toxin to Fusarium based toxins. And here’s what can happen. hypertensive emergencies in pregnancy, neural tube defects, increased risk of preterm birth and late term miscarriage, neonatal jaundice, impaired fetal growth. And I mean, just straight infertility. So, when we see women that are infertile, I mean, I just look at some of the friends I had from high school and college. And many of them have had issues with fertility. Some of them did IVF. Some of them had miscarriages. Some of them had pre preterm birth at a friend actually just have a baby and their baby showed up six weeks early like wow, what is her Mold Test look like? So this is a really, really big piece of the puzzle that I think people are missing. And we’re inside all the time, right? We’re on technology. So we’re inside a lot more than we used to in the farmer days. And so now we’re breathing this stuff in all day, whereas before, it maybe would have only happened when you were sleeping in the farmhouse. But during the day, you’re out on the farm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah. 100% Yep. 100%, the zerion alone. mycotoxin is that’s made by the Fusarium fungi. So it’s a mycotoxin actually made by that level of mold. And it’s in the food and it’s in the in the the animal feed. And that animal feed is designed to fatten those animals up. So I have one kind of study here. It’s called zuranolone. All the study is called by Science Direct. And it’s looking at the absorption of zuranolone on body weights, and how it increased the size of the pigs 15 to 25 kilograms. And basically, it increased body weight. And then one of the big things they found with zuranolone. In reproductive tissue, it actually decreased. Fertility is one of the side effects of this study. I’ll pull up the exact study on screen here in a minute, I have it up here in front, I’ll find the exact paragraph on there, and I’ll show it to y’all. But mold toxins is going to be one of the big conversations here with fertility. Now we can plug that into xeno, estrogens and plastics, we could potentially plug it into pesticides as well, which are going to be found in food. We can plug it into growth hormones and milk and dairy and hormones and animal products. The problem is it’s all a hormonal stress load. It’s not just one thing. So when you look at different studies on one topics on one thing on one toxin on one hormone on one mold, it may not be enough in one person or globally to pop up as an issue. I mean, here we’re finding studies on an off the bat. But we know it’s all about your stress load. And so I want to get people’s mindsets kind of around that stress, that metaphorical stress bucket and all of these different toxins, whether it’s mold, or pesticides or hormones, or plastic type of hormones, they’re all adding into that big stress bucket. And of course, fertility is going to be significantly impacted by that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said, here’s something crazy, too. It’s a little bit related. You and I were looking at this a little bit ago. The onset of puberty is massively dropping. So why am I bringing puberty? Well, because this is connected into hormones, and what’s happening with hormones. So in 1860, and you had a graph of this, that was really cool, too. But in 1860, the average age of onset of puberty in girls was 16.6 years. So over 16 years old, 16 and a half years 1860. That’s puberty. In 2010. It is now 10 and a half years old. That is insane. And that’s probably the most I mean, I can guarantee you that’s the most rapid change in puberty age in in human history. And it all happens less. And it all happened in the last What’s that about? 100 and 150 170 years. That’s insane, right? Isn’t that crazy? I’ll pull that graph up here for everyone to see here. So you guys can see it. I think now really important to visualize. Yeah. Now while you’re doing that, they’re just talking here, just like you said, there’s this really this stress bucket, so endocrine disrupters, various chemicals in the environment, acting on hormones, widespread industrial and pharmaceutical pollutants. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff here. diagnosing recently high in sugar and fats declining physical activity. Yeah, here’s the graph. So people listening, you’re not going to get to see this, but the graph is pretty nuts.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so you can see here the, the y axis, the up and down access, so you can see the age right 16 to 15. And then you can see the x axis is time. So as we go from the 1860s, up to current day, you can see we kind of flat plateau between, you know, 13 ish, 13 ish for puberty age versus, you know, 15 to 16. And a lot of that has to be influenced due to mold toxins, and some so here’s one article here that Evan talked about here, maternal mycotoxins, and again, mycotoxins are toxins produced by the mold. So a lot of times, it’s not necessarily the mold that’s causing the problem. It’s the toxins produced by the mold. So it’s good to look and test for mold, but also test maybe for the urinary mycotoxins as well, but you can see exposure and adverse pregnancy outcomes. And and this is a very interesting study talking about increase in puberty, increasing in puberty age, like I mentioned, also fertility, right. preterm birth, late miscarriage inclusion, some evidence for toxins or pregnancy may have detrimental effects on pregnancy outcomes. Now, of course, there’s limited studies, right? No one makes a whole bunch of money, studying this kind of stuff. But we know it’s, it’s there. And there’s some data already on it. And we also have a lot of common sense. We know something’s a toxin, and can affect the hormones that it makes sense why that may be effective.