Functional Medicine Steps to Reversing Depression and Mood Disorders | Podcast #382
In this video, Dr. Justin and Evan talk about depression. Depression is a common mental disorder characterized by persistent sadness and hopelessness. Treatment options include anti-depressant medication and mental health practices such as therapy. Recent research suggests that factors such as amino acids and gut health may also play a role in the development of depression.
Another approach to treating depression and mood disorders is Functional Medicine, which focuses on identifying and addressing the condition’s underlying causes. This approach may include addressing nutrient deficiencies, addressing gut health issues, and identifying and addressing any underlying chronic health conditions contributing to depression or mood disorders.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
00:26 – Depression
03:12 – Amino Acids
10:14 – Gut
28:17 – Key Takeaways
Dr. Marchegiani: Hey guys it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani, today we are here with Evan Brand. Excited to have a nice conversation with you, man! How’s it been? It’s been a little bit! What’s cooking, brother?
Evan Brand: Yeah, not too much is cooking. I figured that over the weekend, I was looking at statistics, and I thought, okay I wonder if things have changed since a year ago or five years ago, or 10 years ago when I really got interested in the topic of depression.
Turns out nope nothing’s changed, depression is still the number one leading cause of disability in the United States. That’s shocking! and…
Dr. Marchegiani: Isn’t that crazy?
Evan Brand: This affects everything! This affects your marriage, the way you treat your kids, the way you treat your co-workers if you’re an employer, the way that you’re treating everyone. And so our job today would be to provide Solutions and maybe some testing strategies that someone who’s suffering from depression or other mood issues. What could they do at home from the functional medicine perspective, and how could you actually reverse it? Is it actually possible to reverse it?
And I would say yes, it is because we see it all the time and I’ve suffered tremendously but I’ve made massive strides in my mood over the years by slowly and systematically fixing little pieces of things that have been wrong with me from parasites and gut infections and mold and lyme and tick-borne issues, all of these add up it’s not just “Oh he’s in a bad mood!”, There are literally underlying causes you can fix so let me just jump into that first and say that from the Psychiatry model of depression, let’s talk, what about your childhood?
Well, what’s your relationship and how do you feel, and how does that make you feel? And it generally stops there. Maybe there’s a prescription given but they don’t ask “Hey when’s the last time your basement flooded?”, “Oh, I saw you had mold growing around your window trim let’s talk about that.” They don’t go into that. They don’t go into your environment, or how your environment may be contributing to it from a biochemical biotoxin perspective and that’s a huge missing piece of the mental health puzzle.
Dr. Marchegiani: Oh I agree! I mean, you know, there’s a study that just came out last year we talked about it, I think, in a previous podcast that looked at antidepressants, and they’re essentially not being effective right? And kind of that whole Serotonin model as being kind of an antiquated model. Right, so a lot of these older medications, they block these reuptake ports where Serotonin would come back into that presynaptic neuron and essentially go back into the neuron and be used up again.
And so essentially, that model of causing the Serotonin to accumulate in between the synapses, so we have a neuron, that’s the presynaptic neuron, this is the postsynaptic neuron, Serotonin would hang out in this area called the Synaptic Cleft. And essentially, the Serotonin will then go back up into the presynaptic neuron, and the medications would block that, it would block that port, so then it would accumulate more in the Synaptic Cleft. And so they’re kind of saying this model is kind of more antiquated. It’s not quite necessary that’s what’s happening.
And that’s interesting because this is the kind of drugs that have been talked about and used in this area, and this mechanism for, you know, 20 to 30 years and so, there’s also some nutrients that you use that are similar. We talk about, kind of 5- HTP, and some of the cofactor nutrients that we use on the amino acid side may plug into that model or maybe it’ll be a little bit different than that. Can we kind of talk a little bit more about the amino acids?
Evan Brand: Yeah, well, first what we do is we look at the urine. And you can measure the metabolites of your neurotransmitter, so Dopamine, Serotonin, Endorphin, you can measure these metabolites. Think of it, the analogy I’ve been using lately is to prove that there was a bonfire, you look for the ashes. So we kind of look at those ashes, and we’re like okay, look at the evidence here, there was a fire burning, so we measure the urine in the same way where we look at these breakdown products of those brain chemicals, and we can infer what the level of brain chemistry may look like.
And we often see low Serotonin in people that are anxious, depressed, irritable, they have trouble sleeping, and so we will plug into that amino acid pathway with things like Tryptophan, or Five Hydroxytryptophan, we’ll combine that with B6 which is a necessary cofactor for Serotonin and then for Melatonin and people feel better. So I think it’s crazy to think about how many hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds and millions of prescriptions were given out if truly those drugs don’t work! I mean are people going to go ask for a refund now? I mean that’s crazy!
Dr. Marchegiani: I know, right
Evan Brand: Like, what a disappointment really that model was the model, and what we’re seeing is totally the opposite. We’re seeing massive success with amino acids you and I’ve talked about free-form amino acids, these certain blends where if there’s low Serotonin and low Dopamine, we may sprinkle some Tyrosine in there, or DL-Phenylalanine and these people can make a recovery within just a few weeks.
We’re talking if you’re on a scale of one to ten, your depression is a 10-max like you don’t want to live. You could knock that down by half, I’d say, in as little as a month if you’re doing all the right steps.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, I think part of the reason why we see clinical benefit using some of these amino acids or nutrients, so number one, the medications are working differently. They’re not actually adding building blocks, they’re blocking the reuptake of that. The problem with when you block the reuptake of these neurochemicals into the presynaptic neuron is you increase the recycling, right?
It’s kind of like these neurotransmitters go back into that synaptic neuron to kind of hide out from the cold or from the harsh weather, if you will because the longer they’re outside the more they get depleted and so the whole goal of these medications is they block that reuptake but then they end up depleting and impacting a lot of the Serotonin long term. That’s part of the reason why doses have to be increased over time. So there is that mechanism that’s part of the reason why we see side effects with these drugs.
Number two is we’re actually adding building blocks, and we’re also adding the important cofactors that are needed for synthesis. B6 needed for synthesis, we’re providing the amino acids. Also, we never see a patient that has mood issues and we just say “Hey, here’s B6 and 5HCP.” We’re making changes with their diets. We’re reducing inflammation, we’re managing Dysglycemia that means preventing these high and low blood sugar swings.
We’re maximizing protein, we’re making sure we’re breaking down our protein, we’re making sure the fats are good that’s important because every single cell in your body has a healthy lipid bilayer and these lipids if they’re rancid, junky, Omega-6 processed vegetable oils that have been oxidized, that’s going to create stress within your cells and so if we’re using good healthy fats that are Omega-3, fish oil, good healthy saturated fats from pasture-fed eggs, grass-fed meats, you know, wild game organ meats or grass-fed butter or tallow.
These fats are going to make healthier cell membranes, less oxidative stress, and so we’re fixing the Glycemia, we’re fixing the nutrient density, we’re fixing the healthy fats, we’re fixing the digestion, we’re adding in cofactors and so then when we add in different amino acids whether it’s 5-HTP, Tyrosine, different cofactors, Calcium, B6, Folate, B12, these are important cofactors as well so we’re never just giving one nutrient in isolation.
Another problem with a lot of the studies, they’re going to be like “Hey this amino acid without making any changes in this person’s health, didn’t really create that therapeutic effect.” And we’re like “Yeah, well, we never would just do that anyway.” So that may be true that’s why science and functional medicine is hard because science wants to deduce all the variables and just do one thing at a time but we just control 20 different variables right there by getting their diet right, they’re water right, their sleep right, their supplements right, their environment-mold right.
So you know all these things that’s like 20 variables, and so that’s kind of where medicine and functional medicine have a hard time because there’s too many variables that can’t be isolated when we see patients.
Evan Brand: Yeah it’s really not fair too because you’ll see this one headline, this amino acid or natural medicine for depression is BS, it’s snake oil, it’s pseudoscience it’s like okay, well, take Johnny, who loves his wife, loves his kids go for a hike every morning, gets plenty of sunshine, clean house, eats great, no gluten, no Dairy, and he takes it and he does amazing and then you have Betty over here she starts her morning with donuts and she watches negative news, and she sits in the dark she gets no natural bright light in the morning and she takes it and she hates her life, and she hates her kids, and she’s divorced and lonely and smokes a pack of cigarettes and she takes the 5-HTP and it doesn’t work and therefore it’s BS.
So yeah, I agree with you it is hard because what we’re doing is 20 to 30 variables all at once and then we’re not even addressing the part that we talk about too, which is trying to get the Limbic System dialed in because if you’ve been stuck in a chronic state of fight or flight because of your depression, you want to get out of this hole, you feel trapped in this home, you’re trapped in this job, I mean this could be a three-hour mega podcast but the long story short of it is all these other variables those change, how your brain processes, stress, fear, and that all can lead to more depression too. So we’re always trying to implement some sort of mental health practice.
I love doing meditations. It used to sound crazy to me. I used to hate to sit there for five minutes and be quiet but now I look forward to it. Now I’m like “Oh! I’m turning back into the real me!”, versus this busy version of me is different so I think you have to be miserable enough to listen to us when I say and I know that our friend and Mentor Kayla has said this for years something like if you don’t have an hour to meditate you need two and I was guilty of that because I was like I’m too busy. I’m too busy to slow down, I’m too busy to relax and think and now I’m like no I need that time so that I am clear-headed and not depressed during the day because I’m less overwhelmed because I’m more clear-headed.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yes, so when we talk about a lot of things here different factors, just take it with a grain of salt you can find studies you can find people that have had benefits or not, the issue is we’re not going to ever just take and do one variable at a time. There’s going to be a lot of things, and the more leverage you move and the more you set that foundation of health up, the more a supplement or a nutrient or an herb or a Botanical or a hormone could potentially provide a therapeutic effect even though data out there isn’t supported because we’re setting a foundation and moving a lot more variables than these studies are. It’s important to note.
Evan Brand: Yeah, we hit the organic acid test also, if you are having mood issues at all. You need to look into your gut as you and I know there’s a huge correlation between gut infections and mood disorders, whether that’s anxiety, bipolar, depression even panic attacks, this could be coming from the toxins released by the overgrowth of the microbes in your gut so to me a stool test would be a critical component of a mental health workup.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, so in general that’s super important because 80%, 90% of all the neurotransmitters come from the gut now. Some of the data says hey these neurotransmitters don’t cross the blood-brain barrier but either way the amino acids that we take in those do have to get through the gut into the bloodstream and then those would then either get converted in the gut or go past the blood-brain barrier the astrocytes in the brain and they would get converted in the brain so the whole idea of like 5-HTP is those can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and go to the brain but we need to have good health, good healthy gut function to be able to break down and absorb these things and then also the newer model of depression looks at the brain’s inflammation.
They’re saying, hey a lot of the inflammation in the brain could be what’s causing problems. The problem is we know a lot of conventional medicine’s way of addressing inflammation tends to have side effects. We know NSAIDs kill about 20 000 people a year with gut and liver issues. We know Vioxx from the early 2000s killed 60 000 people with strokes and cardiovascular issues. So when you start to inhibit and stop these uh Cyclooxygenase the Cox Pathways. Cox-1, Cox-2, Cox-3 they can have impacts on reducing inflammation but those enzymes are also really important for rebuilding other tissues so you’re kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
And so conventional medicine, they have a lot of tools that may have a lot of side effects and so we know this new model of brain inflammation and mood is real and I think that’s why we can move the needle so much when we fix the gut because so much of the inflammation is in the gut. Whether it’s from food dysbiosis, endotoxin from bacteria, mycotoxin from fungus, or colonized yeast or mold, H. Pylori, parasites, just not breaking down foods and having larger food molecules of of dairy, Casein, wheat right grains and so all of this inflammation in the gut can be easily driving inflammation in the brain.
Evan Brand: Do you think you can eat your way out of this because that’s a common thing that just spreads on social media like wildfire is this idea like if you just get your diet perfect, all your problems go away and I already have my answer but I want to hear it from you because 90 plus percent of people that come to us are already doing something to improve their diet and they still have these issues.
Dr. Marchegiani: The more chronic the problem is no because I give an example of a patient, right? If you’re driving down the street and you get a flat tire right and now your car is not driving well, if I change that flat tire that day, do all my problems with my car go away? Yes because it just happened that day. But if I were to drive around on that flat tire for years and then be like well the root cause was that flat tire if I just change the flat tire I’m addressing the root cause the car should go back to normal like it drove three years ago well now you have collateral damage because you drove the car now aligned for years now the front end, the axle the suspension the shocks, the steering, everything’s jacked up and so just because you fixed the underlying root cause collateral damage happen in other places in the body.
And so then now you have to come in there and fix all the other collateral damages that occurred.
Evan Brand: Yeah that’s a great analogy. I mean the sound bite makes it difficult for us because then we have to explain that to people because people say oh well I heard from so and so if I just eat this, if I do kefir, if I do grass-fed Meats I’ll just be fine. That’ll fix my SIBO, that’ll fix my infections, that’ll fix my health issues and if you could eat your way out of this, if everyone could eat their way out of this then you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah and a good history is really what tells you because usually with a good history, you can kind of see where the first shoe to fall was right. you’re like going to the person’s history their diet was good their lifestyle was good they had a mold issue in their basement because of a flood that wasn’t addressed and it’s like oh okay that screams to me this is an environmental thing or you can go back and see there was emotional stress and then there was some diet issues and then antibiotics you’re like okay.
So the history kind of can tell you you know how things started to unfold just like if I told you my history about my car and I told you three years ago I got a flat tire, you could say Okay, I see how that kind of unfolded. So this is where a good history you know really makes a lot of sense and then you want to also go into it not thinking it’s just one thing. It’s just the mold, It’s just you’re the gluten, it’s like no no. So when you have people that are like just dietitians, the problem is all they have is food. So all they’re looking at is food as being the underlying issue and that’s the problem.
You have to have a broader tool belt because then you’re like okay, food definitely is blood sugar, definitely is. But then other things could be as well and you want to combine everything.
Evan Brand: It may be a little harder for us to explain that and we’ve done this for a decade plus now which is that we have to be generalists and specialists at the same time like if you go to just the diet guru he’s going to convince you everything that you do diet wise is going to fix all of your problems and then you and I go wait a second you take 20 depressed people that come to us there’s going to be 20 different clinical outcomes and 20 different clinical protocols for this people here.
Dr. Marchegiani: And diets too!
Evan Brand: It could be this lady here, it was the death of her husband, it was an illness, it was moving out, it was Trauma from her children and it was mold exposure and dysbiosis and she was on XYZ medication versus over here lady just had thyroid issues. Okay easy fix that depression, this lady here gut infections, fixed that, that depression is gone. So the problem with the mental health space is it’s like okay depression and everyone thinks they have the same flavor of depression. You can have 20 different flavors or 20 different little small rivers that all end up at the same symptom depression but not everyone is getting there the same way the same path.
Dr. Marchegiani: Bingo! 100 percent! And even with diets right, I see some patients and they’re super sensitive to vegetables. They can’t even handle vegetables; some have to be on an elemental or even a carnivore diet. Some are just okay with the Paleo template, some need some level of variation between an autoimmune or an SCD or low oxalate or so there’s always a different variation depending on what’s going on.
So food always is important, so when we look at food, we’re looking at nutrient density, anti-inflammatory, low Toxin and we’ve got to make sure that you can break the foods down that’s super important and then the next part on top of food is that we don’t have enzymes acids in bile support, dial then and you can’t break that food down that food’s going to be a stressor inside of your body. And then, of course, all those nutrients to run our brain chemicals and pathways have to come from that food so if we don’t break them down and absorb it then that’s a problem too.
Evan Brand: So let’s make that visual for people so this is a 52-year-old woman, she’s had digestive issues for 20 years and she has depression. She was told if she does go autoimmune or she does go animal-based, she’s going to be fine. She does it, now she has diarrhea, she doesn’t know what to do, she’s confused. How do we approach that and break that down?
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, so I mean, the first thing is we have to look at her gut because even a healthy diet and healthy enzymes and acids there could be infections and stuff inside the intestinal tract that could be creating stress and inflammation so we’re going to work on the enzymes, we’re going to work on the acids, we’re going to make sure she’s breaking down her fats, we’re going to make sure the food is dialed into to whatever degree we think we need to based on how severe the issues are and then we’re going to be testing, we’re going to be looking at what’s going on with her microbiome and her and dysbiotic bacteria and yeast and bacteria and potentially colonized mold. This colonized mold from the living arrangement for where you live could be impacting things as well so we’ve got to look at everything.
Evan Brand: Yep, Candida could be in the puzzle too so people blame the food and they’ll say oh well I don’t feel good with meat like I’ve tried that I don’t feel good I’ve tried to increase fats I don’t feel good and then they may give up and we’re like okay it’s not the food that’s the problem it’s everything else that’s in your bucket that’s making that a problem. You should tolerate this, you should feel fine with it, it’s just a matter of getting your nervous system calmed down.
Someone in the comments has a vagus nerve yeah I mean your nervous system is a piece of it, we were talking about the limbic system. You know if you’re stuck in fight or flight all the time that you know that’s going to impair your ability to digest your food I mean how many times have you been in an argument at the dinner table you get done with the meal and you don’t even remember you’re still hungry. You’re like did I even eat? Like that’s what we’re talking about here.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, when you’re activating your amygdala and or your limbic system, this is kind of your fight or flight response, that’s going to go up the vagus nerve or your parasympathetics go down it’s not a seesaw. So as the limbic, amygdala, brain stem right that’s the back part of the brain these are all primordial reflexes for fight or flight and survival okay. So very very important and the problem with that is if this is over activated the parasympathetics which are really that’s the vagus nerve, that’s this whole entire nerve cascade that helps with rest digest, activates the frontal cortex so you can make decision making, you can see the outcome of poor decisions and actions and then you can stop acting in a bad way right.
Most crimes and people doing bad things it’s because they’re thinking from their amygdala brain stem and not their frontal cortex, and so the more stressed you are that can create problems. I also saw, I read an article one time where a lot of things like road rage and like serious crime done like impulsively, was done from people that were hypoglycemic, so very low blood sugar. Because the low blood sugar kind of creates a stress response, and that activates the frontal cortex I mean, everyone can have that response of like dealing with their spouse and they haven’t eaten all day, and they’re just like, “Oh my God! I just need to eat like I’m just, I’m angry!” right.
So things like nutrition and blood sugar could easily impact that kind of brainstem response now outside of that there are different programs and things you can do, like you mentioned earlier in meditation or there’s different programs like DNRS or the Gupta program or NLP or EFT or EMDR. These are different programs that help get at the subconscious, limbic system, brain stem response kind of calm down which then brings up the parasympathetics and brings up the vagus nerve.
Evan Brand: Yeah and this was a critical step for me I mean I didn’t realize I was stuck in fight or flight until I downshifted from it and then I’m like, “Oh wait a second, man I was running running running like a little rat on a wheel”, and then finally I kind of snapped out of it, and I was almost running on autopilot I’m like wait a second I need to be more conscious with what I’m doing my actions and all of that.
So sometimes you have to say no to be able to say yes and what I mean by that is if you’re a people pleaser, you may end up as a depressed, anxious person because you’re constantly trying to satisfy everyone’s needs. This could be for your children or your spouse or whoever. If you’re a people pleaser we find this a lot. Those people are the ones that end up more burnt out, more anxious, more depressed, whether it’s a caretaker role as any sick family member or a sick parent or aging parent or just trying to please people in society.
So it’s okay to say no if you’re too booked up, if you’re too tapped out, you can say no to someone. Get your mind right, sit down, get your functional medicine labs done, get your work up done, so you can see what you’re up against. When you’re so stuck in fight or flight, you’re dealing with blood sugar crises, you’ve got toxins, you’re worried about your house, you got to get the plumber over to fix the leak, you got to separate from all that if you need to go sit out on the front porch and watch the birds fly for a minute to get your mind right that’s what I would do.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah you kind of mentioned the people pleasers. I grew up with some of those and it’s interesting right? Because you think people pleasing comes from a place of like, you know this is good, I want to help all these people around me. The problem is there’s also on the other side of the people-pleasing spectrum is a lot of resentment, because people pleasers will do a lot for this person XYZ, family, friends, kids, etc.
But then there’s this unspoken kind of goal or agreement that they’re kind of making that person is also going to make them a priority at some point and help them and if they don’t, it’s totally unspoken, this is where the resentment comes in. “Hey, you didn’t do this for me but I did this for you.” It’s like “Well, wait a minute. I didn’t realize I had to pay you back on that. I didn’t realize that was something I had to like to be indebted to you. I thought you were just doing that out of kindness.”
So it’s really important that you know, one, that you make yourself a priority that’s important because only you know what you need. Only you know the rest you need, the self-care you need, the things that you love, the hobbies, the time that you need right? Only you can put food in your mouth and get to bed on time. I can’t ever force you to do that.
And then you’re kind coming from a place of abundance where your cup is filling over and then, the spilling over is what you give away to friends and family and obviously, this is different if you have young kids right because they can’t take care of themselves but as kids get older and family gets older right it’s kind of more of that cup running over and that’s a much better mindset than having a low cup where you just give away and then your cup super low to begin with.
So just kind of make sure that you’re making deposits into yourself and then using the abundance to help others around you after the fact.
Evan Brand: Yeah and this could be something simple, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a supplement, this could be you taking a hot bath, you could be scheduling a massage, you’d just leave the house, go take a little drive, if you got to get away hopefully your spouse is supportive. If you say “Hey, gotta get my mind right. Gotta reset, go for a drive honey.” Perfect! These are the small steps that allow us to think clearly about our next action step but if you haven’t looked at your underlying issues, it’s time to look.
If you’ve done the diet, you’ve done the lifestyle, get the data because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing.
Dr. Marchegiani: Yep and anyone that has young kids, you have three kids, I have two young kids. We know kids, their needs are insatiable and they will never fully be satiated where like, you go do this activity, you do this, you give them this treat, you have this meal, you have this experience, the kids will never say “Mom and Dad thank you so much for this great day. You go take care of you now.” That never happened, it’s like “Now we’re on to this! And now we’re on to that!” right? There will never be that closure of like, “Great job Dad, thanks!” It’s like “Now what’s next? Now what’s next? Now what’s next?”
So you have to have that like all right, “Now it’s Mom and Dad’s time.” We’re gonna get a sitter, we’re gonna have a date night, we’re gonna have, I’m gonna schedule a time to go for a drive or go for a walk or meditate or exercise right so you have to kind of have that boundary within yourself and know that no one’s gonna just probably pat you on the back and say “All right, you go do you now,” probably not going to happen.
Evan Brand: Yeah and that’s not really a sexy advertisement that’s going to come from the media or anywhere else. There are benefits to society being caught up in this Loop and when you can step back from that it really helps change your perspective and even just that perspective change alone can help improve your mood so this topic is all about depression but as you see there’s a million different little spider webs. Yeah little inputs here and I think this is a totally reversible condition, yes there are genetics involved, yes there are environmental pieces, biochemical pieces, nutrition, lifestyle, digestive, all of it adds up but you really have to just plug and fix each little hole in this happiness bucket.
If you think you’re happy I think of it almost visually this bucket of happiness, default that’s what it is like my baby she’s default happy but as you age you get inflamed, you get infections, you get nutrient deficiencies because the soil’s depleted. Even if you eat an organic orange, you gotta eat 20 of them to equal the orange of 1920’s,
Dr. Marchegiani: Exactly
Evan Brand: Well, that’s a hole in the bucket. And then it’s, you’re overworked, okay that’s a hole in the bucket. This is why tribal societies, you ask them, they rarely have a word for depression because all the inputs they’re getting are keeping that happiness bucket full or set another way, they don’t have as many holes in their bucket that we in the modern world do so try to plug those holes, fill that bucket and you can totally reverse from this to where your life is something you look forward to, rather than you dreading your life and wishing it away.
Dr. Marchegiani: I love it! I love it! And so outside of that, if you have like previous trauma, whether it’s sexual abuse or issue with marriage or kids, get the support you need on the counseling side, behavioral therapy or if it’s like some kind of a subconscious trauma that’s there from the past, you know, EFT, EMDR, NLP, these are techniques that really work on that kind of subconscious stress, just make sure you have support for that if that is a thing or not and then everything else that we’re going to recommend is going to be customized because I could have a patient with really really high cortisol and all these nutrient deficiencies, we got to get that cortisol in check because that’s going to be causing limbic system problems.
And if I see these neurotransmitters off or important cofactors like Folate, B12, and B6 off, that could be a bigger deal for someone that maybe have normal markers for that. And so a lot of the rec like, these are things that could be wrong, but then we like to have that individualized approach so we’re not guessing, we’re assessing. So this is where we’re going to do organic acids and nutrient tests, this is where we’re going to look at the hormones so what we’re going to look at blood sugar and diet.
Just causing dysglycemia issues can cause massive problems so you can go get like a Freestyle Libre Three, put it on your shoulder, connect it to your phone, and test your blood sugar for two weeks, see how you do, see how you feel, monitor that, creating awareness, check, track your sleep, track your HRV, see how you’re doing in regards to your recovery and your parasympathetic response. These are some cool kinds of devices that you can do to kind of monitor and bring awareness to what’s happening.
Evan Brand: Yeah absolutely and I would say for someone that is on the verge of giving up and they have no hope, have hope, just reach out to someone, talk to someone. If you are obviously suicidal, you know call The Suicide Hotline. Don’t kill yourself over this, it’s not worth it. There’s too many people ending their lives that they could have been fixed. I mean just a famous recent case of suicide was, it was the either president or there was someone high up in Texas Roadhouse. It was a, there’s a restaurant chain that was headquartered in Kentucky where I’m from, and the guy, post virus, had tinnitus, and of course he got depressed from that and ended his life.
It’s like, well, there’s a million things we could do to help with tinnitus, like if he could have had a functional workup, he might have been able to fix that and would have ended his life. So there’s so many different situations that lead to someone doing that but I’ve even had clients where in the beginning they feel like they’re at the end of the rope and by the end, they think, “Why did I ever think that?” “I’m totally out of that mindset now.”
Dr. Marchegiani: Yeah, the last thing you want is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, right, that’s what suicide is. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. We gotta have that solution-based mindset, okay? And again, the healthier you are, the more adaptable to stress you become, right, the more you’re going to think with that frontal cortex, the more you’re going to be able to problem-solve and get to the root.
So I think we have some good things here, that we kind of laid out. Again a lot of this will be individualized again if you guys want to dive in deeper, head over to evanbrand.com. Evan has research and resources for y’all, sees patients worldwide, and you also can head over to justinhealtstg.wpengine.com as well. We do functional medicine support worldwide, so you can reach out to either of us. We’ll put some links down below of different supplements that we like, different labs that we, like highly recommend work with a practitioner so you can have a guided approach.
