How to Address Sinus Infections Naturally | Podcast #368
A sinus infection, also called sinusitis, is a common problem that causes your sinuses to swell up. The sinuses become inflamed and cause symptoms similar to the common cold. Many people can contract a sinus infection after having a cold or the flu. A bacterial infection usually causes sinus infections, but viruses or fungi can also cause them. These infections can either be acute or chronic.
Dr. J and Evan discuss nasal flushing, which can help clear the mucus out of your sinuses. It is one of the most effective home treatments for a sinus infection. They also emphasized the importance of rest, filtered air system, and other nutrients to boost the immune system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:17 – Nasal flushing products
10:03 – Mucus and nebulizer
16:54 – Sinus anatomy
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For today’s podcast, we’re gonna be talking about how to address sinus infections naturally with Evan today. Really excited. Good topic here. It’s a common topic that people are experiencing especially in the winter season so we’re gonna go through it. What we gotta do to heal fast from sinus infections naturally. Evan, how are we doing today?
Evan Brand: Hey, doing really well. Why don’t we start with the conventional approach? What is that? If you go to your ENT with a sinus infection, what are they doing?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it depends, I mean, some are gonna be more antibiotic hesitant and say well you know it could be a viral infection, right? You know, almost a quarter of all antibiotics are actually prescribed for sinus infections. You know that? It’s crazy. So, most of the time, they’ll wait and see how bad it is. See if you have a fever, uh, usually like you have that punch in the face kind of feeling where your teeth are really starting to hurt, chronic headache and then you’re having a fever usually they’re waiting seven to ten days or if it’s gotten better and then gotten worse again and it’s usually seven to ten days out with a fever then they’ll start to, you know, typically prescribe antibiotics. Again, most sinus infections are viral so you know, you have to get to the root cause of that so a lot of times antibiotics won’t work. The problem with antibiotics is you’re swallowing it, it’s going 2 or 3 feet away from the actual issue so you’re basically dropping a systemic bomb to instead of hitting a localized area. Now, there are some more, I would say functional based medical doctors that may do some kind of an antibiotic in a compounded powder like an amoxicillin, something like that in a suspended solution or powder and they put it in a sinus rinse bottle like this and then you can flush your nose with that. Better, right? At least it’s more localized. We’ll talk about some strategies using saline flushes and different things that I recommend to help get that under control, naturally and not have to destroy your microflora in the gut. So, that’s a big thing out of the gates which can be very helpful. I got a sinus infection last week from a viral infection that my kids brought home. I never have been exposed to so many bugs since I have two young kids, 2- and 4-year-old boys that go to an outdoor wilderness school and they bring stuff back home from all their classmates and so I’m getting inoculated every single day and so we’ll talk about some of the strategies that I take so I can recover fast.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I still hear a little bit of you. So, what are you doing? You mentioned you got some kind of tools on your desk there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So, couple of things out of the gate, you know, to irrigate or flush that area out can be very very helpful. One, to flushing the viral particulate out. Two, we may add in some components to actually help kill what’s up in the nose as well. So, we have our saline, so you can either do NeilMed saline, which is really good. We’ll put links down below. The Neti Xlear is really great. I’ll kind of go back and forth between those. I have both. And so, we’ll take this and you’ll add eight ounces of water in one of these types of bottles. This is actually the best bottles. It’s made by Xlear. It’s Xlear’s bottle. It’s the best because of the plastic isn’t cheap so when you press it, it recoils really fast so when you’re doing good flushes, sometimes you’re pressing and then you’re having to let it reload so to speak and it’s just a really good plastic. Some of the plastics are weak so then, it kind of just stays sunken in so I also have a NeoMed bottle, definitely a cheaper plastic. And there’s another bottle by Walgreens. It’s even cheaper. So, this one is okay, you know, they give it away with like 60, 70 packets of saline so it’s pretty cheap. It’s a nice bottle. I have like three or four of them lined up in my office sink so when I’m in between patients, I’ll just give it a good flush. And so, we’ll take the saline packet. We’ll mix 8 ounces of water; we’ll add it to it and then I’ll take either food grade hydrogen peroxide. You could do regular hydrogen peroxide from the drug store. It’s not as big of a deal if you’re nebulizing it. Again, it you’re flushing it, if you’re nebulizing it, you probably wanna go more food grade just to make sure any stabilizers are out. And then, I typically just fill it up just enough to cover the bottom part of the cap. That’s it. Just about that.
Evan Brand: That’s like a dash. I mean just a tiny amount.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And you know, you went too much if you put it into the water and then I would just pour it into the saline, my finger over and just shake it up and then you know you did too much if you feel any kind of irritation or burn. You can so you can always start less and kind of work your way up and then if you do too much you can just add a little bit more water to it and back off so that’s a good option right there. Another option I have is I’ll do like my GI clear 3 silver and I’ll add a cap full of that to it. You can do that. You can add just straight up betadine iodide. I’ve stopped doing that because of the orange color. It just stains. It’s really annoying so I’ll go to, like, a clear simple potassium iodine which is good. Those are a couple good options out of the gates and so we’ll basically irrigate 2 to 3 seconds of flow, clear everything out and blow your nose in between. 2 to 3 seconds of flow below your nose. That’s a good way to do it out of the gate. Now, there’s a couple of other strategies that you can do, so some of my sinus sprays that I’ll use and so I have 3 big sprays so here’s extra rescue which is really a good one because it has six different herbs in there. It has, like pau d’arco, parsley, eucalyptus, oil of oregano, tea tree, right, so it’s really good. Six different herbs and so what I’ll typically do out of the gates if you’re new to using the product. I’ll do it, about 2 sprays in each nose, about ten minutes before a sinus flush. What I find is, it starts to, like, agitate and release all the mucus. That’s kind of stuck to the inside of the sinus cavity and so like five to ten minutes before spray it, wait, and then do a sinus flush. I find that it releases things a lot better. So, that’s really good there. And once you’re better with it and you feel more comfortable, you can do it after as well. Just see how you feel. If you’re really, really inflamed too, there’s another product called Xlear max, which is a good one.
Evan Brand: I’ve never tried that one. I’m scared of that one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Well, the rescue one, I think, is like the strongest form, like a killing perspective. The Xlear max is more, like anti-inflammatory. So, the big difference is, this, the last one was grapefruit by the way and the Rescue.
Evan Brand: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so in the max, the difference is it still has the same saline, still has the same xylitol. So, this has xylitol plus six herbs, okay, saline. This says xylitol saline, the difference is it has aloe so it’s a little bit more soothing, all right, for the sinus. It has the grapefruit as well, which, so it still has some killing effects in it and it has some capsicum which is like a homeopathic anti-inflammatory. So, this is like, if you’re like the tissue is really inflamed, really raw, this is a better one. This one’s really good for killing because of the different herbs that are in there. And then, there’s a regular one out there. I have it upstairs, as well, which is the regular Xlear and that’s more like people that have chronic sinus issues, you can use that more every day and it’s a little bit more gentle where it’s just the xylitol and the grapefruit extract and it has the saline and again the benefit of that, the xylitol, it really kind of knocks down some of the bacteria that could be there. It prevents biofilms from adhesions so biofilms are like the protective shields that a lot of the bacteria used to protect against the bugs. So, that’s very helpful. And so, the nice thing is if you do the saline, right? Oh, by the way, the water reverse osmosis or distilled, make sure it’s high quality filtered water. Do not use your general tap water, very bad, so make sure it’s really good. Don’t even use, like, river water, it’s gotta be really good clean filtered water. Like even now and then, I’ll use the water out of my faucet because I have a whole house activated charcoal system so it’s still good but I also have a RO system where my countertop is, so that’s where we cook in and drink out of that water so I use that 99% of the time. So, I’ll use that, I’ll add the packet, fill it up to 8 ounces, pack it and then I’ll add either hydrogen peroxide or silver. It’s good to have a couple that you rotate through just in case there’s some resistance which is, you know, meaning like there’s some bacteria or viral resistance. It’s going to have a couple of things there and then I also have just a straight grapefruit and saline solution as well. This one is okay. It’s gentle and so those are good ways to do it. I recommend, start to do it before you flush like 5-10 minutes before because a lot of times it just releases a lot of mucus and then it allows the flush to do really well and then depending on how you feel afterwards, you can also try it after a flush and then give it a sprayer. So, once everything’s really clean and see how you do afterwards. So that’s a good start out of the gates. Of course things like N-acetylcysteine are wonderful. NAC is great. That helps with the inflammation. Really helps drying up the sinuses. I’ll do glutathione, as well. I’ll do high-dose vitamin C. We’ll add in some different nutrients, zinc, those kinds of things as well. All the good immune nutrients, vitamin D decrease all the sugar consumption. A lot of that is very very helpful. I also have a red light in the office and so I’ll kind of go up against it and let the red light get in there because that’s very anti-inflammatory as well.
Evan Brand: Man, I should have paid better attention to the label on that Max. I was afraid of that one because I thought that one was more intense than the rescue. I’ve done the Rescue forever. I kind of like the berm. You will get a little burn with that Rescue one but the way you talk that Max is actually more soothing than the Rescue. The Rescue is more hardcore so I need to try the Max, I’ve never experimented with it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think the big thing in the Max is just people are already, like more inflamed because there’s less killers in there, it’s grapefruit. It’s got the same sodium chloride, it’s got the aloe which is soothing and that has the Capsicum. I’ll do that right now actually.
Evan Brand: That’s very cool and the question came in about colloidal silver so in some of the rinses you could do a little bit of silver. We, also, have talked about it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I already talked about that so I said you can do the hydrogen peroxide, add it or like I’ll do my nano silver like my GI Clear 3 or some kind of a silver so you’d add like a dropper or 2 worth of silver in there which is what I have for there. So, you can do silver, you can do hydrogen peroxide and you can also do some iodine. Those are your three good ones that you could do. You could also throw in like someone in the chat wrote about like oil of oregano or tea tree or something of that. Maybe overkill if you’re already using the Rescue afterwards or before because you’re already adding that to it.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And so, we could do that in a nebulizer protocol too, so if we’re doing a hydrogen peroxide or a glutathione or a silver nebulizer that could be another sinus support.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The problem with the nebulizer, I find it’s just, it’s deeper, it’s better for, like lower respiratory stuff. The problem with, like the mucus that comes out of the nose, it’s very tarry. It’s very sticky, right? And so, what is the mucus? Well, you have one just mucus which is clear which is like your body trying to flush bacteria or virus out and then you have the immune system interacting with the infection and then the dead soldiers, right, of that fight, that battle are essentially all the green and yellow and so the more dead soldiers, right, the more battle we go from like light yellow to yellow to darker yellow to green, right? So, the darker, right, and the, the more chunky the mucus is, the more there’s an immune fight happening up there and so what happens is, you have, you know not that, this is the best analogy I can think of is you have all these dead soldiers from the immune reaction just like sitting up there and sticking all to the sinus cavity preventing breathing oxygen exchange and also some of that can eventually go down the eustachian tubes which connects to the back which can go to your ears then you can start to get an ear infection and all that dead debris can also become like fertilizer for like a bacterial infection down the road. So, you got to get it out. So the problem with nebulizer, it’s in a vapor form so it doesn’t have the ability to push the junk out and so with a nice bottle like this pressurized, you can come in there and you can really pull all that stuff out and push it out where you’re not gonna get that with a nebulizer so your nebulizer is gonna be, you can still do it, I still did it daily but it’s gonna be better for lower respiratory issues and this have all the same stuff in it a nebulizer will, the difference you’ll have the pressurized force behind it to really get it out. Push it out. That’s the difference. And there’s some like I mean there’s sometimes, I mean I won’t get graphic but like I’ll blow my nose I’m good right? I’m good, go flush it out and then there’s twice the amount of junk left behind after the flush that was that what I couldn’t get out through blowing and so you get a much deeper cleanse of the sinus cavity with this because a lot of times you’re getting stuff out literally in this upper forehead area in here and so you’re just getting a lot better release.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you mentioned NAC already, which NAC got banned from amazon so if you need access to it, Justin seems on your store, I believe I’ve got a glutathione NAC combo. I do not have an NAC by itself. What do you do, do you have something to offer there?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We have different products like in my line have a detox amino product that has more other stuff in it. I just have a straight NAC here. I’ll go, there’s a couple of brands that I’ll go back to before, in between 90% are out so a lot of times I just have to get brands right now. That I typically wouldn’t get if we had a better supply chain with NAC right now but yeah we’ll put a link down below anyone needs NAC, they can reach out to the office but to highlight back on what you’re saying there, NAC is super helpful and then also there’s a Nasaline you can get which is like a pressurized syringe which is great. So, you suck up the saline from the bottle, it’s like a syringe, you put it up against your nose and you press it, that’s helpful. Also, I find too if things are really stuck, sometimes you need to go like pulsations so you need to like squeeze hard, relax, squeeze hard, relax, squeeze hard, relax because I find that the pulsation sometimes will free up some of these mucus that’s really tarry and sticky so that can be very very helpful.
Evan Brand: Knock on wood, I never ever get sinus infections.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I don’t either. It’s my first time.
Evan Brand: I don’t know what to, what to attribute them to like you said is it an exposure, is it a weak immune system, is there a gut connection to it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s just part of the viral infection so viruses tend to go in two major areas. They go upper respiratory or lower respiratory, right? So, a viral infection that goes too deep can eventually become pneumonia. A viral infection here can become a major sinus infection and so by being on top of this, you have your tools, your sinus flush is your best for your upper respiratory, your nebulizer is best for your lower respiratory and so you can prevent those things once you have viral infection, it’s replicating it creating inflammation. You could prevent these things from going too far with those tools.
Evan Brand: Well, that’s a great point you just made which is the possibility of it turning into pneumonia so people listening are like well why should I care, why should I try to do this and speed the process up, why should I try to intervene? Well, because you don’t want to create more systemic inflammation or lead to something more serious especially in a person who’s 80 years old or above, you know, that could create much more problems if they didn’t treat it while it was just up here and it went further south.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah and if someone’s sick and they’re trying to prevent it, I think two to three flushes a day is good for, like, prevention especially while you’re sick. I think it can’t hurt just doing straight saline rinse once a day in general. I wouldn’t add any killers or anything to it. Just a straight saline. I think it is fine, just to kind of keep your nose clean at the end of the day. You wanna do that, I think it’s fine. If you’re sick, I’m going like every hour or two, I’m flushing my nose out just because at one it feels really good. It’s really clean and just as long as you’re not irritating the mucus, you know, its isotonic solution, so you have like the sodium, the chloride, it has the bicarbonate in here. Those are the two major compounds, right? Like sodium chloride is basically your sea salt, right? And then, you have your bicarbonate in there. So those are the two major ingredients and then of course this is like USP grade so it’s just really really clean.
Evan Brand: And what do you mean by that? For people listening, what you’re saying is that pH balance so it’s not gonna irritate your sinus cavity.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. You can’t just take regular, like, clean water and put it in your nose. If you will absolutely burn it and irritate it. It would feel like someone punched you in the face because the mucous membranes need a certain pH and a certain level of sensitivity so it’s kind of like using eye drops, right? Same thing. You need to have, like, saline-based eye drops. This is, you’re using sodium chloride. Pharmaceutical grade plus the bicarbonate which is baking soda. That’s everything nice and balanced for the tissues. So, when you flush it, it shouldn’t irritate the sinuses and it should have allow it too feel nice and smooth and gentle afterwards and then if you have some kind of infection brewing even preventative for a bug just add a little bit of silver or hydrogen peroxide in there or a couple of drops, you know, some iodine that’ll give you enough killing capacity to knock down any bugs that could be multiplying but I’m going every hour or two, for me it just feels really good very soothing. It feels like plus if you blow your nose too much, you just keep your nose all raw around the side so it’s nice to have a nice clean flush. I kind of call it like, it’s like a bidet for your nose. It’s kind of how I look at it.
