The Gut Skin Connection – How Your Gut Health Can Impact Your Skin | Podcast #330
The gut and skin enjoy a constant dialogue via what has become known as gut-skin axis. In this video, Dr. J and Evan are discussing that while symptoms of gut health issues can be incredibly varied, the skin is often a great barometer for what’s going on inside the gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:51 Different Skin Aspects
5:37 Getting Good Skin
13:12 How Gut affects Skin Health
20:28 Collagen Benefits
28:52 Tips to Remember
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here today we’re going to be talking about the gut skin connection, how your gut health can impact your skin. This is a, you know, quite a big topic of discussion. A lot of my patients have gut health hormone health. And part of that whole sequelae of symptoms is going to be skin issues. And it’s important right skin kind of is your first representation to the world of who you are and your health. And if you’re healthy, you want good skin as a byproduct. So we’re going to dive into that and talk about, you know, things you can do to improve your skin and your gut health. If it’s not at an optimal level, Evan, how are we doing today, my friend?
Evan Brand: Doing really well. And you’re right, when you see someone your initial gut reaction, you know, they say, Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Pun intended.
Evan Brand: Exactly. When you look at somebody, you go, oh, wow, they don’t look healthy, or they look pale, or they look frail. Or they look weak. I mean, we make a lot of quick judgments on people. So you know, for the people listening that are like, well, I don’t really care about my vanity, you know, that’s so vain or whatever. It’s like, Well, do you want a good paying job? Do you want a good spouse? You know, you might not even get to the second date. If the person looks at you and goes, Oh, wow, you know, this person looks unhealthy. They look sickly. So I think it’s, it’s important to try to go beyond feeling vain about it and know that as you mentioned, your skin is it’s it’s a picture of your health picture. And my skin was a really good barometer. For me going through some of my detox protocols, my wife would look at me and say, Honey, you look pale, and I would go take a binder and then all of a sudden my skin tone would get better. It was almost like I was recirculating toxins. And then when I took my liver detox or binder support, my skin looked better. So for me, I kind of personally use it as a barometer. Or if I eat dairy as a treat, I may see acne pop up and I’m like, Oh, look at that. Look what I did. Here’s the effect of that dairy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And the pre show, we were trying to figure out effect versus a fact. Right? And so effect is the end result. A fact is, is the verb so we’re trying to wrap our heads around that the English language is quite the the crazy thing. So yeah, absolutely. So skin is very important. So there’s a lot of different aspects of skin right? Its first aspect is, you know, just keeping acne and skin rashes under control, whether it’s psoriasis, or eczema, or just general acne, there’s different food allergens that can have effect on that. There’s different enzyme and acid and just indigestion with foods, not breaking them down, that can have a big effect on that. And there can also be things like hormones. So whether it’s elevations in testosterone with women, whether it’s, you know, testosterone, androgens, that can have a major impact on women’s skin. Also just inflammation in general food allergens, in general, high levels of insulin can create more oil from that sebaceous gland. And that sebaceous gland, that oil can feed a lot of the bacteria on the skin, which can create, obviously the acne vulgaris bacteria feeding and creating acne. So there’s a lot of different mechanisms, right. So when you look at skin health or anything, is a lot of different components. And so food allergies are one component in digestion, not enough acid and enzymes, a component and of course, things like H. pylori, and bacterial overgrowth and fungal overgrowth, and parasitic infections can all impact that. And then of course, female hormones can play a big role. estrogen dominance is a big thing. Insulin resistance is a big thing. Insulin resistance can feed excess androgens and women, that’s a big thing. And then of course, increase aromatization. And estrogen in men can also feed skin issues as well. So there’s a lot of different connections here that play a big role. And of course, certain nutrients, if you’re deficient in zinc or vitamin A, can also play a big role in skin health as well. And then, of course, poor detoxification, because your skin is the integumentary system. And it plays a major role in detoxifying. So the biggest organ of detoxification in the body. So there’s a lot of different mechanisms here. And we’ll kind of dive through them one by one.
Evan Brand: Imagine how much profit we could reduce from the makeup industry. If Well, I guess it would be a multifactorial process, right. And number one, you’d have to convince women that natural skin is beautiful, and that you don’t need the six inch long eyelashes and all that. But imagine how much of a hit we could put into the makeup industry if we were to improve people’s skin because you have so many women that they’ll say oh, well, I wake up with bags under my eyes. It’s like, well, it’s not the bags that are the problem that needs to be covered up by makeup. Those bags under the eyes are the clue that maybe there’s some lymphatic issues or there’s some detoxification issues. And so many women, yeah, food allergies. You’re right. I mean, I have so many women that report that just by working through some of the protocols that you and I use that they need less makeup, and of course their husbands are always wanting women to look more natural anyway, at least my wife, I look at her and I’m like wow, she’s naturally pretty, I don’t think you need or should be putting stuff on. So and of course, there’s the mental brainwashing of society and the psychology behind makeup and all that that we don’t have to get into. But I think from a biochemical perspective, women should embrace the way they look and use that as a motivating factor. to work on these underlying issues that we’re talking about, meaning don’t just go for the foundation or whatever, it’s called to cover up the bags, let’s fix the bags.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and ideally you get healthier so if you want like a natural healthy makeup option, there’s some decent ones out there, you need less of it to kind of get the job done. You know, because some women it’s, it’s, it’s part of who they are is they’ve been doing it for so long. So let’s just try to reduce it and try to use healthier ones that are going to be less toxic, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, and the Environmental Working Group will just get that out of the way now the Environmental Working Group has done a great job of their skin deep database you and I’ve covered that I know you’ve mentioned some of the micelle products and some of these others that that are that are helpful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I like the Marie Veronique has a couple other good companies from a skincare standpoint. So the first rule of thumb when you’re supporting your skin is do with food. Right? Don’t put toxins and food allergies, fix your gut. Use good nutrient dense foods right your skin needs high quality fats. It needs high quality amino acids. It needs collagen in each vitamin A it needs zinc. It needs a lot of good nutrient dense foods to support it. We also want to decrease inflammation right? A lot of the junky omega six fatty acids, trans fats, foods that are refined processed grains lots of sugar that drives insulin. Insulin feeds the sebaceous glands to make oil oil can feed bacteria on the skin and create acne. And then of course, food allergens can also drive eczema can also drive psoriasis, sub harangued dermatitis right, a lot of these things that are fungal or bacterial or autoimmune base can be driven by a lot of these things. So foods really important. And again, there’s a big disconnect in the dermatology community, like you go to a lot of conventional dermatology offices, they’ll say in some of the pamphlets like food does not influence your skin. And that’s an absolute crock of crap. Right. And part of the reason why that’s the case is because dermatologists aren’t educated in nutrition. They’re not doctors in medical school, conventional allopathic doctors have very little education and nutrition. And when they do, it’s primarily from the aspect of disease, vitamin connection, right? scurvy, but low vitamin C very, very low B one, right? A lot of these diseases that are connected to low nutrient levels. But we know health is not about diseases, it’s about a health is on a continuum. And so the extreme end is a disease but there’s a lot of stuff in between, that we’re looking at. And part of that could be skin issues. And so certain nutrients play a big role. And I can tell you having seen 1000s of patients and hundreds who have skin issues, and I’ve been able to have you know 95 99% resolution with these issues, partly because of the fact that diet plays a major influence. So foods, keeping carbohydrates in check reducing insulin, insulin and women drives lots of androgens, androgens will create more cystic acne, inflammation, even dairy like even sometimes butter in really healthy people could be a problem. So I always say anytime you have any acne issues, we’re cutting out 100% dairy, even carry gold grass fed butter out of the gates. And that’ll be one of the first things we try to add back in as the skin gets clear to see if it’s kryptonite or not. But that plays a very important role. I’m trying to get more zinc in your diet, whether it’s like pumpkin seeds or oysters or just high quality grass fed beef zincs very important can always throw in some extra zinc in your molti or in a zinc lozenges things are very important for the skin vitamin A very important some studies back in the 1920s on to dermatologists called Pillsbury and Stokes and they found that probiotics and called Never Oil were very important for skin health. This is 100 years ago. So the fact that dermatologists aren’t up on this literature is just ridiculous. It’s because they aren’t interested in a nutritional intervention. When you have retinae and clindamycin and Accutane and tetracycline and, and different, and you chrissa and you know, all these different medications that are used for skin, right, that’s what their go to is and that’s what they’re educated on. And it doesn’t fix any of the problems anyway, it’s it covers it up. And so a lot of other things that can be done and have been done for a very long time.
Evan Brand: It’s funny that you and I are not dermatologists, but that we have, in most cases, better results than dermatology offices. And at least if it were a comparable success rate, like with their drugs, that’s palliative care. And what we’re doing is root cause care. So maybe if you took Joe Blow and Jane Doe over here, and let’s say they work through you and I and our protocols and testing, and then they go to the dermatology office and just get the Accutane or whatever, maybe in terms of look, maybe you’d make the person look similar because those drugs do work. But then you get off of them and things go backward. But man, all I’m saying is I think we’re better at skin now. I don’t know how to recognize melanoma. My grandfather’s had it and he’s got it cut out. So in those skin cases, yeah, go to your dermatology office. But if it’s more of these chronic issues, these more functional scan issues. I tell you, we’re gonna have much, much better results and somebody listening may hear what you said and go oh my god, he said 95 to 99% success rate. You’re not you’re not inflating those numbers. at all, I can tell you with confidence those numbers are legit that you’re saying because I’ve seen the same thing, even within just six weeks of Gut protocol, sometimes we’ve had 80 to 90% improvement in skin symptoms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think dermatologists do a really good job at handling skin cancers. You know, I think that can be very helpful picking up melanomas. There’s also a lot of the autoimmune stuff that they recognize, it’s typically you know, they’re just going to recommend corticosteroids or some kind of, you know, immunosuppressant like Ella dal or you chrissa. They’ve done a lot of options, or they’re just throwing a lot of antibiotics on the skin, which can screw up your skin microbiome as well, your skin has its own microbiome. So some of these things acutely may be fine. If you have a teenage kid that has an acne flare, and you want to decrease the chance of scarring, right? That makes sense. But you know, what’s the long term solution, right, you need a long term solution outside of that, and they may not have those options for you. So it’s good to have someone in your back pocket know where they’re good know whether or not there’s getting to be more holistic ones out there that understand diet plays a big, big role. And that’s good to know. I mean, I think, you know, if, if your kid eats like crap, and your dermatologist says it doesn’t matter, and then that keeps your kids acne flaring. Well, that’s not going to fix any problems. And plus, we know skin requires nutrition, amino acids, fat soluble vitamins. So just kind of from like a foundational level, you need to consume good building blocks. So your body can repair and turn over and use those good building blocks to help your body becomes stronger, right. Food and calories that you consume and nutrients you consume. They’re not just for energy, they’re actual building blocks so your skin can turn over. So very important there. I think also with sunlight and things like that getting some sunlight don’t burn, right, minimal urothelial dose, if you’re going to go outside, make sure you’re using you know, for a long periods of time where you would burn make sure you’re doing a full spectrum sunscreen that’s in a block out UVA and UVB for a long time, we’ve only blocked out UVB light, and we let a lot of UVA come in and people will damage their skin because the collagen will get destroyed. If you’re chronically allowing a lot of UVA exposure, the UVB that gives you the burn is kind of the it tells you whether or not you’re out there too long. But if you block the B and allow the A in, you’re basically allowing yourself to potentially destroy collagen. So if you’re going to be out in the sun, use a full spectrum, UVA UVB maybe even a UVC to make sure you have coverage if you would get burned, and then try to get yourself some sunlight. And then for me topically, I’m going to be using some natural retinol not a lot of the retina the retina has a lot of side effects can create redness and irritation, don’t love it. But I’ll use some of the retinol with some vitamin C and glue to fire and in some of the skincare products that I use, I use a really excellent prebiotic probiotic miss that have good bacteria for my skin. Because I want to really support my skin microbiome. Those are really important things for me on the skincare side. And then of course, like keeping the food allergies down. Now, for some people coming out that have a lot of acne, we’re going to come out of the gates with some autoimmune stuff out of the gates because I’ve seen eggs and nuts and seeds, dairy and butter be problem. So we’re going to be a little bit more strict out of the gates. We’re going to make sure we’re digesting our foods really well indigestion is a problem. We’re going to look at the gut, the gut can play a major, major role. And I’ll pause there and you can you can kind of dive a little bit.
Evan Brand: Sure. Yeah, I’ll take it further. So the gut, to me, the big mechanism is h pylori. Now parasites are big. I mean, you saw my skin was six, maybe I can’t keep up with yours, maybe six or seven years ago, my skin was messed up. And it was because I had various gut infections. I do believe parasites are a big contributor. But really, it’s hard to pick a smoking gun for the gut, because Candida bacterial overgrowth, parasites, they all contribute to the same thing, which is an issue with nutrient absorption, they create this malabsorption problem. But I think h polarize is one of the big ones for people because of what it’s doing with the parietal cells and reducing your stomach acid because then what’s really happening is you have this domino effect of the H pylori, then allowing the purification of your food which then creates the overgrowth of even more pathogenic bacteria, which then may allow parasites to thrive because now there’s not enough stomach acid to kill them off. So I really do think that h pylori was one of my big variables for my skin. And I can tell you with confidence that I’ve seen it in countless countless teenagers and people in their 20s that are still dealing with acne. If we get rid of H. pylori alone, we may have 60 to 75% improvement in the skin just based on that. And then the question is, well, can you bring in enzymes to help reduce some of the malabsorption and 99% of the cases? Yes, rarely is there too much inflammation or gutter rotation where we don’t do enzymes and acids out of the gate. But really, if I were a dermatologist running a brick and mortar practice, you know what I’d have on my shelf, I’d have digestive enzymes, and every client that comes in with skin problems, here’s your enzymes, and that would fix it.
Enzymes and HCl as long as there’s not so much gastritis or gut irritation, definitely a combination of the two for sure. I 100%. Agree and then a good elimination diet plays a big role. These you know, if you have bags under your eyes, that’s called allergic shiners and allergic shiners. They’re basically a pool of the lymph under the iron because there’s a lot of lymph in this area. And so lymphatic increase lymphatic fluid increase is going to happen with inflammation. Think about if you bump your head or get in a fight and get a black guy, what happens there’s inflammation and pulling, while you’re doing that at a at a micro level when you have inflammation from food, and you’re going to see it in the eye area, because that’s where there’s a lot of lymph. So if you’re having allergic shiners, right, don’t carve it up with makeup, try to cut out the foods out of the gates, that’s gonna be a big one out of the gates. Make sure you’re consuming enough water, people that have chronically dry skin, it’s not a hydration issue. Remember, fats provide a lot of the moisture to your skin to be moist and not overly dry. So if you’re having a lot of chronic dry skin, you know, eat consume good water, right, but also really make sure your fats are up and make sure you’re digesting those fats that’s really important. And if you want to topically add some shea butter or some coconut oil to your skin, if it’s the winter and you’re in a really, really low humidity environment, you know, you may need to topically add a little bit of that to during the winter months if it when it’s drier out. So you may want to topically hit it. But you don’t want to get into the habit of only doing the topicals because you got to support your skin inside and out.
You know what’s amazing now that you mentioned it like that. When my wife and I first got together, it will be 11 years ago, our diet was not like it is today. And every winner her and I both we would get really itchy our skin would get red, we get really dry skin. I’m telling you, man, I did not put lotion on but maybe once this entire winter. And I used to have to do that all the time. How funny is that? We could put the lotion industry out of business with this advice too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, you may topically need to add a little bit but you’ll be able to reduce the 80 to 90%. I remember when I was first trying to get healthy 15 20 years ago, 15 years ago, I was trying to low fat thing. I’m the gates and I remember one winner, my skin was so itchy and dry. And I remember I came across an article and I started adding in coconut oil and an olive oil. And I was just doing a tablespoon of a day and I remember being like Wow, my skin the dryness just it reduced at 90% with just internally adding fats, because I’m thinking like oh dryness, that just means more water, right, you need more water, but you need to be able to carry that water to the skin. And the fats provide that kind of support, the fats help bring that hydration to the skin. And so fats for me played a huge role. And I’ve seen that as well. And of course with all this fat phobia, the more dry your skin gets. That means the more inflamed is going to get the more inflamed the more redness and and and potential for other issues are going to happen. So if you don’t have enough fats on your skin that can create this cascade of a lot of other skin issues.
Evan Brand: Well, you know what else is I’ve noticed too, you know, Irish descent, at least some Irish some German. And years ago, I would never be able to get tan, I would just straight burn. And I rarely wear sunscreen, maybe you advise me different. But I typically just wear like a big sun hat in the summer. If it’s like 95 degrees and it’s frickin hot. I might do some zinc oxide if I’m out all day, but if I’m just out like half an hour plane in the garden, and then I’m gonna head back in and cook lunch or something I’m not putting sunscreen on I’m just out there with no shirt. And I used to just burn so bad even from that dose. Now, I don’t burn. The fats are helping me not burn now. Maybe it’s the meats to the collagen. I mean, there’s something changing where I just, I can I can bronze now, which is pretty interesting, especially for an Irish guy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, the fats definitely play a big role and helping to bring calcium to the skin that can be I’ve seen that be something also having a lot more of the bioflavonoids whether it’s Grapeseed, or a lot of the antioxidants, those can go to the skin and also have an SPF kind of factor. I know Grapeseed extract plays a big role. A lot of these oligomeric proanthocyanidins, which are like these antioxidants, and in fruits and vegetables can play a big role. The fats, like I mentioned, the omega threes play a big role.
Evan Brand: Oh, you make a good point. Yeah, sorry, I forgot to I forgot to mention that. Yeah, I mean, I do a ton of blueberries like come spring, early summer, I’m doing a ton of blueberries, I think you’re right, there’s probably some antioxidant factor too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Antioxidant factor, there’s a good fat factor, the fast to play a big role with bringing calcium up to the skin, which I know helps. And then obviously having enough zinc plays a big role because we typically, the more natural skincare is going to use like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide for kind of natural sun scare sun skincare. And so of course that that has a deflective aspect to it. And I imagine that the zinc that you consume orally is also going to play a big role. So like in summer months, you know, I’ll bang down six to eight oysters in a week. And you’re getting you know, eight milligrams of zinc per oyster. So if you bang down eight or nine oysters, I mean you’re getting 70 or 80 milligrams of zinc and you know the daily requirements only like 10 so you can get like a week’s worth of your zinc in one oyster session.
Evan Brand: Wow, that’s impressive.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so it’s really good and you can also get some extra from pumpkin seeds too as long as you tolerate the seeds.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I actually had some pumpkin seeds yesterday they were good just some I got some sprouted ones supposedly those are easier to digest so if someone reacts, maybe tried to sprout it I personally don’t have an issue either way. So some one thing to consider Alright, so we hit the gut infection piece. You did great hitting on some of the nutrients Stephen some of the good nutrients that would be in a multi which you and I make some really professional multis.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Alright guys, you’re gonna have 20 or 30 milligrams of zinc in there. So that kind of gives you a good whack and then if you’re adding in, you know, mushrooms or grass fed beef, right or any some of the healthier nuts and seeds that are out there, that and obviously, that’s gonna play a big role and then collagen, collagen really helps because we’re just not getting a lot of collagen based amino acids, right, we’re getting a lot of muscle meat, we’re not getting a lot of skin or joint. So having the skin on your chicken or chicken thighs very helpful, right having soups or bone broth helps. And you can also really take an excellent collagen amino acid support. I know mine, we use collagen from grass fed cows and we also use proteolytic enzymes to help break down those amino acids to make it easy and you can mix them in your water you can mix them in your tea or your soup or your coffee. So it’s just a great way to get extra building blocks for your skin. And it also helps your hair and your nails and your joints.
Evan Brand: I was speaking to college and let me do a little rant here and an anti plug. So the bulletproof collagen bars I used to eat those. Dave Asprey is bulletproof company, who he was the CEO of and then he stepped down couple years ago and now the ex or current CEO of hostess who makes like ding dongs now he’s the CEO in charge of bulletproof product. Anyway, I was at Whole Foods a couple weeks ago, I used to love eating those collagen, like the collagen bars, you know, it’s like a hydrolyzed collagen with like a little bit of stevia or monk fruit in there with some organic cashews. And I go in there, and there’s a new box, and it’s like new and improved recipe and I’m like, Yes, this is gonna be delicious. And I didn’t even read it because I just thought, okay, it’s gonna be awesome, right, you know, and I get home and I start to eat it. And it’s like real slimy. And it used to be kind of crumbly. I’m like, What’s weird wise, it’s slimy. Maybe I got a bad batch or something. And I flip it around, I look at the label. And it’s no longer organic cashews. Now it’s just regular cashews. And then now there’s safflower oil, which Dave was extremely anti bad oils. So now there’s safflower oil in there. And there was one other thing that tripped me out. But yeah, so safflower oil from organic to non organic nuts. And then there was one other thing. So luckily, I was able to return them and get a refund. But that used to be my go to thing that I’d recommend for people to get a good easy source of collagen as a snack, and I can no longer recommend that product.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Yeah, I had an experience to where I bought a mainstream collagen brand at Whole Foods, I have my own called Tru collagen, but I ran out. And I needed something right away, because I typically put it in my coffee or tea in the morning. And I grabbed the you know, good one, or named a brand that everyone will recommend put it in my coffee and my coffee tasted sour as heck. And I’m like, this is unflavored what’s going on. And basically, there’s two ways you can manufacture collegen. Of course, like you buy the best raw material you can, but then you got to break that cut, you know that collagen into peptides, right. And so there’s two ways you can do it. You can do it with sulfuric acid, or you can do it with enzymes. And so mine we do it with enzymes, which gives it a very, very neutral taste. So when you mix it and stuff, there’s not an extra taste. But this brand, I guess had used sulfuric acid because that’s the major side effect is you get that little bit of sourness or a little bit of a bitter aftertaste when you mix it and things. Now it’s like, oh, okay, got it, even though it’s unflavored. And you don’t see anything in the ingredients. You know, how you extract those, how you extract those amino acids matters, and it can really affect the taste.