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And I’ve seen several women who are going through a protocol spontaneously get pregnant, which is really cool. Now, some of these women came to me with the intention of getting pregnant. They’re like, Hey, you know, I’ve been told the fertility specialist are unable to help me. Can you help? And I’ll say yes, Probably so. And then some of these women just had spontaneous pregnancies as an accident because they thought they were infertile. They thought they can’t get pregnant, we put them on a protocol, and then all of a sudden they get pregnant. So let’s go into some of the the action steps. I mean, what are we doing for these people? I think it’s important to know about what we what we discussed is everyone owns bad news affects hormones affects fertility affects puberty. But what do you do about it? So as you mentioned, number one, we’re going to be testing the environment. So using-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hold on one thing, I want to go a little bit deeper into what you just said, we talked about some of these mold toxins and in fertility, right, we have this one study here, which we already mentioned, which is maternal mycotoxin exposures and adverse pregnancy outcome, which is a new new study, right? mycotoxin research may 2020. That’s important. And this is actually on humans. There’s lots of studies on zearalenone, that’s i’m pronouncing that good in farm animals, because it’s been used in farm settings to fatten animals up for many years to the feed. So there’s a lot of data on this. And that’s important. So we know for instance, studies on in vitro effects allowed to understand the mechanism of action, right in vivo means the actual animals, and they see an impairment of semen quality and female reproductive function. So we talked about fertility, right? Most people think of fertility as women, right. But we know it can affect men as well. And it takes two to tango, right? And zearalenone could be a factor responsible for Reproductive failure in farm animals. And so if you go to the reproductive MD, are they going to be testing you if you’re having issue with pregnancy for mold toxins? Probably not. And look here, one study here, under allanon. Here, if you look here on the bottom part, so zearalenone is a nonsteroidal estrogenic mycotoxin. It’s produced by several species of the fusarium fungi, okay, so it’s produced by this Fusarium fungus, it’s a mycotoxin. And you can see here it’s supposedly it’s not it’s low in grain content, but it’s the storage of a lot of the grain where the moisture is greater than 30 to 40%, where this mold and fungus is produced, okay. And then right here in this one part, typical clinical signs are hyper estrogen ism, which explains the increase in puberty. Are the decrease in puberty age, right? More hormones sooner in life increases puberty, swelling of the vulva mammary gland hyperplasia, secretions prolonged uterus, increase in pseudo pregnancy, infertility, decreased libido, complications of rectal prolapses, stillbirth, small literary. So we know it has a lot of fertility issues. And a lot of the studies first tend to happen in animals. So it’s good to know the data here in animals, as well as some of the human stuff here we talked about earlier.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the whole thing’s crazy. I mean, it’s hard to believe they would use this in the feed. I mean, like you said, maybe not intentionally, but it’s kind of a byproduct of storing grain in a, you know, in a moist thing. I mean, it’s like, you’d have to have a dehumidifier on your grain, or how about you just pasture your animals? So you don’t need to feed them moldy grain? How about that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I can tell you one story I had with Dave Asprey. He told me and I can’t find the data on this, but they would use zearalenone pellets, that put the pellet in the cow’s ear. And that was enough to cause this increased fat absorption. Because those hormones were so concentrated, they were going into obviously, the the blood supply via the ear, and it was causing the animals to get fatter. And of course, farmers, you know, sell their animals based off of weight. So we know that zearalenone may even be used in a way outside of just Incidentally, in the fee, we know, it may just be there to fatten them up as well.