Evan Brand: That’s hilarious. You know, this would be a good strategy for travel too. So, if you need something portable like the excellent Rescue. If you’re on a plane or after you get off a plane it’d be a good idea to boom boom do a couple of sprays that’ll be great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, also, amazing for kids. Kids cannot honk their nose, blow their nose or the damn right. They just cannot get a good blow in there and you get these things on the market like a nose Frida which you know we have one you get like that deep in the cavity. We’ll do the whole nose Frida for you to think about the nose and then we’ll do this with my kids, flush it out and you’ll see so much junk come out. This is how kids get ear infections right? If you look at sinus anatomy, once you go up this far, there’s this canal, right here that goes straight to the ears and it’s called the eustachian tube and with kids it’s a little bit flatter a delta kind of angles up a little bit so it’s harder to get things uphill with kids because it’s a little bit flatter so it’s easy for the mucus and the junk to go into the ear and then you have an ear infection and of course like if your kids are getting ear issues to the food, sugar and of course high dairy products are gonna create more mucus, more mucus in the sinus cavity can make their way and so if your kids are more mucusy, one make the diet changes but two get their nose cleaned out as well so it doesn’t travel to the ear and this is why you want the mucus cleared up because if you let all the mucus and all this coagulation of all the immune soldiers so to speak, stay up there, it can make its way to the nose and now you have an ear infection.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Good point about the diet. I know we got to run here in a minute or two but that’s a good point about the diet if you are looking for like preventative maintenance strategies, I mean obviously you can’t just live in a bubble and not get exposed to things but you wanna have the good foundation of your diet to reduce inflammation, I mean so many people come in and say they have quote sinus problems, really it appears that they’re food allergies because once they clean up their diet, they get rid of gluten, they get rid of dairy all of a sudden their sinus is clear.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And people have, like, allergies to the environment. One, have a really good high quality air filter. We recommend the Austin air because it has the activated charcoal, the Zeolite plus the Hepa. Hepa is, like, usually standard in most if you’re on a budget. You know, go with the Hepa to start but definitely get one that has an activated charcoal, Zeolite, the Austin air, the filter lasts five years per replacement so you don’t have to spend as much money replacing it every six months and the activated charcoal and the zeolite filters out more toxins but I’ll tell patients like you know, do a flush you know in the morning when you get up, do one after you’re outside working and then do one before bed. Just the saline’s fine. You could do a little bit of spray, you know, before or after. Try before that’s helpful but just try to get the allergen out especially before bed because if you have all these allergens way up here and they’re creating inflammation that could be a stress response during sleep that’s preventing you from deeper restorative sleep and so the sinus can be flush really helpful along with some of the uh some of the remedies that we have here.
Evan Brand: It’s a good call. Well, if people need help, they can reach out. You can book a consultation with Dr. J at justinhealth.com. So, if you have sinus issues or other health symptoms, you wanna talk, see what’s going on, see if we can help that would be justinhealth.com for Dr. J, or if you need help from me, that’s Evan, evanbrand.com. We’re available worldwide. So, most of these products we can get and we can ship to you. I know a lot of people internationally have trouble getting some of this stuff, silver and NAC. Some countries are just weird and it’s hard to import stuff but usually we have. Our team is great with logistics. So, I think it’s good to just have a stash of this stuff if you don’t already, don’t wait till you get the sinus infection then try to order, get it. Get it now. Get it, get prepped.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They have a bottle of it there. Someone said, can you do too much of it. I would say it depends, right. I would say, if you have an active infection, I think you’re gonna be fine just make sure the water is clean, RO high quality water. Make sure you’re using a good quality sodium bicarb, I think if the killers are making you more sensitive, right? You could always do your spray or killers before and then do the just the saline without anything in it after so then everything’s clean and flushed out so then you don’t have anything overly abrasive in your sinus after the fact, that’s a good way to do it and if that’s still a problem you could even, you could even just do a saline flush and not anything else after that. It’s still better than nothing just to get everything out of the sinus cavity but worst case do your spray before and then afterwards just the flush. And they have spray that are just silver too, so you have, I have a silver spray too. You can just do that, I’ll do that for my kids sometimes because they’ll complain about it like just the feeling it’s a tiny tinge of a burn for like 10 seconds and so I’ll do the silver sometimes with them. Oh by the way, my kid had a pink eye issue, used to silver spray, opened his eye up, I just like this, I went, gone in two days. So, silver is excellent for some of the pink eye stuff, I would never do it with this. That would burn but the silver is good. I hope that makes sense. Any other questions about that so far?
Evan Brand: I think we got most of the questions answered here, there was one question about getting mucus after food and these were things like yogurts, ice cream, soy sauce, wheat products, well yeah, I mean it sounds like food allergy so obviously I would clean up your diet. I don’t recommend any of those foods, maybe if it’s like a coconut cream ice cream with low sugar maybe but beyond that all of those foods to me sound like potential irritants.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sugar and inflammatory foods, especially excess sugar and inflammatory foods will cause mucus, that’s part of the inflammatory response, that’s just part of it. Yep. That’s part of the reason why people have sinus infections outside of just getting upper respiratory tract viral issues.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Absolutely. How many people are going to the ENT and getting a paleo diet prescription, probably not many.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, and there just gonna recommend steroids, Flonase, steroids, antihistamine, they’re not really ever get to the root cause that’s the problem and so It’s really good that people are bringing these things to the light, you know, this guy Dr. Mehta, I think it’s Dr. the NeilMed guy, he’s really been on top of it, which is great. I mean this is an MD that’s talking about using really good options to clean out your nose and then you know having more of these sprays together is really good and having things that can add to them, I mean, just amazing and a lot of these viruses live in your nose so preventatively we can be on top of it, you’re out with a bunch of people, you know, instead of being overly worried about washing your hands which you know, that’s fine, wash your hands but flush your nose, easiest thing, flush your nose.
Evan Brand: Totally more valuable in my opinion for sure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So guys, to reach out to Evan, evanbrand.com. Evan is available worldwide for health consultation support. I am as well, Dr. J, justinhealth.com, we are here to help you out. We’ll put some links here. Give us a little bit of time. I’ll put the links down below very soon so you can see some of the products that we use. Also, we’ll put some of the products that we recommend from our own store so you guys can get an idea of what we like. All right, any questions feel free to put them in the chat. We appreciate it. Share with family and friends, they could benefit and have a phenomenal day. Take care.
Evan Brand: Take care. See you next week.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/how-to-address-sinus-infections-naturally-podcast-368
Recommended Products:
Fatigue, Tiredness, and Lethargy: Link to Gut Infection | Podcast #311
Tiredness is not a symptom that defines any one particular disease. Rather, tiredness can be a symptom of many different diseases and conditions. Causes of tiredness range from lack of sleep and over exercise to medical and surgical treatments. The lack of energy (lethargy) associated with tiredness can sometimes cause difficulty with normal daily activities, leading to attentiveness and concentration problems.
Dr. J suggested considering to support protein breakdown by extra amino acids and enzymes. Dr. Evan also added that if you have issues, always reach your conventional Dr. or functional Dr., be tested, find the root cause and guide to fix possible infections that cause you to feel tired before you reach a crisis level.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:10 Mechanisms to Gut Infection
4:05 Where Gut Stressors Come From
12:12 Infections that causes Fatigue
17:41 Probiotics and Beneficial Bacteria
22:32 Supplements to Gut Infection
24:18 Immune Issues
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan brand. Today we’re going to be chatting about your gut infections may be making you tired. Many people don’t think about how their gut maybe having an impact on your energy, your mood, your emotions, but it’s totally true. Most people think, oh, if I have a gut issue, I’m just gonna have bloating or diarrhea or constipation or acid reflux. Oh contraire. We’re gonna dive into that today, Evan, how are we doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Doing really well. How about should I just go straight into my story, then? I mean, I suffered with this thing firsthand, as you know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Let’s do it.
Evan Brand: So when I was down in Austin, I was losing weight. And I didn’t know why I was losing weight. And turns out and I was exhausted. That was that was the main thing. I mean, I was drained, like, it was really tough for me to get through the day. I mean, I was to the point where, at some point, it’s kind of embarrassing. I mean, I was like, okay, am I do I have enough energy to cook a meal at night, you know, for dinner, like, the workday just drained me. And so fortunately, after I got the gut infections resolved, I mean, the story is not much longer than that my energy came back online. So I mean, we can say clinically, and personally, that this is a big, big smoking gun for anybody who’s been dealing with chronic fatigue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, totally 100%. Now, let’s talk about some of the mechanisms why like, you could have constipation, you could have diarrhea, you could have all these digestive issues, that’s fine. And it makes sense why some of these issues may be causing problems. Because if you’re going to digest a lot of the nutrients that energize you, right, B vitamins, your amino acids, your essential fatty acids to burn them in the mitochondria for fuel, all of these things require optimal absorption, right? So if we don’t have adequate enzyme, or acid level or biliary level to break down fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, we’re going to have a problem with those nutrients getting into our bloodstream and making their way to ourselves and our mitochondria to be burned for fuel. So that’s one big mechanism. And the other big mechanism out of the gates, and we’ll kind of expound deeper into each one is the fact that your immune system sucks up lots and lots of resources. So think back to when you maybe got the flu or had some kind of illness. Were you energized? Are you tired? Most people were very tired. Now, why is that? It’s because your immune system allocates lots and lots of resources when it’s stressed. And it will make you tired, because it’ll pull some of those energy resources to put it towards fighting an infection. All right. So if your immune system is caught chronically in that state of trying to fight something, whether it’s a gut infection, cebo, or parasite, or just gut permeability issues that are upregulated, due to bad foods, and food allergens, you’re going to be really over stimulating and over allocating resources to deal with whatever’s happening with the immune system, aka the gut. Don’t forget 80% of your immune system is located in the gut, people forget that so important. So if you’re over stressing your immune system, you’re gonna have problems.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And so for me, I was taking some immune support, but it was all just kind of a bandaid, right? Because I wasn’t focused on the underlying infection. So this time of the year, we’re, we’re talking in the fall here coming up on winter, you have a lot of people that will say, Well, you know, I really just want to strengthen my immune system. So they’ll go and do maybe some extra vitamin C, maybe some medicinal mushrooms, or maybe some other herbs, astragalus, things like that. But it doesn’t matter if you do all those if you don’t address the infection. So if someone’s like, tired and they feel weak, they feel depleted. They feel like they’re possibly immunocompromised. Sure, you could do some of the tools, like we talked about those herbs, but really, you got to test first of all, figure out what kind of infections you have. And then step two, is you come in and make a protocol to fix those infections. And not to mention, you know, like h pylori is super contagious. So, I mean, you and I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of cases where, you know, husband and wife have reinfected each other. And so we’re not doing this to try to make more money. We’re doing this to help the family when we say, Hey, what about your husband? What about your wife when we try to get them on board? It’s because we know about this potential, you know, cross contamination.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So we kind of look at the gut, and we’re like, Alright, where are the gut stressors coming from? So the first stressor we look at are food allergens, because if your immune system is kind of responding negatively to food, that could be a big a big issue, right? And what happens is, when food allergens kind of come in, whether it’s gluten or dairy, or just you know, processed grains, or sugars, or even things like nuts, or seeds, or just more allergenic foods, soy those kind of things. Your immune system is upregulated dealing with those foods, and that’s going to suck away resources. And also, these foods if you have an allergen to them, if your body’s hyper allergenic, meaning your immune system is over responsive. There may be some gut permeability. And gut permeability is like these little tight junctions in the epithelium in the small intestines. They’re like this. So imagine you’re putting your hands together like you’re saying a prayer now, start pulling your fingers apart a little bit, you see the little gaps that happen that’s happening at a microscopic level with the tight junction cells in the small intestine. So the more you’re stressing your gut lining, these tight junctions open up, like I mentioned, the fingers come further apart. And then food particular we call it antigens, right? These foods aren’t supposed to be in the bloodstream at the size they’re in. Now you start having these antigens go into the bloodstream at a larger level, and now the immune system’s going to start going after it with full force. And that’s gonna start sucking up a lot more of your resources. So the first thing when we’re working with patients worldwide, we’re trying to cut down the food allergenicity we’re trying to decrease the immune response by helping the foods not become so bad or stressful on the immune system. So some people coming in on a standard American diet, a paleo template, maybe enough. Some people that are really have an autoimmune issue or Irritable Bowel Disease, we have to go to a paleo template where we’re cutting out extra allergenic foods, some we have to even go to a carnivore or some kind of an STD low lower fodmap diet because the bacteria is overgrown, and it’s reacting to even fodmap foods like broccoli and onions and garlic like healthy foods, were reacting to it. And so it this whole thing becomes a little bit more nuanced with food, the more unhealthy you become, or the longer your conditions progress. So as a practitioner, right, we’re trying to meet people where they’re at some people come in at a really easy phase, they’re just diets crap. And we can just make a simple change with the Paleo some we have to get a lot more nuanced.
Evan Brand: So let me ask you, you brought up garlic. I had a woman last week, actually. And she was complaining that garlic was a big issue for her. So we’ve already cleared out gut infections, and we’ve done a great job. We’ve retested we’ve confirmed that we got rid of all the gut infections, we are doing some leaky gut support, but she says every time I eat garlic, I get really bloated. What would you What would you do? What would you say to that garlic person?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it could be a SIBO thing. So I’d want to test other fodmap foods. So if there’s some kind of a gut issue or like a bloat or a motility issue, or a diary or a constipation issue, we’re going to be cutting out fodmaps fermentable carbohydrates, fructose, oligo, disaccharide, mono and polyols. And we’re going to do that and then we’ll eventually do a reintroduction. And when we reintroduce foods, we’re going to start with moderate fodmaps first and then go to higher fodmaps. Last, so those foods are higher fodmap. So the question will be How did she do adding in the moderate ones? First, I want to know how she did incrementally adding things in.
Evan Brand: So like apples, she does fine, which was interesting, because to me, I’ve had a lot more people have issues with apples than I have with garlic. So I thought Hmm, you know, is it really a bacterial overgrowth thing? The stool test didn’t really show much in the in the bacterial category. So it’s kind of like, well-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: when people like that, I just want to see is it a one off? Is it just garlic? Or is it other foods like onions and broccoli and avocado, which is a moderate or sweet potato, which is a matar, I want to test more of the moderate fodmaps? Maybe add in some fermented foods like a kombucha or a sauerkraut? Did it happen with those two, if it’s just a one off, then it could be some die off, it could just be she’s having an issue with that food. So if it’s a one off, I don’t really worry about one offs, I look for patterns, like patterns or like part of being a good functional medicine doctor, it’s pattern recognition, you’re looking for patterns, like some patient that can be Well, last week I had this happen or that like, we got to look at bigger picture, we got to have enough data points. So we can look at patterns. Anything can happen one off due to stress or a poor night’s sleep, or you got exposure to some bad foods. And now your guts a little bit rocky for a few days. So we got to look at longer trends and really have a lot of good pattern recognition. Part of what we do, we’re kind of CSI detectives, and we got to look for things repeating itself, because anything can happen one off, we don’t want to change what we’re doing, or the programs that people are on, off of just a one off issue.