Evan Brand: Wow. So I’d love to put them on blast. But if you don’t want to, that’s fine. And we’ll just tell people that storebought is not the best. And there’s a reason that Justin and I have professional healthcare manufacturers. And there’s a reason that what we have is considered a practitioner grade, you know, I get kind of annoyed when, when people will market supplements as like pharmaceutical grade because pharmaceuticals are crap. They’re filled with corn and fillers and all kinds of garbage. So when I see like, you know, pharmaceutical grade, like vitamin C, it’s like, ah, get out of here with that crap. So I would just prefer that we use the term professional, professional quality. And that’s not bs marketing. That truly is a difference.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, when people say pharmaceutical grade, because there can still be a lot of crap and pharmaceuticals, it’s more like the cleanliness of the factory or the manufacturing facility is very clean. But you could still add a whole bunch of crap into the supplement that’s not clean. But because the the manufacturing process is clean. It’s it’s pharmaceutical grade, right? And so yeah, so it’s professional grade, because we’re also cutting out all of the extra crap that we know isn’t going to be as good fillers, dyes, corn, you know, potential glutens all those different things that aren’t not going to be as good so for sure we keep all that in consideration and then We also do testing, right? I mean, we, I tested bunches of ashwagandha from major, you know, manufacturing people that we get it in and we test it and it’s got lead in it, we’re like nope, see later, you know, because we need to have the highest quality of product because we’re working with patients and we need to, we need to have a clinical outcome. It’s not just selling something and making some money, I need a clinical outcome, I need the highest quality because that matters, the outcome really matters. So you’re 100% right on that professional grade, so where to go. So we talked about collagen, I think low hanging fruit anyone, you could always do tablespoon of cod liver oil a day, tablespoon or two across the world, the vitamin A, and there’s excellent central fatty acids really good at eating high quality animal products is obviously going to be great. If you’re not doing high quality animal products, we’ll fix your digestion. But you could always do some seafood. If you can do that, you could always do some egg yolks, you could do that. You could also do some nuts and seeds, as long as you can tolerate them, especially the pumpkin seeds can be really good or chia seeds can be really good, or at least some algae on that side of the fence can be great. And then I would say make sure you’re pooping every day, make sure your bowels are regular. If you’re not going every day, you can be reabsorbing a lot of toxins in your gut. And if you have a lot of bacterial overgrowth, what happens? The bad bacteria Creek creates an enzyme called beta glucuronidation, this enzyme de conjugates metabolize estrogen. So what happens is you bind these proteins to estrogen. And these proteins are that you’re basically conjugating you’re binding this protein, and that allows you to excrete these hormones. And this enzyme comes in their ad conjugates. It breaks the handcuffs and allows those hormones to go back into general circulation. And so it’s possible that bad bacteria can really create hormonal imbalances. And if you’re a female, and you have potential estrogen dominance, that can be part of what’s going on. And so estrogen dominance can drive hyperpigmentation and skin issues as well. So you got to be on top of that. And of course, if you’re taking the birth control pill, you can almost guarantee that you’re going to be in that estrogen dominant state as well, because you have all this synthetic typically ethanol estradiol in your bloodstream as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. So we technically could have called this something like the SIBO hormone skin connection or something, but it is all connected. And we do find that when you get gut infections resolve skin’s better. And also, when like you mentioned, you’re knocking out the gut infections, you’re able to lower the beta glucuronidation. And now that pathway, the glucuronidation pathway works more efficiently. And then you get other toxins out to like mold toxin. So you can have skin issues with mold toxin, I certainly did. And that’s because we know that mold toxin can affect the gut barrier, mold can create leaky gut. So if you are treating the infections, you don’t get that toxin out to you’re not fully out of the woods. And in regards to testing, let’s mention that real quick. And then we can wrap up. So if you’re working with somebody like Dr. Justin and I what we’re going to be doing is a GI map stool test or similar, we’re going to be using organic acids testing, maybe some hormone profiles, and maybe some other toxin profiles. So with urine and stool, we can get so much information into this. And your dermatologist is never going to run a stool test. They’re never going to run an organic acids test and find that you have clusters and Candida and strep and klebsiella, Giardia and H pylori and give you herbals to kill it herbal antibiotics antifungals. That’s never the protocol. So I’m not saying don’t go to them. I’m just saying if you want root cause solutions. These are the types of tests and solutions you need to implement. Not a topical steroids, which is exactly what my wife got prescribed when she had a lot of issues. They did a good job with testing, but it was a patch test. And they found that she was reacting to some parabens and all the garbage that was in her conventional skincare products at the time. So they at least did a good job of testing that. But they never tested the actual body. They just tested the chemicals. They didn’t go and say hey, what are the deeper underlying issues? Oh, you’ve got poor methylation poor detox function. You’re not pooping. You’re pooping once every three days. They don’t go into that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, 100% you know, so we got to try to get to the root underlying issue. The problem is when you do steroids, you also weaken your connective tissue, you weaken the skin, and then it sets you up for more dependency. And then it also weakens the immune system and it could also create more blood sugar imbalances, especially if you’re having to use a lot of steroids. And that blood sugar, guess what, that can increase insulin and increase insulin increases what more sebum oil production, potentially more acne. So a lot of times these medicine medications can create a vicious cycle. So you got to be very, very careful with that. So out of the gates, kind of what’s the Reader’s Digest version, work on the diet, work on your carbohydrates, work on certain nutrients, fat soluble vitamins work on digesting your protein, adding college and adding vitamin A and zinc. Get your gut looked at work with a good functional practitioner. If the low hanging fruit things aren’t working? Right, it’s okay to you know, stop guessing and assess what is going on. Also, put your comments down below. Let us know things that have already helped you in the past. I’m curious to know, let us know your successes. Also feel free and share this information with friends or family that are suffering or dealing with issues and want to dive into the next step or want to do deeper testing into it. Give us a thumbs up, I really appreciate it. And we’ll put our links down below you want to reach out to Evan EvanBrand.com, great place to go. You can schedule with Evan worldwide, as well as myself, Dr. J JustinHealth.com. As well, we’ll put links underneath as well where you guys can review our podcast, we appreciate your feedback. This helps us to help more people. So if you’re enjoying this information right now, give us a quick review just a sentence or two, let us know if we’re doing good. And if we’re not give us some feedback, we always want to do better, Evan, anything else you want to highlight?
Evan Brand: Yeah, if people are just sitting there like maybe they’re like halfway awake, or they’re daydreaming, snap back into reality, review us, we will love you forever. We really do need the reviews, it helps us beat out other people. You know, we don’t do ads on this show. Maybe one day I’ll go back to doing some if I have a good partner that we work with again, but for now, this is a non ad show. And so many other shows are just filled with it. You just have to put up with the spam, we try to give you guys all killer, no filler. So I hope you recognize that. Take the two seconds go on your your app. for iPhone users, it’s probably the easiest. That’s the best place to review us on your Apple podcast app, see the show, click write a review. Boom, give us the stars you think we deserve? Give us a few comments. It really helps motivate us, you know this kind of a thankless job, you’ll get hundreds of thousands of downloads and then maybe two people are like, yeah, that was a good episode. So we really want to hear it. And we really appreciate it. It’s what keeps us fueled up and just mentioned the links, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re going to save you more time and more money. Yes, you got to pay to play, so to speak to get labs and console’s done, but I tell you if I knew what I know now, man, I could have saved myself years of suffering with my skin issues throughout high school. I mean, I just had, it wasn’t the worst that wasn’t the pizza face, kid. But I certainly have my my issues with acne. And man, if I would have been able to get it dialed in now like we do for some of our kids and teenagers that you and I work with. Wow. And we’re literally changing the trajectory of their entire life. It doesn’t go this is like I said the beginning. This is beyond the vanity. I mean, I had a kid in California who’s 17 and now that his skin is so much better he’s so much more confident he got a promotion at work so he’s making more money. He’s feeling better he’s got a new partner so he’s you know, he’s he’s with a female now and he was previously too like embarrassed to to want to date anyone. So I mean this this could affect everything. Career finances, this is not just how you look in the mirror. So I want people to go beyond that and think about how much more could you achieve if your skin was better? And I think the sky’s the limit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, also scanning god are intimately connected. If you have skin issues, you may not be breaking things down. You may be gassy. You may be bloated. So look within right above below inside out. Alright guys, hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. Really appreciate it. Share, care, thumbs up review links below.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-gut-skin-connection-how-your-gut-health-can-impact-your-skin
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Fatigue, Tiredness, and Lethargy: Link to Gut Infection | Podcast #311
Tiredness is not a symptom that defines any one particular disease. Rather, tiredness can be a symptom of many different diseases and conditions. Causes of tiredness range from lack of sleep and over exercise to medical and surgical treatments. The lack of energy (lethargy) associated with tiredness can sometimes cause difficulty with normal daily activities, leading to attentiveness and concentration problems.
Dr. J suggested considering to support protein breakdown by extra amino acids and enzymes. Dr. Evan also added that if you have issues, always reach your conventional Dr. or functional Dr., be tested, find the root cause and guide to fix possible infections that cause you to feel tired before you reach a crisis level.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:10 Mechanisms to Gut Infection
4:05 Where Gut Stressors Come From
12:12 Infections that causes Fatigue
17:41 Probiotics and Beneficial Bacteria
22:32 Supplements to Gut Infection
24:18 Immune Issues
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan brand. Today we’re going to be chatting about your gut infections may be making you tired. Many people don’t think about how their gut maybe having an impact on your energy, your mood, your emotions, but it’s totally true. Most people think, oh, if I have a gut issue, I’m just gonna have bloating or diarrhea or constipation or acid reflux. Oh contraire. We’re gonna dive into that today, Evan, how are we doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Doing really well. How about should I just go straight into my story, then? I mean, I suffered with this thing firsthand, as you know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Let’s do it.
Evan Brand: So when I was down in Austin, I was losing weight. And I didn’t know why I was losing weight. And turns out and I was exhausted. That was that was the main thing. I mean, I was drained, like, it was really tough for me to get through the day. I mean, I was to the point where, at some point, it’s kind of embarrassing. I mean, I was like, okay, am I do I have enough energy to cook a meal at night, you know, for dinner, like, the workday just drained me. And so fortunately, after I got the gut infections resolved, I mean, the story is not much longer than that my energy came back online. So I mean, we can say clinically, and personally, that this is a big, big smoking gun for anybody who’s been dealing with chronic fatigue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, totally 100%. Now, let’s talk about some of the mechanisms why like, you could have constipation, you could have diarrhea, you could have all these digestive issues, that’s fine. And it makes sense why some of these issues may be causing problems. Because if you’re going to digest a lot of the nutrients that energize you, right, B vitamins, your amino acids, your essential fatty acids to burn them in the mitochondria for fuel, all of these things require optimal absorption, right? So if we don’t have adequate enzyme, or acid level or biliary level to break down fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, we’re going to have a problem with those nutrients getting into our bloodstream and making their way to ourselves and our mitochondria to be burned for fuel. So that’s one big mechanism. And the other big mechanism out of the gates, and we’ll kind of expound deeper into each one is the fact that your immune system sucks up lots and lots of resources. So think back to when you maybe got the flu or had some kind of illness. Were you energized? Are you tired? Most people were very tired. Now, why is that? It’s because your immune system allocates lots and lots of resources when it’s stressed. And it will make you tired, because it’ll pull some of those energy resources to put it towards fighting an infection. All right. So if your immune system is caught chronically in that state of trying to fight something, whether it’s a gut infection, cebo, or parasite, or just gut permeability issues that are upregulated, due to bad foods, and food allergens, you’re going to be really over stimulating and over allocating resources to deal with whatever’s happening with the immune system, aka the gut. Don’t forget 80% of your immune system is located in the gut, people forget that so important. So if you’re over stressing your immune system, you’re gonna have problems.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And so for me, I was taking some immune support, but it was all just kind of a bandaid, right? Because I wasn’t focused on the underlying infection. So this time of the year, we’re, we’re talking in the fall here coming up on winter, you have a lot of people that will say, Well, you know, I really just want to strengthen my immune system. So they’ll go and do maybe some extra vitamin C, maybe some medicinal mushrooms, or maybe some other herbs, astragalus, things like that. But it doesn’t matter if you do all those if you don’t address the infection. So if someone’s like, tired and they feel weak, they feel depleted. They feel like they’re possibly immunocompromised. Sure, you could do some of the tools, like we talked about those herbs, but really, you got to test first of all, figure out what kind of infections you have. And then step two, is you come in and make a protocol to fix those infections. And not to mention, you know, like h pylori is super contagious. So, I mean, you and I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of cases where, you know, husband and wife have reinfected each other. And so we’re not doing this to try to make more money. We’re doing this to help the family when we say, Hey, what about your husband? What about your wife when we try to get them on board? It’s because we know about this potential, you know, cross contamination.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So we kind of look at the gut, and we’re like, Alright, where are the gut stressors coming from? So the first stressor we look at are food allergens, because if your immune system is kind of responding negatively to food, that could be a big a big issue, right? And what happens is, when food allergens kind of come in, whether it’s gluten or dairy, or just you know, processed grains, or sugars, or even things like nuts, or seeds, or just more allergenic foods, soy those kind of things. Your immune system is upregulated dealing with those foods, and that’s going to suck away resources. And also, these foods if you have an allergen to them, if your body’s hyper allergenic, meaning your immune system is over responsive. There may be some gut permeability. And gut permeability is like these little tight junctions in the epithelium in the small intestines. They’re like this. So imagine you’re putting your hands together like you’re saying a prayer now, start pulling your fingers apart a little bit, you see the little gaps that happen that’s happening at a microscopic level with the tight junction cells in the small intestine. So the more you’re stressing your gut lining, these tight junctions open up, like I mentioned, the fingers come further apart. And then food particular we call it antigens, right? These foods aren’t supposed to be in the bloodstream at the size they’re in. Now you start having these antigens go into the bloodstream at a larger level, and now the immune system’s going to start going after it with full force. And that’s gonna start sucking up a lot more of your resources. So the first thing when we’re working with patients worldwide, we’re trying to cut down the food allergenicity we’re trying to decrease the immune response by helping the foods not become so bad or stressful on the immune system. So some people coming in on a standard American diet, a paleo template, maybe enough. Some people that are really have an autoimmune issue or Irritable Bowel Disease, we have to go to a paleo template where we’re cutting out extra allergenic foods, some we have to even go to a carnivore or some kind of an STD low lower fodmap diet because the bacteria is overgrown, and it’s reacting to even fodmap foods like broccoli and onions and garlic like healthy foods, were reacting to it. And so it this whole thing becomes a little bit more nuanced with food, the more unhealthy you become, or the longer your conditions progress. So as a practitioner, right, we’re trying to meet people where they’re at some people come in at a really easy phase, they’re just diets crap. And we can just make a simple change with the Paleo some we have to get a lot more nuanced.
Evan Brand: So let me ask you, you brought up garlic. I had a woman last week, actually. And she was complaining that garlic was a big issue for her. So we’ve already cleared out gut infections, and we’ve done a great job. We’ve retested we’ve confirmed that we got rid of all the gut infections, we are doing some leaky gut support, but she says every time I eat garlic, I get really bloated. What would you What would you do? What would you say to that garlic person?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it could be a SIBO thing. So I’d want to test other fodmap foods. So if there’s some kind of a gut issue or like a bloat or a motility issue, or a diary or a constipation issue, we’re going to be cutting out fodmaps fermentable carbohydrates, fructose, oligo, disaccharide, mono and polyols. And we’re going to do that and then we’ll eventually do a reintroduction. And when we reintroduce foods, we’re going to start with moderate fodmaps first and then go to higher fodmaps. Last, so those foods are higher fodmap. So the question will be How did she do adding in the moderate ones? First, I want to know how she did incrementally adding things in.
Evan Brand: So like apples, she does fine, which was interesting, because to me, I’ve had a lot more people have issues with apples than I have with garlic. So I thought Hmm, you know, is it really a bacterial overgrowth thing? The stool test didn’t really show much in the in the bacterial category. So it’s kind of like, well-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: when people like that, I just want to see is it a one off? Is it just garlic? Or is it other foods like onions and broccoli and avocado, which is a moderate or sweet potato, which is a matar, I want to test more of the moderate fodmaps? Maybe add in some fermented foods like a kombucha or a sauerkraut? Did it happen with those two, if it’s just a one off, then it could be some die off, it could just be she’s having an issue with that food. So if it’s a one off, I don’t really worry about one offs, I look for patterns, like patterns or like part of being a good functional medicine doctor, it’s pattern recognition, you’re looking for patterns, like some patient that can be Well, last week I had this happen or that like, we got to look at bigger picture, we got to have enough data points. So we can look at patterns. Anything can happen one off due to stress or a poor night’s sleep, or you got exposure to some bad foods. And now your guts a little bit rocky for a few days. So we got to look at longer trends and really have a lot of good pattern recognition. Part of what we do, we’re kind of CSI detectives, and we got to look for things repeating itself, because anything can happen one off, we don’t want to change what we’re doing, or the programs that people are on, off of just a one off issue.
Evan Brand: And that’s what it was, it was a one off and it was kind of, you know, frustrating for me because I’m thinking well, crap, you know, everything else, she’s tolerating good and any other problematic foods, I’d kind of put in that same category that we thought would be a problem. They’re not a problem. So I’m sitting here thinking, Okay, well, what kind of explanation Can I give her? Because she wants some kind of good functional medicine answer for me, right? And so that’s what I told her. I’m like, well, this sounds like just Oh, to be honest, kind of like a food sensitivity, particularly to the garlic. You know, I don’t looking at the testing. I told her I didn’t really see anything that was compelling to indicate any other sort of issue and all the other foods were tolerated. So I kind of just gave it like a political answer. It was like, wow, hmm. You know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, well, we’ll come it’s possible there could be just a, her immune response is just a little bit more sensitive to if we don’t see extra data points correlating to it, then I just tell patients, hey, let’s just we’ll come back. We’ll work on probiotics. We’ll work on good re inoculation of good healthy bacteria while adding some prebiotic fibers every month. We can try testing it again. But as long as there’s no yeah, as long as there’s no, let’s just say, family of other foods that are interacting like this, then we’re not going to really worry about it too much. But you can always retest, make sure that gut’s doing good, but it’s possible you have one off allergen issue that’s possible. But every month, we can always retest it and see.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good point, I did end up throwing in a high dose, multi strain probiotic. So we’re with a high amount of bifido. So we’re gonna see what happens.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and this person could tolerate fermentable carbohydrates, like sauerkraut and, and maybe a little bit of kombucha it’s probably not a fodmap issue, because those things are very, very high in fodmaps. It could be she’s killing some stuff off. It could just be she sensitive to garlic. It’s possible. Yeah. And so I mean, I just tell patients, hey, you know, that’s an artifact, we just kind of make a note on it. When we follow it down the road later on. If things kind of connect back to it down the road. That’s nice. But if not, things that are one offs. You don’t want to you don’t want to one off to derail your whole investigation.
Evan Brand: Yes. Yes. That’s a great point. You know, it’s like you’re, you’re you’re like, you know, investigating a crime scene, and you have his weird piece of evidence. That does not make sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Right. Okay. Well, we’ll make a note on that. And we’ll come back to it if there’s any patterns that they point back to it down the road.
Evan Brand: Yep. Yep. Great. So so small tangent, but really helpful. I think it’s, it’s helpful for people to see how do you have to think when you’re approaching these issues, it’s not always black and white, you know, we try to refer back to clinical experience, we kind of sprinkle in some of the data sprinkled in some previous case studies that we’ve done with people. So it’s really fun. But back to the fatigue piece.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I just wanted to highlight one component, because while you’re on it, is when we are talking about these things, because we’re clinicians, and we see thousands of patients, we’re operating more off of clinical concepts than like rote memorization of like, a fax. And so when people listen to our podcasts, we really want them to understand the overarching concepts of health. If you understand a concept, you don’t really have to memorize it, if you’re trying to memorize random facts and randomness, and that becomes a little bit convoluted and a little bit stressful. So just try to get the overarching concepts that we’re talking about here. Once you get the concept, you never have to worry about memorizing, and it’s just there.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, good. So I just wanted to go back to the to the fatigue piece, because for certain people, there may be multiple layers of infections that are causing your fatigue. So for me it was H. pylori, and then once I got rid of the H pylori, then it was the parasites that were still causing me to be tired. And once I got rid of that, then I did have some Candida that I had to address. So what I want people to know is that if you double down or triple down on something, you know, the guy tells you it’s parasites, or the girl tells you it’s this, and you pursue that, and you’re not better, it’s possible that you’ve, you’ve missed something. And so I just want people to wrap their head around you, like you say, you have permission to have multiple things wrong at the same time. So you could have a bacterial issue, a parasite issue, a Candida problem, all at the same time. And so you got to make sure you get all the data if you just run a stool test. Candida rarely shows up on the stool test, you and I’ve talked about this many times. So the urine test will often fill in the blank. So if you had one test done, or your doctor ran this or that, and you feel like you’re missing something you probably are so keep, keep digging.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You also there’s one study here just looking at h pylori and mitochondrial function, I’ll put it up on my screen. But this is important, right? And the reason why it’s important, I’m going to just I’m going to do a share here. So if you guys are listening to the podcast on YouTube, you’ll be able to watch the video. If you’re on iTunes, you know, you have to just click the YouTube link, and you’ll be able to see what we’re talking about. If not, I’ll try to describe it pretty well. But you can see my screen you see my screen.