Evan Brand: I’ve heard that too. I can’t find anything on it. But if any old school farmers are putting zero unknown pellets in your cow’s ears, let us know. Tell us about it. Give us the story on it, because we’d like to like to share this stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I know. It’s totally interesting. I believe there’s something to it. I believe, you know, someone like Asprey wouldn’t, wouldn’t say that unless he had some actual good info on that. But very interesting. So off the bat, we have mold toxins, we talked about that. And that’s important. Now again, and humans, you could get mold toxins from eating crappy grains and crappy food. So eating foods that are going to have lower mycotoxin counts, and to be important. So you know more from vegetables more from fruits more from high quality, fresh pasture fed animal products, good high quality fats, that’s going to decrease a lot of your mold and mycotoxin and xarelto load right there out of the gates, okay. And then the next component is going to be making sure your house isn’t moldy. So if you have a history of water damage, or flooding, you want to make sure you go back and listen to our podcasts on looking at and dealing with mold and mycotoxins in your home. But of course, any history of water damage, or any leaks, you want to leave or any visible mold, you want to at least get a really good high quality amino Linux plate test that looks at the mold as well as mold toxins. I’ve had some patients that have ordered the plates and just say, Well, I’m gonna let it culture and just look at it myself. It’s like, well, you want to send it to the lab, because you want to know what the mold species is. And if there’s any mycotoxins associated with that mold species, because you may look at it and see the culture, right. But you may not know if it’s a friendly mold or not. So you want to know if it’s Is it a, is it a mold that’s from the environment and the soil? Or is it something that’s actually from water damage type of mold species? That’s important to know.
Evan Brand: On a retest, it’s probably fine to do the self test, because you can look and just see this, hopefully, colonies show up. But yeah, on the initial I tell people the same yeah, definitely. Because also too, we rarely find that the house correlates to the mycotoxin in someone’s urine. That’s pretty interesting. So that tells us most people are sick from a previous exposure, but in a few cases, we have found where the molds in someone’s house and the mycotoxins those would produce for example, Aspergillus and Penicillium producing things like okra toxin, mycophenolic acid, will then look at the house and see Oh, yeah, you’ve got a bunch of Aspergillus growing, that matches up to the urine. So it’s cool to see, but it’s not necessary to to get someone better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I look at it just a tiny bit differently. Like if I see someone with a lot of mold, like weird kind of neurological symptoms, I always do the foundational things first, because a lot of times that can move the needle without having to go into any crazy mole protocols off the bat. But then if I see their home is very high and mold as well. You know, it’s easy, it’s sometimes it’s easier to decrease the exposure than to accelerate detoxification, especially if their guts not working well. So then there may be some easy simple strategies, like let’s just get a high quality air filter, let’s maybe get like a citrus bass, anti mole candle. If there’s any active leaks, let’s get someone in there that can work on remediation process, at least patch the leak or decrease humidity in the area. We can work on a couple of those things. And that can move the needle a lot.
Evan Brand: Yep. Let’s go into binders. So this is where the magic happens. Like you said, you may need to do some work on the gut First, we may come in and help support the adrenals because detoxification it is work and it’s not easy, and you can get worse by trying to make yourself better and I’ve certainly overdone it on binders. I’ve certainly overdone it with glutathione and had a bad headache for a long time. So that wasn’t fun. So the good news is you can pull this stuff out of the body and in regards to that yerlan own, the some of the most effective binders are going to be your clays. Now charcoal can help a little bit so we often use like a broad spectrum you can come in and spot treat. And there are certain people that say you need to spot treat mold toxins meaning you need to use charcoal for okra toxin you need to use zeolite clay for zearalenone. But the truth is, a lot of people are not showing up with the true amount of mycotoxins on their first urine sample, meaning you may just show up with okra toxin, but you also may have zearalenone. But if you’re a bad detoxifier, you may not be urinating out all of those toxins. Therefore, I do kind of spot treat, if you will, but I still like to use broad spectrum full spectrum binders just because of this issue because what’ll happen is on a retest, maybe we took care of one toxin and then a new one shows up like well crap, we could have been addressing the other mycotoxin say we were just using charcoal for ochratoxin we could have been using a little bit of zeolite clay as well and that would have took care of the zero unknown but boom, now’s your will