Hair Loss Restoration, Improve Testosterone, Inflamm-aging & Inflammation – Jay Campbell Podcast #373

Having a lush and full head of hair is a treasure we all want to enjoy. Having thick hair is seen as a sign of being youthful and having vitality — even being sexy. Millions of people find that they’re suffering from thinning hair or hair loss, called “alopecia” in medical terms. It’s a common problem that affects both men and women. Medical hair restoration is the only way back from thinning hair for many people. For a select number, though, their thinning hair is due to inflammation.

Dr J and Jay Campbell discuss that the good news is you can help your body control the amount of inflammation you’re experiencing by making simple changes in your diet and managing your stress levels. You can take a proactive approach to your hair restoration by eating a diet rich in anti-inflammatory foods. Try anti-inflammatory beverages and foods. While hair restoration is not an overnight process, making these small changes in your diet can support your body’s efforts to heal itself.

Reducing your inflammation can give your hair a chance to regrow. Be sure to reduce your intake of foods that promote inflammation and approach your doctor for a professional and safe course of action.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00  – Introduction
3:35   – Hormones
49:27 – Insulin Resistance
55:17  – Peptides

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani in the house with Jay Campbell. Really excited for today’s podcast. We’re gonna be talking about a whole host of things from hair loss to improving testosterone, inflammation versus inflammation as well as just increasing consciousness. Jay, welcome to the podcast, man. How you doing? 

Jay Campbell: Doc, man, it’s an honor to be here always when I got a chance to speak with people in our profession who are knowledgeable. I’m privileged and humbled to be here. So, man, let’s make this amazing.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Very good. Well, in the functional medicine community kind of where I work, there’s a lot of people that complain about hair loss especially kind of people coming post-Covid, right? We’re doing a lot of nutritional things, diet things, improving digestion, absorption, trying to get inflammation down. But I kind of found you because you have a couple of products out there that I’ve heard some really good things about that kind of improve hair loss, improve hair restoration, outside of like you know your typical like Propecia, Rogaine, Minoxidil type of medications. I want to talk a little bit more about that just kind of out of the gates. Go ahead. 

Jay Campbell: Yeah. So, it’s, uh, again, thanks for being here. It’s an honor to be here with you today. I’m very excited always whenever I get the opportunity or the chance to talk about hair loss, um, when I speak about hair loss, I usually, for people that aren’t really up to speed, um, I kind of like dropped the hammer because as you know from reading my articles but you’re one of the few that actually wants to drill down to that rabbit hole because you know that article that was on ben greenfield’s website last summer that was three parts is over 10 000 words right? So, most people today don’t read in that depth but there’s a lot of science now out there that teaches us the real definition and cause of hair loss and drum roll please. Hair loss is caused by blood flow restriction to the scalp. There’s nothing else that causes hair loss but blood flow restriction to the scalp and blood flow restriction to the scalp is actually caused by a myriad, you know, number of things. I mean, there’s probably, I could give you a hundred answers as to what causes hair loss and you know that obviously is covered, uh, that is micro irritants that is you know heavy lead poisoning that is overexposure to the sun, that is stress, that is lack of sleep, that is hormonal related hair loss, right? So, DHT inhibition, uh, you know, women that have autoimmune disorders lack of sleep again causing cortisol spikes and you know over increases of prolactin, I mean, again, there’s so many different answers IGF-1, you know, insufficiencies and overproduction, so there’s  so many different things that can cause hair loss but we definitely at least now know that if we can control for the loss or the blood flow restriction to the scalp and do things to increase blood to the scalp, we can actually regrow hair and Justin what’s so cool is you know my product um you know without being a show or sounding like a shill. If you are suffering from a genetic predisposition which is you know androgenic alopecia or androgenic alloresia, there’s other ones you can actually minimize that by doing again the things that you need to remove inflammation from the scalp and increase what you would call angiogenesis to the scalp which is again increasing red blood cells and at some point, you know, as we get deeper into this you know, I’m happy to give people a lot of different things you can do, I have like a really cool meme that I can send you and you can post you know after the fact of like my and my business partner obviously nick  with our company but like our inner circle hacks of what you can do to massively increase hair loss as your hair regrowth as you age.   

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent and I saw this article, I had it up here on the screen as we were kind of chatting. This was a phenomenal article I saw earlier in the year because it talked about DHT, we kind of know DHT is this like testosterone metabolite and so, as you get older, essentially you have these hairs that are naturally prone to be DHT sensitive and we know there’s different medications are out there to block that so just kind of for the average person you have your finasteride medications, you could do oral or topical thing that kind of block that which can be helpful for some people but then you kind of and I always intuitively knew there was an inflammation component because I’ve worked that many patients over the last decade where we improved their diet, we got their gut working better, we modulated cortisol, we did things to help kind of the immune response, glutathione, NAC, things to help with the oxidative stress around the scalp and I saw hair improvements significantly so I know there had to be something more than just DHT in and of itself and then you kind of posted a couple of articles talking about that so just to kind of you know we have like one major track in conventional medicine which is like you finasterides which are you’re like 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors, then you have like Rogaine minoxidil which are your vasodilators. Those are your two major paths but then you kind of come in so just kind of talk about how you took the two major paths and how you kind of had this little side detour that you find to be better. 

Jay Campbell: Man, I’m so glad to talk to you today man because I haven’t had a chance to go this deep but this is you know really what we have been attempting to expound and obviously we did a pretty good job myself Nick and Ben and we did Ben’s podcast and you know again, the article was three parts and Ben did a lot of stuff into this but to your questions. Let’s go really big pictures. So, the conventional medicine route was always about inhibiting DHT. But anyone who’s ever inhibited DHT whether it was from the script which is you’ve already mentioned Propecia finasteride or dutasteride, yep, you know topically they realized that those, you know, medications actually attached to the follicular root in the scalp somewhat I always say someone and again you know read the articles that we’ve written if you want to understand the true science but they will prevent further miniaturization but here’s the big gotcha, the big gotcha is that 90% of people who use any of those products to again further miniature or reduce miniaturization. If you stop, all the hair falls out, because they have attached to those follicles in the scalp blocking that conversion so once you stop the you know the actual taking of again the drug or the vasodilator because this also applies to minoxidil and Rogaine, uh, the hair falls out and again anyone who’s used these things has experienced this the other big issue is that there’s a very large percentage. There’s really no number, uh, of men and women sadly because don’t report this like men do but who suffer all sorts of dysfunction. Sexual dysfunction, brain dysfunction, uh, bone mineral density dysfunction from these drugs and again as you know because you’ve read them and you just brought them up but you know we wrote an article about DHT inhibition causing cellular dysfunction over time and the problem and again, I don’t want to worry people and this is a big rabbit hole but again you know happy to point people and you will obviously and you’re doing it now to the articles on our site that provides the science on this but over time DHT, inhibiting DHT, which is again a natural biological pathway causes cellular damage and this can be seen if you do genetic testing, if you do methylated genetic testing, if you go to trudiagnostic.com it’s T-R-U , you know it’s Ryan Smith’s company or if you use the Glycan age test. Any of these people now that are doing this kind of DNA at the cellular level tests can see people who have been using DHT inhibitors and by the way this also extends into testosterone optimization. If you’re using an AI an aromatase inhibitor medication because again, you’re blocking from an x. Yes. Exactly. You’re blocking very powerful and profound biological pathways that should never be inhibited. Now, remember most of DHT medications and AI medications were originally created for people that we’re suffering from cancer, right? And then these medications were extrapolated and one of my good friends in medicine always like says extrapolation does not correlate to causation, right, you know, they’re putting them over into these other fields like hair replacement or hair restoration and of course suppressing estrogen and people using therapeutic hormones, uh, it was bad thing all together and now we have you know five seven 10 15 years of observation and we can see the harm that it’s causing but Justin, a lot of people will come out, you know, who and they’ll listen to this podcast and they’ll say but J I’ve been using a DHT inhibitor, it’s stopped my hair loss, I get my blood work done twice a year, I have absolutely no issues right. Like, I’m low body fat. I’m low inflammation, I take care of myself, I have clean diet and I will say that’s absolutely true but what do your telomeres look like. And so, this is a whole big thing and I would say that like over the next three to five years as more and more people start doing these DNA based tests and they can really look at the end caps and they can see what these DHT inhibitors and AI drugs or medications are doing. It’s gonna be a major reveal and I will just one throw one other thing I there just to like drop the hammer. The majority of men who have died in the last three years, uh, you know pro-body-builders physique athletes, performance athletes, competitors, even strong men of quote unquote heart attacks or sudden death because again, they’re using God knows, what you know in the kitchen sink, those guys actually died of what are called micro fissures in their vascular networks from using AIs. The AI’s literally are causing fissures.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh wow! That’s the reason why, huh? Yeah, I know, they’re doing a whole bunch of medications. 

Jay Campbell: I have. I’m the only guy that’s brave enough to come out and say this. And again, there’s nobody doing autopsies on these people and I’m not gonna mention names. I am very connected to people who worked with these guys or work with these guys, previous to them dying and we know what they’re using and

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re not hearing this from the heart, the heart issues, the heart hypertrophy due to the steroids. Is there any component in that too?

Jay Campbell: Absolutely. Dude, there isn’t a single bit of research in the entire world that shows that testosterone causes anything. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I imagine these guys probably aren’t just on bioidenticals, they’re probably. 

Jay Campbell: Exactly, kind of, I mean. Exactly, so we’re talking about that’s exactly right. So, we’re talking about when you’re taking super physiologic levels of all sorts of things, right? And all sorts of things are going wrong and all sorts of harm is being caused but what we definitely do know is it’s the Ais that are causing the blockage in the vascular network and look let me explain the science behind this because this needs to get out there more. You never inhibit estrogen, ever. Most doctors out there today still do not understand that there’s no such thing as estrogen or high estrogen symptoms or side effects. These side effects that are being caused are due to inflammation. People have too much visceral body fat. They’re on, you know, therapeutic hormones. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a man or woman and the exogenous hormones are causing an inflammatory response. Their inflammasomes being released from the visceral fat, normally that causes the quote unquote side effects of like you know water retention or you know irritability or mood disablement. All these people literally extrapolate that to high estrogen symptoms it’s completely a falsehood. All the science and evidence shows that you need healthy levels of estrogen to confer protection to biological systems so whenever you use testosterone whether you’re a man or woman you should never block estrogen, you know, again, through aromatization because that is what is going to convert protection to the vascular network to the brain to bone mineral I mean all of these things need estrogen and I dude, I go on Instagram yesterday. And I’m looking at, I won’t name names because they’ll name names but very very well-respected people with massive audiences way bigger than me who do not understand this still who are still recommending to their patients about preventing or miniaturizing or blocking aromatization. I know, we rabbit whole from hair loos but all of this stuff relates yeah and I’ll take it back very simplistically, you cannot block a God-created or biologically-created system in the body and not think that you’re gonna have if you’re, basically, you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? They’re going to have downstream issues and effects that are going to show up within time, you know my business partner Nick love to call you know he’s a dork. Third order effects, right? But, like, the reality is you’re going to see nasty things happen when you do this and unfortunately medicine, conventional, not you and me, conventional loves to use these drugs to screw around with the biological cascade that was again created, you know in these perfect bodies that we have, not realizing that doing that is going to have long-term damage.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. So, what about using natural compounds because you’re talking about like you know the Aromatase inhibitors, right? You’re talking about some of the pharmaceuticals but just by keeping inflammation down by avoiding processed grains and excess omega-6 oils. That may also have an improvement on things just selenium and zinc and nutrients may have some mild DHT, estrogen metabolizing effects. Eating cruciferous vegetables and some of the sulfur-rich compounds may help with some of that too. So, we kind of draw a line between natural things that may have a more modulating effect versus drugs that may kidn of be in discretionary and kind of go too over the top too high or low on that. 

Jay Campbell: So, yeah. So, it’s a great question, so like I get this question a lot all the time, you know, people will ask me well what about natural stuff you know, like doctor, I got one, a question like to days ago Dr. Berg recommends, you know natural, you know using things to naturally suppress estrogen. Okay, so again, let’s go back. We do not want to suppress estrogen. What we do want and you already said it is, we want less inflammation. How we suppress inflammation is not being fat and obviously one of the talking points that we have on this call is what is the greatest strategy for a human being to minimize disease as they age. The greatest strategy and by the way, if you ask a hundred doctors that question one will get it right, the greatest strategy to minimize disease as we age is building muscle because muscle is the greatest deterrent to the disease of aging because muscle is the most metabolically active tissue and muscle does not allow for inflammation. Now, I’m not talking about becoming a huge body builder but I’m talking about being functionally lean as we age when you build muscle you have less fat, the more muscle you have, the less chance you have, the disease, again the less inflammation, the more bone mineral density you have, the more functional strength you have on and on it goes so I mean like the reality is all those things you said are great adjuvants you know cruciferous vegetables, uh, you know minimizing seed oil consumption, living insulin control, I love talking about this kind of stuff but at the end of the day, you have to build muscle and you know, I’m not one of those guys that says oh, you shouldn’t do cardio and you only build muscle, you have to have a holistic viewpoint. You know, if you’re a man, I mean I just got into this yesterday with a very, very big influencer, I won’t name her name, she’s very, very well, now we talk all the time and she’s like not doing cardio and she’s almost 50 and I’m like what, you know, I’m starting to get belly fat, I won’t do cardio, well then that belly fat’s gonna keep coming like there’s no amount of growth hormone or testosterone or peptides or anything that you’re gonna take, if you don’t increase movement patterning, right? So, I mean, at the end of the day, all those things are amazing but build muscle, be functionally strong, you know, we can talk mindfulness and yoga and meditation and doing all that stuff and being pliable but you got to build muscle because the more sick you get it’s not okay. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me kind of go rapid fire, you hit a bunch of avenues I want to go down, so from a movement, um, muscle building standpoint are we just talking about functional movements, push pull band, squat kind of lunge type of patterns. Anything more like super slow, certain periodization bands, cables, I mean, kind of what does your routine look like, just you know, what would be that they, if you look at your routine kind of from a thousand-yard view, what would be the key core things you’d want to distill to other people that they can apply to theirs? 

Jay Campbell: Dude, man, I love your questions dude. You’re the best. You’re the best interviewer I’ve been on in a long time. Very, very knowledgeable man, so great credit to you. Um, that’s a very open-ended question, and I would say that, the answer is I’ll definitely give my, you know, regimen, my wife and its regiment and I’m 51 you know and I look literally a lot better than most people look at 20. Okay, and obviously grow. Everything but the kitchen sink at my body, you know, I use therapeutic testosterone, I use therapeutic growth hormone, uh, when I’m not using therapeutic growth hormone, I use peptides, uh, I take all sorts of insulin suppressing medications and supplements. I use metformin, I use you know, dihydro berberine. I mean, like I said man, I throw the kitchen sink in my body but I’m also very you know scientifically efficient, I use very precise dosages, I go by the research and of course the research for me is empirical, right? I got 30 years of doing this. I mean, I’ve been treating my body like a raprap for 30 years but to answer your question specifically because it is important, it’s an amazing question is, it’s gonna be relevant to the person’s age. A 25-year-old man or woman can train much more intensely and recover much better than a guy at 51 can, right? No matter, how well I take care of myself and how injury-proofed I am and all the shit that I take to recover and how good my sleep is, I still do not have the synovial fluid in my joint capsules as that 25-year-old does, right, so I have to modulate the intensity and the recovery from that age to a 50-year-old but you know to answer your question I think the answer is yes. You know, I would say all of the above, you know, weight training obvious bone bearing resistance training, you know, a lot of people that don’t have access to a gym with all the bullshit that’s happened in the last two and a half years then yeah, you got to do push-pull, push-ups, you know free standing squats, uh, you know if you have a pull-up bar hopefully if you have bands, I mean again, everything is good. My personal pet belief is it’s really not a belief it’s more of a knowing because I’ve been doing it for so long is, as you age rep range is more important that it when you’re in your 20s in your, let’s say like your early 30s because it’s all about taking the muscle to positive muscle failure, right, not eccentric, not negative but to a place where literally, your fibers cannot do another rep so like I have a formulation of training again I’ve created myself and I call it positive muscle fiber training. It’s PMF training. It’s a system that I sell it’s a video and I’m not here to sell my course or anything like that but I don’t even know about that wow, yeah, I mean I’ll do, I’ll send it to you after this and you can go through it. It’s pretty epic. I got a lot of people on it but and honestly I’m stepping on the shoulders of giants because you know I learned from Charles Poliquin, I learned from Jim Brown, you know, I learned from genius guys but the end of the day, the older you are the more you have to push your body’s ligament you know ligaments tendons and muscle fibers to a place where they reach exhaustion pretty quickly and so for me a couple of warm-up sets, two work sets each work set goes to positive muscle failure, again, I’m not doing eccentrics, I don’t have somebody spotting me and then I move, right and I train my body over usually six weeks, uh, you know, periodized, uh, rotations and it’s either full body Monday Wednesday Friday or it’s um kind of a push-pull split. It’s basically a split, you know, chest, back, leg, biceps and then delts, triceps, always finishing with core depending on where I’m at in the year, you know, I always foam roll before and after yeah. Sometimes, I do some pretty static stretching.    