Evan Brand: And that’s what it was, it was a one off and it was kind of, you know, frustrating for me because I’m thinking well, crap, you know, everything else, she’s tolerating good and any other problematic foods, I’d kind of put in that same category that we thought would be a problem. They’re not a problem. So I’m sitting here thinking, Okay, well, what kind of explanation Can I give her? Because she wants some kind of good functional medicine answer for me, right? And so that’s what I told her. I’m like, well, this sounds like just Oh, to be honest, kind of like a food sensitivity, particularly to the garlic. You know, I don’t looking at the testing. I told her I didn’t really see anything that was compelling to indicate any other sort of issue and all the other foods were tolerated. So I kind of just gave it like a political answer. It was like, wow, hmm. You know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, well, we’ll come it’s possible there could be just a, her immune response is just a little bit more sensitive to if we don’t see extra data points correlating to it, then I just tell patients, hey, let’s just we’ll come back. We’ll work on probiotics. We’ll work on good re inoculation of good healthy bacteria while adding some prebiotic fibers every month. We can try testing it again. But as long as there’s no yeah, as long as there’s no, let’s just say, family of other foods that are interacting like this, then we’re not going to really worry about it too much. But you can always retest, make sure that gut’s doing good, but it’s possible you have one off allergen issue that’s possible. But every month, we can always retest it and see.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good point, I did end up throwing in a high dose, multi strain probiotic. So we’re with a high amount of bifido. So we’re gonna see what happens.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and this person could tolerate fermentable carbohydrates, like sauerkraut and, and maybe a little bit of kombucha it’s probably not a fodmap issue, because those things are very, very high in fodmaps. It could be she’s killing some stuff off. It could just be she sensitive to garlic. It’s possible. Yeah. And so I mean, I just tell patients, hey, you know, that’s an artifact, we just kind of make a note on it. When we follow it down the road later on. If things kind of connect back to it down the road. That’s nice. But if not, things that are one offs. You don’t want to you don’t want to one off to derail your whole investigation.
Evan Brand: Yes. Yes. That’s a great point. You know, it’s like you’re, you’re you’re like, you know, investigating a crime scene, and you have his weird piece of evidence. That does not make sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Right. Okay. Well, we’ll make a note on that. And we’ll come back to it if there’s any patterns that they point back to it down the road.
Evan Brand: Yep. Yep. Great. So so small tangent, but really helpful. I think it’s, it’s helpful for people to see how do you have to think when you’re approaching these issues, it’s not always black and white, you know, we try to refer back to clinical experience, we kind of sprinkle in some of the data sprinkled in some previous case studies that we’ve done with people. So it’s really fun. But back to the fatigue piece.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I just wanted to highlight one component, because while you’re on it, is when we are talking about these things, because we’re clinicians, and we see thousands of patients, we’re operating more off of clinical concepts than like rote memorization of like, a fax. And so when people listen to our podcasts, we really want them to understand the overarching concepts of health. If you understand a concept, you don’t really have to memorize it, if you’re trying to memorize random facts and randomness, and that becomes a little bit convoluted and a little bit stressful. So just try to get the overarching concepts that we’re talking about here. Once you get the concept, you never have to worry about memorizing, and it’s just there.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, good. So I just wanted to go back to the to the fatigue piece, because for certain people, there may be multiple layers of infections that are causing your fatigue. So for me it was H. pylori, and then once I got rid of the H pylori, then it was the parasites that were still causing me to be tired. And once I got rid of that, then I did have some Candida that I had to address. So what I want people to know is that if you double down or triple down on something, you know, the guy tells you it’s parasites, or the girl tells you it’s this, and you pursue that, and you’re not better, it’s possible that you’ve, you’ve missed something. And so I just want people to wrap their head around you, like you say, you have permission to have multiple things wrong at the same time. So you could have a bacterial issue, a parasite issue, a Candida problem, all at the same time. And so you got to make sure you get all the data if you just run a stool test. Candida rarely shows up on the stool test, you and I’ve talked about this many times. So the urine test will often fill in the blank. So if you had one test done, or your doctor ran this or that, and you feel like you’re missing something you probably are so keep, keep digging.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You also there’s one study here just looking at h pylori and mitochondrial function, I’ll put it up on my screen. But this is important, right? And the reason why it’s important, I’m going to just I’m going to do a share here. So if you guys are listening to the podcast on YouTube, you’ll be able to watch the video. If you’re on iTunes, you know, you have to just click the YouTube link, and you’ll be able to see what we’re talking about. If not, I’ll try to describe it pretty well. But you can see my screen you see my screen.
Evan Brand: Yep. h pylori affects the mitochondrial function.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this is important right here. So mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cells. This is really important and the powerhouse of your cell generates ATP for energy. Now, if you look here at the bottom they talked about, they wanted to investigate whether there’s an increased mutational load and mitochondrial genome and what they found was there believe that the there’s a downregulation in the mitochondrial DNA repair pathway? What does that mean? It means how your mitochondria are repaired and regenerated. It’s going to be down regulated, so you’re not going to be able to repair your your mitochondria as fast. It’s believed to be involved in mitochondrial base excision repair. Our results suggest that these genes A p one and y b one, just know that their DNA is that are involved in mitochondrial DNA repair. They’re they’re demonstrated to be involved and they’re demonstrated to be down regulated when there’s an H pylori infection. So it just means that your body’s ability to generate ATP which has decreased respiration coupled aptr. So you’re not able to generate as much ATP and repair your mitochondria as well when you have an H pylori infection. And this is something that we think is there with a lot of gut infections. It affects your mitochondria. Your ability to repair it, which then affects your ATP synthesis.
Evan Brand: That is pretty crazy. I mean, especially if we’re talking about an athlete who wants to perform right you’ll have all these big celebrity personal trainers and stuff and they’ll just get people on different diet changes or no, you need to do this exercise or this exercise and they missed the boat. They don’t have a clue about H. pylori being the root cause of the of the fatigue or the exercise performance. So yeah, it’s just crazy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then also, there’s a lot of right here, right here one study, I’ve already looked at it before, if people are having gut issues, and they go to their conventional gastroenterologist, what are they typically prescribing? Well, a lot of times they’re prescribing antibiotics, right, and there’s a lot of data, bacterial Seidel, antibiotics induce mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative damage. And so we know this is something that’s actually present, where there’s damage to the mitochondria with antibiotics.
Evan Brand: Well, and and, and to be clear, for H pylori, it’s not just one antibiotic, it’s three or even four, they have what they call quadruple therapy now, which just the name of it scares me, it’s literally four antibiotics at the same time. And you and I have both seen patients that have had triple or quadruple therapy done and guess what we retest them, and unfortunately, due to antibiotic resistant bacteria, the infections are still there. So now we have to come in, repair all the mitochondria that were damaged, plus use herbs, which are much, much safer, and in my experience, just as if not more effective, and then we actually get rid of the bugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, she’s a summary of your mitochondria dysfunction and oxygen damage induced by bacterial Seidel antibiotics, which is interesting, because bacteria, all antibiotics are bacterial Seidel, so interesting. They use that description. It’s mammalian cells. I’m not sure which mammals they use. But they talked about that it’s alleviated by antioxidants. Well, guess what, when we use a lot of the clearing herbs that we use, guess what they’re rich in, I mean, tons of antioxidants, polyphenols. And that’s the benefit, a lot of the herbs that we use, they have a lot of antioxidants in them to help buffer the oxidative stress. Because remember, oxidative stress is part of what happens with the antibiotics. And we have a similar effect with herbs. But the herbs have a lot of antioxidants, which is helpful. Any comments on that?
Evan Brand: Well, what you’re saying makes us look really good, because not only are we giving nutrients that can effectively get rid of the infections, but we’re also protecting the system or even replenishing antioxidants, because in general, and the oxidants are going to be reduced because of all the oxidative stress from the infection in the first place. So it’s literally like a win win, for us and for the person under the protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And there’s lots of different studies here as well on probiotics and beneficial bacteria, correcting mitochondrial dysfunction with probiotics. There’s there’s definitely studies on this as well. And again, you know, these are things that we’ve seen in our practice, like when you see someone get better. So protection of hepatocyte mitochondrial function by blueberry juice probiotics. So there’s lots of studies on this, because when you see patients get better with certain beneficial bacteria, after you do an elimination, you’re like, why does that work? And so what happens is you see a clinical outcome, patient getting better when you do something. And then you’re like, Huh, what could the mechanism B and then you chase it down online? And you’re like, oh, maybe that’s it? You know, maybe it has to do with the fact that it’s helping the mitochondria and people’s feel better afterwards? Maybe that’s the mechanism. It’s possible, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We have to comment on that.
Evan Brand: Well, it’s a lot of good things happening. And then you mentioned the probiotic piece. So that’s going to help even more. So after we get someone on a killing protocol, there’s going to be good benefits there, your energy is probably going to get better just based on doing that. And then when you go to the next phase, if we’re going to come into the gut healing phase, you’re going to get even better than so it’s it’s really fun for us to kind of paint the picture here of just how how is someone going up, up up up better, better, better? And you’ve just outlined how so pretty I talked about it right here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They talked about a collusion the studies show this is BP stands for blueberry juice and probiotic exhibit a synergistic effect preventing the development of a and that’s non alcoholic fatty liver disease by protecting mitochondrial function, suppressing the damage of mitochondrial ultrastructure by reducing mitochondrial swelling, right. So mitochondrial damage by antibiotics, as well as we could do the same thing when we search, let’s say pesticides, or heavy metals or mold toxins, so we know that gut plays a big role and one helping to absorb those nutrients. But number two, also helping to have beneficial bacteria that modulate these, this inflammation and mitochondrial damage as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. Well said. Excellent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it’s good that just a couple of studies. I mean, when we look at like we look at research a lot differently, so just kind of everyone there. We look at clinical outcomes in patients. And then we chase them back to what the literature says. The problem is a lot of people who are clinicians, they’ll look at the literature, and then they’ll try to then come up with a clinical like decision based on the literature. And that’s sometimes it’s really hard to do, because a lot of the PhDs and a lot of the research out there isn’t necessarily clinically driven, and maybe driven because someone has a PhD in this area. And they’re just they’re just studying that topic, because or maybe it’s an NIH funded study. Who knows, right? So we’re looking at things that are clinically driven, not research driven, because someone has decided to dedicate their life to this topic. And this is the study they’re choosing right?
Evan Brand: Now. It’s good that we can kind of pull out some studies to help backup what we’re saying. But it’s not like we go into PubMed to try to figure out exactly what we’re going to do the clinical stuff is really that’s where all the magic happens.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And some may say we have a confirmation bias and how we look for these things. But we’re not looking for out of the blue we’re looking for, because we’ve seen clinical outcomes support something is happening in that direction. And then we use the data, the research to say what could be if positive things are happening in this direction? A to B, what could be the mechanism of why that is? And so we kind of chase it backwards. versus the other way around?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. And it’s just it’s a blast. It is fun for you to pull that stuff up. Right? Because, you know, we get we get used to our our methods, we get used to our results. But when you get to see in the literature like that antibiotics, causing mitochondrial damage is like, Oh, yeah, I forgot. That’s why we do this. It’s Yeah, we’re Exactly. We don’t want people to get damaged.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you get confident when you see things repeat itself. Clinically, you’re like, Okay, something’s happening here. Now what? So you’re going at it with a lot more confidence versus like, Hey, I think maybe, you know, I’ve heard this, it’s a hearsay kind of thing. No, you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it clinically? Well, here’s the confidence.
Evan Brand: Here’s the thing that’s always fun for me is when we’re on the topic of fatigue and gut infections. And so when you have a case where you do the follow up, and someone is reporting that they have significantly more energy, and you didn’t give them any energy supplements, you just fix their gut, you just gave them some liver, maybe some enzyme support, some gallbladder support, and then you killed the infections and all the sudden, boom, I’m 20% more energetic. I always smile and laugh simultaneously. Because it’s like, This is so fun. We have 20% more energy. And we did zero energy supplements. That’s just super cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s powerful. Now, if people start feeling a little bit worse, then we got to be very careful. So when people start feeling worse, I’m like, all right, we got to spend more time building up the adrenals, we got to make sure the diets clean, because if someone’s got his or, like, if you’re putting lots of bad foods in and you’re inflaming the gut, then your immune system and also your adrenals may be making more resources to deal with the inflammation in your gut. So we have to decrease the inflammation in our gut and support the adrenals by calming it down. Now, the adrenals have more resources. And of course, we always like supporting the adrenals ahead of time. So then you have natural, your more of your natural anti inflammatories, because conventional medicine when there’s serious gut issues, they’re going to give prednisone cortisol, well, let’s just support your body’s ability to make that naturally. And then when we go into a gut clearing phase, then we have more of those resources on board. And then patients are sensitive. I’m titrating the herbs in there slowly so we’re not overwhelming the system by killing more, you know bacterial toxins, LPs endotoxins, mycotoxins, we’re not overwhelming the lymphatic system that a toxification immune system. So we’re going to kind of really titrate things in a little bit slower if you’re more sensitive. And we may even add things like binders and glutathione too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, the glutathione is good for me. I had to take a break from it for a little while. It was just too strong. It does mobilize toxins to so this is all case by case basis. But yeah, I love glutathione when it works. But when you take too much, that’s no good. There’s always a right dose.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, if you’re slow, if you’re like more sensitive, always start low, work your way up. And then if you’re sensitive, you can always start with just a gentle binder first, as long as you’re not getting constipated. That’s a good first step on increasing things.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s great. So let’s see here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Um, the other component, I would say is people that have got issues tend to also have immune issues. We already talked about why 80% of your immune systems in the Galt, that’s the gastric associated lymphoid tissue that’s in the stomach. And then also the model that’s the mucosal associated lymphoid tissue, lymphoid meaning like lymphocytes, white blood cells, and that’s in the small intestine. And so if you have a lot of gut permeability issues, if your guts over responding well, what’s the most common autoimmune condition that affects people and mostly women, five times more women is autoimmune thyroid. And so if you have an autoimmune thyroid, that could also be affecting your energy because you know your thyroid gland is being attacked and your body is ability to generate thyroid hormone may be decreased. And it’s possible that your conventional doctors overlook that. And so knowing that there’s an autoimmune thyroid could be affecting your energy too. And if you have an attack, you could feel hyper where you’re like anxious, can’t sleep irritable, sweating, right? first and then you go into a hypo where you’re like tired, fatigued, depressed, right? So you could easily be going hyper and hypo swings based on autoimmune tax of the thyroid.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and once again, the hashimotos could be a side effect of something else. So even if you go to the endocrinologist, let’s say they were a more advanced endocrinologist, for example, hopefully they’re running thyroid antibodies TPO, TG maybe TSI. And they’re looking at that and maybe they’re treating your thyroid giving you desiccated glandulars, or nature thyroid, or just Synthroid or side ml. Even then you see how people can fall between the cracks and not get better. Because yeah, you’ve kind of cranked up the thyroid that was hypo due to autoimmunity. But you still never got to the gut infection that started at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: BINGO, BINGO, BINGO, BINGO 100%. That’s what we got to look at always the root cause. So anything else you wanted to talk about here on the gut and fatigue I did, we hit the thyroid, of course, I alluded to the adrenals earlier, because they play a huge role in regulating inflammation. And we know acute gut issues, they may be, they may be given a corticosteroid to calm down the gut inflammation, that’s possible too. So we want to support your body’s ability to do it naturally. I would also say supporting protein breakdown. So with maybe adding in free form amino acids, because protein can be very hard on the body to break down. So of course, dialing in enzymes and acids and maybe giving extra free form amino acids. So it’s taking stress off the digestive system to be able to access those amino acids as well.
