Natural Solutions to Address POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome) | Podcast #329

POTS is a known blood circulation problem indicated by two elements: a specific group of symptoms that constantly happen when standing. A heart rate suddenly increases from horizontal to standing (or as tested on a tilt table) of at least 30 bpm in adults, or at least 40 bpm in adolescents, measured during the first 10 minutes of standing.

Management for POTS should be specific to each individual since the symptoms and underlying conditions may vary. Most patients can control the situation with food templates, exercise, and medications. In this podcast, Dr. J and Evan emphasize the importance of the quality of food that we eat and seek medical attention, and undergo tests that will find the disease’s root cause for better understanding and achieve a healthier body.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

1:15 What is POTS

10:56 Adaptogenic Herbs

15:15 Addressing POTS

24:43 Detox and Sauna

27:14 Other Natural and Organic Tips

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s got the J in the house here with Evan Brand really excited to have a excellent podcast on the topic of POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which is has to do with blood pressure and dizziness. And there’s a strong connection with POTS and the adrenals we’re really excited to dive into that today, Evan, how are we doing today man?

Evan Brand: Doing really well. I feel like I started every story or every podcast by like complaining a little bit, but that’s okay. Because we learn from our personal struggles. And that’s what makes us better practitioner. So I was telling you before we hit record that when I had the, you know what virus, I had a lot of POTS types symptoms, I was really dizzy, I was really faint. I was having some lower blood pressure. I was having some heart palpitations, I was having some mental confusion just fell out of it. And so dealing with it personally, I definitely tried a lot of different things. So you and I are going to try to go into it. You and I were talking about the adrenal piece. So why don’t you just start telling us about that? What do you think the connection is? You think it’s a more of a low cortisol deal? A high cortisol? Do you think it’s just adrenal weakness? The whole HPA axis is functioning as a whole, or do you think there’s any specific part of adrenal problems that’s causing this?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great, great, great question. So first off, you know, what is POTS? Right? So essentially, there’s like dysautonomia happening, right? The autonomic nervous system that controls heart rate, and blood pressure, sweating, all of these different things, the symptoms are over exaggerated now. So when you change body positions, you may get very dizzy lightheaded, right, your heart rate may be really up, energy fatigue, maybe up, right, conventional medicine, they’re going to use a tilt table test to kind of simulate that change of body position, and they’re going to test your heart, they’re going to test your blood pressure, okay? Now the typical response you want in, in natural medicine, there’s a test called the raglans test, which looks at blood pressure and correlates it to adrenal dysfunction. And so the raglans tests, basically test your blood pressure when you’re sitting or laying down, and then you stand up or change body position, you want your blood pressure, actually to go up about five to 10 points, okay? People that tend to be more on the pot side, where they have a lot of those symptoms on changing their body position, they tend to actually have a drop in blood pressure. And that’s important, because when you change body positions, now, if you’re like more horizontal, well, guess what, it’s easier for your blood to flow to your brain, right? Because blood flows downhill. And if it’s level than that, that works too, right? soon as you get up. Now, you really have to pump blood uphill, if you will, to get to your brain. And so if you have a drop in blood pressure, you’re not going to have enough pressure to perfuse that blood nutrition and oxygen to the brain. So that’s a big thing. So you may have symptoms in regards to your heart, in regards to dizziness, right? body awareness, all those different things because you don’t have adequate blood pressure. And so that’s a common sign with adrenal issues. And it’s possible to be on the POTS spectrum, where you have that change in body position, you have that change in lower blood pressure, but you know, your conventional medical doctor may not be able to diagnose you with POTS because it’s not severe enough. So like anything, there’s a there’s a continuum on a diagnosis, right? disease, allopathic kind of criteria is here. And then we have optimal health here. And usually there’s a spectrum of where you may sit where you’re kind of in no man’s land. And so most of our POTS patients, right who are on that pot spectrum where there’s blood pressure issues, on the lower side or the change in body position causes lots of disturbances cognitively cognitive wise heart issues, whether it’s faster or or beating through the chest kind of things, or abnormal rhythm. All of these things are connected to adrenals. And adrenal is are of course connected to blood sugar. They’re connected to your minerals, your sodium, your chloride, your magnesium, your potassium, blood sugar, cortisol glucocorticosteroids. And then of course, your adrenals eventually have a connection with your sex hormones. So you can see chronically lower dapa back can create other lower or more sex hormone imbalances that can create more issues, whether it’s PMS, low progesterone, more anxiety, more depression, poor sleep. So you can see how an adrenal issue can easily spin into a sex hormone issue, partly because the adrenals really are one of the backup generators for the sex hormones. And so especially if you’re a female, you’re going to rely on those adrenals to pump out dapa sulfate. And that’s going to be a major building blocks. So as you transition into menopause, you’re going to rely more on those adrenal. So as you hit your 40s, it’s common as those ovaries aren’t supporting the hormonal output like they used to that you may start to lean more on the adrenals. And more of those POTS type of symptoms may show up.

Evan Brand: Yeah, well said, well, you pointed out something really interesting. I never thought about it like this, but you and I clinically we kind of operate in the no man’s land, meaning that people may have not been extreme enough, as you mentioned, to get the clinical diagnosis. I mean, the same thing happens with celiac, right? They’ll say that you have to have some In crazy, like 95% tissue destruction in the intestines to be considered celiac, but if you’re like 94%, they say you’re not celiac, go eat some bread, it’s fine. So it’s very interesting point you made. And we’ve actually had clients report this to where they’ll say that their pulse rate or their heartbeat only increased by maybe 20, or 25 beats upon standing. And they were told clinically, it had to be 30 beats. So if you’re 28 beats, you’re still not pods, if you’re 30 beats, increase your POTS. And so that’s the problem is there’s this huge in between area where people have these symptoms, but then they go to their doctor, and they’re basically going to get told that everything is fine. And there’s really nothing we can do for you or possibly what they’ll do. If it was moderate enough, but maybe not clinically diagnosed on paper, maybe they do a beta blocker, because they say, Okay, I understand you’re standing up, you’re having heart palpitations, you’re having chest pain, let’s go ahead and do this meta pro law or other beta blocker to try to calm the symptoms, but then you never actually fixed the adrenals you never support the hormones, you never fixed the minerals. And all of that still goes unaddressed. And then of course, you get the side effects of the drug, and then you create more problems. So you see how this could be a really big slippery slope. And then also one thing I want to mention too, because I experienced it personally was you mentioned like the the dizziness and that kind of stuff, but also just mental fog. I mean, if you don’t have enough nutrients, enough blood flow, you just feel kind of spacey. So if you’re having trouble with focus, a lot of times you and I are looking on like an organic acids test to try to look at dopamine or other neurotransmitter problems. But this whole dysautonomia POTS thing could also create brain fog. So that’s just something else that we’re going to be looking for and trying to address.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so typically with POTS is you’re gonna have a combination of a drop in blood pressure, right? So conventional medicine diagnosis is looking at a 20 millimeter drop in mercury on the blood pressure cuff on the systolic, that’s the top number, and then about a 10 or more on the bottom number. So if it’s normally 120 over 80, you know, you got to be at, you know, below 100 over 70, if you will, okay, and that’s in the first couple of minutes of that change in body position. And then typically, as the blood pressure drops, now you’re not able to move as much blood. And so what has to happen is your heart rate has to increase to compensate for the lack of pressure. And so as the heart rate increases, that’s where you start to see the increase in heart rate, that’s where the, the postural orthostatic that’s the change in body position, tachycardia, that means faster heart rate. And so that’s where you start to feel your heart beating out of its chest. Okay, and so then you have the drop in blood pressure on one side, and the increase in heart rate on the other side. So the first thing we look at, from a functional medicine perspective, where are we in? Where are we at with hydration? Okay, are we getting enough water and hydration in? Number two? Is that full spectrum mineral water? Are we getting a really good mineral water? Are we getting? are we adding additional minerals to it? And then number three, where are we at with diuretics, coffee, tea, things that have caffeine because coffee or tea number one will increase adrenaline, right? And adrenaline is part of this whole POTS cascade, so increased adrenalin, increased, cortisol can always increase the heart rates. But it also acts more as a diuretic where you pee more water out, that drops your blood pressure. And then when you drop the water, you drop the minerals and your heart needs sodium and chloride and magnesium and your minerals to function. Remember, magnesium is a natural beta blocker. And so if we can get the minerals in that brings the blood pressure up because water follows minerals. And if we can get minerals in that relax the heart because magnesium is a natural beta blocker, right. And so that can really help start to relax the heart, but you got to fix the underlying issue. And so you got to really get and that’s just a couple of lifestyle, diet strategies out of the gates, we’ll talk more specifically. But anyone that has POTS or POTS symptoms, we have to really look at the adrenals. And you may not necessarily have an Addison’s issue where your cortisol is pathologically low, right, or Cushing’s where it’s pathologically high, it may be some kind of an imbalance in between. That’s why we use the word adrenal dysfunction because some people are high in the morning, low at night, and vice versa. So it may not be high throughout the day or low throughout the day, you could be somewhere in between. And so we really got to look at these things and test it and quantify and see exactly where you’re at.

Evan Brand: Yeah, great points. And on the testing, you made another great point, too, which is that if you do work with conventional medicine, they may say that your problem is not bad enough to be pathological. So we’ve had clients that will do just a morning cortisol sample via blood, and their doctor says, Well, your cortisol levels are fine. And it’s like, okay, yeah, you took an ATM blood sample. And that’s it. That’s just not enough tensional data, you have no, maybe you have a better analogy, but my analogy is you’re you’re touching the sidewalk to estimate the forecast. You have no idea what’s going to happen throughout the rest of the day with that rhythm. So if you’re having your POTS episode at 2, 3pm, you’re crashing, well, what’s going on from a cortisol perspective at that point with that 8am blood sample and that’s it. You don’t have a clue. Let me let me mention a couple things too. So I know that a lot of people with mold, just looking at Dr. Shoemaker and his big list of symptoms, POTS is sort of thrown in to some of these symptoms for mold exposure, and then also lyme. So when you’re trying to find root causes adrenals could be a factor, but there could be another layer deeper. So if you’ve had any kind of take issues, coinfection issues that could be a problem. And so, I know Stephen Buner, I talk about him a lot. He’s a really great herbalist who’s written a lot of books, he discusses using Hawthorne. And so I’ve experimented with some heart formulas myself, like mixing CO, q, 10, and Hawthorne. And I’ve had really good success with it. And so I think those are two, two good herbs that you know, two good nutrients that could help. And then also gingko could be helpful too, because gingko is going to help with blood flow and microcirculation. We use it a lot for brain problems. But I do believe that it can be helpful for POTS. And then let’s talk about the adaptogenic herbs. So I guess it really depends on what you’re looking like. But in general adaptogens are going to help modify you either way. So I would say something like rhodiola, or maybe a good ginseng, like an eleuthero is going to be probably the top top choice on adaptogens. What would you say? Oh, what about licorice? Should we talk about that?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so a lot of these herbs out of the gates, you know, they’re nice, because they’re going to help with blood flow. A lot of these herbs like gingko, or Hawthorn, they tend to be used more on the high blood pressure side, right. And so they may help with blood flow. But remember, I think with POTS, there’s definitely more of a blood, low blood pressure kind of kind of thing. So we have to kind of, you know, make sure we support all of the other underlying issues. Because, you know, a lot of times, if we’re not getting to the root, then we may not get lasting results. Plus a lot of times the medications that are used, what are the big medications that are used out of the gates, is it just beta blockers out of the gates, I know they do some things like floor enough, which can be helpful, which is basically a pharmaceutical version of aldosterone, which helps to hold on to sodium, which helps increase blood pressure. You kind of alluded just a minute ago, licorice does help mimic that. And so we can use things like licorice, that non diglycerides meaning not licorice, that’s diglycerides de glycerides. licorice loses that aldosterone stimulating effect, and it’s more for gut healing. But if we’re using licorice that has not been de glycerides, non dgl, licorice that can have very powerful effects on low aldosterone levels, and it can help hold on the minerals better. So for adding more minerals in there, that’s helpful. conventional medicine typically only talks about it from a perspective of sodium and sodium chloride, they kind of forget about the magnesium and the potassium part of it. So magnesium and potassium are also very important. Also, they’re using a lot of beta blockers, right? So beta blockers, guess what they reduce the heart rate, but they also can reduce the blood pressure. And they have effects of creating nutritional deficiencies. And it can it can lead you can lose some of those same minerals, magnesium, etc, that are also very helpful for the heart in general. So the problem with a lot of the medications, they can actually make some of the problems worse in the long run, because they’re not fixing the underlying issue.