Again it’s not just if I gave you a recipe right and I said, hey these things are, this is what you need for the recipe, but I didn’t give you the right order, and I didn’t customize it for you you’re gonna have a bunch of slop because if you put the eggs in after you baked it right it’s just not going to taste good and so the order of operations and that customization approach is so important that’s how we get patients better so just kind of FYI on that. Anything else Evan you want to leave a listen with?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I appreciate the website and we are some of the best guys out there. We don’t say that just to toot our own horns, we say it because we’ve been through our own struggles, and we’ve helped thousands of people worldwide.
I’ve confirmed with the labs that we work with that we are in the top 10 worldwide of practitioners running the most labs, and from that, we see a ton of data, and with that data, we can help people the average person has been to 5, 10, or even 15 different practitioners specialist, other functional medicine people, naturopaths, conventional doctors, neurologists, cardiologists, and then somehow they wind up with us, and we give them good results so if you do decide to work with us we’re going to take great care of you, as he mentioned, Dr. J at justinhealtstg.wpengine.com that’s justinhealtstg.wpengine.com or me Evan Brand at evanbrand.com.
We’re happy to be there for you guys, and we’re always willing to look someplace that someone else hasn’t looked at, that’s why we don’t give up. We’re just ruthless for the pursuit of health and happiness, so thank you all, and take good care.
Dr. Marchegiani: Excellent! If you guys found value in this, please give us a share with friends or family, write us a review, put a comment, give us that five star on iTunes we really appreciate it. Thanks, guys! Have an awesome day!
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How to Retrain Your Brain, Amygdala and Heal From Trauma – Ashok Gupta | Podcast #378
Hey, guys! In this video, Dr. J and Ashok Gupta talk about brain reach training and nutritional component to better well-being. The brain is a highly active and malleable learning machine. So, we can develop strategies to improve well-being, like engaging in new and challenging activities.
Therefore, we can influence our brain development in positive or negative directions. The more we engage and challenge our minds and body, the longer our brains function at a high level. There are also many other benefits to encouraging neuroplastic change.
Moreover, for the brain to function correctly, it needs specific nutrients, making the food we eat vital to brain function. To learn more about improving your brain function in areas such as memory, attention, focus, and sleep while eliminating symptoms of anxiety and depression, make sure to subscribe, check out other videos, and feel to reach out for more info & consults!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:17 – Amygdala
13:05 – Repetition and Self-Love
16:22 – Breathing patterns
21:33 – Techniques
24:24 – Nutritional component
29:17 – Program Transition
32:10 – CBT vs Brain Reach Training
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys! It’s doctor Justin Marchegiani here. I’m really excited for today’s podcast. We’re going to be talking about how to retrain your brain, your amygdala, and heal from trauma with Ashok Gupta. Ashok, really great to have you today. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Ashok Gupta: Hi, I’m very well. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Lovely to be here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Well, in the functional medicine world, dealing with a lot of chronically sick people that have hormone issues, gut issues, when you’re doing a really good history on someone, you see a commonality and that there’s a lot of underlying emotional trauma that usually can be a big stressor in that stress bucket, that’s holding back healing. And so I wanted to get you on the show because you’re an expert in this and you have a program that really works on getting to the root cause. So I wanted to just kind of first talk about kind of, you know, what you’re passionate about and kind of what your goal is with your program out of the gates.
Ashok Gupta: Uh, yeah, absolutely. So just to give a bit of background to myself, I actually suffered from a chronic illness many, many years ago when I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge. So I actually suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome. And it was, you know, I was a young guy in my early 20s. My whole life had suddenly had this brick wall which is a chronic illness. And I’m seeing doctors and specialists and they’re telling me we don’t know what causes it. There’s no treatment for it. You may have this the rest of your life. Good luck. Essentially, you know, I remember my darkest moment thinking this is the worst thing ever. If I can just get myself better. If I and thousands of others who suffering from this. And I said if I can just heal this one person, just even myself. I would dedicate the rest of my life to helping people with this condition. That’s how serious I was about it. And that spawned a lifelong quest to understand these conditions and really treat them. So I did a lot of research into brain neurology, understanding these conditions, and eventually I came up with a hypothesis. I got myself completely, 100% better using ad hoc parade brain retraining that I created and also the clinic to treat others and have published other papers as well. So that’s my journey, so my real passion and vision here is that I believe that brain reach training as we refine it better for these conditions could be the future to treat chronic illness and I want that to be embedded in primary care and that is my mission.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s excellent. Now I know you talked about with your Gupta program, we’ll put links down below to so you guys can access this. I know there’s some kind of introductory you know offers on the on the website where you can kind of take a look and kind of dip your toe in and see if you like if you talk about Neuroplasticity, which is obviously, you know, rewiring the brain in the sense so these neurons can’t connect in different ways, but you also talk about the amygdala, which is kind of the part of the brain, it’s like an almond size and it’s all about processing fear and threatening stimuli. And so when someone is chronically ill, is that part of the brain over active where where you’re seeing everything as a threat and it’s kind of always on talk a little bit more about the amygdala, how that plays in to these chronic health concerns.
Ashok Gupta: Yeah, absolutely. So I always like to start this explanation with the biggest question of all. Why are we here? And I love that. Half an hour long conversation about the philosophy of that. But let’s say from a scientific perspective, we’re here because this brain, this body, this nervous system has been trained over millions of years to adapt to the environment, to survive and pass on the genes the next generation from. So from a Darwinian perspective, this system is designed to adapt, thrive, survive and pass on genes. And this has come from, you know, plants, single cell organisms, invertebrates, vertebrates, reptiles, mammals, human beings, all of that, that DNA. And that growth is all within our own DNA. And in fact, you know, we share around 50% of our DNA with a banana. Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:That’s crazy.
Ashok Gupta: Uh, you know, so our team actually contains a lot of the DNA of their animals as we’ve evolved to get to where we are so this system is designed to survive, so the number one priority of our bodies is not actually well-being or health.The number one priority is survival. If we take that as a starting point, the way that these illnesses start is that. Let’s take the example of COVID and long COVID, because we know millions are suffering from COVID and the after effect. So imagine we get collection normally, our bodies trigger the immune system, they’re able to fight off the virus, then the system resets, goes back to normal. We have our health back but in a small number of cases where actually 10 to 20% of cases. What happens is if our system is a little. Let’s say tired, fatigued or we are mentally, emotionally, physically overdoing it.Then the system is more vulnerable. So when the virus comes, our immune system thinks right. We’ve got to really fight hard because our systems would speak so it over response towards the virus and we know that for instance, people who passed away from COVID, they’re not passing away from the infection, they’re passing away from the cytokines storm or the over inflammation from the body itself and so what happens is in COVID we believe that the system over response we still managed to fight off the virus, but it’s left the legacy in the brain which is, let’s turn on the side of caution because maybe the virus is still here, so the brain continues to trigger immune system and the nervous system inappropriately. Creating this cascade of symptoms in the body. And we believe the culprits, as you’ve mentioned, are the amygdala and the insular. So the emitter that we believe is where the core conditioning lies in terms of triggering the nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system and then for the immune system. We know they’re from animals, this comes from the insular part of the brain, the insular part of the brain, is getting over triggered and overstimulated, so both these structures keep triggering this over different responses creating symptoms in the body. And the brain detects in a hypothetical way, all of these symptoms. The body which comes up to the brain, the brain says, Oh, maybe we’re still in danger. Yeah, just like in this diagram. Yeah, #9 we’re still in danger, then triggers at #4 and five. The chronic sympathetic arousal, the immune dysfunction HPA abnormalities, which then creates symptoms to #6 and then at #8, the brain because it’s hyper hypersensitive, magnifies these signals.They come back in the bank #9 and we are caught in this vicious cycle, and this is a vicious cycle of a lot of these different conditions and the only difference here which we certainly always are. Fibromyalgia is pain or chronic fatigue is immune oriented such as long COVID, but we also get sensitivity reactions to the external environment, so more disease, chemical sensitivities and muscle activation. This is where external triggers and food sensitivities. External triggers now create this cascade and this. Despite all this vicious cycle. And an analogy, I don’t know any doctor, you were a fan of Game of Thrones?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s a great show. Yep.
Ashok Gupta: So, let’s say an example of imagine you’re the the king of the castle, OK, and your Kingdom is suffering a drought and your army is the sympathetic nervous system and your Navy is immune system, so imagine the kingdoms you know weak because of the droughts and incoming army invading army with some dragons over the hill, right? So your immune system and nervous system your army and navy responds. They fight off this invading army. But because they’re weak, it takes them a lot longer to fight it off. Once they fought it off, they come to you as king of the castle and say, hey Doctor J, we only just managed to fight off that incoming invasion. We need all of the resources of the Kingdom, the castle now, channel us so all the wheat, all the corn, all the metal, everything comes to us, and you agree because it made sense. And so now all the sources of the body go to the Army and Navy. And then even if a child is walking over the hill. The Army, Navy respond as if it’s a full blown threat and trigger your machine using up all the resources and hence we get stuck in that alternative way being that lack of homeostasis? And so bring me training is saying actually, we need to persuade the general, the Army, Navy, that we are no longer in threat, no longer in danger to switch off these responses and get back to normal. So that, in a nutshell, is the hypothesis.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. I mean, it’s good to have an amygdala that’s making connections, that’s a processing threat. It’s like if there was this woods over here and bears would come out and eat, eat a human, you know, you there’s probably be natural inclination to have some fear and anxiety about being close to that because we already know there’s a threat that could take your life, so it’s good to have this level of fear perception. The problem with a lot of trauma today is it’s firing off like it would take your life, but it’s really maybe not that serious anymore. And we kind of have to it there. We need to have this rational discussion with our amygdala and our brain hit, this isn’t maybe as much of a threat and so obviously may not be, may not be able to do that from a conscious ability where we can just have that conversation. So what type of modalities are you incorporating to make that connection? Hey this is, this shouldn’t be the threat that it is. My amygdala is hyper responding. It’s like having an allergy response to danger in the air like it’s a virus. Well we shouldn’t be responding that way. So what type of modalities are you using or techniques within your program to kind of get that response to be more appropriate and realistic.
Ashok Gupta: Exactly. And as you say, traditionally these types of approaches have been applied to emotional reaction actions or trauma reactions, right? OK, so the emotional side, but how do we communicate with our immune system, right, it’s a very, very different approach and so what we’ve done over the last 20 years is develop a system and set of processes that actually communicate with these unconscious brain structures about physical health, yeah. And you might say, well, hang on this, you know, how on Earth can you do that? How can we kind of change our physiological responses? But, you know, as we know, the power of visualization is very, very powerful. So let’s take an example of a lemon. Right. So imagine I take a slice of lemon. And I placed it on your tongue. But you can’t bite into it yet. But it’s really it’s hanging really sour. Just on your tongue, you bite into that sour lemon. Just right. Imagine doing that. Imagine all the saliva starts coming up. Now imagine so you got saliva coming in your mouth, by the way?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah, that visualization. Yeah, for sure.
Ashok Gupta: Yeah. So isn’t that incredible that we’ve been able to create a physiological response just through the power of imagination, even though you know it’s not real consciously. You can bypass the conscious processes and imagination, visualization is one aspect. OK, that’s one aspect of this brain retraining. But there’s plenty of other processes. So there’s a seven step process where we get people to recognize these unconscious data signals. So then process them and they actually create a safety response to the brain. Say hey brain, we are safe. We are not in danger. You can switch off these. Uh.These immune responses and these defensive responses, and that uses a number of different techniques including self coaching, breathing, visualization and imagination and also you know, physical touch as well, so there’s a number of different processes and that supported through meditation and breathing as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s excellent. So, what’s the first step out of the gate? Right, we start out of the gate. What’s the first thing we’re going to do to kind of move the needle? Is it just breathing? Is it really just making sure we’re breathing to the nose? Uh, having a deeper breath. What’s the first step out of the gate?
Ashok Gupta: So out of the gate before our brain is ready to be retrained. As you say it becomes. Alright, so it’s a bit like the idea of until we were able to accept something first and become, we can no longer give if the brain’s not so flexible if we are stressed and anxious. So give the example of, if the husband and wife come home after today’s work and have an argument because they’re both stressed, that’s the worst time for them to have an argument. If they calm down, relax, etcetera, then they’re more likely to have more conducive conversation. So in the same way we calm our brains first through breathing and meditation, so they are supportive techniques, and then, we look at the brain retraining. That’s the second R. So the first R is relaxing. The second R is retraining the brain, and that’s where I’ve talked about these unique processes. And the third is reengaging with joy. And this is something that is often neglected in mainstream medicine, which is that we know that actually when people are unable to connect with things that uplift their spirit that bring them joy and happiness. Their immune system is bolstered. They actually are able to heal from a wide range of different conditions, so we teach people to recognize what can boost their immune system and reset it. Use this idea of reengaging with joy, which is I think it’s a missing piece of medicine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. And then what type of I don’t like? NLP’s been out there for a while where they used a lot of visualizations and really focus on the pictures kind of in your brain, how much does visualization and just kind of the images that come within your brain, because a lot of times people have a fear. There’s almost always the image of that thing before that fear is felt. How do you start to change the images in that brain and maybe the self talk. A lot of times, most people wouldn’t be friends with the person if they’re self-talk was emanated from a friend in front of them. The amount of self-talk that’s so negative and so putting themselves down. If it was a friend then in real life they would never be friends with that person. How do you change the pictures and the voice inside the brain?
Ashok Gupta: So this is a great question, and the core of this is repetition and self love. So it’s a bit like imagining that self-talk is a precocious 7 or 8 year old child, right? And we want to kind of get really anxious about something. If you tell them one time, hey, this is nothing to worry about. They’re not going to listen. But with that love and that compassion and that action and that repetition of look, hey, we’re safe. There’s nothing to worry about if you can calm down. Through that process, you’re able to gradually get the brain to recognize we’re no longer in danger, and a representation is absolutely key and imagination and visualization is part of it, but not the only part of it. Any change in life involves awareness. We have to be aware first of all of what is that negative self-talk is. What does it look like? Let’s write it down. Let’s be very clear. What is creating this vicious cycle, that’s the first step, is awareness. And from that point onwards, and that is acceptance. So a lot of people have these conditions but don’t accept that they have this condition. They’re constantly fighting it, pushing against it. That’s tensing up against it. Resisting it, which then creates more anxiety, more turmoil. So the first step is awareness and the second step is acceptance, then the first step is this process of repetitive retraining of the brain again and again and again. And so the brain gets the message that we aren’t in danger and switches off these responses and that’s the core of how do we get people well?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. So what’s the next step? So your program out of the gates, what, 28 days?
Ashok Gupta: Yes. So we offer a 28 day free trial where people can access some of the videos, some of the audio. And get a flavor of the program and see if it’s right for them. So that’s the first starting point, we’d love people to experience the free stuff that we’ve got lots of videos and if they choose to take the full program then it is what we call a six month program. Now, why do we say six months? Because that seems like a long time. Actually many people retrain within weeks and months. But we don’t want people to become complacent because I’m still a doctor J. You’ve seen in your practice, as well that people get well from some kind of protocol, but then as soon as a new stress comes into their lives, wow, all the symptoms come back again. Yep. So we teach people not only to get well, but to stay well, to recognize our stress triggers, to recognize what brings back these symptoms and to control that and to you know, uh, recognize that for the rest of their lives when people stay well. We call it a six month program because we want people to get so deeply into retraining that it becomes part of their lives and so that they can maintain that health for the rest of their lives.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. And what do you find? I mean, obviously the goal was to try to activate some of the parasympathetic nervous system response, right? If that amygdala is overactive, then we’re in that sympathetic fight or flight that can shut down digestion enzymes, hydrochloric acid can cause cortisol and adrenaline fluctuations that can cause more stress, the more you dump out your electrolytes, your potassium, magnesium that causes the heart to go go faster so you can see this downward cycle with this sympathetic nervous system response with all the different hormonal systems, digestive system, what’s the when you talk, when you do breathing, right? What’s the type of breath pattern that you find to be the most effective that you incorporate?
Ashok Gupta: Right, so there are several. The first is deep diaphragmatic breathing during the 4-4-6-2 pattern. So that’s when people put their yeah, one hand on the stomach, one hand on the chest. Many of us are breathing very shallow from the chest, and we know that, parasympathetic breathing or from the belly, the belly is going out and in as we breathe. And so this is actually a technique that’s taught in the art of living cause, art of living breathing, which is, if you’ve heard about it, a very powerful breathing technique. Yeah, part of their breathing technique is to actually breathe in for four. Hold for four. Breathe out for six and hold for two. All through the nose, all through the nose. So we know that it actually comes in and out through the nose. What that’s able to do is a combat nervous system has been used for millennia. And another technique is alternate nostril breathing as well. So you breathe it in through one nostril, breathe out through the other nostril, then in through that nostril out through the other one. So that’s another very well known breathing technique called alternate nostril breathing. In Sanskrit it’s called 90 shorthand.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And these are breathing in and out to the same and then switch in and out then switch.
Ashok Gupta: Yeah. So. So now when you do that, you’re breathing in from through what? And breathing out through the other. Oh, okay, they’re breathing in through that one. And then breathing out through the other. And then breathing in through that. And then breathing out.Yeah, yeah.And what people find is gradually as they control the breathing, but not control in an anxious way, but just observe it great breathing becomes slower and deeper. Easing that process is balancing the left and right hemispheres of the brain. That’s one of the roles of alternate nostril breathing. And so that’s kind with regular meditation as the starting point. What that is able to do is to tell the brain, hey, just calm everything down at the generalized level and then we’ll be ready to retrain those specific neurons that have got caught in this vicious loop.To indicate that we’re in danger. And so that is the, you know, a very complementary approach. And I think what happens is in modern medicine we have this reductionist philosophy of OK, nothing to do is test breathing techniques over here and see what impact they have. And now going to test meditation techniques over here in a separate randomized controlled trial. That actually is the cumulative effect of all of these things together, which is able to persuade the brain to switch off these dangerous purposes. So, that is the most important thing is to have all of these things operating at the same time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s excellent. That’s very cool. So I like the breathing aspect, and the goal of that is to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. What should your brain be focusing on to just be focusing on the breath? When do you start to incorporate the trauma or whatever that memory is that’s triggering you? I don’t know. Let’s say you got in the car accident. Every time you jump in the car, you’re reliving that trauma. When do you start bringing those pictures or that experience into work?
Ashok Gupta: So first of all the program is not necessarily a trauma relief program, yeah although people use it for that and they do find trauma, and as you say, the purpose of the way that we teach breathing and meditation is that yes, images will come up as you meditate. Some of them might be frightening. People sometimes spontaneously burst into tears as they’re experiencing these techniques. And the most important thing is not to get caught up in any imagery or any emotions, just to observe it. So we’re not pushing away any of it, and we’re also not trying to obsess about it. We are staying calm and centered as we observe with a curious mind the images and the negative things that may come up. And that is one way and one technique of releasing trauma is to simply observe with a neutral friendly mind. Allow it to just come up with that. Trying to pick it apart or try to analyze or understand it. And what we say is that actually people can heal from chronic illness without actually having to heal their trauma. This is so important because I think this is a missed thought sometimes. For most people, they had trauma in their lives, but they didn’t have chronic illness that layered on top. So the best thing is to remove that layer of chronic illness and then deal with the underlying trauma. At the same time, there’s no fixed up, you know, dogma here. Of course, if people want to address their underlying trauma at the same time, that’s absolutely fine. And some people do. Alternately, Uh, treating and healing the chronic illness first we find is most effective because if you have a chronic illness and you’re trying to overcome trauma at the same time, that’s a lot to actually process and and and deal with.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. And so you get the breathing stuff going on. You’re really working on self love, right, that’s important. And do you incorporate any tapping or eye boob and stuff? I know there’s a lot of big techniques like EFT or EMDR or different things. Do you incorporate those modalities in your program?
Ashok Gupta: We have another technique called the accelerator process, which is something that we’ve created and that does not involve tapping necessarily. But a lot of our coaches trained in EFT and other modalities. So we give a core set of techniques to the patients and if they want tapping, if they want some of these other things and many of our coaches are trained in those modalities as well. So that’s if people need one-on-one support. So our program is an online program in which people can go through it at their own time at their own pace and there’s extra support from coaches as required.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. What other modalities? We’re going to put links down below, so if anyone listening wants to try the 28 day course, that’s going to be an option down below in the links as well as the whole 6 month program. If you feel like you’re getting success and you want to continue with that good consistency, we’ll put links down below. What’s another good thing for listeners at home to start to incorporate, to start improving their mental health and calm down that amygdala response, that fear response?
Ashok Gupta: So I think regular meditation first of all is incredibly important and then secondly, I missed the core point of retraining is just awareness of the noise. Yeah, to regularly check your stuff. And that’s a mindfulness technique, say, to think about what you’re thinking about. Ah, how interesting. I’m thinking about that. And to actually write these things down to have what we call a worry diary. Yeah, not that we want to reinforce it, but kind of getting stuff out of your head and onto this worry diary, almost like a journaling type process. So what kind of thoughts have I had today? Let me get it out of my head in general. OK, I’m worried about this. I’m thinking about this, I’m thinking about this. Just that process in of itself is amazingly therapeutic and healing because you’re no longer got this churning going on. You’ve exhausted it. Get out of your system. And with journaling then you recognize all of these patterns and then say what do I choose to substitute these patterns where this churning thoughts and emotions. What I choose to kind of say, what we call the love messages, what loving messages do I choose to give back to my unconscious, to oppose or heal these kinds of patterns that are going on? I think that’s something that we can all do in the general public and what we’re doing in brain retraining with a seven step process that we have.That’s more when the patterns are extreme. When we’ve got such an extreme, almost traumatic pattern that actually self-talk isn’t going to shift it, we actually need something really powerful to train the brain. Not just rethinking but training the brain out to these responses, and that is that deep work, that deep repetition of these neuroplasticity techniques.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s very good, excellent. Now when I work with patients, you know, I look at physical health, right, which could be structure of the body, injuries under exercise over exercise, the chemical help which is important, that plays a big role, diet, nutrition, sleep, hydration.Um, gut health. Of course. If your nutritional health is poor, your physical health is poor and you’re inflamed, you’re sore, your diet is junky, you’re not sleeping, that obviously spills into your emotional health. I mean, try dealing with your taxes after you haven’t slept for a night. Emotionally, you’re going to be a wreck. How much do you plug in the nutritional component or the chemical stressors, how much do you try to plug that in to also help the emotional health?
Ashok Gupta: Yeah, definitely. We’re a holistic approach, absolutely. So we kind of focus on the brain retraining but we say that as you say, if you have all of these things not working in your life then it’s not going to make the difference. So we have something called the anti-inflammatory diet, but we call it the 80% diet because some people go on this very strict diet and get even more stressed by having to stick to this very strict regime. And so we have the anti-inflammatory diet then we have natural anti inflammatories. So turmeric, ginger, all those, Umm and so plenty of supplements. And then the things that generally are missing in diets where people have over stressed and so. So that’s things like vitamin D, that’s magnesium, that’s all of those types of natural supplements, the omegas, all of these things we know are generally good for our health. And then so this anti-inflammatory diet and supplements and there’s also the sleep hygiene. So getting the sleep hygiene right and when we’re overstimulated and over stressed then our sleep is one of the first things that gets compromised and regular meditation, regular breathing has been shown to improve our sleep rhythms. So that’s part of it. And then also, what we do in those last two or three.Hours before you go to sleep is incredibly important. And so we look at, you know, the things that people can do that have been shown to deep sleep and lengthen sleep as well, and then also the importance of getting out into nature. Nature is incredibly healing, and so walking in nature. And the importance actually of UV rays and the importance of being sunlight, especially during, you know, the summer months, it’s fine, but in the winter months, how difficult it is and how people feel worse during the winter months simply because two things, number one, you know, getting exposure to daylight at the right times. And then secondly, their physical body is not absorbing the UV rays and therefore not producing vitamin D but also all of the other aspects of sunlight that are incredibly important for our bodies. And so we look at how people can can, you know.Be the best during the summer, at the winter months as well. So those kinds of things are definitely incorporated. But ultimately what we find is when people have come to us, they’ve already been down these avenues. So they’ve been to a nutritionist, they’ve been to dietitians, they generally have been on top of their diet.They’re trying to sleep as well as they can, right? Peace. Their brain is overstimulated no matter what they do. How can they focus on that and retrain that and and sometimes we find people retrain their brains and then they’ve spent thousands on supplements. And they can just stop all the supplements and it makes no difference, right, because the supplements are there, important when our system is overstimulated, but once it’s reset itself and we’re calm.That actually, our bodies don’t need so much of this supplementation. It’s just very natural.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. Well, anything else I Ashok you want to share with the listeners that you think would be powerful or something else they could be working on incorporating?
Ashok Gupta: Uh, yes. I think one of the most important pieces of advice that gives people is there can be very well meaning support groups and doctors and whatever who have kind of put it kind of negative approach, which is hey, there’s no cure for this, there’s nothing that they can help these conditions and you know you’re on your own and and don’t believe it that people get better. So, sometimes we have people getting better through brain retraining and they’ll go back on these forums. And people will say, oh, well, you didn’t have the condition in the first place. That’s the only way you guys got that. And the hope that I want to give to people is that whether it’s through our program or through other modalities, people do heal from these chronic conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, mold illness and long COVID. People do heal. People do get better. So never give up on the ability of your body to heal and the great news is I believe there is nothing actually fundamentally wrong with the body in that there’s not organic damage in the longer term. That’s what we’ve certainly noticed. It’s a functional issue whether the body and the brain itself is over stimulating its own systems, creating a vicious cycle, which is keeping the body in this altered state. But if you fix that, the body can actually go back to health. And that’s the hope that I want to give to people. Don’t think that my body is weak. It can never get better. Once you get the right key to the right and the right lock, you can unlock your health. Unlock the healing potential of your body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. I love that now. I mean it’s really interesting because you know, you see conventional psychiatry with a lot of people that have trauma, you know, for the most part they’re going to recommend some kind of an SSRI or antipsychotic or benzodiazepine, which is really just dampening or numbing.The body’s response to that, and a lot of times that brain response is there for a reason, and just numbing it out tends to over time, that problem tends to get worse because you’re just ignoring the reason why it’s there. How do you work with patients that are already on conventional medicines? That are just kind of dampening and covering up the issue versus getting to the root. How do you make that transition?
Ashok Gupta: It’s a huge scandal. First of all, you know, we have many people come to us, we’ve been on benzos and have benzo withdrawal, SSRI’s and it’s a huge scandal because these things even when they’re usually prescribed are supposed to be for a few weeks at a time. They’re not supposed to really. Yeah, long term dependency. And then when that dependency is there, when people try to come off these medications, they feel even worse than they did when they first started. So it’s kind of licensed drug dealing to an extent. Now of course if anyone’s listening, I don’t want anyone to stop the medications. Of course you do that in the auspices of your doctor or psychiatrist. But actually what we do is say keep your medication as safe at the moment, work with brain retraining, get your system calm and stronger. And only then very slowly come off the drugs in association with your doctor. That’s incredibly important because some people get super excited and then suddenly have cold Turkey withdrawal and it can actually cause more problems. So they need to come off these drugs very, very slowly. And so we actually have in benzo forums, you know, many people using our program to come off benzos, so they’re slowly coming off benzos. What’s using our program to calm the nervous system and retrain any negative patterns that are coming from it. And once again, this dampening that you’ve described, when the brain is dampened down, it over responds and says, hey, I’m trying to alert you to danger, but you’re dampening down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, exactly.