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How long is your workout typically?

Jay Campbell: Uh, my wife and I train together and my 14 years old daughter trains with us because she’s like a Mary Lou from Mary Lou Retton and Jim Freeze. So if  it’s al three of us probably 50 minutes but today my, she’s actually a cheer camp at woodward academy up in central California so my wife and I trained together this morning and we were like 36 minutes I think.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nice, nice and in regards to the cardio aspect are you kind of doing more of a tabata interval sprint stuff. There’s a lot og stuff on my twitter feed about people really more into like the zone two type of thing getting your heart rate around 120 for like 30 minutes and just kind of holding a steady state. What’s your thought process on both of those. What do you like? 

Jay Campbell: Amazing question, so I’m probably gonna be a little bit different here and you know take it a different direction and you know my background from a research standpoint is low-carb ketogenic dieting 20-plus years ago so I have a lot of experience with energy systems at one time, one time I worked with Lyle Mcdonald, I was kind of his research assistant before he wrote the first book on ketogenic dieting and exercise so you know all the science but at the end of the day a person’s cardio training should be relevant to their diet and the reason I say that is if you’re a faster okay or a very low carbohydrate person and that might be what paleo that could be carnivore keto, you have to use your training, you’re not your lifting but your cardio training should be relevant to your energy demand, right? So, if you’re somebody like me and by way I have a program that I’ve been following since 2010, it’s you know, one of the programs in my book which is called the metabolic blowtorch diet but it’s an every alternate day fasting. So, I fast on the non-lifting days and I eat on my lifting days, right? So, I eat, I train, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, normally and those are the days I eat and then Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, I fast and my fastening intervals are anywhere from 18 sometimes just full 24 hours, wake up early the next day and you know glycogen load before I train and that’s how I do it but in truth your cardio or the people watching this shows cardio should again be relevant to the energy that they have while they’re doing the cardio so that zone one, zone two is it’s great advice, I mean I normally I’m doing my cardio, fasted I’m normally in steady state and my heart rate is somewhere between 150 and 135, okay? Now, if I wanted to do a Fartlek, Tabata interval session, I would do it on my lifting day because I have glycogen and I would do 30, yeah, it depends 25 to 35 minutes of some form of an interval right and I would do that because I know that I have glycogen to fuel and not I’m in a place where I have, you know glycolytic deprivation and I could burn my muscles so here’s the big mistake, the big mistake that people make is they’re fasting and they do intervals and you don’t want to do that especially if you just fasted for 16 hours because your body is very prone tapping, uh, you know through what is it the enzyme muscle creatine kinase, yeah, muscle protein and any more catabolism. Yeah, exactly as soon as you do that, you’re now breaking down muscle tissue and fueling your body’s energy demand from the protein and so I always tell people like you just got to be cognizant where you are from an energy system so you know again if you’re a hardcore carnivore keto person then you should never be beyond zone two it should be always be steady state moderate intensity and let’s not forget depending on your age, low impact, do you know how many people who are 40, who like you know, take up crossfitting and go right into this like high impact ballistic shit and destroy themselves, I always used to I always used to make jokes I was like man if I was an Orthopade, I would put all my centers next to crossfit gyms. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean for my whole cardio approach, like doing rowing because just because most cardio things, you’re in flexion state. 

Jay Campbell: Rowing’s amazing. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s the only thing that opens you up and puts you in that extension. 

Jay Campbell: Rowing and swimming. Same thing. If you can do broad smoke swimming but I mean how many people have a lot, have access to a lap pool but dude, rowing is amazing. If you have one of those in your house, that’s the best form of cardio. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so, you recommend most people. Do you like it empty stomach doing your cardio, keep it more zoned too for most.

Jay Campbell: Yes. Yeah. So, like I mean again, it depends because there’s days when I train, I mean again, um, everything is relevant to what that person’s goal is right so like if you’re a 45-year-old person. Yeah. Exactly like you don’t give a shit about being ripped or you’re not in a you know a triathlete or some sort of like crazy weekend competition. It’s how do I look better with my shirt off, you know, how do I have good self-confidence in my job, you know, and then ultimately like as I age like can I bend over and I pick up my grandkids or my children’s kids you know what I’m saying without suffering without pulling something in my spine, um, you know, my wife and I are like really into looking good like we enjoy traveling, you know to exotic vacations so there’s like, you know, usually like three months out of the year sometimes four, we want to look amazing in a bathing suit, you know, I mean, to be an empty nester you know, so it’s like  I want to like travel the world with my shirt off and be like, yeah. I feel good about the way I look, right? It’s always about as you know Doc, functional strength as we age and the self confidence to that comes from being lean. I mean you know you look better in cloths you know, you don’t have to worry about like throwing your cloths away, you know, because you’re going down and up and all that stuff so again, inflammation will stay ay bay by maintaining strength, maintaining leanness and obviously you know preparing, you know, again, depending on your diet, the form of training. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. I think it was Charles Paulken, that said that most people’s health goals just revolve around wanting to look good naked right? That’s pretty 

Jay Campbell: much honestly, that’s probably the best way you could say it and you know there’s another thing though to do that too is like

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: At a functional aspect

Jay Campbell: Look for the opposite, most people don’t even give a shit not your watchers or mine but most people don’t give a shit about their health until they don’t have their health.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. That’s true.

Jay Campbell: And then they throw everything, you know, including the kitchen sink at it and it’s like dude, you took 35, 45 years to get to this poor level. You think it’s gonna be fixed in a six week or nine-week program or boot camp. No. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Right. So, I want to crystallize. It so your workout, you’re working out for 30 to 45 minutes. What are you picking six to eight movement patterns your foam rollies are working on soft tissue quality and pliability, you know probably during the workout and so is that kind of you want to add a little more detail to that. Does that ring a bell. 

Jay Campbell: Absolutely. Let me add more detail I mean I just came from the chiropractor before I got on your show, okay so I mean I see my chiropractor at least once a week. You know my wife and I usually go together, he’s pretty advanced dude, uh, once a month I see my deep tissue lady who does cranial sacral and I did a five and a half hour session on Saturday and you know she clears out all the negative juju. Yeah and then I also have a body worker that I see every other week on Tuesdays which I will be seeing him tomorrow and you know he does the cupping and you know ART and you know just literally just realigning me and stuff so I mean we’re very hardcore, I would say you now most, more than most people and really like making sure that we maintain these physical avatar bodies as we age and as you know dude, it gets it doesn’t get easier, that’s all you can say. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I can imagine so your cardio routine, what does that look like now, give me that

Jay Campbell: That’s another great question, um, so I’m a big biker, I have, I don’t have a Peloton, I have a really nice life cycle. It’s literally, right over to the right of me in my studio. We also have in my house, we have the newest, the latest and greatest, uh, what is it, um, shit, the treadmill that goes up to 40-degree incline. I can’t even think of what it’s called. It’s insane. Like, if you, so we’re going to Peru at the end of July, I’m filming a television series there and it’s my second trip to Peru but I mean, you know, there’s 18-19,000 feet, uh peeks in Peru you know mount humane day is like 19,500 feet. So, you know, I wanna be ready and I mean I’m pretty good I you know, cardiovascular but I’m like, no, I’m gonna buy this. It’s a NordicTrack. I couldn’t think of this, the x32i. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve seen that.

Jay Campbell: The x32i, it’s like the, you know, the bee’s knees and we just got it like two months ago and it’s amazing, dude. Like, I mean, it’s the most amazing treadmill I’ve ever got, I mean there you have to be an absolute freak to walk for 30minutes at 40-degree incline at like 2.5 miles an hour. I mean, it’ll burn. I’m not exaggerating. It’ll burn 1500 calories in 30 minutes, that’s how insane. But it’s uh, it’s you know, we got it for that purpose but I normally do bike because I like to breed on my bike, okay, and my masseuse, my cranial sacral lady told me on Saturday, she’s like dude you got over patterning in your right, you know, lower quadrant, uh, you know, inside where your, uh, you know, your connective tissue is, uh, your psoas and all this stuff, you just got over patterning, you’ve been biking for so long and doing it so consistently I want you to move to the treadmill and she’s like don’t walk fast, you know, she’s like walk at a wide pace, so I mean I moved to that to do that but normally I’m a biker man, I mean, I should get an ergometer, you know, when you said that you’re like here’s another guy telling me that’s I got to get that in my house but uh, my wife is a treadmill walker on an incline and I’m mostly a bike guy but I mean again, you know, back to the heart rate stuff, I usually ride, at 15 intensity on my life cycle and my heart rate goes from you know, anywhere from at the highest like 142. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How are you measuring your heart rate? Do you have a wearable?

Jay Campbell: I do have, uh, the amazon, uh, whatever the 60 little amazon thing is because that thing actually works with that new treadmill too. So, I got that like two months ago but besides that I mean my life cycle is you know just a hand meter, but it’s pretty accurate, you know, I’ve been using it for like six years now, I need to get a new bike by the way too because it’s just worn down but, uh 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, you’re lifting three to four times a week, three to four times a week you’re lifting, cardio three to four as well?   

Jay Campbell: So, lifting three times, cardio is really just dependent on how much time I have in the day and how lean I want to be like, if I want to be absolutely shredded, I will probably do a second session of cardio on Tuesdays and Thursdays but again it’s just depending on whether I’m at if I’m home if I have access to cardio equipment if I’m on the road and I’m traveling, I’ll never do two sessions usually because you just don’t have access

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Alright. I gotta, I gotta bunch of questions. I’m gonna go rapid fire at you so I’m really interested, I know you’ve done a lot of stuff on testosterone bioidentical supplementation. I want to know how you dose it, I see lots of patients that come into me that are using creams that are using extended release formulas typically if I recommend testosterone supplementation. I’m trying to keep my patients in that top 25% of the reference range. I’ve seen too many patients come way outside of the reference range then you get this receptor site down regulation, I like to keep the injections you know between two or four days, I feel like you can keep the dose more steady on that versus doing every seven days or ten days, I feel like you get this big kind of like you know have the steady levels.  

Jay Campbell: You got it right. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I wanna know your, you know, what’s your best dosing gels, injectables frequency? Where do you like people to be in the reference range? Go ahead.

Jay Campbell: Okay. All great questions. Let’s start off with what you can’t do. Okay, and again, this is sad because there’s still so many endocrinologists and urologists that have no idea what they’re doing, giving patients this but you cannot give a bolus of testosterone at 7 or 10 or even 14-day interval and expect it to work because as you know Justin and they don’t and they should know because they went to school for this. The way the half life works of these medications, you cannot put it into somebody’s system, shut down their endogenous, again, with this exogenous supply and then understanding the bio or the half cycle life of that bioidentical hormone thinking that you’re gonna have any kind of efficacy after six days, I mean you’re not. I mean in fact you’re gonna have to crash and you’re gonna have all sorts of again you know perturbations of estrogen going sideways, testosterone crashing, I mean, there’s, it’s just a horrible situation, so two delivery systems that work. What you said is accurate. Now, what we want to understand and again for the people watching the show are not familiar with my work, I mean, this is like you know, my quote-unquote claim to fame and like

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ll put links below for everything so people can see

Jay Campbell: Yeah. So, from the internet standpoint like you know I wrote a book in 2015 called the definitive TRT manual, it became the number one selling book of all time on testosterone, four years later, I wrote a book called the testosterone optimization therapy bible and it is the number one selling book of all time on testosterone so I work with the top docs, the top researchers, the top endos, the top epidemiologists, like all the people that really are the who’s who in this industry is the people that I work with in this so just to give you guys that clarification and that justification but at the end of the day what we wanna do when we use therapeutic hormones and this goes for by the way women or men is we want to mimic the body’s endogenous postal tool release as closely as we can. Now, you’re going to do that based on using a delivery system that is not spasmodic, right. It’s not a giant bolus, there’s a lot of testosterone delivery systems out there that are absolutely worthless. The only value that they provide is lining the pocket of the doctor who gives it to the patient, okay. I don’t have to mention some of those but at the end of the day you know I have doctors that will argue with me and they’ll be like, that may be true J but some testosterone is better than not been better than none and I can’t dispute that but I definitely argue that you know some delivery systems cause way more side effects than others and should be avoided but back to what you were saying, the best way to imitate or mimic the body’s natural pulsatile and usually diurnal release of testosterone is through every other day or daily uh, delivery systems so if it’s injections, uh, you know, it would be really nice if you were injecting with an insulin needle early in the morning with a bolus of like 25 to 35 milligrams or 15 to 20 milligrams again if you’re going daily and if you’re every other day then you’re looking at again depending on that person, uh, you know I’m mostly speaking about men for right now but you know somewhere between 40 and 60 milligrams every other day.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. What place in the reference range do you like people to be, I mean, it’s are you gonna recommend testosterone if they’re in the bottom 25% and then is there a goal that you want to fall within the range?

Jay Campbell: Okay. So, this is you know very unique stuff here. I’m not a physician. Okay, right? So, I’m not prescribing to men and I’m not also you know governed by state medical licensing. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re speaking from your personal experience and people reporting back to you, where they feel about. 

Jay Campbell: Well, look, I understand your business very well okay. I’ve not been in the business but I could easily be in the business if I choose to be in business. I’m not in the business but I also with obviously literally hundreds of doctors, I understand this I’ve sat there and listened to the top teachers in the world and you know what happens to guys that are attempting to prescribe and you know again what can happen negatively if you know people are at one low end of the range and they prescribe and then they get audited and blah blah blah so this is what we know again from like a general universal conduct, the only thing that matters when you’re optimizing two people any person’s hormones males or females is if they’re asymptomatic and they feel good. Now, levels are again just a measurement, a qualifier so to speak of you know again various lab corp companies, right? So, what we have to understand Justin and this is big picture for people watching this is that whoever is behind the lab companies have been suppressing the standard mean deviations, right? So, the top and the low are pushing and being compressed and I think you know this. Five years ago, the high end of the range for both companies was between 1240 and 1400s and now between lab corp and quest and you know fact check me if you guys have to on this because they’re lowering them all the time now, 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 800 to 1000 typically 