Evan Brand: Yeah, well said, here’s here’s a couple other drugs, you’re asking what drugs, here’s a list of them. There’s one called Ivabradine. It’s a drug that acts on the heart to slow the heart rate, but it slows the heart with without affecting blood pressure. And then there’s another one here, underneath, it’s hard to even pronounce it Pyridostigmine, the brand name Mestinon, this is a drug that prevents the breakdown of acetylcholine. So that’s pretty interesting. It’s like an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, I guess.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hmm, interesting.

Evan Brand: It says they use it for. Let’s see here. Myasthenia Gravis.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s an autoimmune condition that affects the postsynaptic neuron where acetylcholine plugs in.

Evan Brand: So they’re using that drug for POTS also, I guess it’s kind of an off label deal. And then SSRIs for some reason, it says here that, you know, people I guess they’re saying practitioners suspect that the fainting spells may be related to serotonin or some other neurotransmitter so they also use SSRIs. But once again, none of this is root cause and as you mentioned, the conventional like Web MD stuff is all about sodium, sodium, sodium, like you should just be frickin eating spoonfuls of like iodized salt all day, which is just ridiculous.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And there’s different kinds of salt right? And there’s some salts that we like that like real salt or Redmond Real Salt or Celtic salt or Himalayan that are gonna have sodium and chloride but a bunch of other minerals as well, which is great. The problem a lot of the medications for instance, beta blockers are notorious for depleting CoQ 10. And we need coq 10 for healthy heart function. So problem with a lot of these medications is you’re kind of robbing. You’re paying your credit card debt from last month with a new credit card you open this month. And so you can only play hot potato like that for so long before that bill becomes due.

Evan Brand: We made the point about the potassium to I think we talked about that for a minute because you’re saying even if we do bring in some of the Celtic or the mineral salts You may get some trace amounts, right? But you’re not going to get a significant amount. So you’re thinking possibly supplementing, like we have. I know you and I work with a couple electrolyte formulas where there’s some potassium added in there. So something like that would be better than just straight salt.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so how I look at it with patients is first thing first is drink enough water. Make sure that water is clean, filtered, no crap, not tap water, number one. Number two, avoid the diuretics. Right. avoid caffeine. avoid alcohol, avoid teas, right. So that way you’re not peeing out extra water and minerals. add extra minerals to your water. So good. Redmond’s real salts Celtic sea salt, half a teaspoon teaspoon twice a day is great salt your food very liberally hydrate you know, 20 ounces or so before each meal 1015 minutes before drink in between meals. It’s great. If you’re drinking a really clean reverse osmosis water which is fine. Just make sure you add extra minerals back to it. definitely avoid any distilled water. And then if you want to drink like a really good clean mineral water throughout the day, my favorite here in Texas Topachico’s wonderful, right? It’s the Pellegrino of the South Pellegrino is also wonderful good mineral sulfate drill Steiner, Evian, Fiji, Fiji has got a lot of silica in there really excellent out of the gates love those. I would say also, you may need to have more potassium and magnesium than what you’re getting in mineral water and in the salt, because you need about 4700 milligrams per day. So I recommend everyone, head over to JustinHealth.com/cronometer, put the link below, run your macros run a typical day through there, right put your age, your height, your weight, your activity level, and you’re gonna find you need about 4700 milligrams per day. And that’s the [inaudible] daily recommended intake, most people are only getting two to three grams 2000 to 3000 milligrams, and you’re probably have a deficit. And then you also have to factor in when you’re stressed. And when your adrenals have issues, you may need a couple extra grams on top of that, because you’re losing extra minerals. So you got to factor that in. So take a look, see where you’re at, see how low you’re at. And out of the gates, you know, you want to supplement additional potassium, whatever that recommended intake is if you’re at 2700 milligrams, you want an extra 2000 milligrams to meet the needs. And then from there, you really want to work with a functional medicine practitioner because if you go too high in potassium without enough sodium to support it, you can actually you can actually lower sodium by doing too much potassium so you got to keep that sodium potassium in check. Now if you’re doing Redmond’s Real Salt, like I mentioned, along with the potassium, you’re probably okay. But if you have any POTS issues at all, you really want to be working with a functional medicine doctor like us, you want to be looking at cortisol, like Evan said earlier, a blood test is only going to look at your serum cortisol, your protein, it’s not going to look at any of your free cortisol, it’s not going to look at it throughout the day. It’s not going to add it up throughout the day. And then we also run organic acids that look at the catecholamines the adrenaline, the epinephrine again, adrenaline, catecholamines, and epinephrine. It’s all the same thing, right? Medicine uses these words to confuse the heck out of you, adrenaline, catecholamine, nor epinephrine, all the same thing, okay. And so we have to test those and we use organic acids, we’ll run tests for Vanilmandelate and Homovanillate, which gives us a window into your adrenaline precursor. So if we’re burning up adrenaline, we gotta support the amino acids, we got to calm down the adrenals to really help the body. So we’re not creating all this extra stress because that stress causes you to dump minerals. And so if you’re dumping minerals, we have to replace what you typically need. Plus a little bit on top of that, plus, we got to fix and calm down the whole nervous system, right? That autonomic nervous system, that’s the automatic nervous system that controls heart rate, beat, these are things you don’t typically think about. You don’t think about beating your heart, it happens automatically. So we got to help calm that down.

Evan Brand: Yeah, so even some of the lifestyle strategies can get involved too, right? I mean, you could take all the adaptogens. But if you’re just a type A personality or a go getter, you’re not resting, you’re not taking breaks. So I would argue, some music, I would argue meditation, guided meditation, maybe a float tank, deep tissue massage, may be myofascial relief, anything that you could do to try to basically downshift your nervous system. Because yes, you mentioned something several times, which I think really kind of just ding ding ding hit the bell for many people, which is the the variable of stress. And people that are more stressed are going to have this problem more, you’re likely not just going to be sitting on an island, you know, getting, you know, spoon fed pineapple and you feel POTS. Now, this is going to be people that are really under the gun. They’re in the middle of a lot of transition there. Maybe Who knows, maybe they lost their job. Maybe they had a viral issue that really took them down like you had a post viral type POTS Come on. So stress, I think is the big variable and that’s where the adaptogens come in and help the nervous system self regulate. However, I’ve done adaptogens for years and I can still be stressed so I still have to focus During the lifestyle stuff, take the kids for a bike ride, go ride the skateboard, go for a walk, go for a hike, just sit out in the sun and listen to music. So you got to come in with the lifestyle stuff too. You can’t just go take the magic pill and you know, eat the salt and be cured. I think at a certain point, you need to come in and evaluate your lifestyle and figure out do I have toxic people I need to cut out am I working too many hours? Am I able to delegate some of the work I’m a you know, financial advisor and I’m too stressed I’m working 60 hours a week, can you delegate Can you reduce the workload reduce the stress, because in a vacuum, the stuff that we’re talking about, it won’t get you fully out of the woods with this, I do think you have to do a good life evaluation.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% got to look at all of it right. And that’s super important. Now, in general with with a lot of things we may want to get, you know, a couple extra, you know, grams of good quality sea salt. So you can start with you know, an extra gram, the 10 grams of high quality sea salt, I typically recommend starting with a half a teaspoon to a teaspoon, two times a day, put it in your water, shoot it down. You can also salt your food very liberally, you know to taste throughout the day. You can also add a little pinch in your water just enough so you can’t taste it, you shouldn’t be able to taste them. You can also drink a good quality quality mineral water right mentioned a couple of these brands. And then you can also work on doing all the right things to reduce stress. So I already mentioned a couple things out of the gates. Blood Sugar is a big thing, the more your blood sugar goes up and down on a roller coaster ride your surging adrenaline and cortisol when your blood sugar goes hypo when it starts to go low. And when you start surging adrenaline, it’s going to create more mineral depletion, because you’re going to pee it out, right? So we The more you can kind of come down that blood sugar and make it more stable part of that by being more fat burner right? healthy proteins, healthy fats and dialing in the carbs, less refined, refined grains, keeping it more to vegetables. And low sugar fruit in those kinds of things play a big, big role in keeping the blood sugar rollercoaster smoothed out. The less blood sugar roller coaster, the less adrenaline the less dumping of minerals does play a huge role across the board.Evan Brand: And this is a new problem. By the way, the blood sugar issue that you’re mentioning this is in terms of modern history, right? Because if you look at like a hunter gatherer, for example, maybe they’re gonna find a beehive and get some fresh honey every once in a while. But never in human history. Have we had access to the processed carbs, the fructose, the processed sugar, these major nations have processed grains, yeah, flowers, any of the stuff that is screwing up our blood sugar. These are all relatively new problems for humankind. So if someone’s sitting back and they’re listening, like God, why is it so complicated to be a healthy human? Well, because we’ve screwed it up with the diet, the lifestyle, the sedentary, the stress, the the schedules, the work hours, I mean, modern life has contributed to this problem. So, you know, I know it’s a little frustrating. And thank God, why is everything complicated with health? Well, because the diet is a big part of it. And I certainly know that when I had blood sugar issues, I had a lot more unstable blood pressure, too. So there is definitely a big connection there. The good news is once you get your diet dialed in, and you are a fat burner, you’re going to feel so much better, you’re going to feel so much more stable.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I remember early on when I was looking at your diet law, we were chatting, I think you were having some of these POTS issues with a lot of the heart racing, right. And I remember looking at your diet and there was like an eight hour gap. In the day where you weren’t eating, I think you were trying to do a little bit more intermittent intermittent fasting, things like that. I’m like, wow, you know, you’re not going to be able to do those things because the fasting is too much of a stress on your body, your your physiology is not strong enough to be able to adapt to that stress. And so if you are doing a lot of intermittent fasting, you really got to be careful of that, you know, so kind of my checklist out of the gates is definitely be more of a fat burner. Avoid the refined flours, grains, high blood sugar types of foods that add in the extra minerals, half a teaspoon, teaspoon high quality, sea salt per day, work with a functional medicine doctor, get your magnesium, your potassium dialed in half your body weight in ounces of water. Clean, filtered water is excellent good quality, reputable brand mineral water during the day. All of these things are vitally, vitally important. Good breathing, good movement, don’t over exercise where you’re sweating too much. You know, make sure you’re doing all the right things and get your adrenals tested, get your organic acids tested to look at your adrenalin as well. I mean, we can always dive in deeper. If you have a lot of gut issues and absorption there. There always could be a bottleneck with the gut as well. It’s always possible, but those are kind of your first steps out of the gates, Alaska with the low hanging fruit, start with low hanging fruit, and then work on finding a good functional medicine support practitioner to get in your corner.

Evan Brand: I wanted to bring this up before you wrapped it up. So last thing, detox and sauna. So I do notice that some clients and me included if we go too high, we do too much. We do too frequent with sauna and or detox support, especially binders, we can run into some trouble. So just like you mentioned On the exercise not doing too much. Same thing with sauna I think you got to be careful with it if you’re already adrenally depleted, if you’re glutathione deficient if your detox pathways are not working, you can overdo it quick. So I would say the average person could hopefully handle twice a week, maybe 135 to 140 degrees for about 20 minutes but if you start to feel woozy, you feel faint, you feel like you’re gonna pass out in the sauna just get out, you’re probably dehydrated, your mineral are off your adrenals are too weak, so don’t push it, don’t push it. And then on the binder piece, work with your practitioner, but in general, sometimes less is more on the binders. I remember when I was doing like eight charcoal per day, I started to feel pretty woozy and it could have been like a detox reaction, but I think it may have been some mineral stuff too. So I was doing some fulvic acids and some salts to try to help balance it, but I still overdid it with binders. So those are just two other notes I wanted to share.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So if you’re going to do a sauna, make sure if you already have kind of POTS symptoms, one don’t do it right after exercise, probably too much stress. Okay, do a sauna session by itself. Number two, take an electrolyte support a balanced electrolyte support product before you go in and have a good mineral water while you’re there sweating. So then any water that comes out, you’re replacing it as it comes in with mineral so supplement before and then good mineral water during and that should be and then try to keep it under 20 minutes and make sure you’re not feeling any bit woozy or any bit worse in regards to your symptoms while you’re in there. I think that’s a good kind of general way of of hitting.