Evan Brand: I think I think you’ve hit it all. I mean, I would just say, kind of where do you go next is you really have to get the data. I mean, we’ve talked about a lot, right. But if you don’t have the data, you don’t know what you’re up against. You don’t know what you’re doing. So, you know, I think the best advice I could give is if you’re dealing with these issues, test, don’t guess. And so, you know, feel free to reach out to Dr. J. Justin at JustinHealth.com. And he can run labs on you anywhere in the world and send them to your door and jump on a call and discuss it make a great protocol to help you to get better. Same thing for me my website, EvanBrand.com. And we’re available we love helping you all we’re grateful to be in this position. So you know, sure you know a lot of you listening or kind of do it yourselfers. That’s what led you to be smart and find a podcast anyway. Because you want to kind of educate yourself, but there’s a certain point where it’s okay to reach out. And I tried to fix myself for a long time. And you spend more money and you spend more time doing that. So you know, feel free to reach out and get a guide.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and then you’re available at EvanBrand.com worldwide. We’re available worldwide and we’re clinicians, we have our sleeves rolled up and we’re in the trenches every day, dealing with patients. Also, if you’re listening to this don’t just kind of glom on to one thing. So we see lots of people they’re like, they come in like Oh, I know what’s h pylori or I know it’s Candida or I know it SIBO keep an open mind on what’s happening because you have the right to have more than one issue going on at the same time. And for instance, Evans original story was Evan had not could have it wrong if you had h pylori, Giardia and crypto. That’s correct. Yeah, yeah, h pylori, giardia crypto, those are some serious infections. Any one of those infections is serious and could could have created the symptoms Evan was having yet he had all three at the same time. So if Evan was like, Oh, it’s only H. pylori, you know, he may have missed the fact that grd and crypto were involved too. So go into with an open mind and you have the right to have more than one infection happening at same time. Sad but true. But either way there are solutions to work on it and fix it.
Evan Brand: I was tired. Man, I was tired. Now that was a that was a that was a level of exhaustion that just doesn’t even seem real. I mean, that’s how you know something’s wrong when you’re that tire. But you know, hopefully, with this education we’re providing people can reach out and work on this before it gets to that crisis level because it’s much easier to pull you out if you’re not that deep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now Evan can you go to your conventional medical doctor or a gastroenterologist and typically get these infections picked up on?
Evan Brand: No, definitely not the testing is just so outdated, you know, it’s not sensitive, like the DNA stuff we’re using. So that’s the downside is if you go to the gastro doc down the road, say, Hey, I think I’ve got Giardia, I heard these two guys on the internet talk about it. They’ll probably just laugh in your face and say, Well, you didn’t travel to any third world countries. So you don’t have it. But if you if you really want to Sally, I’ll test you on they’ll run the outdated test and then everything comes back negative and then we’ll say see, I told you it was all in your head, just, you know, take an acid blocker.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So yes, my opinion is very similar. So the more acute you are, especially with typical gastrointestinal symptoms, the greater chance they’ll pick you up, especially if you came back from like Mexico or some kind of a country like Bali where infections are probable, right? But now what do you do? If your infections aren’t really gut based symptoms, they’re the fatigue or the brain fog, well, then how does that get picked up, you’re typically never going to get picked up for that you’re more than likely to, to get a psych referral for an antidepressant, right, then to get a gut test, and Evan already alluded to some of the technology they have isn’t going to be as up to par. So we have a little bit you know, more access to the DNA technology a little bit more sensitive. And then also like H. pylori testing that they may run a breath test, right? Urea breath test and look for elevated levels of co2, it’s possible, but that may miss an infection. And if it’s more subclinical, you may need a more sensitive test to pick it up. So if you’re listening, and you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna go to my MD that may not be the solution, I may not get you the answers you want. And if you don’t have the typical gut symptoms, diarrhea, bloating, gas, a lot of stomach discomfort, and irritability, you may not even they may not even want to run a test, because those symptoms don’t match with what they think the problem could be.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. And you know, it sounds like we’re like picking on him. Right? And we sort of are and that’s fine. I love picking on them, because they’re failing people. And it makes me sad. Because I was there I was sitting in the doctor’s office trying to get help. And I was told that I just needed an acid blocking medication. I told the doc, no, I feel better when I take it. enzymes that actually increased my stomach acid, I think you’re wrong. She said, That’s not possible. You’re gonna hurt yourself, you need to stop taking supplements stop all dietary supplement, the FDA, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And and that was it. And that’s when I signed off and said, No, I’m done.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and I do recommend, and I think you’re in the same way, I do recommend patients that have chronic issues, or acute issues, at least go see your conventional medical doctor just to get checked off that there’s nothing glaring that’s going on. And that that way, if you work for someone like myself, for you, and then they’ve kind of already been looked at, and they’ve kind of already know, okay, conventional medicine is kind of done all they can do. And, you know, functional medicine is the next best option at that point.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’m not saying we’re the all knowing at all, if you’re bleeding out of your butt, you need to go confirm you don’t have some type of a bleeding ulcer or colon cancer or you have some type of a polyp issue or diverticulitis and you need colon surgery. I mean, there are certain things that we can’t help with. But for these more functional, non pathological issues, we’re definitely going to be able to help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we can help with all those issues. Once they’re stable. If they’re unstable, though, conventional medicine does a really good job on stabilizing very sensitive issues. But once they’re stable, now what because for the most part, it’s going to be just symptom drug management for the rest of your life. Right? If you look at what they talked about, it’s, hey, we’re managing your gut issue versus let’s actually get to the root underlying issue. And sometimes management’s good when things are acute and flared. But now when they’re stable now what we want to go beyond just who wants to just manage their diarrhea for the rest of their life? That’s crazy, right?
Evan Brand: Oh, God. Well, that happens every day, doesn’t it? It’s happening today while we’re doing this call somebody is in the doctor’s office right now about to get an antispasmodic drug for their diarrhea.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and that may be fine acutely, but then what’s next? So get your health issues under control from a you know, stable standpoint, and then work on the next step with a good functional medicine doctor. Well, everyone was excellent chatting with y’all anything you want to leave us with Evan?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. We’re just ranting at this point. So if you need help, please reach out. JustinHealth.com, EvanBrand.com. Take great care yourself. We’ll be back. Have a good one, y’all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye now.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/fatigue-tiredness-and-link-to-gut-infections-podcast-311
Recommended Products:
The Lymphatic System and Infection Support | Podcast #241
Lymphatic System is a part of the vascular system and is plays an important part in the immune system, and comprises a large network of lymphatic vessels that carry lymph directly to the heart. So, it is very important to know more about this, and how to keep this healthy and running.
In today’s podcast, Dr. Justin and Evan Brand are going to talk about the Lymphatic system and infection support. Everything is discussed, including how important it is, especially when you have stressors or infections, and how you can support it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:08 All About Lymphatic System
8:07 Massages for the Lymph
11:09 Symptoms and kinds of Infections
18:06 Testing things, herbal solutions
26:59 Other recommendations
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: All right. And we live it’s Dr. J. here in the house with Evan Brand. Today’s podcast is going to be on the Lymphatic system and how important it is, especially when you have stressors and things like infections going on in your body. We’re going to talk about what the Lymphatic system is, how you can support it, and how important it is, especially if you have things like infections which are stressors on your body that could be essentially clogging up that lymph system. So excited to be a great podcast today, Evan how we doing man.
Evan Brand: Hey I’m doing well. I was looking at a picture of the Lymphatic system and we were talking off air about how crazy it is that the lymph is its own separate system from the blood. So when you think of all your blood flow and arteries and veins going every which direction and then you look at a picture of your Lymphatic system, it’s almost like two totally separate but parallel highways in the body which is just incredible. I’ve never done anything like a human cadaver work. Did you ever do that when you were in school? Did you ever work on human cadavers at all?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes we did. Yep. I have a lot of experience of that.
Evan Brand: Did you see could you see like lymph nodes and such when you were in there or was it just too small?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I mean you can definitely see a lot of the lymph I mean a lot of it’s gonna be dehydrated when the fluids not there because it’s kind of like a balloon without air in it. Right. It’s more collapse, it kind of looks like a little bit of tissue. Yeah definitely you can see it lymph plays a a pretty major role in the body I mean typically what I describe the people is like you have tissue, you have blood, and the blood has to be clean because the bloods go into the organs, so you have like nutrition and things coming in, and then you have waste build up from the tissue whether it’s metabolic stuff like lactic acid or toxin exposure whatever. And that’s going to essentially go from the tissue ,think of the lymph as \ the filter, the in-between type of filter, and then think of the blood as everything it’s clean. So in other words like, if people have like a gravity filter like a Berkey filter right figure of the top part of the Berkey, think of that as like your tissue fluid, that’s your tissue fluid. All right the fluid in your tissue Lymphatic fluid. Think of the filter, the Berkey filter component, that’s like the lymph and then think of the clean water you drink is like the blood. All right. So that’s kind of the lymph in a nutshell and it’s really important because when we get exposed to toxins and stressors we want to make sure that’s really clean and there’s a couple of different organs that are responsible and that are involved in the process of filtering. So there’s a bunch of different things I haven’t listed out here but in general, we have spleen which actually helps make a lot of red blood cells and are really really important for making the healthy cells that we need to you know have good function, thymus also makes a lot of T cells in lymphocytes which are actual white blood cells that are involved in the Lymphatic system which is really important, they actually call attention to attack infections and really important for knocking down cancer and other not so good things. We have the lymph vessels which are like, essentially the transport pipes between the lymph nodes, the lymph nodes are like the filters. Right. That’s where like a lot of mono sites and other bigger players are going to live and they will start gobbling up and attacking and lacing or breaking down a lot of critters, so the lymph nodes are kind of where a lot of these things hide and stay and they will go and attack a lot of critters and you’ll see lymph nodes swell a lot because it’s gobbling it up. It’s kind of like you get putting a lot of food down the garbage disposal, it may kind of like the water may kind of backup for a minute while the garbage disposal kind of breaks it all down a while it gets shot down the pipe. So we talked about the findings we talked about lymph nodes and lymph vessels and what’s the difference there? The spleens really important we talked about that because that’s where you’re going to make some red blood cells there’s also going to be a lot of filtering of toxins there. Now we have tonsils which are really the first major filters, the first major lymph in the body and these tend to get removed because it’s like the pre filter that just gets blacker or congested or clogged really soon and we can see that one get filtered up and kids can get congested and people get tonsil stones and this is kind of the major pre filter that gets pulled out first which is really sad. Right. I had my tonsils taken out at age five. That’s a real common thing. And last but not least is going to be the bone marrow. Right. Bone marrow helps make red blood cells, helps make white blood cell and platelet, so really important with the immune system. Also a lot of lymphocytes come from there as well. So we need lymphocytes. They are the cells that are going to primarily hang out in the Lymphatic system. And then one more thing about the spleen, spleen is the largest organ in the Lymphatic system. So its primary job is to filter out kind of damage old red blood cells. So we want to help the red blood cells of the spleen is really really important for that. And then basically the spleen also helps sure a lot of our lymphocytes. So that’s where they grow up and become stronger and bigger. So that now when they enter the Lymphatic system, they’re kind of, they’re ready to go, and they’re ready to do its job and help keep the blood really clean. That’s kind of the organs. I’ll give you a minute to comment.
Evan Brand: We think that’s all awesome info. I’m just so amazed at the Lymphatic system. You know when I first had tick bites this was probably 2011 maybe 2012, when I was working at the park system, I remember feeling low left quadrant pain and learning more about Lyme disease and co infections. Epstein Barr virus, certain bacteria, they can actually affect the spleen and cause the spleen to swell. So like Lyme disease you can have spleens swelling and so if you’ve had pain on that looking down at yourself that lower left quadrant over there that could be related. And so really, you and I were kind of talking about this off air, Lymphatic system problems are really secondary, meaning the Lymphatic system kind of catches the crap that wasn’t addressed upstream. So meaning, if you’ve got bacterial infections in your gut that haven’t been addressed. If you have Epstein Barr virus and other viral infections that are suppressing your immune system, now the Lymphatic system kind of has to come in as like the secondary team. Hey we’re going to try to help out but the goal is not just take Lymphatic support herbs to get that better, you have to still work upstream to fix the root cause. So if you need antiviral herbs, you’ve got to use antiviral herbs, or if you need antimicrobials to address the bacteria overwhelming the Lymphatic system, you’ve got to get rid of bacteria and then get the proper testing done too. So you know if I’m mentioning Lyme and co infections you got to try to look for that stuff and see do you actually have Lyme and or co infections causing spleen pain or swollen lymph nodes in the groin or armpit or in the throat. I was telling you this morning my throat had felt kind of weird kind of tied up in here. So I’m assuming I’ve got some Lymphatic stagnation going on and we were looking at some research and we found that there was a study from it was journal of complementary medicine and it was just titled, “A Study of the Effects of a Single Session of Swedish Massage on HIPAA and Immune Function”. And it was pretty cool. What they found is that just a, let’s see was it a forty five minute massage, or was it an hour. Yeah. Forty five minutes of Swedish massage compared to a light touch massage. It was proven the Swedish massage, number one it lowered cortisol a bit, but then it increased the number of lymphocytes significantly, and then it also decreased Interleukin 4 5 10 and 13, meaning that we’ve actually lowered inflammatory cytokines. So you mentioned that massage is a critical part of your maintenance plan on your own body I should be doing more massage. It sounds like and everybody definitely could and should benefit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah massage is a really important tool. I mean it really helps move the lymph mechanically right so you can move them the lymph mechanically just like you would with a lymph brush. And again the key is if you’re going to you can even massage yourself that’s not a problem it’s pretty simple. It’s just basically light gentle touch. I mean you can do deeper but essentially you want to always bring it back to the heart. That’s kind of the key. Like when I was doing more chiropractic work, there was something known as what’s called a fashioned flush. And when we were taught that technique I would use a precursor or roller and we’d always bring it back to the heart over in the front we’d bring it up the inferior vena cava back to the heart, because that’s where the lymphs all dumping back because the goal is the lymph is taking fluid and filtering it out and bringing it back to the heart. So the heart could pump out clean stuff. Right. So we’re bringing it back to the heart either from the front we’re going down up or from the back we’re going up and over like over the shoulder back to the heart or back to the heart. So if you’re watching the video, that makes a little bit more sense over in the back, we’re going up it over the shoulders, back in the direction of the heart in the left side, or in the front we’re going up to that left side to kind of get that fluid back there so it can go back into circulation and that’s really important. Also, yesterday I was doing a lot of whole body vibration so I got a massage. I also had whole body vibration, whole body vibration is going to be amazing on the Lymphatic system. You’re moving Lymphatic fluid so much you’re everything kind of almost feels very warm because there’s so much movement of your internal lymph where everything’s just heated up. It’s pretty amazing. And that really helps because you’re helping to move that lymph and keep things moving which is amazing. Right. The more that filter gets clogged the more things just start to kind of stay and get stagnant so keeping that lymph moving is amazing. You’re going to have the same thing with exercise because you’re pumping your muscles and when you’re pumping your muscle, that’s the kind of like you’re giving yourself an internal massage by contracting the muscles, so muscle movement is going to help as well. That’s really important. I would also say drinking enough clean water is important because if you don’t have enough good clean fluid to work with, God forbid that you’re using a lot of fluid that’s like soda or alcohol base that’s going to create more inflammation that’s going to make that fluid and be like molasses like biscuits. So drinking lots of good clean fluid and having good electrolytes as well is going to help. We need healthy electrolyte levels so our sodium potassium pumps can work. Not enough sodium potassium we’re going to have some problems there.
Evan Brand: I can’t believe that some people just don’t drink pure water. You know I’ve had clients where the husband or the brother and the sister the cousin they say all they drink is tea or juice or soda and I’m like well do they drink, just pure water? No, they don’t like water. All my goodness how do you not like water? How do you not drink pure water? If you’re just living on sweet tea or even unsweetened tea. That’s just a diuretic. It’s not good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah definitely not good because they will cause you to lose more water. So I always tell people anytime you’re drinking coffee or tea, that doesn’t count it again, doesn’t count as your fluid for the day. And number two is you have to compensate and actually do more high quality fluid to combat the decrease in fluid from peeing it out. So that’s really important.