Ashok Gupta: Responses from the immediate to keep warning you. So emotions are warnings that either an emotion hasn’t been resolved, or there’s an attitude that we’re taking to life which is non conducive, or a belief system which is non conducive. And the problem with modern psychiatry is that it’s following the same reductionist medical model of come to see me, you’ve got 10 minutes with me, let me figure out what’s going on, and let me prescribe you drugs. But that model is not even fit for purpose for modern medicine and medical conditions, never mind psychiatric and emotional conditions. You know, it’s even worse for that. And so actually, you know, recognizing that there’s nothing wrong here, when we experience those types of extreme emotions, it actually just requires a lot more talking therapies and neuroplasticity approaches to help us understand the deeper messages of these conditions.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes a lot of sense. Now, what if we kind of take the, you know, connection with modern day psychology where it’s kind of cognitive behavioral techniques and talk therapy. Why is that not enough sometimes? People can be in therapy for years and years and years and it’s like they haven’t even gotten over it. Obviously it’s good to have communication and it’s good to have dialogue, it’s good to talk about the issues, but why is that not enough all the way?
Ashok Gupta: Now CBT is very effective at certain things such as mild to moderate depression. It’s shown to be effective, certainly anxiety. It can be useful, but the issue is the difference between CBT and brain retraining or neuroplasticity approaches. First of all, when people are going through CBT, they are rewiring their brains as well. So let’s be very clear. You know, any therapy that we’re taking ultimately is rewiring range change or shift that we’re making. But we often find that some, you know, CBT is like taking a fire extinguisher to a house fire, right? It can certainly help, but in certain instances if the house fire is very very powerful and huge. It actually requires, you know, the fire truck to turn up and actually deal with the blaze.Yeah. And so.The difference between CBT and some of these neuroplasticity brain retraining approaches is the intensity and the repetition of it. So, you know, imagine learning to drive a car, right? So learning to drive a car. Imagine on the first lesson, your first day CBT like thinking, OK, I’m now aware of my negative patterns about learning to drive, and I’m gonna be aware of them and shift some more positive belief systems. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Let me see what’s blocking me. But that isn’t going to train your brain to learn how to drive. But neuroplasticity is saying, right? Let me practice pressing the gas using the gear stickers, you guys call it, you know, moving the steering wheel. And we’re training that into our nervous system through repetition again and again and again and again until it becomes automatic and our brain gets it right. I now know how to drive a car. Yeah. So that’s how it’s different to CBT. CBT could certainly do that, but it would take a lot longer. But this is about actually training the brain repeatedly, intensively to get the message.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s very good. And what kind of movement do you incorporate with your program? Is it just something simple like, hey, just get out and walk it, get out in nature, breathe, get some sun or do you recommend any other specific types of movements like resistance or interval training, how does the exercise component work?
Ashok Gupta: For many of our patients, they have to pace themselves very carefully because they’ve got intense amounts of fatigue. And so initially we’re asking them, some of them are bed bound, so we say initially, gentle stretching is enough, so that might be some Tai Chi and yoga. So as long as you’re moving and stretching the body, people can manage more than walking in nature. So that can be you know there’s two types shown to be effective. So forests and fields and countryside, Yep, or near the ocean they can be very therapeutic. So walking in nature and then as people can get more energy then it might be some gentle, very gentle cardio because what we’re aiming to do is use up the stress hormones that have been triggered, the cortisol and adrenaline or adrenalin. So and certainly resistance training is fine as well but it’s that gentle cardio, mild to moderate cardio which is using up the stress hormones and calming the whole system down. Which we find most effective. And then if people are back to full health, then certainly things like interval training, cardio, resistance training, all the good stuff that we know that people can do. That’s all great stuff to keep the nervous system calm and we know that with the brain as well physical exercise is brilliant at increasing resilience so mental and emotional resilience increases when we have physical resilience which is why all of these things are completely linked together.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you really made a good point about the stress hormones because people don’t realize but that stress hormone response is really about mobilizing glucose and energy reserves so you can fight and flee. The problem is, most people aren’t fighting and fleeing from something where they need that additional fuel for their muscles. So you have all this adrenaline and cortisol that’s mobilized all this glucose, but then you’re not using it and that glucose tends to start getting stored back away as fat a lot of times. That’s why the more stressed you get, the more you could start storing fat because it’s like you’re it’s like you’re eating a bunch of carbohydrate and sugar and you’re not using the fuel and so getting a little bit of walking or movement in there starts to take all that stress hormone and glucose and start to burn it up a little bit so you not storing it as fat. So that makes a lot of sense to me.
Ashok Gupta: Absolutely, and not only that. There’s the feedback loop between the body and the amygdala. The periodontal group, which is the brain, says I’m in danger, triggers these responses, but also gets feedback from the body as to whether we’re in danger. This is the kind of kinesthetic response. And so if the brain detects the muscles are tense, right? We’re physically feeling the effects of that anxiety, it interprets that as a reinforcement that we’re in danger and therefore creates more danger response, which is why when you physically feel anxious you get anxious about feeling anxious, you get stressed about feeling anxious and that’s that secondary loop that occurs. And in fact for us chronic anxiety is that is partly as a result of the anxiety about the anxiety we don’t like. We don’t like the sensations, the physical sensations and the emotional sensations of anxiety itself and therefore physical movement. Physical activity really stops the feedback loop and is able to calm the whole nervous system down and trigger also the parasympathetic nervous system. So we know that in physical exercise we’re triggering the sympathetic system to tighten up the muscles and get the muscles moving and then afterwards the system ratchets down and enjoys a period of parasympathetic response. And you know, people think I was, do I have to go to the gym and have to do a hard workout, brisk walking in nature, which I think most of us, if not all of us can do, has been shown to be highly therapeutic. So 30 to 40 minutes of brisk walking in your local park, in the forest is supposed to be the best, you know, near the ocean or in the ocean. That can be incredibly beneficial for your overall health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it? Excellent, Ashok. I really appreciate you being on today’s show. We’ll put a link down below justinhealth.com/gupta. G-U-P-T- A. We’ll put it down below so you guys can access the 28 day course. By the way, what’s the time commitment to start the course? Is it 20 minutes an hour a day? What’s the initial commitment?
Ashok Gupta: So some of these videos are five or 10 minutes, so we don’t want to, right? So it’s like taking off 10 to 20 minutes a day watching your video. We give you a couple of free meditations that you can watch as well and that initial set of content is really for you to empathize in terms of does this really resonate with me? Is this my experience? And if so, then you can obviously go to the full program and then start the retraining process.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. A shock. Anything else you want to leave the listeners with?
Ashok Gupta: Uh, yeah. As I said, just believe in your, in the ability of your body to heal. It will heal, it can heal and we have that healing ability within us and also to recognize that whatever you’re experiencing, whatever physical assessments you’ve had in terms of someone saying you’ve got high viral titers or you know this particular enzyme is out of whack, those physical things are downstream. Yeah. And you will have those physical abnormalities in your body. But let’s go upstream, let’s go to the source. And we believe that a source of a lot of our conditions is actually in the brain. Even our gut health, I believe, is ultimately decided by our brain and the interaction between our gut and our brain. Fix this up here and all the downstream things will naturally take care of themselves.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it. Very good. Yeah. When someone says your issues are incurable, that just means the cure is within. So I really appreciate that Ashok. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
References:
https://justinhealth.com/gupta
Audio Podcast:
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Vitamin D Benefits You Should Know
Vitamin D has a couple of different benefits. Let’s go over some of the benefits. We’ve talked about the natural antibiotic that’s being produced by vitamin D, which is called cathelicidin, a kind of antibacterial enzyme. It is super helpful at being able to knock down bacteria. It also has antiviral mechanisms, as well as antimicrobial peptides and antiviral mechanisms.
Part of that is it stimulates and it can modulate the Th1 immune response in the Th1 immune system where you’re making a lot of your natural killer cells and your helper cells. Good helper cells can also help your antigen-presenting cell and it can help make antibodies more efficiently. So, you’re also going to have a better Th2 immune response. You’re going to make antibodies to whatever that infection is. Those tend to come a little bit later in the game, but good signaling to make your antibodies is super helpful as well.
There is a couple of other studies here that are talking about different things. We have a reduction in our MMP-9 concentrations. We have a reduction in bradykinin storms and reduction in our cytokine storm. So, basically we have a lot of inflammatory molecules that get produced such as bradykinin, cytokines, interleukins MMP-9. These are inflammatory types of chemical messengers. Vitamin D can help modulate that and prevent that from being overproduced. The more we overproduce those, the more our immune system responds. So, we can create more cytokine storm issues because our immune system will be on this positive feedback loop, responding and creating more issues with the cytokines. When there are less cytokines, there’s less chance of a cytokine storm, which is basically our immune system responding.
Imagine a fight between two people where one person yells out first and the other person yells back. Then they’re pushing, shoving, and hitting and the violence escalates. That’s what happens with the cytokine storm with your immune system and all the different cytokines and immune chemical signal. So, we can keep that modulated a bit which is very helpful. Vitamin D plays a really important role in that.
Recommendation
Get vitamin D supplementation from Thanksgiving to spring. At least, make that investment. If you want to come off the rest of the year, as long as you’re getting some sunlight, it’s fine. At least do that vitamin D supplementation to give you a good bump and the fat-soluble nutrients you’ll get over those four or five months will hang around months afterward because it takes a while for that vitamin D level to build up.
If you want to learn more about Vitamin D, click this link where you can schedule a chat with me!
The Top 5 Causes of Chronic Headaches
Today we are going to be talking about the top underlying reasons why you may be having a chronic headache. I had a patient come in today who had headaches for 25 years, monthly and chronically, and we were able to get to the root cause and there are many different root causes for every person. Let me lay out the common ones that I find to be a major vector of my patients.
So we have headaches and head pain or migraines where you kind of have that aura and sound sensitivity. There are a couple of different major reasons why headaches may happen.
1. Food Allergens
Most common food allergy is gluten and dairy. There are some studies on gluten affecting blood flow up to the brain. We have these garden hoses on the side of our neck called our carotid arteries. When we have inflammation especially caused by gluten that can decrease blood flow and blood profusion to the frontal cortex, and when you have less blood, you’re going to have decreased performance of the brain. You can see that manifesting in a headache. People don’t know but headaches are actually an issue with vasodilation in the brain. Caffeine can help as caffeine actually causes constriction and brain’s typical headache signal is caused by vasodilation.
2. Food Additives.
These could be things like MSG, aspartame, Splenda or various artificial colors and dyes.
3. Blood Sugar Fluctuation.
We want to have healthy proteins and healthy fats with every meal. If we skip meals or we eat foods that are too high in carbohydrates and refined “crapohydrates” and sugar, and not enough fats and proteins, our blood sugar can go up and then drop. This is called reactive hypoglycemia. We react by putting a whole bunch of sugar in our bloodstream because all of these carbohydrate sources break down into sugar — processed sugar, grains, flours and acellular carbohydrates. These type of flours and refined processed carbs get converted to glucose in our bloodstream. When glucose goes up, our pancreas goes, “Holy smokes! We got a lot of glucose there. We got to pull it into the cell.” It spits out a whole bunch of insulin and pulls that glucose right down, and we have his blood sugar going up with a lot of insulin driving that blood sugar back down. When that blood sugar goes back down, this is where we have cravings. This is where we have addictions, mood issues, energy issues, jitteriness, and cognitive issues. Our body makes adrenaline and cortisol to bring that blood sugar back up. Most people literally live on this high insulin where they are making fat, storing fat and engaging in lipogenesis which makes us tired. Then blood sugar crashes which makes people jittery, anxious, and moody. Most people live on this reactive hypoglycemia rollercoaster and that can drive headaches.
4. Gut Infections.
Patients with a lot of gut inflammation, gut permeability, and infections whether it’s H. pylori, SIBO (small intestinal, bacterial overgrowth) or fungal overgrowth have gut stressors can create inflammation in the gut. When we have inflammation in the gut, we have gut permeability. So our tight junctions in our intestines start to open up and undigested bacteria, lipopolysaccharides, food particles can slip through and create an immune response. You can see histamine along with that immune response and histamine can create headache issues.
5. Hormonal Issue.
A woman’s cycle is about 28 days and in the middle is ovulation. Some women have it during ovulation and most have it right at the end just before they menstruate. This is called premenstrual syndrome that is right before menstruation. A lot of women may also have it during menstruation, too. What happens is progesterone can drop out early and that drop in progesterone can actually cause headache manifestations and also the aberrations in estrogen can also cause headaches as well. We may also see it with excessive bleeding too. So if you’re bleeding a lot or too much, what may happen is you may lose iron and that low iron may cause oxygenation issues. That low level of oxygen may also cause some headache issues as well. Because if you can’t carry oxygen, that is going to be a stressed-out situation for your mitochondria and your metabolism. For menopausal women who have chronically low hormones and they’re not in an optimal place, that can create issues. Progesterone and estrogen can be very anti-inflammatory. So if there is inflammation in the brain, progesterone is a powerful anti-inflammatory and that can really help a lot of inflammation in the brain.
Mood Imbalances and their Root Causes | Podcast #250
Depression, being the #1 cause of disability in the US, has tons of other mood issues that come along with it. Some psychiatrists are not telling what are the things that caused us mood issues,and what should we do to lessen it.
For this podcast, Dr. Justin and Evan Brand talks about root causes to mood issues. Also, learn through this podcast the importance of blood sugar maintenance, sleep, diet, and a lot more.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
01:15 Moods and Diet
03:40 Blood Sugar
09:00 Sleep
12:20 Chemicals in Food
14:40 Progesterone and Estrogen
Evan Brand: I’m doing very well. This is an exciting topic because depression is the number one leading cause of disability in the US and there’s a ton of other mood issues that come along with depression and your psychiatrist is not telling you that you need to detox heavy metals and get infections out of your gut and stop eating pesticides and all the other things that are causing a mood issues. They just give you a drug to treat it and give you a Band-Aid which has save lives but it’s not the root cause so we always love root cause.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% So let’s talk about some root cause foundational mood stuff first and we kind of have the Nuance nitty-gritty stuff and then we have the foundational stuff. So the first thing is just your diet, right? We need a nutrient dense anti-inflammatory low toxin dietary template and I I like to talk about diets me template. It provides a lot more flexibility and then we have a framework premise and why we recommend the things that we recommend part of it is foods that are evolutionarily appropriate Foods. We had enough time to adapt to eat, food that are going to be low in toxins, whether it’s anti-nutrients are oxalates are five dates or natural plant Oxalis plants have claws and feet to run and Fun Run and fight so they have berries toxins, right? So we want to make sure were using cooking methods and avoiding toxic plants, especially the more got issues we have and that anti-inflammatory, right? We know foods have the ability to move us to an anti-inflammatory environment good healthy, omega-3 fatty acids good healthy saturated fats of the more process refined omega-6 that are more fragile and they can move it move us more in that Pro in from inflammatory State and then of course the nutrient density foods are going to be super nutrient dense B vitamins minerals. Obviously the food quality is now a big deal because you can have the same kind of meat on on your plate. Looks totally different under a microscope because of the hormones because of the feeding practices cuz the medications and the and the drugs given to the animal while they were having their life and growing so to speak. So we have to look at nutrient density anti-inflammatory status and hormones and toxins are the big things off the bat.
Evan Brand: I’m glad you about this before but we could just bring it up briefly which studies done on prisoners and when they were giving Omega-3 supplements basically fish oil supplements, they had less violence and less just crazy behavior overall and there’s been some like Psychiatry studies looking at just overall like homicidal rage and suicidal thoughts and those things in there directly correlated with a deficiency of omega-3. Fatty acids
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Omega-3 is really important. Also blood sugar stability. There’s also data on the fact that’s Information I should say. Are you able to see me hear the screen?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I see you perfectly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Good excellence. All right, so there’s information showing that. Mood issues anxiety and depression is a result of inflammation in the brain. And we also know that anytime low blood sugar environment can happen right refined carbohydrates blood sugar Spike followed by a drop that’s called reactive hypoglycemia. Those kind of those kind of situations are going to create mood issues and this data on the fact that a lot of violent crimes are committed in a hypoglycemic environment and some of the data on that is because of the fact that low blood sugar and are making shutdown activation of the frontal cortex in the frontal cortex is the part of the brain that’s going to predict the outcome of an action so it can say Hey, you know that person that just pissed you off. I want to go hit him or go call him out. And then that frontal cortex has that like 20 milliseconds of hey, you know, if you do that you may get arrested and it can dampen the impulse so to speak so the more you have good activation of that frontal cortex through reducing inflammation. And then also maintaining good blood sugar and part of that as we become more fat burners and that fat burning environment put logs on our metabolic fire was future blood sugar from going up and down and then avoiding a lot of a refined carbohydrate which tends to make our blood sugar go up and down as well.
Evan Brand: Well, this is part of the reason people make bad decisions when they go out to a bar into a club and they drink alcohol and go home with somebody that they don’t want to partial partially due to what is alcohol. I mean, it’s basically correct liquid. It’s basically liquid sugar. It’s going to crank up the blood sugar but it’s also going to crank up serotonin and then the serotonin is going to just flat line and when you run out of Serotonin, you can’t make decisions that are smart. And so if you are somebody who is struggling with mood issues alcohol needs to be out of the picture completely for multiple reasons that we just met-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Blood sugar or I should alcohol actually lowers your blood sugar can create a hypoglycemic and where I might just go take a for instance a shot of vodka and just test your blood sugar your blood sugar. Drop restaurants do this on purpose because they know if they can get you some refined carbohydrates and pretzels and some bread and then they can get you some alcohol pretty fast. They’re going to cause a reactive hypoglycemia environments and you’re going to be ordering more food and getting more carbohydrates may be ordering a bigger desert whether or not they understand the biochemistry of it all they understand that if they do these kind of things in the beginning of the meal they can create a larger bill for you at the end of the meal.
Evan Brand: Should have clarified like margaritas and things that have like agave syrup and all the sugary stuff mixed with the alcohol. That’s when your blood sugar is going to go crazy, but I haven’t tested the Vodka by itself. That would be cool to see on a glucose monitor.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly yup 100% you can really create some significant significant issues of significant stressor 100%.
Evan Brand: So we could spend time and talk about this isn’t for today. But I mean, there’s like a traumas for example, you know any trauma that’s left over in your body, you know physical mental abuse or anything like that yet. You must address promise. I don’t want somebody listening and thinking if they just perfect their diet and get rid of alcohol. Their mood issues will go way there could be super deep traumatic issues that need to be addressed but no we were trying to focus on more like the biochemistry aspect the blood sugar affect adrenals hormones thyroid got those things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% Yeah. I totally totally get that for sure. So in general we have the inflammation components to so of course gluten to be a big one there the main mechanism how gluten is in a create more mood issue is going to be through inflammation and it can create gut permeability and that gut permeability can allow various inflammatory cytokines and Undigested food particles to get in the bloodstream that can create more of an inflammatory response and then create leaky brain as well. And then a lot of these inflammatory compounds whether it’s lipopolysaccharides or just inflammatory foods that are unprocessed that you have that immune response these particular can get into the brain but through the astrocytes which of the blood-brain barrier and then that can activate our glial cells in our brain and that can create more cognitive issues more information in the brain and some of the newer families of antidepressants that are coming out very soon. These medications are actually working more on inflammation in the brain problem is like any medication is going to be at have inherent side effects just because of the fact that Any medication does when you block and inhibit various enzymatic Pathways other things happen as a result, like the old vioxx days with these cox-2 inhibitor medications the cox-2 enzyme the cyclooxygenase to enzyme that was being blocked by some of these medications like vioxx. Well, those enzymes also have beneficial effects on recovering liver heart and gut tissue to then you had a lot more stroke and cardiovascular incidences. When you were on this medication. Do you know they worked at enzyme and other important roles outside of just blocking paint.
Evan Brand: Where they pulled from the shelves. I mean, that’s like long gone, isn’t it? Maybe I should look it up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah that was pulled like 10 years ago. I make more cat a massive lawsuit around that I think it was on record of killing 60,000 people. Yeah. Yeah. I know really sad but we are going to do you know?
Evan Brand: All right. So let’s talk about the Sleep aspect like for example 3rd shift workers much much higher incidence it personally when you’re working a third shift. You’re messing up your circadian rhythm your serotonin in your dopamine your melatonin your cortisol all these hormones and neurotransmitters that can act as both neurotransmitters and hormones. They all have a circadian rhythm. And if you’re not going to bed with the sun and getting up with the sun, you’re probably not going to be optimally happy now. There may be a few people listening. So I work 3rd Shift for 20 years and Im as happy as a lark. Okay, Mike, maybe you’re unique but as a general human rule going against the sun is not going to result in Good Moods. It’s that simple.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, 100% shiftworks a big one. We know that I can definitely Cradle by The Moody she’s partly because we are hardwired to kind of be on a natural circadian rhythm Right light stimulates cortisol cortisol stimulates, you know alertness and and being awake and then that cortisol drop throughout the day and a Miralax at night and darkness stimulates melatonin antioxidant information helps you recover. So yeah, that’s a really important step into this. Equation for sure. So they sleep component, the food the nutrient density component think it’s really big. Lets go to the next low hanging fruit– digestion. Okay, great. Were eating a really good diet. But now we got to actually break down those nutrients those nutrients so we gotta make sure what you and our food up. Well, we got to make sure we have enough acid and enzymes to break down those amino acids. Those fatty acids those cholesterol compounds cuz they are building blocks for a brain is cholesterol and saturated fats are hormones are building blocks from cholesterol as well. And then our brain amino brain chemicals. They’re all going to come from amino acids, which come from protein. So all of our brain chemicals norepinephrine dopamine Gaba serotonin serotonin than Converse the Melatonin which is our sleep hormone and our antioxidant for the brain, they all come from protein. So we really have poor digestion and their studies actually on H. Pylori for instance cant create mood issues. And what’s the major mechanism? My opinion, the mechanism is the fact that you have poor digestion you have less stomach acid. You have less breakdown of these important building blocks and then hes building blocks can be used to make these healthy brain chemicals that allow you to feel good sleep good and deal with stress.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I agree. I was depressed when I had h-pylori could attest that my mood was not good and I lost a lot of muscle too, I mean you looked at me and you told me Evan man. I remember seeing a picture of you you had some muscles what happened to you. I was so skinny. Luckily. I’ve regained a lot of that muscle back but mood issues are definitely related to gut infections and I just want to talk about kids for a minute because a lot of parents blame their children or just being kids and that’s why they have a bad mood. I’ll tell you as a father of two mood issues are totally related to what’s going on with your kids diet as well and your kids got so if you send your kid to school with crackers and goldfish and other garbage that’s going to be inflammatory. But also it’s going to affect your blood sugar and they’re not having good protein with their lunch. It’s no wonder they crash. I have bad moods and then they are getting in trouble in school in the teachers calling you saying hey, you know Johnny hit another student today. What would have happened if his blood sugar was well regulated and go ahead.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I saw my son a picture of him. it’s snack time last week. It was really funny. All the kids are there had their lunch box is open and you could see he had like some green apples that were cut off. He had this like grass-fed organic, like beef jerky. They’re just really easy and Ill kind of cut off and he had I think some little bit of almond butter is a hit a really nice snack and he has seen a lot of the other kids. You see the Goldfish. You see a lot of sugary drinks. I’m like oh man, and these kids are just really getting their blood sugar on a roller coaster ride, and they’re not going to be as good I mean, don’t get me wrong nutritions not going to make your one or two year-old a three-year-old who is developing be a perfect angel but it’s going to significantly improve things and make it much much better and it’s in a provide the building blocks. They need one to heal in to grow their nervous system and connect all these synapses in the brain. All these neural connections from all these new skills that there that they are using but two are keeping a lot of the inflammatory dies and chemicals and Foods out that could make things even worse as well.
Evan Brand: There’s been countless studies on the artificial colors and flavorings increasing the risk of ADD and ADHD. And a lot of these behavioral cognitive issues that are deemed as common so the teachers, you know, well just recommend that the parents speak with the doctor in the doctor puts the kid on Ritalin and that calms the kid down but that’s not the root cause he there’s a root cause of that and this is not hey, you know, Justin and I are awesome in our kids are better than you but I’m just telling you I’ve seen it my daughter hanging out a plate at a playground versus other kids where other kids in the same age group are having emotional breakdowns and they’re crying and rolling on the floor and screaming and just acting out like not how you think a kid would act out just not in control. Where is my daughter would be controlled or emotions would be controlled. Does she still have outburst and cry? Over silly Small Things. Yes, totally. But she’s three years old at the time of this recording. So I’m just saying that as a general rule, but also the chemicals to write when Im just talkin food. Were talkin that you and I both are you’re giving your son detoxification support. I give my daughter detoxification support. We’ve given both of our kids herbs to help treat gut infections and bacterial and things like that in the gut too. So maybe if the diet is dialed in but you’re not seeing any progress Improvement this applies for adults, but also children since were on the subject run a stool test on your 3 4 5 6 10 year old 15 year old kid and you may find gut infections like the H pylori just to mention as another root cause of the mood issue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly plus it’s probably incidences where maybe some not-so-great food or more refined processed food slipped in with your child at all. And then you probably saw an outburst or behavioral issue, you know, we had an incident. I think on a birthday. We gave him a little bit of gluten-free cake and there’s a little bit of a crash afterwards we could see that in this by observations from you. So it’s all wrong with it. Right now. We definitely want to provide the hormone environment where it allows our kids to grow in NBA Staples possible think it’s really really important. We hit the the food component the digestion component. Let’s talk about four months. So obviously blood sugar has a major effect on our hormones the more I blood sugar goes up and down the more cortisol and adrenaline to get call to the rescue to to bar for that out to the mortgage Reno stress gets put on our body in archery know our stress handling system and the adrenals are a part of the hormonal system is connected with the sympathetic nervous system. So the sympathetic nervous system is the part of the nervous system that deals with fight-or-flight stress running fighting, fleeing confronting and that part of the nervous system the more it gets turned on or flare the more adrenaline and cortisol and stress hormones that are catabolic the break tissue down or going to be secreted and the adrenals also produce a significant amount of sex hormone precursor. So the more we’re stressed and dealing with the catabolic stress side last week and allocate resources to the anabolic repair and Recovery parasympathetic size. And then it makes it harder for us to recover put on muscle feel good turnover on neurotransmitters and just be able to deal with and adapt to stress. So there is that on one side and the adrenals affect the kind of men and women relatively equally but then women have their hormonal side from the ovaries that cycle throughout the month and that part of the Cascades a little bit more unique because cortisol, which is that major stress hormone that we talked about can also be made from progesterone. And so the more we are stressed, the more we can pull from the progesterone. I was thinking create more estrogen dominance so are relative ratio of progesterone estrogen which is typically 20 to 25 to 1 on average for progesterone Dash inserts asked you and this condition called estrogen dominance starts to occur with a percent of that returns coming up and this can create more mood issues more PMS kind of issues breast tenderness cramping back pain in the mood components of they want irritability anxiety depression. All those symptoms can happen as a result of that. So the more we can take away that up and down with our cortisol in the movie that takes out of that the less estrogen dominance will kick in.