Evan Brand: Alright, here’s my shameless plug. And then we can wrap up My Hydration Essentials is an electrolyte formula that I drink, I just do a scoop of it. I mix it with water and drink one scoop a day. And it does have some ribose it does have potassium, some taurine, some of the other nutrients outside of just your sodium. And I also drink that in the sauna and I give it to my kids. And I like to actually mix it with beet powder. And we use just an organic beet powder. And I add it to the electrolytes because it really increases nitric oxide. So my hands, my feet, everything gets warmer, circulations better and I sweat, like 25% more sweat in the sauna, if I mix the electrolytes with the beet powder and drink that. So that’s called hydration essentials.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that’s great. And other natural thing that you can do on top of that celery juice is wonderful. You get about one gram of potassium in a cup of celery juice. So celery juice is excellent. Very good. It’s kind of your it’s Mother Nature’s natural Gatorade, right problem with Gatorade ton of sugar, a ton of high fructose ton of dyes. So it’s basically crap. You know, Mother Nature’s gatorades coconut water. But the problem with coconut water is a lot of sugar in it. So you really only want to do a post workout. So the best type of natural low sugar gatorades in the me celery juice, that’s a great option for you a lot of good minerals, a lot of good potassium. And if you do any green juices really avoid any carrot and or any fruit in there because when just juice it, the sugar concentrates really high. And that can create this reactive hypoglycemic drop blood sugar was a fast comes down hard. And this is kind of what feeds into the all the pot stuff. Right, it creates more cortisol aberrations and more adrenaline, noradrenaline stimulation, so just be careful that really good we’ll put links to the some of the products that Evan mentioned and some of the things that I mentioned as well. Anything else you want to highlight, Evan?

Evan Brand: Great call on the carrots. You know, when you think of eating a carrot, like in a beef stew, you don’t think of it as being necessarily sugar. But I have had some clients do what you’re describing, which is they’ll get into the green juices with the carrots and will track their blood sugar. Man, that stuff screws up their blood sugar almost as much as a soda does.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, if you’re gonna have a carrot, eat it whole. Once you juice it, it becomes a problem. Now if you’re doing like, if you’re just using like one carrot, and you’re relatively healthy, probably not a big deal. But if you have blood sugar issues, I stay away from any carrots if you’re gonna have a carrot habit and your salad eat it raw. I think that’s a good way to do it. Still nutrient dense. But yeah, you gotta you don’t want to throw too much blood sugar on that blood sugar rollercoaster. And beets too.

Evan Brand: Sorry. Well, last thing. So I talked about the beets. So the one that we use and carry is a non hybridized beet powder because apparently just like with strawberries, and pretty much every other fruit in the in the modern world, everything’s hybridized now to be bigger, brighter, sweeter. So most beets are hybridized even if they’re non GMO, they’re hybridized and so they’re gonna cause a big blood sugar problem. I have some clients that are just way too blood sugar unstable to handle beets but if it’s a non hybridized version, it is a little bit more well tolerated. So just keep that in mind if you feel kind of woozy. If you do the beet powder thing I’m talking about you feel weird. It could be messing with your blood sugar, you could always test it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent really good. Hey, if you guys are enjoying today’s content and how you support us feel free click down below look at some of our links. Sign up for our newsletter. If the information that we’re talking about resonates Feel free to schedule a call with with Evan or myself we have colleagues and support teams ready to help you out if you want to dive in deeper. We’re here to help you take control your health. 99% of people may not take that step. Use the information. Take Control your health, you’re ready for that next step we are here for you. Share this content with friends or family. Put your comments down below. I want to know what your experiences are with POTS or any of these POTS like symptoms. We’re here to help and appreciate you guys all engaging. Have a phenomenal day.

Evan Brand: Take care now.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care y’all. Bye now.

Natural Ways to Improve Your Sleep | Podcast #199

High-quality sleep is essential to one’s overall health. For numerous people, sleep deprivation led to risks in blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. Upkeep your well-being through the natural ways you can enhance your sleep.

Watch this video to know how Dr. J and Evan Brand explain the relationship of sleep to temperature, exercise, gut issues, blue light exposure, and smoking. Don’t forget to like and share!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

01:00 Temperature and Sleep Quality

02:45 Top Metabolic Things Moving Sleep Issues

09:42 Benefits of Sleep

04:00 Work Hard, Rest Hard

18:30 What Keeps You Up at Night?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, there. It’s Dr. J. Welcome ladies and germs. Hope you guys are having a phenomenal Monday. Evan, what’s going on with you?

Evan Brand: Hey, man. Not too much. Uh– The sun is shining still. Summer is still here. I thank the Lord. Uh– We had some weird like cold weather for a couple of days, and I thought, “Oh, man. I don’t know if I’m ready for this yet.” But today, it’s back to the heat so I’m enjoying it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Summer down here has been hot as you know what. But-

Evan Brand: Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -I got like a little portable air conditioner unit outside of my central air, just good. It’s like, dude, I just can’t keep up with it. I got like my three or four monitors and then my treadmill and my– my– my stepping desk as well. I got like a little step or so. From sitting, I can– I can bike. From standing, I can walk and just all the heat that comes off in like a– a smaller office, it just gets contained in– I think I just get it– get it out.

Evan Brand: Yeah, maybe that should be strategy number one for today’s topic on improving sleep, which is make sure your environment is cool enough, because I’ve seen that some of the literature where they do like sleep studies on people that have the temperatures above like 70-72 Fahrenheit, people start getting restless.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah. Hundred percent agree with that. Yep. Sleep quality, sleep– We were talking about sleep today, in case you guys didn’t know yet. But, temperature’s important. I mean, I try to keep it in the upper 60’s, low 70’s. Uh– One thing I’d done recently because, you know, I’m in Texas right now. It’s hot as heck and it’s really expensive to keep everything super cool. So one thing I invested in recently is called the BedJet, and the BedJet’s excellent. I’ll see if I could put a link down below for you guys to get that–

Evan Brand: I love– I love that thing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Have you gotten it?

Evan Brand: No. Remember you showed me when I was at your house?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah! Yeah, I showed you at my house. Yeah. So you saw it-

Evan Brand: I love those.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -but it’s great. It basically goes underneath your sheets, and then it pumps in air. Now, it can warm the air up, but it can only cool the air as low as the air temperature. But it’s nice because it can pull in if you have like 75° or 76°, you know, temperature in your room, and it’s cool and already air-conditioned. It can pump that air in and it kind of stays underneath there that can kind of cool you a bit, and it’s very, very cool. And I put it on low like– I mean, you know, it’s the very low speed.

Evan Brand: Yup.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Maybe like it’s a 10%-20% of max, and it just comes– keeps a little bit of air in there, which keeps me cool, which is really nice. And– You know, especially in the summer, if a little bit of humidity that kind of– it can– the sheets can kind of stick to you. It feels a little uncomfortable. It’s just enough to cool that off.

Evan Brand: Yup. That– That’s– So temperature’s huge. I mean, many people-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Temperature’s great.

Evan Brand: -work that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, I agree. Totally. So, the temperature aspect’s great. I mean, I always sleep great when it’s like uhm— when it’s colder, when it’s around 69 or so, and then you can kind of really stay warm underneath through. That’s really the kind of the optimal temperature, 65-69, but in summer, it’s a little hotter, especially if you’re in a hotter place– places in the US. And then next step to that, let’s kind of go into a couple of other metabolic things? What are your– What are your top few metabolic things you want to start with?

Evan Brand: Well– I mean, blood sugar’s the biggest one. I had so many issues with my blood sugar for probably my whole life, just being raised on a Standard American diet, rich in carbohydrates, refined sugars, and so my blood sugar was probably one of the biggest, you know, movers for my health. And if you’re blood sugar’s crashing at night, your adrenals have to kick in to crank up and create some extra Glucose through the Gluconeogenesis process, and then all of the sudden you wake up and your heart could be racing, your mind could be racing, etc. So for me, you got to work on adrenals. I just want to give a couple statistics first. People may, you know, feel like sleep is just their issue and they may not know that many, many people struggle with it. So, if you’re looking at some of the CDC– I mean, they’re– they’re saying 50,000,000+ people have some sort of issue with sleep. Fifty million people in the US alone, so that is huge. And then, of course, they’ve got this whole list of uh– health conditions that are tied in to sleep issues, so it could be things like Stroke, Cancer, Arthritis, Depression, Diabetes. We know that if you’re not sleeping well, you’re blood sugar’s messed up from not sleeping well. And blood sugar can mess up sleep, so it’s like this big connected spiderweb. That’s a lot of people. Fifty million people struggling with sleep.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Definitely a lot. New study that just came out uhm— over the weekend actually, and the study looked at what’s the optimal amount of sleep for healthy– for– for cardiovascular health. They found six to eight hours was the optimal dosage for sleep. Too high actually had an increased risk factor, and then too low also had an increased risk factor. So six to eight was a sweet spot. They weren’t quite really sure what that mechanism was of that. Could just be a correlation versus causation kind of thing. I really have a hard time thinking that if I get 8½-hour sleep, uhm— I’m gonna increase my risk of heart disease. That doesn’t quite make sense to me from a mechanistic standpoint.

Evan Brand: No, it doesn’t.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But, hey. Six to eight, that makes sense, so if you’re getting less than six, for sure, you got to curtail that. But I do think, for me, if I’m not doing a ton of higher exercise– harder exercise– seven hours is essential. I do notice though, if I’m exercising more and I’m lifting more weights, you know, eight to nine becomes like important. So if I’m like more busy, I actually cut down a little bit on the morning tense exercise ‘cause it just requires me to get more sleep to recover.

Evan Brand: Yep. Yep, well said. So the exercise piece– I think exercise is a great sleep inducer, as long as it’s not too stimulating and not too close to bed. So, you know, depending on the weather, like 7:00 PM, if we can go for a walk– you know, I’ll try to take my wife and the baby down the street and back.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.

Evan Brand: You know, 15 to 20-minute walk, I’m much more ready for sleep if I do that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, totally. I– I agree. I mean, the big thing with sleep, in general, and exercise is the fact that it revs up– it revs up your sympathetic nervous system. So the healthier you are, the more you can kind of go on and off. Right? On-off. So, if you can turn off– on and off, and you can regulate and get that sympathetic stress response down, that’s great. Awesome. So maybe, like for me, I do like Tabatas around 7:30. Maybe some push ups, I do like, you know, ten to fifteen thousand steps during the day on top of that. So I get my 10,000 to 15,000 steps and I do like a little bit of Tabata action, and that’s–

Evan Brand: And you’re saying 7:30 PM?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I do it, but I mean, my Tabatas five minutes, so it’s not like-

Evan Brand: Okay.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -you know, a long thing. But I’m fine with that. That’s not a problem. So that’s– that’s helpful but if you have some neurological adrenal stuff, you may got– you may want to be careful of the timing of when you do your exercise. Maybe do it in the morning, or you may be fine with a Tabata or an interval thing that’s shorter, right? We just want to make sure, number one, we feel good after the exercise; two, we can emotionally repeat it. If the workout’s shorter, it’s u– most people can wrap their head around to it emotionally. It’s not draining them out. And then, three, how do you feel that next day or that next night, if that was a morning workout. That way you can kind of gauge in the intensity, the frequency, and the duration of how long your workout is, and you can adjust those variables accordingly to get you in that place where you can check all three of those boxes. Do you feel better? How do you feel emotionally afew minutes after? Can you repeat the movements? And then how so you feel later that day or that next morning?