Evan Brand: Let’s talk about symptoms a bit. So things that can be going wrong with you and you would know, hey I’ve probably got something wrong with my Lymphatic system and therefore there’s probably an issue above that. So like chronic fatigue could be common. We talked about the swelling of the lymph nodes like your throat, the jaw line there, the armpits, the groin, muscle aches and pains, joint pains, sore throat just in general that pretty easy, getting colds more often frequent infections viruses, fibromyalgia symptoms, arthritis, and even cancer formation could be on this list here because what’s it called Hodgkin’s disease. That’s a Lymphatic cancer- lymphoma, that’s a Lymphatic cancer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes sexually the cancer cells accumulating in that lymph system. We’re not going to go into the different types of it, not necessary but in general the more we keep our immune system in our Lymphatic system healthy through keeping inflammation down, inflammation is one of the first and best things because number one, cancer cells are primarily going to thrive in a in a glucose rich kind of anaerobic environment, so the more we provide good oxygenation through keeping inflammation down and through movements, that’s going to keep those cells moving right the more we put more inflammation into the system. That’s going to add Interleukin and cytokines are gonna be responding. As a result, it’s kind of like if a rock in the beehive the bees are gonna swarm afterwards. When you put a whole bunch inflammation in your body of your food or stress or infections like bacteria, or viruses you’re going to have a lot of Interleukin and cytokines being produced which are going to make cells agglutinate, glutinate means like a stick together. So it’s like if you’re trying to clean something, a whole bunch of grease gets put into your sink. You just feel that coat and everything. And that’s kind of what’s happening in your Lymphatic system, everything just gets really this viscous and very coded. So we want to make sure that we keep inflammation down, so a good paleo template. And if you’re really inflame, keeping the glucose in the carbohydrates down can be helpful just because glucose and sugar can cause a lot of stress on the Lymphatic system as well. And if you’re healthy and you’re exercising and your leaner, you may be able to handle that, also lower thyroid function is important because low thyroid function or hypo thyroid was originally known as myxedema. Hence the word edema. So we need healthy thyroid function also for your metabolism to work, for your heart to work inside. So we need healthy thyroid levels we can see extra fluid retention with that. I see a lot of people develop fluid retention during an autoimmune flare so getting exposed to gluten or any other autoimmune foods that could create inflammation and of course people that are more, they have an autoimmune predilection or predisposition, they’re going to create more inflammation than their immune system is going to aid, their immune system is actually come to the party and create more inflammation by attacking. So we talked about adding inflammation to the system. Well if you’re autoimmune, we’re adding inflammation but then your immune system also joins in at the party and creates more inflammation as well. So it creates this spiral control, it’s why you see a lot of people with autoimmune issues have lots of swelling and lots of lymph issues for sure.
Evan Brand: Not good. So you’ve got to get it under control. Well you mentioned thyroid. So looking into thyroid testing with your practitioner would be a key thing to do, making sure you’re getting a full panel too, like I had a woman last week she e-mailed me she said yeah here’s my endocrinologist, they did bloodwork on my thyroid and it was literally TSH and total T three or maybe total T four maybe two or three markers total and that’s their quote, full thyroid panel which I mean that’s just not enough information to do anything with. Do you want to speak on proper thyroid testing, making sure you’re getting above and beyond the standard of care?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. So with the thyroid we definitely want to be looking at TSH to make sure that’s adequate ideally below two and a half but definitely below three is ideal. And if it’s not then the question is why. So then we go look at T four levels one to one point five for T for free six to 10 for T for total right, 3 looks at the functional amount of five what hormone that can actually dock to receptor site. Total looks at the overall strength of the gland, freeze more important like to see both in range and then t three free is about three or above is adequate and then 100 or above for T three total. And then of course we have reverse T three which can go up when T three starts to drop, we may see it with an adequate selenium levels with liver stress, and with adrenal stress, and then T3 uptake which T, T three FDA tends to be adequate if reverse T three is good, and T3 levels are good, that’s kind of the uptake of thyroid hormone by the receptor sites. So we look at all of those things, and it’s important if we have low thyroid levels we want to get to the root cause, we’d also want to look at thyroid antibodies because antibodies, remember that autoimmune mechanism is a big part. So TPL where thyroglobulin antibodies are really big that that’s high that tells you your immune system is really aiding into that fight and that could be really creating a lot of sluggishness with the thyroid and your immune system.
Evan Brand: I felt a huge difference just comparing and contrasting my blood work when I had elevated reverse T three at one point, I was in the 30s, I was like 34 with reverse T three which is real high, and I had a lot of adrenal stress going on, I had multiple sculpture, I had tick bites, I had immune stress I had all of it. So it would make sense why I felt so sluggish that reverse T three which is way too high. And last time I checked my blood reverse 23 look great. I was down to like a 12 or so but don’t just depend on your thyroid panel. You could have perfect thyroid numbers and still feel like crap and still have problems with Lymphatic swelling and other issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah also heart’s really important obviously because the heart’s the muscle that’s pumping everything. So if you’re older and you have risk factors or symptoms of heart failure or cardiovascular disease, we’d see that with thoughts of inflammation or decrease ejection fraction of the heart, maybe higher blood pressure, right higher blood pressure means your heart has to pump harder and work harder to kind of move. Because if your blood pressure is 150 over 90, your heart has to generate more force than the pressure in the arteries to move things. So you have to work 20 or 30 percent harder. So a lot of times that’s going to be from inflammation, because inflammation is in it cause constriction of a lot of the vessels. The more inflammation you have you start generating foam cells. You decreased your nitric oxide, your n0 which is gonna be really important for basal dilation. People that consume lots of fructose or have mold exposure or inflammation from infections, that’s going to decrease your nitric oxide levels which nitric oxide is your natural base Odile.
Evan Brand: Yeah I can tell you one hundred percent. Last summer, my blood pressure was crazy and I did the Burchell. I think it’s Berkeley, not Berkey, but Berkeley test strips it’s nitric oxide test strip. You put it on your tongue. I failed at every single time. Just showing I had no nitric oxide production at all. So in the interim while I’m in the middle of detox, I’ve been doing beet powder and some Argireline and Centreline and other things to try to help, Hawthorne, some extra folate been trying to increase my nitric oxide but I’m still using bandaids. My ultimate goal has to be to detoxify but luckily, blood pressure is back to normal now so I’ve experienced exactly what you said and it’s not fun.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And then if we see that of course we’re working on getting everything, inflammation getting the inflammation down, and we’re working on giving nutrients to help our heart work. So I mean low hanging fruit are gonna be high quality B vitamins, carnitine to help generate energy from fat co Q10 which is really important for the heart. So it can have that energy to to run the electron transport chain, and help beat then of course magnesium as well because magnesium is a natural beta blocker and a lot of times people’s heart is stimulated too much by that sympathetic nervous system, causing the heart to contracted beat. So magnesium can really help relax the heart too, so when you’re, when you’re not stressed, your heart can actually downshift. It’s like driving a car and having it be stuck in first gear on the highway and your RPMs are are too high. So it allows you to go into that higher gear for the highway but then also allows you to downshift so you can relax and go into that lower gear when it’s time as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Let’s briefly mentioned other testing things that may be important if you’re dealing with the Lymphatic system problems. So we talked about thyroid. You mentioned antibodies which is great. I would throw organic acid testing into the mix because we know that bacterial infections can stress out the immune system in general. So streptococcus and staphylococcus and parasites and worms and Candida overgrowth these are things we can find using a combination of stool and urine test.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah and you can see the extreme with parasites that get into the lymph. You can see it like elephantiasis issues which are like massive Lymphatic swelling of worms or parasites really disrupting more of the actual physical structure of the lymph. And that’s you know that’s going to be the ultimate, you know endgame or end stage type of disease presentation, but you can have in between stressors where fungi or bacteria or yeast or parasites are stressing out the lymph. So of course the first step is going to be seeing a good functional medicine doctor, a practitioner that can help figure out what those stressors are, and then work on killing and addressing those infections. Now I think we hit everything up pretty good from a foundational level, now what are some supplements that we use clinically to help. Well I’ll tell you off the bat, Ginger is a really really great one and I use that part of my program preventively because it helps with inflammation, helps with gastroparesis, it helps with digestion, it helps with the lymph. It’s also a natural Biofilm Buster So supporting the biofilms and supporting the lymph and the inflammation we kind of use ginger tea is kind of a catch all. I’ll let you go list off some of yours I have and have a couple others I want to hit up to.
Evan Brand: The red roots going to be my favorite. I personally felt the difference using red fruit when I didn’t have that lower left quadrant pain. I started using a blend, so I can’t tell you it was red fruit just by itself. I would tell you it’s probably a combination of some of the other ones in there like burdock, but the red fruit for sure helped reduce swelling and if we are doing the lyme or a co infection protocol with someone, red fruit has some antimicrobial properties too. But I was using it just for spleen and in general lymph support.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah so red root or red clover is pretty much I think the same thing. Also burdock roots powerful in my [inaudible] product. I put the burdock root in there because it really helps support the lymph. So burdock is amazing red root is also a famous cancer formula that have been used by natural cancer people for I think 80 years called SCA T and SCA T he has like rhubarb in there but the big thing that has it has burdock. Like I just mentioned which is a really powerful lymphatic cleansers, a lot of natural cancer people have known for a long time that burdock helps because the lymph tends to be overstressed with people that have cancer. So even if you’re doing chemotherapy or a conventional cancer program, you really want to work on supporting and helping to cleanse your liver because all this stuff’s coming into your body and you want to make sure that you can filter it out after it’s gone and done its thing with the cancer cells. So SCA T or some kind of a natural Lymphatic support is gonna be really helpful. And I would say systemic enzymes, especially Serratiopeptidase or lumbrokinase are amazing because all of this viscousness, or kind of stagnant sludge that can build up in the lymph, the enzymes are kind of like a liquid plumber so to speak so you have that clogged deepen your drain. You don’t want to call the plumber to go pull out the snake to kind of break it up physically, but you may put some liquid plumber in which is gonna break it down internally through various enzymes or corrosive compounds, we can use enzymes internally which are natural, they aren’t going to hurt our body and they’re going to help break down some of that inflammation ,break down some of the cytokines break down any any sludge. So some of these enzymes can be amazing. We’ve got to take them away from food. Typically an hour before food three hours after we take, higher amounts and it really help kind of Roto-Rooter our system.
Evan Brand: Good. That’s that’s a killer recommendation. We’ve done a podcast before on immune system in general, but I would just throw some other general support immune herbs at you so like the astragalus echinacea, those are gonna be a couple of good ones. Medicinal mushrooms I would say could and should be part of the protocol too, like some Rashi, Cordyceps, Mottaki, Shittake, beta glucans, anything that’s generally supportive of antiviral anti-microbial immune support. Olive Leaf. I would throw that in. Now does it directly influence lymph. I don’t know. I could look into some studies and see but I just know that for me, Olive Leaf is helpful for beating Candida and helping as an antiviral. So I think that could be a good strategy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah looks like your lymph is like your pre filter and think of your kidneys as kidneys and liver is like the post filter. So anytime you’re supporting the liver or the kidneys, you’re having an effect on the Lymphatic system because everything has to go back to the heart which then gets its way into the tissue again which then has to make its way back to the lymph. So you can create a backup. So things like astragalus and cordyceps and chaparral, these are all medicinal compounds that will help support the kidneys and we use a lot with kidney patients, so we know things like mold and mycotoxins stress out the lymph and we know that they also the studies that they stress out the kidneys as well. So any time you support the kidneys or the liver, you’re gonna be helping your detoxification. Are you going to be helping your Lymphatic system directly and indirectly.
Evan Brand: Yeah I just found a research paper here looking at the different herbs used for lymphoma, so green tea extract was mentioned, Optisol, Rashee mushroom, sunshine exposure, olive leaf extract, reducing sugar stress alcohol. So yeah I mean pretty much everything we’re already doing, we’re kind of fixing Lymphatic issues often, even when we’re targeting a primary issue like a viral bacterial pathogen problem which is pretty cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah and lymph nodes are pretty much going to be everywhere in your body. I mean you’re gonna see it really conglomerate in and around the throat area, you’re gonna see a conglomerate in the axillary armpit area, and then you’ll see him really conglomerate in the growing areas. That’s where a lot of them are gonna be. And like the first major thing that anyone listening to this that has Lymphatic things, what’s the best thing you can do is number one, get your diet on a paleo template, get the inflammation down, number two, get enough good clean water and fluids in your system, with maybe a little pinch of Redman’s real salt. There’s some kind of high quality mineral salts and the number three, move and that could be anything from just if you’re totally sedentary or wheelchair bound. Just isometric where you’re contracting your muscles and not even actually moving, or actually someone just going for a walk or someone actually doing a workout, or even doing a whole body vibration, where you actually sit on a vibration plate and that stimulates your lymph system and then you can do things outside of that by doing a massage. Getting a lymph rush, or actually getting a really good deep tissue or sweetest massage to help really move a lot of this lymph can help stimulate your immune system to.
Evan Brand: Great great strategies and get the testing done to figure out what you’re up against there’s there’s something happening right. If your Lymphatic system is not working not working properly there’s a reason. So now you just gotta do some digging and figure out what it was. In my case, I have multiple things I had to fix and I’m still working on fixing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Then of course the nuance. Things are gonna be all the infections so you really want to work with your functional medicine doc on that to help that of course when we have inflammation issues in our body. We already talked about the things that you can control but your adrenals are a big interplay, because your adrenal helped regulate inflammation that your natural anti inflammatory. We talked about how the thyroid has a major role and can create edema which can put more stress on the lymph because you of all this fluid that’s pooling ,that it just makes it harder to kind of get back up into circulation and clean it out and then all of the infections like I mentioned and all the supplements that you can use. It’s really important though that you start with the hierarchy, all the things we talked about one two three and four before we go on to five and six which are going to be the Lymphatic supporting arms as well, as, as well as killing the infections, we can put activated charcoal in there too because activated charcoal is a great cleanser in the guts. And if we’re cleansing crud out in the gut that means there’s less chance that it has to get circulated back to the Lymphatic system goods going out in the toilet because it’s going to be stuck in the intestines packaged up with the straight jacket on it and then out into the toilet. So activated charcoal or any type of really good binders or fulVic minerals can help bind up a lot of this junk and help you excrete it as well.
Evan Brand: Cool. It’s interesting you know we talk about a topic we try to go and zoom into that topic but we always end up connecting it to the other piece mainly because that’s important for us to get that message across. But because you literally can’t focus on just one body system, you literally can’t. You will fail like if you just. I’m going to go take a bunch of limp supporting herbs. You’re not going to succeed, because you’ve got to address everything else and for you to throw the adrenalin there too is critical because a lot of people ignore lymph and that’s why I mean one of the first things you and I talked about, you know, four or five years ago was hey you’ve got to have adrenal is on board whether you’re working on thyroid gut infections, like adrenals are literally the pillar that hold you up to make you strong enough to be able to handle working on any other system. So if your practitioner just doubles down on killing things in your gut and you don’t have adrenal support on board that could be a reason you’re not feeling as good or you’re still dealing with chronic fatigue type issues, you may just be overloading the system and the adrenal is can’t keep up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100 percent and that makes total sense man. Well today was a really great chat. Is there anything else you want to add about the lymph or add about any functional medicine aspects connected to this?