Evan Brand: I just want to point out one key Point you’re speaking about ratios a lot of women come to us and say I’ve got so much estrogen. I’m so estrogen dominant know he’s not saying that you have tons of estrogen you saying in relationship to your progesterone. So it’s not that the estrogen is literally overwhelming and you have more estrogen than progesterone. that’s not what’s happening. Correct, correct?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it could be that your estrogen is actually really really high. Im seeing with a lot of my female patients is progesterone is low really low acids also low, but the ratio is still skewed. So Im seeing it like if you are as progesterone, right and he is estrogen what’s happening. Both are low, but progesterone is even lower. So it’s like that.
Evan Brand: Are you saying estrogen overwhelmed progesterone or would that be like an extreme case?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That being extreme case and almost all the time with cases like that. There may be an exhausting is pit Ashton being taken right? You’re definitely would see on the birth control pill side. You may not see it come back like that because a lot of egestion metabolites me to come back on the test cuz youre not, you know the actual the actual estradiol or estradiol hormone. They’re like the analog that it’s a metabolite that has still in that shouldn’t affect but it’s not coming back in the lab. So we just know the fact that if these levels are that high cuz you’re taking it then the warm out there going to be Might as well.
Evan Brand: OK make sense would be a mechanism to cuz if you had like yes High B6 recirculating all those hormones hormones would just make it works. Right if your recirculating hormones.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: correct Plastics that I have seen no estrogen kind of facts whether [inaudible] egg. And then of course, you’re going to have hormones in the states right to give it a lot of estrogen type of hormones to make them fatter and kind of woke up. So to speak to the farmers can make more money on the slaughter there is that too. So that’s why you have to mitigate the toxins in the hormones and all the food and then you have to look at detoxification pathway. So well run on the docks tested a little gas gauge in the bottom left-hand corner of stop H3. it’s called the two methoxy hydroxy acid metabolites panel, or I should say reading and it’s a little gas gauge you want to at least in the middle, but you’ll see a lot of decreased methylation so it’s way to the left and that’s a sign that were not metabolizing are Estrogen.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s important. So you have to address hormones and were not saying hey, you just go on thyroid medication. Like that’s not you know, this is a whole system here adrenals are connected to your thyroid thyroids connects. The brains involved. You mentioned the sympathetic nervous system. So if you’re somebody whos working 70 hours a week or not taking days off in your nervous system is so revved up. You can eat a paleo-diet and still have mood issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Yep. that’s very possible. So we have those kind of hormone issue is and of course any women listening to it mood maybe one component of that. It could be other things as well could be the energy you could be back pain and cramping breast tenderness fluid retention. It could be all the above.
Evan Brand: We should talk about toxicity and liver and chemicals and metals and stuff for a minute. But why don’t we just briefly mention autoimmunity and the role that I could play in hormone. So if you’re someone who has autoimmune thyroid, isn’t it possible that if you’re going from hypo to hyperthyroid, you may have some mood issues associated with that autoimmune attack or some day is the immune system is bang bang and then some days he knew system is not.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So we look at hormones. it’s either ATM or ATF and it’s not you know, the ATM where you get money or the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms government agency ATM is Adrenals Thyroid Male Hormones, ATF is Adrenal Thyroid Female Hormones. So we already talked about the adrenal and the female and the adrenal and the mail. Yes the same mechanism are as we complete DHEA and we kind of lets just say deplete our sex hormone precursor from the adrenals testosterone can also drop and then testosterone can have a significant mood depleting fact as well. So same on the men the little bit less has less pronounced because women have a hormone cycle that that rhythms up and down throughout the cycle or manner kind of like a flat kind of Foghorn. So to speak there isn’t quite as much rhythmic activity. Therefore it’s harder to knock that off so to speak but now with the thyroid issues women are going to be five times more prone to But men still listen because if you have symptoms, we definitely want to rule out the thyroid like you said just having low levels of thyroid hormone can create anxiety for sure and also having high levels can also create anxiety and irritability and also having Hashimoto autoimmune flares which would eventually end with low thyroid but like you mentioned that autoimmune flare can flare up your thyroid autoimmune response was Canaan cause more hormones to dump in the system, which can then create mood swings and irritability and anxiety difficulty sleeping and that can create issues as well. So you really want to look at autoimmune markers for the thyroid TPO thyroglobulin antibodies. You want to look at your thyroid levels because high or low or going to be significantly driving a lot of mood issues most of the time it’s going to be low because low is The Chronic place that people tend to end up but you will see with a cute flares that it will go high or more in the hyper side again in general. it’s going to be harder to catch that but if we see Levels of antibodies we can definitely assume those level of flares may be happening whether or not we catch the high-level on the test. If we know High antibodies are there then it makes sense that’s possible. And then of course some graves for sure, graves will be the other condition where were making antibodies. Where is thyroid receptor site antibodies are TSI with your thyroid stimulating immunoglobulins those can cause thyroid to make more hormones and that’s an autoimmune condition as well. Get ninety-five. 99% are going to be Hoshis, Hashimoto’s 1% grave. So in general, it’s more plausible. If you’re gambling person that you’re going to go on the Hashi side Less on the graves, but you know, you’ll typically were not going to ever run for Graves antibodies unless we see very high levels of thyroid levels like very high levels of T4 and T3, then we’ll definitely say, okay. Lets run TSI. Lets run thyroid what receptor antibodies.
Evan Brand: Your endocrinologist would probably even run even if you beg them. So a lot of times were ordering Special Labs because the primary doctor that someone may have the working with us. We may try to push them. Hey, you don’t try to get your endocrinologist to run this and they just won’t they’re very stubborn. Even when it comes to the TPO and TG antibodies despite the mass of massive increase even just the past 5 to 10 years of autoimmunity with thyroid. You would think that it’s like part of standard procedure and protocol now, but it’s still not my grandfather got his thyroid Labs run. It was literally just TSH and T4 and maybe like T3 uptake, but still nothing else and it’s just crazy. So what are they doing? They they modified your drug based on TSH, TSH one up. Lets give you a little bit more synthroid and people just don’t know why they’re not getting better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly and then conventional medicine will look at the graves thing and they’ll just say, okay. Well if you’re not in any hormone the right when you come in and your TSH is buried meaning it’s very low and let’s say below point 3.2.1. Then they may want to look Downstream at them some of those antibodies right? They may look at T4 and then I’m a look at TSI in the thyroid receptor site markers, but outside of that unless they see that they’re probably not going to do much.
Evan Brand: Yeah, hopefully that’s what they do. But in some cases they may go straight to hey, we need to do radioactive iodine and try to just kill your thyroid off because youre youre over your thyroid overactive. I’m sorry that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If they saw grave markers, that would be the next logical step. They didn’t want a thyroidectomy or they give u p t u or more time is all the shutdown of the thyroid activity or they give the radioactive iodine to just kill the thyroid to begin with.
Evan Brand: Not pretty.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No it’s not so thyroid flares because of Hashimoto’s well that may never come back on the TSH may never come out of balance enough for it to be an issue and your TSH may still be relatively in range, even though your antibodies are going up and down and your T3 may be low or could be going up or down to so you may not even see a problem with that.
Evan Brand: Alright so let’s talk about that was a good diversion. So I just wanted to make sure we hit. Community Casa del Carmen and no pesticides damaging the gut barrier damaging the blood-brain barrier. Even if you’re a vegan listening, please eat some meat but if you’re not, you know the vegetables or not benign neither you can still get a different herbicides pesticides excetera that still damaged your good gut bacteria and create leaky gut, even if youre saying everything I don’t need hormone me. Okay? Well the plants could do at 2 and then also the heavy metals, you know, we’ve seen a lot there’s just Google it look it up on PubMed your Googles evil because they’re suppressing a lot of help people. So use another search engine like one called ecosia ecosia. They plant trees every time you do a search every 10 searches the plant a tree for you so search on a Ecosia, PubMed Mercury depression or you know Mercury anxiety and any like bad mood something that you type up you can find a correlation with a various heavy metal.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. I think it’s really really important. So heavy metals various pasta sides various toxins Roundup glyphosate. These are all going to be potentially stressors on your nervous system on your immune system on your brain. I told easiest thing is one just decrease the toxic overload. Just be eating organic higher-quality food. Drink really good clean filtered water. And then number two we can always give support to help run our Phase 1 Phase 2 and R2 toxification Pathways, that’s really important. We could do simple things like activated charcoal with you give sulfur-based Obito acids, we can get glutathione straight into liposomal former reduced form. We can get back Extra B vitamins and antioxidants like milk thistle with cumin and Resveratrol and really powerful things to help with inflammation and in donating antioxidants anything else. You want to highlight their on the detox.
Evan Brand: I started over the weekend doing some glutathione and a nebulizer. there’s actually a brand out there which I can tell you about a bluetooth ion this mixed with a sodium bicarbonate that you can make Saline solution. I’ve read a Stephen Buhner, the herbalist that you and I love because of his work on Lyme and co-infections. He made a COPD protocol for people suffering with asthma and other lung conditions and came up with a nebulizer protocol with essential oils. And so I’m doing the nebulized glutathione by itself and you just need to put the face mask on you got the nebulizer and I just took a of 200 mg of glutathione intranasally and I tell you my brain yesterday was so clear like, amazingly clear and I’ve actually spoke with some of these people at the company who’ve gotten their patients off of IV glutathione and onto the nebulizer because they don’t have to drive anywhere to get poked with a needle is much cheaper and the results are being seen much better because it’s getting through the blood-brain barrier when you inhale the glutathione vs. IV is not so that’s like my new development on detox and I haven’t done it enough yet to to give you the full, you know the whole story but for right now, My story is very positive.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Very good. So I think we talked about some of the toxic things. And again, it’s pretty simple. it’s like you just got to look at the food. Look at the environments try to increase sweating the infrared sauna good clean hydration could get a grill to go clean water filter JustInHealth.com/water or the ones that I specifically used Evan probably has some as well EvanBrand.com and you can look at his shop as well. But that’s kind of things. I actually use and I recommend personally clean water organic food being able to digest your food and then we talked about some of the various binders that we can do like chlorella for that some of the heavy metals activated charcoal as it’s a really good multi-tasker for a lot very spent the night Clays or folded minerals are really good too. And then they also you know from what we may also do things like Z light or maybe even Coley star means to help that bind up some of that mold as well that could be there environmentally if that’s the case then well have to do some testing on the house and and look again. Is the root cause of that Dilantin I have a guest that were going to get on just a few minutes. It will talk all about that in the next podcast. I will be right after this show.
Evan Brand: Yeah, we got to wrap it up so that you all can chat about mold. it’s going to be fun. But the sauna would be the last thing I would add animal wrap it up the sauna and I love sweating sweating is the key and you can look at if you just look up PubMed typing like ochratoxin sweat. You can read that mold toxins. In fact do come out when you sweat so there is proof behind that and there’s a reason that our ancestors did like sweat lodges and some of these ceremonial practices they sweat their butt often those things and they were probably detoxing too good thing for them as they did not have any of the hundreds of thousands of manmade modern chemicals that we have today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s important. that’s great. Awesome animal today was a great chat as always. Hope everyone enjoyed the podcast in the interview before you put your comment down below. Let us know things that you have used to help you detoxify good experience that you had and if you enjoy today¡̄s show, give us a share. We appreciate it, and you can write a review at EvanBrand.com/iTunes and JustInHealth.com/iTunes. We appreciate ya¡̄ll. Everyone has a phenomenal day and we’ll talk real soon.
Evan Brand: The clinical websites. If you want to reach out to Joe is clinically, please do so at his sight JustInHealth.com. You can reach out around the world. We can send test kit’s to your door. You don’t have to drive anywhere and wait in a boring dirty doctors office and read People magazine. You can do it from your house. So JustInHealth.com, and then my side is EvanBrand.com. We look forward to helping you were very grateful for the opportunity.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it, excellent. Awesome Evan, have a phenomenal day great chat with you is always will be back next week. Thank you. Everyone.
Evan Brand: See you later. Bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye. Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/mood-imbalances-and-their-root-causes-podcast-250
Recommended Products:
https://justinhealth.com/water-pitcher
Seasonal Depression Solutions | Podcast #244
Seasonal Affective Disorder, also known as SAD, is a type of depression when there is a change of seasons. Some people are affected in this type of depression in late fall or early winter, which sometimes makes them moody or unenergetic.
Listen and read to this podcast as Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand gives abundant information on SAD, the importance of natural sunlight in our bodies, supplements to take and how to overcome this type of depression.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
01:37 What is Seasonal Depression
04:34 Importance of Sunlight and their alternatives
16:43 Supplements
33:05 Depression on Gut Health
40:07 Infrared Lights
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. I’m hitting the record button here now Evan for you. All right. We are live it’s Dr. J here in the house. I am back off of my maternity leave for a week. I had my second son named Hudson Lee Marchegiani. He is doing great, six pounds three ounces, super healthy, feeding great got a great powerful suck my last son didn’t quite have that good suck because he was born two weeks earlier so he’s doing phenomenal great breast milk supply on my wife’s side feeding napping routine everything’s great so we are very blessed very fortunate and thanks for all the well wishes. But, Evan it’s been real less than two weeks how you been man.
Evan Brand: Hey man congratulations. I’ve been great. I’ve just been kind of sitting by the wayside waiting to see your pictures and here everything’s good so I’m glad it all turned out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah everything’s really turned out great. Really appreciate it. So now you got two girls I got two boys and we got like the perfect tandem.
Evan Brand: I know it’s a trip yin and yang.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah exactly. All right. So we talked about pre show about seasonal depression right. This is actually Labor Day. Yes we work on Labor Day and that’s kind of signifying the end of summer so fall starting to come in. Then when the seasons change, especially as I was going from less sunlight or more sunlight to less some people can deal with depression and we’re going to kind of break down what that looks like, causes, solutions, getting to the root cause of what you can do about it so you can have great mood all year round so why don’t we dive in.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So I’ll share my story with seasonal depression you know I used to work third shift to pay for my college I was working like midnight usually around anywhere between 11:00 p.m. and midnight as a starting time and I would get off at 5:00 a.m.. So by the time I’m trying to go to bed the sun is coming up it was just absolutely terrible. And the only way that I think I survived it to be honest with you was using light therapy boxes and so obviously the sunshine is the best. And you’re never gonna be natural sunlight exposure in your naked eyeballs without sunglasses on. But in my situation I was using a light therapy box at night before I would go in. So I would use it around 11:00 p.m. for about 30 minutes, I’d sit next to this light therapy boxes is basically just like a sun in a box. Now it’s not anywhere as close to bright but you can get him around 10000 lux, l u x, which is a measurement of brightness the sun on a sunny cloudless day. You’re getting like one hundred thousand Lux. It’s just extreme levels of brightness a cloudy day. You know 10000 lux to 15000 Lux something like that. So this box is trying to replicate at least the brightness of a cloudy day. And that would help to set the circadian rhythm. I was basically trying to trick my body and tell my brain to wake up at midnight and go to bed at 5:00 a.m. which is not natural and not optimal but that’s how I learned about light therapy and seasonal depression and then ultimately the goal would be people who are working nightshift get them off night shift it’s just not the way you’re supposed to live.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. The shift work or night shift work is actually considered to be a non substance. One of the only non substance carcinogens that can increase risk of cancer in the same category as is Festus in smoking. So definitely not a good thing. It can affect your body healing recovering all those good things. Obviously between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. you’re recycling and turning over a lot of your brain chemicals and neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, GABA so it’s really important that we don’t have that good sleep. You’re not gonna be able to turn over your brain chemicals ultimately.
Evan Brand: Yeah well said. So depression could happen just based on having a bad shift. Insulin as well. I mean I noticed that there was a ton of overweight people that work nightshift if you just look up like diabetes nightshift or insulin nightshift you can see well duh. You’re not supposed to be up at night but there can be some issues changing with your left ending Gremlin and insulin and some of these hunger satiety and blood sugar regulation hormones. So if you type in night shift nurses cancer you could read about that there was a popular study done on female nurses and the incidence of breast cancer in night shift and I believe it was like around a 50 percent higher incidence of breast cancer. Nurses at night versus daytime nurses.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah definitely not worth the shift differential you get a little bit bump in pay to work night. Definitely not worth it.
Evan Brand: I know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If you’re on the fence with that try to have that normal day shift. It’s to be much much better for your health. So in general when we look at depression right seasonal changes can make a difference. We know that’s just sunlight and healthy levels of cholesterol have a big have a major effect on serotonin and serotonin receptor sites. So we know cholesterol and cholesterol is synthesized via sunlight on the skin and you can get this preform of vitamin D 3 that could make its way into the body and that can have a major effect up regulating mood and serotonin. We know there’s a natural circadian rhythm. So cortisol gets kind of emphasized during the day based on lights right. Light and dark hormonal rhythms and the hormones at during the day are really emphasized and accentuated by light so healthy light stimulation can really help your cortisol rhythm and then the light dropping out at night can really help emphasize melatonin rising which is a powerful antioxidant and it’s also a powerful you know it’s to help you sleep throughout the night and help you regenerate and heal and melatonin is made from serotonin so serotonin that feel good neurotransmitter so the same chemicals that allow you to feel good are the same chemicals that allow you to sleep. So I’m a firm believer in the fact that there’s a connection between seasonal affective disorder and the season changes and also sleep. So if we can make sure that one we’re getting some light exposure during the day, and two we’re deemphasize we’re emphasizing we’re deemphasizing light at night we’re emphasizing darkness at night maybe blue blocking glasses, get dimmer switches on the core rooms you’re gonna be in at night so you can drop the intensity of light in those rooms down 80 percent those are gonna be great strategies to accentuate melatonin production so you can sleep better and that better sleeping will help your natural circadian rhythm and that circadian rhythm of lower cortisol at night higher melatonin at light at night higher cortisol in the morning getting that good rhythm will will spill over and affect your mood especially during the transition into summer and fall.
Evan Brand: Yeah it’s crazy. We have to have this conversation but with the invention of electricity and light bulbs we’ve taken a very natural well regulated rhythm and thrown it out of rhythm I mean you just look at some of the indigenous people now let’s just you know take some Indigenous person in the Amazon rainforest. They don’t have any screens they’re getting 100 percent natural light during the day. Tons and tons of Lux just insane levels of brightness. The body knows hey it’s daytime. Let’s wake up versus you take the person in the morning who has their blinds halfway open in their house it’s down in their bedroom they’re kind of you know tiptoeing over to the coffee machine and then they get in their car and they put their sunglasses on normally sunglasses are about an 18 percent lens meaning 78 percent or more is gonna be blocked. So like a ray band for example sunglasses are typically 18 percent lens so if you look at like a car’s window 10 20 percent means only 20 percent of light gets hand. So 18 percent means 18 percent of that sunlight coming into your eyeballs and then you go into your office and you sit under fake lighting and maybe you’re lucky and have a window or maybe you don’t. I’ve taken measurements when I used to work in an office setting and I was only getting around seven hundred and fifty Lux. I mean that is just dark. So your brain the whole hypo filmic pituitary adrenal this whole thing helps. It’s generated by light. So when you’re sitting there in a dark office or a dimly lit office under fake lighting you really don’t ever get the signal that it’s daytime. So these people including me would have these midday crashes of just cortisol. But you could measure it to a sliver but you would just feel it right. You’d get tired and then you’re thinking oh I need a snack and then you eat something to try to pick yourself up but it’s not an it wasn’t a lack of food that was causing that midday fatigue. It was a lack of sunlight. So the only way I was able to maintain my sanity was in the middle of the day. Take my shirt off on my lunch break and go out and just find it. Find a field behind the office and sit in the field bare feet with my shirt off and just trying to act like a solar panel and absorb as much sun as I could. That was the only way I could do it luckily now I’m in between calls. I’ll just jump out my window and run outside and get a few minutes of sunlight and then come back in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s smart. I think it’s really important, especially this time of the year. You know some may not quite be as intense. So now you may need to get out there midday or maybe in the summer. It was a little too intense so it’s a good time to actually go out more during the midday especially as fall transitions because you know the axis tilts a little bit or a little bit further away from the sun this time of year. So the sun’s rays are a little bit less intense so that’s important.
Evan Brand: There’s an app called D minder like Vitamin D D minder you can get where it’ll tell you your vitamin D window so people think oh just because the sun’s up I can get vitamin D. No you really can’t especially in the wintertime. I mean you’re literally like 30 minutes like I know in Kentucky isn’t your higher north latitude than me. So when your winter comes it’s gonna be like 20 minutes or something crazy in the middle of the day from like 12 to 12:20 PM. You know that’s it. So if you’re a super high north like New York level latitude there are parts of the day. Well there actually there are weeks at a time where you literally can’t make vitamin D regardless of whether the sun was out just because the angle of the Earth is tilted so far away from the Sun that the rays get scattered too much and you can’t make vitamin D versus if you’re at the equator you know you can make vitamin D year round then there’s no change in seasonal daylight or nighttime you have 12 hours a day and 12 hours a night at the at the equator get around which is pretty cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. So big strategy no one is really accentuate light during the prime time. The middle part of the day you can get 15 20 minutes and expose yourself to some sun at night or at lunchtime. That’s great. Number two really utilizing blue blocking glasses is fine at nighttime. I think I mean like some people like I can do pretty go to even looking at my screen right up before bed. It doesn’t affect me at all winding down or relaxing. I do feel like I can definitely go into parasympathetic a little bit faster. So I mean I’m still really good. Like it’s not a huge noticeable thing. I’ll find if I have blue blocking glasses on I will literally be like falling asleep while watching a show or on my phone. So it’s just like it’s almost like if I don’t have some guys the blue blocking glasses off because I’m just falling asleep so easily. And so some people may get overstimulated and it really whines them up. So you kind of have to feel it out. The healthier your nervous system the more you can adapt to it if it’s affecting your sleep winding down or relaxing. Then go with the blue blocking glasses at night but do your best to create a really good environment you know lights on dimmers which is keep that at least down. You can at least get like on my phone. I have a blue light app on there so it killed it and then I have a setup here on my iPhone where if I tap it three times, book it goes pure red. Nice with your light so then I’ll use this as like a night light at night like walking up to my bedroom getting ready and I’ll just kind of use that or from my son’s room I have to go in there or put him down or read a book I’ll use it as a as a nightlight which is pure red light so there’s no blue coming out of there at all. I have it on night shift all the time so there’s actually a significant reduction in blue light on this phone. So those are some good strategies with your tech so you can at least get blue light reduced and then you can also do the setting where you knock a blue light out all together I’ll put a post up on how to do that it’s a little bit technical but you can knock out 100 percent of the blue light which is pretty cool.
Evan Brand: That’s beautiful. Yeah we use the salt lamps at night so there’s a couple of good ones that you could buy like on Amazon like salt lamp night lights where you just plug it in there’s just a little switch on it and some of the Himalayan salt some of them are really dark pink and so it just barely generates any light just enough for me to read a book to my daughter at night. So that’s kind of a cool strategy I haven’t used like a spectrometer to measure the color frequency or anything like that to see how much blue is still coming through. But it’s an incandescent bulb inside of those night lights and those are like five watts or something. So I mean they’re pretty pretty pretty low. Same thing as you. That’s great. Just trying to minimize not flipping a light switch on to go brush your teeth, not flipping a light on to get your bed ready. You know just try to live like your ancestors would have done even just a hundred years ago they would have had a baby just a couple lanterns or candles on and there would have been no option to crank up the bright light. So you know women like taking off their makeup at night if you have to wear makeup then just try to do it in the dim light if you miss it. Get some get some extra makeup off in the morning that you missed the night before. It’s just not worth sacrificing it because when you do when you shift that circadian rhythm you know it may take you forty five minutes to two hours just based on some of the readings I’ve done of the hormone laboratories we use. They say you can shift that melatonin production by an hour plus just by that one flash of bright light. It’s like daytime, tricks your brain your brain thinks oh today let’s make cortisol not melatonin actually.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I have little blue light bulbs and I have been all the rooms. And so that’s one of the big things that I’ll use them in the wrong kind of brushing teeth or do anything at night that light bulb gets flicked on. I’ll have it in my son’s room if we need it. It’s going to be off during the night. It doesn’t sleep with it on. But if we need to see something in my hands or whatever our fall I we use those. So the low blue light night bulbs are phenomenal. I try to put a link in the show notes to the ones that I’ve been using for the last five years. They work phenomenal.
Evan Brand: Sweet. Yeah. Richard Handler. He’s got that company lowbluelights.com and nice dude.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:I didn’t know that.
Evan Brand: Yeah. He’s like in his 90s I hope he’s still alive. I interviewed him like in 2012 when I first started my podcast. So what’s I’ve been seven years ago. So he’s by. I don’t know. Almost 100 years old now. But he was a very nice guy and you know he had so much guilt about working at G.E. developing brighter and more blue light bulbs. So now he’s like anti Blue. So that was kind of his motivation to work on getting rid of blue at nighttime. He wrote books about you know pregnant women and how important it is for pregnant women to pay attention to what we’re saying to, you know if you’re up in the middle of the night nursing a kid for example with a new baby you know making sure the mom is avoiding blue light as well because the melatonin goes through the breast milk to the baby. I’m pretty sure, don’t quote me but I’m pretty sure infants and young children don’t make melatonin maybe as effectively or efficiently as adults and they depend on some of that breastmilk transfer rather than making it on their own.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I can just tell you with my previous sons in the past you just getting extra high quality protein before bed makes a big difference. So we would up you know a lot of the high tryptophan rich animal products and that would make a big difference that really make a big difference with the sleep component.
Evan Brand: That’s that’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And a lot of sleep hormones right melatonin comes from Chip different amino acids essentially the more you consume them as the mom you’re going to have a greater chance of passing that through to the baby. So you can only give what you got so high quality animal proteins and to be the best source to pass down those amino acids that are going to have the precursor building blocks for serotonin which is gonna allow you to feel good but also serotonin the precursor to melatonin which will allow you to sleep well too. And you gotta be careful with taking an end stage hormone like melatonin while you’re breastfeeding so you’re much better off getting the building blocks and if you’re having a hard time with just getting it from meat you may want to look at tryptophan first and then five HDP with B6 second because B6 was a really important factor to converting those amino acids upstream and helping them to synthesize into serotonin and melatonin B6 is that rate limiting nutrient.