Evan Brand: Yep. Well said. The next thing we have to mention is the timing or the schedule of sleep. If you’re working swing shift or night shift, that is bad news. We know, if you just type in “night shift nurses sleep study,” it’s something crazy, like a 50% increased risk of breast cancer if you’re working night shift. I mean, think about it. We didn’t evolve to be up at night. And if we were up at night, we were hanging out by a fire, which is gonna be a pretty orange or red colored light, and we– maybe we were chasing away a hyena or something or a bear that was gonna come eat our children when we were hunter gatherers, but we weren’t up at night under fluorescent lighting working in a hospital, looking at a computer screen. So if you’re a night shift nurse or a night shift anything, like I was when I was in college, I mean, it destroyed me. And I think one of my biggest down– you know, I guess one of my biggest downfalls or the thing that destroyed my health was working at midnight, and would work all the way through the night and I would get off at 5:00 AM and I would go to sleep at 6:00 AM. And I would try to sleep from 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM, and I survived but I did not thrive at all. So, people may yell at us, “Oh! Just, Evan, I have to work this shift.” Okay. If you absolutely can’t change it, you can’t get another job, you can’t work with the sun, I hear you, but I hope that there’s an alternative to where people can get off of that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I a hundred percent agree. If you have the ability, great. Awesome. Make it a priority. Or if you get paid in a lot more and that’s what you need to do, fine. It is what it is. You just kind of have to know that you’re going up to the plate with two strikes against you, so you really gonna have to make sure that your nutrition is– is borderline perfect. You’re gonna have to make sure you have some good adaptogens going and some good adrenal support going. And then, ideally, you know, make sure– It’s tough because then what do you do on the weekend? Do you keep that same cycle going? Do you go back to a normal rhythm? Uhum– That’s where it becomes dicey. I mean, I would probably say, “Keep the rhythm going to keep it consistent so you at least have a good rhythm.” But you got two strikes against you, and you really have to make sure everything else is dialed in regarding hydration, regarding uhm— adrenals, regarding adaptogen and regarding nutrients, and not even say gut function because we got to make sure there’s not a lot of gut stress and we’re absorbing and assimilating and then utilizing our nutrients efficiently.

Evan Brand: Yeah. I tell you, when I worked that shift, my lunch hour was like 3:00 or 4:00 AM. Your body’s not wanting to digest food. I don’t care how long you work night shift, you never feel like you’re fully satiated after a meal at 3:00 or 4:00 AM. I mean, there’s a lot of hormonal stuff going on in the middle of the night that your body’s not really wired to be eating a grass-fed steak and veggie, so I never felt good no matter– no matter how quality the meal was. So I think, in that aspect, you can hack it. Maybe you can hang in there, but eventually, you got to get off the night shift. I mean-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.

Evan Brand: -it is a killer.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I agree. Now, regarding sleep, what are some of the benefits of sleep? Now, getting– not getting enough sleep can cause blood sugar issues because part of the sleep is its restoration of your hormones, repairing your— your organs, repairing all the– the physical and the biochemical structures of the body so you can function optimally. So, 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM is that Growth Hormone Window so we have a lot of physical repair happen at that time. And then, 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM, we have more of the biochemical kind of repair happening. And, ideally, getting closer, going to bed on the other side of midnight is ideal. I mean, for me, I’ll be straight up. I’m not perfect. I typically get to bed around 11:30. I try to do like 11:30 to 7:30. That’s kind of my gig, and then I’m operated to go at 8:00, but you got to figure out what works best for you. I mean, if I had more health concerns and more issues, I would be more on top of that, but I– I feel relatively good and– and I manage my stress and I wind down at night, so I feel pretty good with that. But in general, if you have any health issues, you’d want to be more on the other side of midnight. So getting to bed closer to even 10:00 o’clock would be ideal, just so you maximize that growth hormone output steroids that happen around 10:00 PM.

Evan Brand: Yup. Well said, and bright light in the morning, that’s really important. People don’t talk about what you do during the day to influence your sleep. People think, “Okay. What’s the magic supplement I need to take before bed to help me sleep?” Well, the magic supplement may be getting outside first thing in the morning in getting bright light exposure. So right before we jumped on this call together, I was on my bike. I rode my bike without my shirt, getting as much sun as I can, just down the street– down the street and back, you know, 5-10 times. I felt good. I felt amazing. I still feel good from it. I know I’m gonna sleep better just because of the exercise piece plus the sunlight telling me that it’s morning. It’s daytime. It’s time to get going. It’s time to peak the cortisol.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.

Evan Brand: And you and I test cortisol on every client, and we see a lot of times that people in the morning or in the afternoon, they have a lowered or a flatline Cortisol rhythm. And we have to improve upon that because if you don’t have a peak, then you can’t have a drop. So if you’re just flatlined all day, you’re not gonna feel very good. And then sometimes, what you and I see on the testing is we see that they have an inverse cortisol pattern or maybe it’s too low in the noon and afternoon, and then it kind of spikes at night. And then those people are the ones who they laid down but they’re too wired and tired. So we really have to focus. We have to test, first of all, you got to get the data. We have to test the adrenal function, and then we have to help modulate that cortisol rhythm if it’s off. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter if you take Melatonin or some other magic sleep supplement. It might not work.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent. So again, that reverse cortisol rhythm is the hallmark of a sympathetic kind of overload or sympathetic dominant person. Their fight or flight nervous system response is more activated and is starting to go up at night. And the WHI ha– HERS II study show the greatest correlation of cancer was a decreased cortisol gap between their cortisol in the morning and their cortisol at night. So the lower their cortisol got in the morning, which should be higher, and the higher their cortisol at night, this gap– this spread between morning and night– the smaller that spread got, showed a greater increased correlation risk of cancer than even smoking.

Evan Brand: Whoah!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, it’s really important that we keep the sympathetic nervous system– you know, we keep it so we can oscillate and adapt between parasympathetic and sympathetic. So a couple things we do is adaptogenic herbs; can be really helpful.

Evan Brand: What are you taking there?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s just some Ashwagandha-

Evan Brand: Oh, okay.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -and some extra vitamins. Uh– On top of that would be, of course, a really good anti-inflammatory nutrient dense diet, uh– along with blood sugar stability, ‘cause sometimes low blood sugar going into bed can create cortisol uhm— surges in the middle of the night.

Evan Brand: I remember when my nervous system was screwed up. This was like 2015. It’s like three and a half years ago. I was about to move back to Kentucky, and– and I called Justin. I was like, “Justin,” I was like, “I’m freaking out, man.” I was like, “My heart is beating a thousand beats a minute. I can’t get it to slow down.” And that was when I was about to move so the house was in boxes. Do you remember this?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup. I remember this.

Evan Brand: The hou— The house was in boxes. We were getting ready to pack up and move the next day, and you said, “Hey. Just try like a gram of Magnesium.” So that’s what I did, and then I ended up doing like an Epsom Salt Bath too with some essential oils, and I calmed it down. But I’ll tell you from firsthand experience, if your nervous system is screwed up, if you have more stress– you know, people say the term, “Work hard. Play hard.” If you don’t work hard and then rest hard, you’re– you’re gonna be messed up. And for me, you know, I had all of these impending uh– transition of moving and such, and I was not mitigating my stress properly. I was doing my adaptogenic herbs, which is great, but I was probably not getting enough exercise, sunlight, etc. So I’ve been there, done that, and it’s not fun. So, you have to make sure– I’ll just kind of say it in a different way. However much stress you have in your bucket, you’ve got to have an equally large bucket of de-stressing activities: meditation, massage, float tanks, herbs, going to bed on time, blocking blue light at night, etc.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent. Like in my line, I have a product called Magnesium Supreme, which is a Magnesium dimalate, which is great. There was this other Magnesium uh– powders that are great. I’ll do a little bit of Magnesium with some Collagen, which has Glycine in it, and the Glycine can be really calming and relaxing too at night time. So I’ll do that before bed as well. People can also do some of the decaf Tulsi teas are excellent ‘cause that kind of has an adaptogenic effect. Some people would do even the Ashwagandha, which is great. Ashwagandha Supreme’s awesome. Do that one to two caps before bed. Just do recommend testing it out during the day just to see how you do. Some people, they get really energized with it, so you– you want to just make sure it’s not– you’re not one of those people that really get over– overly stimulated with the Ashwagandha. You can always do some other teas like the Camomile tea. The Tulsi decaffeinated teas are excellent ‘cause that’s Holy Basil, which is kind of a– a similar adaptogen as Ashwagandha, where it help– really helps calm and relax. You can always do some sublingual or liposomal GABA. We can even add some L-Theanine, too, which is an amino acid that’s really calming and– and relaxing as well. Uh– Anything else you wanted to ask, Evan? Al– Also uhm— Phosphorylated Serine is a nice adaptogen that helps calm the Hypothalamus’ response to Cortisol, so it can help really relax that Cortisol response at night, in case you got this reverse Cortisol rhythm pattern that’s happening.

Evan Brand: Yeah, and–

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What, Evan?

Evan Brand: yeah, I do. Yes, and I’ll first comment on the Phosphorylated Serine. People may think you’re just pronouncing it different or wrong. You’re not. No. This is different than Phosphatidylserine. This is Phosphorylated, so there is a difference that’s he is talking about. I’m a huge fan of Lemon Balm. I have Lemon Balm tincture [crosstalk] in my– Yeah. I’m growing it in my garden but it’s a lot easier to just buy an organic Lemon Balm tincture. So I do that, and then, Motherwort, another favorite. Uh– There’s a couple different herbalist that I look to for education about herbs. And one herbalist said that taking Motherwort is like getting a hug from planet Earth, and I would agree with that statement completely. It’s a weird thing to describe how are you getting a hug from planet Earth? But when you take Motherwort, you just feel like you’re cuddled. You feel like you’re getting swaddled like a little baby. And so I take Motherwort and I just go lay down, and it’s basically– uh– I mean, It just takes all of your worries away. It’s a very, very calming thing to do, and it’s really great for people with heart issues– you know, atrial flutter, atrial fibrillation, any other type of like a sympathetic overdrive heart issue. Obviously, if you’re taking pharmaceuticals, you got to see if that stuff matches up. But if you’re not on pharmaceuticals, Motherwort is a really good go-to.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. We can also do things like Melatonin. I always recommend if you’re using Melatonin, if you have good benefits with Melatonin, try to use more of the 5-HTP with B6 first ‘cause that provides more of the building block amino acids to make the Melatonin hormone. I always like providing more of the building blocks and precursors. Some people, they just have burnt out their Serotonin from stress or from too much sugar or inflammation. So those building block kind of pulls to make their Melatonin can be lower. So I was recommend that utilizing some of the 5-HTP with B6 first. I think that’s great. And if you need Melatonin kind of in a punctuated fashion, I always have some lipo– a sublingual version by my bed. So if I’m just coming off a weekend where I was up a little bit later, [clears throat] or if I’m up at night where I’m more stimulated, I can just get it in my system in five or ten minutes and have it be done ‘cause it’s going to my sublingual tissue so it’s there right away.

Evan Brand: And dosing on that is how much, typically?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I tend to always start super low, so anywhere between two to three hundred micrograms and up to one milligram. Most people they all start at even at three milligrams, right? So I try to start super low because I just need the– the kind of the sedation-relaxation, kind-of-going-to-sleep effect. I don’t need it to kind of nurse me throughout the night.