Jay Campbell: Dude, it’s insane. It’s so much lower and if you ask people in the endocrine society or whatever the urology you know uh deal is, they’ll say oh well it’s not conspiracy theory J, it’s fat people are getting fatter and we’re just deviating for the compression of like lower testosterone due to metabolic disorder and dysregulation and blah blah blah but again if you ask the smart people who go to the endocrine society meetings every year and I know somebody who just went and you asked the smart people there like Abraham Morgan Tower who I love and has done more testosterone optimization than anyone he’ll tell you that is doesn’t make sense so in my opinion if you know we want to go full blown put tin foil hats on conspiratorial, they are making men fatter softer, weaker, I mean this is where, this is going, right, so it’s like to answer your question in a long convoluted way I would personally like to see men that have free testosterone levels and again depending on the measuring criteria of somewhere between 35 and 50, okay? and they feel good like they’re energetic, they have dopamine signaling, you know, increased cognition, there’s no brain fog, they’re obviously really goof sexually and have you know, erection, thick you know, firmer erections, morning wood, all that stuff that’s where you want to be from a free standard uh measurement you know is there a total number that’s great? No, but if you talk to the best docs, they’re going to tell you that like depending on when you test them, you know, at the peak or the nadir, you know, you want to see them somewhere between a thousand and 1500 now that’s not to say that somebody who’s at 2000 for you know an hour who’s now gonna function probably between 750 and a thousand during the week is bad. So, it really just comes down to like are they not having symptoms and do they feel good and that’s a shitty answer for you because like you know you want to like be like, okay well when they get tested I want them to be here or here or here but it’s kind of hard to say that because ultimately it depends on when you test them what the delivery system is now let me just also answer that there’s two forms of delivery system that are best okay. Now, I know there’s now oral products on the market and we can go deep down that rabbit hole if you want and talk about that in a second, I feel that they do have promise but they’re not there yet but the other one is trans-scrotal, right? So, a transdermal obviously is on the skin but what we now know scientifically is that the membrane of the base of the scrotum is eight times more permeable than any other skin location so if you’re gonna prescribe transdermal for a man and by the way this goes for women too trans labia right so right in the area of the clitoris and the vaginal lips is where you want to put testosterone cream and obviously with women that’s a little bit more complex you know you might have progesterone cream in there with them too whatever it’s a hold of the thing but at the end of the day the places where they can get the best absorption for the trans nerves is the best and so uh I’ve now been on testosterone therapeutic testosterone for almost 22 years, I was on injectable for close to 17 and a half and since then I’ve been on trans-scrotal and Justin I will never go back to injectable for a couple of reasons. Well, I travel the world a lot and I don’t like carrying needles in my hygiene bag because you never know when you’re going to run into some asshole at international airport who says what the hell is this, right? But then the other person reason is it’s just a lot easier to carry a transdermal cream you know in your hygiene bag as you travel around the word and obviously on the side of it you know it has your script and your doctor’s information and the codes and stuff like that versus like you know you’re going through a what you call it you know a screen point and they pull it out they see needles and they’re like ah I mean you know you’ve heard of stories of like you know just alone and all these guys getting pulled over but at the end of the day that’s why I changed you know there is some biological reasons uh cream on the scrotum increases DHT uh a little bit higher from a standpoint and obviously as you know DHT is the primary anabolic cascade so men will have better uh erections uh you know and but as far as anything else it’s equal, you’re not gonna have better energy or better muscle growth or better stamina or cognition or any of those things. They’re equal. But those are the only two delivery systems in my opinion that are worth the shit uh you know I know that the number one delivery system is pellets and I’ve done videos about pellets. I’ve brought on the best experts in the world about pellets this is what I’ll say about pellets because  people need to hear this. This is how you know pellets are worthless delivery system and I know I’m gonna offend people. There has never been a single scientific study on testosterone ever done using pellets. Now, if you knew that why in the hell would you ever consider using pellets for therapy and look I know there are thousands of people in north America right now using pellets especially women and they get great results and the doctors that use them and prescribe them and it might be you if you prescribe them you know, they’ll say hey dude some of these people are in the military and they’re in active duty and they’re in the field and they don’t have an option, they can’t inject you know, they’re being scrutinized they’re you know blah blah they can only get this like every six or eight weeks I get it.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. That makes sense. 

Jay Campbell: That’s, most cases that’s cool but pellets are bad news from a delivery system because of the way they cleave as an ester in people’s body. Everybody’s biochemically unique Justin. We’re all end of one and a lot of people are hyper excretors and you can put in a pellet that’s supposed to be an eight week life cycle and they have four weeks 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And they’re the last half I always see them just drop out a ton. 

Jay Campbell: It’s horrible, dude. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Frequently. 

Jay Campbell: It’s horrible. But again, I’m not against it if it’s the only most efficacious path and it’s that person’s only option because again some is better than none. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Now, when do you recommend doing testosterone because my philosophy naturally is all right someone comes in they’re overweight, they’re tired, they’re fatigue, my first thing is get the inflammation down, let’s improve your nutrient density, get your cortisol and insulin resistance in check. Let’s get you moving some cardio some resistance training. Let’s get everything fixed metabolically and then just kind of see where you fit and if you continue to improve excellent we can use some herbs maybe some Tribulus, different you know horny goat weed Epimedium, there’s different herbs you can use kind of when do you transition from herbal diets to going a hormone route and then do you ever use like things like hCG in between. How does that progression look for you? 

Jay Campbell: All amazing questions, uh, these are not easy answers and obviously I’m injecting a lot of my opinion on this, um, I’ve done a lot of research on herbs, testosterone boosters. Well, let me just first talk about testosterone boosters and by the way for the people that are new to me that watch this, this is live right? And then you gotta be on your youtube channel, okay, so the people that are new to me are watching this right now and I’m gonna be a chill but I highly recommend you go to my youtube channel and you watch the video that was part one last week with Dr. Keith Nichols and part two today in about two and a half hours and they are I’m telling you guys right now this is the state of the science on hormonal optimization for not just men but for women too today’s video is about 90 mins last week’s was like 48 minutes but I broke up the whole conversation 82 because I was like I want people to digest this we talk about prostate cancer we talk about vascular illness, I mean it is the state of the science, Keith is going to be, Dr. Keith Nichols, who’s interviewed with me, he’s going to probably at some point be the guy that replaces Dr. Neil Roger who’s the number one trainer on the planet for testosterone optimization or just hormone optimization in general and it’s just brilliant. I mean anyone can learn what he is talking about in there but you know to those questions there isn’t a single testosterone boosting herb or supplement on the planet that’s proven to work now as you know because we’re going to talk about consciousness at some point, the placebo effect is very real if a human being takes something and puts their energy and their intention into it that it’s going to work, they probably will create that reality, it’s absolutely possible but from a scientific standpoint if you analyze all of these different supplements and these again Tongkat Ali and  Horny goat weed and mocha these things, they don’t do jack shit. Okay? So, are the gonna work if the person believes in them, yes. But if that person that you’re working with and you said all the things decides that they want to stop being fat and stop being inflamed and exercise and eat better and control for insulin that’s gonna do just as much as any of those other things. Now, I’m not saying that adding those things in as you know additional adjuncts won’t help but I would say that you know before you go and we’ll get there a second but before you go the therapeutic adjuvant route like you just said do what you just said. Do what you just said, lower inflammation, lower belly fat, get them exercising blah blah blah but here’s where you know the really smart people in this industry will come in and say that’s great J. And Justin, but how are you gonna get a 50-year-old guy who’s got 30 pounds or 20 to 30 pounds of belly fat and a 135 total testosterone level with no free testosterone. How are you gonna get them the energy to do any of that shit without concomitantly optimizing their testosterone? So, for those people that I’m like well you know what dude like you’re probably gonna have to put them on a mild dose hoping and again this is where you as a physician really has to have discernment to decide whether this person’s committed because like if I’m you and again I’m not you but if I’m you, I’m not putting a fat person who comes in my office who’s a lazy pile of no way on testosterone because it’s not gonna do shitboard. If anything it’s gonna cause inflammation and again look man I want to say this because I’ve never had a chance to say this and someone so educated is you show uh I see a lot of fat guys and when I see fat guys, I mean they got big bellies, right? They got beer drinking bellies and they go on testosterone and it doesn’t work you know quote-unquote and it doesn’t work because they’re inflamed and they’re injecting testosterone into their fat visceral body in their stomach and that out of center adiposity right there and they get supreme inflammatory responses. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s probably aromatizing as well. 

Jay Campbell: Well. Okay. It’s aromatizing that’s what you think it’s doing. What’s happening is just okay so let’s go to that because I want to address that so when we inject testosterone and it doesn’t matter the testosterone delivery system. Let’s just say for now when we’re injecting it. We want the estrogen to fall to the level that the testosterone is going to allow it to aromatize so yes we want to aromatize but the aromatization is not bad. The aromatization is providing the benefits. We want healthy levels of estrogen to provide protection to vascular networks to the brain networks to the bone mineral density into the skin. There’s a lot of all these amazing things so the problem is not in the aromatization, the problem is in the visceral fat which is causing inflammation so the inflammatory cascade which is happening for these people that have too much fat is absolutely causing the side effects but 90% of physicians and I’m not saying it’s you. They miss this and they think it’s high estrogen symptoms and side effects. It has nothing to do with high estrogen. It has everything to do with inflammation and the cascade of inflammation and so I’m telling you I’ve seen tons of men who literally quit because they’re like I can’t handle the side effects and their doctors tells them it’s high estrogen side effects. You know, water retention, itchy nipples, I could go on, no, it’s inflammation that you have systemically that the testosterone is adding to because the testosterone is an exogenous chemical that the body is like saying oh great another one. Top of the beer and the pizza, and the cheese and all the peanut butter and ice cream that you’re pounding in, I mean that’s causing the inflammation so ultimately it’s tough dude the people in America today because as you know we have what I mean saw a stat two days ago that says that is insane by the way. Seventy percent of men and women over the age of 40 in the united states are obese. 70%!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s insane!

Jay Campbell: 70% over the age of 40. I don’t want you know people to get confused that but that’s I mean dude we don’t have to worry about like the v or the c I mean that’s diabetes and you know what comes after diabetes I mean right, so I mean at the end of the day man if you’re a fat person and you know this is for you for a physician, if a really fat person comes in man, you got to do a psychological analysis like dude, are you sick and tired of being sick and tired like. Are you truly gonna change like are you gonna fight through this because I’m not giving a really fat person testosterone bro if I don’t think they’re gonna actually do the work because testosterone is just a it’s not a magic bullet as you know, its imagined.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. 100%. It makes sense. Very good. Yeah. I wouldn’t argue I would just say things like insulin resistance are primarily gonna be driven through inflammation and internal resistance would it’s kind of all connected right. Excess carbohydrates, grains process, it’s all connected. 

Jay Campbell: So, you know, what, I’m glad you said that because I screwed up and missed that. So, all, so high estrogen symptoms is insulin resistance. That’s 100% the answer and again most people miss this so if you are again fat and inflamed it’s 98.9% likely that you have severe insulin resistance. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think that’s great and you mentioned a bunch of things that you were doing for that obviously all the exercise things, you mentioned the berberine right you might think you mentioned metformin as well I imagine you’re probably doing some B12 with that because they know that. 

Jay Campbell: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I take a very, a very, very complex uh I take uh B right from Gyro formulas. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So, let’s talk about bounce. So, yeah, let’s talk about that so if you’re gonna go on therapeutic hormones, what we now know and this is very cutting edge tip of the spear stuff is you cannot optimize the endocrine system without also optimizing the thyroid, the pancreas and the pituitary. Now, you already know these because you’re a functional medicine freak and you know all these things but the average guy prescribing this shit doesn’t know this especially for women. I mean do you have any idea how many people go on, you know, again, testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, you know depending on age, you know, perimenopausal, post-menopausal whatever and they’re not optimizing the thyroid. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah. Especially on the hair loss side for sure. 

Jay Campbell: Dude. It’s crazy. Though how often you see this so you know I like to say this it’s a triune, if you’re gonna go on hormonal optimization and again for me if you’re 45 and you’re in America with this and we haven’t talked about this before, you know we end the show but at the end of the day we are being bombarded bro. I mean you can’t from the blue light from the plastic in the water I mean this is the best water on the planet it’s still in a plastic bottle I mean I could pour it in metal if I wanted to right but it just will work but I mean we have to be so overly proactive in type a to you know intervene if not avoid this horrific biochemical onslaught to us so at the end of the day if you’re going to look to hormonal optimization in my opinion you have to at 40 to 45 again depending on your level of leanness and your inflammation uh I’m saying the way it’s done right is again depending on your woman or man age it’s looking at free testosterone to see if you’re eligible to start you know obviously therapeutic route it’s supplementing with uh desiccated slash porcine thyroid again relative to your you know relative to your metabolic issues and insulin resistance and then of course you have to control for insulin and you know again I obviously I’m the biggest metformin homer in the world I’ve written an article that’s you know cited on the Harvard education review you know it’s ten thousand words I met Mormon but I am a big metformin advocate because of all the things it doesn’t do outside of the great stuff. It does for insulin suppression right it’s can stop tumor formation and increases aqua Mancy I mean it does so many amazing things but at the end of the day if you don’t want to get metformin you’re afraid of metformin you know you’ve read all the bullshit on the internet about metformin then at least use dihydro berberine because again you’ve got to control for insulin and I know there’s new drugs you know there’s what is semaglutide and literally there’s a new one and they’re coming out all the time now all these things that suppress blood glucose and that’s cool but you know metformin is a plant and dihydro berberine is a supplement so you know I’m all about natural adjuvants but you know between desiccated uh you know therapeutic testosterone maybe some progesterone maybe a little of estrogen depending on your if you’re a woman or a man you know in your age uh and then uh suppressing and controlling for insulin I mean that’s the holy triune for me that’s the three long you know deal you if you do one or two without the other you’re eventually going to throw the balance of the other one off.    

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No. That makes sense, you said metformin is natural yes from the French lilac flower so for sure a lot of good natural things there I love it. I just want to pivot here one sec before we kind of wrap things up. I want you to kind of five a little bit into the genesis of your hair formulation. We talked about well I’m going to kind of go through a couple of the ingredients, I just kind of want to pick your brain and kind of have you walk us through your thinking of why you put those in there so obviously you chose the grapeseed oil, I’ve heard some really good benefits of grape seed oil blends really well um what why is it you chose that fat I’m just curious 

Jay Campbell: Yeah I know  so great questions and I’m happy to go through and break them all down you know as much for whatever relative time we have left um so the grape seed so so version one of Auxana was MCT oil and again you know we’re just going and learning as we go and MCT oil as a carrier molecule uh pretty much the same but messy thicker constitution so we changed the grapeseed oil and we then put it in a spray bottle, we originally had a dropper but then all those bottles broke and that’s you know the story that we gave on Ben’s podcast last year but at the end of the day uh grapeseed oil is very texturized, it’s a very thin constituent and so as the carrier oil for you know the primary uh active ingredient which is carbon 60 uh it just settles in the hair as a spray and you can massage into the scalp a lot easier uh obviously grapeseed oil is very inert and there is you know some data in the world as you know kind of it’s like an essential fatty acid that it also helps neutral, it helps from a nutrient density standpoint in scalp but we’re really just using it as a carrier oil for carbon 60.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Got it. Excellent. I put on screen here just so you can see as well all the ingredients there and then can you talk about a couple other you know more keystone ingredients. How about the peptides you chose?

Jay Campbell: Yeah. Let’s talk about the product. So, the product for everybody is called Auxana Grow uh and by the way you have an affiliate code in that so just make sure you put it in here but um and if you don’t um I think your assistant has it but if not just email me and I’ll give it to you but uh so Auxana Grow is developed or created for people um who do not want to use DHT inhibitor medications, you know, ever or if they’re on it now like how to wean yourself off I just did which is a very long time coming a video on how to wean yourself off of a DHT inhibitor medication while utilizing the natural uh peptide based product of us but so it’s two phase of Zara product, there’s um B and A okay um formula a or formula b. Formula a is the peptide uh copper peptide GHK-Cu, copperpeptide GHK-Cu is what we call the shamwow of peptides. It has so many uh you know modalities to help skin hair um the primary effectiveness of that peptide is that increases angiogenesis which is again uh the simulation or the stimulation of red blood cell formation so when you put it in the scalp and you massage it into the scalp it will increase again angiogenesis so it will bring more red blood flow blood cells to the scalp now as I told you off air I’m not allowed to talk about invasive procedures but if you are a smart person and you ask does microneedling or does uh derma rolling help, well do the math. Right. So,   

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Got it. 

Jay Campbell: What would be, you put serum a on first massage it into your scalp and if you want to then add red light, okay, if you have a red light technology in your home 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: LED laser on top. Yeah.

Jay Campbell: Absolutely, uh, infrared and LED together for three to five minutes and then you would put serum b which is the carbon 60 and just let me explain the serum b so obviously you already talked about um the grapeseed oil extract but the carbon 60 does two things. Carbon 60 is a very powerful antioxidant okay but for our purposes it acts as a molecular sponge and it actually will attempt to pull in the serum a which again is the copper peptide but it also as a molecular sponge or as a superoxidative dismutase it’s going to help remove all of the micro inflammatory agents in your scalp so it’s like a two full process so the way it works just is two sprays of serum a, massage it if you want to do something you know quote-unquote with an INV to you know in uh and you know further stimulate you know absorption do that then hit it with red light then put serum b on you know 30 to 40 seconds and by the way for everyday less is more is not better for our product. Less is more because again this is not about spraying it into your hair especially if you’re a woman and you have a long hair. It’s about getting it into your scalp and then massaging it into your scalp and again scalp massage can be 30 seconds it could be three minutes. It’s totally up to you. Scout massage has proven scientifically without formulation without essential fatty acids or you know minerals you can just massage your scalp every day and you increase red blood cell formation it’s a fact right? So, obviously if you wanna massage your scalp after you apply the products it’s a good thing but uh for people that have aggressive hair loss and by the way you mentioned it earlier and this is important that we talked about this uh autoimmune dysregulation and you know hair loss cause which again this the big c causes hair loss we now know that people have c hair. This product dramatically improves covalent related hair loss I shouldn’t have said cova but I apologize but it definitely it definitely improves it again because this is as you said um you know oxidative related hair loss this is caused by you know whatever the big c is and your putting this into your scalp especially for women because a lot of women are reporting you know c-related hair loss more than men it dramatically will improve that hair loss and again we have you know hundreds of reviews on our website from women that have had that issue and they’re like oh my God it’s a miracle you know there’s a doctor you might know her in uh Pennsylvania um Dr. Amy Horman, she’s like the thyroid fixer. She’s got literally thousands of women you know using Auxana now because it’s the only thing that we found that actually will work against autoimmune disorder or dysregulated hair loss.   