unknown shows up on the retest. Now we’ve got a whole new mycotoxin to focus on. So long story short, full spectrum, broad spectrum and multiple binders are what we like to use. And then I’m a huge fan of the micronized chlorella there’s a couple brands we use they have a liquid chlorella, that can be amazing. There are some tablets of broken cell wall, chlorella, that can be awesome for heavy metals as well. And then sweating. I mean, I tell you I feel much, much more clear, you know, clarity mentally, right after I get out of the sauna, you can have like a detox hercus reaction from a sauna as well. But if you’re healthy enough and you’re supporting adrenals you’re doing electrolytes. To me sauna is a game changer and even just a hot bath. If you don’t have access to a sauna, even if you just get hot enough to sweat in the tub. That may be a little too hard on someone if you’re weak adrenally like your constitution is weak. But or if you have blood pressure issues, you know, a hot bath may make you feel bad. But if you can do it, you can sweat you know it’s free, compared to a sauna may cost you 1000 bucks minimum.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah, I mean, you can always add in some, you know, really good magnesium salts like Epsom salts, which can be very helpful and relaxing for you as well. So yeah, so the problem is a lot of the binders that we may add in or if it’s necessary to add them, and they could also decrease or cause bowel motility issue. So if you already have a lot of bowel issues, this is why it’s so important that we kind of deal with the hierarchy. And a lot of times the gut needs to be fully addressed. And working so we can have good detoxification because the gut is so important. Hepatobiliary why’s liver gallbladder, it dumps a lot of those bile and toxins that are mixed in with the liver and the gallbladder back into the intestines, and it has to move out. And so we give maybe things like Evan mentioned, various pectins are activated charcoals, or clays or fulvic minerals to bind up a lot of these things. But if we have really slow motility, it could really jack up with our absorption of nutrition and a reabsorption of other toxins, we want to make sure our bowels are still moving. So some people may not be able to handle that. And also, you kind of alluded to getting a false negative on some of these urinary Mold Test. That’s why it’s very important that you probably do one to two weeks worth of glutathione ahead of a urinary mold test to make sure we’re adequately dumping it. Because people their detoxification may be so weak, they may not be dumping it, they may look to that Mold Test, hey, look, I’m good, but you may not be. So I do a week or two. And I tell patients that if you are really feeling crappy during that loading phase, you probably have some level of toxins, and may not just be mold, it could be other pesticides or metals or other things in the environment you’re dumping. But it’s always good to do that load period. And if you feel too sick or just too achy during that timeframe, you know, feeling lethargic, malaise, achy brain, foggy Moody, it’s probably not the right time to do any testing yet, maybe you want to wait a little bit longer, get things moving better, and test the home, see what’s happening in the home and wait a little bit more till everything’s working better on the detoxification side, just getting your diet better, decreasing your inflammation, improving your nutrient density, surprisingly, that actually moves the needle a lot. And then you could always add in some gentle sweating protocols like Evan mentioned as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you know, you and I’ve talked about this for years, this idea that when people figure out there’s something going on, they want to take care of it immediately. Remember, we’ve done shows on parasites, and we talked about how, as soon as you see parasites show up, the the gut is, you know, the gut feeling is Oh my god, get this out of me and you and I’ve kind of discussed that you do want to do things in the correct order. And I would agree that happens with this toxicity issue as well. So if we’re working with a mom who’s had infertility problems, or you know, issues with pregnancy, and we want to help increase her health, we still are going to focus on the gut because there’s a right place in the right time. And if you’re really weak, you’re really sick, and then you try to go straight into a detox protocol. You could go the wrong direction. And it Trust me, I want this stuff out of you as fast as you want it out of you. But there is a right place in the right time. So we’re still going to be doing other testing, like looking at stool to try to investigate these gut infections. You know, you mentioned some of the reabsorption of toxins, too. That’s a big problem. If you have bacterial overgrowth because of this whole beta glucuronidation issue that we see. And so, there may need to be a month or two of just fixing the gut and fixing the enzyme production before we even get into detox. So don’t rush, don’t rush, don’t rush. That’s the whole message here. And can you do this on your own? That’s a question we get a lot. Well, can I just go online? Go on Amazon, buy a bottle of charcoal and be done with this? I would argue No, I will speak for Justin and say he would say