Evan Brand: And most people overdose on Melatonin.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm–

Evan Brand: What we see when we test people is that people that are doing like 5-10 milligrams Melatonin, well, look at their Cortisol pattern, and they don’t have that morning spike with their Cortisol like they should ‘cause the Melatonin opposes Cortisol and vice versa.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so– I always say, we’ll give them like a 1 mg like sublingual lozenger and we’ll have them nibble off a third, and just see how they’re doing. And they can gradually increase it if they need it. So I’m fine with that. And also, just– sometimes people wake up in the middle of the night. They have a pattern or a rhythm of having a hard time going back to sleep. There can can be stress that happens just sitting there wondering if they can go back to sleep. So, sometimes, if you’re that person that’s– it’s better to almost as nibble on a little bit of Melatonin ‘cause then at least you’re done what you need to get back to sleep, and that helps negate that Cortisol response from you wondering if you’ll get back to sleep.

Evan Brand: Yeah. I would also like to bring up emotional stress too. If that’s unaddressed, that’s gonna keep you up at night. So if that’s a financial worry, or a relationship problem, or you hate your job and you don’t want to go to work the next day– something like that, you got to address it. So, I would try to write down a big list of all of the stressors. What are the things you can control? What are the things that you can do? What are the action steps to resolve those stressors? And then, for some of the stuff you can’t control, like maybe you’re stuck in this job, you don’t like this boss right now, maybe you can do some EFT– and you tapped about it. You know, even though I don’t like this boss, I deeply love and accept myself, and you just do your tapping and affirmations. That could help too. And then– I know you may have a couple of other things to go into, but we should definitely just really hit on the fact about testing ‘cause you brought up the Serotonin and how people burn that out due to stress. We don’t just guess with that. We always test people, and we can measure it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, on the stress thing– I mean, what I’ll do is I’ll just use my– my to-do list, either on Google Task or just on my iPhone, and I’ll just punch in what are– what are the top three things that are keeping me up. ‘Cause the big thing is, as long as I’m taking action on those things, it’s usually the– the uncertainty and the lack of action taking on a– a stressful task that creates the uncertainty. So– Hey, what are those top three things? And just make sure we’re doing something to close the loop, so we’re always doing something. So we’re not sitting back and kind of being a spectator so to speak.

Evan Brand: Yeah, being paralyzed from it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hmhm– Yeah. Always make sure you’re doing at least something to get the monkey off your back.

Evan Brand: And then did– did you have other categories or body systems you wanted to hit on? I think we hit the gut briefly. I will say that gut infections can mess up your sleep. When I had parasites, my sleep was terrible.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Infections can be a stressor, and these infections are more active at night time, so the inflammation they create at night, the body may respond by producing more anti-inflammatory hormone, i.e., Cortisol. Cortisol’s also stimulatory as well, so that could wake you up. So we– you know, we do our best to clear out the gut infections. That could be more of a long-term strategy. We may use palliative things first, like I mentioned, the Magnesium, the Calm, the Motherwort, the– the 5-HTP with B6, the Melatonin, all of the healing and soothing and calming herbs, and adaptogens first. And then, of course, we get the patient ready so they can get to that next step and do the killing efficiently. We may work on the blood sugar stability before bed and have something by their nightstand in case they are waking up with low blood sugar. They have uh– easy smoothie or an easy bar right there at their nightstand, and they access if needed.

Evan Brand: Yeah, good. Like a little fat bomb, you know, like a little big chunk of coconut or something like that that’s gonna give you some fats.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. EPIC Bar, one of these collagen bars, or a little smoothie that’s already made in a shaker cup– It’s already ready to go. We just don’t want you having the to get up, go to the fridge, the bright light pops on, or you having to use your head to make– to mix whatever you’re doing. I just kind of want to on autopilot. So if you need something, it’s just there, ready to go.

Evan Brand: Yup, yeah. So parasites for me, I mean, that was the biggest one. I had an H. pylori infection too. That screwed up my sleep. My sleep is much, much better now. Of course, you know, with the baby, we’re– we’re getting there. We’re almost out of the woods with her sleep, so I’m gonna be sleeping much better. I already am sleeping better than– than previous, but uh– Let’s talk about the testing too because I think it’s important. People can go and buy all these supplements. You can buy Melatonin, Ashwagandha, etc., etc. And as you mentioned, it’s more palliative. It’s not really root-caused. So you hit on the adrenals. We talked about testing for that. We do that with Saliva panel. You can measure the 24-hour rhythm or you could do urine, but either way, you want to look at the morning, how the day progresses, and then evening, take a snapshot there. If there’s Cortisol issues, you have to fix it because that could be messing up your gut, ‘cause if the Cortisol’s too high, that’s catabolic. So then it’s eating your tight junctions away in your gut. Then you have leaky gut. Then you get autoimmune condition. Then you’re really screwed. So, you got to test adrenals, and then step two– you mentioned the brain chemistry, the serotonin– so we run organic acids testing on everyone through urine. It’s a great test, and it looks at, also bacterial infections and yeast, dopamine levels. It looks at your endorphins, amino acids, etc. And then step three– we talked about the gut– getting the gut tested, running a stool test– we do this at home. So if you work with Justin or I, we send a test kit to your house. You collect stool. You look for all the infections, and then we come in and we address those. And then, maybe, we’re doing some of the stuff behind the scenes along the way, but you have to fix those big body systems if you really want to sleep good and have long-term health.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So we have kind of the anti-inflammatory, nutrient dense, low toxin diet going. We’re working on the gut. We’re working on the hormones. Oh! Also, low progesterone and some hormonal imbalances, I see it with a lot of my women that have severe PMS or they’re perimenopausal or menopausal, postmenopausal. The hormonal imbalances from progesterone and estrogen, either going low or being out of balance at certain times of the month, can easily throw off the cycle, or– I’m sorry, sleep– easily throw off your sleep.

Evan Brand: Now, would you say that– would you say like Estrogen Dominance is what’s happening?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it can because Estrogen Dominance tends to imply lower progesterone, and progesterone kind of open those GABA chloride channels and GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter, which means it helps you relax and turn off. So, GABA’s kind of the switch that allows the sympathetic nervous system to go off and the parasympathetic to go on, which is important so you can wind down and chill out. So, that can be helpful. So some of our cycling patients or even our menopausal patients will give some progesterone at or around bedtime, or we’ll have them dosed their progesterone at around that time of the day anyway. So it really help with relaxation.

Evan Brand: And you’re talking like how much?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh– It depends, but typically with patients, we’ll do anywhere between 25 mg to 50 mg.

Evan Brand: Man, that’s like a typical dose. Like you’ll see like a teaspoon of like a micronized progesterone. It’s like a pretty standard dose.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Twenty-five to 50 milligrams is pretty good. It just depends on how low the person is. We may go up more, above that– you know, go up to 200, and just if we continue to see benefit or improvements, that’s good. And if we see lower levels that will give us more motivation, then we should go higher. But I always like to start lower with hormones because progesterone can sensitize Estrogen receptor sites, so people can get symptoms of Estrogen dominance as they increase their progesterone because of that receptor site sensitivity. So starting lower tends to help the body adapt to the dose-type of responses. Kind of like it’s easier to get into cold water if you can kind of start with warm water and gently nudge the temperature downward. Kind of like that.

Evan Brand: Yup. Well said. Were there any other body systems or things we didn’t hit on yet?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, we talked about the amino acids and the neurotransmitters. We talked about uhm— B6. We always like to combine there ‘cause B6 is really important to uhm— these neurotransmitters converting and synthesizing. So, if we have Mitochondrial stress, if we had dysbiosis, B vitamins are made in the gut. A significant amount, obviously a lot, will come with food and– and healthy meats, and good animal proteins, and good plant material. And then after that, uhm— minerals are important. People that tend to eat lots of sugar and excess carbohydrate and refined sugar, they’ll be depleting their Magnesium ‘cause Magnesium’s one of those nutrients that gets burnt up with excess carbohydrate metabolism. So Magnesium’s really important. That will help uh– have a– a really good relaxation kind of effects. So that’s important as well. And then, just some of the diet– some of the lifestyle strategies is keeping the– the lights down at night, blue-blocking glasses can be great. I use them sometimes. For me, I can go from sympathetic to parasympathetic like that, so it’s not like this huge thing. But I think if you have a hard time coming off of a TV or a movie, or just in general, that could be a good thing to kind of help the parasympathetics turn on faster and better, so keep that in mind. I will find like– I find watching TV like at 9:00 o’clock or 8:30, and I have those glasses on. I’ll want to go to sleep so– so much faster.

Evan Brand: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really, just like, “Whoah!” I’m just like– So I mean, it’s like go to bed a little too early so– so I like a little bit of stimulation so I know I’m ready.

Evan Brand: Yeah. I mean, I– I’ve got a pair of it I gave my wife to wear, and we both wear them. We get super sleepy quick and we basically just–

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.

Evan Brand: We have uh– salt lamps on at night, and that’s pretty much it. We don’t really have any overhead lights at night, so we– we try to live like we’re hanging out at a campfire in the evenings-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.

Evan Brand: -and it– and it works great.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And for me, we have blue-blocking uhm— night lights so– In my son’s room if we need to or– In our room, if we need to, we have night lights. So if we need a little bit of light, which sometimes we do, is at least not emitting any blue light, so that’s not gonna stimulate the Melatonin. Right? It’s the blue light that gets the Melatonin going, so more of the infrared uh– red frequencies tend to be less Melatonin s– uh– less Melatonin-inhibiting.

Evan Brand: Yep. Yep. Well said. So the light piece you cannot ignore. Like you take all the perfect supplements, you got a big bright light or you’re checking your phone right before you go to bed and you’re not using blue-blocking technologies, then you’re screwing yourself up for sure. I saw a question uh– if you’re ready to hit questions, it was a-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.

Evan Brand: -question about PQQ, and whether it improves sleep or not. I did find a study on that, and it was just titled exactly that, “Oral supplementation PQQ on stress–”

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhmhm–

Evan Brand: “-fatigue and sleep,” and turns out that yes, it definitely does help in terms of sleep onset sleep duration. And it does help to reduce fatigue, tension, anxiety, depression, anger, hostility, and confusion. So, PQQ’s great. I mean, we do use some of PQQ and some of our protocols. It’s a great [incomprehensible]

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: [incomprehensible] from mitochondrial function? It’s– There’s research showing that it actually can help regenerate Mitochondria.

Evan Brand: That’s so cool ‘cause when you hear about Mitochondria, it’s kind of like brain cells. People used to think that once your Mitochondria get damaged, you’re toast, but you’re not. You can actually regenerate Mitochondria, which is cool.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A hundred percent. Any other questions you want to highlight here, Evan?

Evan Brand: Yeah. Let’s see here. There was one that said, “If I’m in a toxic environment, is it smart to do fasting if I wake up at night hungry?” That’s kind of a confusing question. Do you understand that one?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well– I mean, I would say– So like, do you mean– I’m gonna make some assumptions– meaning toxic like poor air quality or mold in the environment? I mean, I would say, number one, you’re gonna– as long as you have access to good quality food, I would say, eating is gonna provide the nutrition to run those detoxification pathways. Alright, part of the benefit off fasting is uhm— you’re not putting any food in your body, so you give your gut a chance to rest. So if your gut’s inflamed or stressed, that makes sense, but if your gut’s already healthy and you’re putting really good food in your body, well that nutrition’s important to run your metabolic pathways. Your metabolic pathways either go in debt to run, meaning they– they burn up other tissues, which may be good if it’s fat, but they need nutrition to run. As far as I’m concerned, your fat does not store a whole bunch of uh– vitamins and minerals. It has a lot of caloric reserve. It doesn’t have any mineral or fat reserve, and you may have some fat-soluble vitamins stored in your liver– A, B12– B12 tends to be a little bit– even though it’s a water-soluble vitamin, it tends to be stored in higher amounts in the liver from what I understand. Uhm– But in general, I would say, you– you want to make sure you have good nutrition to run those pathways optimally.

Evan Brand: Another question here. It was about uh– Samuel. He said, “Seems like the blue light blocker fad is winding down. Is it still effective for proper sleep?” Of course it is. It’s not a fad. It should stay here forever. Blue light is never gonna not affect Melatonin. Period. Once the– Once we figure that out, I think that’s a lifetime strategy.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I still don’t understand why a lot of people just have them on during the day ‘cause I just like, “What’s the point?” Because don’t you want that stimulation during the day? You want that Cortisol.