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. I imagine also too with the oxidative stress that also is what causes the hair to lose. The melanin and become premature gray. 

Jay Campbell: So, you know, so the fact that you say that I wasn’t gonna say that but a lot of women and men report that a natural positive side effect of using it is the darkening of the hair and by the way I mean. That’s me too. Okay. Because like I would be and I’m not using Auxana aggressively as I normally would because it is true even though this is crazy when I say this, you can get to a level with regrowth that you don’t need to keep using it although uh a very big influencer and I just did a podcast about this because he’s like hey man I stopped using it for a year and my hair is coming out again. I’m like well yeah, dude, you’re 47. So, at the end of the day age-related hair loss. There really is nothing that can you know completely stop it. Even a great lifestyle even our product uh you’re still gonna have to deal with that so you know the reality is it’s like you know use it every now and then we are going to be coming out with a maintenance product Justin because again so many people are asking for it you know kind of like a uh you know Jay Paul Mitchell pump the sponsor put in your hair when you get out of the shower at night you know go to bed with it or whatever but uh most people who get results and again this is not gonna work for everybody. Some people have really bad genetic hair loss. Some people are stressed you know some people have really severe trauma and inflammation that they just cant overcome but I’d say somewhere between 68 and 75% of men or women who live a clean healthy lifestyle as our uh as a person that runs our influence or marketing likes to say people who are serious about their health you know are going to get really positive results I mean anybody who knows me can just go back two years uh before this product came into the marketplace and I was nearly bold in fact I actually did the Vantis Procedure on top of my scalp which is like a henna tattoo you know to keep me with like the five o’clock shadow hair and you know people see me now in public yesterday I was out and saw hadn’t seen a guy in three years, he’s like bro do you have a hair transplant. I’m like no dude this is my product. So, you know people can regrow their hair with this product you were asking about is it a maintenance product because you have a lot of hair right now it absolutely is for someone like you, you know you would spray it into your scalp like once or twice a week massage it in and it’s an absolutely amazing. Yeah. It’s a very really strong maintenance product. You can also use it on beards we are gonna eventually have a beard problem really probably oh yeah. You can absolutely use on beard. It’s amazing on beard so the serum a is uh you know a water-based formulation so you can absolutely massage it into your scalp, you’re not gonna have any residue it’s gonna grow it’s gonna feel amazing but the serum b again with the grapeseed oil extract, it is slightly oily. It’s not oily oily but it definitely feels noticeable.   

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is it better at night to do it so it can absorb? 

Jay Campbell: Uh, I mean it depends on I think you know the length of your hair like if you were you know something not you but somewhat balding man with patches you’re not gonna notice it. But for a longer hair person like you or a woman and you spray a couple of sprays and you don’t get into the scalp and some of it sits in the hair you will definitely probably notice a little bit of residual. A lot of our patients slash patients a lot of our customers report back that they like it as a texturizer and they don’t have to use quote-unquote product to mess their hair or mousse their hair or anything like that so it doesn’t 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Probably get that benefit going from MCT to the grapeseed I imagine right now

Jay Campbell: Now, yeah 100% on that and that’s why Nick actually did that um the other thing I would say is um the beard product is that’s coming will be similar to serum a now because you’ll see it because it’s harder to use unless you got a big long you know beard which I know a lot of guys have that now the neckbeard people. It’s harder to get to the base because remember again it is a health of the skin product. It’s copper peptides so the longer your beard it’s going to be harder but when we have um the product for beards it’ll be more of like a balm roll on versus the spray now which is for the scalp so but you can definitely use it in the beard now we have tons of people have been using it in their beard for over a year and they’re like it’s the best product to have. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, serum a first and then if you do any laser stuff and then serum b will be the last component. 

Jay Campbell: Yeah and you know it goes to mention because I know you have a lot of different patients I mean our skin products which is royal blue serum and sky blue cream are the best on earth. In fact again don’t leave the guy who’s the hype man for the company. Go read the reviews you know we have women who are very well to do affluent sophisticated ladies that use Lemur and Rhode island fields and all the high-end shit and they’re like we threw it all in the trash and we buy the bundle of your guys product every month. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, is the hallmark ingredient in the um royal blue is that gonna be at the peptide as well? 

Jay Campbell: Same thing, so GHK-Cu is the shamwow of peptides. It’s the number one skin peptide uh and by the way just so you know so people understand this you can absolutely buy GHK-Cu and inject it in your scalp, I mean if you’re insane enough to inject it into the skin on the top of your hair you know which is gonna hurt like shit but it works I mean I have hundreds of people you know who have messaged me about that and saying man I use your product as like the base and then I inject GHK but yeah it regrows your hair better than anything man 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So how long to get results because like the data on like Medoxomil or um uh with Rogaine or Minoxidil or Propecia usually nine to twelve months, right?   

Jay Campbell: You see results, okay so let me temper my enthusiasm. It depends on the cellular health of the end user right so someone like me who’s no inflammation you’re gonna see results in literally three to five weeks. Okay, we have women that see results in 10 days. Women that have covid-related hair loss start regrowth their hair back immediately. Now, as far as like when is the dosing of this we’d never tell anyone to dose more than twice a day and personally and again this is my opinion I already said less is more uh it’s more important that you massage it into your scalp than it is spraying it in twice a day because again so many people think that if I spray two sprays and I get great results then three spray it’s gonna be better it’s not that way it doesn’t work that way so when we sell the bottle we say up to a 90-day supply because it is expensive it’s not cheap to manufacture the stuff. It’s really really high-level  GHK-Cu product it’s not coming from China. It’s all USA made It’s expensive um we do not tell people to over apply it and I swear to God Justin it doesn’t matter, you know, we live in a super size. More is better economy. They always  want to put more in but like if you’re a guy and you’re hair you’re watching this in the rerun or now or whatever and you have hair like mine literally just do it once a day for a month, see what happens. It’s gonna still last you for three months. I mean, my hair, two bottles which is one order is gonna last 90 days but if you have longer hair and you don’t like you know it’s harder I mean let’s be honest it’s harder to massage in the scalp with longer hair so 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Maybe after a shower when your hair is a little bit wet and you make it more visible

Jay Campbell: Yeah. I mean yes and no I mean it really depends right if you’re a woman and you have a mop on your head like my wife’s got long curly hair you know, it’s still not gonna get into the scalp like it would for somebody like me.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, right. 

Jay Campbell: It’s just gonna get absorbed by the hair so no matter how good you are massaging into the scalp it’s still gonna be more difficult but that’s why we say up to 90 days because longer hair people are not gonna get so much out of the two bottles as a short hair person is. It’s just not gonna happen. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, and one other question too I’ve noticed this with a couple of patients where they have DHT patterns of hair loss. Yet we, they’re we working on all the core foundational things. Their DHT levels look really good on the blood test, right? Can you have DHT issues at the scalp level but have it not show systemically in the blood. 

Jay Campbell: So, I’m gonna blow your mind with this, if you prescribe this is where it really gets crazy about DHT. If you prescribe them a DHT cream they will grow their hair back on their scalp like a wolf  man. So, DHT in that article as we said, is secondary and most likely tertiary effector and causal agent of hair loss. It’s not anything to do with dihydrotestosterone and again that’s how we know that in the article that if you write somebody a script for a DHT cream, and they put it all over their scalp, their hair grows back now the only thing to answer that question though that’s important is um you cannot put our product on a bald patch that does not have active hair follicles. You know, that’s and again we’ve been very transparent from the very beginning that where our formulation is now and you know I’ll shed some light on this in a second it won’t work that way. You know, but as my the genius formulator brainiac Nick Andrews, my partner Nasir says he goes oh eventually I’ll be able to grow hair on a cue ball. And that’s where it’s coming so that’s where we’ll eventually go I’d say we’re integrating stem cells and such exactly we’re that exactly right we’re like two  phases away so we’re in V2, V3 is coming and V3 will be a one phase liposomal system so it will literally be bottled squirt it into your hand massage it the oil based carbon 60 will be in a nanomolecule you know incased in the water-based formula and it’ll break open when you massage it into the skin and then version three four will have what you just said it’ll have all sorts of other peptides like micro agents and abrasions and it’ll be like uh it’ll essentially be a derma roller uh you know uh what do you call it uh invasive product just by yourself. Yeah, that’s excellent. yeah awesome. It’s coming. The technology’s amazing but you know we’re not there yet. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:I love it. Well, it was amazing you have a new on today’s podcast. I really appreciate all the significant knowledge. Any last points you want to make before we end the show. 

Jay Campbell: No man. I mean I want you to come on my podcast because I know It’ll be just as awesome um you know for anybody that wants to connect with me uh I actually have a link I always do for everyone I go on podcast you can go to Jay C middle initial jaycampbell.com/freebooks and you can download should I think maybe all my books are free now but I know there’s at least three books up there, the testosterone bible is up there for free uh my book on the fasting the blowtorch diet is up there for free and then I have a book on consciousness which the next time you and I talk we’ll go deeper on that. The only other thing, it’ll say is that uh this week, I finally acquired my domain and jaycampbell.com is gonna be my website so I’ve had a guy cyber squad for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny story, he asked me for a lot of money and I usually delete him and ignore him and I finally wrote him back and I said you know what man this would be the last time I ever responded to you. I will offer you blank and it was a lot less than what he was asking for and if you don’t say yes off and I’ll you’ll never here from me again and I can assure you no one will ever offer you that amount of money again for jaycampbell.com so you actually said yes so anyway I will be on yeah I will be on jaycampbell.com effectively Thursday of this week the transmission or the domain transfer is starting on Wednesday so it’s totally cool for me because whatever I tell people go to jaycampbell.com they’re like jaycampbell or they do j-a-y and then put campbell I mean it’s just a nightmare man so I’m like really grateful that that’s going away but uh no man I mean I’m so blessed to be here today you got me going a million miles an hour because you asked the most amazing questions I wish people could ask questions at the level you could man because then I can actually like talk about things in greater depth but uh I can’t wait for you to have you to come on my podcast  brother I appreciate it man, we’ll work that out I really appreciate it. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m gonna put all the links down below people can get access to my favorite articles some of the products you mentioned as well as the uh the free books to look. Thank you so much Jay for everything. Look forward to connecting with you real soon man. 

Jay Campbell: Yeah for sure Justin. Just uh you know let them know it’s you know if they buy it you know if with your affiliate link or uh code, you’ll have a link and a code. It’s 15% off so. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, that’s great. That’s awesome. Well thank you so much man. It was great chatting with you we’ll talk again soon. 

Jay Campbell: For sure my brother. Thank you.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye. 

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://drjockers.com/

Recommended Products:

GHK-Cu Sky Blue Cream & Royal Blue Serum Bundle

Auxano Grow V2 Hair Growth Formula

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/hair-loss-restoration-improve-testosterone-inflamm-aging-inflammation-jay-campbell-podcast-373

Natural Solutions to Heavy Menstrual Bleeding and PMS | Podcast #299

Dr. J is tackling menstrual irregularities and heavy menstrual flow, symptoms, what your cycle should look like, looking at hormones, when to best test, triggers of irregular cycles, and some tips for helping regulate menstruation.

Most women cope with their PMS and irregular cycles like it’s a normal thing, but really heavy menstrual flow can be a sign of something deeper, maybe even estrogen dominance. Heavy menstrual flow can cause fatigue, lethargy, mood issues, irritability, brain fog, hair loss, and most importantly low iron. Heavy menstruation can drive anemia and low iron which is essential to the body, then it can take weeks to replace iron, by the time you feel more yourself the cycle starts all over again. What can we do? Well Dr. J has much to say from the perspective of a functional practitioner.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

2:54      Menstrual Issues and Terminologies

11:12     Social Isolation, Supplements and Herbs

15:10    Tests for Menstrual Irregularities

17:44    Fasting as Stressor

20:16    Diet Restrictions

How to Regrow Hair | Podcast #243

A large population in our community worries about hair loss. This type of problem is common. Some may think of the products that they use contributes to their hair fall, but Dr. Justin and Evan Brand thinks it’s more of a side effect, especially when you are unhealthy on the inside.

Listen and read this podcast as Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand laid out information on how we can prevent hair loss on the functional medicine side.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

01:21 Medications contributing to Hair Loss

10:03 Healthy diet, organic foods

22:07 Nutrient supplements

30:13 Hair Supplements

39:53 Hair Transplants

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house. We have Evan Brand here as well. Today’s going to be an exciting topic — we’re going to be chatting about hair loss and how to naturally regrow your hair so, really excited about this topic. Evan how are you doing today.

Evan Brand: I’m doing pretty well we were just taken through some research before we jumped on here and it turns out there’s a lot of stuff that people are doing that’s contributing to their hair loss. And then people go to their doctor and the doctors don’t know the stuff that we’re about to tell you. Like all these different medications that we found that have been linked to hair loss and tons of people like the vast majority of Americans are on one or multiple of these different medications. So why don’t we just start there– talking about drugs because people love drugs, Americans like the land of pharmaceuticals compared to other countries. So why don’t we go down this list real quick of any medication that could be contributing to your hair thinning or hair loss.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah that’s definitely the low hanging fruit because if you’re on a medication we already know the side effects are already documented. It’s not really that controversial. It just may not be talked about so let’s bring that to the forefront. Go ahead.

Evan Brand: All right. So I’m just gonna run through the list here and if you want to go further into these we can. But acne medications, antibiotics, antidepressants, antifungal medications, blood thinners, chemotherapy of course, cholesterol lowering medications ,epilepsy medications, high blood pressure medications, hormone replacement therapy, immunosuppressants, interference, mood stabilizers, insane oral contraceptives, Parkinson’s disease medications, steroids thyroid medications. That’s basically every drug that people use. I mean that’s like all of them. So if you’re on any of those and you have hair loss and you’re complaining about your hair loss that’s the first place to start.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100 percent 100 percent. So let’s kind of just dive in and just talk about a couple of simple mechanisms that could be at the root because we have foundational things that can be done and then we have more nuance thing. So it’s like when you build a house you know you may not be worried about picking out the crown molding and the fancy tile that you’re going to use in your master bedroom when we haven’t even laid out the foundation yet. So let’s start at the foundational principles. So first thing is going to be just generally inflammation. Why is inflammation. What’s that. Why is inflammation important. So when we have excess inflammation that’s gonna cause ourselves and our tissue to breakdown fashion than we build up. That’s big. And the big vectors of inflammation are going to come from physical sources, chemical sources, and emotional sources, and all of these stressors interplay on our hormones, on our gut, on our immune system. And then of course if we’re driving inflammation the nutritional means nutritional kind of fits into that chemical category. Chemical could be heavy metals mold it could be inflammatory foods like gluten and refined sugar, could be hormonal imbalances female thyroid, it could be autoimmune issues like he got gluten sensitivity so a lot of things kind of fit into that chemical stressor bucket. Of course the emotional stress is a big thing, a lot of people have had experiences with like maybe you know death of a loved one and you start losing hair and there’s that or you’re over exercising right you see it women they over exercise they may lose their period their hair starts thinning they start getting colder. So a lot of those symptoms are common on the emotional side, common on the physical side. We’re gonna go into the more nuanced chemical stress, so of course if we’re not getting enough nutrition to build our hair that’s numero uno, so essential fatty acids right, healthy amino acids, these fat soluble vitamins– vitamin A, selenium zinc, magnesium, these are important biotin or B7 right. These are very important building block nutrients. So the first thing is if we’re eating kind of a paleo template it’s automatically going to be nutrient dense low and toxin and anti inflammatory. We may adjust the macronutrients protein fat and carbs according to what you need. But every bite of food is going to be anti inflammatory nutrient dense and low in toxins and low in toxins and being organic you’re not getting pesticides, you’re not getting roundup glyphosate, remember glyphosate is a chemical cue later so it’ll pull out the zinc, it’ll pull out important minerals selenium, that are important for hair growth, the catalysts enzyme is really important for hair growth and hair color and that’s a glutathione based enzyme and we need selenium for glutathione and if you’re eating your plants that are grown in depleted soils because of pesticides and roundup that can easily deplete some of these nutrients. So just highlighting the nutrients is going to be healthy proteins, healthy fats, vitamin A, fat soluble vitamins, your selenium, your zinc, very important for hair, and also skin and nails tend to connect with that and then the next thing I would say is OK great you’re eating these things now we have to be able to digest them we have to have enough hydrochloric acid and enzymes and enough gut integrity to be able to break everything down so that’s kind of foundation. I’ll let you comment.