no, as well, because we’ve done this 1000 plus times. And we know that if you’re just trying to detox and you’re not addressing everything else, you may send yourself backwards. What does that mean? Well, it means if you’re overwhelming your system, so like when I took charcoal, I’ve got some right here on my desk. I thought, well, I feel so good on four capsules a day, I’m going to go up to eight capsules a day. And I didn’t do anything in regards to my gut, my liver adrenals. And I crashed hard, I had way too much charcoal is like whoa, you can’t have too much of a good thing. So that’s why I would argue it’s better to have a practitioner kind of prep your body and build up the other pillars of health. Before you go into the detox pillar. detox is sexy, right? Like detox tea and all of this, it’s kind of a trendy thing to do. But people don’t have the disclaimer that you need to be ready, you need to have a constitutional strength to do this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% I totally agree. Sometimes we detoxification slow and steady, is the better way to deal with the issues, especially if a lot of these issues came slow and steady. If they came over decades, then it makes sense. If it you know a little bit more of a short term kind of toxic issue, you could probably hit it a little bit faster and harder, especially if you’re younger and more healthy. That totally makes sense. So when we talk about, you know, fertility and mold, I know a lot of women out there are going to be like, man, I knew it’s mold, maybe maybe not. So I just want to make sure anytime we talk about a specific issue, and we connect it to a thing like fertility that resonates with women, right. Like if you have fertility issues, you know, it’s it’s a very stressful thing for women that want to get pregnant, and they can’t, it’s very, very stressful. And so you want to look at the goal of pregnancy holistically. So you always want to look at diet and nutrient density. And all of the building blocks in your food. And being able to digest those foods adequately is core foundational, you want to be able to get sleep and having high quality water, you want to look at mitigating toxins, whether it’s molding your food, whether it’s eating crummy moldy grains, whether it’s consuming a lot of hormones, or pesticides, you want to look at those things as foundational. And then we can look at the hormones, we can look at your luteal phase hormone levels, we can look at your adrenals we can look at thyroid, autoimmune gut permeability, gut infections, and then we can eventually work our way to detoxification. And mold levels down the road, there’s an order of operation. So just kind of look at things as what’s going to give you the best bang for your buck. I always tell my patients if you’re going bowling, right and it’s your first role, you’re not trying to hit the outside left pin, you’re trying to hit the pin right in the middle, why hit the pin in the middle and knocks everything else down. So it’s kind of that’s how we want to look at this and mold maybe a pin that’s off to the right or left with some people. Some people that may be the center pin, right. But we always go with that center pin. And that’s always gonna be the foundational things to start and then we build on that as we go.
Evan Brand: Nice. bringing out the bowling analogy. That’s a new one. I like it. I like it. That’s awesome. Excellent. So for men, I mean men listening to they’re like, Well, you know, this is all about her. Nope. Did you hear the part about the reduction in sperm quality? So men, you are not exempt? I get frustrated with these fertility practitioners that people have seen before they come to me because why is the male not on this phone call? Like, this is so important. Why is the male not here? What is he doing? And so we know just the mold toxin, but anything else in regards to the diet, the lifestyle, the gut, that all affects male fertility as well. And I think this is really the missing piece. The women take all the blame the emotional blame the physical. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s a big issue for them to, to not have fertility, and so the men are just sitting back with their arms crossed, like, Oh, poor you, but they got to get involved too. And so there may be a male protocol that we’re implementing as well, a lot of the foundational nutrients for women, you know, we’re doing prenatals omegas, vitamin D, vitamin K, possibly some trace minerals, enzymes, electrolytes, liver support, did I say adrenal support already? adrenals. So those are some of the pieces that we’re implementing. And good news is, a lot of this stuff we’re talking about. It is reversible. Now, if you’re age 50 I’ve had some women literally age 50 52 coming to me because they want to have babies. I’m like, Ah, you’re 52 I’m gonna help you get healthy, but I’m not signing in blood. You’re going to have a baby at age 52 like this is Wow. So, you know, I think there is a cut off. But, you know, if you’re 40 listening to this, and you’ve had issues, I think you still have time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So I mean, my wife, we had our first child she was 41 and then 43. We had no problem getting pregnant. For the most part. We had a little bit of a fertility snafu in the beginning because she had a fibroid that was kind of