Evan Brand: You do.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I don’t understand. I see people like Dave Asprey and uhm— Dr. uh– Jack Kruse. They have them on during the day, and I’m just like– I mean, maybe if you have some kind of timezone switch and you’re trying to adapt to a timezone maybe and you’re overly stressed and you’re trying to decrease that stress response, fine. But during the day, I would think you’d want to have that Lead exposure especially in the first half of the day, and then the last half of the day, maybe after 5:00 PM if you’re trying to get that nervous system to quiet down, maybe you’d throw in the blue-blockers to help accentuate that parasympathetic shift.

Evan Brand: Yeah, I chatted with Dr. Mercola about it. He says the only time and reason that he wears the blue-blockers during the day is if he’s in like a conference hall or something where it’s all artificial lighting-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Artificial light.

Evan Brand: -and he has no sunlight. So, if it– if you’re getting exposed to fake blue light during the day, and you still have sunlight-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhmhm-

Evan Brand: -opposing it with windows or your outside, you’re in good shape. But whe— when you have nothing and you’re in like a dark hall, and all you have are these fake lights, that’s when I know Mercola said he will use the glasses. And so that’s kind of the– the two cents there. Charlie asked, “Should you eat carbs like a sweet potato or honey before bed? How long before bed for optimal sleep?” I don’t worry about the timing, but I do feel like I sleep a little bit better with some starch at dinner.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think people that have lower Cortisol at night, tend to go lower at night do little bit better with some carbs. So I think, number one, if you know your adrenals tend to be a little bit lower in the cortisol side, try it. Just try doing a little bit of carbs before bed. If you have a device like a FIT-BED or an Oura Ring but has some HRV attached to it, try it and then see how your HRV, which is kind of uh– window into your nervous system. See how that looks at night time. But I mean, if you’re having times where you’re waking up at night, definitely throw a little bit of carbohydrate in there with some protein and fat, and see if that makes the difference.

Evan Brand: Yup. Uh– Elizabeth said she used to have trouble sleeping and she was told she had parasites, so she got rid of the parasites and she slept. So yes, that’s awesome.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. We see that a lot. That’s great. Awesome.

Evan Brand: I know–

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you got uh– major questions here you want to run down that are pertinent to the podcast here guys? Do you have any questions? Try to keep it to the sleep podcast. I’m gonna try to, in the notes, always put like in the beginning like, “Hey this podcast is on whatever topic.” In that way, you guys can chime in accordingly.

Evan Brand: Uh– Yeah. Mike asked, “Blue light is for the light of the morning, why would you want that all day?” So– I mean, the sun emits blue light all day until-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.

Evan Brand: -the spectrum starts changing and then you start to remove blue light naturally as the sun sets. So that’s how it’s supposed to happen. The atmosphere starts to filter out the blue and greens, and then you transition into darkness. So that’s how it suppose to work, which is why being on the computer at night with no blue-blocking software or the glasses is– is not good. So I don’t do any– pretty much any screen too late, and if I do, it’s always with the blue-blocking glasses or software on.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.

Evan Brand: I think that’s all the pertinent ones.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. On my iPhone, I have the night shift on and I went in and I– I like turned off all the blue so it’s only red at night. And that doesn’t mean I can be on my phone right before bed, like if I’m like– I don’t know– like getting my alarm set or making a couple of notes on my to-do list for tomorrow, doesn’t affect me at all, but I also have to have all of the blue off, 100%. And I have the light on the lowest possible uh– setting as well.

Evan Brand: Yeah, like the brightness itself-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.

Evan Brand: -turned down? Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The brightness all the way down. All of the blue totally off so it’s just red that’s showing and it’s just the– the tiniest bit. But then if I have to like– let’s say I have to go on a comp– the computer like late to do some work, something got missed, then I will use my blue-blocking glasses just because I got all these monitors on. So that’s when it’s really nice. If you have to do work a little bit later, use your glasses for that.

Evan Brand: Yep. Excellent. Kruse said something interesting last time I spoke with him, which is he thinks people should be wearing scarves around their neck because the blue light penetrates through the skin and it can affect the thyroid and cause Hashimoto’s. I think it’s an interesting thought.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh my gosh! Okay. Uhm– [laughs]

Evan Brand: I’ve been interviewin—

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Here’s the deal. I’m always open to trying it so like if you feel less stimulated, great. Awesome. Give it a try. Will that cause Hashimoto’s, I’m not really worried about it. Uhm– There’s way other– way more triggers that people are already activating with Gluten and with infections and blood sugar. I’m not worried about that. Now, if uhm— And also VItamin D is really important, right? Vitamin D has a major effect on the immune system and can help modulate the immune response, but I wouldn’t– I wouldn’t [laughs] jump to that conclusion on the Hashies first but I think it’s worth trying if it helps you feel less stimulated for sure.

Evan Brand: Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think if you’re desperate, that’s something you should definitely look at. If it reduced your antibodies like let’s– I think the only way to track it would be if you had all other variables dialed in and then you put on the scarf at night, so therefore the blue light didn’t penetrate to the thyroid and then all those antibodies went down but you did nothing else. That may be a way to quantify it but that’s hard. It’s hard to quantify.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. For me, like blue light I think is optimal because there is some data, I think, In TS Wiley’s book, uhm— “Lights Out.” She talked about, I think, a study at the University of Chicago where they had people like a sleeping– sleeping, and then they would like shine a light. They would like put a light right in the back of someone’s knee.

Evan Brand: Yes. That’s right.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it would like wake them up or pull them out of sleep. I’m not sure if it woke them up or it just made their– their sleep uhm— their sleep study look, you know, more unfavorable so to speak.

Evan Brand: I– I think it down-regulated Melatonin too.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.

Evan Brand: And it was literally a light the size of like a nickel behind the kneecap, and that was enough to affect Melatonin.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. So I look at like blue-blocking glasses at night time is like the lights are down to a– a dimmable level, and maybe you want to watch TV or some Netflix or check out your iPad or whatever, like that’s where I find it’s really good. Ideally, you want everything kind of dimmed down.

Evan Brand: Agreed.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you don’t want all the lights on, all the lights on, and then the blue-blockers on.You’d want everything down and then you’re using it just so you can engage with your technology, or watch a show and not be– you know, overly sympathetically stimulated.

Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s an important note. Is environmental light needs to be reduced as well. You can’t just blast yourself. “Oh! I have blue-blockers. I’m fine.” I agree. It’s got to be both-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.

Evan Brand: -which is why I did nothing but salt lamps at night.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Best investment everyone can get is number one, uhm— like for your bedrooms, get blue-blocking night lights and/or like a night– a bulb that’s like a blue-blocking bulb, and/or number two, in all the major rooms that I’m in like around night time, they all have dimmer switches. So if I have to use lights in my bedroom, I put on the absolute lowest setting; of my TV room, lowest setting; or for like– you know, around my TV or bathroom, absolute lowest setting. That way, I can at least, you know, decrease the intensity if light has to go on.

Evan Brand: Yup. Yup. I think that was all the questions. So if people want to reach out– I mean, we always test people. Could you take some of these supplement recommendations and benefit? Probably so, but we do like to test people and figure out what’s really going on. So if you want to reach out, you can do so to Justin at his site, justinhealth.com. Justinhealth.com. And if you want to reach out to me, it’s evanbrand.com. We love helping you all. We love getting the data. We love seeing the difference too, like after we implement something and then the Cortisol rhythm’s fixed and then the sleep is fixed, it’s like, “Oh! That’s why you’re sleeping better. Look at your Cortisol. It went from 12 units at night to now it’s one unit at night.” It’s really satisfying to see the results on paper.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent. And we appreciate the awesome questions from everyone who kind of chimed in, and we think we’re one of the only people that does a live podcast like this and answers questions just live, right? We’re functional medicine health improv here so we appreciate the great questions. Give us a share. Give us a thumbs up. Make sure you hit the uh– notification bell. And anyone that– your friends or family that that needs more help or wants to chime in and be part of this great conversation, we appreciate uhm— you sharing the word. So thank you so much, everyone and Evan. Today was a– a great podcast as always and let’s talk real soon.

Evan Brand: Take care, bye.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks. Bye.

References:

A recent study about Optimal Amount of Sleep for Cardiovascular Health

Night Shift Nurses Sleep Study

The WHI Estrogen/progestin and HERS II Study

“Lights Out” by TS Wiley

https://www.evanbrand.com/

https://justinhealth.com/

General Minerals and What Can Happen | Podcast #188

Welcome to today’s podcast with Dr. J and Evan Brand! Listen as they dive into issues relating to the top five general minerals, namely, Sodium, Potassium, Magnesium, Chloride and Calcium, which are the big ones. Discover how these minerals help your nervous system work, muscles work, and cells communicate.

Also, learn how minerals affects our heart health, excretory health and reproductive health. Keep tuning in for more!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

02:00 The Big Five Minerals

07:11 Hyponatremia

14:40 Antidiuretic Hormone

16;33 Minerals, Blood Pressure and Stress

23:04 Getting Enough Potassium Doing Keto

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, guys! It’s Dr. Marchegiani here. Welcome back to Beyond Wellness Radio. Evan Brand, how are we doing my friend? How’s your weekend?

Evan Brand: Hey, man. Weekend was good. People are probably like, “I’m listening on a Wednesday, why are you talking about your weekend?” But hey,look. This is our Monday so uh— we’re having fun and soaking up the sun. I’ve got a bunch of bites on my legs like my legs are itching. I need some recommendations for uh— itch cream for my legs, like maybe some Aloe or something.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dude, all you need for that, man, is you just— you just need some like one-dollar uh— Rubbing alcohol to get at a drugstore.

Evan Brand: Hmmn—

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take a little bit of that in the cotton ball and just rub it right on the bite. Gone.

Evan Brand: I’m gonna try it. I think I’ve got some. I think I’ve got some Rubbing Alcohol— Uuh— No. I may have Hydrogen peroxide. I have to get some. I’ll get some. I’ll get some Rubbing Alcohol and report back. [crosstalk] I don’t think it’s the mosquitos. I haven’t seen any mosquitos yet, but uh— I know they’re out there.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. It could be just some kind of other little pests out there that’s giving you some bites. Little bit of Rubbing Alcohol, you’re good, man.

Evan Brand: Cool. Cool. Well…

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How’s that?