Evan Brand: Yeah that’s that’s a good point you don’t want to have to depend on melatonin you actually down regulate your body you know, Justin and I we give people supplements to help fix issues and we get a lot of questions like well, am I going to get dependent on this, for example like digestive enzymes people will say what is my body going to get lazy and I will not be making enzymes and acids anymore because you all are giving me digestive enzymes supplements the answer is no, that doesn’t happen, you’re only feeding the fire and adding to the fire you’re not replacing the fire, versus with melatonin that does happen you do replace the fire in your body will down regulate production just like if you use Gaba supplements to help yourself sleep you can become dependent on that. I’ve seen people take 10 20 30 milligrams of melatonin at night which is just crazy. You try to get those people off of it. It can be difficult. So we would prefer to let your body make it rather than supplementing. There’s this phenomenon where it’s like a seesaw and if you throw too much melatonin in you know that can give you that hangover the next morning partially because your cortisol will not peak as much as it’s supposed to and Justin and I measure that on salivary cortisol panels will measure an average melatonin level and also we’ll look at cortisol. We’ll see people that supplement too much melatonin, their morning spike let’s just make up a number and say their morning cortisol should be 20 units they’ve been doing too much melatonin in their morning spike may be only 10 units and so now all of the sudden it’s the equivalent of you charged your smartphone to 50 percent battery in the morning and that’s it. And now you’re going to try to make phone calls all day. It’s gonna be difficult. So that court us all. It’s not fully peaking when it should in the morning what that bright light stimulation. Now you’re gonna crash out at noon and your cortisol level will be like a 1 or 2 units which is what it’s supposed to be around midnight and we measure this right. That’s not something we’re just making up. We see this on a piece of paper, we look at these labs, we live in and breathe these labs all day every day. So I can tell you with confidence that just by getting yourself off melatonin if you’re hooked on it, working with somebody like Justin or I to help regulate your hormone levels and circadian rhythm better. That alone is going to pay dividends and you won’t have to depend on coffee. Coffee can be a good part of your day but it’s not going to be like whipping the tired horse like many people do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I mean coffee is great. I’m sipping on some great coffee right now. Just try to do it before before noon time maybe even before 10:00 11:00 o’clock. That way it’s done. It’s in your system. Coffee can have a great way to emphasize that cortisol in the morning. We don’t want to do more than typically two cups or so and putting all this use it as a crutch.
Evan Brand:That’s all I was trying to point out is like people like—.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:They’ll do in the afternoon they’ll do it late afternoon that’s putting out the best because then one it’s got a half life of about eight to 10 hours so that means it’s gonna be in your system at bedtime. So the benefit of doing it in the morning it’s going gonna be for the most part out of your system and not impeding sleep. So and also you’re not going to be overly stimulating your adrenal throughout the day kind of a nice little bump in the mornings OK because I consider coffee a superfood the alkaloids in it have major anti aging benefits but they also can be a little bit stimulating. So once in the morning it’s fine but not in the afternoon or nighttime because at overstimulated and also it will spill into your nighttime and affect sleep and melatonin production, more your sleep and your rhythm is off like I was saying earlier a greater chance that you’re going to be affected by seasonal affective disorder, SAD or seasonal depression. So the more we can keep let’s just say your night rhythm kind of untouched unencumbered the better chance that your mood and energy will be the next.
Evan Brand: Let’s talk about supplements and labs. So lab testing you know I have mentioned and alluded to salivary hormone testing we can also measure melatonin via saliva. We can use urine for looking at cortisol and melatonin as well. But you got to get to the root cause of what the seasonal depression is. So in my case I was working third shift , the root cause is third shift. You’re trying to work when humans should be sleeping. So but I you and I kind of talked about this before we got on air which is that I think seasonal depression after going through it for you know 10 15 years of my life I think seasonal depression is more pronounced when you have other health issues going on. I don’t think if if you’re an optimally healthy person I don’t think you should have seasonal depression. I think it’s if you’re toxin bucket or your stress bucket is already so full and you’re already so dysfunctional that seasonal loss of life affects you way more like the past couple of years. I felt great I wasn’t depressed it was weird because I’d have these gray cloudy cold days where normally I just want to curl up in a ball and wrap myself in a blanket. I didn’t have those I was like out hiking in the woods you know in a foot of snow with wet snow boots on having fun. So exercises is huge for seasonal depression but my main point here is that I think if you do have seasonal depression there’s price something going on underlying that you just haven’t found yet. So it could be gut infections robbing your nutrition you mentioned trip the fan and having good animal products in the diet. Well if you’ve got gut infections for example you’re not digesting those animal proteins as well. Now you’re not getting that trip defense. So now you can’t manufacture brain chemicals like you should be. So it could be a gut issue leading to the seasonal depression. It could be relationship problems, it could be you’re not getting enough bright light because you’re stuck in a dark office. It could be lack of exercise. It could be that you’re just not getting enough fresh air you’ve got kind of this cabin fever syndrome going on. So I think you still have to consider other options and then I’ll let you comment on that and then I do want to mention some supplements that have helped too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent. So in general what you said is kind of the take home here is the healthier you are the more adaptive. So the things like changing of the seasons especially as you’ve like drops and things get colder is going to affect you less. That’s really important. So we have our metaphorical stress bucket right in that bucket holds our physical chemical and emotional stressors that we may dump into it. So we could probably look at the season changing maybe as a chemical stress or maybe less UV light. There also could be some emotional stressors because maybe you can’t jump in your pool or or do the fun things you used to do when it was warmer so maybe there’s a chemical component there because of the light and maybe there’s the emotional component cause you’re missing activities or you’re cooped up inside right. So those are kind of some stresses we put into our stress bucket right there. The healthier we are and the more those buckets are those balls and our buckets are managed well we can adapt. That’s number one. OK. Number two on top of that you highlighted various stressors you hit. Well let me just go back one big component one big nutritional component are gonna be healthy nutrients. Now one big nutrient that’s important for brain health and neurological health. I saw a study on this the other day looking at like vegans versus meat eaters and they’re talking about one important nutrient that they’re it’s kind of it’s underrated but it’s really important for brain and neurological health. It’s Colin is primarily going to be found in abundance and egg yolks and grass fed beef high quality animal products maybe even in some full fat dairy. So colin vital for healthy neurological brain formation healthy neurological health in general. So Colin is a vital and people who are plant based or vegan or vegetarian are not going to be getting enough of this nutrient. So if you are vegan or vegetarian may want to look at a fast food related surgery phosphate related coli or phosphate title calling some extra holing support in your diet to supplement what you may not be getting from some of these animal products that actually push you to start eating maybe at least some egg yolks something like that to get that good colin. That’s really important. And then of course we already talked about all of the amino acids which are vital because those amino acids are going to convert downstream into serotonin and melatonin. And those are going to be primarily found in animal based sources as well. You can also do supplemental chip the fan and or five HTP with B6 on top of that. And like Evan said if this is kind of a longer term pattern with your health we will look at gut function to make sure there’s not an absorption component or a digestive component. I mean we’ll look at kind of how your nutrients look we may run certain panels that will run plasma based amino acids so we can see how all your amino acids look and how all your downstream B vitamins look in the Krebs cycle of mitochondria see how they’re functioning well that way we can get to the root cause while at the same time we can spot treat some of these nutrients that you could feel better faster too.
Evan Brand: Absolutely. I was going to say sometimes we even in a mediator we may need to come in and give supplemental acids and enzymes but also throwing in specific amino acids. Now I caution people to go and just buy a bunch of amino acids and start playing with them because amino acids even though they’re over the counter they can be very powerful and you don’t want to come in and just I heard five HDP is good so I’m going to just take a ton of five HDP. You don’t necessarily want to do that because what this spider web of brain chemistry when you start to throw in one thing you can throw in you can throw something else off. So for example I’ve seen long term five HDP supplementation depleting or down regulating dopamine. So if you’re throwing and tripped the fan or five HDP we may need to throw in a little bit of tyrosine or DLF [inaudible] to kind of balance that out to where we’re bringing up not only the stimulating neurotransmitters but also kind of your Sarah tone and feel good neurotransmitters and if people just go one or the other maybe short term OK. But I’ve seen people make themselves quote dependent on five HDP I had one lady who was like a yoga teacher and she took five HDP for like five years like five hundred milligrams a day which is way too much. And she tried to get off of it and she had major major panic attacks trying to get off of it. And so we then had to come in and try to use GABA and CNE and passion flower and other things to help her nervous system because she had a really really messed up her neurotransmitter balance.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well a lot of people that are using five HDP chronically especially if they have chronic stress they may have issues with dopamine and adrenaline. And the problem with doing five HDP by itself is you’re up regulating the aromatic decoder box allays enzymes. Those are the same enzymes that are going to metabolize dopamine and adrenaline based amino acids. So then you can actually functionally create a deficiency because as you’re taking five HDP over here that enzyme is upregulated and you’re metabolizing dopamine and adrenaline amino acids at a higher rate. The difference is you’re dumping this in at a higher rate but not this therefore over time this will start to drop as part of the reason why like with carbidopa with sentiment with Parkinson patients that are on this higher dose of dopamine they start having side effects of low serotonin because those medications actually deplete serotonin. You can have it in a functional type of way. On the reverse side when you do a whole bunch of serotonin you can kind of create deficiencies on the dopamine adrenaline side. So it’s important that you’re working with the practitioner that supports all the other nutrients supports the other side of the teeter totter so to speak even does some deeper testing whether it’s organic acids or plasma based amino acid testing to look at what your levels are.
Evan Brand: Yeah and I’m glad we can look at it. You make great points about the drug so we don’t want to create fear but we also just want to educate people. Yeah. Amino acids can change your life but they can also make you feel terrible if you mess yourself up. So I would advise you like I said reach out somebody like Justin or me to get help with this because if you don’t test you’ve guessed. And so you don’t want to say oh I feel depressed I need five HDP maybe but maybe not. We’ve seen tons of people to have depression and it’s a dopamine based depression not a serotonin based depression C like if you’re like a person who just watches mainstream TV you’re going to be convinced serotonin is the happy chemical. Kind of. But dopamine depletion if you see low dopamine that’ll make you feel depressed too so you may be like in the totally wrong department trying to self medicate so you really gotta get the data and that’s what we love, we love and breathe these labs because it makes us look better for one, because it’s like hey we actually found the problem rather than guessing we found it. We gave you the correct protocol to fix it. We retested. Now look your brain chemistry feels great. You look great. Your mood is great. Everything’s great OK. Look at the piece of paper we can prove it. So I just I like the data I like to leverage the information as opposed to nothing against some natural past but I’ve had many many people come to me and also come to Justin that have previously been with a naturpathic doctor where it’s more of a symptom supplement treatment option as opposed to a symptom lab and then a protocol option where it’s like oh I don’t feel good try this. And there wasn’t really enough emphasis on getting the correct clinical information getting the puzzle pieces.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah so when I look at symptoms, I I look at symptoms just long enough to trace them upstream to the systems, body system whether it’s digestion infections hormones adrenal thyroid female hormones. When these systems start going off symptoms happen so I only care about the symptoms just long enough so I can start to isolate what I think what the systems could be and then we’ll run tests to assess the function of those systems but then we’ll also look on this side of the underlying stressors that cause these systems to go out of balance. It could be gluten sensitivity, it could be mold exposure, it could be poor sleep, it could be dehydration, it could be not enough protein, not enough hydrochloric acid. So we have stressors over here physical chemical emotional that then emanate system imbalance right. Hormones, gut, detox, mitochondria that then caused symptom issues over here. So most people live here and it’s drug nutrient to treat the symptoms which may be OK as long as you don’t forget about the systems and the underlying stressors that got us here to begin with. So it’s that’s kind of the kind of model that I’ve created over the last decade seeing thousands of patients one it’s great for patient education. Number two it keeps you focused on all right. What’s the root cause and then what. Let’s say what systems need a restart because sometimes some of these stressors over here that were around here when everything started may not be even active now let’s just say hey someone let’s just say someone had a leak in their house had a whole bunch of mold exposure. Well now they got their house all cleaned up the leak is fixed right. They change the environment in their house but they still have all these symptoms, right underlying stressor is maybe fine. But the systems are still dysfunctional and of course the symptoms are now going crazy. So we have to look at it like that sometimes these stressors may not even be an issue anymore. A lot of times there still are some but sometimes they may not have either.
Evan Brand: Yeah well said. Glad you brought out mold. I mean I’ve seen countless Mycotoxin and tests lately where people have tons of mold in their body and they say oh yeah I was in a moldy house like five years ago we do the plate testing we confirm their current environments OK. But the body holds the score the body still has the mycotoxin load which can be a huge trigger of depression and anxiety and poor sleep. I don’t know the mechanism but I do know that mold suppresses melatonin. How do I know, well because when I do binders my sleep is way way better, way deeper when I’m on binder so there’s probably a nervous system component and the mycotoxins doing something to adrenals to help but the bump up cortisol in stress hormone and then that down regulates melatonin because when I take binders before bed, man my sleep quality is way better. Let’s let’s go into supplements. So if you want to comment on that but I do want to talk about like things that you can use besides amino acids to boost yourself up if you’re trying to work through this issue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So of course you can do things that are going to be naturally kind of tranquilizing and relaxing. So Gaba, Athenian, magnesium. Excellent excellent excellent things like ashwagandha and rodeo. Because one they’re going to help with their circadian rhythm they’re going to just help you adapt to stress better anyway. Right. These herbs have been studied Russia in the 50s and 60s use lots of adaptogens for a long time with their military and with their their version of NASA with their astronauts doing all these space missions to help improve immune function of virility stamina. And so there’s a lot of research in Russia on these things these herbs are very helpful and they can be used longer term too and they help with the immune function they help with dealing with stress to help with sleep. They help with mood so really good benefits. So I like those types of herbs ashwagandha and rodeos are my favorite fur for mood stuff mutation rate for sleep too. So I like that you can also do ginseng during the day. Schisandra,[inaudible] is great for sex hormones support as other herbs like tributaries which are really good for male sex hormones. There are ones that use more for females like macca or Peruvian ginseng. So those are excellent talked about magnesium of course the amino acids right and that we may do some testing for that but that could be five HTP with B6 that could be the tyrosines or DL allow any and those can be excellent. I mean just think what about anything can be excellent for gaba precursor and then of course you have herbs like valerian root passion flower which can be very relaxing in support of hops. Some people do very good with CBD as well. CBD could be excellent. On top of that. Anything else that comes to mind for you Evan.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So rode during the day. But don’t do it at night. Rodeo will be too stimulating at nights of super effective antidepressant too which is why I love it. I’m in the same boat as you it’s one of my top favorites. Holy Basil. So another big favorite of mine. I notice differences you know I used to take a lot of adaptogenic herbs in a compound like 5 6 different adaptogens together but I’ve started to play with isolated like a shot a rodeo. A shot of a [inaudible] a shot of ashwagandha, a shot of holy basil to see how I feel and I’ve noticed with holy basil I get a much much more physical boost rodeo love to me can be helpful for physical endurance but I feel holy basil is even better. I almost feel invincible when I’m on a couple shots of holy basil it’s just it’s really really like a powerful feeling that can overwhelm you. Maybe I’m just different but for me holy Basil’s great. I’ll mix them so I’ll do a shot or rodeo in the morning. A shot of ashwagandha, gonna take a couple raishi capsules and then do one or two of some other like Siberian ginseng. A shot or two of those and then mix them all together in tincture form. Once I know how I feel individually then I may bump up something more so I may do two parts. Rodeo La. One part. Holy Basil one part of Luther row. And then you already hit on it a bit but like the B vitamins in general. So B is in Bravo B6 b twelve even rival flavor for example. Nice and b one I mean all these are still important. So just a good complex would be would be a good idea. And if you’re under stress you’re gonna be burning up B vitamins more so wouldn’t hurt to have an adaptive gym blend. Plus a good trace mineral micronutrient amino acid and vitamin blend all together and then exercise Move movement. I mean it’s free and it can be very effective.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Now let’s talk about some light therapy. I know you two talked about full spectrum light as well. We have some questions on the chats here about red light therapy and so there’s a company out there Juve, juve Red light is a good one. What’s your thoughts on red light versus full spectrum. How do you break that down in your head.
Evan Brand: Yeah so full spectrum when I hear that. I’m thinking more of like a full spectrum sauna that may have a near infrared light in it which is kind of like a red chicken coop type bulb that’s warm but also can generate some near infrared raised to help penetrate your body. Plus a full spectrum like carbon based system that’s heating your body. So when I think full spectrum that’s what I think of. You could consider incandescent light bulbs to be more full spectrum. If you look at a spectrometer this basically the rainbow of colors you look at the sunlight it’s got the full rainbow of colors you look at incandescent, incandescent bulbs. The closest you can get to the sun whereas LED lights have a lot of abnormal peaks especially in the blue area. So LED is not really a natural light. It’s not. It doesn’t mimic the sun anywhere close to to it like what I would consider. Full Spectrum really just a marketing term like if you go to like a pet store you know, they’ll sell like full spectrum light bulbs for reptiles. You know if you buy a lizard you have to have like a full spectrum light to kind of replicate the sunlight. So those full spectrum bulbs they’re really just incandescent. They may have a couple of changes in the wavelength but overall it’s just a glorified incandescent bulb. So when we moved into this new house we actually had LED previous owner put an LED everywhere in the flicker of them is really bad. Like if you do your hand in front of your face the flicker of the LED is evident and that’ll cause stress too. So we swapped them all out. We put in all incandescents and yes it uses a little more electricity but I love the look and the natural spectrum that you can get from from incandescent bulbs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:Got it. OK. That makes a lot of sense.
Evan Brand: I didn’t answer the question about the red light though so the red light I have seen the Juve people reached out to me and said hey we want to sponsor your podcast and all that. And I just didn’t like the idea of the LEDs because the red light bulb that I used from sonic space. I felt much better with because it’s like this chicken coop bulb it’s very hot. But I felt really good it warmed you up whereas the Juve I don’t believe is designed for warming it’s more of just hey let’s blast your body with red light which supposed to be healing. I like the feeling of feels like sunshine when you close your eyes and you’re sitting in front of that near infrared bulb and it’s blasting you. It feels very very good. So that’s kind of my preference over the juve right now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is that the sort of space that the big two hundred and fifty watt near infrared light.
Evan Brand: Exactly. Yep yep. So it’s a single bulb and you could I mean if you’re on a budget you could even just go on Amazon the GE brand just like what people buy to put to keep their animals warm in the winter, it’s a two hundred and fifty GE bulb that’s red that is almost the same exact thing as far as I know in terms of sonicscape bulb. So I can’t justify the money if you get you a light bulb for 20 bucks you get one of these little like aluminum. It’s like a bulb holder with a plug on it and you plug that bad boy in and you’re looking at less than 50 bucks. So got it in the near end for it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s got to be a near infrared so the wavelength on that from a nanometer perspective I think near it’s somewhere between six hundred to a thousand nanometres and I think the red light bulb with sonic space is right around 8, 850 and so that’s going to be helpful for what then help supercharge the mitochondria at that frequency. It’s going to help with seasonal affective disorder because it’s to help stimulate serotonin production. What other can are happening with that wavelength and then how does that different than like a far infrared or light. Let’s say someone that has a guy. I have a combo infrared sauna vs sunlight. How would that be different in that.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So for me and I don’t know, I’m sure there’s some data on this to prove it but for me I noticed a reduction in pain using the near infrared so you know if I had like so re elbows from lifting too much heavy weights I would just put the near infrared bulb on my elbow kind of spot treat with it. If I had neck pain I would just put it on my neck for five minutes. If I haven’t had stomach pain like I got food poisoning or something I put that near infrared bulb on my tummy and you could use it for children too if you have kids would upset tell me you could put the red light bulb on it for 30 seconds. Dr. Lawrence Wilson, he’s the guy who really brought near infrared therapy into the forefront. He wrote a whole book on near infrared sauna therapy and he talks about hundreds and hundreds of different uses and benefits a near infrared. So I would look up his articles and he’s got a whole book on it and you can learn.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then are you actually putting that light bulb right against your skin.
Evan Brand: No it’s way too hot you burn the crap out of yourself. Now you you put it like maybe 8 to 12 inches away. It it’s so hot. So yeah like a foot away is plenty. But Lawrence Wilson he’s, he’s the guy who really probably started the whole near infrared sauna industry. I mean he literally to me was kind of the forefather of putting this information out and he has all these like what do you call them not recipes. These online books on how to make and design your own near infrared little cubicle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. If when I understand is there’s two types of near infrared there’s the halogen base one which I think is the one you were referring to with with the light and then there’s the LED admitted once I think Juve is more of an LED admitted near infrared. Is that correct. That’s right. Yeah. And from what I understand is that the nanometer wavelengths a little bit more in the sweet spot with the LED. So it’s supposedly a 50 80 versus I think twelve hundred or so with the incandescent but I think you know it’s worth trying the cheaper method first see if you feel a benefit then you can always switch to an LED version of that wavelength and see how it goes.
Evan Brand: Yeah. There’s there’s a whole article that Brian Richards did. He’s the head of the sonic space company. He did this whole article like coming up with all these different reasons of why he doesn’t like the Juve and why he doesn’t recommend it. So I don’t have all the details now to bring it out but all these point people to that article because I actually spoke with him about that as a man you know Juve is promoting themselves like they’re they’re so awesome. But I spoke with Jack Cruz and he was like I’m not a fan of the LEDs for this and this and this reason and I felt personally better while using the near infrared halogen on myself it warmed me up so I liked that. But Brian had a good article on it so maybe people can check that out if they want to dig into the debate more. I mean here’s the deal, is any red light better than no red light. Yeah probably. But you know there’s always gonna be pros and cons to each system that you choose.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely and what about what about like the sunlight in the sun and it’s good to have a combination of near and far.
Evan Brand: That’s the best. That’s the best you can do. So I’ve got a clear light kind of a similar competitor to the sunlight and so like in the clear light in the front. What I have it’s like it looks like a big thermometer basically it’s like this big red glass tube that glows hot red. That’s your near infrared spectrum. And then the walls are what have the far infrared waves. It’s best to have both because the near infrared really warms you up the far infrared kind of penetrates supposedly near and near infrared penetrates farther than far infrared. It gets confusing with the wavelengths but I would just tell you if you can have both near and far. That’s what I feel best then and I know because I had just a far red sauna before and it did not feel nearly as good compared to the system I have now which is a combination like yours where it’s a near and red hot red bulbs and the heating system in the wall.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Yeah I’m looking at this interview with Dr. Michael Hamblin. He talks about that the near infrared don’t penetrate the body as deep. Only about 10 percent on the outer kind of surface. And it’s the far infrared that penetrate deeper so that’s so it’s just—
Evan Brand: It’s confusing. I would just say get both if you can because you know I remember seeing a Merkel interview. I think Brian Richards may have done it or maybe somebody else on saunas and they said far infrared is just a term but the wavelength can’t penetrate as deep so near penetrates deeper. I don’t know. I don’t want to confuse people but I would just say if you have access to the ability to do near and far combo that’s what I do and that’s what you do and we feel good with it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I’ll put some of the articles that I have here in the show notes under references so people can go look at and just kind of see some of the things that we’re looking at to make our best guesses of. That’s great. All right. So that’s good. So we have kind of the cheaper option where we do like a sauna space incandescent light ball about that mid 800 nanometer wavelength and then we have some of the LED Juve options as well as you know a full spectrum near and far infrared which would be like us for instance like sunlight and sauna or what was the brand that you had.
Evan Brand: It’s a clear light clear light.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK. Great. And I think I affiliate for sun lighting as well. I like the sun. I have it in my home office I think it works great if anyone is interested we’ll put notes about how to get a discount on that below as well and the same thing for you. Is there anything else you want to highlight about using various light therapies to improve Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Evan Brand: I think we covered it. It works. It’s a good strategy it should definitely be in your toolbox. But make sure you’re trying to work the day shift and not do night shift if at all possible and get your hormones working right. Get your gut working right. Get your mitochondria supported and you should be able to thrive during winter when there’s not as much sunlight.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Very good. Let me just hit a couple of questions for listeners. How much melatonin before bed if you’re gonna do it. Typically you try to do five HDP and B6 first anywhere between 100 to 400 milligrams is fine with that. You know maybe divided in two doses at dinner and before bed is fine. And then melatonin I typically start off at half of a milligram, half of the milligram and then work up from there. Try to get the lowest possible dose to have the greatest effect possible on that. Couple other questions. I think we hit it. I think I’m sensitive to caffeine more than average it takes me eight to 10 hours maybe 12 to 24 to metabolize coffee just a guess but even one cup isn’t safe for me. So if you’re a slow coffee or caffeine metabolize or that’s the C Y P snip you may just want to just do decaf coffee which only has five milligrams per cup versus the typical one hundred that would give you a ninety five percent reduction. So start with that see how you do .
Evan Brand: You could do some good organic ceremonial grade matcha. You’ll get like maybe 30 40 milligrams per cup. He’s probably fine with that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Taking magnesium bring down vitamin D. Not sure about that. Not sure.
Evan Brand: I’ve never heard that it doesn’t make sense to me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah he ever tried to use the relaxant.
Evan Brand: No I haven’t. I have not.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I have not. I think we had all the major questions guys. Anything else Evan, you want to highlight.
Evan Brand: I don’t think so if people want to reach out we help people with this issue every single day so you can do at Justin’s website. His website is JustInHealth.com and you could reach out. He works with clients worldwide. My website is EvanBrand.com. We look forward to being on your team. We love helping people fix these issues and the things we’ve talked about today are far more effective and far safer than going on a depression medication because you feel depressed in the winter. It’s not a deficiency of pharmaceutical drugs folks. It is something else. So you got to make sure that you’re addressing everything else.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent and we’re going to have a great link for the podcast down below us if you want to listen to the higher quality audio version. We’re gonna have that as well. And then references resources down below as well. Make sure you subscribe to both our channels and we appreciate you guys giving us a comment or feedback. JustInHealth.com/iTunes for a great review and same thing. EvanBrand.com/iTunes for a review that we really appreciate it guys. I’ll be back in a few minutes here for a live Q and A with me so if you are listening. Feel free hold tight. I’ll put a reminder out for y’all and we will be in touch. Evan it was great chatting man you have an awesome day.
Evan Brand: Take care. You too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks. Bye.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/seasonal-depression-solutions-podcast-244
Root Cause of Mood Issues| Podcast #229
Anxiety, depression and mood swings are more than just that. Those things are real and are not just in our mind.