Evan Brand: Yeah, you may need to go more straight to a diet we may need to go more autoimmune paleo if this is like an alopecia type situation where you’ve had maybe a family history of immune system issues ,but when you have alopecia you know you could potentially lose everything. I mean you could literally be your eyebrows, your eyelashes. I mean every hair on your body could disappear. So if you’re in that bad of shape and we’ve had those alopecia cases before, we got to go with an autoimmune paleo template. I’m so glad you brought up the point about glyphosate being a key later. I don’t think many people discuss the fact that it’s pulling minerals out. That’s, that’s huge because you could be on a paleo diet but if you’re still getting exposed to a lot of chemical toxins like let’s say, you do like some meal prep surface and they do sweet potatoes and strawberries and those are not organic but they’re still quote paleo because they’re real food. The average sweet potato has 20 plus pesticides, the average strawberry 22 pesticides and herbicides in it. And so you’re actually doing more damage to yourself by doing those foods even though it’s called real food if it’s chemical it’s just not worth it. So really really really focus on organic. This is key. I looked at the price difference. People complain, Oh you got to be rich eat organic at Whole Foods. I’ve seen a pound of strawberries for two ninety nine which is chemical conventional garbage. Organic was three ninety nine for the same size it was one dollar or more. And that extra dollar is going to provide you more nutrient density more trace minerals. You’re not going to be getting genetically modified things and you’re saving your gut because we know that glyphosate is damaging your gut bacteria too. So you and I are going to talk about that today. You’re already giving us the preface talking about stomach acid levels. If you’re damaging your gut bacteria by consuming pesticide foods. Now you have bacterial overgrowth and that bacterial overgrowth prevents you from digesting your food and then you don’t have enough of those raw nutrients to build your hair. So the whole domino effect can fall apart just by you not doing enough organic, which sounds crazy but it’s true.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent and just get off the bat. I was a poor doctoral student for a long time being in school in San Francisco California which is obviously one of the most expensive places to live. I think I was living on like fifteen or sixteen thousand dollars a year for financial aid which anyone knows the poverty level. Francisco is like 80 grand a year. I was like living maybe six or seven times below the poverty level and I just had a really strict budget. So I had a budget. I would spend seventy five to eighty dollars a week on food and I would get a lot of my vegetables would be frozen organic. I would do some fresh spinach or fresh leafy greens that were organic. That you know five dollars you get a big thing and then a lot of my meats I would just do free range or grass. I was a little bit too expensive but I could do something at four or five dollars a pound. And because Amazon’s bought whole foods, some of their grass fed meat is under that price now. So you’re actually have better quality now. I would do a lot of chicken thighs which would be very helpful. I would do a lot of skipjack tuna which is pretty good because the sledding to Mercury ratio and that’s really good. And then I would do more free range eggs. I wouldn’t quite get organic so if you don’t, if you’re not all the way on the organic try to at least be hormone free antibiotic free, if you can’t quite get the pasture fed grass fed. So there is an in-between. It’s not an all or nothing. So do your best just to make sure the foods are nutrient dense and anti inflammatory and then try to see if we can at least get an in-between quality. Maybe you go organic on the frozen vegetables, you get some fresh vegetables that are organic. You do some fish. You try to get some wild Alaskan sockeye frozen maybe go to Costco to get some stuff there and then try to choose chicken thighs skin on over like a breast or any of the more expensive cuts you know stay away from the big steaks, ribeye filet, those things but you can at least do ground meat. You can at least do tuna fish, you can at least do a chicken thighs skin on those are really good starting points and I’ve done it. I did that for four or five years so I understand it and I hope it helps.

Evan Brand: And people go to Hardy’s and they’ll go get like a double cheeseburger with fries and a large coke and it’s like seven ninety nine. So you take two people going to get a fast food meal that’s six. That’s 16 bucks. You could go to Whole Foods and you get an already cooked organic rotisserie chicken for eight or nine dollars and let’s say you buy at the salad bar you get like a cup full of organic blueberries, that’s maybe a buck or two and then maybe you buy a bag of like Seattle cassava chips for like four bucks, your total meals like sixteen dollars for two people and the food nutrient density was way better than the hardy seven ninety nine double cheeseburger with fries and a large Coke.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hundred percent. My goal when I was a poor doctoral student was always to get my meal below five dollars total if I could get it under five. Then I am doing better than going to a fast food restaurant right. That’s kind of where I was at. Plus I’m getting a lot better nutrition. So just kind of people out there that are struggling with that just make it a priority. It’s got to be a priority number one, you’ve got to see the value in at, number two junk foods artificially cheap because our government subsidizes soy and corn and wheat. So it’s artificially cheap or you’re not really paying the real cost of it. And then number three is we got to look at what we’re eating as the quality components are really important. You can’t just eat it and think it’s good the quality has to be there too. So that’s the food component. Next let’s dive into hormones. So hormones are vitally important. So the first thing is if we consume too much carbs or too much refined sugar, insulin resistance is going to be a key key problem with hair issues. So one of the first things insulin is going to do is you’re going to be depleting more minerals that run your energy cycle as your Krebs cycle, your mitochondria when your blood sugar is higher. Is that Krebs cycle then has to run and it requires amino acids magnesium minerals to help run it. So that’s number one. So you’re going to deplete a lot of those nutrients when you eat more sugar. So then it’s like using a credit card. But you don’t pay the bill so then your next month’s bills higher because of the interest get to pay. It’s kind of like that. And so when you have a high levels of insulin certain enzymes are going to be up regulated. As a guy you’re going to regulate an enzyme called aromatase, that enzyme will cause problems with your testosterone having it convert downstream to estrogen and when estrogen goes downstream you start to up regulate enzymes called the Five Alpha Dihydrotestosterone, so the five Alpha reductase is the enzyme, and that the enzyme is important from testosterone going to the source around to die. Hydro testosterone so, dihydrotestosterone is the stronger testosterone. And that can is associated with causing hair loss. That’s what a lot of these medications the finasteride. They block that enzyme five Alpha reductase and they block it. Now there are natural things that block it. Two really important ones are zinc and selenium also are natural five Alpha reductase inhibitors. So what happens is this here’s the mechanism: we have high levels of insulin, too much carbs, too much sugar the high level of insulin starts to upregulate aromatase, aromatase causes testosterone to start going to estrogen, as testosterone goes to estrogen. Testosterone starts to drop and our body starts freaking out and it makes this stronger testosterone called Dihydrotestosterone DHT for short, DHT starts going up and the enzyme that goes from testosterone to DHT is the five Alpha reductase enzyme and as your diet becomes poor and nutrients drop the minerals that help regulate that enzyme selenium and zinc start going low which starts to increase a DHT more. So you can see low selenium, low zinc, more right more dihydrotestosterone as those minerals are the break that prevents that DHT or from going up and that DHT is associated with decreasing blood flow to the hair follicles. So insulin is a big big component with raising DHT, raising estrogen in men and lowering testosterone so that’s one component there. You’re also going to see it in women as well. You’ll see it with testosterone you’re actually gonna see different things. You’ll see ovarian cysts start to form in women, and you’ll start seeing more hair growth and you can start seeing hair loss on the head, when you start having excess cortisol surges especially in women and men you can start losing hair there as well. So you can see it with high cortisol. You can see it with high insulin, and then high insulin in women increases testosterone, high insulin in men decreases testosterone and increases DHT. So it’s a little bit switch for men and women. So I know it’s hard to kind of wrap your head around that. You may have to listen to it twice. So I’ll say it one more time. Women– high levels of insulin, increase testosterone increase cortisol, hair loss from the high cortisol. Men increase insulin, you’re going to have increase in aromatase, aromatase is going to decrease testosterone, increase estrogen and then DHT, the stronger testosterone starts to go up that pinches blood flow off to the hair follicles. Hair loss, that’s one major mechanism.

Evan Brand: Well said that was very very clear. Crazy how you would think oh this high fructose corn syrup soda. You know this is bad because it’s sugar but you don’t think wow I could be messing up my hair by drinking a soda. And so when we talk about herbs we’ll get into that soon. I do want to hit on the gut though are you ready to talk about the gut.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let’s do it. Let’s hit it.

Evan Brand: OK. So I’ll go on a little bit of a rant about the gut just because I’ve seen so many cool things happen with men and women that have had hair loss issues. You mentioned earlier it was connected to the skin into the nails too, which is huge because that was an indicator that my gut was messed up or my fingernails.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.

Evan Brand: Oh you can look at your fingernails if you’re seeing vertical ridges vertical lines. You’ve got real brittle nails the quality of your nails is not good. You’ve got skin issues then you probably have gut issues. And so obviously if you’re working with us one on one we would be doing functional testing on you to look at your urine and look at your stool to investigate and find rule in or rule out various infections that are affecting digestion like H Pylori, which reduces stomach acid then your food doesn’t digest then you can’t get these nutrients adjusters talking about to fuel these pathways for optimal hair growth, then you got other bacterial overgrowth, you’ve got Candida, you’ve got parasites, you’ve got worms, all these issues in the gut can totally affect digestion which long story short affects the hair. So you’ve got to get the data and don’t just guess. Don’t just go and take like olive leaf because you read olive leaves good for candida or […]. Yeah those are cool but you want to know what you’re up against for, so we really like you to get the data because you could go and take a probiotic and feel worse and don’t know why you say, oh I heard probiotics are good for my gut. You said the gut is why I’m having hair loss. It’s not that easy. You, you might find that probiotics make you worse you may get bloated or you may feel bad. So get your functional medicine testing done first and then you can make the order of operations. Well I’ve got these infections so first I need to work on getting rid of bad guys before I go into doing probiotic replenishment later. So that’s really all I have to say about the gut is that it’s huge. But you have to get the data because if you don’t know what you’re up against we literally can’t just say, here’s a supplement for your gut like aloe vera extract. Yeah. Maybe that reduces inflammation in the gut but it’s not root cause.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent. All of the important nutrients that we talked about from a dietary perspective and how the nutrient density and also the food quality affects the nutrient density, that is important but above and beyond we have to be able to digest that. So if we’re not breaking it down digesting assimilating absorbing and utilizing then that just everything goes well from there. So one hundred percent. We talked about the hormone issues now in women. If we start going more into menopause late 40s early 50s estrogen and progesterone start dropping that can definitely influence hair as well. We start to see more skin dryness, hair quality. Those type of like connective tissue things start to decrease as women go into menopause. We see more wrinkles increase. We see more libido issues. And then of course the hair is going to be part of that connective tissue cascade. So we have to make sure if we’re going into menopause we’re supporting the adrenals and we’re supporting those hormone pathways to to a place of balance. So that’s going to be different for every person. So if you’re a female and that you know, late 40s early 50s and that’s happening to you or even if you’re postmenopausal in your 50s 60s or 70s, you really want to find a good functional medicine doctor that can work on your hormone balance. But it’s really important that you’ll look at the adrenals, because as those ovaries start to drop those follicles start getting depleted, your adrenal is are going to be utilized a lot more to fill in the gap where those hormones from the ovaries are not. So that’s really important is the adrenal is the second thing and this affects men and women equally. But women five times more is going to be thyroid issues. So low thyroid or hypothyroid or Hashimoto’s which is an autoimmune attack on the thyroid that causes Lothar what function is important cause we know thyroid hormone is really important for follicle growth and if you don’t have enough thyroid hormone, we’re not going to have that that milieu you to cause healthy follicles to grow. And that can cause hair loss too. You may also see eyebrow thinning which is a patented low thyroid symptom so outer third of the eyebrow thinning you may also see cold hands, cold feet, constipation, mood issues, depression anxiety. So typically there’s not just hair as being an isolated symptom you’re going to have hair issues and a whole bunch of other cascade of symptoms as well. So thyroid is really important. Now it may be as simple as getting on a bioidentical thyroid support and that can fix it. Most thyroid issues are autoimmune so typically you’re going to have to fix the autoimmune attack and we may use certain herbs and nutrients and diet changes like an autoimmune template, we may use natural anti inflammatory compounds to help modulate the immune system like curcumin or glutathione, the enzymes that are really important for hair growth and hair color are catalysts enzymes, and these enzymes are strongly connected to glutathione. And it’s interesting because selenium is a really powerful glutathione building block but solarium is also really important for hair color and hair growth but it’s also really important for thyroid conversion and it’s also really important for helping to decrease thyroid inflammation when this autoimmunity. So it’s amazing how so many of these things kind of dovetail and a lot of people are taking synthetic thyroid medications which Even mentioned have side effects of hair loss. So the first thing is look at those medications. Number two, if you’re on a conventional thyroid medication, you really want to look at the full hormone cascade,TSH T4 T4 free, T3 free, reverse T3 TPL thyroid glob an antibiotic you may even want to throw in T4 total and T 3 total as well, because you may not be converting T 4 to T3. You still may have very high amount of antibodies you may have high amount of reverse T 3 which tells me there’s adrenal stress. So there could be other things in this whole cascade and you really want to zoom out and get a complete picture and we may need to have a natural thyroid support that actually has T3 in it that can help.

Evan Brand: I mean I’ve seen that where women have switched over from like a centroid over to sometimes just a Cytomel, just a straight T3 and sometimes that’s enough or we get them over to like essella that can NP thyroid nature throid. There’s a couple that you and I’ve used like thyroid gold which is a desiccated thyroid and I’ve heard massive massive improvements on that just based on that. Also anemia you know that’s kind of a low hanging fruit that we haven’t mentioned. Why don’t we talk about anemia real quick just because a lot of women that have come to us have had different issues with their menstrual cycle, maybe they’re heavy bleeders or they’re having long cycles and if these women are now postmenopausal, they don’t have a cycle anymore all the terrible hormone issues they had, they didn’t just magically disappear just because they don’t have a cycle those lasting effects of anemia is could still be a big factor.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent. So when we talk about various things or nutrients I don’t want you to just think of the nutrient and say just take it. I want you to go upstream and think about the mechanism because the nutrient being helpful or not that’s downstream. Right. The root cause and the mechanism is upstream. So iron is really important why. Because iron binds the hemoglobin to help you carry oxygen. Why is oxygen important. Well because oxygen helps with a robust metabolism. And part of the reason why let’s say DHT is harmful for men is because DHT can decrease blood flow to the hair follicles. What happens when there’s decreased blood flow, decreased oxygen, so you can see how some of these mechanisms when you look at Iron, low iron especially in women, why women. Because women can menstruate, guys don’t, when they menstruate they had their periods they lose blood there. So if your estrogen dominant and you’re losing a lot of blood there’s another hormonal mechanism, you lose a lot of blood. You have low iron low iron. Not enough healthy oxygen carrying capacity, not enough healthy oxygen capacity going to the hair follicle, not that’s important for healthy hair generation. Right you choke out the hair. You don’t give it enough blood flow and oxygen. It’s going to die. Right. So there’s that mechanism, two is we could be vegan or vegetarian and not getting enough high quality heme based iron. Right. We can’t just base it off of spinach. We actually even though spend it behind our and we need actual animal products to get good quality iron in there, and the number three there could be a lot of malabsorption. So I see a lot of patients who have a lot of gut inflammation. It could be autoimmune where there’s irritable bowel disease like Crohn’s or all sort of colitis. It could be something in between where there’s a gluten sensitivity issue, or some kind of an IBS or some kind of just low grade gastritis or gut inflammation and they’re not breaking down the nutrition is adequate and then they’re not getting enough of their animal products broken down. So those are the three big mechanism when it comes to iron. Yes. So when we do blood work, we would want to look at a marker called ferritin. It’s an iron storage protein. When women start to get down to like a 20 or 30 with ferritin, number one there’s going to be a lot of hair loss. But number two these women may complain that they can’t catch their breath like they’ll go up a flight of stairs and they’re just like, oh I can’t breathe like I can’t catch their breath. And that’s exactly what you talked about. There’s just it’s it’s a starvation you’re starving from not enough oxygen. So when we really want to get to optimal hair growth levels, the ferritin usually going to be somewhere like 90 and I believe it’s like in G nanograms over deciliter NG over DL. I believe that’s the normal reference range either way regardless of whether you’re in U.S. or somewhere else and uses a different reference range you want to be on the upper end of the reference range for ferritin and you don’t want to be just at the low end and the doctor is going to miss that they may look at ferritin, 30 is fine but 30 is not optimal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah at least 30 ideally above 40. You may want to look at Iron served to make sure it’s more mid reference range. We also want to look at Iron saturation make sure it’s at least twenty five. We can also look at TIBC and UIBC binding proteins those actually go high when iron goes low. So somewhat in the middle high doesn’t mean necessarily good when it comes to those binding proteins because they’re kind of on the reverse side. So that’s really important. But again we want to look at the root cause and vegans and vegetarians definitely are going to have a harder time with that. If it’s really important that you be vegan and vegetarian. Well I would I would advise having some level of protein in there or protein at least maybe the liver capsules if you could if you can wrap your head around doing liver capsules there are some vegan vegetarian iron sources that are decent ones called Flora vital or Floradix. It’s a German herbal product that’s been around for about 100 years. Flora vital is the gluten free source of that. So if that’s really important that you maintain a vegan status or vegetarians that if that’s at least one good option I always try to at least push for at least deliver capsules. Hey you’re not tasting it maybe you can wrap your head around it. That’s a good source right there off the bat.