Evan Brand: Yep. h pylori affects the mitochondrial function.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this is important right here. So mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cells. This is really important and the powerhouse of your cell generates ATP for energy. Now, if you look here at the bottom they talked about, they wanted to investigate whether there’s an increased mutational load and mitochondrial genome and what they found was there believe that the there’s a downregulation in the mitochondrial DNA repair pathway? What does that mean? It means how your mitochondria are repaired and regenerated. It’s going to be down regulated, so you’re not going to be able to repair your your mitochondria as fast. It’s believed to be involved in mitochondrial base excision repair. Our results suggest that these genes A p one and y b one, just know that their DNA is that are involved in mitochondrial DNA repair. They’re they’re demonstrated to be involved and they’re demonstrated to be down regulated when there’s an H pylori infection. So it just means that your body’s ability to generate ATP which has decreased respiration coupled aptr. So you’re not able to generate as much ATP and repair your mitochondria as well when you have an H pylori infection. And this is something that we think is there with a lot of gut infections. It affects your mitochondria. Your ability to repair it, which then affects your ATP synthesis.
Evan Brand: That is pretty crazy. I mean, especially if we’re talking about an athlete who wants to perform right you’ll have all these big celebrity personal trainers and stuff and they’ll just get people on different diet changes or no, you need to do this exercise or this exercise and they missed the boat. They don’t have a clue about H. pylori being the root cause of the of the fatigue or the exercise performance. So yeah, it’s just crazy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then also, there’s a lot of right here, right here one study, I’ve already looked at it before, if people are having gut issues, and they go to their conventional gastroenterologist, what are they typically prescribing? Well, a lot of times they’re prescribing antibiotics, right, and there’s a lot of data, bacterial Seidel, antibiotics induce mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative damage. And so we know this is something that’s actually present, where there’s damage to the mitochondria with antibiotics.
Evan Brand: Well, and and, and to be clear, for H pylori, it’s not just one antibiotic, it’s three or even four, they have what they call quadruple therapy now, which just the name of it scares me, it’s literally four antibiotics at the same time. And you and I have both seen patients that have had triple or quadruple therapy done and guess what we retest them, and unfortunately, due to antibiotic resistant bacteria, the infections are still there. So now we have to come in, repair all the mitochondria that were damaged, plus use herbs, which are much, much safer, and in my experience, just as if not more effective, and then we actually get rid of the bugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, she’s a summary of your mitochondria dysfunction and oxygen damage induced by bacterial Seidel antibiotics, which is interesting, because bacteria, all antibiotics are bacterial Seidel, so interesting. They use that description. It’s mammalian cells. I’m not sure which mammals they use. But they talked about that it’s alleviated by antioxidants. Well, guess what, when we use a lot of the clearing herbs that we use, guess what they’re rich in, I mean, tons of antioxidants, polyphenols. And that’s the benefit, a lot of the herbs that we use, they have a lot of antioxidants in them to help buffer the oxidative stress. Because remember, oxidative stress is part of what happens with the antibiotics. And we have a similar effect with herbs. But the herbs have a lot of antioxidants, which is helpful. Any comments on that?
Evan Brand: Well, what you’re saying makes us look really good, because not only are we giving nutrients that can effectively get rid of the infections, but we’re also protecting the system or even replenishing antioxidants, because in general, and the oxidants are going to be reduced because of all the oxidative stress from the infection in the first place. So it’s literally like a win win, for us and for the person under the protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And there’s lots of different studies here as well on probiotics and beneficial bacteria, correcting mitochondrial dysfunction with probiotics. There’s there’s definitely studies on this as well. And again, you know, these are things that we’ve seen in our practice, like when you see someone get better. So protection of hepatocyte mitochondrial function by blueberry juice probiotics. So there’s lots of studies on this, because when you see patients get better with certain beneficial bacteria, after you do an elimination, you’re like, why does that work? And so what happens is you see a clinical outcome, patient getting better when you do something. And then you’re like, Huh, what could the mechanism B and then you chase it down online? And you’re like, oh, maybe that’s it? You know, maybe it has to do with the fact that it’s helping the mitochondria and people’s feel better afterwards? Maybe that’s the mechanism. It’s possible, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We have to comment on that.
Evan Brand: Well, it’s a lot of good things happening. And then you mentioned the probiotic piece. So that’s going to help even more. So after we get someone on a killing protocol, there’s going to be good benefits there, your energy is probably going to get better just based on doing that. And then when you go to the next phase, if we’re going to come into the gut healing phase, you’re going to get even better than so it’s it’s really fun for us to kind of paint the picture here of just how how is someone going up, up up up better, better, better? And you’ve just outlined how so pretty I talked about it right here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They talked about a collusion the studies show this is BP stands for blueberry juice and probiotic exhibit a synergistic effect preventing the development of a and that’s non alcoholic fatty liver disease by protecting mitochondrial function, suppressing the damage of mitochondrial ultrastructure by reducing mitochondrial swelling, right. So mitochondrial damage by antibiotics, as well as we could do the same thing when we search, let’s say pesticides, or heavy metals or mold toxins, so we know that gut plays a big role and one helping to absorb those nutrients. But number two, also helping to have beneficial bacteria that modulate these, this inflammation and mitochondrial damage as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. Well said. Excellent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it’s good that just a couple of studies. I mean, when we look at like we look at research a lot differently, so just kind of everyone there. We look at clinical outcomes in patients. And then we chase them back to what the literature says. The problem is a lot of people who are clinicians, they’ll look at the literature, and then they’ll try to then come up with a clinical like decision based on the literature. And that’s sometimes it’s really hard to do, because a lot of the PhDs and a lot of the research out there isn’t necessarily clinically driven, and maybe driven because someone has a PhD in this area. And they’re just they’re just studying that topic, because or maybe it’s an NIH funded study. Who knows, right? So we’re looking at things that are clinically driven, not research driven, because someone has decided to dedicate their life to this topic. And this is the study they’re choosing right?
Evan Brand: Now. It’s good that we can kind of pull out some studies to help backup what we’re saying. But it’s not like we go into PubMed to try to figure out exactly what we’re going to do the clinical stuff is really that’s where all the magic happens.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And some may say we have a confirmation bias and how we look for these things. But we’re not looking for out of the blue we’re looking for, because we’ve seen clinical outcomes support something is happening in that direction. And then we use the data, the research to say what could be if positive things are happening in this direction? A to B, what could be the mechanism of why that is? And so we kind of chase it backwards. versus the other way around?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. And it’s just it’s a blast. It is fun for you to pull that stuff up. Right? Because, you know, we get we get used to our our methods, we get used to our results. But when you get to see in the literature like that antibiotics, causing mitochondrial damage is like, Oh, yeah, I forgot. That’s why we do this. It’s Yeah, we’re Exactly. We don’t want people to get damaged.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you get confident when you see things repeat itself. Clinically, you’re like, Okay, something’s happening here. Now what? So you’re going at it with a lot more confidence versus like, Hey, I think maybe, you know, I’ve heard this, it’s a hearsay kind of thing. No, you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it clinically? Well, here’s the confidence.
Evan Brand: Here’s the thing that’s always fun for me is when we’re on the topic of fatigue and gut infections. And so when you have a case where you do the follow up, and someone is reporting that they have significantly more energy, and you didn’t give them any energy supplements, you just fix their gut, you just gave them some liver, maybe some enzyme support, some gallbladder support, and then you killed the infections and all the sudden, boom, I’m 20% more energetic. I always smile and laugh simultaneously. Because it’s like, This is so fun. We have 20% more energy. And we did zero energy supplements. That’s just super cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s powerful. Now, if people start feeling a little bit worse, then we got to be very careful. So when people start feeling worse, I’m like, all right, we got to spend more time building up the adrenals, we got to make sure the diets clean, because if someone’s got his or, like, if you’re putting lots of bad foods in and you’re inflaming the gut, then your immune system and also your adrenals may be making more resources to deal with the inflammation in your gut. So we have to decrease the inflammation in our gut and support the adrenals by calming it down. Now, the adrenals have more resources. And of course, we always like supporting the adrenals ahead of time. So then you have natural, your more of your natural anti inflammatories, because conventional medicine when there’s serious gut issues, they’re going to give prednisone cortisol, well, let’s just support your body’s ability to make that naturally. And then when we go into a gut clearing phase, then we have more of those resources on board. And then patients are sensitive. I’m titrating the herbs in there slowly so we’re not overwhelming the system by killing more, you know bacterial toxins, LPs endotoxins, mycotoxins, we’re not overwhelming the lymphatic system that a toxification immune system. So we’re going to kind of really titrate things in a little bit slower if you’re more sensitive. And we may even add things like binders and glutathione too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, the glutathione is good for me. I had to take a break from it for a little while. It was just too strong. It does mobilize toxins to so this is all case by case basis. But yeah, I love glutathione when it works. But when you take too much, that’s no good. There’s always a right dose.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, if you’re slow, if you’re like more sensitive, always start low, work your way up. And then if you’re sensitive, you can always start with just a gentle binder first, as long as you’re not getting constipated. That’s a good first step on increasing things.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s great. So let’s see here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Um, the other component, I would say is people that have got issues tend to also have immune issues. We already talked about why 80% of your immune systems in the Galt, that’s the gastric associated lymphoid tissue that’s in the stomach. And then also the model that’s the mucosal associated lymphoid tissue, lymphoid meaning like lymphocytes, white blood cells, and that’s in the small intestine. And so if you have a lot of gut permeability issues, if your guts over responding well, what’s the most common autoimmune condition that affects people and mostly women, five times more women is autoimmune thyroid. And so if you have an autoimmune thyroid, that could also be affecting your energy because you know your thyroid gland is being attacked and your body is ability to generate thyroid hormone may be decreased. And it’s possible that your conventional doctors overlook that. And so knowing that there’s an autoimmune thyroid could be affecting your energy too. And if you have an attack, you could feel hyper where you’re like anxious, can’t sleep irritable, sweating, right? first and then you go into a hypo where you’re like tired, fatigued, depressed, right? So you could easily be going hyper and hypo swings based on autoimmune tax of the thyroid.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and once again, the hashimotos could be a side effect of something else. So even if you go to the endocrinologist, let’s say they were a more advanced endocrinologist, for example, hopefully they’re running thyroid antibodies TPO, TG maybe TSI. And they’re looking at that and maybe they’re treating your thyroid giving you desiccated glandulars, or nature thyroid, or just Synthroid or side ml. Even then you see how people can fall between the cracks and not get better. Because yeah, you’ve kind of cranked up the thyroid that was hypo due to autoimmunity. But you still never got to the gut infection that started at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: BINGO, BINGO, BINGO, BINGO 100%. That’s what we got to look at always the root cause. So anything else you wanted to talk about here on the gut and fatigue I did, we hit the thyroid, of course, I alluded to the adrenals earlier, because they play a huge role in regulating inflammation. And we know acute gut issues, they may be, they may be given a corticosteroid to calm down the gut inflammation, that’s possible too. So we want to support your body’s ability to do it naturally. I would also say supporting protein breakdown. So with maybe adding in free form amino acids, because protein can be very hard on the body to break down. So of course, dialing in enzymes and acids and maybe giving extra free form amino acids. So it’s taking stress off the digestive system to be able to access those amino acids as well.
Evan Brand: I think I think you’ve hit it all. I mean, I would just say, kind of where do you go next is you really have to get the data. I mean, we’ve talked about a lot, right. But if you don’t have the data, you don’t know what you’re up against. You don’t know what you’re doing. So, you know, I think the best advice I could give is if you’re dealing with these issues, test, don’t guess. And so, you know, feel free to reach out to Dr. J. Justin at JustinHealth.com. And he can run labs on you anywhere in the world and send them to your door and jump on a call and discuss it make a great protocol to help you to get better. Same thing for me my website, EvanBrand.com. And we’re available we love helping you all we’re grateful to be in this position. So you know, sure you know a lot of you listening or kind of do it yourselfers. That’s what led you to be smart and find a podcast anyway. Because you want to kind of educate yourself, but there’s a certain point where it’s okay to reach out. And I tried to fix myself for a long time. And you spend more money and you spend more time doing that. So you know, feel free to reach out and get a guide.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and then you’re available at EvanBrand.com worldwide. We’re available worldwide and we’re clinicians, we have our sleeves rolled up and we’re in the trenches every day, dealing with patients. Also, if you’re listening to this don’t just kind of glom on to one thing. So we see lots of people they’re like, they come in like Oh, I know what’s h pylori or I know it’s Candida or I know it SIBO keep an open mind on what’s happening because you have the right to have more than one issue going on at the same time. And for instance, Evans original story was Evan had not could have it wrong if you had h pylori, Giardia and crypto. That’s correct. Yeah, yeah, h pylori, giardia crypto, those are some serious infections. Any one of those infections is serious and could could have created the symptoms Evan was having yet he had all three at the same time. So if Evan was like, Oh, it’s only H. pylori, you know, he may have missed the fact that grd and crypto were involved too. So go into with an open mind and you have the right to have more than one infection happening at same time. Sad but true. But either way there are solutions to work on it and fix it.
Evan Brand: I was tired. Man, I was tired. Now that was a that was a that was a level of exhaustion that just doesn’t even seem real. I mean, that’s how you know something’s wrong when you’re that tire. But you know, hopefully, with this education we’re providing people can reach out and work on this before it gets to that crisis level because it’s much easier to pull you out if you’re not that deep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now Evan can you go to your conventional medical doctor or a gastroenterologist and typically get these infections picked up on?
Evan Brand: No, definitely not the testing is just so outdated, you know, it’s not sensitive, like the DNA stuff we’re using. So that’s the downside is if you go to the gastro doc down the road, say, Hey, I think I’ve got Giardia, I heard these two guys on the internet talk about it. They’ll probably just laugh in your face and say, Well, you didn’t travel to any third world countries. So you don’t have it. But if you if you really want to Sally, I’ll test you on they’ll run the outdated test and then everything comes back negative and then we’ll say see, I told you it was all in your head, just, you know, take an acid blocker.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So yes, my opinion is very similar. So the more acute you are, especially with typical gastrointestinal symptoms, the greater chance they’ll pick you up, especially if you came back from like Mexico or some kind of a country like Bali where infections are probable, right? But now what do you do? If your infections aren’t really gut based symptoms, they’re the fatigue or the brain fog, well, then how does that get picked up, you’re typically never going to get picked up for that you’re more than likely to, to get a psych referral for an antidepressant, right, then to get a gut test, and Evan already alluded to some of the technology they have isn’t going to be as up to par. So we have a little bit you know, more access to the DNA technology a little bit more sensitive. And then also like H. pylori testing that they may run a breath test, right? Urea breath test and look for elevated levels of co2, it’s possible, but that may miss an infection. And if it’s more subclinical, you may need a more sensitive test to pick it up. So if you’re listening, and you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna go to my MD that may not be the solution, I may not get you the answers you want. And if you don’t have the typical gut symptoms, diarrhea, bloating, gas, a lot of stomach discomfort, and irritability, you may not even they may not even want to run a test, because those symptoms don’t match with what they think the problem could be.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. And you know, it sounds like we’re like picking on him. Right? And we sort of are and that’s fine. I love picking on them, because they’re failing people. And it makes me sad. Because I was there I was sitting in the doctor’s office trying to get help. And I was told that I just needed an acid blocking medication. I told the doc, no, I feel better when I take it. enzymes that actually increased my stomach acid, I think you’re wrong. She said, That’s not possible. You’re gonna hurt yourself, you need to stop taking supplements stop all dietary supplement, the FDA, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And and that was it. And that’s when I signed off and said, No, I’m done.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and I do recommend, and I think you’re in the same way, I do recommend patients that have chronic issues, or acute issues, at least go see your conventional medical doctor just to get checked off that there’s nothing glaring that’s going on. And that that way, if you work for someone like myself, for you, and then they’ve kind of already been looked at, and they’ve kind of already know, okay, conventional medicine is kind of done all they can do. And, you know, functional medicine is the next best option at that point.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’m not saying we’re the all knowing at all, if you’re bleeding out of your butt, you need to go confirm you don’t have some type of a bleeding ulcer or colon cancer or you have some type of a polyp issue or diverticulitis and you need colon surgery. I mean, there are certain things that we can’t help with. But for these more functional, non pathological issues, we’re definitely going to be able to help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we can help with all those issues. Once they’re stable. If they’re unstable, though, conventional medicine does a really good job on stabilizing very sensitive issues. But once they’re stable, now what because for the most part, it’s going to be just symptom drug management for the rest of your life. Right? If you look at what they talked about, it’s, hey, we’re managing your gut issue versus let’s actually get to the root underlying issue. And sometimes management’s good when things are acute and flared. But now when they’re stable now what we want to go beyond just who wants to just manage their diarrhea for the rest of their life? That’s crazy, right?
Evan Brand: Oh, God. Well, that happens every day, doesn’t it? It’s happening today while we’re doing this call somebody is in the doctor’s office right now about to get an antispasmodic drug for their diarrhea.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and that may be fine acutely, but then what’s next? So get your health issues under control from a you know, stable standpoint, and then work on the next step with a good functional medicine doctor. Well, everyone was excellent chatting with y’all anything you want to leave us with Evan?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. We’re just ranting at this point. So if you need help, please reach out. JustinHealth.com, EvanBrand.com. Take great care yourself. We’ll be back. Have a good one, y’all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye now.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/fatigue-tiredness-and-link-to-gut-infections-podcast-311
Recommended Products:
Natural Ways To Increase Your Glutathione Levels | Podcast #292
Glutathione is an antioxidant that is capable of preventing damage to cellular components and also gives a lot of benefits to our body. For today’s podcast, the topic that came to mind is glutathione. Dr. J and Evan point a lot of information and tips on how glutathione is important in our health, how we increase our glutathione levels the natural way, the pros and cons, and a lot more. Read and listen below.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
00:37 Glutathione as Tri Peptide
06:06 Conditions Associated with Low Glutathione
11:32 Glutathione in Helping with Treating Cancer
23:03 Food and Supplements
38:46 Tips, Ideas for Higher Glutathione Levels
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here. Really excited to chat with y’all today. We got Evan brand here in the house, Evan, what’s cooking my friend?
Evan Brand: Oh, not much. We cook some bacon and some pastured sausage earlier, but nothing is cooking at the moment beyond that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome, brother. Well, I know we were chatting about topics that for today’s podcasts in the pre show and glutathione was one of these topics that kind of came to mind based on challenges that we’re seeing with our patients based on things that we’re seeing in our comments section on our pages, and we decided glutathione will be a great topic for the show today. So really excited. Let’s just start off the day what is glutathione? So glutathione is a tri peptide. What does that mean? Tri means three, Peptide means essentially amino acid. And there’s three amino acids that make up glutathione. Glutamine, cysteine and glycine, those are the big three glutamine cysteine glycine. Now we really important because these are all amino acids. Sulfur rich amino acids and you’re not going to find a lot of these amino acids by the way in in plant based products, you’re going to find the mainly in animal based products. So for amino acids are much more rich from animal than you do plants. A lot of plant based products tend to be lower in sulfur amino acids and you actually have to combine them to even get them appropriately right. That’d be like rice and beans, right? Because they’re missing certain amino, so you got to combine them just right. So glutathione really important try peptide, glutamine, cysteine, glycine, glycine, very, very high in bone broth and collagen. Right. cysteine very high and a lot of high quality animal products. Also whey protein. Okay. And then glutamine is obviously in a lot of gut healing supports glutamine is really important for the gut lining. Glutamine can also be more inflammatory, too. If you don’t have enough B six, it can go down glutamate pathways without B six. So we also want to make sure we’re getting enough B vitamins and we’ll talk about glutathione metabolism. We’ll talk about some of those pathways and what nutrients are needed to maximize glutathione and healthy glutathione metabolism besides just those try peptides, glutamine, glycine, and cysteine. Any thoughts seven?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I think it’s all excellent. I look forward to breaking it apart more. Now, how do we measure glucose ion? One way is we like to look at organic acids testing. There’s not a direct marker that says, glutathione, boom, that’s your level. But using some of the metabolites that you can measure in the urine, you can get an indicator of it. And we know that when people are exposed to toxins, whether it’s mold, or heavy metals or pesticide or herbicide, whatever it is, you’re going to be reducing your glutathione levels. And as you mentioned, you know, people that are on veggie based diets, they’re probably going to show up low. And so we can measure that on the oat test other other ways that you know, have to measure glutathione or is that what you use?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So yeah, the big ones, like you mentioned are going to be the pirate glutamate. The sulfate and the alpha hydroxy butyrate. Those are going to be some of the best ways to test it on the organic acids. Those are precursors to solidify own and a lot of the the sulfur nutrients cysteine, glycine, glutamine, those are big, big ways to do it. So when you look on the organic acids section, it gives you about five different organic acids that are that are very, very helpful at looking at glutathione the big three of the ones I just mentioned, I’ll pull up a couple others that I use as well, that are more on the precursor side for glycine. So glycine is another big one. Because that’s really important for glue to found as well then there are others that look at glutathione than the cysteine and the glutamine on top of that I’ll pull that up in one second. So organic acids are great. There’s also a red blood cell glorify on that you can do doctors day that does it. I think spectra cell does it.