In this episode, learn various causes of our mood swings and situations that trigger it. Also, natural remedies to ease it and getting to its root cause is included in today’s podcast. Stay tuned!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
01:03 Causes of Mood Swings
05:40 Medications and Antidepressants
10:12 Going Natural
11:07 Proper Oxygenation
26:29 Environment Matters
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey there it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome back to the podcast. We have Evan Brand here. Today we’re gonna do a live podcast today on mood and natural mood solutions, getting to the root cause of your mood concerns. So we’re live on Facebook here as well live on YouTube. Make sure you click down below, leave us some comments, we want to know what you think we appreciate a share we appreciate the like. Obviously subscribe and don’t forget to smash the bell so you can get notifications of our awesome content coming up. So, Evan how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Hey man I’m doing pretty good. I’m looking for statistics right now to make sure we can discuss how many people have depression how many people have anxiety. The Center for Disease Control they study this stuff and so I want to make sure people understand this, its not just
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: (Cross talking.) Exactly
Evan Brand: One or two people out in the world that are struggling with mood issues, I mean it’s an epidemic so how big of an epidemic well that’s what I’m about to tell you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome, so let’s dive in. So we’re gonna be talking about mood issues. Now I kind of draw the line in a couple different areas because there’s gonna be mood issues that are like all the time and you’re gonna see this in men women and more women. You’re gonna see mood issues that are more cyclical that are involved with their cycle whether it’s at typically it’s in the be, sometimes at ovulation and usually throughout that luteal phase, that last part of a woman’s cycle a week maybe three tool days to a week before they actually menstruate or bleed, have the period that’s when you’re gonna see a lot of mood issues and that could be hormonally based. So you have mood issues that are more cyclical than like an everyday kind of thing there’s that number two blood sugar issues people that are on a reactive hypoglycemia roller coaster and live their life on a blood sugar roller coaster that’s gonna be a problem. Number three, just poor nutrition. Like you’re not getting enough B vitamins and magnesium and amino acids in your body so you’re just – your diet’s just poor nutritionally it’s not nutritionally dense to provide the building blocks, to make all the brain chemicals, and then number four I would say is a malabsorption issue. Meaning, you don’t have the your digestion, is it off, or you don’t have the digestive secretions because of infection or food allergens or gut stress you’re not able to break down those nutrients so maybe the nutrients are coming in but we’re having a deficit on the breakdown side if you will
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s not what you eat, it’s what do you digest from what you eat. So you could have a Paleo diet yes, but if you’re still on an acid blocker or you have some infection you could still be at a deficiency of those amino acids that you need to manufacture brain chemicals
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, and then number five but kind of dovetail with the female hormone issue, but that’d be more on the adrenal stress side highs and lows in cortisol or cortisol rhythm issues. Now, I would say a lot of women that have the cyclical issues probably have an adrenal issue, but there are some people that may have all the time issues that are more Audrina based indoor men may have adrenal based issues, and then connecting to that, I would say with me the thyroid low thyroid hormone is commonly shows up as anxiety. They’ve done studies where they’ve taken people with anxiety and mood issues given one group, lithium the other group actual t3 and they found the actual t3 thyroid hormone saw some of the mood related issues and better than the lithium did. So those are kind of the big four or five things I’m trying to dovetail and we can connect any comments on that the brief over you Evan.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so what symptoms are we talking like when we say mood issues are we hitting, I mean we already did an anxiety podcast, we could talk about depression and that’s part of it are we just saying mood issues as a whole, I mean that could be irritability, that could be anger, I mean do we just tie it all together because really it’s all connected.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, your debility, anger, anxiety, depression and then typically those things tend to dovetail with fatigue I think the only if we’re unique most people that have fatigue tend to have those issues, with the exception of maybe anxiety. I’ve seen some people that are very energetic but are anxious kind of that tire but why are you kind of thing but they may not be like fatigue so to speak. So typically you’re gonna see almost all of those issues have a fatigue backbone with the exception of anxiety maybe but you can still be anxious and tired though –
Evan Brand: Yeah, so depression specifically what I found here for statistics in the US about 10% of the US population has reported depression, so I mean how many people are depressed that have not reported it probably a huge amount. So you know if we estimate the US population over 300 million people, 10%, that’s what 30 million people, yes a lot of people, so you know not just you and your brother and your sister and your cousin, no, I mean this is everywhere you go I think the numbers are probably way higher than 10%. I think it’s just that people are not reporting it you know, what are you gonna do like you’re gonna go to your doctor you’re depressed a lot of people are catching on to the fact that all they’re gonna do is get a prescription pad written form and in your intro you said nothing about a deficiency of depression medication, you didn’t say anything about a deficiency of anti-anxiety medication, so people know they know that’s the only supposed cure that they’re gonna get is those drugs and people don’t want to do, I mean you and I talk to people every single day all day and a lot of them do have depression and they know I can’t get help from conventional psychiatry or doctors so then they come to us because they know there’s something else going on it’s not just a pill that I’m missing to fix my depression it’s something underlying and I had depression for I don’t know 10 years I mean as long as I could remember and my mood started to lift significantly after I worked on my gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% now looking at a lot of medications acutely a medication may be necessary if you’re in a suicidal place that that may make sense but you have to work with someone to get to the root cause. The problem is most antidepressants that actually don’t work in the long run. What happens is the dose has to be raised up and then as you increase the dose your chance of side-effects increase and side-effects of antidepressants can be weight gain, it could be low libido, it could be other mood issues, it could be energy issue, so there’s other issues that could happen spinning off a various side effects. So like within the depressants we have SSRI medications right that’s your selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, these are like your pre and post synaptic neuron you have all the the brain chemicals here in between the synapses is like your serotonin and there’s react ape ports on the presynaptic neuron where these chemicalsget recycled and a reuptake inhibitor it blocks this. So imagine putting my hand over this part and that way these chemicals cannot go back into that presynaptic neuron and if you guys are listening on podcast feel free and click below to see the YouTube links that you can see my, my little hand puppetry if you will. So that’s kind of SSRI you have SSNRI which is like Selective’s Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitor so SNRI. Now, looking at norepinephrine dopamine which is similar you have things like wellbutrin, there’s other medications that are in that category that are working more on adrenaline dopamine kind of cascade because dopamine’s a precursor to adrenaline. So you have those medications on the depression side there’s new lines of antidepressant medications coming out working on brain inflammation. The conventional medicine is starting to understand that brain inflammation is a big impact on mood so they’re giving you these medications to help with that. Now, you got to be careful because anytime you don’t get to the root cause you create potential side effects, so these medications are so new coming out not even sure if they’re even from market yet they’re in the testing process now, so the side effects I’m not sure of yet but I guarantee you there’ll be a whole bunch. Now, looking at functional medicine in nutrition we want to get to the root cause of that brain inflammation, so one of the first thing we look at is to diet and the first thing after that is the gut because inflammation in the gut drastically causes inflammation in the brain, we have this the tight junctions open up this leaky gut gastro intestinal permeability phenomenon occurs undigested particulate bacteria foods gluten dairy get into the bloodstream, they can make their way up to the brain and make an activate our microglial cells which can create more cognitive issues more brain fog and more mood issues. So depression is a really big component so just kind of laying out the medication here and then obviously we have like our our gaba like as a pain medications which are gonna be working more on the gaba receptor sites and then we have ourold tricyclic s–from the 80s which are antidepressants from the 80s, less side effects with those but those still are kind of a weaker SSRI and —
Evan Brand: Well the problem with the benzos is that they’re highly addictive and if you try to come off of those you have a big withdrawal period where there’s going to be potentially more anxiety, more depression, panic attacks, I mean I’ve had people who come to me after they tried to go cold turkey off of a benzo and they’re having night sweats and panic attacks it’s like no you can’t do that, you know those drugs were really really effective so it’s just not something you can do on your own, you really have to have a doctor to help get you off of those drugs and a big problem is two people that are trying to mix supplements with medications – I mean you can’t just go take a SSRI and then go take 500 milligrams of 5-htp that’s just not something that you want to do it’s rare and I haven’t seen any cases of it personally but it’s called serotonin syndrome and that’s when you can boost up serotonin way too much with the drug and a nutrient so this isn’t. I mean when you’re talking brain chemistry you don’t want to come in there and just go to Whole Foods, buy a bunch of amino acids and start popping them if you don’t know what you’re doing
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and the side effects are pretty prolific like we talked about nausea, fatigue, poor sleep, dry mouth, blurred vision, constipation, low libido, weight gain, so all of these things can, can add to the milieu of symptoms that are already there and we’re not getting to the root cause, so we kind of lead it the medications we talked about how important that is we obviously know foods really important because foods where all the building blocks come from so we want diets a very important very nutrient-dense with lots of good healthy B vitamins especially b6 which helps activate a lot of our brain chemicals. So obviously like a paleo temple it’s gonna be a great starting point with healthy organic green vegetables you know lower sugar fruit lots of good anti-inflammatory compounds they’re good healthy omega-3 fats which can help a brain inflammation and help with inflammation in general and lots of healthy good animal products that are gonna be grass-fed not grain fed with all the roundup and pesticides and junk.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’ve noticed a big difference myself with the fish oil just taking that tends to just level my mood out it’s not like it’s an any depressant effect like you would get from something like rhodiola, that’s one of my favourite adaptogenic herbs for depression. It’s not that significant but it just kind of makes you more even keel, where something like an adaptogen is going to help really boost you and you’re gonna feel altered, almost like you have a buzz from the herbs like, whoa I’m I feel happy I feel great. Yeah ___[10:57] is good for that gotu kola is good. I would say ginkgo could be in that category too because ginkgo will help with the blood flow in the brain, you know some of it could just be poor oxygenation what you think like if someone’s sedentary and maybe they have poor circulation, maybe they have mold issues that’s blocking nitric oxide, I mean how much of depression do you think is an oxygen related issue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean anytime you have poor or increased coagulation meaning blood is kind of viscous, it’s like molasses things aren’t flowing well. Exercise helps improve that just getting inflammation down when you’re more inflamed and you have more inflammatory cytokines or interleukins in your bloodstream. Things get stickier and they’re not gonna flow as well, so movement helps getting the inflammation down, helps doing things like ginger tea. Ginger can be helpful. Fish oil is a natural blood thinner so you talk about fish oil. Part of the mechanism on fish oil works is it helps that coagula, it prevents things from clotting and sticking and also a fish oil is like a weak MAO inhibitor so basically, MAO is another kind of enzyme that metabolizes a lot of these brain chemicals kind of naturally and this it has a way of delaying that metabolism so not quite a drug like effect but it does have a mild effect there and again when you do things that are more natural and have mild effects. You have less side effects so fish oil’s wonderful with that also things like St. John’s Wort has some really good depression antidepressant qualities too and a lot of times they’re working on indirectly. They have anti-inflammatory effects they have which then helps with blood flow which then they tend to have maybe a mild MAO kind of you know decreasing the metabolism of our brain chemicals kind of mechanism that’s happening at play. Also one thing about gluten they’ve done, studies on gluten where gluten decreases blood flow to the frontal cortex so oh you have you know your garden hoses up the side of your head is called your carotid they gave people basically functional MRIs and they looked at blood flow and activation and the frontal cortex pre and post gluten and they saw significant reduction in blood flow to the frontal cortex the neocortex which is what makes us humans compared to animals and they saw a significant reduction and also significant reduction in migraines when that blood flow was supported. Meaning, when they cut the gluten down migraine stopped and they also saw that the blood flow was coming up when that happened so kind of outlined the mechanism. Blood flow is a really important component so anytime we can decrease the coagulate, meaning things sticking and we can improve the blood flow, like we talked about that makes a huge difference now exercise helps with the blood flow it also helps stimulate beta endorphin which is the natural antidepressant. It hits that opiate receptor and it’s a nineteen amino acid compound, meaning you need to be digesting and having good protein so the more you’re vegan and vegetarian and you’re not getting good quality proteins in there or you’re not supplementing additional proteins and b12 as a vegetarian vegan in omega-3 from algae you’re in a worse situation because you’re not getting those certain nutrients in
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ve got my wife on some herbs right now St. John’s Wort passion flower motherwort dandelion Damiana black cohosh this is a kind of a postpartum mood remedy that we’re using that’s an herbal tincture and I’ve tried it and I feel great. I feel a lift from it too. So, this is something we’re doing for her just because you know a lot of depression we didn’t talk about this yet, a lot of depression is postpartum but then it never lifts right you and I talk with moms every single week. We’ll talk with the mom who says you know you and I will do a history together we’ll say okay let’s go back in time when did this depression start or when did this anxiety start. We’re always trying to make our timeline and so a lot of moms will say, wow this was after my first kid or after my second kid or after my third kid, the depression came on and it never went away and some of that steroid related because we do see a lot of postpartum Hashimoto’s where all the sudden the immune system goes crazy antibodies go up. The thyroid gets attacked the woman becomes hypo under functioning with thyroid or maybe she’s alternating between hypo and hyper and then she’s feeling bad because of that and so these herbs can come in and really help to regulate not only thyroid function, you could do some adaptogens to help adrenal thyroid but then the mood ones too like passion flower. I love it you know I think it’s something everybody could benefit from especially if you’re more on the anxious side where you’re stuck in traffic and you’re freaking out even my grandfather the other day he told me he said, Evan I can’t handle traffic anymore, and my grandma starts making fun of them they were talking about how they got stuck in rush-hour traffic and my grandpa was kind of freaking out kind of panicking getting anxious and he never used to be like that. So I told him, hey maybe we can get you a passionflower tincture. You put it in your purse, you know my grandma’s purse and take a shot of that next time you get stuck in traffic
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, now some natural ways that you can improve GABA levels is there’s some people to talk about GABA is too small or too large to pass the blood-brain barrier, but yeah I don’t know I kind of go back and forth on that so there’s that so you could take a product called Pharma GABA and you can do with sublingually so I’m gonna take one now to kind of promote my parasympathetic nervous system responses.
Evan Brand: I love them. They’re great. I chew them up too so great, great tasting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anytime you’re supporting adrenal stress right because GABA is the brake on the sympathetic fight-or-flight nervous system so anytime you can kind of bring cortisol and adrenaline back into balance, it’s helpful so things that you can do are gonna be ___[16:37] is gonna be excellent, magnesium will be excellent, ashwagandha will be excellent as well that really helps curtail, let’s just say a lot of the at the HPA access dysfunction.
Evan Brand: Let’s go into magnesium a bit because you hit that one but I don’t want to gloss over because magnesium is a huge needle mover. Maybe let’s dive into just a couple different forms for people that they could use. So last night I did some magnesium oil. I did some spray on my legs, my calves, I started to feel a little cramp coming on I thought you know, I was in the sauna over the weekend I was sweating I might not have replenished enough of my magnesium so I did magnesium oil and I slept much better with the oil. So that’s one topical form and then a lot of times you and I talked about magnesium glycinate, ___[17:23]I’ve had really good success with ___[17:25] especially for like muscle relaxation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, so magnesium is gonna be excellent. It’s a natural beta blocker so it can relax your heart so your heart’s not beating out of your chest. Obviously there’s like a thousand enzymatic roles in the body from magnesium so it’s in help with motility it’s in help but blood sugar metabolism it’s in hell but inflammation in the brain I think part of the mechanism and how magnesium works , ___[17:51] it’s highly anti-inflammatory to the brain. I saw a lecture with Russel Blaylock who’s a famous neurosurgeon and he said clinically when he operated on people and he would give them post-op stuck the metal magnesium they heal better than his colleagues patients that had the same procedure, it was like a remarkable difference. He said so supplementing additional magnesium really made a big difference.
Evan Brand: Magnesium threonate, that’s amazing magnesium threonate would be the other form I would recommend just because we do know magnesium threonate and a-actually crosses the blood-brain barrier so when you’re talking about gaba, you know supposedly being too big to cross the blood-brain barrier and the pharma gaba is smaller and is more easily readily available to get through the barrier same thing with magnesium threonate. So yeah if you do one to two grams of threonate that’s going to get to the brain and you’ll feel significant changes, I mean we’ve used it for people with PTSD. You know some of the literature we use professional healthcare companies to manufacture our products and they’ll give us some text sheets on the back end and they’ll have a whole list of symptoms why you would use threonate and PTSD and anxiety is one of them so we know these people think of anybody who’s at a stressful or traumatic event which is pretty much every human ever obviously some more than others. The threonate to me is a good a good remedy I mean if I had like a a trauma clinic or like a PTSD clinic or something or a mental health clinic where you know let’s say you’ve got people having mental breakdowns, you know kind of back in the day like my grandmother her grandmother would talk about oh if you have a mental breakdown you go to this hospital you stay in there for a month and they send you home. I guarantee they weren’t using magnesium threonate because it wasn’t invented back then but that would be something I would have in the protocol for people rather than, yeah, automatically going to the prescriptions.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I know Blaylock. I don’t even think Blaylock was using threonate, back things it wasn’t really that big.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Using a standard citrate, probably citrate it’s fine. It’s a cheaper version you can get it in natural calm, it can cause bowel, your bowels to move so some people do better with the ___[19:51] or a or glycinate or if you know this cognitive issues we can do a magnesium that is a threonate, that better at crossing the blood-brain barrier we love that.
Evan Brand: Yes, I wanted to give you a brief diversion on the magnesium piece because here magnesium, but then they don’t know there’s a lot of different varieties of it that have different effects .
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm yeah, exactly. Now, next passionflower is great which is otherwise known as melissa officinalis. Another great relaxing kind of herb. It tends to be almost like a natural.
Evan Brand: melissa is a lemon balm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, oh yeah I’m sorry yeah yeah, the same thing Melissa and lemon balm tend to be relaxing so a lot of like natural hyperthyroid formulas have that in it so Melissa Melissa and lemon balm are over here passion flowers is similar and then Valerians both sent when they didn’t have relaxing kind of dampening effects and yeah, thank you.
Evan Brand: Yeah theLlatin on because you said passion flower, then you said otherwise Melissa yeah ,passion flowers Latin name is like Pasi flora something and carnie incarnate, uh, something like that I don’t really.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s, it’s lemon balm and Melissa are the same thing yeah, flour and then valerian excellent also we can add kava to the mix there’s been research on kava from the Cochrane Database. You know, finding it’s very effective at helping with anxiety without the side effects so kava is excellent.
Evan Brand: Have you tried kava?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve tried it supplementally a couple times. I’ve tried it, someone made me kava tea before, it’s big in Fiji I think it’s very helpful it basically activates those GABA-A receptors is GABA-A and GABA-B and it really activates the A receptors in the brain so it can really help kind of chill you out and relax you.
Evan Brand: I went-I’m going to a kava bar one time when I was down in Austin and drink a shot of it, it tasted like – it tasted and looked like mud water.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s exactly how it tasted look, yeah.
Evan Brand: And I was I was altered, I thought man I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to drive home. I mean I’m really sensitive so maybe my GABA system just got flooded but I was sitting back in the chair kind of like, whoa I mean it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve also seen CBD do very well in the mood side too so that’s ___[22:01] with the non active THC has, I think is very helpful too I always tend to lean more on nutrition first, so like the B vitamins, b6, magnesium ,will also do higher dose l-theanine amino acid which can help promote GABA production stuff the mental gammas I tend to promote those along with the long-standing adaptogens that have a long term success record, like ashwagandha is excellence I’d say Kava after that’s wonderful lots of studies on it and then- um-any comments on that before we go to the next step?
Evan Brand: Yeah CBD has been helpful for me too. I give it to my daughter so if she complains of a headache or a bellyache or if she seems restless at night we’ll just give her a one milliliter dose which the brand I carry is a 10 milligram CBD, she’ll go right to sleep so it’s a really good settling thing and so for kids too. I mean I didn’t mention the statistics I was looking at some of this stuff from the Center for Disease Control. I mean we’re seeing we’re seeing 20 to 30 percent of children now are reporting anxiety and depression so I have moms that are telling me their kids are suicidal at 5 10 years old. I mean, when I was 5 and 10 years old I had no comprehension of death or mortality so I don’t know if it’s you know the the TV shows and the violence that kids are exposed to in other places that I wasn’t because I was outside on my bike all the time or what but you know as a kid I don’t remember other kids being anxious and depressed. Now I mean it’s almost every single kid that I see there’s an underlying anxiety problem associated with as you mentioned the gut you know we see these kids eating conventional food or get tons of glyphosate they’re good bacteria killed off the bacterial overgrowth are making toxins which are depressing and causing anxiety and the kids, so I mean there is a root cause for the kids too. It’s not where they need to be put on medication immediately same thing with ADHD. ou know these kids are getting diagnosed with ADHD we see that get better with fixing the gut to 100% and there’s herbs for kids too so there’s actually I mean, technically we can just dose adult formulas down but there are some special kids formulas that we do use that are specifically maybe they have a glycerine base as opposed to an alcohol base and passionflower skullcap, things like that you can use those with kids as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% also there’s something called people, may know it call phenibut or for amino 3 phenol butyric acid. Now this components a little bit controversial because there’s, there can be some addictive qualities to it it’s essentially a GABA agonist. Supposedly crosses the blood-brain better it’s a GABA agonist I’ve had some people that had phenomenal results with it ,but I’ve seen it I’ve seen it become a little bit more addictive and people become dependent upon it so it’s one of those things as a double-edged sword. I would never go to it first but I’ve seen people that have done very well with it I think it would probably be better than peeing on a benzo long term but I would always try that, that mean the last thing I would potentially ever go to in my arsenal because of so the so-called some addictive qualities to it
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean it helped, it helped change my change my life and get me through some tough times but, yeah, there’s a huge risk with people not respecting it and overusing it and down regulating GABA so much that you get more anxious you get more panic etc. When you try to get off of it whereas the pharma GABA that you just chewed up you’re not gonna have that potential for that one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, yeah, exactly, so we have a lot of the supplementation I would also say if it just depends – because if we have a high cortisol state things that can help lower cortisol make a big difference. Some people have a very low cortisol state and some of their anxiety and mood issues is driven by low cortisol so some people think it’s like, hey this is the solution for that, well it really depends because what if you have low adrenaline and low cortisol well a lot of your anxiety and mood stuff could be from the lower state versus higher anxiety and high cortisol or higher adrenaline and high cortisol be many things to bring it down so we may be doing things more like phosphorylated serine to bring it down and actual gana we may do things to bring it up that are more stimulating like ginseng or licorice if it’s chronically low, and or tyrosine if we see low adrenaline so we got a look at what the pattern is because sometimes extreme high and lows can feel the same and that’s hard people to wrap their heads around.
Evan Brand: Yeah that’s a good point. I mean I had a woman in college who she, she was in Hawaii I remember that we found out her her dorm was super moldy and that’s why she was having all these panic attacks so that was cool too, but she had extremely, extremely high cortisol but just based on doing the initial intake and we talked over her symptoms. She was exhausted couldn’t get out of bed etc, we thought, oh my god I bet her cortisol has flatlined, no it was the opposite it was very sky-high so this is why you know you listen to a podcast you think, oh I’ve got low cortisol I’m tired I’m gonna go take a bunch of licorice, no way if we would have given that to that girl with high cortisol we would have made her blood pressure go up she would have had more anxiety more panic so this is why you have to test you don’t want to guess with this stuff you really want to get the data, maybe we should talk about that now do you think we should move on to testing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah so I would say off the bat right we got to make sure the guts functioning well right the absorption of these nutrition where inflammation kind of gets into the bloodstream and goes to the brain really depends a lot on gut inflammation so good high-quality stool testing. I know we talked about doing the GI map task we like there’s a couple others that we do as well but if someone wants to dig in deeper to the gut we have to really fully assess that.
Evan Brand: Yeah so the guts huge urine I mean you’re in great we test for micro toxins through urine we test for chemicals we test for amino acid metabolism we test for bacterial overgrowth and Candida which can affect the mood so getting a urine test will be key and then getting the saliva adrenal test or a urine I don’t know do you do salivary adrenals anymore are you just doing urine
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know sometimes salivary adrenals but I’ve been liking the urinary metabolites because I see a lot of women that have a hard time metabolizing estrogen, so it’s nice to be able to run that one because I can also see how they’re metabolizing the hormones too. So that totally helps if you’re a female and you have estrogen dominant issues. So I maintain a new right estrogen dominance right that that ratio of progesterone estrogen drops right progesterone and estrogen drop like this. Meaning everything drops but progesterone drops faster so it’s nice to be able to see that because that can be a big mood issue – remember progesterone is a natural GABA chloride channel opener meaning we can promote GABA in the brain with healthy levels of progesterone so part of your GABA issue could be lower progesterone as a woman and also progesterone is very anti-inflammatory in the brain even with men with like concussions or any brain trauma they’ll give a couple hundred milligrams of progesterone for a few days after brain trauma to actually curtail the inflammation in the brain, so progesterone is very anti-inflammatory because of its cortisol building block effects of progesterone can help brain inflammation in brain trauma.
Evan Brand: Now let’s go a little further then are you talking supplementing progesterone, are you taking, doing some of these specialized maca extracts to help regulate progesterone estrogen?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Both no, but it depends on how bad it is. If it’s slightly out of balance we always lean to herbs and diet and natural components, if it’s significantly out of balance will use the bioidentical plant base and we’ll dosed it accordingly to accelerate the results.
Evan Brand: Okay and then like estrogen dominance, you’re talking removing plastics removing phthalates and other things from the makeup and environment. Plus maybe you’re gonna be throwing in some herbs to help regulate that maybe like the do you pronounce it ___[29:41]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah ___[29:42] more gonna help on the testosterone side, but on the inside we would do more like calcium to ___[29:47] and all methane, fiber. Right these things are really helpful also there’s some some seed protocols where they’ll, do they’ll, do what’s the seed-
Evan Brand: Alpha linoleic acid omega-3 flax
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah exceed in the first half of the cycle so f for first half of the cycle and then typically a lot of sesame seeds for the second half of the cycle F &S; sometimes they’ll throw some pumpkin seed in there as well and that can help bind up some of the estrogen metabolites too.
Evan Brand: Oh interesting I was going to say I was reading some studies over the weekend about detoxing mycotoxins and actually one of the suggest that things to do was take flaxseed to help bind to toxins so that’s pretty cool it’ll bind the excess estrogen as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I think that’s in our ___[30:36] buying product too isn’t it?
Evan Brand: Yes,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, so that’s really good for mycotoxins and mold and then we already kind of dovetail through the mold mycotoxin coagulate issue it’s in a decreased blood flow so if you have any mold or environmental stuff that could easily be affecting how the blood is flowing to the brain and obviously potentially even getting to the brain and activating those microglial cells – that’s very possible.