Evan Brand: Good idea. Good idea. I’m glad you’re putting solutions because I like to make fun of vegans and say hey what you’re doing is not sustainable quit doing it. But I like that you put in a sustainable idea.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean hey it’s like I’m real it like my first goal was getting you a result. That’s number one. So if you’re fully onboard with what I’m saying or you still want to be on board is there a middle kind of road. Right. So that’s the least the middle of the road thing. The second thing we already highlighted in some of these things there’s gonna be tips here that people listening can just do on their own. That’s great. And there’s gonna be some tips that you’re going to really need a good skill a practitioner like looking at the gut. Making sure there’s no infections like Candida or H Pylori that could be affecting absorption. Also looking at gut permeability you’re looking at parasitic infections that could be creating more gut stress. Right. Making sure these nutrients are being absorbed we may run nutrient panels whether it’s an iron panel or a neutral eval or spectrocell. We may see some of these intracellular nutrients are very low. We may want to support them as well. Right. But we’re going to support them in conjunction with, Hey why are we low to begin with. Is this just a poor diet thing is it a hormone thing is it a good thing. So we may use palliative support with the focus still being on the upstream root cause.

Evan Brand: Make sense and there’s different multivitamins like for the hair skin nails that we can use, we could throw in collagen peptides, we could throw in like sol palmetto which helps to block DHT, you could throw in like pumpkin seeds. I’ve read pumpkin seeds can help with the DHT by blocking the binding sites. Fish oil could be a good and antiinflammatory adaptogenic herb supporting adrenal is like we talked about, aloe for reducing inflammation in your gut. Zinc you mentioned that selenium so there are supplements you can throw in but I just want to point out that this whole way of thinking which hopefully you all are adopting this by listening to Justin and I over and over and over again, which is the fact that you’re going to find a symptom or a complaint like hair loss. OK so you’ll come to us and you’ll say, oh my my I want to lose weight and I’m losing too much hair, like very I’m not going to say they’re vain but I’m going to say they’re very like vanity based. Like OK you really care about your hair and you care about your weight. But then after we do all the diagnostics and we pull all these labs out and put them in front of you, we’re actually showing you, hey look really what you should care about is look at your mitochondrial function, it’s not good. Look at your gut inflammation it’s really high. Look at your nutrient absorption, we’re assuming it’s low based on how low you are in these amino acids, look at your neurotransmitters, your brain chemistry is burned out. Are you sure that you’re not eating a chocolate bar every day. Oh yeah I am I craved chocolate at all the time. OK so your endorphins are burned out and your adrenal hormones look like this and your vitamin D too low and you’ve got anemia and you’ve got high insulin and your A1 sea levels too high and you’ve got this parasite and you’ve got this bacterial overgrowth. Now you have some candida too, and oh look you’re deficient all these trace minerals and you’ve got some thyroid antibodies. So when we really pull all that other stuff out it’s like OK here’s what you should really care about, and you have to fix all this to work to fix that one goal of, Hey I’m losing too much hair and I want to lose 10 pounds. So I just it’s, it’s a whole ‘nother way of thinking but it is like the best way to approach these issues.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. I want people to walk away from our podcast not with just random factoids but with a new perspective on how to think if I can get people to think better when they come to a conclusion or an understanding of something they’re going to be able to understand how they got there what the mechanism is when you understand the mechanism. You don’t ever you know, you don’t forget it’s locked. Right. You understand a concept versus memorizing a fact the concept sticks forever. So that’s really important. So let’s go look at one. There’s a common sentiment out there. It’s called Nutrafol. I want to break people kind of mindset down so they can understand why that product may work.

Evan Brand: What is it how do you spell this.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: N U T R A F O L nutrafol.com. Now I’ve seen it help some patients I’ve seen it not. We use a lot of these ingredients even in our supplements already. So if you’re a patient working with me we typically use a lot of these nutrients anyway in different formulas that we have. But here’s just one product. Let me walk you to the thinking. So the first ingredient is tocotrienols. What’s that. That’s Vitamin E right. Where does Vitamin E fit in, vitamin D a fat soluble vitamin. So we already talked about how fat soluble vitamins actually vitamin A D E and K which you’re gonna get in healthy animal products is gonna be very helpful. We may supplement it as well it’s in my multi support packets. We have a full spectrum to cover all complex in there. So vitamin E is important. Next one, ashwagandha. Why is that important. Well if you remember the hormonal mechanism we talked about earlier cortisol in stress is really important. Ashwagandha has various glycoloids which help with the HP axis the pituitary adrenal feedback loop to the adrenal. And it can help kind of curtail high amounts of cortisol. It can help curtail stress perception the less you perceive stress, the less stress hormone you make the more you feel relaxed etc. It’s a self-defeating cycle. So ashwagandha can help break that up. Third is curcumin. Why Curcumin. We talked about curcumin is a natural anti inflammatory. Earlier we mentioned how inflammation does what it decreases blood flow. So when we decreases inflammation we can help improve blood flow and we can help improve oxygenation. Next sol palmetto. Why sol palmetto important? Remember earlier we talked about blood sugar and we talked about high amounts of insulin upregulate aromatase, aromatase in men. It’s going to decrease testosterone increase estrogen and then it increases this hormone called DHT Di hydro testosterone that inhibitor that enzyme that goes from testosterone the DHT that’s five Alpha reductase that enzyme is going to be downregulated with sol palmetto. So sol palmetto is a five Alpha reductase inhibitor. It’s a little bit more gentle than like a lot of the finasterides, right finasterides can decrease that enzyme as well but there’s also a lot of symptoms associated with that. So like Rogaine minoxidil, flowmax a lot of these are like finasterides and they can decrease that enzyme. But there’s also you can just google post finasteride syndrome. So there is some of those medications we got to be careful of. All right. Next is gonna be Marine Collagen and me back up. So Sacramento’s a five Alpha reductase inhibitor. Great. So is zinc so with selenium. Right. So there’s other nutrients that can be used outside of supplements to down regulate that enzyme. Fifth is collagen and I use collagen and all the time college is really important. I have a product called true collagen and why do I like it. We don’t get enough connective tissue amino acids in our diet active tissues are bone broth right. Most people aren’t making foods where they’re putting the all the bones everything in there. And when you do an eye soup you can extract a lot of those amino acids people that aren’t drinking bone broth may not get enough good collagen amino acids these collagen amino acids are more connective tissue base and they’re going to have a lot of building blocks for good quality hair integrity. So just kind of walking people through my thinking. Most people see this supplement and they’re just like OK great. Now you understand the deeper thinking so I think these are some good things that can be used. I would also add bites into that. I would also add things like horse tail I would add in zinc I would add selenium I would add more vitamin A as well. These are other things that I would utilize in conjunction with that to help it be even better.

Evan Brand: It sounds like they’ve got a really good marketing though, you promote this product for hair, hair wellness from within. Eighty eight bucks a bottle. I mean they’re making a lot of cash on that. Eighty eight bucks.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep it’s definitely expensive you can do these things when we put them into our program they’re going to be cheaper because we’re we’re doing them. It’s not by itself it’s going to be part of an adrenal support. A lot of time we’ll have some of those products in it. We may be using things like curcumin for inflammation regulation we may be doing sol palmetto in a natural 5 alpha reductase enzyme formula which will have more things that will have lycopene in a pumpkin seed it will have more things than just that. So for sure it is.

Evan Brand: It’s funny though isn’t it the world of supplement marketing you know you could market something for hair loss but like you mentioned you and I are already basically implementing this entire protocol of these different nutrients just as part of our functional medicine philosophy of supporting hormones, restoring gut balance, giving collagen, reducing inflammation but we don’t market it as a hair loss protocol. We just make it a protocol to get you really healthy and as a side effect of you getting really healthy your hair grows.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep MSM is also great as well. That’s a sulfur based kind of amino acid compound that’s really really good. We already talked about sol palmetto, fully and B12 are also going to be really important. We already mentioning Millennium and biotech being helpful. Go ahead.

Evan Brand: The last thing I wanted to mention was we did look into the research on the low. They call it LLLT low level laser or light therapy. And it does work. So you’ve seen I’ve seen some of these ads on Facebook and other places where they’ll promote these men or women wearing this crazy contraption looking like Dr. Emmett Brown from Back to the future and he’s got a bunch of like laser beams beaming his head to regrow hair. They do work. There are studies on this and it does appear within. I think it was a 16 week trial that I found it was like a six hundred and fifty five nanometres laser. Let’s see here. So this was a six month study. A six month study, 55% increase in women who did this.74% increase in men who did this. There was another double blind trial on a different type of laser for hair. Twenty six week trial and they didn’t give us a percentage they just said significant hair density improvements we’re seeing. So the lasers do work but I don’t want people to still eat McDonald’s and just do a laser on their hair and most people do that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think the major mechanism that lasers are going to work is number one, lasers tend to have stimulatory effects in the mitochondria. So that’s going to be helpful and they’re going to help reduce inflammation. So anytime you reduce inflammation you increase blood flow and that’s going to provide better nutrition. And then in and of itself they’re naturally going to stimulate blood flow as well. So if you get better blood flow less inflammation, less inflammation helps blood flow you stimulate the mitochondria. Right. You provide stimulation to the cell and then as long as the nutrition and all the other building blocks are there and you reduce all the other internal stressors like pesticides and all the junk in the diet, it could be more helpful from a root cause perspective but it will definitely be palliative but at least that’s palliative without all the side effects of maybe an Astra medication.

Evan Brand: True. We just don’t want your average person who’s eating a Standard American Diet go into Chick Fil A drive through on a Saturday morning and shoving their breakfast sandwich with MSG. By the way, Chick fil A. They promote themselves as like higher quality fast food. There’s MSG in all their products just look them up look up their sausage biscuits got MSG. The eggs are fake. The chicken nuggets have MSG and other garbage even dairies and a lot of their products. So you go oh I’m going to go get my morning Starbucks then I’m going to Chick fil A and I’m gonna get my morning drive through you know sausage egg and cheese biscuit and then I’m gonna go get my laser therapy. No that’s not you’re not thinking about it the right way. You gotta do the other stuff and I don’t even know how much a laser cost. So ditch the garbage fast food get real food in your price save more money and not even need a laser.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hundred percent and there’s also other things as well like a PRP injection which is a platelet platelet rich plasma and also various stem cell injections that can be used in the scalp as well. Again these are gonna have really good important building blocks and growth factors that will help stimulate the hair to grow which I think is beneficial but still it’s going to be palliative. It will not fix the root cause mechanisms of your guy and you’re like, Hey I really want to get my hair turned around. These are other options that I would look at but make sure you have the foundation already dial them because these procedures are expensive. So if you are gonna go into it you want to give it the highest chance of it working. Therefore you want to get the cortisone check, selenium all the minerals all the nutrients, make sure your hormones are good, make sure your guts good make sure your blood sugars are good and that’s gonna give you the first best step. And I understand. Like if you’re a guy and you’re losing hair you know and you’re trying a lot of these things you know some of these topical Rogaine or Minoxidil they can be helpful. So if you’re a guy coming in there maybe a tiny amount of these things topically on on that area versus taking it systemically like you would with kind of a flomax med maybe more beneficial. It’s kind of like if someone had a skin infection. Well I think it’d be better to use an antibiotic cream than taking a whole systemic antibiotic in itself right orally. So you kind of have to figure out that and again if you’re on the prescription side of the fence make sure you talk to your prescribing doctor about that to adjust it. So it’s more specific and more localized versus doing a kind of systemic thing.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said that’s great advice.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then of course the last but not least thing is going to be a hair transplant. And again the hair transplants have done you know they’re much better today there’s less scarring they’re more exact and how they do it. And a lot of times they’ll combine it with PRP or stem cells to help the hair grow even better. Big thing is though if you’re gonna do it’s definitely definitely definitely definitely do it with all the other conjunctions. In fact I mean it’s a lot of celebrities you can see that have definitely had hair loss and then their hair. You can see it’s grown back a ton. I mean for instance Ellen Moss just look at his pictures in the late 90s. He was basically bald and look at his hair. So it’s a beautiful set of hair. Same with Matthew McConaughey late 90s. Look at his mug shot online right. Basically balding. Look at him today. Beautiful head of hair. So some of these procedures do work combine them with all the other things that we’re talking about. And then you got a winning team.

Evan Brand: Yep. Amen.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah that’s got to be on the extreme side say most people, especially women, they’re going to have a better chance because a lot of it’s hormonal and gut based. There are some genes that will skip generations the gene is a big one that can encode for androgen receptor protein and these are the ones that are going to be really affected when free testosterone drops and that can have a significant effect on hair loss. And again that’s typically going to be on the mother’s side. Usually skips generation and it’s on the mother’s side. So that’s the big genetic component there.

Evan Brand: So you’re saying look at your grandma and if she balding then you might bald.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s gonna be your grandmother’s Dad.

Evan Brand: Oh yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that’s the ARG. But I’ve had some people where you know that didn’t quite ring true and then some people it may just be a genetic predisposition and let’s say they did other things to combat that and maybe they were able to starve it off longer or have less. So you know it’s not going to be you know something that happens right away. It’s not a guarantee but it’s definitely a strong strong predisposition. And let’s just say there’s a more. Let’s just say sensitive environmental factors if they’re in a play. Yeah you’re going to lose your hair but you may be able to starve it off by doing all the things we talked about today and that may give you the best possible chance of keeping your hair and then that’s where you’d want to look at something that a more natural surgical type of things while doing all the foundational things to.

Evan Brand: Make sense. I have had so many women that reported on their follow up so I went to my hairdresser and they said I’m growing so much more new hair. I was not intending to do that. I’m just fixing what I see. I’m working on the gut the adrenal is like we talked about. So you and I really we’ve become able to speak on this topic because from clinical experience it’s not like we took a course on how to regrow hair naturally. No we just we just help people improve their health and as a side effect the hair grows so now we feel that we have enough information to share on this. But you know when we’re working with someone we don’t say hey, my goal is to help you grow more hair. I always tell him straight out my goal is to fix your gut and all these other issues I see. And you’re probably going to grow more hair as a side effect of getting healthy.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A lot of these superficial types of goals or symptoms which they’re still important they’re all downstream. Right yeah. The guy gets better and all these root cause upstream things happen. Right. It’s always top down inside out. Right you work inside out top down and a lot of these things are in the downward kind of manifestation. So if we go inside out top down we’re going to fix a lot of these things downstream so I think it’s really important. And if people are listening to this now. All right. Dr. J. They haven’t just listed out a whole bunch of like mechanisms and a lot of science like I’m overwhelmed like what the heck do I do. All right. Let me break it down. So number one if your issues are severe and hair loss is just one thing out of many. You really got to find a good functional medicine doctor were available. EvanBrand.com, JustInHealth.com number one. Number two what can you take action on right away. Cut grains out of your diet right. Cut you go on a paleo or at least autoimmune paleo template no to get adequate amount of selenium and zinc. What does that look like at least two hundred micrograms supplement it through selenium and 30 milligrams so automated through zinc. So two hundred micrograms of selenium, 30 milligrams of zinc different metrics there will not be doubt you know make sure the recall that get enough collagen in your diet. What does that look like. That could be about 30 grams a day maybe 40 or 50 if we have hair loss issues. That’s to give you extra building blocks and then we could also use extra vitamin an extra fish oil extra Vitamin E. These are good low hanging fruit to kind of start off with one, nutrient based, two you already need them anyway. And if we don’t get enough there at least low hanging fruits to bumpy in that right direction and then everything else find a good functional medicine doc if that’s not getting you where you want to be to figure out the next steps.