Evan Brand: Have you ever done it or do you run it or do you think it’s not worth it? If we’re doing that oat.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think if you already have a good look at the oat, there’s four or five markers on there that you can elucidate from so I think the oat’s fine, but if someone has a chronic condition chronic detoxification issues, I don’t think it’s a bad way to just kind of give it a an extra look, see, especially if you’re struggling on the organic acids, or if the organic acids look good, but you’re still having some detoxification issues, I don’t mind running it. A lot of times I’ll run an ion panel with some of my patients which will come with an organic acid and a intercellular nutrient blood test as well. So it would be on there and then also be on the organic acids so that’s a way to kind of get a package deal on and kind of get two for one if you will.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I love the combos. Love the combos yes to like you mentioned the, like vegetarian sources where people are going to get sulfur to boost glutathione. I mean, that’s going to be the cruciferous stuff. This is why you and I will use some of these like broccoli sprout extracts. There’s some kale sprout extracts, things like that. There’s different greens powders, and there are some encapsulated products that we use and I’ve used them with children were if they weren’t able to swallow or they couldn’t stomach like a encapsulated glutathione or maybe alive was almost like they didn’t like the taste and some of the broccoli sprout extracts tend to work pretty good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally and on the organic acid just to highlight sulfate and pirate glutamate are the big ones for glutathione that’s really big. And then the other ones are going to be to methyl hip right we’ll really look at glycine and then the gluco re also looks at glycine so those are some of the other ones that can be ultra ultra helpful.
Evan Brand: This is why oat test is like I don’t know desert island you only have one test to choose from between like a DNA stool and an organic acids. Oh, man. It’s tough. I mean, I some days I go with the oat over the stools, my only test if I had to pick one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it can be helpful because you get a good window into yeast and fungus, which can be really helpful. So that’s really nice. And then also, we can talk about gluten if I own the different conditions that are associated with their other nutrients that help you recycled modifying and that are very helpful in the healthy metabolism of fluidify own and we have a nice handout here. I’m going to pull up so you guys can see I think it’s under Very, very, very helpful. I’ll pull this up here for you guys to see. So there’s a bunch of different conditions that are associated with low glutathione. Everything from aging to all simers to cancer to chronic liver, cognitive issues, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, hypertension, any immuno deficiency and chronic viral issues, lupus, mental health issues, multiple sclerosis, neurodegenerative issues, Parkinson’s, I mean, this is like through the freaking roof. It’s unbelievable. The association with other conditions, it’s not saying this is a direct cause they’re just saying, hey, they test a lot of people for who to die on. And they just find this chronic association with these issues. Now, I would say there’s definitely going to be there’s definitely going to be a causation link there for me, it’s hard for research to say that it takes a while for research to do a causation thing you got to do a metabolic war and you got to really take people in, give them Low, low defiant take people out, give them some glutathione and study the different it’s really hard at metabolic Ward studies are tough. So it’s you have to kind of look at more of associative studies versus metabolic Ward that really give you the causation. Let me show a couple things here for you guys to see. me pull this up for you guys.
Unknown Speaker: Okay, can you see my screen Evan?
Evan Brand: It’s loading. Yep, there it is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, cool. So these are a bunch of the conditions here that are associated with low glutathione. And then there are the links here. So you can actually see the scientific studies right Alzheimers, the emerging role of glutathione and an Alzheimer disease, right? You can see diabetes glutathione synthesis is diminished and patient with uncontrolled diabetes is really important. And again, this is the article right here I wanted to highlight is called a review of dietary phytonutrients for gluten support. It’s in the journal nutrients September 2019. So pretty, pretty fresh study. But this pathway here I really wanted to highlight for everyone. I think this is super important. When I get this just the right size, does that look good to you?
Evan Brand: Yeah, looks perfect.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, cool. So let me kind of highlight a couple of things that are happening here so people that are listening, we got a video on screen so you guys can actually see the different pathways and how glutathione gets into the cell and works. So you have your three major amino acids you have cysteine right here, which can come from an acetylcysteine and can get converted from cysteine assisting right there, you have glycine, right very high and collagen and bone broth. That’s why I like to do my 20 grams of collagen in my coffee every morning. Okay, and then you have your glutamate or glutamine inside the cell. So outside the cell, these are the big two amino acids and then inside the cell, you have your glutamine that gets conjugated here. Now also outside of the cell, look at the the green vegetables right the brassica vegetables, the high cruciferous vegetables. Some of the polyphenols like green tea are very important in this glutathione to conjugated, basically it helps conjugate a lot of these foreign chemicals xeno biotic means foreign chemicals, you know, biotics could be xeno estrogens that could be xeno neurological things from pesticides right? So basically they’re going to be chemicals that are foreign to the body that are stressor on the body this can help with fluidify on to GST and conjugate Gosh, conjugate just means binding a protein to it, typically, so the body can excrete it via the stool or the kidneys or urine, right?
Evan Brand: Now, here’s the thing. You mentioned that big list of conditions so it would make sense why cancer would be associated with low glutathione because this pathway you’re showing if you’ve got a build up of all these toxic chemicals and hormone disrupting chemicals whenever if that pathway screwed up. I mean, it sounds like you’re going to end up sick so it’s not that like you said, it’s not causation, but that pathway could be you know, if I were somebody like focusing on an anti cancer regimen, I mean, this pathway here would be a huge piece of the puzzle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and this GST stands for glutathione S transferase and they’re actually making drugs that are glutathione s transferase in nature. So this GST is very very very important in excreting toxins and crap outside of the body. And we know this to like a lot of the things we may use on the brassica vegetable side, we may do broccoli sprouts, we may do sulfur rich compounds like dim, which is di n Dom methane, or we may do indoor three carbinol these are all going to be so for concentrated compounds, we may even do things like calcium to glucose rate. And these can help improve this clarify own clarify on s transferase pathway. Any comments there?
Evan Brand: I’m trying to figure out what the I would love to learn about that you’re saying they’re using or they’re making prescription drugs to work on this pathway?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so let’s um, let me see I can pull it up here on screen for you. Can you see this right here?
Evan Brand: We’re still on the image we still see the image of the pathways.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, let me just pull this up here this is an older study but you know I like to just show people what’s going on so they can actually see it
Evan Brand: Because here’s if they’re gonna make a prescription here’s what they’re going to do they’re going to jack up the price 1000 X to do the same thing that in AC or DC now do yes sir.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, so you can see this the role of fluidify on s transferase. In anti cancer drug resistance. So it seems like this may be helping a lot of the cancer drugs work better. So they’re talking about who defined as transfer rates are a family of phase two detoxifying enzymes that help catalyst catalyst is a gluten independent enzyme. And it basically helps when I say conjugate that means bind a protein to it, a variety of endogenous and exogenous toxin. So endogenous means toxins that are made by your body. exogenous means toxins that are come into your So think of mold and pesticides as exogenous. Think of maybe yeast overgrowth or bacterial overgrowth and those toxins being produced like acid aldehyde, maybe being endogenous. Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: It does. I actually found something on this. I’m looking on this drug website, and actually found out here that for chemotherapy, doses of 1.5 to three grams of glutathione have been given in a 15 to 20 minute time period right before a chemotherapy treatment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally makes sense. Yep, totally makes sense. So I’m trying to go down to the conclusion of this one study here. I haven’t gone through it yet. Yeah, I’m just trying to look through this here. Alright, cool. I’ll have to go through this here later on. But I mean, it just shows you how important glutathione is with detoxification, cancer and also we can talk about the immune system, right. There’s the reason why that page had immune issues, AIDS and viral issues as being a low glutathione issue. Because gluten has a major, major role in immunomodulation and immune balancing any comments there?
Evan Brand: I just wonder where this conversation is happening in an oncology office though, hey, we need to boost up your clue to find out I want you to eat broccoli sprouts and take some extra NAC and vitamin C and some of the stuff we’re going to get into. It’s like, Where’s that happening? I mean, maybe in a holistic oncologist office, but I feel like your conventional guys, it’s still just the chemo model. It’s not going to be anything like this. Exactly wrong. If you’re, you know, cancer doctor out there, then let us know who you are, what you’re doing. We’d love to hear about it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, the problem is, people on the pharmaceutical side or conventional medicine side, their perspective when they look at things is how can we make a drug that modulates this pathway or interacts in this pathway? The problem is once you start making the drug, you’re forgetting why these pathways are low to begin with. Right? Hay diet issues, digestion issues, stress issues, exposure to toxins, right They’re forgetting why these pathways are low to begin with. And then number two, anytime you make a drug, you can’t patent Mother Nature. So you can’t patent the actual codify on building blocks, you have to do isomers, or different substrates that look similar, but may not be the real deal. And the problem is once you start deviating from Mother Nature, all drugs have what Evan?
Evan Brand: They have side effects, side effects. It’s like the designer babies. It’s like, oh, let’s play with these genetics. We’re going to make this baby have this color hair and this color scan and whatever there. It’s not what nature intended.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So once you start doing that, then you have an increased risk of side effects. And because you can’t patent Mother Nature, you know, that’s the problem. That’s the big issue. You can’t patent Mother Nature. Therefore, you have to go and create compounds that are isomers that look similar, they may work a little bit will never work as good as the real thing. And then you’re going to have a whole bunch of side effects.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s get back to that first paper that you and I have pulled up with the graphic on it because we wanted to go through some things that have been shown to help with this whole glutathione people think just pop glutathione pill in that scene of the day. But there’s and that’s true. You can do that. You could do your oral, your sublingual, your zomo, your intravenous glutathione. But there’s other things along the way they can help, like NAC is a game changer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So let me let’s kind of let’s work from the top and go down. Okay, so we talked about what’s happening outside of the cell, right? We need cysteine. We need glycine, these are really really big pathways. We talked about maybe some of the sulfur compounds in the vegetables, we hit that right now inside. If we go to the top of this cycle and work our way down, you can see folic acid or we’ll just call it full late. Okay? And you can see thf this is tetrahydrofolate and this goes to mthfr. Right everyone talks about methyl tetrahydrofolate reductase right mthfr right. So you need full A B vitamins, and then you’re also going to need b 12 betaine, which is trying methyl glycine, so these are important nutrients that are needed. So this pathway can go around and essentially when you have an mthfr issue, this pathway up here, this enzyme is lower. Therefore, you need more of these nutrients here to run this pathway and of course not folic acid we activated fully, whether it’s cat you know, folic acid or calcium D fully or mthfr folate, we need to activate it fully. And then you can see here I’m assigning gets stuck as homocysteine if we don’t have enough of these nutrients and we know homocysteine can create vasculature inflammation, inflammation in the vasculature right? associated with heart disease. You can go look at the research of Kilmer McCauley over at Harvard, and we need enough of these nutrients to take pining to go to homocysteine and then go all the way down to cysteine down here so then you can see cysteines are really good sulfur amino acid cysteine then binds with glutamate or glutamine. Okay, and then you can see cysteine and glutamine go downstream to actually make glutathione and guess what else you need? Well, you know, if you look at some of these nerve pathways over here where you know, you know that multi level product called Protandim, right, it’s got a lot of the phytonutrients the green teas ashwagandha fits in this category, a lot of bioflavonoids like resveratrol, vitamin e omega three and guess what? Magnesium. So these nerf two which is really important for binding that cysteine to the glycine and making glue to find magnesium is really important as well. And then you can see glutathione also is very Selenium dependent. So fluidify on gets utilized in the body, it needs to be two and then also when it gets reduced to reduce go to diet, it needs vitamin C and lipoic acid to bring it right back up and to recycle it. So if you don’t have enough vitamin C or lipoic acid, which is a silver component, we may not recycle our glutathione and then Selenium is very important too because Selenium helps take the metabolism of Go to found it spits out a lot of hydrogen peroxide right here, h2o. And Selenium actually binds an oxygen off and makes it water. So it actually helps the metabolites of glutathione that are very inflammatory h2o to and it turns it in the water. And then we use a lot of these phytonutrients as well to buffer that oxidative stress.
Evan Brand: It’s beautiful. It’s a it’s amazing how that happens. So you and I’ve talked about autism and behavioral issues and detoxification issues and all that and how it’s related to mthfr defects. So what we’re kind of showing here can show how just simply improving the methylation component of this picture can improve detox because methylation helps with detox on its own, but you see the mechanism downstream of glutathione. So this is why some kids that we work with even just by improving methylation, and as you mentioned, we’ll give them like an activated, you know, l mt hf or something similar data We’ll clear up some of the mood issues that will clear up some of the skin, it will clear up dark circles under the eyes. I mean, just improving methylation alone could be a game changer. My favorite part of this whole picture is the vitamin C, because in this paper that you and I were looking at, it was shown that even just taking 500 to 1000 milligrams a day of vitamin C for 13 weeks. So what’s that give it three months or so led to an 18% increase in gluten ion levels? So that’s it. That’s such low hanging fruit. You and I are such huge fans of addressing low hanging fruit. I mean, how much easier can it get? You’re boosting Bluetooth on 20% just by vitamin C. I’m rounding at 18 but I’m calling it 20. I mean, it’s close enough.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I wanted to highlight this one study here so you can see it to kind of just dovetails with everything we’re talking about. I want to just make sure that makes sense. pull this up screen here so you guys can see it.
Evan Brand: Okay, while you’re doing that, I’m going to just keep ranting about other nutrients. So yeah, I just pulled up Selenium. I want to say one thing about that real quick. So Selenium. It was found that beautify on increases just by giving Selenium as well. So I’m not saying spot tree. But let’s see someone had a thyroid issue were like, Hey, you really need some extra selenium, that alone could be boosting Bluetooth ion. So it’s really, really cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the nice thing is when we’re looking at patients, we’re testing all these nutrients because of course, yes, it’s going to help but if you’re deficient in one nutrient over the other, that nutrient could be the bigger linchpin for supporting your glutathione. Right. Now, this study, I thought was really important because one of the major mechanisms of glutathione and how it works with cancer is it modulates the immune system, better immune system, right? It controls cancer cell growth, right? What’s cancer just cells growing out of control, and then it helps with oxidation, right? oxidation is when you lose electrons and cancer is very oxidative. It causes a lot of loss of electrons which then creates a lot of free radical stress and damage. To the DNA into the immune system, so really powerful abstract here, role of fluidify on and cancer progression and chemo resistance which means resistance to chemotherapy. It talks about codifying, placing an important role in the cellular process, including proliferation and a pop ptosis. That means cells growing and cells dying, so it helps cells so they don’t grow too much until they die sooner. That’s good. We need that. Then it talks about while glutathione deficiency or decrease in glutathione ratio leads to an increase in susceptibility of oxidative stress. What does that mean translation, you lose a lot more electrons, and that creates free radical damage and DNA implicated in the progression of cancer elevated glow to final levels increase the antioxidant capacity. That means it helps you take electrons that you’ve lost it helps bind to them and stabilize the cell and resistance to oxidative stress observed in many cancer cells. The presence highlights the role of gluta thiam as a cytotoxic That means it protects the cells from being damaged. Carcinogenic means means the formation of cancer. So it protects cells from being inhabited by cancer and the sensitivity to tumors to the cytotoxic agents, or the cytotoxic effects of anti carcinogenic agents, so what that means it’s going to protect you from getting damaged by chemotherapy. And it’s going to protect you from the cytotoxic effects of chemotherapy. So that’s kind of the the layman’s translation as we go. So what’s the moral of the story glutathione protects you from the damage of cancer, it protects your cells from growing into cancer and it protects you from the damage of chemotherapy. So three ways it’s very beneficial.
Evan Brand: That’s amazing and not that this was the glutathione cancer podcast, but hey, I’m sure everybody listening would agree that you don’t want cancer. So, of course, you can’t say glutathione prevent you from getting it, but man, it’s an incredibly protective molecule.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% Evan, can you see me back on screen now?
Evan Brand: Yes, sir.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: All right. Awesome. I think we hit that one really, really well. Let’s keep on rolling though, if you don’t mind. So we talked about that pathway, which I thought was really helpful. We’ll put the links down below. So if you guys want to see it, why don’t we talk about some of the big foods, so beautify on right cysteine glutamine glycine, so now we just back into it what foods are really high in cysteine, glutamine lysine? Well, of course, things like whey proteins and to be great as long as you’re not ultra dairy sensitive whey proteins great sulfur rich foods are going to be helpful like a lot of your brassica cruciferous vegetables right bok choy, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, kale, mustard greens, turnips, again, the problem is that’s not going to really help you with a lot of the intercellular glutathione but it’s still going to be helpful. Now what other other foods that are more high in some of those intercellular nutrients? Well, you’re going to see all of your high quality animal products, beef, chicken, fish, eggs, all of these things. The higher quality the animals are, meaning the less hormones the West junk, the less toxins, the more they’re fed high quality grass, the more nutritionally dense they’re going to be.
Evan Brand: I found, I’m looking at a couple of like food data sheets. So in one large egg, you get almost 150 milligrams of cysteine. And who knows if that’s even, I mean, that could have been a conventional egg. I mean, what about like a fully pastured organic egg, you may even get more cysteine you’re talking almost I mean, if you do two eggs, you’re at 100% of even over 100% of your daily intake for assisting with two eggs. Love sunflower seeds, and a handful, a one ounce handful of sunflower seeds. You’re at over 100 milligrams of hemp seeds. You get a ton from hemp seeds as well. So like let’s say you did a smoothie in the morning where you put in some collagen with maybe some hemp seed or maybe some hemp protein added to it. Maybe a grass fed way. I mean you’re going to be stellar in the solidify on generating department.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. 100%. So your animal products are always going to be the best way to go off the bat just because of how high they are and how nutrient dense they are. Also, when you look at amino acids and plants, you have to look at the digestibility of the amino acids, there are certain scales, you can look at that look at the digestibility because plants have a lot of anti nutrients that bind a lot of these amino acids up because plants don’t have claws and teeth to fight or flee. So how they survive is they have anti nutrients which makes some of their nutritional compounds harder to break down which means they pass through the stool and then they can grow seeds and flourish and other parts of the soil. So they have to have anti nutrients so they can pass other animals digestive tracts right. Animals just have claws and teeth to fight and flee plants don’t so there’s a lot more anti nutrients that prevents some of the digestibility whether it’s mineral blockers like fighting And oxalates, whether it’s trypsin inhibitors that help decrease proteolytic enzymes, so their proteins can’t be digested, whether it’s lots of hard to process fibers, all those things are potential and could be, could play a big role in those amino acids not being fully absorbed.