Evan Brand: You came up with a good topic idea today of minerals, which I thought was cool because I had mentioned another topic which is kind of like, “Okay. I’ve been doing a lot of yard work and I think dehydration is a common issue for people. We kind of skipped over spring, like we’re straight into summer here so it’s been 90 degrees and above Fahrenheit. It’s been crazy hot for Kentucky and May, and I’ve been doing some work outside. And then I come in and throw together a bunch of little tinctures and potions and powders. And I thought, “Man, how many other people are dealing with mineral issues?” And you’re like, “Hey. Let’s, you know, maybe we tied in to the seasons like summertime, but why don’t we tied in to general minerals and what can happen.” And I thought that was a genius idea because previously— And I think we discussed it a bit on the podcast, maybe not. But, uh— like back in— starting in February, I was having those random blood pressure spikes, and you and I started talking about this whole adrenal mineral blood pressure kind of blood sugar stuff. And I think that’s cool. So, why don’t you lead us off. How should we dive in to this topic?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, I tink minerals are really important, right? Because they help kind of your nervous system work, right? You need minerals to allow action potential for that nervous system to work. So, we need— Primarily, to keep it simple, we need Sodium. We need Potassium. We need Magnesium. We need uhm— Chloride. And we need uhm— I think we hit them all. Sodium, Potassium, Magnesium, Chloride, Calcium. Those are your big five, right? And these help action potential to help your cell repolarize and depolarize, which is really important for any type of contraction. They help your muscles work. Sodium, P— Sodium and Potassium help kind of your cell communicate uhm— so we can have the cells working and communicating properly so we need healthy levels of minerals to function, helps regulate blood pressure, uh— mood, uh— help regulate your nervous system function, like for instance, your adrenals need healthy levels of Sodium and Potassium for your nervous system to work. The more stressed you are, you actually pee out minerals. Because the more stressed you are, you create inflammation and acidity, and your body has to use minerals to buffer a lot of that inflammation so you’ll dump a lot of uhm— Potassium and such if you get stressed, or even Sodium if you get stressed. So, the more stress will actually buffer the acidity, but the problem is your nervous system and your cardiovascular system and your— and your uh— heart, and your muscles and your cells need these minerals. So, the more stressed you are, you can actually lose a lot of these minerals and that can create problems for your muscles, for your body’s ability to generate energy, for your cells to communicate, for your nervous system to do a good job. So, it’s important that, number one, we’re getting adequate minerals in our— in our body through our foods, that we’re drinking water that actually supports minerals. So, I like drinking my Toe Pacheco. Again, it’s kind of this “in” thing if you’re down here in Texas. It’s a great little mineral water. It’s got a good kick. It gets you here. It gets you that…

Evan Brand: [crosstalk] Where do they— Where do they source it? Is that uh— like a well? Or, what is that?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I don’t know. It’s in Monterrey, Mexico. Uh—

Evan Brand: Hmn—

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m just a huge fan of the— the flavor and the taste. I know it’s good quality mineral water from when I see online and such. I also have a whole house of water filtration system with a— with a reverse osmosis for the countertop. An dI have a mineral— a trace mineral support there so I’ll do a squirt or two in the morning and the afternoon with my water there. So, I get extra minerals during the day [clears throat] and then I also make sure we get enough. You know, Potassium and Magnesium are the big ones, right? Sodium, I get from the sea salts, and Potassium, I get from some of my extra supplementation, as well as, you know, green veggies, Avocado, some of my Squash and Sweet Potato, and then some of my fish. So, I was really trying to get enough of those minerals in those foods. So, we can talk more about that in a minute. But, minerals are really important for the nervous system to buffer stress and inflammation, for your heart, for your muscles and for your cells to communicate. That’s called the Sodium-Potassium pump.

Evan Brand: I would think that most people that the heart is a muscle but if you do have, and many of you listening probably do, if you’d had issues yourself with your heart or you’d had issues uh— on your family with heart issues, you know, you’re gonna get probably some Potassium IV, maybe some other type of minerals via IV, like if you’re at the emergency room and you thought you had a heart attack or you’ve got like Atrial fibrillation, or you have uh— Arrhythmias of some sort. You know— there’s a lot of these heart issues that can be functionally treated. And our— our good friend Dr. Jack Wolfson, the Paleo Cardiologist, he talks a lot about that when you and I chatted with him about minerals and how many people end up on these heart drugs, you know, beta-blockers and uh— heart rhythm drugs and other problems. And it’s really a mineral problem, or it’s some type of a dietary problem like they have MSG in, which is causing a fib. You can— Believe it or not, you can have a heart issue or a heart symptom from something like Monosodium glutamate, MSG, which still does exist even though a lot of products are going no MSG. It does still exist out there and there’s a lot of hidden names like Maltodextrin that could actually be MSG so got to get your minerals, right? Make sure the diet’s dialed in. Make sure you don’t have anything affecting the heart. And, don’t forget, if you just drink a bunch of water but, as you mentioned, you don’t have the dietary stuff, or you’re a vegetarian or a vegan who’s just doing a bunch of like Spinach and Kale and you’re not getting your Avocados and— Uh— I think uh— Don’t quote me on this but I thought pumpkin was a good Potassium source too.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It is. Pumpkin is Squash too. Yes.

Evan Brand: Is it— Okay. Okay. And then Sweet Potato, you mentioned that one, and then you mentioned fish. So— So, those are all good. I’m drinking some electrolytes right now, and uh— I added in some different tinctures, too. I added some Schizandra tinctures, some Ashwagandha tinctures so, I’m feeling really good. Cheers!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh. You too, man. Absolutely. Now, just real quick. With the Sodium-Potassium pump is we have, essentially, Sodium on the inside of the cell and then Potassium on the outside of the cell. And then what happens is a gradient, where they kind of switch. I think it’s three uhm— three of the Potassium go in, two of the Sodium go out. It’s ki— It could be reversed but that’s just how, number one, uhm— the cells work and communicate. And, that’s how action potential and the nervous system and all these things work. That’s why there’s the condition known as Hyponatremia, which is hypo, low, natremia means minerals, or a lot of times can be Sodium in particular. When people around marathon time drink too much water, they can dilute the minerals. It was a big thing. It was like uh— I think they call it Wee for a Wii. It was like, whoever drinks the most water without peeing wins a Nintendo Wii.

Evan Brand: Oh.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this girl, I think drink six gallons of water and she died. Right?

Evan Brand: Oh.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because you develop Hyponatremia because she diluted all those minerals down now the cell can’t communicate.

Evan Brand: So, what happened? A Heart Attack or something, or what? What happens from over diluting your minerals like that?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ye— It’s gonna be Cardiac Arrest.

Evan Brand: Mmh—

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? ‘Cause the heart’s not gonna do the work. So, yeah. So, I was correct the first time. Inside the cell, right? Sodium. Outside the cell, Potassium. Two Potassium go in, three Sodium go out. So, it kind of place this little switcheroo scheme.

Evan Brand: Okay. So, let’s chat about— Yeah, it does. Let’s chat about the adrenals in that context then. So, you brought up marathon. So, let’s talk about this. That mean that’s an extreme adrenal stress. Mark Sisson, uh— you know, notoriously was a— a long distance runner and said— you know, he basically almost killed himself doing that and really does not push people towards marathons; really pushes people towards like sprinting and [crosstalk] High Intensity Interval Training and playing Frisbee, which I think is cool, uh— and not marathons. And a lot of clients that have come to you and I. They’re wanting to train for marathons and I just tell people the blunt truth, which is like, “Hey, look. I’m not really gonna encourage you to do this. I guess if you’re paying me to do it, I’m gonna support you the best I can. But just know that running 26 miles is probably not the best thing for your health. But, just talk us through. What’s going on from an adrenal perspective. I guess the kidneys are doing something too. Are the kidneys responsible for dumping some of these minerals or is it adrenals burning them up? Or is it all of it?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, there’s a natural Sodium-Potassium kind of ratio that happens. So, as your adrenals get more stressed, there’s a hormone inside the adrenal glands— right— called the Aldosterone. And like in— in Doctorate School, when you’re learning about the function of the adrenal glands, i— it’s like this. It’s sugar, salt, sex. The deeper in you get, the better it gets. That’s how you remember the adrenal gland function. So, the outside part of the adrenal glands, sugar. That’s the Cortisol portion of the adrenal gland that regulates blood sugar. Okay? The inner part in regulates salt. That’s the mineraloCorticoids Aldosterone. And then the very inside is the sex hormones. That’s the DHEA and such. So, sugar, salt, sex. So, Cortisol, mineraloCorticoid Aldosterone, which helps regulate minerals, that’s what we’re talking about here. And then the sex hormones. So, the reason why it’s important is because the more you whip the adrenal glands, the more stress that you’re under, which long term exercise is a stress. You’re gonna deplete the sex hormones, which makes it harder for you to repair and recover, and heal. And then, number two, uhm— stress on the adrenals makes you pee out more the minerals. So, you’ll pee out a lot of the Sodium and that’s gonna— Actually, that can cause Potassium to go up. But overtime, Potassium can drop out too with Chronic stress ‘cause your— your kidneys and your body can use that to buffer a lot of inflammation. So, you’ll pee out a lot of that. Plus, a lot of people, they aren’t just getting enough of it in their diet, right?

Evan Brand: Yup.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You need 4,700 milligrams of Potassium a day. So, what does that mean? So, if you got to justinhealth.com/cronometer— or cronometer, whatever you pronounce it. C-R-O-N-O— meter, M-E-T-E-R, and you sign in. It’s a free account. [clears throat] You can then just plug your foods in. Excuse me.

Evan Brand: He’s got that frog in the throat coming back.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Little— Little frog in the throat. It attacked me. It got me!

Evan Brand: [laughs]

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh— So just put your foods in there for a simple day, and what you’ll find is, at the bottom, it’ll tell you your macronutrients. Your protein, fat, and your carb percentage. It’ll tell you your micronutrients, too, which it’ll walk you through your Sodiums, your Potassium, your minerals, your vitamins, and you want 4,700 milligrams of Potassium per day.

Evan Brand: That’s a lot. I—

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a lot!

Evan Brand: I guarantee…

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a lot.

Evan Brand: …ninety-eight percent of people listening, if they do that, they’re gonna see that they’re too low. It’s fun, like it’s kind of a pain to track everything but I think you guys listening should do this at least for a few days. Track your typical day ‘cause we all get in the habit of eating the same thing over and over again, or same menu Monday through Friday or whatever. So, you’re probably eating the same foods. So, it should be easy. Maybe it’s even— Start doing this for memory. Log in and— and look at it. Uh— I bet you’re gonna be low, most people.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. So, you need about 4,700 milligrams of Potassium a day. You’re gonna typically need about 3,400 hundred of Sodium— Sodium and Chloride. Now, that’s easier to get because, typically, even junk food has Sodium and Chloride in it.

Evan Brand: Right.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Table salt is Sodium Chloride, right? N-A and then C-L. So, even people that’s on junkie food diets tend to get enough Sodium. They may not get good quality Sodium. So, if you look at Dr. Brownstein’s book called “Salt Your Way Back to Health Detox” about getting good quality sea salts, whether it’s Himalayan Sea Salts or whether it’s— I like Redmond’s Real Salt because it— it tastes really good too.

Evan Brand: [crosstalk] So good.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …some of the minerals in it so I like that. So, you’re getting good quality Sodium, good quality Chloride but we also need the Potassium, right? About 4,700 milligrams a day. What does that mean? Okay. You’re gonna get about a gram per Avocado. Okay. So, one Avocado gets you almost 25% of the way there. And then, you want about five or six servings of green vegetables. So, I’ll do like a green drink. I’m gonna have it in a little bit. I got uh— a Thyroid Reset Summit interview, which I’m excited about, in about 20 minutes. Go to thyroidresetsummit.com to sign up. It’ll be this fall. But, uhm— I’m gonna get a green drink, that’s gonna have seven servings of vegetables. It’ll have about 1,200 milligrams of Potassium. So, I have one Avocado already, then I’ll do one green drink. Now, I’m already half my Potassium for the day. And then, if I do a nice two— two or three servings at lunch of green veggies, and then another two servings of dinner, I’m like, “I’m good.” Right?

Evan Brand: Yup.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m good. You can also supplement with Potassium Chloride, there’s a salt called the Nu-Salt, N-U-hyphen-salt. And that’s a Potassium Chloride Salt. So, you can salt your food with that, and that can get you over the top as well. I also use a couple of electrolyte support products by my sink. That is uhm— This two uhm— I think are the same product. I use uhm— Endure by Trace MInerals Research, and I also use one called Lyteshow, which has almost the same ingredient structure. I think they probably private label it. So, I like those products uh— by Trace Minerals and Lyteshow. There’s some really good mineral ones. I use the uh— Real Salts in my water. And, the Potassium Chloride Nu-Salt doesn’t taste as good so I’ll typically do that on my food.

Evan Brand: That’s cool. I— I’m doing uhm— Ben Spin— Lynch’s uh— electrolytes. Pretty good.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup. That’s a good one. I’ve seen that.

Evan Brand: It doesn’t have vitamin C. Uh— Couple other brands that you and I use. There’s couple professional brands that make electrolytes. Some of them have vitamin C in there. And because of my Iron being way to high, vitamin C increases absorption of Iron. It’s the last thing I want to be supplementing so I’m doing all electrolytes with no vitamin C added for right now ‘til I get that under control.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And if it’s a small amount like couple hundred milligrams, probably not…

Evan Brand: It’s like 2,000.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh! [crosstalk] That’s a lot.

Evan Brand: It’s like almost two grams.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Two grams.