Evan Brand: I don’t think so. We could always do part two but for now I think that’s a good limp support and dysfunction 101 and we could dive deeper next time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great. Well if you guys are listening to this we really appreciate a thumbs up, a share if you’re watching on YouTube make sure you give us a share. Hit the bell as well, and put comments down below. We really want to know what you guys think. Want to get ideas for future topics. We really appreciate you guys jumping in. Reach out to Evan, EvanBrand.com. Evan does consults all over the world, JustInHealth.com for me. We all do consults everywhere. So if anyone’s in any country feel free to reach out. We’ll be happy to help you and I hope everyone’s enjoying a lot of this free content, not just listening to it and being entertained which we hopefully are. But we want to make sure that you guys are picking at least one thing where you can apply to your health, into your daily routine to make yourself healthier.
Evan Brand: Hey man, hey man, we’ll it’s great to chat with you. Look forward to talking with you again next week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. And then you have a great day. We’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand: Take care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-lymphatic-system-and-infection-support-podcast-241
Recommended Product:
https://justinhealth.com/water-pitcher
Natural Solutions for Diarrhea | Podcast #239
Diarrhea is a common sickness that deals with disruptions in your gastrointestinal system. Diarrhea is characterized by frequent, watery stools, abdominal cramping, and bloating. In most cases, diarrhea can be treated at home and it will resolve itself in a few days. You might experience Diarrhea as a result of a viral or bacterial infection, sometimes, it’s because of food poisoning. If left untreated, it can cause pain and dehydration to a patient.
Learn more about the natural solutions for diarrhea, what to do when you have diarrhea, and look through what natural medicine can do with curing diarrhea. More info with Dr. Justin himself and Evan Brand.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
00:20 Everything about Diarrhea
05:01 Common medications
09:29 Chronic Infections
20:25 Food and natural solutions
26:36 Essential Oils
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Hey guys it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here. Welcome back to the podcast. Evan, how are we doing today my man?
Evan Brand:
I am doing great. We’re here to talk about a glorious topic that somebody has to cover because if we don’t cover it, well then who the heck is going to get to the bottom of their gut issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
I know everything about diarrhea it’s there all the key things about diarrhea. What you can do? Why is it happening. Natural solutions. You really want to focus on getting to the root cause.
Evan Brand:
I had IBS for a long time, probably a decade.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Oh by the way just to kind of chime in before we dive in on the diarrhea aspect is we’re really working on upgrading the audio quality today everyone. So you’re listening on YouTube. We’ll put a little podcast link as well so you can listen to the higher grade audio give us some feedback on it, let us know what you think and if you really enjoy it, please give us some extra shares.
Evan Brand:
This should be like the ultimate studio quality based on how we’re recording it now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Yeah. So we’ve changed kind of how our recording methods. If you guys like it, let us know. We appreciate it.
Evan Brand:
So I had IBS for prolly like a decade. IBS is really a terrible stupid term because it really just means that you don’t have a clue why you’re suffering from gut issues. So, we will mention constipation just because it’s often for people to alternate where one week or one day, they may have diarrhea, and then the next day, or the next week, they may have constipation. So a lot of people do alternate like that and there’s many different causes. So our goal today is to try to break down some of these big triggers, and then talk about some of the testing options to investigate this problem, and then talk about some of the solutions, like what are the palliative things, what are the little low hanging fruits that you can do, but then what are the root cause strategies you have to implement as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Exactly. So one of the first things that’s happening with diarrhea is obviously motility is fast. Now the problem with that is, you’re going to you’re going to have malabsorption. It’s gonna be harder to break down protein absorb fat ionized minerals and absorb a lot of these key minerals for healthy metabolic function, thyroid function, mitochondrial function. So it’s really easy to have brain fog, fatigue, and to not feel like yourself. And especially to this inflammation of your body sucking out a lot of these minerals, pulling water into your small intestine and colon to kind of get whatever irritant is out. So then if these minerals are low, that can lead to more [inaudible] issues as well and minerals are important for healthy blood pressure. So if you’re getting dizzy, or standing up fast or having heart palpitations, or feeling anxious. These are all common side effects with diarrhea. Now we look at the long term effects of diarrhea or long term solutions or I should say solution slash causes, because they’re connected, are going to be chronic infections; parasites bacterial overgrowth H Pylori. We’re going to see a combination of low enzymes, low hydrochloric acid, levels and obviously inflammation in the gut. And the more inflamed the gut is the more things will be shuffled through the intestinal tract at a faster rate making it harder to absorb a lot of these nutrients. And when these nutrients aren’t absorbed, it creates this downward spiral because we need these nutrients for healthy metabolism, healthy adrenal, healthy thyroid right, selenium, magnesium zinc for healthy thyroid, magnesium for healthy mitochondria. Well now we start to have more and more nutrient deficiencies which continue to make these problems worse and worse and worse every single week. So it’s really this downward spiral and we have our chronic issues like I mentioned. And then we have acute issues, food issues, could be like food poisoning, like an E.Coli or salmonella, or [inaudible] chemical Baxter type of infection that causes an acute diarrhea, could be a gluten sensitivity issue as well. We’re gonna expose to a food allergen like dairy or gluten casein etc. and that’s creating inflammation that’s causing your intestinal tract to not be happy and to move things out faster. Also bacterial overgrowth typically with hydrogen gas, dominance regarding SIBO, the hydrogen gas can really affect motility and typically cause things to move along faster.
Evan Brand:
Yep. All great points. In my case I had H Pylori. So we know that was messing up all my acid production which is why I wasn’t digesting my food very well, once I got rid of the H pylori, then I retested the stool and that’s where I showed up with those parasites like crypto and giardia. And then once I got rid of those, finally I was able to get the diarrhea under control, and so I told the story to you many times on different podcasts we’ve done together where when I was in college I would have to figure out where the bathroom was, and that was just part of my lifestyle. I just thought OK, just find the bathroom and you’ll be fine. And many people they take the Pepto-Bismol or the Ammonium AD or whatever other type of prescription or over-the-counter anti diarrheal medication, and they just live with it. They keep it in their purse, they keep it in their backpack, and they just assume I just need this medication. And we always want to point out diarrhea is not a deficiency of anti diarrheal medication. There is something going on. So don’t just keep putting duct tape over the check engine light. You have to address why your check engine light is on in the first place.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
What are the most common antiviral medications. We have things like Pepto-Bismol, all right. These are gonna be anti diarrhea, Maalox would be another big one, those are the big kind of like over-the-counter types. Now one of the things that we’ll use in natural medicine which I think is great, is if we have some kind of toxin or irritant. The easiest way to help decrease that effect on the motility is bind it up. So we’ll use activated charcoal or bentonite clay taken with that food or questionable food were taken while motility is on the faster side and that can really help slow things up.
Evan Brand:
I’ve got my favorite one right here on my desk. Toxins Bind from Beyond Balance. You can only get it through practitioners but this is a game changer for me, one, the detox mode. Two, it’s very helpful to slow things down just a little bit. It’s not going to get you to a point where you’re constipated. You know some people can’t get constipated on binders if we are doing some type of detox protocol, but it’s very easy to mitigate that. Just throw in some extra magnesium and vitamin C and usually it’s no problem at all. It’s kind of like a gas pedal. You know some people they’re so into diarrhea territory they need full those binders multiple times a day to slow them down enough to have normal stools. But if you’re on the other side where you may tend towards one loose stool here or there, and then you get slowed down too much, then just throw in the extra vitamin C magnesium and you’ll be in the sweet spot.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Exactly so the big thing is we’ll throw in the binders like we talked about. Also dehydration is big. So we may add an extra minerals whether it’s Redmon’s Real Salt you know a full teaspoon with water shoot it down, a lot of conventional people are gonna go in the direction of PD light, which is going to have a lot of junky dyes and high fructose corn syrup and not the highest quality minerals so we want more natural minerals support. So Redmond’s real salt is a great way of doing that. You can also sip apple cider vinegar is excellent. Get some really good mineral support you can sip sauerkraut juice is excellent. There’s also some really good electrolyte formulas that are kind of blended together don’t have all the extra dyes and flavors and sugar in there. So those are good options as well. And if we need some extra glucose or extra carbohydrate we’ll just throw in some coconut water. Coconut water is your natural electrolyte formula with glucose or with sugar in there because it got a little bit of coconut sugar, but it’s not going to be on the natural side and it won’t have all fructose corn syrup in there that’s kind of going to be extracted from corn, right. So you’ll get some extra potassium from the coconut water and then we can always throw in some extra Redman’s real salt or even some new salt which is potassium chloride based salt so we can get our potassium and we can up our magnesium, and our sodium, and our chloride, and our magnesium ,and our sulfates. These are great ways we can get our minerals up. Also extra Pellegrino or Topo Chico good quality mineral water. On top of that will be really helpful for rehydration and getting your electrolytes.
Evan Brand:
When my tummy is upset. I’ll go for ginger tea. I’ll do a double bag a ginger tea, or even mix one bag of chamomile with one bag of ginger and then just throw in like a half or a quarter teaspoon of raw honey. And that’s pretty good too. You know some argue there’s a lot of different minerals and trace nutrients and stuff in honey. I don’t really use honey as a source of nutrition though, I just use it to taste good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Yes I think that’s great. Now ginger is excellent as well. Typically ginger has some natural prokinetic effects to it. So it really helps with slow motility, but let’s not forget diarrhea tends to have an inflammatory component to it. So a lot of these natural prokinetics that help with slower motility. Well they also have anti inflammatory qualities to them. So if we can decrease inflammation in the intestinal tract, that can really help modulate motility. It’s too fast and kind of bring it back down.
Evan Brand:
Yeah. Now, speaking of inflammation, it is possible that your diarrhea situation is more than just an irritable bowel situation that could be triggered by parasites H Pylori, bacterial overgrowth Candida. It could be an inflammatory bowel disease or some type of autoimmune disease like Crohn’s or also Diff Colitis. So we don’t want to discount the fact that your situation could be more serious. So, we don’t want you to listen to this podcast and just go drink ginger tea and think everything’s gonna be OK. You really need to work with a practitioner who can help you get the proper testing done to make sure it’s not something more serious, especially if you’ve been suffering with chronic diarrhea.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
One hundred percent. So we have these chronic infections that need to be looked at. So you really want to hook up with a good functional medicine doctor that can help you look at what potential infections or gut stressors could be there. And then let’s not affect this is really important. Let’s not forget the emotional stress. So we know emotional stress is going to interplay with the adrenals, and the adrenals is are part of that stress handling sympathetic nervous system. So we have the bridge to the parasympathetic which is the relaxation. Calm down, that’s the break. That’s the brake on the car to kind of slow things down, and then we have the gas pedal which is go go go go go, and the bridge from the parasympathetic, the brake, to the gas pedal, go go go. The sympathetic are the adrenal. And so when we’re activating those adrenals and we’re heading that fight or flight response, one of the big things that’s going to happen is motility tends to go faster or it can go faster because digestion disrupted. So when we have poor digestion because the sympathetic nervous system’s up, we have less enzymes, we have less acid. We’re going to have less breakdown of these food. So I said that things can go faster. They can also go slower too. When we have poor digestion, things can go fast or they can go slow. So the same root cause may be in effect though. That’s the kind of hard thing is, you could have someone can have diarrhea. The other person could have constipation and it could be similar root causes regarding adrenal and stress and in digestive aspects. You really have to look at everything from a root cause lens, and we connect the hormone component to it as well. And then let’s not forget, thyroid, one of the main symptoms of low thyroid can be low motility. Because thyroid hormone has a natural migrating motor complex stimulating effect, meaning it helps stimulate those wave like contractions. That’s the migrating motor complex which helps move food through. Now, with diarrhea, thyroid typically may not be as much of an issue but definitely with constipation, it could be. So slow motility low thyroid increase adrenal stress, increased cortisol, increased sympathetic nervous system. We could very well have diarrhea partly because of that and who knows what kind of stressors in the gut are affecting it. Food could stress it out. Infections could stress it out. It’s a two lane highway of communication going from, you know, the adrenal to the gut. It’s not just a one way, it’s two way; stress in the gut can cause adrenal stress, stress in the adrenal it can cause gut stress and vice versa.
Evan Brand:
Yeah. Think about a time. Yeah it totally does. Think about a time where you’re really scared. You know you had to slam on your brakes in the car, or you had a big business meeting, and you’re worried, you’ve got to sit down with the boss, man. You get scared and people get that nervous tummy, makes perfect sense. I think people forget about how much stress could play a role in their gut symptoms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
If you look at kiddos, right kiddos, they don’t even have the ability to manage their urine or bowels, it’s because at their age they don’t have the parasympathetic nervous system kind of built in yet, so they’re more sympathetic dominant. Cause sympathetic stress causes bowel or urinary release. And think about it, right, we all have had that story of someone who literally whether they wet their pants because they were so scared. Right. Why is that. Because the sympathetic nervous system can cause a release of the bladder or even the intestines. We see it more with the bladder because it’s more readily available. It’s easier to do. So we’ll see a lot with that level of stress can affect the bowels and affect the urinary tract.
Evan Brand:
Well I’ve read stories of different people in the military where they are in an active shooter situation or they’re in a hostage situation that people poop their pants. You know it happens. It’s not fun but it happens. So that just goes to show what the adrenal stress and the hormone peace can do to your gut. Now you mentioned medications, so we didn’t talk about drugs that people are taking that could be messing them up though. So what about like acid blocking medications? I would suspect that acid blockers are going to make the situation worse. And if you’re trying to control your reflux situation, but now you’re lowering your stomach acid, now you’ve got all this undigested food, you’re going to be much more likely to have diarrhea type issues if you’re on acid blockers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
100 percent so acid blockers make everything worse. Let’s say it was an acid issue, and you’re coming down the acid levels in your intestines, well a lot of times that’s not an excess acid issue. Usually it’s the guts lining is worn down so thin it just can’t handle much acid at all. It’s kind of like you want a great massage because you’re back some pain but that back when you have a sunburn at the same time so that back massage causes pain even though it’s really not, it’s just you’re in hypersensitive mode, right. The same thing with your gut when you when that gut lining, when that gastric ecosystem that you just can’t handle much, so you may actually need more, but your tolerance is too low, and the number two, if you don’t have enough acid or esophageal sphincter which is basically the connection between the stomach and the esophagus can stay open and we don’t have enough acidity. So then the food sits it rots acid after the fact forms from the rotting of that food, then it can raise up through that open esophagus sphincter, and start burning that lower part of the esophagus.
Evan Brand:
Let’s talk about kids for a minute. We do see quite a lot of kids, you know infants, toddlers, you know, five six seven eight nine teenagers, that are dealing with gut issues of different types. So if we start at really really young kids, you know, like breastfeeding age and those kids have diarrhea, most of the time we’re going to blame that on mom, probably having gluten or dairy or some other food allergy. And the diet now, so my daughter Summer, and when she was about maybe one and a half, we got her first stool tests done and that’s where she actually showed up with H Pylori plus a virulence factor. And she had either one or two parasites. I want to say she had a blast though and inaudible] amoeba but I can’t remember without looking at her labs. And so she had multiple factors. You know mom’s diet was clean, so we knew it wasn’t that, but you know she had just act like her stomach hurt, you could just tell she was in pain. And so, we gave her some liquid antimicrobials and we got rid of it. We retested the stool the H Pylori was successfully gone, and then she had some bacterial overgrowth and Candida. So we did another round of antimicrobials and then finally her guts and in a good place now. So it’s hard with kids because sometimes if they’re too young, they can’t express to you what’s going on, but you know by the time they’re age three four or five, hopefully they can tell you, Hey, my tummy hurts and if the kids [inaudible] then you know, hopefully paleo template and they’re still having issues, then you can get testing done on kids. It’s easy, stool and urine can provide a lot of information.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
One hundred percent. My son Aiden had significant diarrhea a few weeks back, significant, I think it was a food issue. So one of the first things we did is we kind of gave them some extra anti inflammatory support, we have some ginger in a liquid form to kind of calm his tummy. We added some extra binders and activated charcoal to bind things up, and then I just kind of looking at him I could tell, though based on how everything came about. There was definitely a food poisoning episode to it. So I got him on some specific liquid anti-microbial herbs and within twenty four hours his bowels were solid.