Evan Brand: Well, here’s a couple other things, too. So in that paper, they’ve got a table on there that talks about preparation of the sulfur rich vegetables. And apparently freezing of broccoli does reduce the sulfur. And then of course, if you are eating it overcooked, you’re likely gonna it’s like a sweet spot, right? Because we’ve talked about this before nutrient density of raw versus lightly steamed. So lightly steamed is going to be the way to go. But if you cook too much, then you’ve broken it down that way. If it’s frozen broccoli, then you’re already at a disadvantage state. So it sounds like it’s just too difficult. I mean, I’m not saying that. veggies aren’t important. I still eat a ton of veggies, but if I’m looking to it To increase glutathione I’m not just going to be doing a broccoli smoothie, I’m going to be focused on the way and the collagen. And also, here’s an interesting one. Number one food for my pining king crab, one crab leg, you’re over 700 milligrams of Matheny. It’s the number one source. So if you like crap out there, there’s a reason to like it because of them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. I love it. I think that’s really, really awesome points. So a couple of kind of deal breakers, let’s call it low stomach acid, we don’t have enough high quality stomach acid, it’s gonna be hard to break down a lot of these sulfur rich compounds. So of course, that’s going to be a big, big problem. So if we don’t have enough stomach acid or enzymes, we’re not going to be able to digest a lot of those animal products, and also a lot of the sulfur rich vegetables. Let’s be real, a lot of them are very high and fodmaps, right, fermentable oligo, disaccharide, mono and polyols. So guess what, if you have SIBO guess what kind of response to those vegetables you’re going to have? Yes. A lot of bloating and gas, they may even disrupt motility they may even cause diarrhea or constipation. So you may not really be able to tolerate much of these vegetables. So a lot of people that are like on a carnivore template, a lot of times they have SIBO, and a lot of autoimmune sensitivities and they’re really sensitive to a lot of the anti nutrients in these plants. So a lot of people kind of come down on people that are doing a carnivore template, but the reason why they do it is because they feel significantly better because of the anti nutrients and because a lot of times there’s some SIBO going on and cutting out those fermentable carbohydrates or even going carnivore can help starve out some of those critters too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and important. And let’s point out that’s not forever. I mean, if somebody is on a carnivore template, we’re using that to stabilize those people until we can work behind the scenes on these other issues like the infections you mentioned. Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we may be able to add some other things down the road for sure. So a lot of your vitamin C rich vegetables are going to be awesome. A lot of the sulfur ones a lot of the lower sugar fruits are going to be awesome. Those are going to be great things to do off the bat. Of course, we talked about yourself. Millennium rich foods as well animal products, oyster seafood, high end zinc high in selenium, Brazil nuts can be excellent as long as you can tolerate the knots very, very high in Selenium. We talked about the stomach acid and the enzymes as being a rate limiting factor because of the fact that they need good acid levels and enzyme levels to be able to break them down. And also say we talked about this earlier. Vitamin D is really important for glutathione in the brain. Can you talk about that a little bit, Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah. So I think the best way to talk about this and implement it is through the nebulizer. So there was a couple papers talking about increase included found in the brain. I don’t have it pulled up. But long story short, I’ve looked into this. I’ve done it over the weekend. I will tell you, I get more energy, I get more mental clarity. I feel honestly I feel relaxed. I mean, it’s almost like I snuck in a little bit of gamma powder into my nebulizer something because after breathing in the glutathione, I just felt relaxed. Maybe because I was like focusing on deep breathing and such while I was breathing it in. But I looked at a couple papers on the administration method. So just eating glutathione orally meaning in a capsule form like zomo, doing foods to increase it versus IV versus nebulized. The only way to get it in the brain is nebulizing. At we’re talking at therapeutic levels now, the some of the glutathione made in the body get into the brain, probably, but we’re talking if you want to just crank up brain power, let’s say you have a traumatic brain injury, maybe you had a head injury or you’re an athlete or a soccer player or you fell off a bike or you fell down a set of stairs or you have mold because we know mold damages the brain to me nebulizing with the sodium bicarbonate and the saline solution. It’s a miracle cure, so I can’t say enough good things about it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, I love it. I think it’s really, really important. I wanted to highlight a couple more things that I thought were also very important. Let’s talk about supplements. So we talked about a couple things when we review that solidify on pathway that you guys can see the video on. Alpha lipoic acid is very important in recycling clarify him. Also, milk thistle is a really good tone of fire and does help support glutathione levels as well. Vitamin C is really important, right? That helps with reduced glutathione and help activating it again, that was also very, very important. Oh-
Evan Brand: Here’s one thing. Go ahead. Here’s one thing I forgot to mention this was in the paper. So I kind of went on a tangent on the on the nebulizer. But in that particular paper, you and I were discussing it I was wrong. It is true that you can increase at least this was in rats. So is it the same in humans maybe. But by just giving an IV dose of NAC they were able to increase glutathione in the brain. So what about oral NAC? Does that increase glutathione in the brain? I don’t know. But at least in that paper IV NAC did boost Brain levels include glutathione.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. Yeah, I imagine over time, I mean, those amino acids will eventually cross. I know sometimes the amino acids cross the blood brain barrier and then the glutathione converted in the brain I think glutathione maybe too big to cross the brain itself. I know some of the amino acids like cysteine Oh l cysteine. can cross the blood brain and can then convert to glutathione in the brain. So I know cysteine is a big one. I don’t think NAC can but l cysteine can.
Evan Brand: You think just because it’s smaller?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, smaller because NAC gets broken down into cysteine by the body and some people they say just take cysteine because I know a lot system is very important with adrenaline. And we know adrenaline is a really big, nervous system. amino acid right? And we know dopamine actually gets converted to adrenaline and we know dopamine to adrenaline. That pathway involves sulfur in particularly cysteine.
Evan Brand: So wonder, I’m just thinking out loud just for for my purposes. So I want to People that are having issues with anxiety, if they would be able to reduce the anxiety by boosting up that pathway working more on sulfur.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sulfur can be really helpful. Now in my line, I have a product called detox and he knows that we’ll have some cysteine some and acetylcysteine some calcium to glucose, which is a really good binder for mold and for hormones, refining, cysteine, taurine, glycine, so all the amino acids which is really helpful, I like that a lot. I’ll also do a lot of the the phase one nutrients, a lot of the antioxidants, a lot of the B vitamins, milk thistle, those kind of things for phase one support. Phase One is taking toxins that are fat soluble and converting them to water soluble phase two is going to be water soluble, excrete it out the body and that involves lots of sulfur, all the amino acids I just mentioned. And with some people we may do a combination of El glue or lipids almost glutathione we may do glutathione, there’s another good found has these little these little Bucky balls? Can you talk about that?
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah, I love I love the seat elated. Yeah, so there’s a couple out there with the Bucky balls that basically the idea is to try to just shrink the molecular size of it, so you can kind of sneak it into the cell. So there’s, you’ve got the light zomo where you’re going to do like a sunflower and then you’ve got this buckyball idea now I don’t know if it’s a carbon molecule, if this is the same thing as the C 60. You and I’ve been talking about or what but but there are ways to to make Bluetooth ion smaller for me, I just look at the papers on it. And the acetal version is the one that I believe you have your own I have my own as well have an S acetal ad glue defi on. I’ve had people doing here just just a quick little debate. I’ve had people doing various versions of like Bumble glue defy on and liposomal vitamin C and I’ve measured them and many of these people are still low on the test for vitamin C and glue to violence. So when we switch them over to like an acetal ated and then just a mixed ascorbate I see the levels come up so it’s not that I’m against the life was almost glutathione. But I’m just finding that the acetal works just as good if not better, and it’s capsule because the lipids almost generally tastes like crap. Or if you’ve got a really sensitive person, there’s going to be citrus oil or some other flavoring to cover up the terrible beautify on taste. And then those people don’t tolerate it, and then they’re not compliant and then they don’t get better.
Dr. Justin Marchegian: 100% Yep, I totally agree. So right now, I use a lot of lipids almost, but you still do the seagull and you still get good results with that clinically?
Evan Brand: I do. Yeah, it works great. And I feel good on it. So I’ve done an experiment on myself where I’ll go life as normal for a month and then I’ll go acetal I feel just as good Now it could be because my acetal version has a gram of NAC added to it. So I’m kind of cheating because I’m really getting the NAC plus the gluten. Maybe that’s why I’m I’m getting so much better. Oh, so while you were talking I just did a quick search on studies on glutathione and anxiety because you brought up this whole dopa mean endorphin thing and this is not for the podcast, but really more just Brain Candy for me. Turns out Yes, there’s a link between glutathione and anxiety and bumping up glutathione been shown to reduce depression and anxiety. So there you go.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I make a lot of that has to do with the catecholamine. The dopa means synthesis in the brain. So I think it’s really really important to know. Dr. Marty hands I think he’s over at neuroscience or neuro research. He talks about how sulfur is very important for synthesis of serotonin and dopamine and a lot of your adrenaline over time you will deplete it, especially when you get stressed and you’re taking a lot of your dopamine and you’re converting it downstream to adrenaline, you will be depleting a lot of your sulfur. Now, what does this matter? So this matters, because the more stressed you are, the more sulfur you deplete, which means you’ll have less sulfur leftover. So now if you’re stressed and now you’re exposed to toxins, or you’re living in a moldy home, you can see how stress can make everything worse because now you have less flow glutathione precursors to help you in that situation.
Evan Brand: Yeah, speaking of stress, I’ve got a paper in nature right here. was called I’ll give you the link in case you want it in case you want to show anybody but it was called glutathione depletion, mitochondrial dysfunction induced by chronic stress. And I don’t know this is a rat thing so you know how they deal with rats they do something to them to stress them out but long story short stress in this paper had reduced glutathione brain glutathionr by over 35% so it would make sense why glutathione would help with depression too because you think about the toxicity I mean, heavy metals and such those can impact neurotransmitter function you can get depressed just for being toxic. So by reducing the toxicity, you’re less depressed. I mean, I think that’s really cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Now a lot of people are asking well where can you get the nebulized glutathione right now the third natural site is sold out but JustinHealth.com/glutathione would be where you can find that as the third natural site if not head over to EvanBrand.com or JustinHealth.com just put glutathione in the search and we have some of our own sulfur based compounds that we use in the lead As well mold based compounds we use so feel free to reach out to us, we’ll put pertinent links down below for you guys as well. And then outside of that, just really make sure you have good stomach acid levels because you need good stomach acid to break everything down. And then we also talked about, you know, the animal products if you’re vegan vegetarian, try to get some animal products in there, even if it’s egg yolks, or if it’s a little bit of fish, do your best on that and just try to make it healthy. And then really look at B 12. And fully, you’re not going to get enough b 12. On the on the plant based side, you really need animal products to get b 12. So if you are really plant based, you need to make sure you’re supplementing with the high quality methylated B 12. And maybe some activated full layers to be safe, because you need full eight and B 12 to run those glutathione pathways.
Evan Brand: Let’s just do like a quick 30-second recap because those with brain fog are like oh my god, what am I supposed to do? Do I go like swimming? Am I in a pool filled with glutathione? What do I do? So whey protein, grass fed meats Good cruciferous veggies probably lightly steamed over raw, maybe some greens powders or greens juices if you if you just for some reason can’t tolerate it like the broccoli sprouts, I think that’d be great for somebody that can’t eat broccoli because maybe they have digestive troubles and you could go for some of the extracts, making sure you’re doing enough vitamin C as you mentioned, adequate stomach acid, so making sure you’re testing your gut for infections. If you have H. pylori, and other infections, you’ve got to fix your gut, so possibly extra enzymes, possibly anti microbials, antifungal, anti parasitic herbs to treat the infections, maybe doing an oat test to check in on your overall levels and getting some micronutrient panels run. And then if there’s other issues that are keep depleting you then maybe looking into the mold, the heavy metals and the other toxins that are going to deplete glue to die on. That’s kind of your recap.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% now, what do you need for sulfur amino acids a day? I would say you know 1500 to 2000 milligrams on some of the NAC and some The sulfur aminos I’ll do one to two scoops, you know, 1020 grams of collagen a day, I think it’s great on the vitamin C on the low side, you know, one to two grams, I think it’s great if your diets amazing and you’re getting lots of leafy greens and some low sugar fruit, maybe a gram or nothing is probably okay, if you’re really great there, if not a gram or two on the vitamin C sides are great on the light bulbs almost go to file. And if you want to go that road, I think half a gram to one full gram is fine half a gram on the maintenance side. Or if you’re just getting sulfur amino acid, that may be enough. But if you’re under some stress with mold a half a gram to a full gram. And if you’re dealing with more acute stress, right, a lot of viral issues today can really create stress in the lungs and glorify them can be very helpful with that long stress. You may want to go up to two grams on the glutathione more acutely and those are a couple of good first things go ahead.
Evan Brand: Yeah yeah don’t forget about the NAC too. You and I did I don’t know if we did a whole show or if we just kind of rained it on it for a little bit, but NAC in regards to immune health and NAC being very very protective so I’m usually at around a gram but you could go higher possibly 2 grams per day of NAC combined with that 500 to 1000 milligrams glutathione that is an awesome one-two punch.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, just be careful what the NAC cuz it’s an expectorant it will dry out your sinuses and and your throat a little bit so it’s great if you’re really mucus ease but be careful if you’re getting too dry you may want to pull back on it. So just kind of know that NAC is awesome for a lot of the excess post nasal drip excess mucus but if you go a little too much you may get a little bit too dry in some of those areas.
Evan Brand: I can confirm. I haven’t had a nosebleed but when I was going higher like, two grams. Yeah I was pretty dry I felt like I could breathe better though, man I tell you my sinuses felt clean as a whistle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so if you’re getting over a cold and you got a little bit of post nasal stuff going on, NAC you should be one of the first things you go to in your medicine cabinet specially if you get that little bit of a nagging post nasal drip cough and they cease the first thing to hit.
Evan Brand: Yep.Maybe that some Exley or nasal spray something like that you got anything.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah, well you definitely the sign is flush with the X clear like that’s number one, because you got to flush things up, and the number two, you dry it up and then you do those you’re in good shape. Anything else you want to highlight Evan?
Evan Brand: No, let’s wrap this thing up it was fun and if y’all have further questions or comments of course we always want to hear your experiments and your experiences- how did it go, what did you do with glutathione, did you do like me and then I called Justin in like 10 o’clock when I hey man I took like a double or triple dose of glutathione and I got a terrible headache I remember that so now. We’re always being the guinea pigs and that’s what we love doing and we are available clinically. So if you need help, you can reach out to Dr. J at JustinHealth.com, we work with people around the world. So JustinHealth.com, my website EvanBrand.com and we’ll be in touch next week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And when we talk about these things guys, this isn’t theoretical for stuff. We see thousands of patients, tens of thousands over our decade-long careers and we know it works. We know it doesn’t and if you’re leaning into glutathione, maybe put a little bit of a binder in there an activated charcoal bentonite clay taking way away from food and supplements just to kind of soak up or kind of broom up anything that may be already liberated from your body. So that’s kind of a good first step just to be on the on the alert and always start low taper up don’t ever go over the top on it always start low work your way up try to make sure you’re working with a
practitioner so you have ways to monitor, test and assess as well as figure out the best order of operations and addressing your concerns. And if you want to reach out to Evan, EvanBrand.com, myself Dr. J JustinHeatlh.com. We are available worldwide for support and health consults and feel free and reach there. All right guys if you enjoy it let your friends and family know put your comments down below and what future podcast topics you’d like to hear about. Have a good one guys, take care.
Evan Brand: I got one final comment on that sure, I’m so glad you brought up the binder. So this podcast is not designed for people to go, hey I’m you know feverishly writing down everything that Justin said. This many milligrams of this is I’m gonna go do his protocol- no, that’s not what he said. These are just guidelines okay because if you go and you do a gram of glutathione and you’ve never taken it you’re probably gonna get a headache or feel like crap because you’re mobilizing things. This thing glutathione helps push and I think of it as the push so when we’re talking about a detox protocol it’s kind of a push catch push catch repeat and if you don’t have something in to catch it meaning something to upregulate phase 2 or potentially also in addition the binders like the charcoal the clay zeolite bentonite you know chlorella whatever it is you could get in trouble so please don’t just go to glutathione, you’ve really got to have some sort of catcher’s mitt in place or just help your you know allow your practitioner to guide you because you can have too much of a good thing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent point, Evan. We’ll put some of our favorite products down below so you guys can take a peek and we’re here to help you as needed Evan you have a phenomenal day.
Evan Brand: Great chat with you, take care. See you later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks, bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/natural-ways-to-increase-your-glutathione-levels-podcast-292
SIBO, Yeast Overgrowth, Mood Issues & More – Podcast #169
Your gut affects your health in a variety of ways, and it’s not just about digestion. The health status of your gut can influence the immune system, your weight, and even your mood! In today’s part-podcast and part-Q&A video, let’s join Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand as they talk about gut health and how it affects us as a whole.
Watch and listen as they discuss topics like Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO), yeast or fungal overgrowth, weight gain and weight loss, and even the link between your gut and your mood swings. So many people are diagnosed with SIBO, in fact, Dr. Justin says that almost 90% of his patients are suffering from this condition. Learn how to manage your gut health by taking the right supplements, eating the right foods, and preventing issues from wreaking havoc on your overall health. Watch this video for more info!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
02:30 SIFO is Definitely an Issue
05:20 Conventional Treatment of Candida and SIBO
07:19 Urinary Tract Infection
10:00 Treating UTI by Just Hitting the Gut.
21:36 Top herbs for Candida Overgrowth
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. J here in the house, with Evan Brand. We’re gonna do a live Q and A call. We may talk about some topics near and dear to us, what’s trending. And then if you guys want to come in on the side and ask any questions, feel free. We are here to serve. Evan, what’s cooking, man?
Evan Brand: Hey. Uh— not too much is cooking but I’m drinking some apple cider vinegar drink. Good old Bragg’s uh— with some cinnamons. So, that’s good. This is
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know. Totally. Just that convenience aspect is really nice. I like the lime one. The lime one’s really good, too. IIt’s only sweetened with Stevia.
Evan Brand: Oh, that one doesn’t have sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. That one’s a good one.
Evan Brand: Oh. Yeah. I didn’t know that…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it.
Evan Brand: existed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow, man.
Evan Brand: Well, I did an interview uh—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now you know.
Evan Brand: I did an interview this morning uh— with my— for my summit, and it was all about SIFO, so I figured maybe we could chat about
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think, when we look at yeast, for instance. You know, we do a typical SIBO test, which looks at Methane and Hydrogen gases, which are— you know— You give a sugar s— solution via lactulose to the per— person, and that sugar’s indigestible to the body, except certain bacteria that are dysbiotic. And when those bacteria eat that lactulose solution, they spit off Methane of Hydrogen gases, depending on wha— what bacteria they are. And that Hydrogen can either disrupt and cause diarrhea or increase motility, or can cause decrease motility via Methane, so— Of course, we see it with various gases indirectly. We don’t know the exact bacteria, but we know that those gases are there
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, SIFO’s definitely an issue.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So let’s— let’s go through symptoms a bit. What if somebody
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hundred percent. And a lot of people who have gut issues, right? They’re gonna have a lot of mood issues or energy issues too. It’s very rare that someone only has gut issues. Like, they could have diarrhea, bloating or gas, or indigestion, or GERD, or acid reflux, or gastroparesis with their food, just sits in your tummy for a long time. But it’s very possible that you could just have mood issues, uh— brain fog— With fungus, it’s common to have joint pain. It’s common to have brain fog. It’s even common to have anxiety too. Uhm— the yeast, kind of metabolic products in the gut, uhm— when they metabolize, they can spit off acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde can then create a compound called salsolinol. Salsolinol can create apoptosis in the midbrain, where it— it can actually kill off some of the uhm— substantia nigra cells that produce dopamine— s, of course, you know, chronic yeast issues, severe yeast issues, but could potentially create more neurological issues due to all the toxic by-products.
Evan Brand: That’s a trip. Now, I know saccharomyces boulardii. We talked about it. We use it for the saccharomyces could do two things, maybe you colla— collaborate on this a bit for the saccharomyces as one, gonna help to crowd out the yeast, but can also kill the toxins that Candida’s producing. Can you speak on that? Do you know what I’m talking about?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean, yeast, Candida can also produce [stutters]— As a by-product, they’re gonna produce mycotoxins, right? And these toxic by-products can disrupt digestion. Uhm— they’re also— you know, acetaldehydes, a stressor that’s produced by the Candida that I mentioned earlier. And Candida’s one type of yeast. You know, they’r— you can have, you know, the Rhodotorula species that— that the cal— Candida albicans, as the Candida of everyone refers to. You have the Geotrichum candidum. You have uhm— these species as well. So, of
Evan Brand: Yep. Well said. So, let’s talk about treatment a bit. I mean, some of the options that we use, conventional docs. Maybe let’s chat about that first. I mean, we always go straight to the functional medicine piece and assume that people understand that. But I don’t think many people understand what and how poorly conventional medicine treats Candida and bacterial overgrowth type issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, most of the time, conventional medicine’s gonna, you know, typically laugh at your face when you talk about Candida. And unless you have— number one, you have some type of skin-oriented rash, like a tinea versicolor, some kind of seborrheic dermatitis. That’s apparent on the skin, right? It’s like, it’s there. You can see it. It’s apparent they’ll recommend some type of antifungal cream, and they won’t ever look deeper
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like the yellow kind of thickened discolored toenail. That’d be the— the fourth one. [crosstalk] Mouth, nose—
Evan Brand: What about on the fingers, too? I’ve seen people with like a ye— a yellow nail, where it’s like…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s the same.
Evan Brand: …falling off.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s the same thing, right? Toenail and fingernail is the same kind of thing.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mp— that thickened type of fungal things we see on the nails, on the skin, Uhm— typically, on the mouth, and then typically, vaginal. And let’s say number five would be kind of like a uhm— seborrheic dermatitis, or like a cradle cap, or like
Evan Brand: Got it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …toe or finger.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So, let’s talk about UTIs for a bit. Now, when you hear about a Urinary Tract Infection, a lot of times, this is affecting women.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Typically— It depends. Typically, it’s gonna be bacteria. The— the number one way you can figure it out is typically bacterial vaginosis. We’ll have kind of a fishy odor to it. So, it’s gonna a little bit fishy, in women. No, it’s like— okay, it’s apparent something’s going on down there. Yeast
Evan Brand: Okay. And then [inaudible]—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Of course, you can get a culture. You can get a culture, right? You go see your doctor. They may do a culture, but in terms of treatment for bacterial vaginosis, we may do kind of an herbal formula, mixed with apple cider vinegar. And we make it like a douche applicator and flush that area out for a week or two. And then, we may throw some probiotics in, internally via the mouth and intervaginally to help shift the pH. Typically, getting more acidic pH makes it harder for that bacteria to grow. Obviously cutting out the refined sugar and the junk of your food, too. With yeast, similar thing. We have some Boric acid or suppositories that we’ll use. The help will also get the probiotics going. Cut out the refined sugar. And then for UTI stuff, we’ll typically use some Silver. We can use some D-Mannose powder. We can use Uva Ursi herbs. Uhm— we can do apple cider vinegar, lemon juice. These are all really good things that we can do to help acidify the p— acidify the urinary tract.