Evan Brand: Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. That makes sense. And then uhm— So, in the trace minerals support product, there’ Magnesium. There’s Chloride. There’s Potassium. There’s Sodium and there’s Calcium.

Evan Brand: Do you do this stuff on the weekends and people—

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: [crosstalk] And Sulfur— Sulfur.

Evan Brand: People probably hear you uh— talking about being out on the boat and going skiing. I mean, you’re doing some pretty intense physical stuff, Are you travelling and bringing that with you or you’re not really worried about it because you do it so much during the week that you’re pretty stocked up on minerals?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, I bring my Toe Pachecos out there.

Evan Brand: Okay.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You know— I bring my Toe Pachecos or my LaCroix out there. And again, on the boat, you’re really only gonna have an issue if you’re sweating a lot…

Evan Brand: Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …and you’re drinking alcohol. You drink a lot of alcohol, you’re gonna pee out a lot a whole bunch of minerals. Why? Because alcohol inhibits your antidiuretic hormone. So, it’s like, in school, I had to play these games to like remember these things, right? So, antidiuretic hormone, it’s— it’s the anti-pee hormone, right? If a diuretic makes you pee, and your anti-peeing, so if you inhibit the anti-pee hormone, that means you pee. [crosstalk] Does that makes sense?

Evan Brand: Uh— I’m just visualizing it like uh— like a big barrel, and the barrel is the bladder, and then the cork at the…

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhmhm—

Evan Brand: …bottom of the barrel is the antidiuretic hormone.And then the alcohol pulls out the cork, and then, there you go.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bingo! So, you in— So, you inhibit the anti-pee hormone. That means you pee. So, if you drink alcohol, you inhibit the antidiuretic hormone, meaning you pee more and you lose more minerals. And then obviously, alcohol tends to be more inflammatory in nature so then you’re gonna buffer minerals as well. So, my rule of thumb is, “If you’re gonna drink, the best thing to do is activated charcoal? Bu-bo–bom! [shaking a pill bottle] Activated charcoal and you do one mineral drink in between each alcoholic drink. Do that, you’re pretty much golden. Now, if you want to get like fancy pants on it, you can also add in some Sulfur amino acids, some vitamin C, some Glutathione, some NAC afterwards, if you really want to do really good, or some Milk Thistle. Those are all great alternatives afterwards, to keep your minerals adequate. So, going back, right? We talked about the 3,400 milligrams of Sodium kind of Chloride thing. Potassium’s the harder one. That’s the 4,700 milligrams. Uh— Magnesium’s also pretty hard too, because you burn that up with stress, and the more sugar you eat, you’re burning that too. That’s about a thousand milligrams a day. And then your Calcium’s about 1,200 milligrams a day and then Chloride tends to be connected with the Sodium there.

Evan Brand: I know we’ve got a couple minutes so let’s talk about something I— I think I mentioned off here, but we haven’t mentioned on here yet, which is blood pressure. And, people may be listening to all this mineral talk and then they’re like, “Okay. Well, how does this actually apply to my actual day to day life in terms of health?” I talked about the heart function a bit, in terms of like Atrial Fibrillation or Atrial Flutter. Some of these other more functional heart issues that can lead to bigger issues down the road, if you don’t fix it, that could be affected by minerals. Also, blood pressure, though. So, like back in February, I had a lot of stress going on. I was doing a bunch of interviews from my summits, running the clinic four days a week, doing podcasts, all sorts of crazy stuff, dealing with the baby, getting woke up during the night, and not sleeping as well ‘cause of the baby and other things. And, I believe, that what you and I discussed was probably accurate. The adrenal stress was causing me to dump minerals. Me losing my minerals caused my blood pressure to go up. So, why don’t you just take that little bit of a tangent and go a bit further with it. Cause I— I think this is important for people to understand. It’s not a deficiency of blood pressure medication and why their blood pressure’s a bit high.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, couple things. Uhm— Inflammation, whether it’s inflammation from your sympathetic nervous system going into overdrive, will create your sympathetic nervous system to respond with adrenaline. Adrenaline tends to cause constriction, okay? Think about why. Where do we want the blood flow to go from a prehistoric evolutionarily— evolution kind of pr— you know, perspective. Where do you want the blood flow? We want the blood flow to go to the arms, the hands, and the feet to— to run, fight and flee, okay? Think about it if you’re in your, like backyard. Like, before you head like the little nozzle to put on your hose, where you squeeze it and the water comes out. Let’s say, there’s no nozzle on the end, just the water coming out. What do you do to reach the back part of your yard?

Evan Brand: Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You take your thumb. You put it over the water hose. Why? What are you doing? You’re cutting off the flow and what happens to the water? You’re increasing pressure and that allows the water to go where? Further out. So, think about it. If your body is prime to get the blood to the extremities, that’s like, you putting your thumb over the water hose to reach the outer part of your yard. So, your wa— your— Basically, your body is doing that to get the blood to the outer parts of the extremities, right? So, number one, the first thing we do is we decrease the root cause of the stress. That then takes away the adrenal stimulation, which then takes your thumb off the hose. And then, number two, we give extra things to support it because during that stress we pee out minerals— the Sodium, the Chloride, and then, eventually, the Potassium and the Magnesium, during stress, because stress is inherently has inflammatory by products off it, which aren’t necessarily bad but there’s a price to pay for. And if our diet is poor, then we’re using up minerals to basically pay this stress debt, right? So, the goal is we want to make sure at least our diet is super nutrient dense. So, for under stress, we at least have more coming in that we’re spending, right? So, adrenal stress under control, extra supplemental minerals, and if you’re under more stress, that’s where the diet has to be good, and ideally, we have good supplementation on board too. So, we have extra bioavailable chelated minerals. Like in— in our lines, we use a lot of the Magnesium malate or the Magnesium glycinate, which are uh— Magnesiums bound to amino acids for better absorption, same with Calcium, Calcium dimalate. Uhm— Same with Sodium. We may use the Real Salts. Or if we’re using extra Potassium, we may do the electrolyte support or the Nu-Salts. So, there’s a lot of things we may do to help supplement on top of a really great diet and you’ll see. Anyone listening to this podcast, go to Cronometer and run your food through Cronometer for a sample day. You’re gonna see it’s pretty hard to get that Potassium up there. Are you gonna— It’s difficult.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Uh— I had a two more cents to add about the stress piece. It’s that, anyone listening and they say, “Oh. You know, Dr. J, I’m not stressed.” It’s like, “Okay, look. It doesn’t have to be just emotional, like job relationship stress. This could be gut infections. This could be parasites like I had, H. pylori like I dealt with, bacterial overgrowth. This could be Candida. This could be sleep issues.” I mean, this doesn’t— When— When we say stress, I mean, that is such a big term and I think people blow it off because like, “Oh, no. I’m not stressed. That doesn’t apply to me.” It could. You can have a super chilled out life living in the middle of the woods and have gut bugs, and that stress creates all these problems we’re talking about.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s the hidden stress we’re talking about. And then, remember, it’s not just the stress of the gut bugs, the gut bugs are also gonna create a malabsorption, where you may not absorb those minerals fully, ‘cause it’s affecting your motility or the absorption component. Right? Some of those uhm— minerals may even get eaten up by these bugs. I know Iron’s one of the ones that a lot of bugs like as well. So, it’s possible that bugs could be eating up those minerals, or you’re just malabsorbing them and they’re going out in the stool, ‘cause a lot of times these minerals— some need Hydrochloric acid to be ionized so they can get into your bloodstream so they can actually be utilized.

Evan Brand: Yep. So, if the diet’s perfect, he’d been following a good Paleo template and you’re still not getting results, well, you got to look deeper into the gut. Get those functional tests done ‘cause if you have an H. pylori infection reducing stomach acid, as Justin mentioned. Now, you can’t— you can’t manufacture everything you need to from your your food so it’s not about what you eat. It’s about what you digest from what you eat. And, I think that’s uh— a good way to wrap this thing up. So, get the testing done. Make sure you monitor, using Cronometer, your food for a few days. Check out where you’re at, and get some of the testing. Look into the Organic acids panel. We can measure some of your nutrients and vitamins on there, Vitamin C via [phonetic] Zimbravo___[22:01]. We can look into some of that. Can’t do minerals there but we can make a lot of inferences when we look through amino acids. “Okay, look. We see Malabsorption. We’re assuming based on symptoms. Probably, minerals can be affected. And get a stool test run. We always run a Comprehensive Stool Panel. Make sure you look for the gut infections. And then, always look for adrenal stress. We always run adrenal profiles because there are many different variations of adrenal stress that can happen, and that all depletes minerals and ties right in to this conversation. So, get those functional three-week column. That’s what I call them. Get those functional three done and then you’re gonna be in good shape. If you work with us, awesome. If you work with somebody else, cool. Just make sure they know what they’re doing. Uh— If you want to reach out to Justin for a consult, check for a consult, check him out, justinhealth— Just in Health, that’s such a clever name.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhmhm—

Evan Brand: justinhealth.com. Uh— reach out to Justin. If you want to reach out to me, you could check out my site, it’s evan— E-V-A-N-brand, like brand name— evanbrand.com, and we’re both here for you. We’re happy to help you all.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Then, just to kind of reiterate here, couple things. Uhm— Couple people wrote in the questions here. Is it possible to get enough Potassium doing Keto? Yeah. I mean, you have to do about six or seven green vegetable servings a day. So, like— Let’s say a palm serving is one serving so every meal you should have— you should strive for at least two servings, number one. Number two uhm— that will— you know. Good Potassium, Avocados— is gonna be an amazing Potassium source. So, good one full Avocado, maybe even two, but definitely one full one and six servings of green veggies. If you’re going low with the green veggies, get a second full Avocado in a day. I’m fine with that. And then of course, uhm— some fish tend to be really good. And then, you can always do the n— the Nu- Salt to fill in the gaps there to. I think that’s a really good— [stutters] good starting place there. And also, if you have low Cortisol levels, remember, low Cortisol, you probably also have low Aldosterone levels too. Now, one of the things we do when we see chronically low Cortisol, we give Licorice. We give sublingual Licorice ‘cause LIcorice actually mimics the mineraloCorticoids and will help you hold on to those minerals longer. Now, the only contraindication is high blood pressure. So, as long as your blood pressure isn’t elevated, we would recommend some Licorice with low Cortisol levels. And again, we would have to run an adrenal test to know that, but that can be helpful ‘cause it mimics those mineraloCorticoids and helps you hold on to those minerals too.

Evan Brand: Yup. Well said. Your fish, don’t forget it, like Salmon’s a good one too. Another food…

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.

Evan Brand: …if you’re on Keto, you probably gonna be eating some fish.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Some potato squash.

Evan Brand: Yup. Uh— Coconut water— I mean, that could be a good one but—

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Post-Workout— Post-Workout, it’s great.

Evan Brand: This— Look. Make sure they’re not adding sugar to it. Some brands add sugar so just look out for that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think I— we hit it all up. I would just say, “Everyone, if you’re enjoying this, give me a thumbs up. Give me a share. Go sign up at the Thyroid Reset Summit, and if you already done that, give us a share and let your friends and family know lots of free awesome information.” If you enjoy and you want to take the next step with Evan or myself, Evan already gave you our contact info, and wwe appreciate you guys chiming in Any last thoughts here, Evan?

Evan Brand: I don’t think so. Just uh— if you guys are out and about, sweating your butt off in the summertime, which hopefully you’re outside and getting sunshined. Just keep up with this stuff. It makes a huge difference and when I come back in, you know, from doing yard work, I take my electrolytes. I take my adrenal support, and that keeps me strong and keeps me stable versus me passing out and my wife having to come rescue me. So—

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Excellent podcast today I mean, this is very timely, based on the time of the year that we’re in. So I appreciate it. Evan, phenomenal chat and we’ll chat real soon.

Evan Brand: Take care.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye.

References:

“Salt Your Way Back to Health Detox” book by Dr. David Brownstein

https://thyroidresetsummit.com/

https://justinhealth.com/cronometer or https://cronometer.com/

https://www.evanbrand.com/

https://justinhealth.com/