Evan Brand:
That’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Two days of like pure liquid. And anyone that has infants that we’re diapers, is not fun to clean up. So I was able to get that stabilized within 24 hours, made a huge difference and he’s on a regimen right now, more than likely he got some kind of infection. So we have him on an antimicrobial regimen, that’s liquid, because it’s easier for kiddos to get the liquid down, and then we have months and probiotics as well. Now that’s one other thing, probiotics can have some really good anti inflammatory benefit. So with diarrhea, we may even add in probiotics while we’re doing the herbs, just because they can really help kind of calm the gut down which may provide some relief with the diarrhea. And that’s important because I need to make sure we’re absorbing those nutrients, so we can get diarrhea. Like you know, compressed or dialed in. Then that’s going to help nutrition absorb a lot better. And then we used all the antimicrobials as well, that made a huge huge difference. But one other thing I want to highlight, because you were talking about acid blockers in the spiral of negative consequences that can happen with that, well same with antibiotics, because antibiotics are commonly prescribed for diarrhea as well. What if it’s not a bacterial issue? What if it’s a parasite? What if it’s a yeast overgrowth? What if it’s a gluten sensitivity reaction? Well guess what? Now you just knocked out a whole bunch of beneficial bacteria, maybe you create more inflammation. We know antibiotics can create mitochondrial stress. So it’s not good taking unless you know it’s an a help. Right? So then you could create a whole bunch more issues with the guts. Now we have this rebound overgrowth occurring and now we may have more issues that intensify over time because of that antibiotic. So we really got to be careful if we’re going to just throw medications at things kind of willy nilly.
Evan Brand:
Well said. Well, take someone who has chronic fatigue. You mentioned the mitochondrial damage. We know that’s associated with antibiotic use. So you’ve got someone that’s tired maybe because they’ve just been pooping so much, they’re exhausted from all the mineral depletion, we talked about the adrenal stress. You take that chronically fatigued person, you throw antibiotics in the system, they’re going to become more tired. So now they’re not even motivated enough to get up and cook the healthy nutritious foods they need to heal their gut. So I love that you brought that up because my next thing I was going to say was, well let’s go down the rabbit hole and change that. Let’s turn the tables a little bit. Let’s take my daughter. Let’s take your son and let’s put him through the conventional medical rabbit hole. What would have happened. We would have taken your son to the pediatrician or my daughter to the pediatrician and they would have said, Oh they’ve got diarrhea. Well, probably a bacterial issue. Let’s give them a round of antibiotics. There’s going to be a huge rebounding of Candida possibly skin issues that would happen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
What if there was a parasite?
Evan Brand:
Exactly. It wouldn’t it worked.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Yeah. What if my son got exposed to some gluten. No. Well no. It’s not going to fix that.
Evan Brand:
And most of the time when people come to us they’ve already been through that route. You know I’ve had many people that have been to their pediatricians with their children’s health issues and they’ve been disappointed at the level of care they’ve received. So they come to somebody like you or I. And we say look we really don’t want to use antibiotics in this case, number one because we have the clinical data. We’ve run the genetics full testing, we’ve run the urinary organic acids, we can tell you with confidence on the piece of paper, look, we’ve got this parasite, this bacteria, and we’ve got Candida overgrowth. So, yes you could use antibiotics for those bacteria but our success rate is so high using herbs. Why throw in the big guns if we can use things like olive leaf and Berberine and clove and other herbs that will still do the same antimicrobial benefit without killing mitochondria without killing good guys. There’s just a better way to do it and that is the way to do it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Exactly. We also may make changes with foods, we may cut out from fermentable carbohydrates, if there’s bacterial stop being fed by it. We may lean more on a gaps or a kind of a soup or stew or kind of bone broth type of template where foods are more in a liquid form to make everything easier to digest. And also we’re going to add an extra anti inflammatory [inaudible], aloe, slippery elm of course, Evan mentioned ginger already. These are excellent things to help kind of reduce inflammation maybe even turmeric or curcumin. Conventional medicine typically won’t touch that because, what are their anti inflammatory medications? Well they’re Prednisone, maybe [inaudible] right. These non-state real anti inflammatory is which actually can rip up the gut lining more and create more problems. So a lot of times these medications won’t be recommended because they may create more issues on the intestinal side. You know the major side effect of [inaudible] is alterations that kill 20000 thousand people a year, according to a New England Journal of Medicine. So they tend to not to to reach for many of these anti inflammatory is because they tend to cause more problems than not. But in natural medicine world, we have a lot more anti inflammatory that are natural and they aren’t going to have those side effects and can be added into your diet and really have beneficial effects.
Evan Brand:
Yeah. It’s crazy how quickly you could get down the rabbit hole and not end up any healthier than when you went into a hospital or immediate care center. You know, when we talk about antibiotics, we’re assuming that if you did have a bacterial infection, we’re assuming that that is a non antibiotic resistant strain. But what if you’ve got C. Difficile for example, which kills so many people you know diarrhea could be C. Diff. C. Diff is something that we see as an infection. Yep. And C. Diff has become very very resistant to antibiotics to where these gastroenterologists are recommending stronger and stronger drugs sometimes, even resorting to I.V. antibiotics to kill the Clostridium. I’ve never had an issue getting rid of Clostridium using herbs. I’ve seen it countless times I know you have to. It disappears with the antimicrobials that are natural because see, herbs are not a single mechanism, right, you can’t just say well there’s this one alkaloid or this one polyphenol it doesn’t work like that in nature. There’s so many things that we don’t even fully understand what’s in there. We just know hey Berberine has all this other stuff that comes with it and the package deal gets rid of C. Diff where antibiotics just may not.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Exactly. That’s why we’ll add in specific Sacramice or bifida or lactobacillus species to really calm things down. My big kind of warning for everyone listening is if you have an excess of blood in the stool, it’s not stabilized or the electrolytes in the minerals dropped so low lower, so fast that we’re dizzy, light headed we may need to go to an E.R. to get an I.V. and they kind of get things stabilized while you get things on track. Same with the blood and the stool. So just keep an eye. Things are really intense. And symptoms are ratcheting up fast and you can’t get fluid in, you can’t get electrolytes in, you can’t get things stabilized. Conventional medicine may need to be used to at least get things stable, and that’s going to be on the extreme side. We’d like to at least draw a line for people listening so they aren’t incredibly dogmatic and only go the natural route for the majority of people that would probably be fine. But if you’re in that camp where you can’t stabilize, an I.V. with electrolytes will be helpful. If excessive blood in the stool, then we may have to look at getting that at least stabilized in the meantime while we come back to this we should never ignore it. We should always come back. We may need some level of stabilization first.
Evan Brand:
Yeah well said that happened to my grandmother she had started. I think it was privately to a medication she had started, this was a couple of years ago where she ended up vomiting and having diarrhea. So she was losing liquids out of both ends.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Yes.
Evan Brand:
She couldn’t keep any water down. Her blood pressure was starting to get messed up. She’s already dealing with atrial fibrillation. So she had some heart issues going on as well. I just told her, look, this is a situation where you just got to go. So she went to the E.R. they gave her fluids. Unfortunately, they put her on antibiotics. So then she ended up having more issues with the antibiotics but as soon as I got her back home I was able to pump her full of 50 to 100 billion couple times a day of probiotics and then within about three days, one overnight, but within about three days, we got her bowels normalized again. So she was in a situation where you know especially at her age, she could have gotten really big trouble if she didn’t go to the hospital.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Same thing happened with my son. We were just able to get enough activated charcoal to slow the motility up and all of his drinks had extra electrolytes, extra minerals, extra nutrients, in the drinks. And then we just kept everything really cooked and really easy and on the lower FOB map side as well, and that kind of helped stabilize things, and then getting some of antimicrobials and really help too.
Evan Brand:
Yeah I mean if you have vomiting going on with diarrhea at the same time, one things that our pediatrician did say that was helpful early on in my daughter’s life was, I think she was around six months old. She got, we think it was like a rotavirus or some other type of virus maybe a no real virus. You know vomiting and diarrhea, so coming out of both ends and in the pediatrician we spoke with she’s supposedly more functional. However she still recommends a lot of antibiotics and things we don’t agree with. But, she said, give it two to four hours after vomiting before you try to throw anything and even breastmilk, even water, just let the gut rest. And I thought you know what. That’s actually a pretty good idea because sometimes, if it’s diarrhea and vomiting you get in a rush to throw stuff back in. But if the gut is so irritated sometimes you may just need to just fast for a couple hours and don’t do anything yet. Obviously, there’s a podcast, we’re not consulting with you also you see how there’s so many huge variations of this, and there’s such a spectrum of what may need to be done.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Yeah. How I would handle that is I would just come in there I’d let it rest for a bit. I’d add in some bone broth, some ginger tea, everything very liquid, bone broths, maybe some collagen and amino acids keep it very simple, very gentle, start working in a little bit of probiotics in there as well, start working in a little bit of binders and just kind of get your bowels stabilized, and if we can’t, big deal we just go get an I.V. on board well that buys us a little bit more time. We don’t have to worry about any electrolyte or hyponatremia issues from losing too much fluids.
Evan Brand:
Essential oils or something we should mention, some people get crazy with essential oils, like they’ll say that all essential oils are for everything, or essential oils cure this and cure that. You know I’m not going to go there, all I’m going to say is that essential oils can be helpful. There are some clinical double blind randomized placebo controlled studies of patients with irritable bowel syndrome and by using peppermint oil.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Peppermint’s great.
Evan Brand:
They have significant improvements in quality of life-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
That’s fine.
Evan Brand:
So coconut oil, avocado oil, put a little bit of carrier oil, just put a couple of drops of peppermint oil, rub it onto your tummy, that can be a game changer. Now I’ve seen people like putting like, lemon essential oil and stuff in their water. I just I don’t personally ingest essential oils, I just use them topically.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Yeah. That can be helpful though. The dilimening in those citrus oils or essential oils can definitely help with the diarrhea. So there is the component limiting in the citrus or orange or lime or lemon that does have some natural antiviral qualities, but again, when it’s more subtle that works, some of the herbs that we’re doing, the amount that we’re giving, acutely is so high. And if you were to take that, let’s just say an essential oil liquid form, you’d be shooting down like half the bottle a day and some of these oils can be very abrasive. That’s where it’s nice to have it in a capsule form or a liquid form that’s designed to allow it to get down smoothly without all the taste problems.
Evan Brand:
Yeah that’s where I get concerned. It’s like, OK, grapefruit seed essential oil, maybe that’s a good thing but lowered. I don’t want that going down my esophagus really.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Yeah. So it me essential oils can be great when it’s gentle stuff, can be really great for kiddos too, when they can’t swallow just being able to get a couple of drops in them. It can be very soothing on their tummy but when it gets more acute, that’s what we’ve got to pull out the big guns.
Evan Brand:
Yeah. So fever, that was another situation we forgot to mention, and we talked about the bleeding. We talked about the vomiting situation that can make things more tricky complicated. And then also fever but fever may be the body’s natural response too. So like this immediate idea to suppress a fever may not be wise either. I think it’s just a case by case basis. That’s why a conversation like this gets kind of hard.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Yeah in general my perspective on fevers, if it’s below a hundred and five degrees, we don’t worry about it. Fevers for the most part are always going to be fine as long as there’s not head trauma, if there’s head trauma in the hypothalamus maybe has an inability to regulate temperature then we get a little bit concerned. So head trauma from a car accident, or a fall, and then a fever ensuing afterwards may have to be a little more careful of that. But if there’s no head trauma involved, then we have a fever, then we’re just going to work on supporting the immune system because that’s the body raising the temperature to kill off Mesophilic bacteria. Medium temperature bacteria that will die around 100 hundred and one hundred and two. So it may go up a little bit, that’s below 1 0 5 you’re more than likely fine, conventional medicine we’ll typically recommend Tylenol way sooner which in my opinion is going to decrease glutathione. Actually not my opinion. That’s according to research. It will decrease with glutathione levels, and it will decrease your body’s ability to kill that bacteria. So my opinion is hundred and five or below you’re probably fine as long as there’s no head trauma. Either way please see your conventional MD regarding that. Just to be honest.
Evan Brand:
Yeah. Well said CBD oil just give a brief mention to it. You know I think people overstate the benefits of CBD oil just like they do with essential oils, like you can, oh my left pinky hurt, oh! CBD oil. You know so people get a little carried away with it however I used it for my daughter, I use it for myself, CBD oil does have benefits, now is it going to be as helpful as an aloe extract, the raw ginger extract, or berberines or Pau de Arco or olive. Probably not, really. I mean I think it’s great and it can modify things, but I just don’t think it’s necessarily root cause as much as some of the other things we talked about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
I a hundred percent. So that was an excellent podcast. He really went in deep on the clinical side. I hope everyone is valuing this information. If you do, give us the thumbs up, give us a share, and let us know your comments below, what you liked about this article, and what future topics you would like us to chat about. And if you want to dive in deeper, if you feel like this article resonates with you or a friend or family member, head over to EvanBrand.com to schedule a consult with Evan, or JustInHealth.com to schedule a consult with myself. We’ll put links down below. We work with patients virtually all over the world and we’d love to help you out if you’re ready for that next up.
Evan Brand:
Sounds good. Well great conversation I hope this helps people and we’ll be back next week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Excellent. Hey man it was great chatting with you. We’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand:
You too. Take care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:
Take care. Bye.
Evan Brand:
Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/natural-solutions-for-diarrhea-podcast-239
Natural Allergy Solutions | Podcast #225
Allergies are issues caused by an immune system that is hyper-responsive. Stress in the stress bucket, antigens which are foreign compounds, are some of the big causes of the hyper-responsive immune system.
In this episode, learn the things to look at in the stress bucket such as food stress, emotional stress, exercise, too much, too little, infections, environmental antigens like cedar, dander, pollens and other things to help fix these issues in a functional medicine perspective. Answer why it tends to become a non-issue when one is healthy or when inflammation is under control. Also, learn why those little bits of antigens may be enough to tip one over when inflammation is already topped up and antigen or stress bucket is full.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
02:33 Hyper Responsive Immune System and Allergies
10:26 Nutritional Functional Medicine Options for Allergies
15:09 Fungal Infection Solutions
20:05 Quercetin for Mast Cells
28:13 Poor Breathing Solutions
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey there, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani, how you all doing today? Evan Brand, my man, what’s going on, how you doin’?
Evan Brand: Hey man, happy Monday to you. My pink office is gone, so that’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great!