Evan Brand: Yeah I’ve got a story people like stories right so we get into the geekiest and then people like zone out on us so here’s a here’s a quick stor.y I was working with a teacher last week she’s in her sixties she’s about to retire and we were discussing her urine test we looked at her urine for mycotoxin. She had a lot of different mold problems and I gave her some of these little plates these little petri dishes and we took him to her school she put him in her classroom. Her classroom came back very moldy and she goes, oh my god. you know this explains why after summer break you know all the teachers leave they come back and she says her and all of her colleagues talk about how they get depressed they get fat they get tired they get anxious etc, when they come back to school. Now obviously people would say, oh it’s just the kids stressing them out, no it’s she’s getting out of the moldy environment. For the summer the mold grows there in the summer they probably don’t run the air conditioners because they’re saving money on budget. during the summer they come back school starts in August or whenever and then they get sick again but luckily in her case she’s retiring so it didn’t matter but this is a real issue with a lot of women in office buildings or school buildings if you, if you feel worse, if you feel more tired, you feel more depressed etc when you go into a certain environment that might not just be the stress of the job or the bad boss this could be a toxin or pollutant in there so you may need to get like a HEPA filter in your classroom or a portable HEPA filter to put on your desk. if you’re in a cubicle and you’ve got people wearing perfume and stuff around you right you may need to try to make yourself have a little healthy bubble if you can’t leave or fix the environment that you have to work in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% also be on top of your environment, so we’ve already done plate testing in your house, in my house, my basement, my new office. And my basement tested great for mold but I’m noticing that the humidity contents going up as we get closer to the summer so like my first two floors it’s like 43 44 % but then my basement where my office is is that 56%. Now the problem is I would run the air conditioning more to knock it down but the problem is it’s already sixty five degrees right now it’s already kind of cool because of you know the nature of basement so because of that because I’m on top of it I’m gonna be getting a whole house dehumidifier. Specific for basement dwellings to remove the humidity from the air that way I don’t have to drop the temperature I can keep the temperature where it’s at and just suck the moisture out of the air and drain it out so based on your feedback, I’m already on top of that and everyone listening, if you have if you have a moldy environment or any environmental symptoms but there are no leaks check the humidity content of your house.
Evan Brand: Yeah it sounds like we’re coming out of left field, like okay we’re talking about GABA supplements now we’re talking about your environment. Your environment it’s a huge piece of I mean, think of how much time you spend indoors, it’s like what ninety five percent of your day. Most people are indoors so the air you breathe can affect your nervous system we know just based on looking at the EPA’s work where they’re sampling the homes that live near highways we know that the pollution from a major highway gets into the home and that actually increases cortisol so you actually have a shorter life span if you live close to a major highway or a busy road or a busy intersection they’ve done. Studies on people that live near four-way stop signs and four-way traffic lights and if you live near those busy intersections the cars are breaking the brake dust gets into the air it goes into your home it contaminates you know your children’s lungs your lungs etc so if you’re in a busy area and even if you’re not in a busier. I mean, here’s the deal, you know I’ve got five acres, I’m out in the country but we still have bad air quality because of the way the wind blows and so when the summer starts heating up the pollutants from the car exhaust will have air quality alert days all the time during the summer so that’s the time where you want air purifiers in your home, in your space. Making sure your airs clean now if you go outside and play sure you’re going to get exposed to the crap, but if you’re in your home you need it to be a sanctuary in terms of free of extra EMF free of mold free of extra humidity free of pollutants you know this is very, very critical especially your bedroom.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% that’s why we recommend also high quality air filtration as well if you go to my site justinhealth.com/ shop, you can click on the recommended products tab and look at some of the products that I recommend, that I personally havem I have multiple same thing. If you go to evanbrand.com and click on his store button, he has similar products that we both recommend and talk about and share with each other but if you guys are enjoying this cause and that’s a great way to support us so you can get great products we’ve already tested for y’all.
Evan Brand: Yep, yeah we’ve got like four different brain. I’m always experimenting so we’re trying to get you the best of the best. There’s a lot of crap out there like if you go to Target or Walmart and you go buy a air purifiers thats better than nothing, yes, but is it the best of the best? Probably not, no.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Evan Brand: You get what I pay for you, get what you pay for. You can go buy a $50 HEPA filte.r but you know, I buy more like $500 HEPA filters but they’re you know they’re built like a tank and they’re quality so-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah it’s kind of we are getting like almost a surgical base kind of air filtration.
Evan Brand: Yeah it’s like a hospital in my house in terms of the, the air purity not the not the Candida everywhere on the walls that is affecting people. Have you read about that the candida like ___[36:06] outbreak? It’s very dangerous.
Yes, yes I’ve seen that it’s pretty bad.
Evan Brand:Hhospitals don’t know what to do. I mean they’re, they’re running out of options, you know the antifungal drugs are not working.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah they need to be using more silver and probably even more specific probiotics because I think a lot of these Candida things are coming potentially from people post antibiotic supplementation or post probiotic prescription so I think the components big also, I know surgically my mom’s a surgical nurse for 45 years they’re using a lot more silver, now they’re wrapping all joints in like a silver cellophane after surgery to prevent MRSA an issue, so silver is already being used at that surgical level.
Evan Brand: Good, good yeah we still need more help though, I mean when the center Disease Control says, hey basically don’t even go in a hospital unless you have to, I mean, that’s pretty scary.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah like if I have to go somewhere, I’m, I’m calling a doctor and going directly in paying cash or I’m going to an urgent care place where you’re kind of in and out versus the conventional ER forget about.
Evan Brand: It, it’s just not it’s just not safe so you know obviously the, the hospitals are there sometimes we have to go there but when we’re talking about mood related issues. I mean you could have something as simple as a panic attack, you think you’re dying because if a panic attack you go to the ER and then they go run a bunch of tests on you and send you home with anxiety prescription and nothing was wrong and now you expose yourself to all these pathogens in the hospital and you come home more sick than you went in that’s just not a good thing to do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, yeah, 100% same, and today was a great podcast, is there anything else you want to, to the show here?
Evan Brand: The last thing blood sugar. We’ve done so many we always talk about blood sugar but I just forgot to mention it because when we talking anxiety, mood issues there’s so many pieces of the puzzle when I feel low, if I feel depressed, if I feel anxious, if I feel like oh my heart’s starting to race a little bit, I’ll go prick my finger and sometimes I’m at – at like a 68 on my alt my glucose. Is just too low I’m getting that adrenaline response which is driving anxiety so I mean, don’t you know we got so many people practicing intermittent fasting and doing low carb diets etc, and these people depending on the, the stress and their life they may be less tolerable of lower carb less tolerable of intermittent fasting meaning a intermittent fasting was too stressful so I just currently don’t do it and I was noticing that I felt more anxious on those fasts and so for me blood sugar stability is a huge component.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep I 100% agree and if you guys are liking this content give us the thumbs up, smash that like button and hit the bell as well so you can get notifications. I’ll be doing a live thyroid reset summit QA for all the people that were involved in the thyroid summit so if you guys are enjoying this I am set to go live here another 40 minutes we’ll be taking only thyroid Q&A; topics anyone listening to this as well head over to thyroid reset. Some of oumake sure you subscribe there as well. Evan, anything else?
Evan Brand: Our plugs people have these issues every day all day these are things we work with every day all day ,so if you want help from Justin please reach out to his website justinhealth.com you can schedule a call from around the world. For me my site is evanbrand.com. We don’t care who you work with as long as you get the help you need we’re just happy to be, a be of service to you guys.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah 99.9% of people that we help be never either me cuz they get access to our free content and they start utilizing it and then some need you know deeper more hand-holding and deeper assessment so that’s why we’re here and glad that everyone is enjoying the podcast and we’ll be back. Evan take care
Evan Brand: You too, take care bye
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care, bye.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqKqHwkdOpc
Dirty Cure for Depression (No Really, It’s Dirt!)
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Rates of depression have been skyrocketing. Teen depression rates leaped by more than 60% over the course of only three years. As a society, our mental and physical health is seriously declining. While feeling unhappiness, dissatisfaction or loneliness every so often is completely normal; prolonged periods of these negative feelings takes a real toll on our lives.
Question: When was the last time you got dirty?
No, really, when did you last go outside and bury your feet in the ground or pick veggies straight from the garden?
We live sterile lives indoors. Hand sanitizer and antibacterial soap are never more than a few steps away, and we clean our homes with germ-killing sprays and sanitizers. But what would you say if I told you that research conducted in recent years has revealed that the bacteria and microbes in dirt can aid in enhancing your immune system and boosting your mood?! Let’s further explore the mental and physical benefits of getting dirty.
Dirt Throughout Time
Studies show that children who reside on farms have a significant reduction in allergies, asthma, and gut-associated ailments when compared to children who grow in more sterile environments. This is recognized as “the Farm-Effect,” which links low microorganism exposure to a high vulnerability for developing allergies by limiting the natural progress of our immune system.
If you think about it, it makes sense. For hundreds of thousands of years, we have coexisted with bacteria and microbes and lived lives outdoors. Babies crawl, which in paleolithic times, would have meant spending a lot of time in the dirt! (Plus, babies have a knack for sticking things in their mouth.) Throughout the course of time, until recent times that is, tiny humans had constant daily access to the dirt and all sorts of other microorganisms that boost the immune system and influence gut bacteria. We all require little dirt in our existing lives.
Dirt, Soil Microbes, and Depression
Soil microbes such as Mycobacterium vaccae have been studied for their serotonin-boosting and anti-depressant effects on the brain. Serotonin deficiency has been linked to mood issues including anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In a study conducted on lung cancer patients, the patients were injected with Mycobacterium vaccae, afterward reporting less anxiety and an enhanced quality of life.
Click here to work with a functional medicine doctor for help boosting your mood, naturally!
Ready to Get Dirty?
The microorganisms living in our natural environment have positive effects on our mood, immune system, and more! Below are some of the other top reasons to go outside and connect with nature:
- Reduced blood pressure
- Lowered anxiety
- Boosted cognitive function: Being outside engages your senses. Your brain gets a boost as it works to problem-solve and memorize your environment.
- Reduced rheumatoid arthritis symptoms
- Anti-inflammatory effects
- If you’re playing outside in the dirt, the sunlight is helping you manufacture Vitamin D, and regulates your circadian rhythm, which means better sleep!
- Children who spend more time playing outside are more courageous, energetic, and imaginative!
Human Microbiome
The growing body of research on the human microbiome continually points to the impact of microbes on our long-standing health. Despite being invisible to the naked eye, millions of microscopic bacteria and microbes exist on your skin and in your gut. These bacteria have vital roles in everything from controlling your mood, to the development of diseases like arthritis and diabetes.
Outdoors as a Cure for Depression
Science knows that microbes in the natural world play a vital role in our health. Several antibiotics (like penicillin) are manufactured from the microbes that originate in the dirt.
The majority of the healthy bacteria our bodies benefit from are found in soil. Children flourish when they are allowed to play outside, but us grownups can get some fun nature time too! Gardening is a hobby that keeps on giving. Reap all the benefits of spending time outside in the sun, fresh air, and dirt. Plus, if you grow organic berries yourself, you can eat them fresh from the garden (without washing) knowing they’re safe and more health-packed than anything you’d buy on the shelf at the grocery store.
As the paleo diet and lifestyle movement carries on, researchers are beginning to take a look at re-establishing the relationship between humans and the earth. Research is ongoing, and the antidepressant effects of getting outside back up what gardeners have been saying for years: gardening is better than therapy and good for the soul!
References:
- http://www.nbcnews.com/id/18082129/ns/health-livescience/t/soil-bacteria-can-boost-immune-system/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22892709
- https://upliftconnect.com/science-finds-soil-help-depression/
- https://www.livescience.com/7270-depressed-play-dirt.html
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809917301492
- https://qz.com/993258/dirt-has-a-microbiome-and-it-may-double-as-an-antidepressant/
- https://www.everydayhealth.com/depression/major-depression-rates-surge/
Peri-Menopause and Female Hormone Balance Solutions | Podcast #213
Peri-menopause can be hard on some women. It brings fatigue, mood swings and sleep troubles, a stressful transition that can last for months or years before menopause.
In today’s podcast, Dr. Justin Marchegiani explains the process of peri-menopausal stage and its effect to the body. Learn how the lowering levels of progesterone make one’s system more estrogen-dominant, the different issues brought by peri-menopause especially stress, mood issues, hot flashes, depression. Also, learn how to minimize its effect. Continue for more and don’t forget to share. Sharing is caring!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
02:26 Adrenal Gland
04:31 Female Hormone Cycle
07:31 Hormone Physiology 101
26:27 Stress Response Buffering
12:35 Effects of Estrogen Exposure to Men
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys! It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani, welcome to today’s podcast. Uh, congratulations to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, great go- not really a great game on the offensive side, great defensive game. Uh, 6 superbowl victory for Tom. And I did a podcast on Tom’s performance secrets 2 weeks ago which become even more pertinent today based off of his victory. He is officially the go- greatest of all time. So, really good uhm- to go back and revisit that podcast, lots of good insights in regards to sleep, in regard to hydration, in regards to nutrition, reducing inflammation, uh various training techniques, all these things I think are, a conglomerate of tools that uh- Tom uses to improve his performance, heal fast and keep his uh, pliability and performance up the uh- at the, you know, at the highest age possible. Really, to be a successful quarterback in the NFL, it’s pretty amazing.
So, today, we’re gonna open it up here for uhm… here, I kinda like- maybe a little live podcast here. Anyone wants to chime-in in these specific topics they want me to go into today, we can just choose a topic and just go off the cup and go live. I’m on Facebook as well so, feel free and check in with me on any of these mediums here so far. I’m gonna dive in one topic here today. We’ll go in on peri-menopause. So peri-menopause is really interesting. This is the kind of the phenomenon where you’re in this transition time of going into full menopause or- typically peri-menopause is just starting to miss some periods, you’re maybe in your mid- ty- typically upper 40s. Usually menopause starts between 48 to 51 and it can take 10 years, meaning the symptoms that you deal with during menopause, that can take up to 10 years sometimes. The hot flashes, the mood issues, the depression, uh anxiety, uhm those type of sleep issues, scrappy skin, all those things can kind of con- you know, consolidate and happen over a long period of time. Typically, peri-menopause is that- one year. Once you get in the menopause- menopause typically is like, once you’re been no cycle for 12 months. So, peri-menopause is this in-between time where skipping cycles, maybe you have a period every 4 months, or 6 months, or you’re kinda lost your cycle regularity, you know, fertility may not quite be there, you may not be ovulating as much- uhm- you start to see your cycles just getting more and more irregular, typically in you’d mid- typically upper 40s when that starts to happen.
Now, what do we do about that? So, first thing is, make sure you’re not getting exposed to toxic hormones in your foods or in the environment. That’s number 1. Uh, number 2, the biggest hijacker of your hormones is gonna be your stress hormones, A.K.A. cortisol and adrenaline. So it’s really important that you get your adrenals looked at if you’re worried about peri-menopause because, DHEA Sulfate, this is the major sex hormone precursor that’s made by your adrenal glands. This is actually coming from your adrenals and it’s a precursor to make more estriol in women. It can go more testosterone in men. But estriol is that predominant estrogen that you’re gonna have when you start becoming more menopausal. Typically when you’re cycling and fertile, it’s more estradiol, E-2, the “di” is kinda- right, 2. And then estriol, or the TRI, that prefix for 3. So you start to make more estriol, and that’s gonna be more anticancer. It’s gonna be- it’s have some really good anti-aging benefits. Estriol’s really important for hydration, that’s why low estriol- low estriol can- can create vaginal dryness. It’s also a really good anti-inflammatory, it really helps with brain inflammation. This is why a lot of mood issues and brain fog and cognitive issues start as you become more and more uhm- peri-menopausal into menopause.
So we have to look at the adrenal glands, that’s number 1. Because these adrenals make DHEA, also cortisol hijacks your hormones. Cortisol increases blood sugar, and also decreases protein synthesis, meaning, you have less protein going to build up your brain chemicals and build up your muscle tissue, and that protein is primarily running through gluconeogenesis where it’s shredding up that protein and making more glucose out of it. That’s what stressed us. People get more flabby, they get more cellulite because of cortisol. Breaks down connected tissue, and it breaks down amino acids. So, your- getting your adrenals looked at is really important.
Uh, number 2 is looking at your female hormones as many women as they go more into peri-menopause, they become more estrogen-dominant. And the reason why is, because we talked cortisol hijacking, your hormones- it does so, ’cause it pulls progesterone downstream to make your stress hormone. So this is important. The more stressed you get, the more you deplete progesterone, that puts you more into an estrogen-dominant state. Typically, we have more progesterone than estrogen. It’s about a 20 to 25 to 1 ratio progesterone to estrogen, and when you start going estrogen-dominant, people think, “Oh, that means estrogen goes higher”. No, it just means there’s ratio, it starts to drop. So you still may have more progesterone, there’s that ratio drops down a little bit, and you start to see estrogen creep up, but you may not see estrogen ever go above progesterone. Just keep that in the back of your mind. That’s gets commonly confused.
So we have the progesterone there. And typically, when cortisol’s prolonged, this also affects the HPA, H-P-A-T, H-P-A-T-G-G: hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, gonadal, gut access. So it affects that feedback loop from the brain, and the hypothalamus and the pituitary ups- upstairs to that feedback loop of the glands secreting hormones downstairs. And this is important, so we start to see cortisol rhythm operations. The cortisol rhythm starts fluctuating. We start to see it in women with their cycle operations. A lot of times we just see a lot of PMS or the extreme PMS is PMDD, which is that week or so, before you actually menstruate or bleed. And then we also see a lot of- a lot of times, sometimes shorter cycles, going from 28 to 26 to 24 to 22. So we start to have a shorter luteal phase, just really important ’cause your luteal phase is that primary phase where you’re making more progesterone. So we do test while we actually look at progesterone every other day for a full cycle. And one of the things we’ll start to see is, your overall progesterone that you make throughout the whole month, typically should be above that 3000 marker so, it starts to drop. You start to see it drop. And that’s big, ’cause that’s kind of like looking at your overall progesterone sum, we start to see it drop, and a lot of times that can happen when you compress that luteal phase when you shorten it, ’cause you just have less days where you’re even making progesterone. Uhm, that’s a big one. So we start to see cycle aberrations there, we could see a shorter luteal phase, we could see a longer follicular phase, we may be out of sync, or we’re not ovulating at that right time and your ovulation could be totally off, or maybe you’re not even ovulating. ‘Cause, you know, to have that good ovulation to signal, we need a- [clears throat] a rise in estrogen followed by rise in progesterone and then estrogen kinda pitters out while progesterone stays high and drops. This is kind of our typical rhythm, and how women’s cycle work. So, just kinda first thing that happens, those gotta- kind of hormone physiology 101.
So, we start off by menstruating. That menstruation is typically signaled by a drop in progesterone and estrogen. First thing, progesterone and estrogen drop. That’s step 1. 2, menstruation happens after that, that’s the shedding of the uterine lining. We want brighter blood that’s more oxygenated, more fresh, for starting to see browner, thicker kind of clottier stuff, it just could be- uhm- the uterine lining from previous cycles that didn’t flush out. So, 1, drop in progesterone and estrogen, 2, menstruation, that’s gonna happen for a few days, anywhere between 3 to 7 days, okay? We don’t wanna go more than 3 to 4 tampons per day on average. For our average high, is if not we lose too much blood, we go hemorrhagic, we go anemic because of that. Step 2 is FSH starts to increase. FSH is our brain hormone, follicle stimulating hormone. That FSH start to make the follicle grow a little bit. That follicle starts to produce estrogen. Estrogen starts to rise, right? As estrogen starts to rise, that starts to signal luteinizing hormone, which is our other brain hormone that talks to our ovaries. And then progesterone starts to rise typically around day 12 to 13 after that. So here we are at day 12 or 13, estrogen’s kinda topped out, that signals LH, then we have progesterone going up like this. So progesterone’s going up, and then at some point, estrogen starts to fall again, progesterone stays up, and then around day 28, they crash together and that signals the whole entire step again.
So, drop in estrogen progesterone, signals bleeding, FSH, increases, FSH creates more estrogen, more estrogen creates more LH, more LH creates progesterone, estrogen starts to drop, progesterone stays high, estrogen and progesterone drop and then signal bleeding at the end. So that’s kind of a general uhm, cycle physiology 101, Most people are clueless about that. When I talk to a woman, I say, “Hey how long is your cycle?”, the biggest kind of common misconception, “Oh, it’s 3 days or it’s 7 days”, like no, not your menstruation, your full cycle. Your cycle is from day 1, first day of bleeding to next day 1, typically 28 days later. Uhm- most people get that confused your cycles, your full hormonal rhythm, day 1 to day 1, how much you menstruate is gonna be your- your bleeding, your period time so to speak. Hope that helps. That’s a common misconception.
Alright, so we talked about adrenals, we talked about our female hormone cycle, we talked about hormones in the environment toxins. These things are really important because they disrupt, they put more stress on our metabolism to be our- to be our detoxification system to be able to metabolize hormones. Gut functions’ so important because this is where we absorb a lot of the nutrients from our food to make our hormones, right? Hormones are made from good cholesterol, right, it goes cholesterol pregnant alone and then 27 different hormones that spit out on the stress side, on the mineralocorticoid side and on- then on the anabolic estrogen progesterone, testosterone side. So we- we need to be able to absorb these nutrients so we can make our hormones. We need to be able to absorb nutrients to help buffer the stress response. Magnesium, L-Theanine, GABA, they help us buffer that stress response so we could- think of it as like, imagine buying a car where you can only shift it from first gear to second to third or fourth, fourth to fifth. So, all you can do is bring that car up from low to high but you can’t downshift. And a lot of people are in this place where they cannot downshift their metabolic car, so they constantly feel stressed, they cannot ever bring it down from fifth gear back to first gear. And this is one of the biggest issue- biggest issues we see, and if we can’t absorb our good amino acids, and- and- and make our good inhibitory nerves, transmitters like GABA, through L-Theanine, through magnesium, through dopamine through serotonin, we’re gonna have problems. And typically, this starts to mess up sleep. Starts to mess up our melatonin cortisol rhythm which is the next step. And that’s gonna be basically- melatonin goes up at night, cortisol goes down at night. We have this inverse relationship – melatonin up, cortisol down, right? We get this big “X”. And when cortisol stays high at night time, it disrupts sleep, it prevents melatonin from coming up. Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant, it’s powerful anti-cancer, it’s very anabolic, it helps you heal, recover, turn-over your neurotransmitter successfully and heal your body, ’cause you really tap into ’em, make a lot of your growth hormone in that first half of the night, 10:00PM to 2:00AM. So we wanna be asleep so we can plug in and access that growth hormone.
Okay, so we got our rhythm, cortisol, adrenals, digestion, absorption, and then also, the amino acids that we absorb through our digestive system, also help run our detoxification system. So, we wanna stop the toxins on one side, not drink out of plastics, not consume pesticides, consume organic, right, get, you know, higher quality step-4, step-5, if we’re using the whole food, step-method works, more grass-fed, pasture-fed, organic, the whole nine yards that’s gonna help us make more of the nutrients, absorb more of the nutrients where we can actually detoxify as well.
And then we talked about those hormones helping with sleep, helping to buffer stress. Uh, very-very important components to female hormone health, as well as make hormone health. Uhm- males really get the sure end of the stick, because there’s a lot of estrogens in the environment, you don’t have a lot of synthetic androgens in the environment, so men really get clavier because when men get a whole bunch of estrogen exposure, it starts to inhibit LH. LH is that upstream hormone in the brain that talks to the gonads, right? With the uh- the cells lay dig in the testicles to make more estrogen… I’m sorry, to make more testosterone so that estrogen disrupts that signal. Now we don’t talk to our testicles to make more testosterones, it starts to inhibit that. And it’s a- it’s a really a vicious cycle. With women, they just become more estrogen dominant, which is a good, that starts to mug their cycle. With men, it starts to decrease testosterone. And you start to see things like gynecomastia – man boobs. Uhm, maybe guys even being overly emotional because they’re- it starts throwing off testosterone-estrogen balance as well. So that’s gonna affect their mood and- and focus on- on the male side as well. And of course for the woman, it- it causes same things, ’cause they can create more PMS which can create irritability, breast ___[13:48], back pain, moodiness, irritability, sleep issue, all those things that you know, women do not like. And men don’t like them either, of course. It’s a two-way cycle in that for sure.
So we think we hit all the major things. I’m gonna open it up to questions, primarily on the peri-menopause, female hormone side of the fence. And again, this is total live podcast here. Uhm- again, I just- I interject a lot of clinical information ’cause I work with patients in the trenches. So if you have any of these issues and you wanna dive in, click below to make sure you subscribe, hit the bell, and schedule a consult with me and my staff. Let’s see what kind of questions we have here off the bat. Try to keep it pertinent on the topic if you can.
Alright, let’s see here. Uh, “How bad- how can a bad gut affect hormone?”. So it’s going to affect the two-wa- oh, couple of ways. We absorb all of our nutrients to create our hormones to our gut. Number 2, we absorb the nutrients to our gut to help us detoxify – number 2. And then number 3, dysbiotic bacteria increases an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase. And beta-glucuronidase, uhm deconjugates estrogen. So we have an estrogen molecule right? It is floating in our bloodstream, we conjugate it, we bind it to a protein, to escort it out of the body. It’s kinda like, hey guys in the night club, whatever rock and rowdy, security guard comes up, like puts the guys hands behind his back and like escorts him, out of the club, right? That’s kind of, when you conjugate, think about as putting- err- handcuffs on that rowdy hormone. And de-conjugation is just someone coming around with a handcuff key, and uncuffing each person, right? Think- that’s what’s happening with dysbiotic bacteria… dysbiotic bacteria, bad bacterial overgrowth, increases beta-glucuronidase, then we have the- the handcuffs, are taken off the hormone, and they can be rowdy again. So those are the big 3 ways that can affect that.
Okay, excellent. Any other questions, feel free- uhm, feel free and chime in. I’m- I’m more than like- I’m more than willing to answer any more questions. Okay. I think we hit all the major things here. Try to think of anything else we can do. Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa, awesome… Tssssss… ‘Kay. “What’s a good mindset to have when you are feeling hard bowel, and of crohn’s flare up right now?” So, ob- obviously, gut issues can affect hormone health too, right? So question is, how did it happen? I want to feel like I’m in control of the vicious cycle. I wanna know what the heck happened. So, I wanna look back and at least gain control over how I gotten into this flare up. Maybe the first thing I wanna know. And the second thing is what actions are you gonna take to get out of that flare up? So, feel free and check video 2 to 3 weeks ago on how to, you know, reverse an autoimmune condition flare. Take a look at that video. I go over a lot of good steps that are needed to- to be addressed.
Uhm, “Is fatty liver curable? What supplements would you recommend to help?”. So, yeah, it is, I mean, it’s typically gonna be a combination of insulin resistance. And insulin resistance has a major effect on female hormones. How? Because high amounts of insulin, are going to up-regulate specific enzymes that can increase androgens in women. So that can really throw off androgens, and then of course high amounts of androgens can- can mess up proactive, and prolactin can screw up uhm, estrogen and progesterone, right? So, this is a really, you know, concerning thing. So, high fructose, corn syrup, insulin-resistance are gonna be the big things that are going to cause that.