Evan Brand: So, let me ask you this. Could you successfully treat a UTI just by hitting the gut?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhm— you could. Uhm— again, like some of the things we’d want to do is to want to make sure we have some of those herbal metabolites make their way out the vaginal, you know. I mean, typically UTI it’s gonna go out, right? It’s gonna head some and go out, and so the urinary tract will be hit. The question is, “Will the vaginal area be hit.” Obviously, for peeing it out, it’s not gonna be hit. It’s close in that area, but more than likely it’s not gonna hit it. That’s where you need some kind of an herbal douche formula to topically get in there. Same thing with the yeast. So, yeast, you kind of want to top like in there with a suppository. BV get in there uhm— with a— a flushing type of herbal mechanism, and just make sure you’re not pregnant, right? ‘Cause the— there could be some abortifactant uhm— mechanism there if it’s getting too close— you know, up the vaginal canal. And then, uhm— number three is the UTI that we could do internally, and we could flush out that way.
Evan Brand: So, could you go— I mean are there like professional grade herbal douche blends, or is that something you’ve got to piece together yourselves? Like, does the store-bought version exist?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I have one that I use that works really well. It’s good to call herbal douche formula, and that we should choose an applicator when we mix— mix it with some apple cider vinegar, like the instruction’s say, and we flush one— one or two times a day. [crosstalk] I’ve got to shift the diet. I’ve got to shift the diet. Typically, it should do a— a really good probiotic intervaginally, as well, that kind of help shift the pH and shift the microbiome there.
Evan Brand: Is there a brand for that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I like one by Wise Woman Herbals.
Evan Brand: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: [inaudible] … for the herbal douche formula, and then the probiotics will typically do, you know, my Probio Flora or will do a Woman’s formula. But typically, the Probio Flora is enough as well.
Evan Brand: Cool. Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Probio Flora too is uhm— the Phage in there really helps kill uh— E.coli too. So, if it’s any UTI stuff going on too, that could also help with that too.
Evan Brand: I’m gonna bookmark that. That’s really really cool. And this— I feel like the douche is something good where if you’ve got like a resistant infection or something that just keeps coming back. Sounds like that would be a good thing to add in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And then, typically though, even if we ever— let’s say, we do topically hit that area, we still want to make sure we systemically treat things too. Like, we would topically hit something ‘cause you want
Evan Brand: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like, let’s say, there was a fungal nail, right? And maybe really hard to get rid of that fungus on that nail if we just hit it to the gut. So, we kind of want to hit it from both ends. So, we kind of
Evan Brand: So, do you add apple cider vinegar, too. That’s— I know it comes [crosstalk] west.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We’d add it to it.
Evan Brand: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Make it says like add six ounces of apple cider vinegar or something. If you read the jo— instructions on how to mix it.
Evan Brand: ‘Cause like in ingredients, it says it’s in a base of ACV. So, I was just curious.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Can you read the in— Can you read the instructions?
Evan Brand: Yeah. It says, “Add one tablespoon of concentrate per six ounces of warm water.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. Yeah. So then it’s the warm water then. So, the apple cider vinegar’s already in it. SO, we will just add that to the warm water.
Evan Brand: That’s really cool, man. I learned something new
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s it.
Evan Brand: Wow. Well, thanks. [crosstalk] Let’s look at some questions and see what we’ve got here, digestively. Uh— Evie ask you a question, “Dr. J, I’ve been taking your Digestive Supreme and HCL. They’re helping a lot. Thanks. Is it okay to take for a long time or should I stop after some time?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, typically, if there was an infection, we want to get rid of the infection and then we can taper it down. And then, the rest is gonna be based upon you. So, if you’re under a lot of stress during the day, you know, then we may want to take it during
Evan Brand: And I— I— I’ll throw my two cents in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: I cycle on and off enzymes, personally
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And I noticed myself. I was just having a— like uh— looser stools for the last few weeks only after coffee, and it was just— typically, was a different consistency. So, I just start on. I used to hit my GI Clear 4 and Para 1 up, and I noticed that it did start to solidify again even after coffee. So, I’m gonna be doing the GI Map Test at the end of this month…
Evan Brand: Good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …and see what at.
Evan Brand: Well let’s go through your results when they come.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: It’d be a fun show.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m excited. Then also uhm— I saw your test last night. I saw the increased steatocrit on yours…
Evan Brand: I know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …and the increased beta-glucuronidase. So, definitely hitting it with the antimicrobial herbal stuff, maybe adding in some extra bile salts or lipase in there too would also help.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I appreciate it. I’m gonna uh— I’m gonna do that, and then also, I’m gonna add in some milk thistle too. Try to get that glucuronidase down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep.
Evan Brand: No probiotics can do it, but I think I rather probably do both.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, yeah. I mean, glucuronidase is gonna be— if you kill the bacteria, that— that will go down, too.
Evan Brand: Okay. That’s cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You can just throw in some extra charcoal to help bind that up too.
Evan Brand: Okay. Also, uhm— we’ll have to chat but uhm— where we’re getting our Para 1. There’s also a binder that they’ve got, which is like a Fulvic acid – Charcoal mix.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’ve seen
Evan Brand: Yeah. And the charcoal’s so cheap.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s the thing. The charcoal’s just a little bit more cost-effective, that’s why I like it.
Evan Brand: Yeah. You can’t beat it. Okay, [crosstalk] cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it’s still great. I mean, it’s still— you know, you can use it for alcohol— I had— my Patriot’s play yesterday, my Tom Brady. They’re just freaking awesome, man. He used to go— and— you know, he is just like the perfect— like practitioner spokesperson for natural medicine. I mean, what he does, what his diet, and he eats basically a Paleo Autoimmune Template for the most part. He’s trying to keep inflammation down.
Evan Brand: Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And uh— you know, he trains in a way that to support pliability and muscle length, and then which we’ll have to uhm— try to get his trainer on, man. I got to get him on…
Evan Brand: Good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …and speak to him. I know. We’re gonna work on that. But yeah, he’s a perfect practitioner of all these stuff. But uhm— in regards to—- where was I going? So, we just talked about?
Evan Brand: I think you were talking about—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yes! I’m sorry. So, I had a nice glass or two of champagne yesterday.
Evan Brand: Oh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, I hit up some activated charcoal, and I hit up some Sulfur amino acids, and I feel phenomenal. No issues. Then, of course, I have a nice glass of mineral water in between drinks that
Evan Brand: That’s cool. Uh— anybody uh— listening, watching, add your comments. We’re gonna go through these. We’ll try to answer as many that are on topic as we can. So, add your comments now. So, we’ll go through it now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. And we’ll hit the ones that are on topic— is— is first. And then also, give us a share, give us a like, give us a thumbs up. We appreciate it, guys. Help us grow so we can help more people like you. Your benefitting right now. Don’t keep it all to you. Let it get out there. We appreciate it.
Evan Brand: Absolutely. Uh— what’s our time on? How much time
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We— we got five minutes. Let’s roll for it.
Evan Brand: Okay. Alright. So, we’ve got one here from Jeff. Uh— he says that he’s been taking the GI Clear 1, 2 and 5. Two caps a week for H. pylori. Yesterday was his birthday. He’s been so sick; nausea, headaches, panic attacks. How should I take the herbs on an empty tummy?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, number one, I‘m imagining that because it was your birthday, you may have gone off the—
Evan Brand: Oh, oh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …of the rings there, Jeff, maybe with some extra birthday type of uh— surprises or things like that. So, there could be that. Uh— number one, if we’re having some sensitivities, we need to come off the herb for three to five days, get back to
Evan Brand: Yep. Good advice. Now, the question here. Dr. J, I’ve been following your advice but not perfectly. I’ve had long term constipation, GERD, gastritis, H. pylori, bloating, abdominal distention, cramping. How can I help myself? I’ll answer this one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: If you don’t mind.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You got it. Do it.
Evan Brand: Uh— You’ve got to get tested. I know you said, “I’ve been following…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhmmn—
Evan Brand: “… meaning you’ve probably been watching Dr. J’s videos, maybe some of the stuff that we’re doing together like this. But if you’ve knocked out the testing done, then you’ve— you’ve got uh— you’ve got to do that. If you say H. pylori— if it’s still there, you’re gonna have these symptoms. So, you’ve got to get some functional medicine testing. You can reach out. Get that done. And, we’ve got to fix the bugs. You’re never gonna fix constipation if you’ve got bacterial overgrowth ‘cause those gases are gonna change the intestinal motility time. Bloating;
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent!
Evan Brand: Uh— let’s keep going here. We’ve got another [crosstalk] question from Kitty. Uh— She’s taking the beef protein powder. That makes her constipated so she
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I would say, you could try it, and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, there could be something in it that you’re allergic to so I would try a Collagen protein that’s in a peptide form and see if that shifts or changes it. ‘Cause that’s gonna be in a more broken down assimilated form. [crosstalk] So, try it. Try more enzymes and HCL, and see what happens first. And then try just a really clean— like— you know, my TRUCOLLAGEN. Try something in a collagen peptide form…
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …and see if that fixes it. And then, let us know.
Evan Brand: Good advice. Another question, “Hi, Dr. J. I’d like to ask you uh— how to detox from heavy metals toxins, parasites, etc., naturally?” We’ve done a ton of shows on this. We’ll continue to probably hit this topic, but just searched justinhealth.com or search the YouTube channel here for those ti— uh— those titles, and you’re gonna find some stuff. But that— that could be an hours and hours and hours conversation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. Yep. Absolutely.
Evan Brand: Samuel. Want to read that one?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. “Is it possible to overpopulate with good bacteria using probiotics? And if so, what steps do you take to balance?” So, number one, we can see it with patients that tend to have like digestive issues or SIBO. We see an excessive amount of D-lactate, which can be caused by throwing a whole bunch of Lactobacillus in with the whole bunch of dysbiotic bacteria. So, we can see that. So, number one, make sure we’re starting from a blank canvas, not a canvass full of messiness from the start. Uhm— number two, probiotics tend to be transient. They’re not gonna stay around longer than a month or so. So, they are transient. So— Number one, a good steady dose of them is gonna be fine. So, you know, two to four capsules I think is a reasonable amount, like with my Probio Flora. And I think, you know, some couple sources of fermented foods that you want to throw in a weekly, whether it’s a lower sugar Kombucha, fermented pickles, sauerkrauts, uhm— those are all good standard options that you can kind of add in. And, I think, as long as your digestive symptoms are under control and you’re infection-free, I would not worry about it. If you’re having a lot of blow or gas because of probiotics, you probably have to look a little deeper and see what’s happening with the dysbiosis or other infections.
Evan Brand: Yep. One more questions right next to that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Top herbs for Candida overgrowth?
Evan Brand: Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oil Oregano, Berberines, Silver, not really an herb but it’s still something that we use, uh— Clove, Wild Indigo, grapefruit seed extract; I would say those are a couple, right there. Anything you want to add?
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’d like to add olive—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anything like a medicine?
Evan Brand: Yeah. Olive leaf.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Olive leaf, yep.
Evan Brand: Uhm— the monolaurin, the lauric acid…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Monolaurin, lauric acid, yep.
Evan Brand: Uh— I would also say— I mean, we’ve got so many formulas. I would just say to look at our— look at our GI formulas. Justin’s got several custom formulas I do as well. You could check our sites, justinhealth.com, evanbrand.com. We’ve got many. And these herbs in isolation can work— can work pretty good, but we’ve really like to focus on the synergistic effective herbs together.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. like, for instance, Berberines, and Artemisia. If you look at Stephen Buhner’s book, he talks about the synergistic effect that you have with those herbs together. So, like one and one equals ten, not two. So, combining some of these herbs, they have to work
Evan Brand: Yeah, uh— you want to hit Tammy’s question?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. “I got stomach pain when I take Proteolytic enzymes. What does that mean? I had H. pylori and stomach ulcers twice in the past. So, number one, I’d make sure you’re not taking the enzymes on an empty stomach. I’ll take them in the middle of the meal. Okay? Number two, I would just see that, you know, if you didn’t take the enzymes, would you also have stomach pain? Or is it— Is the enzymes the only variable factor? And if you have a lot of stomach ulcers and those kind of things, number one, we need a support and start adding some healing and soothing herbs. Potentially, lower the dose and make the food more liquid or predigested in kind of like a crock pot type of format. So, the food is easier to process. Nothing raw. Even if it’s like, raw broccoli or like raw Paleo veggies, that may still be too much. So, I would look at crock pot liquid form, healing-soothing herbs and amino acids. Kind of what’s in my GI Restore. Uhm— add every variable in one at a time so that way you know. You get the foods dialed in, right? You get, you know, the type of food and the cooking process dialed in. You add some soothing herbs. You do the enzymes. You start with the very low dose. You work it up. You isolate. You do one of each variable, one at a time. So, you know what’s going on.
Evan Brand: Yep. And I would like to add. Make sure that you’re infection-free. You said you had H. pylori and stomach ulcers twice in the past. Uh— gastroenterology is very very very uh— inaccurate. Some of their testing. You can have false…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: …negative [crosstalk]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And again, here’s the deal, too. If you’re having issues potentially with food or enzymes, then you sure as heck gonna have issues with herbs to knock out the infection. So, work on the first three R’s first: removing the bad foods, replacing enzymes and acids to the right dosage, taken the right way, healing-soothing nutrients and adrenal support. So, adrenals, ginger tea, amino acids, healing-soothing herbs, and then, make the food really palatable so it’s easy to process.
Evan Brand: Uh— Great. Great advice. Angel, “Do you recommend
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s great to help uhm— with the killing and binding effect that’s good at worms. Uh— I use it to kill ants in my backyard when I see them. Uh— Diatomaceous Earth has a high amount of Silica in it and it basically dehydrates the uhm— the exoskeleton of the— the insects. So, it’s a great non-toxic thing. You can also swallow it too so it can— it can dehydrate the worms, too, and kill them.
Evan Brand: That’s neat. Now,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Everywhere, in the ether.
Evan Brand: Yeah, everywhere. Justin lives in Texas. I live in Kentucky. But, we are 100 percent via phone and Skype consults. That’s it. Uh— Riley, “ How long should you take the GI Restore 4 with probiotics after a parasite killing protocol?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh— typically, combination— typically, if we’re looking at it objectively ‘til calprotectin goes down, which is an inflammatory uh— protein that’s produced by the gut when there’s inflammation, and/or ‘til you’re infection-free. So, for infection-free, then we really want to see that calprotectin go down, and ideally, that correlates with symptoms and improving in the gut mucosa just becoming better and feeling better.
Evan Brand: I would say, generally, though, the given number— I tried to get people to run…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Evan Brand: …[inaudible] models.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. I think two to four months on average. I know Riley’s case in particular. You know, he’s had issues with H. pylori in the past. So, there could be just some— some thinning gastric mucosa, that’s just more sensitive, and we just need to make sure that infections crossed off our list. And then start the timer, you know, two to four months from when that infection is gone.
Evan Brand: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Kind of thing—
Evan Brand: That’s good. That’s good. Uh— Addy asks, “ Do we recommend Grapeseed extract for Candida?” Yes. We use it [crosstalk] in our formulas. It can help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely.
Evan Brand: Uhm— uh— another question here. “Thoughts on prebiotics supplements?” I think it’s our last question uh— that we have time for. “Do we need prebiotics if we have lots of vegetables in the diet?”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think you can throw in some resistant starch either some unripened banana flour or a little bit of
Evan Brand: Oh, good. Good. Good. Good. Glad you got a video there. Well, that’s all we got time for, question-wise. I think we hit most of them, though. Unless there were some off-topic. But, we hope this was helpful. Make sure you guys hit Subscribe if you’re not subscribed to the channel. Go ahead. Hit subscribe right
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hit the bell!
Evan Brand: …we’re back [inaudible]…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Everyone’s like, “Hey, Dr. J, like when are you gonna be live?” So, we’re gonna try to let you know a day ahead of time. But if you hit the bell, It’s gonna pop-up on your YouTube app, on your computer or phone. It’s gonna say, “Dr. J and Evan are live.” And then, you’re gonna know.
Evan Brand: Generally speaking though, you guys should expect us here every Monday at anywhere between 11:30 and 12:00 Eastern.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. That’s the general kind of gist and I’ll be online typically 9:30 to 10:00 CST, which is 10:30 to 11:00 EST on Fridays, for our FAQ for you all.
Evan Brand: So, s— you know, go ahead and stalk us here. Subscribe, hit the bell and we’ll be back for more content very soon. If you have…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, one last question here.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One last question. “Can you overdo with herbs?” Yeah, you can, Charlotte. So, just make sure if you’re— people
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They have issues with Vitamin C and issue with probiotics or issues with HCL, and it’s like— these are patients like we got to take our kid gloves and put them on ‘cause we got to go. Everything has to be very slow and very gentle. And it’s not that you’re— you’re weak or have— you know— It’s not anything— It’s not a negative on you. It’s just your system, where it’s at. So, if we go a little bit slower, it helps. It’s kind of like, you want to take a cold shower, get in the shower. Get it on warm and then just inch the dial a little bit co— you know, to the cold direction. And then, before you know it, in three to five minutes, you’re in a cold shower. And it wasn’t that difficult. So, if we have to, we can go slow. Of course, working on ginger tea and soothing nutrients to get the gut lining more
Evan Brand: Oh, I’m gonna advise, two cents…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: …because you made some word adrenal. Yeah. If your adrenals are weak,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it’s human nature. Once people find out they have a critter in them, they’re like, “Get rid of it! Oh, my gosh! This is awful.” And I— I get it. So, normal reaction, but we have to make sure the bigger picture is we don’t
Evan Brand: Yeah. For sure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Awesome. Well, great call. Slam that bell. Give us a share. We appreciate everyone watching. And hope everyone’s health takes one notch in the right direction today. [crosstalk] Appreciate it all.
Evan Brand: Take care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye, Evan.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
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TRUCOLLAGEN https://justinhealth.com/products/trucollagen/
Probio FLora at https://justinhealth.com/products/probio-flora/
Just in Health at www.justinhealth.com
Immune System, Tapping Technique and GI infections – Podcast Live with Dr. J and Evan | Podcast #131
Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand engage in a lively and informative discussion about their recent clinical successes with their patients using the functional medicine approach. Listen to them as they dig into the root cause of their patients’ issues and turn chronic and seemingly complicated problems into success stories.
Know about the tapping technique which involves turning something negative into a better, positive thought. Learn more about GI infections, the bacteria or parasite that may be involved, as well as the tests and treatment options that are proven successful in the functional medicine world.
In this episode, we cover:
03:50 Immune System, bacteria, and infection relationship
15:50 Tapping Technique
19:17 Treating Hypochloridia
24:10 GI infections
28:34 Enzyme Tests
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are live on YouTube here. Podcast live on demand. Also, live here on Facebook. Evan, how are you doing, man?
And again, Facebook people you gotta click on the link here uhm—I’ll put in the comments to see Evan’s pretty face and go back and forth on this. How we doing, man?
Evan Brand: What’s going on? I’m feeling really good today. We’ve got a blue skies, the trees are blooming which they probably—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome.
Evan Brand: a year ago in Austin. So I’m enjoying myself.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. So we got podcast on demand. So anyone wants to write in some suggestions as we chit chat here, we’ll figure out what exactly we want to talk about moving forward.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And I might as well post a link over here to my Twitter page and see if uh—people are paying attention over there. That way, if they’ve got questions, they can get them answered here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Totally makes sense. Same thing, anyone on Facebook, too, every chimes in first we can get this thing moving. But let’s uh—just talk about some clinical successes in the last week with patients. Any updates from you, man?