Evan Brand: Well said. you mentioned the websites but I’ll mention them again. Justin and I work with people around the world. So if you do want to reach out we can send lab tests to your door except for blood. We send you to a local lab for that but still you’re in a lot of the functional testing we do. Urine, saliva, Hormone Testing, et cetera. That’s all done at your house. So pretty awesome, pretty easy and very effective. Far better than the standard care you get done from your once a year blood work with your doctor, you’re once a year hormone check with your endocrinologist, this is far and above that we’re not saying, Ditch those people we’re saying we’re just going to go beyond what they’re doing. So if you want to reach out to Justin, JustInHealth.com or me EvanBrand.com. We love to help people were super blessed, we’ve got really really cool jobs because we send people back into the world feeling better. And if you want to change the world the best way in my opinion is to help multiply ourselves. So I feel like we’re pretty awesome. We put out good stuff to the world. So if we can help other people get their energy better, get their sleep better help the relationships with their kids because now they have enough energy to play with their kids and now they’ve got enough energy to do the dishes. So the wife’s not complaining the dishes are piling up, and then their marriage gets better because they’re both sleeping better, so they’re not grumpy, and we doubt in their diet. So they’re not hungry and having blood sugar crashes like all the stuff we’re doing is making people better people. And then those people are hopefully nicer and better to their people and then it just kind of spreads like a healthy virus. That’s our goal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One hundred percent and if you guys love this then and you enjoy it. Give us a thumbs up. Share it with a friend or family member that’s dealing with this problem and then also if you really enjoy it too. Right below there’ll be a link to go write us a review so if you go to JustInHealth.com/iTunes and I imagine Evan probably has a similar link, EvanBrand.com/iTunes that will show right up to our review pages and feel free to write us a great review and if you want to give us the same review and just cut copy and paste it to make it easier and just change the names. That’s cool too. We know you guys are busy. We appreciate the review, we appreciate the feedback, and if you’re a little bit overwhelmed which is normal. We’re still here for you as well and we’ll put the contact info below. Hey Evan today was a phenomenal podcast. Anything else you want to leave the listeners with?

Evan Brand: This was fun. I would just say pick a step and start there. And don’t give up. This is a fixable problem.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely also. I’m having my second son this Friday so really excited. His name is gonna be Hudson. So we’re really really excited about that. Putting the name out there early so keep your fingers crossed and probably won’t be here next Monday but the following Monday I’ll be back in the saddle. Right now I’ll be on terrorism late nights but I got my adrenal support I’ll be all right.

Evan Brand: Oh Man I’m excited for you. Congratulations. I hope everything goes well.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey Evan thanks so much man. It was great chatting. You have a great day.

Evan Brand: You too. Take care.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.

References:

https://www.evanbrand.com/

https://justinhealth.com/

Audio Podcast:  

http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/how-to-regrow-hair-podcast-243-0

Functional medicine hair loss solutions – Podcast #94

Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand talk about supplements, hormones and how the adrenals affect the thyroid in relation to hair loss. This interview is geared towards educating people all about hair loss and functional medicine solutions. Learn all about alopecia areata when you listen to this podcast.

Also find out about the different things that you can do to help improve your hair quality and even grow it back. Get to know about ferritin and iron saturation and why you should pay attention to these. Discover the possible causes of hair loss and what hair supplementation to take which are proven to be very helpful. Learn how the functional medicine approach to hair loss can be very effective at addressing this issue.

In this episode, topics include:

00:23   All about hair loss and alopecia

02:32   Gut issues 

04:35   The thyroid connection

06:37   Blood tests and hormones

09:38   Supplementation

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Hey, Evan! It’s Dr. J. It’s a great Friday here over in Austin. How’s it up in Louisville?

Evan Brand:  Howdy! Blue skies and the grass is green. We’ve had about 3 feet of rain it feels like over the past weeks, so everything is super lush.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  That’s great. Another great Friday. Well, we talked pre-show we wanted to discuss a little bit more about hair loss and different things that we can do to help improve hair quality and potentially even grow back hair as well.

Evan Brand:  Yes, sir. Yeah, so I’ve had a quite a few—quite a few women, I mean, and it’s—it’s always there. Hair loss is always the symptom, but I’ve found this week especially that alopecia has been popping up, and it almost makes you think it’s more common when you’re hearing it multiple times a week. It’s like, “Whoa! Does everybody have alopecia?” And so we know one of our online friends, Yuri–

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yup.

Evan Brand:  He has alopecia and he talked about it. I believe he’s talked about it at least where he’s basically he’s lost his eyebrows, he’s lost everything, and obviously that’s an extreme case to lose everything, but there’s definitely some—I guess a spectrum of hair loss that can happen. So maybe it’s not a full state like the alopecia but there’s also like some thyroid dysfunction and some other stuff, I suppose we can chat about that it’s gonna be tied into mild hair loss.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Got it. Yeah, I actually had a conversation with Yuri Elkaim about his hair loss and he mentioned a lot of it had to do with poor diet when he was younger as well as gut health issues. And if you look at alopecia or alopecia areata as it’s known in the conventional medical world. It’s kinda fun to say—areata, that’s autoimmune and we know with autoimmune stuff, there’s almost always a gut element connected, right? Because we know leaky gut is when those tight junctions, the epithelial tight junctions open up, undigested, whether it’s bacteria, lipopolysaccharide particles or undigested food antigens which are foreign food proteins get into places in the bloodstream where the immune system isn’t used to it and that can really drive immune attack or an autoimmune attack, and alopecia is nothing more than a disease that describes where the immune system is attacking especially the hair follicles.

Evan Brand:  Interesting. So we would have to assume that any person who has this hair loss issue has some sort of gut issue. Is that a safe statement to say?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  I would say anyone that has hair loss and I hate absolutes, but I would say there’s a very strong chance that if you have hair loss, outside of it just strictly being a genetic factor, there’s more than likely a gut issue. And when we look at gut issues, it could be a gut issue where there’s a full on infection, like a parasitic or fungal overgrowth or a bacterial infection. It could be just something like a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or it could even be something like hydrochloric acid and amino acid or protein—prote—proteolytic enzyme deficiencies where you can’t break down those amino acids, where you can’t ionize those minerals. Now typically any type of deficiency in the gut where there’s lower enzyme levels and lower hydrochloric acid, after a period of time, they’ll typically be an infection present because we need the hydrochloric acid to sterilize the—the gut environment, especially the stomach. That sterile environment is akin to you going to a—a dirty picnic table and maybe spraying some bleach or some kind of sterilizer on the table. It keeps that area clean. Well, that’s what happens in your gut and hydrochloric acid is also important for cleaning the environment but also activating enzymes. So if we aren’t activating enzymes and we aren’t keeping that environment clean, overgrowths can happen and if food doesn’t get broken down, the food rots and ferments, and then typically bacteria will then feed on the remains if you will.

Evan Brand:  That makes sense. Yeah, and I actually had several—several people like I mentioned over the last week with alopecia and one woman, I think she ended up not proceeding with her lab test. I’m not sure what—what ended up happening but I really wanted to take a look at the gut, so at this point I don’t know what’s going on with her gut if we’re not gonna proceed with testing, but I think it sounds like that’s an important place to start. And then maybe you could shed some light on the thyroid issue, because any time we talk about hair loss, women think that it’s automatically the thyroid. Is that a place that you’re gonna look for issues as well?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah, so one of the common symptoms of thyroid or of hair issues can be low thyroid. A lot of women will see it with the outer third of their eyebrows, it’ll start to thin out. We need thyroid hormone for adequate hair growth. So on the things we see with lower thyroid hormone—thyroid hormone can be a really powerful growth factor for that hair follicle to produce hair. So if we have lower thyroid function, and it could easily be from an anemia because a big building block for thyroid hormone is iron—that’s part of the whole iodination process involves iron. So if you’re a female that’s vegetarian or has a gut issue, low stomach acid, which typically also means low enzymes, and malabsorption and/or you’re a vegan-vegetarian, you’re really set up for a world of hurt, of having a high risk factor for thyroid issues because we need that iron to make healthy thyroid hormone, and I did a blog over this a couple of  years ago over at FixYourThyroid.com—you can take a look at it—where we talked about thyroid function and hair loss. And that’s an age-old tell-tale symptom for low thyroid function. So we always wanna look at thyroid issues when we see hair loss and we always wanna look at anemia especially for women when they’re either vegetarian, they have gut issues and malabsorption problems, and/or they’re ec—they’re menstruating excessively. They have a lot of PMS and they’re bleeding—they’re going through more than, you know, 4 or so tampons, or they’re having just a prolonged bleeding period and they’re losing a lot of their iron that way.

Evan Brand:  Interesting. So there’s a few things here. So it could be some iron anemia going on. So we would wanna look at ferritin levels, and then you and I were also chatting off air earlier about iron saturation, correct? Would that be the two most important blood tests to look for?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah, so ferritin and iron saturation are gonna be important to look at. We like iron saturation 25 or above. We like ferritin, at least for a female, 30 or above. Now we can go above and beyond that, we can also look at your iron binding proteins like TIBC and UIBC. These are inverse proteins, so they go high—they go high when iron goes low. So think about it as like LittleFingers, right? The more you need the iron, the more fingers are gonna be up there to try to grab and pull that iron into where it needs to go. So binding proteins go up when iron goes low. So it’s kind of an inverse thing. It’s kinda like TSH, right? TSH screams louder to the thyroid when the thyroid goes lower, like you’re trying to get someone’s attention, right? You’re talking to them across the room, they’re not responding to your voice, so you raise the volume. Same thing, you’re raising the volume and trying to pull that iron and get it into your body so you can carry oxygen and make thyroid hormone.

Evan Brand:  Okay, so you’re talking about thyroid, so when TSH is high, that’s when we know the thyroid function’s gonna be low. So if we’re kind of mixing lab tests here, we’re kinda talking about a few different things that we’re gonna be looking for this whole hair loss picture, the thyroid’s a good place to look. The iron levels are another good place to look. And then what about the adrenals because typically we’re gonna see adrenal issues happening that could be tied into thyroid issues, correct?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah, it’s very possible. I mean, stress hormone will do a lot of different things to our body, right? So stress hormone will typically catabolize tissue and amino acids. So we’ll catabolize amino acids that could be used to make muscle or neurotransmitters, and amino acids can also go and make hair. So it’s very possible the more you are in a stressed out state, the more—the more the adrenals are hyperresponding or being whipped like a tired horse, you could potentially catabolize those building blocks that could go and make quality hair. That’s why many people have had experiences of extreme stress in their lives, like you know, really punctuated stress like someone dies or you know, something really catastrophic happens and they start losing hair. So it’s very possible that extreme stress and higher secretions of cortisol can really drive that hair loss and also we know we need cortisol healthy levels of it for thyroid conversion. So if we’re not activating our thyroid hormone because now our cortisol’s in the dump, we can also have it because of chronic cortisol imbalances that are driving low thyroid activation or low thyroid conversion.

Evan Brand:  Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So now the first place that people like to jump is supplementation. There’s who knows how many millions of products out there that are designed or marketed for women especially for hair, skin and nails. Is that something that we would wanna do right out of the gate, or obviously it sounds like the better alternative is we need to kinda look for these other deeper underlying causes first and then maybe the supplements are gonna be kinda phase 2 or phase 3 in terms of treatment.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah, absolutely, so obviously the diet stuff is really important. We kinda echo this stuff. Supplements are meant to supplement a good diet and lifestyle, so we’re making sure we have an anti-inflammatory diet because inflammation will drive cortisol because cortisol is our body’s natural inflam—anti-inflammatory. So cutting out the grains and a lot of the food allergens, plus we know that alopecia or alopuc—alopecia areata is going to be autoimmune and we know gluten, how important gluten is at being an autoimmune—part of the autoimmune mechanism, being an autoimmune stimulator, we know it can open up those tight junctions. We know it can drive inflammation, it also can be very high in sugar, right? A lot of the carbs, gluten, and a lot of refined sugar can drive your insulin levels up and high blood sugar can also feed fungus and a lot of people will have like cradle cap or aka dandruff or they’ll say—call it seborrheic dermatitis. A lot of times this is driven by fungus. I’ve had a handful of patients just this week that have come in with dandruff and with like psoriasis and things like that, and a lot of the seborrheic dermatitis and dandruff stuff is fungal in origin, like a lot of the—the Nizoral or these anti-fungal Head & Shoulder shampoos, they’re all trying to reduce fungus and we can do that by stopping to feed the fungus in our diet and the sugar and stop driving the leaky gut which could drive the autoimmune element with the alopecia areata.

Evan Brand:  Absolutely, so now are you gonna see—I guess if they’re new patients, then you’d probably don’t have the results yet, but are you expecting to see some elevations of some markers on an Organix to see maybe that there’s some fungus or maybe even some yeast and fungus together that’s causing these issues, too?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Absolutely and if we see imbalance in gut bacteria, whether it’s SIBO, or whether it’s just a kind of run-of-the-mill dysbiosis, whether it’s a fungal overgrowth and H. pylori infection or a parasite infection, we wanna make sure all of those things are eradicated and then at the same time make sure we have enough good clean amino acids and protein in the diet and we’re actually able to digest it. So we wanna make sure we’re at least adding the secretions like the hydrochloric acid, enzymes, bile salts so we can break down these really good fats and proteins so we have the building blocks going right into our system.

Evan Brand:  Absolutely, and the thing that’s beautiful about this model that we use is it doesn’t really matter what the condition or what the symptom is, this net is—is both broad spectrum and specific in terms of the labs that we usually discuss and run to find things. So if it’s gut symptoms, if it’s hair loss in this case, you know, it may seem like just a general blanket approach, but really it’s general and specific at the same time to try to identify the underlying causes of what’s going on and really, there’s only so many ways it seems like that things can dysfunction or function properly.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  100%, yup, absolutely. So when you have a systems-based approach, we’re just going in and we’re assessing the body system. So we go and we look at the foundational system which is gonna be diet and lifestyle. Blood sugar? Check. Do we have our macronutrients dialed down? Check. Too much carbs, too much proteins. Are we breaking our food down? Check. Sleep, stress, all those things, and once we have those all checked off, then we can go into body system one where we look at the hormones in particular—adrenals, thyroid, fi—female or male hormones, ATM or ATF, and then we can go into the next system which is the gut and that’s where it gets interesting because we can go through the 5R’s there which are removing the bad foods or placing enzymes and acids, repairing the gut lining, removing infections, reinoculation with good bacteria. So we go through a lot of that there and then we can also look through other deeper infections, too, and then we can go down into detox and other nutrient deficiencies on body system three. So we really have this really great big net so we can catch as many potential intruders or imbalances before they become a major problem.