Uhm, “Thoughts on IF in regaining cycles, avoiding IF until cycle returns”. So, uhm- typically, what I would recommend, is that you do not engage in any intermittent fasting until you get your hormones back and under control. Not eating food for a long periods of time can actually be a stressor on your hormones. ‘Cause we need nutrition to run our metabolic systems. But if you are more stressed, it- it may be too much stress on your body avoiding these foods, these nutrients. ‘Cause then, longer periods of time may cause your adrenals to make more cortisol, and adrenaline and gluconeogenesis to regulate your blood sugar. The more stressed you’re at, uhm- the more stressed you’re at, the better you’re going to absor- the more stressed you are, the more gluconeogenesis, the more you’re gonna rely in other hormones to pick up your blood sugar. If those hormonal systems are weaker, you’re essentially gonna need more of those other systems to pick it up. Now, by eating and stabilizing your blood sugar, that’s gonna take stress off those hormonal systems that are weaker, and give them the chance to get stronger. It’s kinda equivalent if you break your ankle. You walk around on crutches for a bit, the goal of walking around on crutches is going to be to take weight off your ankle so it can heal.
Alright, excellent. Very good. Uhm, “Can low progesterone in ladies cause low libido?” It definitely can. Low progesterone can definitely cause, uhm, low libido in ladies. Uh- lot of times it’s just the estrogen dominants that starts to pick up, that can be the big issue.
Uh, Samuel writes in “Hey doc, been drinking a little more alcohol recently due to football games and hunting season, seems to have messed up my circadian rhythm a bit. Uh- what would you recommend for a reset?”. Uhm, more than likely, I would just stop with the uhm- stop with the alcohol kind of down a bit. You could do more vitamin-C and more sulfur amino acids, uhm, to help your body heal.
Excellent. Uh, let’s see here. Any other questions? Barbara Scott writes in, “Could chronic muscle pain impart of the menopause phase of life?”. Well, yeah, I mean, it definitely could. I mean, it’s very possible that, uhm, your adrenals are weaker, and then that’s gonna help- that’s gonna impair your body’s ability to manage inflammation well. It’s very possible. Uh, a lot your hormones have really good anti-inflammatory fats-progesterone estrogen, it just depends on what the root cause is. Did it happen from food? Did it happen from… uhm- stress? Did it happen from poor sleep? So, I wanna get a- a window in what the heck is happening there as well.
Okay, excellent. Let me keep on rolling here. Uh, “Can a hair analysis tell you a lot of accurate info?” Uh, I think a hair analysis can potentially give you some good info, the problem is, it’s all downstream information because all those nutrients that get into your hair, the half that come in through the gut. So if you have impaired gut issues, that’s going to affect what’s in the hair. So if people are looking at the hair, they’re looking at all these different mineral ratios in the hair, but if we have a gut issue, I consider that to be a lot more upstream.
Uh, “What’s the best way to balance out estrogen and progesterone in ladies?”. So, off the bat, uhm- you gotta at what the underlying reason is. Is there toxicity issues, number 1? Is there uh, absorption issues in the gut, number 2? What’s your adrenal strength at, number 3? How is your hormonal rhythm, number 4? And then I also wanna look at just uhm, you know, exposure to conventional, uhm hormones in the food. Those are all gonna be big ones, they’re off the bat.
Ugh, let me just see if I can continue to do that. “Tom Brady’s a beast last night”, not in- actually, all I had during the game was one kombucha, during the game, I got some keto-cups which are like one gram of sugar, uh- coconut, like peanut butter cups but that uses coconut oil instead. And then I had a pizza which is a cauliflower crusted, and then I use the dial almond cheese. So that was the big one that I had there.
Uh, “What would you recommend to naturally treats- treat sinus-headaches brought on by cold?” So, if you go to my site, and look at recommended products, justinhealth.com/shop, and then you look at recommended products. I have a couple of links to amazon products that I like for that. I like either a combination of the nasaline or a sinus- just injector, and essentially uhm, the Xlear Sinus Rinse. I think that works really good. The NeilMeds, good but the Xlear has a lot of the xylitol in there, which is great at killing different kinds of bacteria and also flushing things out, and it’s really helpful with that post-nasal drip as well.
Uhm, I think we hit a lot of good things here. JACK ATTACK writes in, “How do you feel about citrus pectin?”. Well on the context of hormones and peri-menopause, it’s really good at binding up a lot of these metabolized hormones that may have a problem getting escorted out, and it kinda puts the handcuff back on these hormones to help it escort outside the- of the body. So I think it really helps with detoxification of hormones. Thanks Jack, appreciate it.
“I’m an active 30-year-old male on a paleo diet suffering from bloating, loose stools every morning, find myself wanting to eat more starchy vegetables for energy.” Yeah, so I mean, that’s kind of a broad statement, but in general, I would look at the gut and figure out what- uh, the next step is there because the gut needs to be addressed.
Okay, try to keep all questions related to the topic of peri-menopause. Uhm, that’d be super helpful for me so I know what’s going on. ‘Kay, very good… Anything else guys? What else is going on? “What cauliflower crust pizza did you do?”. It’s a local place by my house that- that does an organic cauliflower crusted pizza, I’m not sure the actual brand. Uhm, and I did the diet cheese. So it’s kinda lower carb too which is nice, so, I don’t get all bunch of a carbs either, feel pretty good afterwards too which is nice.
Alright guys, hope everything’s going well. Make sure you guys subscribe over to my thyroid reset summit, thyroidresetsummit.com, we’re going live in a month. We got a whole bunch of free stuff I’m giving out as well. I’m giving out the first like, 25% of my thyroid book. So, really excited for that get out. Hopefully it’ll provide a lot of great information. Everything I try to put out there s- I wanted to be action-oriented, so you guys can use it to actually start getting better. I help more people through my content than I actually do in person. Obviously, you know, having a personal relation, if you can’t substitute that, but this is a great way to get good information out to people here. So, make sure you sign up.
“Best lab to discern HA versus early menopause?”. Uhm, can you define what HA is? Uhm, much or- I mean, it’s probably something very common. I just- give me what that meaning is there…
Uhm, “What’s the difference between ox bile and bile used by conventional docs…”, uh- I think you mean “urso… “, uh- I’m not sure how you pronounce that – ursodeoxycholic acid. So typically, a lot of bile- ox-bile’s typically used as a bile salt supplementation when they take it from oxes or- I think bovine sources it sounds like, and they’re using that supplement as wise. Now, my line and Liver Supreme, we will use bile salts, we will use beet roots, we will use… uhm- french tree, or ___[24:47], things that are really supportive for the liver, supportive for the gallbladder, thinning out the bile, and then we’ll also help provide uhm- extra bile as well because if we can’t break down our fats, typically we’re gonna have a hard time breaking down our cholesterol, right? And if we can’t break down our cholesterol, that’s gonna really hurt our hormones. This is a really important question ’cause if you’re dealing with peri-menopause, this may significantly affect your hormones not being able to break down good quality fats.
Uhm, so- “Hypoth- hypothalamic- hypothalamic amenorrhea versus early menopause?”. Okay, so amenorrhea. So amenorrhea is like you’re still in that cycling age, it’s premature, you’re not having your period, okay? I have a woman who is 40 years old, uhm, this last couple months, started to get her period back. I see that happen many times, she wants to have a second child. Her period’s back for the first time in two years. Why does that happen? It’s a combination of typically poor gut issues, you’re typically under- you’re getting underneath nutrition, and it can be a combination that you’re not eating enough, or you’re not breaking down and absorbing enough. And then of course, all of the hormonal stress that compound for math, ’cause of course that creates adrenal issues, and that creates female hormone issues, and that detoxification issues ’cause if you don’t absorb, then you can’t run- put the nutrients in and run detoxification systems as well. Uh, so best labs to discern that, I mean, you wanna run a high-quality month-long test, and then also want to run some blood work and also some uhm- some adrenal testing as well. So you’d wanna dig in, find a good functional medicine doc to get that set up for ‘ya.
Oh, great to hear Irma, glad you’re registered, awesome. Uh, another great question just came in here. Try to keep it to the female hormones today guys… Uhm, “If I see anything remotely sad or happy tears, is that an estrogen issue? Will that affect gut health?” So, it’s hard to say, is this a- a guy you asking this question or female? Uhm, but, yeah, definitely, hormonal imbalances can affect the emotions. And you know, it’s gonna be- you’re gonna be looking for that change in emotions, maybe more emotional’s typically what you’re gonna see, but yeah, that can definitely have major effects on your emotions as well.
Nora writes in. Hey Nora, “Got acne around my jaw since June 2018. Last consult you asked if I had started doing anything different around that time but I didn’t recall. Later I found I re-introduced some thyroid support for hypothyroidism around that time. Since tests show no more hypothyroidism now, is it okay to stop the ‘Thyro balance’?”. Uhm, so in general Nora, we’d wanna make sure that we’re testing your hormones on the thyroid side, and as you’re dropping that down, we’d wanna make sure that your hormo- your TSH stays within a good functional range, as well as your hormones stand a functional range. So, it’s not something you’d wanna just drop out by itself, you’d- you’d wanna test you, and make sure as we drop it out, there could be, you know, that you’re doing good there. And then regarding any jaw acne that happens, I mean, we’d want to make sure number 1, insulin is okay, right? Insulin’s good. Uhm, ’cause if you’re doing too much insulin that’s gonna drive more androgens and then that’s gonna activate the sebaceous glands to make more oil, and that can cause the acnes. So we wanna make sure insulin’s good, wanna make sure detoxification’s really good. So- and for me to add in more sulfur amino acids and detoxifying support to run those systems, that’s good. Number 3, potentially various fibers to help bind up some of these junks so it gets or- escorted out your gut better, and then I would say number 3, if we’re still having issues you may wanna add in some prostate glanding support like black currant seed oil, and email my office if we- if we- I don’t have your protocol up in here in front of me yet, so when patients ask me about questions here, I- I may be having some incomplete info to go off of, so if we haven’t added any black currant seed oil, we may wanna do that to help with the prosta gland and then some help with the jaw issue. And the next thing will be to- to retest your hormones with the DUTCH test to look at also how you’re metabolizing your estrogens to make sure that’s getting better. But don’t adjust anything until we chat.
Yeah, vitex is gonna be a great hormone- a great herbal support, A.K.A chastry, that’s gonna be really good at helping progesterone balancing for sure, really good.
Uh, “After getting through menopause does one need to stay on additional hormone help continually through life?”. It really depends. So what I recommend is get all your hormones symptoms under controlled, number 1. Test your hormones, make sure your adrenals and your female hormones are relatively good, uhm, from lab-testing standpoint based on your age. And then I recommend gently tapering down your hormones and see how well you do. See if you can keep your symptoms, your menopausal, se- was under control, sleeping good, your mood’s good, vaginal dryness is okay, brain fog’s good, and if you can maintain that benefit while dropping that bioidentical hormone support, that may be an option but Barbara, you’d have to deal with that at a consult, and continue to monitor that and keep that dial on going, but that’s a great question.
Okay, great. Uhm… just kinda kind of- come in here guys if I skip your question, don’t take it personal, tryna go to the questions that are most pertinent to this conversation. Zoe-Holistic writes in, “Would you be worried about a 54-year-old woman, still cycling and ovulating? Would you recommend supplementation as a- oestrogen is very high”. It just depends if you’re 54 and you’re still cycling and- and- the cy- cycle’s relatively stable and lengthen, PMS-wise, I wouldn’t too wor- I wouldn’t be too worried, I wanna know more about your parents and this is something that your sisters or- aunts- aunts, and/or mom or, you know, mom went through as well, our grandparents went through? I wanna know a little more about the history. And doing some testing, right- I think would also be good just to see where your levels are at, I think that’s a really good thing. I’ve- I typically more concerned Zoe with people, uhm, prematurely going into menopause, that’s my bigger concern, that’s the thing I’m seeing these days. But I think it’s always good to get tested.
“Is there a connection between hypoglycemia and adrenal fatigue?”, yes! Great- great question Olga. I see a lot of low-blood sugar symptoms’ really being a big stressor on the adrenals, and then that can create a lot of lower progesterone issues, creates a lot of stress. I definitely see that being a concern.
“What is the average acceptable age for menopause?”, typically 48 to 51-ish.
Ik O, “Best test for progesterone levels?”. I mean, you can run a typical progesterone blood test, you know, we like to be at least 10 to 15 on that, around day 20 of your cycle, right? Considering your cycle being like 26 to 30 days, and/or like a- a good high-quality DUTCH complete panel that we’ll run around day 19 to 22.
Nora, you’re totally welcome. So, email my office if you need that black currant seed oil, I’ll put you on 2 capsules of that twice a day if your skin is still having some issues. Two caps, twice a day and I have a couple recommended brands.
Jessica Lynn writes in, “Does liquid vitamin-C raise estrogen? I read studies say that there’s a connection”. I’m not sure that it would raise it. I will typically give vitamin-C in fiber to actually help with estrogen detoxification, so I don’t think it would raise it, maybe there’s some modulate- maybe there’s some modulation effects, or may help modulate it but I couldn’t imagine it actually raising it, like taking maybe uh, hormone would.
“My kidney pain by eating a honey, age 27, serious problem?”. Uhm, yeah that’s a good question, kinda little off-topic, but in general, I would be careful with the too much fructose.
“Will chaste tree help with progesterone?”. It will, it’s gonna help with LH, luteinizing hormone which is gonna help talk to your- your ovaries, and that kind of female hormone area to make more progesterone?
DesignLover writes in, “Took birth control pills for 1 year for adult acne, it worked. Now I’m 37 and it’s creeping back around the jaw line. Connection to sugar or more estrogen related? Or more cortisol? Also, hard time sleeping.” Now again, like birth control pills can help, even though you’re actually giving more estrogen with the birth control pill, it does kinda level out your hormones, so you’re not getting swings. So, I think a lot of the hormone swings can really be a big effect there so we can kind of level stuff off. But I also see, you know, birth control pills cause more issues. You can see melasma as well, which is the estrogen, kind of stimulates the melanocytes and more pigmentation, you can kind of get that pregnancy mask, while on the birth control pill, and someone that can actually make their acne worse. I’ve seen it on both sides. Is there connection to sugar and more estrogen-related, yeah, there’s definitely a big connection with sugar because sugar will actually increase more insulin. And insulin will create more ___[33:23], which will cause the bacteria to feed off of your skin and create more acne.
“My natural doctor put me on liquid vitamin-C and I’m having short cycle, 26-27 days with very light bleeding and prolonged bleeding”. Yeah, I would need more info, I’d wanna test your hormones, see where you’re at. A lot of my younger female patients will use herbs to help the signaling upstream from the brain to your ovaries and then we’ll also- a lot of times give a little bit of bio-organical progesterone, but we’ll give it in a specific cyclical augmentation fashion while we’ll taper it up and down. But we really wanna be specific in how we do that.
Amelia V writes in, ” If taking T3 you mentioned in past, needing it uh- multi-x-day due to half life. Why am I only- why am I only RX dosage for the AM?” Uhm, so, yeah, if you’re just taking T3, I don’t recommend only taking it in the AM, and like if you’re doing a Cytomel or liothyronine, you’re gonna be dropping off on your- uhm- on your T3 within 4 to 5 hours, so you definitely want to uh, not do it that way. In the thyroid re- reset summit, we had ___[34:26] on the uhm- summit talking about these exact things. So make sure you subscribe thyroidresetsummit.com, make sure you subscribe.
Olga writes in, “Can longtime use of Mirena iud cause energy problems?”. Yeah, Mirena can cause a lot of side effects. Merina is a synthetic progesterone, and there’s an iud to secretes that. So, yeah, it can definitely- I mean, my biggest issue with that is it just kind of seeps in your bloodstream throughout the whole month at least with like, birth control pills, you kinda take a reminder session, you know a 6 to 7 day reminder where you kinda- drop out your hormones and then- and then that can cause bleeding where you kinda have this steady state of hormones with the Merina, which I think’s a little bit unnatural because you don’t have any drop at all. That’s concerning, so- I always recommend my female patients if they want- uhm- an iud to try the ParaGard which is a copper-iud that’s non-hormonal.
Uhm, “‘Can’t miss’ interview from the thyroid summit? What was your favorite interview?”. It’s a great one, I’d had a lot of a really good interview. It’s hard to say which one was the best. It really depends on the topic. ‘Cause we’re really connected the thyroid to the gut, thyroid to the emotions, thyroid to the adrenals, thyroid to fertility, thyroid to female hormones, thyroid to- even male hormones or gut inflammation, or gluten, or autoimmunidase. So those, you know, it- it was so many different areas, it’s really hard to say.
Paul writes in, “In menopause, how to stop hot flashes?”. Well, a lot of times, the hot flashes can be from a lot of these upstream hormones in the brain like FSH going really high. ‘Cause think of the ovaries, right? Your brain makes hormones that talks to the ovaries to make more hormone, more female hormone. So, as the brain- as the ovaries aren’t, you know, don’t have the follicles coming in, and we’re not making as much hormone, the brain is trying to rev up the volume that talk to the uhm, downstream glands. And that FSH as it goes higher can really increase vasodilation so, giving certain herbs can really help with the signaling and help kind of decrease the volume a little bit, modulate the volume, and then giving some bioidentical hormones can also help modulate the volume as well. ‘Cause the brain says, “Hey, I’m getting a little bit more hormone in there naturally, we can lower the volume as well”, and then we deal with the herbs to help with the receptor sites too. So there’s a couple different ways that we can do it. But that’s kinda one of the major philosophies regarding FSH, and regarding a lot of the hot flashes.
Uhm, ” Is Chaste Tree something you can take to see how you feel…?”, I mean, you really want to be working with the functional med doc on this. A lot of variables when it comes to that.
DesignLover , “Is there a connection to an imbalance of hormones in women who haven’t bore any children?”. Potentially, I mean, women that haven’t born- birthed children, they don’t have that progesterone increase that happens, uhm- throughout pregnancy, so that- you that- 8 or 9 months where progesterone goes up because of HCG, that goes up significantly higher. So that may- let’s just say, you have a greater chance just kind of being more an estrogen dominance, over your- your cycling fertility time-frame so to speak, where hormone, who is uhm- pregnant one, they’re not gonna be using up the follicles as much ’cause you’re not cycling when you’re pregnant and a lot of time during the breastfeeding process. So, you’re not going to cycle through your eggs as fast. And then number 2, you’re more overall an average having a higher input of progesterone, so that has some effects as well.
Uhm, Zoe writes in, “Do you find the people with more severe menopause symptoms always have more adrenal issues when testing, is that your finding?”. I wouldn’t say always but I- ’cause it’s- it’s- I don’t- I’m not a big fan of absolutes but I would say yes. I would say on average, that is a significant correlation, more menopausal issues have more adrenal issues. And also, peri-menopausal issues, more adrenal issues, and I’ll even go one step further, cycling female issues, right? Definitely adrenal issues.
Uh, Amelia writes in, ” I’ve heard it takes one month to re-balance cycle for every year you haven’t had one?”. Yeah, that pro- that makes sense, I definitely agree with that, I mean, I typically see a major rebalancing in a- in a woman’s cycle within 6 to 12 months. And a major rebalancing is- I thi- I would s- call that, is about a 50% improvement. Alright, and then from there, we continue to compound that improvement month after month.
“Can someone with copper toxicity use a copper iud?”. Yeah, I mean, you can just make sure you’re doing extra zinc, put some extra zinc in your supplementation regime to help balance out the copper toxicity. That would be a good helpful approach ’cause you have the paragard or- is a copper iud and of course that can increase your copper levels. So you gotta be careful with that. You gotta weigh that out with your doc and see if you are really are copper sensitive. I have some patients that cannot do a paragard copper iud, they just can’t do it. Uhm, some can do it great and they have no problems. So you really gotta weigh those options out.
Uhm, “Can peri-menopause cause weight gain in the stomach? I’m 49 years old, no period for 7 months, gained 20 lbs. in the stomach in the last year and I can’t seem to lose it, is it just from unbalanced hormones?” So, remember, a lot of uhm, adrenal issues connect to peri-meno- menopausal issues. And a lot of adrenal issues are coming from cortisol imbalances. And cortisol has a direct effect on your tummy through just cortisol itself, the stress hormones can aff- affect the gut, and also through more sugar being released which can have an effect in insulin which can also affect your tummy. So, adrenal issues, have a major effect with cortisol, and also plug in and connect to insulin as well. So, great questions there.
“Do you think women with polymorphisms in COMT and MTHFR should not take the contraceptive pill? Controversial topic”, I know. Well, I know, in general like COMT like uh- catechol-O-methyltransferase. So when you see, uhm these types of issues, you may have issues with various adrenaline and just being able to deal with stress because these catecholamines are- like, you know, basically your stress hormones, your stress neurotransmitters. And MTHFR typically is gonna have a major effect on folate and then also affect B-12 and can affect methylations. So, uh- birth control pills deplete a lot of those nutrients. So yeah, I think what you’re saying is a very valid topic ’cause those issues can really have an effect on those nutrients. So if you are taking the pill, uhm- you really wanna make sure you’re supplementing with extra methylating nutrients, magnesium. In my line we’d recommend like B-vitamins synergy which has like the extra-activated folate, activated B-12, activated B-vitamins, and also a good multi on top of that, with magnesium and calcium, other important minerals that tend to get depleted.
Uh, “What would cause early spotting and irregular monthly cycle?”. That’s gonna because by typically lower progesterone or progesterone dropping out too soon in your cycle.
“Are there other conditions that cause hot flashes after menopause?”. Uhm, hard to say. I mean, you could- you may notice issues with blood sugar. Blood sugar ___[41:27] may get problem. A low thyroid, you may see some issues with that like if you have autoimmune flares on the hashimoto’s side. So yeah, there’s some potential connections there.
“Thoughts on carb cycling/keto for women with hormone imbalances? Ideal balancing diet?”. So, a lot of women do go with keto initially because they have insulin-resistance, and keto is very helpful with insulin resistance. But if you’re insulin-resistance is dialed in and you’re doing good with your blood sugar, some women starts to do better as they add in a little bit of safer carbohydrates, starches, squash, sweet potatoes, and they may even be better doing it cyclically. What does that mean? You’re kind of lower-carb keto for 2 or 3 days and maybe you have a sweet potato for dinner with your veggies and your meat. So, that I think is- is a very valid point, and I see that clinically.
Uhm, let me see here. Any other questions on hormones? I think we hit everything guys. Give me a thumbs up, give me a share, I appreciate it, make sure you hit that bell. People magically just go off my subscribe list if the bell is not hit. So make sure that bell’s hit, so you get all my notifications. Appreciate, uh today’s chat. Hopefully en- you enjoyed it, if you enjoyed it, give me a comment below. Let me know what you think. Any questions related to the topic, I’ll be back in and address them in future podcast or- we’ll respond here and I’ll look forward to connecting with you guys tomorrow, for a live Q&A.
You guys have an awesome day, and uh, go Patriots! Take care. Bye.
References:
https://thyroidresetsummit.com/
Is Blue Light Hurting Your Sleep?
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and fluorescent bulbs are the most commonly used sources of illumination. These bulbs are regarded as brighter and more energy-efficient than other bulbs. LED bulbs are not only the common lighting in homes, offices, and stores—they’re also used in electronic displays, like your smartphone’s screen. While LEDs and fluorescent bulbs are a convenient choice, they aren’t a healthy one. Let’s dive into the reasons you might want to steer clear of these types of bulbs, and what you can use instead.
The Problems with Artificial Light
All sources of artificial light, including LED and fluorescent bulbs, can break off regular sleep patterns. The biological system of our body functions in pulses that are laid down by the light received. This is known as your ‘circadian rhythm’ which manages and controls the timing of various biological functions. Your circadian rhythm sets the stage for everything from hormone secretion and brain activity to your sleep-wake cycle.
Up until modern times, our bodies were exposed to sunlight during the day, and moonlight at night. When our ancestors saw sunlight and then when it started to get dark, their brains knew how to appropriately respond. Upon seeing sunlight, their brains mapped out their sleep-wake cycle, and produced the proper hormones based on the time of day.
Evolution doesn’t move as fast as technology, and our brains are still wired to react to light in the same ways as our ancestors’. This makes the artificially-lit world we live in is very confusing to our biology! We sit under artificial lights all day and into the night. Our bodies do the best they can, but we aren’t receiving the right input. Artificial light baffles our body’s natural rhythm— and is especially damaging at night.
The intensely bright blue light emitted from LED and fluorescent bulbs trick your body into thinking it’s daytime. When you’re exposed to blue lights including the light emitted from your phone, computer, or TV screen), your body stays in “wake” mode. You don’t produce sleep hormones, or any of the other biological steps to prepare for sleep.
Blue Light and Sleep Patterns
LED and fluorescent bulbs create a two-fold problem: they generate artificial light, and they produce blue light. Blue light wavelengths created by electronic devices and light bulbs increase alertness and blocks melatonin production. Studies have also revealed that blue wavelengths inhibit delta brainwaves, which encourage sleep, and enhance alpha wavelengths that generate attentiveness.
Having trouble sleeping? Click here to ask a functional medicine doctor how to optimize your sleep!
Blocking Blue Light
Chronic fatigue, sleep deprivation, obesity, and other hormonal health issues have been linked to blue light exposure after sundown. These are growing epidemics in developed countries, and the increasing omnipresence of blue light gadgets is only making things worse.
There are however steps you can take to mitigate the negative effects of blue light. Firstly, reduce your exposure to blue light by swapping out LED and fluorescent bulbs for incandescent bulbs. Incandescent bulbs contain much less of the blue spectrum. Alternatively, candles are a great option for night time lighting. Other than the moon and the stars, the only light our ancestors would have seen at night was fire. Candles are a biologically-friendly source of evening lighting.
It’s recommended to stop using electronic devices at least one hour prior to going to bed. Let’s be real: most of us are going to be using our phones, checking work emails, or watching TV after sundown. If you’re going to use electronic devices after sundown, there are ways to do so wisely.
The iPhone has a feature called Night Shift, which you can set to turn on at night. A program called f.lux for your laptop and desktop computers is a must. Lastly, it would be wise to invest in a pair of blue-blocking glasses. These glasses have an orange tint to the lenses. In generally, the yellower the lenses, the less blue light they block. The redder the lenses, the more blue light they block. Try wearing blue blocking glasses at least 2 hours before you go to bed—the results are pretty incredible!
Takeaway
In the hunt for more energy-efficient products, LEDs have taken over the illumination industry. These sleep-damaging lights are virtually everywhere, and it is up to us to take steps to mitigate their damaging effects. Be conscious of the light you use, and the light you’re exposed to after hours. Invest in a pair of blue-light blocking glasses, download free light-filtering apps, and start sleeping better tonight!
Click here to work with a functional medicine doctor to start sleeping better tonight!
References:
- https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/what-circadian-rhythm
- https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side
- https://www.livescience.com/53874-blue-light-sleep.html
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-sleep-blue-light-idUSKCN0IC21W20141023
- https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/why-electronics-may-stimulate-you-bed
- http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_layman/artificial-light/en/l-3/4-effects-health.htm