Evan Brand: Yes. So interesting update is uh—there’s a female client that comes to mind and she had seven, I believe, I have to go back at here stool test and count. But I believe it was seven infections and this is a combination of two parasites which—let me just pull it up, that way, I’m not just shooting into the dark here, but—Uhm— with these infections, we started a gut protocol and symptom improvement was seen. She was having a lot of irritable bowel symptoms uhm— running to the bathroom. So she showed up with H. pylori, Blastocystis Hominis, Entamoeba and Fragilis and Proteas and Citrobacter. Somehow, cal protectin level was still low which is intestinal inflammation where—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: –I look at but I was surprised. And so anyhow, we put her on this protocol. And this is like 8 weeks. And the H. pylori while it’s still positive, instead of two viral factors, now she’s got one viral factor. The level of H.Pylori has dropped. The Citrobacter is completely gone. The Proteus completely gone. The Blasto is completely gone. But we still got Entamoeba. So there’s still the parasite and there is still the H. pylori there. So we’ve got work to do but yet, we’ve seen 3 or 4 things disappearing. So I think what the takeaway message is from me is that the bodies gonna heal in an interesting way. It may not heal everything at the same time. Some things may be easier to kill. Some things may disappear first, but you gotta heal yourself especially your gut, your microbiome. You gotta heal these things in layers. And that’s what we’re seeing here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So typically with a lot of patients that have chronic issues is there are some underlying stress, right? Emotional, physical, chemical stress but even deeper above and beyond that, there is some level – there’s some level of infection that’s deeper that creating inflammation even though it didn’t show via calprotectin or it’s just creating leaky gut. And the whole leaky gut mechanism is getting the immune system fired up. The more the immune system is fired up, it’s just an energy suck for your body. It’s like uhm—let’s say guests in you guest bathroom that you never go into your house. And they just leave the water on. Just a little bit—little drip, drip, drip. And then you get your water bill at the end of the month, and you’re like, “Where the heck did that bill come from?” And you’re like, “Oh, yeah. The faucet’s on.” But it’s like that with your energy resources. When got these bugs, it really—when the immune system is overactive. And even just a leaky gut, right? The more your immune system is overactive, the more it’s gonna suck your energy dry. That’s why when you get sick, the first symptom you get when you get sick is what? You get a lot of fatigue and malaise coz the immune system is sucking resources. Go ahead—
Evan Brand: I wanna hear uh—a recent case from you, but first I wanna ask you the question that I get asked all the time. And the answer really doesn’t matter because we need to fix the root cause no matter what. But people often ask well– chicken or egg? Was it that ma—my immune system got taxed first? And then I picked up these bacterial pathogens or these parasites? Or did I pick up the parasite and the bacterial pathogens and then that that set my immune system? What’s your take? Can it go either way?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So typically it’s one of two scenarios, right? Typically someone gets exposed to a very high amount of infectious debris, right? Parasitic—parasites. So you drink some really bad water, you to go Mexico, you have really bad meal or at a foreign country, you get the Bali belly, so to speak. And then you’re overwhelmed with all of that infectious debris and then there’s so much of it that it compromises your immune system, you get diarrhea, you have a lot of gut inflammation that creates malabsorption. That malabsorption puts stress on all of your glandular systems and then you spiral downhill. That’s scenario number one. So just the infectious—the infection was so overwhelming, it just threw everything else downhill. Scenario number two is there some type of immune compromisation that’s happening. Meaning adrenal stress, poor diet, poor sleep, or poor diet and lifestyle habits, low nutrient density. The immune system’s kinda a little bit weaker underneath the surface then you get exposed to some of these infectious debris at smaller micro levels that are in the food. And eventually makes its way to the system and creates inflammation.
Evan Brand: So yeah—so let me—let me clarify there. If we’ve—If we’ve got diet, lifestyle mostly dialed in, but let’s say people are cheating with gluten, for example. They still got intestinal permeability going on. You can still have good class, good sleep, blah, blah, blah. But if you’ve got just a simple thing like leaky gut, for example, you could potentially be more susceptible to pick up these infections regardless of whatever else is dialed in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean—here’s the deal with leaky gut, too. If you’re creating leaky gut, and then there’s some research, you know, on the non-celiac, gluten sensitivity side of the fence, that looks at these foods. Even if you’re not like reacting to a it, like symptomatically, and even if you’re not like having like IBS -like symptoms, bloating, you know, gas constipation, diarrhea, that gluten can still create leaky gut. Where the undigested food particles in the gut can make their way into the bloodstream and create stress. And then the LPS that comes in there along with that, that’s the— the bacterial debris can get into bloodstream and create a lot of mood issues as well. So you can still have leaky gut and not risk from gluten— and still not respond to gluten in general.
Evan Brand: Yup. Yup. I just posted a post on uh—Facebook which I think might be a slightly controversial which was I wrote this little bit of a letter and I put kind of like these five things that have happened over the last year or so where people have said, “Evan, I’ve ditched psychiatrist or I’ve ditched my psychologist or my marriage counselor, or my conventional doctor because of functional medicine.” I kinda wrote the reasons why of how if you lower inflammation, you may need less adjustments at the chiropractor, for example. If you heal the gut, you start producing your neurotransmitters optimally, you might not you’re your antidepressants anymore, so you might not need your psychiatrist. Or if you heal your adrenals, you’re not gonna snap at your children anymore, so therefore you’re not gonna need the marriage counselor that is telling you need to stop yelling at your kids. And how basically how functional medicine can literally, not intentionally, but it’s just a side effect is that we can replace these other industries. I’m not saying these other industries are bad for mental health care or anything like that. But a lot of times, this is not root cause medicine. And my wife and I went out you with a friend of ours yesterday and she said she had a lot of stress, she had to put her dog down and she called up her psychiatrist and said, “Hey I need help, I’m freaking out.” What does he do? He prescribed her 60 Xanax and says, “Here’s your Xanax bars and take these.” And I told her, I said, “Listen, your anxiety and your stress from this issue is not a Xanax deficiency.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Evan Brand: How about we do some emotional freedom technique. We start tapping. How about we cleanup the diet? And then before we left, out the parking lot, I had her do the quick coherence technique, the Heartmath, like the heart focus breathing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And focusing on someone that she loved and we got done with it, and she said, “That was weird.” I said, “What happened?” And she said, “I got tingly and warm.” I said, “Oh, it worked.” And she said, “What happened?” I said, “Well, you just took yourself out of fight or flight that you’re probably stocked in which is causing you to be dependent on Xanax and now we’ve pushed you into that parasympathetic rest and digest mode.” And she feels better. And this is what this is all about. Uh—a little bit of uh—off-subject uh—, but I just wanted to mention to people, check on my Facebook post and you’ll read about what I’m saying. I’m not saying these other uh— practitioners out there are garbage. What I am saying is that if you’re not getting a practitioner to focus on root cause, even if they are psychiatrist, if they’re not a root cause psychiatrist, then what the hell are they doing?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s all about resources, right? And in functional medicine world, we’re trying to help enhance your resources. So just like someone with more money in their bank account can buy more things, well if we enhance our mental, emotional bank account via healthy and diet and lifestyle functional medicine principles, we have more resources to deal with stress in our life. Whether it’s family, friends, being a parent, being present for our partner, just being able to do the hobbies of a hobbit—hobbits—uh—
Evan Brand: Haha
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The hobbies and the habits that we have going on in our life. I got uh—I guess I’m missing my uh – Lord of the Rings movies there. Yeah. So—It ‘s all about resources, right? So we have to make sure that we have enough resources in our system so we can allocate them toward these stressors. And I always tell my patients, “Have you ever tried dealing with stress on 0 night sleep? or “Try doing your taxes the next day when you’re getting like three hours of sleep?” You’re just not gonna be able to handle it. You don’t have the resources. So everything we’re trying to do is let’s test the resources of our body systems, let’s look where the hormone’s at, let’s look at where the gut resources are at, let’s look at detox and nutrient resources are at, let’s support them and let’s work on fixing them.
Evan Brand: Well, the analogy I like to use is we’re just using a big spotlight. Because a lot of different industries and health care, what they do is they use like a little laser pointer or like one of those tiny little keychain flashlight. And they shine something real dimly into one corner. And you’re like, “Oh, Justin looks like we found something. We found some anxiety issues, here’s the Xanax.” But instead, we come in with a giant spotlight and we’re like, “Whoa, look at the left corner of this microbiome. We got parasitic and bacterial infections, which can steal your nutrients, can mess up your blood sugar and cause anxiety. Look over here, we’ve got some adrenal issues. You got spiking of cortisol that’s gonna need to be addressed.” And then we shine the spotlight over here, “Oh, take a look at our detox pathways on the organic acids, you’ve got trouble over here.” And “Oopp, we shine the spotlight behind us, here’s mitochondrial issues. This is why you’re so fatigued.” And that’s the—I think that’s the greatest analogy. It’s a little laser pointer or a little small keychain flashlight, which is just pinpointing one industry of psychiatry or psychology or whatever versus exploring everything. Which is why for you and I, it’s tough for us to become the blank guy. You know people out there, “the thyroid guy” “ the detox chick” “ the bone broth chick” You know what I mean? It’s really gonna be tough for you and I to just say we’re the blank person because I don’t want to limit myself. I wanna let everyone know it is all encompassing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And if rest and niche yourself down, I think it’s a bad thing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Like from a marketing standpoint, right? Marketing is just telling the truth attractively. You know it’s good to have the niche because you wanna reach the people that have special conditions. Because if like, my specialty is thyroid. Number one, I have—I have or had a thyroid issue. It’s under control. Autoimmune thyroid issue. So I’m more passionate about that issue. But again, to treat a thyroid issue, you have to be able to treat all of the systems. So it’s kind of a mythology, like you don’t just ever treat thyroid, you treat the whole thing. But you may mark and put information out there that’s gonna resonate and speak to someone with a thyroid issue more. But again, the underlying issue is from education and clinical standpoint. We’re addressing the key underlying surface issues and the deep root issues as well. So we’re never ignoring it. We may speak to someone uhm—more specifically and get into the more nuances of that condition, but it all comes back down to the foundational stuff that we always talk about.
Evan Brand: Right. I would say my specialties would be— it’s become parasites really. I mean, I’m seeing so many each week and it’s just so fun. I guess because I had parasites.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You had a parasite, you.
Evan Brand: Uh—Yeah. And also depression, I mean because depression is what got me into this whole thing. IBS and depression in college, I mean, like I told you before, I had to figure out when I went into a college class, where’s the bathroom. Coz I have to get out in the middle of the class to run to the bathroom.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And so for me, depression, IBS, parasites, you know, those are all linked together—the whole gut-brain connection. And I really am empathetic for people that have struggled with that because it’s so common and if you diagnosed with IBS, that’s a pretty generic diagnosis. And unless you’re with functional medicine practitioners, you’re gonna get an acid blocker, an antispasmodic—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Absolutely.
Evan Brand: — or some other drug and—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well actually, you were diagnosed with IBS, right?
Evan Brand: I was.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you use the antispasmodic, you used the medications that helps with the gastroparesis. You know—
Evan Brand: Well, they never –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They even do that—
Evan Brand: Well they never got to use it. They try. They wrote me the prescription pad but I denied all three of the drugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the thing is, too, we can also use natural medicines for a lot of those things. That may not fix the root cause, right? There’s root cause medicine and there is using natural medicine in a way that’s gonna help alleviate the symptoms that’s gonna up regulate physiology so things work better. But we have to still be investigating and digging to the root cause, right? So we’re dealing with someone with gastroparesis or low motility, we may add in things like ginger. We may add in things like carnitine. We may add, you know, higher amounts of mag citrate to keep that uhm—migrating motor complex moving. But we are still digging in deep. We’re still making the diet, the lifestyle. We’re still enhancing digestive nutrients, uh—hydrochloric acid enzymes. And then we’re digging deep for the infections. And we’re trying to lock in those diet and lifestyle habits, right? The supplements are great because they can give us that symptomatic relief while we continue to dig over here to the root cause. So as long as you have, you know, that four pace envision that addresses some of the symptoms without the side effects, you know of some of the drugs, which may have more side effects than what you’re treating, and then working on the functional medicine plan, I think we’re in a really good place.
Evan Brand: I agree. Yeah. I actually got a good—good success with that IB Synergy product from designs which get Bonigut in there. It’s got the 5-HTP. I had a guy with just super bad IBS and I said, “Man” I mean he was critically, critically stricken with both diarrhea and constipation just alternating every other day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: So I have him going with that 5-HTP Bonigut blend. And he got better. Now we start to wait for lab results but yeah—I mean sometimes we will do some of the quick fix of band-aid situations to fix things, but we still got to work backwards. I guess to answer these questions uh—should we answer the question about the cancer question here or shall we just make a whole show on the future?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We’ll do a whole show on that. I’ll get some experts on. I got Dr. David Jocker is coming next month as well. He was in the truth about cancer series. And we’ll go on ketogenic diets and we’ll talk more about therapeutic ways to address cancer outside of just the natural chemotherapy. So we’ll hold that one that—we need more time for that.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Agreed. Uh—Samuel asked, “What is the tapping technique? Can you show us? Well since most of our audiences are gonna be audio listeners we’re not gonna take up the air time to show you the technique, but the best resources—EFT (Evan-Frank-Tom) EFT.mercola.com and you can just view the different acupressure meridians that you’re gonna tap. But then also, you’re gonna learn about the affirmations that you can use for emotional freedom technique and that’s something Justin and I use all the time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s helpful. I’m—I’m gonna just give it 15 seconds of airtime here, so—just—I do two hands coz it’s adding it’s more efficient. But you just tap the inners part of the eyebrow, the outer parts of the eyebrow, under the eyes, I do under the nose, and the bottom part of the chin the same time. And then I do both collarbones. So I do this, and you can go top of the head and tap midline. So I do two hands coz I just feel like you get more stimulation. So I go here, and I’m just thinking about whatever is pissing me off, my wife, I just think about it.
Evan Brand: Haha
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I kinda give it a number. So if I’m a t like 6/10 regarding irritation, I just think about it. Whatever that issue is, whether it’s like, you know, the person driving in front of me is so slow or whatever. And I try to knock that 6 out of 10 so that 10 is the worst. 6 is like 60% to being at the worst. I try to knock it down to a4 to a 3. And so every round—every 2 rounds or so, you kinda just check back in and see if you knock it down. And you go as you kinda knock everything down to a 3.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And we have—I—I start at the top of the crown which I usually like—many ways—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You can do that. You can start there, you can end there.
Evan Brand: Now do you do the sides? I know Mercola, he’s big on the side of rib cage under the armpit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I do that, too, sometimes. It’s just wasn’t good for a video.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So you criss cross?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I do two at the same time just coz it’s stimulation.
Evan Brand: No. I mean you criss cross your arms so the underarm’s like this. I do like a monkey.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Haha
Evan Brand: And then—and then finish with the wrist. I typically finished by tapping the insides of the wrist together then doing the affirmations. So even though I’m angry, or even though I’m anxious, I deeply love and accept myself. But you gotta say the affirmation verbally. I tell people if you can, if you’re just embarrassed, then don’t do it. But why be embarrassed? Nobody—nobody is paying that much attention to you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. That depends, too. Like you can do this stuff, and you can kinda say like if you’re at—let’s say, if you’re lying in bed and you’re just really stewing on something and your wife’s next to you and you don’t wanna wake her up, then you can just kinda think it in your head. And then you can just, you know, do the affirmations, tap like this. And then you can tap here, and think about the issues.
I like them to end, though, with a positive thing. So you can end with something positive. So then I just go into like, “What is it that I want to manifest?” So I’m going into right there. I’m thinking about whatever I’m gonna try to create or produce in my life, I just tap it while I’m thinking about it. And the whole idea of tapping is you’re just stimulating various meridian systems that have been mapped out via acupuncture system for thousands of years. And really what it’s doing is it’s neutralizing the negative response that’s stored in the limbic system or in that subconscious of your—more in the psychological side of it. And you’re trying to kinda rewire it so you can get a good pattern there instead. So then, naturally that reflux is to go back to the better thing and not to the negative thing.
Evan Brand: So if you do affirmation about the bad part, would you do like an affirmation about the bad part and an affirmation for a positive?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. So I start off with the negative and just try to lessen—lessen it first.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Coz if you’re—feeling negative, it’s really hard to be positive when you’re negative so I try to decrease the negative to about a three. And then I go into the positive because then, you are in a better place to deal with the positive, right? It’s kinda like when someone tells you to relax and you’re pissed off, like relax, calm down. You just wanna punch him, right? Like, “No, I’m too wound up, come on.”
So I wanna get that dialed in and then now I’m relaxed, now I can rewire it and create some positive things.
Evan Brand: I like it. I like it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So calm down first, and then work on manifestation.
Evan Brand: Should we answer a couple of more questions here?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Let’s hit it, man. Let’s hit it.
Evan Brand: Solam asked, “How long does it take to heal hypochloridia?”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It totally depends, right? If you have emotional stressors that are unresolved ore you’re eating foods that are incredibly inflammatory, maybe never. But if you’re making the root causal changes and your managing your stress, and you’re fixing the underlying gut stuff, I would say within 3 to 6 months, you have a really good chance of not needing hydrochloric acid to digest your food. But again, everyone is different. A longer—the longer the issues been going on, the more severe the infections, and the more infections that are layered in there, I’d say longer, up to a year, at least.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’ll just have my two cents to that, too. If you had a previous history of a prescription, as a blocker’s proton pump inher—inhibitors are now it’s open to counter like the Xanax or the Toms, or anything like that, or—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Evan Brand: Or if you’ve had H. pylori which we’ve chatted about many times, then I would say it may lengthen that time, too, to fix that stomach acid issue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The longer that gut’s has been worn down, the more the immune system is revved up like you get patients are just supersensitive to every little thing. Like I can’t even put in an enzyme, I can’t even put in our apple cider vinegar or lemon juice or the smallest fermented food sets them off. It’s really hard and you’re looking at a couple of years to really dive into it because the immune system is so revved up and it’s so ready to attack the smallest invader that it’s so hard to put things into help and heal it because it’s looking at everything as a foe not a friend.
Evan Brand: Right. We really, really have the baby step in those cases so that’s why—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. Yeah. I mean, just like you heal, with you know, food is medicine there, you go really slow and you do lots of things in broth form, in soup form so it’s – so it is so palatable. There is very little digestion that has to happen. And typically one supplement at a time and one nutrient at a time, titrate up from low to high. Even if it’s something that they can handle, if they go high dose, off the bat, their immune system just freaks out.
Evan Brand: Well I wanna hit on something you just mentioned which is if we’re talking 1 to 2 years, it takes extreme patient—extreme patience for patients and clinicians because for us, that is a very intensive case for us to take on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Evan Brand: And you know, maybe this is to toot our own horns, maybe it’s just calling out the obvious that we do take the time, you know, with people we’re working with. Sometimes it maybe 30-45 even an hour-long call for a follow-up just to take these baby steps. Whereas, let’s jus say some of the clinicians that we’ve seen out there, it’s too cookie-cutter approach and they don’t have the mental bandwidth or capacity for empathy to baby step this people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: So it’s here’s your cookie-cutter protocol, good luck.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Where with us, we’ve really, really, really gonna get super details.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And so this is why if you go and you buy like a leaky gut online program or some other type of program, and you get limited results and you get to us, we’re not gonna be surprised if you suffered through that, and you didn’t get a good result. Because at the end of the day, that’s why Justin and I haven’t created online courses at this point because it’s—it’s hard for us to sleep at night thinking that we’ve created a program that’s too cookie-cutter. We’ve really got to figure out a way that we’re gonna be able to work in all the minutiae and the small details and the variations—variation A, B and C, D for different people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: So if someone uh—packages something up all beautiful and says, “Oh, it’s $297 and all your problems are gonna be healed.” Uh—please be a little bit skeptical of that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I agree. And I’ve talked to you about a patient that I had today that email in that was dropping out of care. And we try to always set realistic expectations. This person just had her labs reviewed a month or two ago, and had multiple parasitic infections, severe adrenal dysfunction, HPA axis dysfunction, and then a lot of issues on her organic tests. Uh— detoxification issues, mitochondrial issues, and we just started with simple adrenal support, made diet and lifestyle changes and she had some— some side-effects so we try to cut things down, go slower. And we’re gonna kinda reconvene and work on supporting detoxification, but person had dropped out. Now, the problem is, to have expectations that things will work off the bat when so many things are wrong like that, expectations are incorrect. So a lot of people they have preconceived notions even if you spell it out to them and you let them know, “Here’s where we’re at now, here’s where we’re going.” They forget because they—they want it done now. And they think because things didn’t work in that initial uhm—in that initial experience, that there is no way to fix it. So continuing to harp on patients in managing their expectations, even though they have a lot of stuff they’re projecting from past failures, we kinda have to get through it. Make sure expectations are real and that make sure they know, “Hey, here’s where we’re going now. Here’s where we’re going next.” These things ahead that may have to be dealt with for us to really see great changes.
Evan Brand: Yup. Well said. We got another question here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let’s hit ‘em.
Evan Brand: Let’s hit Steve’s question. After all GI infections are eradicated, how long does it take the gut to fully heal? All my infections are gone, but I’m still dealing with IBS, leaky gut and issues after H. pylori.” I’m gonna hit on this first Dr. Justin Marchegiani, if you don’t mind.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup. I know you’re gonna say it, by the way.
Evan Brand: Okay. So – haha if—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If you say it—If you say it, I’ll—I’ll tell you that.
Evan Brand: Okay. Alright. Please. Alright. So here’s what I’m gonna say. You say all your infections are gone, but you’re still dealing with IBS, leaky gut, and issues, I would like to know what test was this that says all your infections are gone because I bet all of your infections are not gone.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes! Whoo! I knew it. Yeah. You’re totally right.
Evan Brand: Haha
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. You’re totally right. And then also, just making sure that you have the digestive nutrients on board to help heal the gut lining and the digestive support to break down the food and then I would make the food more—more palatable right now. I’d be looking more at the GAPS or an SCD or more of a soup or broth approach that makes the food really easy to take in. No raw veggies, uhm—try to keep it really palatable so the body can access it without much stress.
Evan Brand: Alright. So the beauty of the Internet, Stevie says—Stevie replied and he says, “DRG” Well, uhm— Justin–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s missing a lot of them. It’s missing a lot. You gotta do the DRG with the GI map. I a—I never do the DRG by itself for the most part—always both. You gotta do both.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if there’s still an issue with the DRG and the GI MAP, I want them go for the 41 side-by-side.