Evan Brand:  Definitely and that’s the goal about this whole functional medicine approach that we’re using which some people say like you said some people say they’re doing functional medicine but it’s different or it’s not quite this type of approach. This method is simple enough but it’s effective enough, too. So people, you know, when they’re looking on the Internet, say for hair loss supplements, you know, you could probably get locked in to some multilevel marketing scheme product or something similar where it’s really just a lot of hype and marketing but it doesn’t really have any solid foundation in science behind it and so people get frustrated and they go and they drop their money into these products and they don’t really move the needle. So maybe we can talk about some of the—the ethical or the intelligent ways that you could supplement if you really were trying to support, you know, optimal hair, skin, nails, hair growth, etc.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Absolutely. So off the bat, I’ve—I skipped one thing—we also know that blood sugar swings and adrenal stress will encourage more reverse T3 which are like the metabolic blanks in our gun cartridge so to speak, in our magazine, because when you pull a gun—pull a trigger or the—on the gun, right? A bullet comes out, right? You actually have an effect. Well, metabolically, reverse T3 is supposed to bind to the receptor sites where T3 would go, but the problem, reverse T3 is like putting a blank in that gun. So you get the sound, but you don’t get the effect, right? You get the hormone in the receptor site, but you don’t get the increase in metabolic activity, that typical T3 thyroid hormone will produce. So that can cause less thyroid hormone via the reverse T3 mechanism, and we know that blood sugar issues will drive that, too. We know overall stress will drive that as well. So that’s one other mechanism I wanted to add.

Evan Brand:  That’s great. Now so you’re saying here that if we are looking at a blood panel that reverse T3 if that’s elevated, and maybe you can shout out some of the more appropriate ranges that that is gonna be an issue.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah, typically we like it below 24 or 23. Typically in the—in the mid-teens is okay. We actually would look at like a reverse T3 to free T3 ratio or a total T3 to T3 ratio. And pretty sure my free T3 to reverse T3—T3 ratio is around 10:14 is optimal. I’ll pull up my—my little reference range here right now and I’ll confirm that while we’re live, but that’s the general gist. Yeah, and total T3 to reverse T3—T3 ratio is 10:14. Free T3 to reverse T3 ratio is 20:30.

Evan Brand:  Okay.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  So that’s the ideal range there. And you can just google those ranges online. There are a couple of good sites that will provide an actual kind of algorithm where you can plug in the T3, plug in the reverse T3, set the standard deviation, you know, whether it’s ng/dL or µg/dL and it’ll give you that number. So total T3 to reverse T3 is 10:14 and then free T3 to reverse T3 is 20:30, and we like to have that reverse T3 ideally in the very low 20s or mid-teens or so.

Evan Brand:  How high have you seen that number?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  I’ve seen it, you know, up into the—into the 30s very easily and that could easily happen with stress, emotional stress, blood sugar stress and/or just overall inflammation in the body because that creates internal stress as well. So the reverse T3 is important because it’s gonna take that T3 that would be active and make it go downstream, and then it not only makes less T3 but then it prevents the T3 that’s actually floating around in your bloodstream from binding into the receptor site and doing what it was designed to do in the first place.

Evan Brand:  Makes sense. That’s a big issue there and a lot of people are like I’m not stressed. It—it’s the invisible stressors, too, that we’re factoring in and we can see that. So you don’t have to actually identify as a person that is stressed, that could be invisible stress that we’re gonna see on these lab results here.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Absolutely and also estrogen-dominance can provide problems, too, because that will increase thyroglobulin and thyroglobulin will decrease the amount of free T3 in your bloodstream. So it’s kinda like reverse T3. The difference is reverse T3 is more or less blocking the receptor sites, where thyroglobulin is decreasing the amount of free fraction. So 2% of your thyroid hormone is actually free, the other 98% is protein-bound, and what it’s doing is the thyroglobulin is decreasing the percent of free T3. So instead of having 2%, maybe now you have 1.9 or 1.8, or just having less free fraction available, so when we look at our total numbers, right? Maybe our total T3 is 110, 120 which isn’t bad, but now our free T3 instead of being at 3 or 3.1, now it’s at 2.9, 2.8, 2.7, and it’s dropping because of that estrogen dominance.

Evan Brand:  Yup, so estrogen dominance which we’ll probably have to do a whole show on that if we haven’t already, a lot of that’s gonna be exposure to synthetic estrogens?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah, it’s gonna be exposure to plastics, chemicals, pesticides, fluoride in the water, and also just being stressed, right? Because in women, progesterone predominates that second half of the cycle, and when women are stressed, they can use progesterone as a building block to make more cortisol. So more stress will actually steal from their progesterone. It’s kinda like a progesterone stealer or progesterone escape. We’re pulling progesterone in to make more stress hormones because our body’s epigenetically hard wired to deal with the stress of today versus the healing of tomorrow. The problem is most people live in a perpetual state of stress so tomorrow never comes.

Evan Brand:  Yeah, exactly. It’s crazy, isn’t it?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  So, I—I did the political side-step, I—you asked me a question and I gave you the answer that I wanted to give. It had nothing to do with that. So let me go back to your question. I’ll reiterate it for the listeners here. What supplements in particular? So number one, we can add good quality hair support from fatty acids, right? Omega 3s, whether it’s good quality fish oil or cod liver oil or sardines and things like that, salmon, mackerel, those are all really good quality Omega 3 fatty acids that can help with hair. Next you have conventional things that have been around a while like Biotin, which is kinda like, almost like a B vitamin so to speak, and that can very much help with the skin, help with hair as well. Next, I would say collagen is one of my favorite–

Evan Brand:  Yup.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Things. Collagen’s amazing. It’s very high in glycine and proline and hydroxyproline, helps provide building blocks for skin, hair, and nails, and I was talking to Dave Asprey last year when he was growing his hair out longer, and I noticed it just being longer and more full. And I’m like, “Dave, what the hell are you doing with your hair? It looks great.” He goes, “I’m megadosing collagen, like 40g a day, 50g a day.” So since then, I’ve been really upping my collagen to really have good high quality hair and skin building blocks, and that’s I think one of the most important things you can do is good quality grass-fed collagen, and by the way we have a collagen product coming out very soon called True Collagen and I was able to source one of the biggest and best distributors for collagen that is grass-fed, hormone-free, pesticide-free. So stay tuned for my True Collagen which is something that we’ll be coming out very soon and I’m already using it now and I love it.

Evan Brand:  I want my sample pack in the mail.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  You got it, man.

Evan Brand:  Okay.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Coming your way. So–

Evan Brand:  Awesome.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  So we talked about Biotin, collagen, fish oils, anything you wanna add to that?

Evan Brand:  No, I think that was good, you know, the fatty acids for sure. Basically, things that are gonna help to reduce the inflammation in general, because if there is something going on in the gut, the gut has to be healthy so if you just or somebody listening and maybe you’re already taking collagen which a lot of women are, they’re frustrated, they’re almost like they’re mad at me. It’s like, “Evan, I’m already taking collagen and my hair is still falling out or my hair is still very thin.” It’s like, well, that’s—that’s the supplement, you know, let’s see what else is going on deeper and usually something pops back up on the stool test, and like, “Okay, well, you know, your digestion’s been impaired, here you are feeding these bacteria or feeding these parasites, not you,” so maybe it’s been good nutritional insurance to get the collagen, but if you have someone stealing your energy, you know, someone like kinda how they used to do in the—they used to steal cable, you know, they’d go up to the main line and–

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah.

Evan Brand:  Slice the cable wire down to your house, if that’s going on in the gut with your nutrients, then you could still have issues regardless of, you know, what you’re supplementing with.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah, I remember Dr. George Goodheart saying in various seminars, you know, years back, “The highest good is to get to the root cause.” The highest good and that’s always in my head. Like alright, “Are we getting to the root cause?” Right? And a lot of times, supplements may be getting to the root cause or they may be palliative and supportive with the fact that we are addressing the root cause but also adding these extra nutrients in so i.e., let’s say we have a gut issue and our diet stinks, but we’re adding in a whole bunch of collagen. Well, is that a bad thing? No. It’s not a drug. It’s not gonna have side effects and kill over a hundred thousand people a year like pharmaceutical drugs do in general taken the right way. So that’s a good thing. We don’t have that nasty side effects. Is it providing more building blocks than would be there anyway? Yes. But we wanna make sure the underlying cause is addressed. So I’m a big fan of if we’re gonna add something in that’s supportive and palliative, at least make sure the underlying cause is addressed or there’s a program set up in place to address it.

Evan Brand:  Right. So there’s nothing wrong with treating the symptoms and sometimes we have to treat the symptoms first to keep people motivated, move the needle enough with them to keep them on their program, but eventually we’re always kinda backtracking from this symptom back to the underlying cause.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  100% and like there’s another element here I didn’t talk about which was DHT, which is dihydrotestosterone. So if we look at kind of the breakdown or the formation of testosterone, it goes from DHEA to testosterone or I should say androstenedione then to testosterone and then to DHT. So in each downward cycle, the hormonal molecule gets more potent, more—more strong. So DHEA is weaker than andro. Andro is weaker than testosterone. Testosterone is weaker than DHT. So essentially said in the different way, DHT is the strongest and most powerful out of all of them, and DHT is shown to potentially starve out blood flow to some of the hair follicles. So that’s important. So if we run a profile, we can look at women with elevations like PCOS can drive elevations in androgens, and we can use things like GLA fatty acids like evening primrose oil or black currant seed oil to help with reducing that DHT. It’s a 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor. In men we can also use—I think women, too, this would work—but we can do zinc and selenium, which happen to be great for the thyroid, go figure. And then men we’ll do it a lot. We’ll use saw palmetto and/or pumpkin seed extract as a natural 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors, and you know, a lot of the medications, right? Like the—the names are fleeting me—I can think of all the commercials from the 90s, the—the Rogaine–

Evan Brand:  Yup.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  And a lot of those types—I forget the actual trade name of it—Propecia. That’s what it is. Those are typically 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors as well at a pharmaceutical level. But we can do it naturally, too. They won’t have all the side effects. So my big 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors for females are really easy one is gonna be the nutrients, selenium and zinc, and then one, I’ll add in the GLA fatty acids like the evening primrose or the black currant. Men can do that as well and they can also go the extra mile and add in some pumpkin seed or saw palmetto along with that.

Evan Brand:  Beautiful, awesome! I’m glad you got there because I—I’ve had that in my radar, you know, the 5—the—the DHT and I was thinking about, you know, men that have used steroids and they have the increased conversion of hormones there so they’re more likely to go bald and I’m glad that you were able to—to pull that out and digest it for us.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Absolutely. So if we kinda break everything down. We talked about the supplements, those are great. Really, really important things. We talked about the hormones. We talked about how the adrenals affect it, right? Cortisol high or cortisol low will affect the thyroid. So if the thyroid’s affected by the adrenals, that’s gonna cause a problem. If the thyroid’s affected by autoimmunity, right? We’re attacking the thyroid gland because of gluten that can reduce thyroid hormone. That can cause a problem. Too much iodine with thyroid issue can drive hair loss. I’ve seen people do excessive iodine with an autoimmune mechanism in the background, massive hair loss.

Evan Brand:  Wow.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Massive. So we have the I—we have the thyroid piece. We have the nutrients that can exacerbate autoimmunity. Gluten potentially. Iodine if there’s already an autoimmune mechanism to process. The leaky gut. Poor nutrients in the diet regarding fats and proteins, not digesting these things, these compounds well. Infections can drive a lot of these things. I’ve heard Yuri talk about it with the gut and the infections causing his alopecia areata. So all of these different mechanisms—we have individual things that like the thyroid. We have individual things that affect the adrenals and thyroid together. We have nutrients that play a factor and then we have different hormonal things like the DHT and the progesterone as well.

Evan Brand:  Great! Great summary there.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Anything else you wanna break down there?

Evan Brand:  Honestly, I think that was great. I think it would just be me doing a broken record pitch there. So I think you did great. You know, the—the takeaway from this is—this is kind of a complex situation so it may sound just easy on the surface. You know, you go to Walgreen’s, you see a hair supplement. “I’m gonna try it. My hair’s gonna grow back.” Maybe not. So if you do have this issue, you know, it would be important to reach out to Justin or myself, you know, let us look for you and see what’s there, at least rule things in and rule things out. And if, you know, run a test and Justin says, “Oh, look, you’re free and clear.” Well, that’s good. But we still need to try to figure out what’s going on. But you’d never know if you don’t test. If you haven’t test, you’ve guessed.  So keep that in mind anytime you’re gonna go invest your money into a supplement. You may need to invest into the clinical data that’s really gonna find out why this is causing it before you can actually work on fixing it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Absolutely. So let’s kinda back up here, alright. So I’m a male or female that’s dealing with hair loss, kinda what’s—what’s the action tree here? Alright if–

Evan Brand:  Yeah, so–

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Go ahead.

Evan Brand:  No, you go ahead. What you got?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Okay, so you’re man, right? Figure out, this hair loss fall in your family. This is a male potter—male pattern baldness thing. Well, number one, we gotta first realize that a lot of how we deal with stress and how we, you know, eat, sleep and drink typically is passed down through our family. So is this purely a genetic thing or is this, “Hey I’m just following the footsteps that my parents did and, therefore, I’m gonna have the same genetic predispositions because I’m eating crap and taking care of myself in a very poor way.”? So figure out how much of this is in your control and how much isn’t. Either way, if it’s totally male pot—male pattern baldness and you don’t have any control, you still wanna be doing all the things we mentioned anyway. So don’t ever let that be your excuse, because you still get other benefits by doing all of these things there, like brain health and performance and muscle and libido and virility and energy. So keep that in mind.

Evan Brand:  Definitely.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  If you’re a woman, you g—you have a lot of control over this as well. So the first thing we do is diet. Cut out the crappy foods. Grains are gonna be the first thing. Get your sugars under control. Next, make sure you’re digesting foods and proteins and fats well. You’re having digestive symptoms and things like HCl and enzymes aren’t working, well, guess what? Get on those. Now next, if that’s not working, then we have to do some testing. We have to look at the adrenals. We have to look at the thyroid. We have to look at the gut. Alright, so that’s where you wanna reach out to Evan or I and figure out the next steps, but in the meantime, you can go pick up a high quality collagen. You can try some HCl and enzymes. You can try some of the nutrients we mentioned. But if that’s not working, you’ve already exhausted the low hanging fruit, so just make sure after that you reach out to a good functional medicine doc to get to the next step. But in the meantime though, don’t let the male pattern baldness genetic stuff if you’re a man stop you from taking action. You don’t know how much of it can be slowed or how much can go back. And if you’re a woman, this is a deeper sign that something underneath is happening. So I hope that helps and empowers everyone listening that’s dealing with this problem.

Evan Brand:  Absolutely. Well-said. Yeah, so it’s the gun. You know, you may have the gun there, and it could be loaded with your genetics and your family, just all of that, you’re—you’re susceptibility to stress, your environment, etc. but you have the ability to not pull that trigger, you know? So don’t just, “Oh, screw it! I’m just gonna binge eat on pizza.” That may not be the step that’s best for you. You know, sometimes we get frustrated with our health conditions and we just say, “Screw it! I’m going all in. I’m gonna go off the rails,” but oftentimes, you know, just pause, take a breath, and then think, “Okay, what can I actually do that’s gonna work me towards my goals? And not just self-sabotage myself,” and that is common for people to—to hit this point, and they do wanna just—it’s all over. They get this kind of a—what do you call that—like a black and white approach I guess.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, so we wanna make sure we have a multifaceted systems based approach, alright? And we wanna have objective testing to quantify it. And even things like temperature-testing can be a really good objective kind of test that doesn’t require any resources to do it outside a—a really good fertility thermometer. So kinda grab those low hanging fruits tests, right? We wanna assess, not guess. So get the assessments to figure out what’s going on and if you guys gotta reach out to someone like Evan and I to get more info, we are here at your disposal.

Evan Brand:  Well-said.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Alright, Evan. Hey, it’s a great Friday, man! I’m looking forward to heading out in the water today in Lake Austin, probably tomorrow morning, do a little water skiing and get some good cardio in or I should say, it probably be more—more anaerobic with some of those movements that I’m doing. But anything else on your agenda for this weekend you wanna share with our crowd?

Evan Brand:  Oh, we’re just gonna get out and enjoy the sun. You know, we got 4 weeks left ‘til the baby comes, so we’re gonna be soaking up the blue sky and the sunshine while it’s here. And before you know, we’ll have a baby and who knows? I mean, maybe trapped inside and changing diapers all day. So–

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  I know. I hear you. Well, make sure you say “Hi!” to Anna for me and you have a great weekend.

Evan Brand:  I sure will. Take care.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:  Take care. Bye!

Evan Brand:  Bye!

References:

http://www.niams.nih.gov/health_info/alopecia_areata/alopecia_areata_ff.asp

http://hypothyroidmom.com/10-things-that-stopped-my-thyroid-hair-loss/

http://www.btf-thyroid.org/information/109-hair-loss-and-thyroid-disorders