embedded in the uterine lining. We didn’t know about it and was just sucking a lot of blood flow. So I always recommend patients that have fertility goals just to get a good general fertility workup to make sure there’s no ovarian tube or fallopian tube blockages, no weird, fibroids or anything weird that endometriosis that could be affecting fertility, because those things are pretty easy to remove. If we have to surgically Of course, there’s natural ways to do it, but it takes time, right. So if you’re under fertility window, you don’t have years to help these things reabsorb on their own. Sometimes a surgical intervention can be helpful when the clock is ticking. But guys, it’s pretty easy to roll out guys, we can do a high quality sperm test we can look at motility how the sperm are moving, you know what percents moving forward, what percent not moving, what percent. moving backwards, we can look at shape, which is morphology, we can also look at overall sperm count. So sperm count cut off, I think most the average firm comm for guys is around 20 million, we want at least 50 million. So we can look at that and there’s also expanded sperm panels, we’ll look at all look at DNA damage. We’ll look at oxidative stress as well. Now the key thing with guys is going to be just making sure insulin resistance toxins are under control, maybe a little bit of lifting some resistance training, you know good quality organic food right enough protein, enough fat that tends to be enough for most guys, adequate Selenium and zinc right adequate levels of good amino acids like Argentine that tends to be enough to really support good healthy sperm count where it’s going to be high enough. We can also add in things like co q 10 and carnitine. Like I mentioned, to support it extra. So it’s pretty easy to rules rule guys out in the beginning, Okay, good, hey, we’re at an adequate level great. Oh, we’re not let’s look at DNA damage. And then we can always then look at toxin load. Or if a lot of the guys are eating conventional standard American or eating a lot of GMOs, we can we can tweak a lot of that we can run a specific intercellular nutrient panel to look deeper at the nutrients and work on spot treating those on top of a good diet as well. But that’s essential. I like to get that if fertility is a goal to get the guy ruled out right away in the beginning.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s that’s great. Yeah. And that’s where like we said, Good multi comes in maybe some adaptogens too, because some of the herbs we use, they do have some supportive effects on hormone levels with man regulating testosterone estrogen levels, you know, some of the detox support may help in regards to estrogen. If men have had have a toxin issue and they’ve got, you know, breast tissue, they’ve got gyno, maybe they’ve done steroids. I mean, there are some issues that they kind of throw a wrench in the gears, but yeah, in general, you definitely make it sound like it’s much easier for men.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, out of the gates, I mean, women’s hormones are just so much more delicate. They’re like a beautiful Symphony and men’s are kind of like a foghorn. As I’ve always said, and, and with a symphony. If you just have the string the strings off or the percussion instruments off, you know that Symphony could turn to noise pretty fast. Definitely. We want to make sure that that’s you know, fully dialed in. And we want to look at the toxic load. So really important if you women are listening and you want to dive in deeper and with fertility goals kind of being there or even energy your mood goals being there to write I recommend clicking down below you can schedule with Evan, EvanBrand.com, you can also schedule with Dr. J. Myself, JustinHealth.com, we’re here to help you here to serve. Here to educate, we recommend taking advantage of all the low hanging fruit, we try to provide tons of low hanging fruit in this day and age. Everyone has access to it based on you know, the internet and everyone having these smartphones that are so cheap. Now it’s great. So everyone can kind of get access to a lot of this great Intel and start applying it. And then if you want to dive in deeper if you want to start stop guessing and start testing and figure out what’s happening under the hood. That’s where I really urge you all to reach out. And if you’re enjoying the content, please refer us to friends and family and shoot over a podcast the best way you can thank us for all that we’ve done is just kind of send the content to your family and friends so they can get healthier. Evan, anything else you want to say man?
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s all I want for Christmas is for everyone listening to share the podcast with your friends, your family, let’s make 2021 and even better, healthier year, less stress, less worry, more health, more vitality, it’s all possible. We try to give you guys action steps every time and this stuff is free. I mean, it’s a thankless job. So the best way you can think of sharing is caring. Thank you so much.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks, everyone. You guys have a phenomenal holiday season.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-affects-of-mycotoxins-on-male-female-fertility
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