Evan Brand: Yup. Agreed. So, Stevie, not that—you know, we’re not diagnosing you. That’s not what these calls are for. But, hey, Justin and I have seen a lot of false negatives with DRG and some other test out there. So potentially some stuff going on. And I would like to add a couple of points about like the—the issues, the leaky gut type stuff. You know, make sure you are doing some of the easy supports, too. You know, chamomile is great. You can do chamomile in a supplemental form. You’ve got chamomile teas, uhm—you’ve got L- glutamine. So there are some leaky gut supplements that why your til—still trying to figure stuff out, you can still be taking support of nutrients in the meantime while waiting for retest.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Totally. Let’s hit the uh—last question there by—E Center Riley. See here, just diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, TPO and TGB bodies, 465 is that high? Eliminated the foods, gluten, dairy, soy, balance in blood sugar, hard with 5 kids. What should I focus on next? So 465 is definitely high. The LabCorp reference range for TPO is 34. Anything 34 above is considered positive—I think it’s above 34. 34 below is considered positive. And anything about 20, for me, I considered to be subclinical. So that is high. Anything above or around 500 is definitely high. I’ve seen patients at 2000, though. I’ve seen patients that go from 2000 to below a 100. Now, my goal is to get people—If I were you, I’d like to see a 70 to 80% reduction in that. Again, maybe you were higher before you made those changes. So I’m not sure if it was gluten, dairy, soy. That stuff was cut out and then you saw the drop. But either way, uhm—getting enough selenium in there, 400 micrograms of selenium, addressing the underlying infections, things like H. pylori, Blasto and Yersinia can be coming to increase the antibodies. And then making sure the adrenals are looked at. There’s a strong adrenal-thyroid connection and a lot of people who have thyroid issues also have adrenal issues. And remember, TPO is a microsomal or essentially it’s uh—intracellular microsomal antibody that helps bind the thyroid hormone together. So if you’re making antibodies to that, it’s gonna prevent that thyroid hormone that I—Iodination process from occurring. So making sure we have the adrenal support there because the adrenals help produce cortisol. Cortisol is an anti-inflammatory that’s gonna help with the inflammation. And with the TPO there uhm—you could potentially have increase in hydrogen peroxide, especially if there’s small amounts of iodine getting in there. So get them the selenium will help neutralize that hydrogen peroxide into H20. High quality H20 which is uh—not gonna be as inflammatory.
Evan Brand: Well said. Yeah. And so uhm—Isabella Wentz, I just did podcast with her a couple of weeks ago. Actually that was my last uploaded episode. And uhm—we’re talking about bacterial infections, too. So you mentioned some of the parasites and she’s seen the same thing the parasite but also the bacteria. The Klebsiella, the Citrobacter, and all these autoimmune triggers has been bad guys for uh—these Hashimoto’s situations and these antibodies, so—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, look for the bacteria, too, and you can definitely fix this stuff and you can make significant progress.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. I mean one person here, wildlab access, “How do you test for various enzymes?”Number one, if you have gut stress, you probably have low hydrochloric acid. And if you have low hydrochloric acid, you probably have low enzymes. Why? Because hydrochloric acid is important for acts of—for converting pepsinogen to pepsin which is the proteolytic enzyme. Hydrochloric acid lowers the acidity of the chyme, which is the mixed up food in the intestine. That inten—that food that chyme that goes into the small intestine which the acidity then triggers the pancreas to make bicarbonate, it also triggers CCK that then caused that the gallbladder to produce bile that also stimulates the pancreas to make light based trypsin and chymotrypsin and all the enzymes that come down. So if you have enzyme issues, you also have hydrochloric acid issues, but we can also assess it by looking at enzyme markers, like elastase, too, which will uhm—look at that in the DRG or the GI MAP test.
Evan Brand: You better get that frog out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Frog out. It just attacked me, man. I’m like, Ugh—
Evan Brand: Alright.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: My water—so uh—yeah. Elastase, I think it’s elastase 1 is the enzyme marker we typically look at for uhm— low enzymes. But typically, just assuming that we have digestive stress, let’s assume it for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I mean that’s the same—the same answer that I would say for the leaky gut. I had people say, “Oh, can you test me for leaky gut?” It’s like, “Yeah. We can go to Cyrex and spend 500 bucks if you want to, but based on your symptoms, I guarantee there’s intestinal permeability. You’ve got XYZ. And we can—we don’t need to spend the 500 bucks on that test. Save your money for the organic acids, your comprehensive stool panels, the GPL-TOX, maybe heavy metal testing. Save your money for that stuff that you can’t really guess on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Absolutely. I agree, man. Well, anything else you wanna hit off the bat here? I mean I think—I had some really good successes last week, too, with some patients that had chronic pain, chronic mood, chronic energy, hair loss. And I mean—just really simple things. We—we fix their hormones, this person has autoimmune thyroid, uhm—hypothyroid as well. T3 was super low, it was uh– T4 to T3 conversion issue, dysregulated cortisol. They had a lot of malabsorption and they had a couple of infections and we just—we just took them down the map. An then just everything first time around, uhm—just knocked in place. I mean it’s like you swing the bat once and it’s connected. It’s gone. Those were the patients where its like, “It’s just so rewarding coz it’s just—it’s easy” And then you have some patients where it’s a lot more trial and error and digging in. So it’s nice to have those home runs every now and then.
Evan Brand: Oh, man. I—so I had a home run earlier with this guy that I got off the phone with name Dion. And he was on an inhaler. An asthma inhaler.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And also I believe he was taking uh—allergy medication, like a prescription allergy medication.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Maybe it was one or the other. He alternated or he was on the inhaler something. But he was on prescriptions for allergies. And all we did is we cleaned up the diet, we’ve addressed some gut infections. He had candida and I believe a couple bacterial infections. I don’t believe he had parasites. I have to look back. But I remember a couple of infections, fix the gut, uh—supported adrenal’s basic adrenal support, some adaptogens. And I talked with him today and he said, “Evan, I’ve not used my medication in the last six weeks. And everything is blooming here right now. All the trees and plants and everything are blooming and normally, I’m debilitated. He said, “I’m completely fine.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Isn’t that awesome?
Evan Brand: How in the world just by working on the gut and adrenals am I not allergic to the environment anymore? It’s just like, “Oh, it makes me feel so good.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see that all the time, too. And hydrochloric acid is one of those things that’s really great with allergies, too. You notice that?
Evan Brand: Ain’t that weird? I mean since digestive enzymes, I told him, I said, “Man, we’ve gotta keep up digestive enzymes.” And then actually I am gonna send him a bottle of some of the like natural herbal anti-histamines, just in case. Because he started sneezing on the phone. I’m like, “Whoa, maybe you’re not all the way out of the water yet. Have this on hand, in case you need it.” So the coresatin in, the rutin, some of those–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hesperetin
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The things I love for allergies: number one, just really get a good air filter. I used one by Advanced Air. You can see that at justinhealth.com/shop Look at the approved products. I like it. It’s good. Uhm—and then your natural anti-histamine degranulating compounds. In my product, Aller Clear. Stinging Nettle, coresatin, and then you’re gonna have like some vitamin C in that, some potassium bicarb as well. So those are really good. And you can go up to eat. The nice thing about it, just not gonna be drowsy. So you can get that allergy support without getting the drowsiness and then really make sure the diet is anti-inflammatory. Up the hydrochloric acid because HDL is really important with low—with allergy. It’s gonna make a big difference.
Evan Brand: Yup, Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ginger. Ginger is phenomenal, too, for allergies. Really good.
Evan Brand: I love ginger. So it’s a great nutrient. I’d do teas, ginger kombucha, there’s so much you can do with ginger.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah. By the way, right after this, I’ve got a new grill. So I’m gonna go out, I’m gonna grill some grass-fed hotdogs, right? And then I’ve got some sauerkraut with mustard. And I’ve got a nice ginger kombucha, I’m gonna open up. So I’m really excited for my lunch break today.
Evan Brand: Nice. What kind of grill? Is that one of those pellet jobs?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I actually—I got a new Webber just because it’s—it’s—my other one was 10 years old. And then the knobs are starting to go. So I got a nice, little Webber Spirit. So it’s great. It’s got three burners. Love it. And uhm—I got a smoker that I use sometimes for ribs on the weekend just like a 4-hour job. So it’s good to have a day or an afternoon to kinda be at home to enjoy that one but—Yeah. So love my grilling. Try not to get things charred. Try to keep the heterocyclic amines and the polyaromatic hydrocarbons to a minimum.
Evan Brand: Agreed. Agreed, man. Cool. Well I don’t have one on my end.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You wanna have a share?
Evan Brand: No.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hope you guys are liking these calls here. We wanna do more. We wanna connect with the listeners. Our purpose really is to serve and help people get their health back. If people want more feedback, or want more kinda like rolling up the sleeves and specifically diving into your case, go to notjustpaleo.com or justinhealth.com, click on the schedule buttons. And we are here to help you out. Evan, anything else, man?
Evan Brand: That’s it. Have a great day people, drink clean water, get rest, reduce stress, be grateful. It’s gonna go a long way.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And people on Facebook, I’m hoping we can get Evan on here soon. We gotta just figure that out. So hopefully, soon we’ll do that. So Evan, great chatting with you, man. We’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand: Take Care. Bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
References:
https://justinhealth.com/products/aller-clear/
https://justinhealth.com/products/advanced-pure-air/
http://catalog.designsforhealth.com/IB-Synergy-60
http://notjustpaleo.com/227-dr-izabella-wentz-hashimotos-protocol/
How to Use Resistant Starch to Improve Your Gut Health
Introduction to Resistant Starch
With resistant starch, we have two main kinds regarding our application.
Type II: Unripened banana flour
The banana flour is great and is what I personally use because I have an autoimmune thyroid condition.
Potato flour is technically a nightshade, which can exacerbate some people’s autoimmune conditions. It’s the alpha-solanine component of the potato that tends to be the problem. If you’re autoimmune, try the banana flour or the plantain flour first.
I use both the potato and unripened banana flour, but I tend to feel better with the banana flour. I have some patients who do better with the potato flour; However, I always recommend trying it out.
What Are the Benefits of Resistant Starch?
Let’s talk about the benefits. Again, the goal is to feed the beneficial bacteria in our small intestine. Many patients that I work with need a lower carbohydrate diet off the bat to help address and correct blood-sugar imbalances.
Typically, a lower-carbohydrate, higher-fat diet can be a great tool in helping to stabilize the blood sugar. Also it helps in taking the stress off the adrenals/pancreas, thus stabilizing the up and down flows of blood sugar.
Going to a lower-carbohydrate, high-fat, moderate-protein diet can be a great option for many people. Some of the research shows that on a low-carbohydrate diet, we can lose some of our beneficial bacteria, especially the Roseburia and E. rectale species. And so it will be very beneficial for us to go on a low carbohydrate diet.
Adding some of the resistant starches mentioned above can help feed the beneficial bacteria by producing butyrate—butyric acid—the same fat as butter, essentially. This helps to keep our small intestine more acidic and prevent SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth) from coming up from the colon into the small intestine.
Some people may get a little bit constipated due to the shifts in bacteria on a low-carbohydrate diet. You can decrease the constipation by just upping the vegetables (nonresistant starch polysaccharides) and adding in the resistant starch in the two forms mentioned above.
Click here to get some answers regarding your chronic health issues.
What Do You Do?
Typically, I start with about one teaspoon and work my way up to about two tablespoons. I continue to double my dose until the magic two-tablespoons dosage has been reached.
If you have an issue at all with the resistant starch, simply cut the dose in half until you find the correct dose for you.
If you have excessive gas, bloating, belching, or flatulence, cut the dose in half till you have no symptoms. Lastly, if you have an issue with half a teaspoon, go to a quarter…an eighth…a sixteenth. Find that magic number.
Clinical pearl: Resistant starch can be used as a diagnostic tool to assess if you may potentially have SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth).
SIBO is when the bacteria from our colon, our large intestine, is moving back up to the small intestine. If you have too much bad bacteria there and you take a little bit of resistant starch—and, again, I recommend starting with a teaspoon—if you have any exacerbation of symptoms, like bloating or gas or bent-over pain or excessive flatulence, that’s a sign that you more than likely have SIBO. So this is a great tool to figure out if you have SIBO.
If you benefit with a low-FODMAP diet and you can check out the Paleo dietitian, Aglaée, she has a great low-FODMAP Paleo diet. If you benefit from cutting out a lot of the FODMAPs, which are going to be your garlic, onions, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, by experiencing less gas and bloating, you more than likely have a SIBO.
SIBO can be diagnosed with expensive lab testing, which sometimes may be needed—but it can be diagnosed with resistant starch and a low-FODMAP diet as well.
Resistant Starch May Not Fix Your Gut
The goal of resistant starch is to act like a prebiotic, where it’s feeding the beneficial bacteria in your gut while increasing butyrate. The elevated levels of butyrate are also making the gut environment more inhospitable, which then makes the environment less hospitable. So what is this really doing? It’s creating a better environment for good bacteria to live in and a very inhospitable environment for bad bacteria to live in.
For some people with SIBO and other digestive issues, the cure-all is not going to be resistant starch or a low-FODMAP diet. You may need to get the right antimicrobials in there to help wipe out the infectious milieu residing in your GI tract.
Once the pathogens are removed, we can start to add back in some of the troublesome FODMAPs one at a time. You need to be careful of the FODMAP load. Having broccoli for lunch and asparagus and brussels sprouts for dinner may be enough to set you over the top.
When you start adding FODMAPs back into your diet, start with one new FODMAP per meal per day.
What To Do Next?
Are you are having chronic gut issues (leaky gut syndrome), fatigue, low thyroid symptoms, and weight gain?
If you are looking to get some answers, running some specific functional medicine tests may be the only way. Most chronic health issues tend to get worse over time if they are left untreated, and the conventional medical options tend to cause more problems in the long run.
Click here to get some answers and find out what you options are.
Solutions to Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO)
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
I see patients every day walking to my clinic with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) symptoms. Have you ever felt your stomach pooch out after eating certain foods? Do you ever feel like you can’t quite digest your food all the way? Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth can also contribute to leaky gut syndrome!
There are millions of people with SIBO-like symptoms covering them up with medications that don’t fix the underlying problem. SIBO can affect our immune system and compromise our body’s ability to break down food and absorb nutrition.
Below are 5 signs you may have SIBO:
1. Burping or belching
2. Flatulence
3. Indigestion/low nutrient absorption (low B12, proteins, and fats)
4. Diarrhea or constipation
5. Abdominal pain
What Causes SIBO?
1. A lack of stomach acid
When we have low stomach acid, or achlorhydria, our body lacks the ability to activate protein-digesting enzymes in our stomach, called pepsin. We need a low pH (acidic), right around 2, to ensure our body’s optimal digestive capabilities. This is why people on proton-pump inhibitors (drugs that block stomach acid) are at an increased risk for SIBO.
A low pH also provides an inhospitable environment for bad bacteria to grow. When bad bacteria overpopulate the stomach, it’s easy to see the increase in intra-abdominal pressure. This increase in intra-abdominal pressure can open up the esophageal sphincter and allow acids from the stomach to rise up and create irritation or burn the esophageal tissue. Without adequate levels of stomach acid, SIBO is almost certain!
2. Pancreatic insufficiency
Without adequate enzyme production, our body has a difficult time digesting proteins and fats. When our body doesn’t break down these proteins and fats fully, they putrefy, rancidify, and ferment in our intestinal track. This is not good!
HCl is the first important step for enzyme production. Without an acidic pH, the foods that are released from our stomach into our small intestine will not provide enough stimulation to trigger the gallbladder to release bile acids and pancreas to produce protein (trypsin and lipase) and fat-digesting enzymes. Without the crucial release of these enzymes, our body is at an increased risk for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO.
3. Chronic infections
Many infections are opportunistic and are able to take hold of the person’s body because of an accumulation of physical, chemical, and emotional stress. When this happens, we tend to have a decrease in immunoglobulin A (IgA). IgA is a protective mucous membrane barrier that lines our intestinal tract and plays an important role at preventing SIBO. Because 70 to 80% of our immune system is located in the lymphoid tissue in our intestinal tract, this has the ability to throw our immune system out of balance.
Chronic infections can lower stomach acid and decrease our body’s ability to break food down. With low IgA and a lack of stomach acid, our body is a sitting duck for an infection. Bacterial and parasitic infections are known to produce toxins (endotoxin and lithocolic acid) that can actually suppress our immune system. If you’re having chronic SIBO-like symptoms, feel free to click here to see if an infection connection is possible.
Other predisposing factors for SIBO
There are many other risk factors for SIBO, including fibromyalgia and IBS. These other conditions have common threads along with the main causes of SIBO that are above.
When our immune system is compromised by various infections, we have an inability to break down, absorb, and assimilate food due to an increase in physical, chemical, and emotional stress. This accumulation of stress eventually breaks the weak link in your chain. Because the gut is so central to the immune system, so many different conditions have a common link with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I would go as far to say that it is impossible to have a chronic disease without some type of gut dysfunction!
What Is SIBO?
SIBO is typically caused by a migration of bacteria from the large intestine making its way back upstream into the small intestine.
“SIBO may be accompanied by both maldigestion and malabsorption. Bacteria in SIBO might significantly interfere with enzymatic, absorptive and metabolic actions of a macro-organism.”
When our digestive system becomes stressed, our ileocecal valve can become loose. The slack in the ileocecal valve makes it easier for bacteria to migrate up the gastrointestinal tract. If more bacteria starts making its way up the GI tract, it makes it harder for the healthy gut bacteria in our small intestine to produce important nutrients, like vitamin K, vitamin D, iron, and various B vitamins.
What Type of Bacteria Is Found in SIBO?
How Do You Test for SIBO?
1. Hydrogen or methane breath test
A solution of glucose or lactulose is consumed. Hydrogen or methane levels are measured after the test, and if hydrogen or methane is found in amounts greater than or equal to 20 ppm, it is considered a positive test for SIBO. Ammonia is a common by-product from the intestinal bacteria. Ammonia has a pH of 11, so it’s easy to see how bacteria can affect intestinal pH!
2. Comprehensive stool test
The pathogenic bacteria mentioned above can be found in the stool by a comprehensive stool analysis. All lab companies are not created equal when it comes to this type of specialized testing. I recommend only using the best companies to ensure that you are getting accurate results. My three favorite lab companies for stool testing are Biohealth Diagnostics, Genova Diagnostics, and Doctors Data. If you are trying to get assessed for SIBO or any other infection, feel free to click here!
3. Organic acid test: This test can look for metabolic by-products of SIBO, including benzoate, hippurate, phenylacetate, phenylpropionate, p-hydroxybenzoate, p-hydroxyphenylacetate, indican, tricarballylate.
How do you treat SIBO?
Conventional Treatment Options
Conventional treatments typically consist of taking specific antibiotics, such as metronidazole and rifaximin. Antibiotics are powerful medicines, and I typically recommend a natural herbal approach first. The herbs tend to be more gentle on the body and don’t have all of the side effects.
Natural Treatment Options
There are many herbal medicines that can help eradicate SIBO. One of my favorites is oil of oregano. Other great herbs include berberine, artemisia, cat’s claw, colloidal silver, and ginger.
Sometimes it’s more than just SIBO causing the problem. If you are having any of the above symptoms, it’s good to get checked by a functional-medicine doctor to make sure there are no other infections driving the problem.
Some of these bacteria use biofilms as a means to protect themselves from the antimicrobials. It can get a little more nuanced when addressing the stubborn infections. Feel free to click here if you need help!
I find many patients do better at making diet and lifestyle changes first and addressing the adrenals and hormonal system second before addressing the gastrointestinal system. When patients go right to the GI system, the side effects tend to be much higher!
Dietary Interventions
FODMAPs: Removing fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols (FODMAPs) from the diet is also important. These FODMAP sugars can fuel the pathogenic bacteria in the gut, which then leads to more toxic metabolic by-products. Many people notice great improvements in stomach distention, gas, and flatulence after removing these foods from the diet. I personally find a combination of diet, lifestyle, and herbal medicines tend to be the trick to addressing the underlying cause of the problem.
Resistant starch: Adding resistant starch type 2 or 3 into your diet can also help feed the beneficial bacteria in the gut. The beneficial bacteria in the gut produce a short-chain fatty acid called butyrate. Butyrate helps keep the pH in the gut lower, tightens the ileocecal valve, and provides fuel for the cells of the colon. Watch the above video for more information on how resistant starch can help improve your SIBO.
My Favorite Resistant Starch
- Type 2 resistant starch—unripened banana flour by Wedo.
- Type 3 resistant starch—potato flour by Bob’s Red Mill.
Instructions: If you have significant SIBO, start with just 1 tsp of resistant starch and work up to 2 tbs. If you have any significant gas or bloating after taking the resistant starch, half the dose the next day. When in doubt start slow. Gas and bloating are surefire signs that you have SIBO.
I can take 2 tbs of resistant starch two times per day without any symptoms. Some people may have to use herbal medicines to significantly knock down the SIBO before the resistant starch can be tolerated. Make sure you work with your functional-medicine practitioner to support you in the process.
On a low-carbohydrate diet, the E.rectale and the Roseburia bacteria can significantly decline. Adding in resistant starch can help prevent this decline in beneficial bacteria while maintaining a low-carbohydrate eating plan. Some people are carbohydrate sensitive and need to keep their carbohydrates down, and this provides an excellent option to get the best of both worlds.