Evan Brand: I’ve now got grey office, and for anybody doing, uh, interior work, they need to just get a hold of you, you’re my interior designer now. You gave me the idea of this good grey color that I have.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s knitting needles grey. We just had my son’s playroom paint to that same color. I just love the greys like that because one, that room, like it’ll go when there’s a little more light or look a little more blue, and then look- look a little more slate or- or dark grey, and then it just kinda blends with everything, it’s- it’s surely Williams number one color of the year like three years ago, and I just- I just have it in a lot of my key rooms.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So, the paint brand I did is Romabio, R-O-M-A-B-I-O. So part of allergy is k- is your indoor environment, you know-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: -the NPA talks about how dirty indoor air quality is compared to outdoor air quality. So if you’re doing any remodeling, you’re doing any painting in your home, if you’re using garbage products, even some of the stuff labeled as low VOC, it still could contain toxic chemicals, the Romabio is all mineral-based, and so you literally smell nothing. And so, there’s no off gassing, you don’t have to open the windows, you’re not gonna get sick when you put it in especially if you’re chemical sensitive person or if you have allergies, you know, you’re gonna be just fine. And even if you’ve got a garbage paint that you wanna paint over, you can just paint right over with Romabio. So, that would be step 1 for today’s talk on allergies is, optimize your indoor air quality. Humans, we spend way too much time indoors, that’s just what we do now because of our society and we’re connected to computers all day. How could you put a desk outside, yeah, you could but then you might not be able to see the screen. So, I do try to work outside when the weather’s nice and sit in the shade under a covered patio, but most of the time we’re gonna be indoors. So back in the corner there, you see my Molekule Air Purifier, Justin’s got one in his office too. I’ve had great success with it so far. The air in here really does s- smell really fresh. It’s almost like you’re at the beach. It’s just a really, you know, fresh air uh sensation, it’s not an ionizer, you don’t want those, you don’t negative ions being created from your air purifier because what those do, is it actually sticks all the toxins and mold and pet dander, it sticks it to the walls like a magnet, so it- the ionizer takes it out of the air but it sticks it to your wall which you don’t want. And what we’re using is a technology called peco, P-E-C-O which actually destroys the- the pollutants, it destroys the dander, it destroys the mold spores. And that’s a far better situation, uh, in terms of your- your air purification.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, air is really important. So today’s podcast is on allergies as we allude it to. So, allergies are gonna be an issue when your immune system is hyper responsive, okay? And one of the big things that’s gonna make your immune system more hyper responsive, is gonna be stress in your stress bucket, or an allergy terminology, we call it, antigens. Antigens are like foreign outside compounds. So, anything that’s gonna drive up inflammation, whether it’s foods, like gluten or dairy, or sugar, or aspartame or MSG, uh, grains, these food- they just have more inflammation. Inflammation is gonna drive prostaglandins, right, these are like- these are cosanoid type of uh- co- ho- almost like hormone-like compounds, they can increase things like prostaglandin e2 which is more inflammatory, right? It’s gonna create more histamine, it’s gonna create more swelling and vasodilation, it’s gonna create more congestions, and of course a lot of foods also are very mucus forming too. So we have mucous, we have congestion, we have stagnant lymph, and we’re adding all these inflammation from our food, and then also stress will do it because cortisol is gonna be a- a stress hormone, it’s an anti-inflammatory hormone but it does- it’s very catabolic. So it’s gonna break tissue down. It’s gonna cause constriction. It could- it could- gonna create adrenaline which is gonna cause constriction that’s gonna decrease blood flow and a lot of waste too. And it’s going to- uhm, decrease your sex hormones, which is your ability to heal, repair, recover and be anabolic. So we look at everything, you know, from a functional medicine perspective, we’re looking at our stress bucket, and we’re doing a really good history evaluating food stress, emotional stress, exercise, too much, too little, infections, uhm, and then we’ll also look at environmental antigens like, in Austin, cedar is a big one. Dander, right, various grasses, right? These types of things, pollens, these can go into your stress bucket. Now, the more you’re healthy, the more your inflammation is under the control, the more it becomes a non-issue. But of your inflammation is already topped up, and your antigen/stress bucket is full, those little bit of antigens may be enough to tip you over.
Evan Brand: Yup, well said. And there’s other things that can add into that bucket too. So like bacterial overgrowth which is something that we’re always testing for via stool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Evan Brand: Uh, we’re looking for signs of leaky gut, so we’re look-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: -for inflammation in the gut, we’ll look for your secretory IgA level on your stool test-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Evan Brand: -uh, we could even see like some microscopic bleeding, you know, there’s a marker called a colt blood that we look at, and that could be related to major inflammatory issues, or even some type of autoimmune gut condition. So if you’re looking at this and then you combine the diet, if someone is eating a high histamine diet, this is gonna be like alcohol, you know, your wine, your beer, uh, a lot of fermented foods people go crazy with now like sauerkraut and soy sauce and kombucha, those are all gonna be higher histamine. Cured meat, so, a lot of people doing bacon in the paleo community, that’s cool, but if it’s cured, those cured meats could be a problem, and then of course like dried fruit, I see tons of people eating like dried mango slices, that’s real high histamine. So you take your environmental allergies like you’ve got your cedar fever, plus maybe you’ve got some gluten in dairy in there, and then you’re snackin’ on dried mango slices, you probably gonna have some issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So we always wanna look at what- what’s the root underlying issue? We have a hypersensitive immune system, we do a really good audit as a functional medicine doc to figure out all the foods that could be driving it. Okay. I see significant reduction in allergies when we just get the inflammatory foods out. Dairy is a big mucus one, grains are a big one, and then also the hidden inflammation like in the sauces and those kind of things. Now, once we kinda have that looked at and supported, getting the hormones and the cortisol under control is huge. Because the more our cortisol is increased, that can affect our immune system, right? Typically, that can create a hyper responsive immune system and even a- a decreased immune response. But typically, with allergies, we’re seeing a higher immune response especially the TH2 part of the immune- so that- that’s like, we have our TH1 part of our immune system, that’s our cytotoxic immune system, that’s our like our natural killer cells, our helper cells. Think of that as a special forces of our immune system, right? It’s the navy seals, it’s the delta force, it’s the army rangers, it’s the first line of defense in attack. Then we have TH2 part of our immune system, that’s like our humoral, or antibody-based immune response. And these are like the infantry that comes in like a week later. This is the same kind of immune response that when you get a vaccination, you’re trying to stimulate these antibodies on the humoral side, to go and create memory cells, and these memory cells kinda linger in the background and they can go attack things. Now when you have a lot of allergies, a lot of times you can have this hyper TH2, that’s hyper antibody response, and that’s- that’s a big one. So, typically, you know, when you vaccinate, you’re gonna jack that immune response up. So there is some data with, I know the DPT vaccine that one of the side effects is increased allergenicity later on in life, and I think part of it is, just winding up that TH2 part of the immune system. So, we’d look at the foods, we’d look at the stress, we’d look at sleep, right, and then there are additional supplements that we can use to kind of curtail and kind of bump that immune response down. Now, low hanging fruit clinically, I find high levels of allergens, also seems to correlate with low stomach acids. So, I find not being able to digest your food, food sitting in your gut, putrefying and a lot of that because of low HCL, low hydrochloric acid, and low enzymes ’cause HCL and enzymes are brother and sister. We need good acidity; we need good nice high levels of acidity to stimulate our pancreas to make enzymes. So we need HCL, that creates enzyme activity, right? Then we- we make our proteolytic enzymes, our lipolytic enzymes and then we also have bile salt production. And our bile does pull out a lot of junk too. So, we need good bile to bind up a lot of that crap that may be from our environment too. So we have HCL, enzymes, proteolytic – protein digesting, lipolytic – fat digesting, and then our bile salts which helps with fat as well, and does some other junk in there that we wanna release out our stool.
Evan Brand: Yeah, makes sense. Well, people say, “Oh, when I was younger, I didn’t have allergies, but now that I hit age 40, or age 50 or age 60, I have allergies”. We know that as you age, you make less and less stomach acid every year. So sounds like if you wanna battle this, supplementing with enzymes, and then you mentioned the putrefying in the gut, there- there is exactly what we’re talking about with a bacterial overgrowth or a candida overgrowth, or potentially a parasitic infections is that, those infections including H-Pylori are gonna reduce the stomach acid level even more. So, if you just go out, “Okay, Dr. J said enzyme and acids”, you make around buy digestive enzymes and acids and you don’t get better, and that’s because there’s still another layer. There’s still another root cause that hasn’t been addressed that could be the infection piece, or as you mentioned, cortisol, it could be the cortisol, pulling apart the tight junctions in the gut barrier, then that allowed bacterial overgrowth. So if you fix the gut bugs but then you still don’t go upstream to fix cortisol, you’re still gonna end up in the same situation with allergies again. This is not, by the way, a deficiency of antihistamine drugs. You’ve noticed we’ve not talked about drugs. Maybe we should spend just a couple minutes talking about the conventional treatment for allergies, you know, what the ENT doctor is going to do for you in this situation, “Oh, doc, I have allergies”, the- the things they have to offer are- they’re not-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Evan Brand: -root cause.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, let’s just go over one more thing before we dive into the pharmaceutical option, and I think you can learn a lot when we contrast nutritional functional medicine options for allergies and then we can contrast it on the conventional allopathic medicine. You can really see philosophically which path are going down, like this is- there’s a big divide in the road, right? One is, we’re trying to reduce inflammation, modulate the immune system, help with drainage, help with inflammation, help with the gut microbiome, and then the other is, hey let’s- let’s give antihistamines, let’s give corticosteroids, right, let’s give uhm, things that are going to suppress the immune system, versus support, heal, nourish, and drain out. Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: Absolutely, yeah. The decongestants, those things too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, yeah, the e- essentially anti-histamines, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, one of the big things with the gut is the microbiomes. We talked about the hyper responsive immune system; probiotics have a huge effect at modulating the immune system. So when we have commensal bacterial overgrowth or dysbiotic bacterial overgrowth or infections or H-Pylori, typically we start to see a lot of collateral, not so good bugs starting to accumulate, right? ‘Cause you know, bad people tend to hang together, it’s very rare you just have a solo bad person by themselves, and then can create an immune response that puts us in let’s say not so good direction. So, getting some of the bad guys to dysbiotic, you know not so good stuffs or the infections under control is very helpful, and then also bringing up the beneficial bacteria, lactobacillus, bifidobacter-type of bacteria, if we’re sensitive to that, we may even use more spore biotics, like bacillus, strains, we may avoid a lot of the lactobacillus, K-CI strains, the higher histamine strains if you’re sensitive. So we may look at lower histamine strains, look at, you know, we’d avoid the para-k-ci, the k-ci we may give more spore biotic strains with the bacillus coagulans, ___[12:22] to support the microbiome which does have a modulating effect on the immune system.
Evan Brand: I’ve seen some of the lower histamine probiotics on the market, I think it’s usually unnecessary to have to do some of that specific if you just fix the gut. I’ve rarely had somebody have a problem. With you and I, I mean, we use professional healthcare companies to manufacture our products. And so, the quality is so insanely high, it’s very rare. Maybe like 1 out of a hundred or 1 out of several hundred clients who can’t tolerate our normal, high dose regular probiotic. And that’s because we usually have fixed before we come in and fertilize and add all these probiotics, you and I have already tested, and we’ve already identified and fixed any infections that would potentially be releasing histamine. You know, these different bacteria could be releasing toxins that short of- shooting at the immune system. We’ve already cleared all that out. So, the probiotics are usually tolerated versus, the maybe if you just heard this, and you thought,” Hey, just said enzymes and probiotics, I’m just gonna go buy those two things and think I’m gonna get better”, you might not ’cause you still haven’t gone to the correct order of operations.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. So, I would say maybe 1 to 5 percent of my more inflammatory, very- lot of inflammation, lot of the immune dysregulation patients fall into that category, number 1. But like we’d use that, I do find a lot of people that really are reacting to probiotics, they’re throwing a whole bunch of probiotics into a tummy or a microbiome full of dysbiotic, not so good bacteria or even lots of infections. And that’s where you can get a lot of that kind of response. You know, my- my analogy, it’s just like throwing a whole bunch of seeds down, and a weed- oh, and a garden full of weeds, it’s like taking your car to a car wash, and getting it waxed before you get it washed, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s an order of operations and how things kind of our, you know, for best practices so to speak, and it- when we incorporate a functional medicine program, that best practices and that kind of system approach is already built into the logic of what we’re doing.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, it’s kinda like if you just go down the reign of supplement, I only start like pick and choose range of things, like, this is immune, I’m gonna throw it at it, and hope that it sticks, I mean, you might get some limited success with that, you know, people could go out and buy an herb like stinging nettle for example, and they could take stinging nettle, maybe they get some progress, but it still may not be root cause. You wanna talk about that now, maybe some herbs we do use?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think we can go there. Is there anything else you wanna highlight on the physiology or the biochems ’cause I- I really want our listeners to understand what’s happening in their body from a physiological biochem perspective, so they get the root, ’cause then when they understand what’s happening, then we have this puzzle piece whether it’s a supplement, or a drug, or a diet, or lifestyle modification, they can see how it plugs in. ‘Cause that way, people get the root cause perspective, versus the palliative, you know, paint over the rust so to speak? Is there anything else you wanna highlight on the biochem or physiology part?
Evan Brand: Yeah, now that you mentioned it, I would just say uhm, fungal infections, of the sinuses could be another problem that most people miss, and especially the ent doctors miss. So people that have lived in an environment where they’ve had high moisture and potentially mold, they may have some type of uh, fungal infection up in the sinus cavity where you can do a- a- a blend of citrus oils, in essential oil format that we put into a sinus irrigator that’s battery powered and you can pump this up into your sinus cavity and don’t actually kill off the colonization that’s happen because, your sinuses are so close to the brain. So if you’ve got a fungal infection up in here, that’s so close to your blood brain barrier. You could be releasing mycotoxins into your sinus cavity up into your brain causing allergic response even if your gut checks out okay. So I would just say make sure you’re addressing both sinus and gut at the same time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I agree. And sometimes, some of these critters, they can hang out in the gut. Now one of the things that I do, especially with my son, ’cause he’s not quite at the age where he can blow his nose really well to get all that, you know, mucus that’s way up here in his frontal cavity out. So, we use the device called the nasaline, and then we use the neti Xlear packets which have xylitol and also so many uh- minerals and sodium bicarbon there. And we’ll suck up about, you know, couple of ounces of that in the nasaline. We’ll mix it up in the- in the solution, then we’ll suck up a couple of ounces, and then we’ll- we’ll inject it in one nostril, then a second or two, a flow coming from the other side where it drains, and then we’ll go to the other side and we’ll push- and I’m not talking the spray, we’re not doing the xylitol spray, we’re actually doing a syringe and nasaline pump, that’s like a big turkey baster, and we’re-
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -we’re injecting fluid up, and it’s literally flowing out of the other nose for 1 to 2 seconds. When I kinda ring out his nose, and then we do the other side, and have it flow for another second or 2, and that’s going all the way up in the frontal cavities, and may even go down the back of the throat. So if you’re having an annoying post nasal drip, that could be something hanging out way in the back posterior part of the sinus cavity that needs to get flushed out. And the xylitol is great ’cause it will kill some bacteria and potentially even some fungus and then just- and also restoring that good pH up there. So it makes it harder for some of the not so nice stuff to grow, it’s very helpful for sinuses in- or for allergies in the sinus cavity.
Evan Brand: That’s beautiful, and does he tolerate that, is he allow you to do that or is it a pain?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, here’s the deal. We used to use the bottle, like the Neal med spray bottle or the- or the uhm netty Xlear bottle, but err- one- if you- if you had it at an angle little bit, it- you wouldn’t get optimal pressure-
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -so the nasaline allows you to get optimal pressure from any angle ’cause it’s- it’s kind of, you know, in an injection fashion. And then number 2, is you get more flow, you get better pressure. So sometimes with the bottle, there’d be mucus, and we- there wasn’t enough pressure to break it up. So with the nasaline, you can get like 2 to 3 times more pressure, so it breaks it right up and then you can see it fully on the other side and it’s- you get that like sense of like, “Oh my God, that was like way up in your sinus”, and then he can breathe so much better and helps, ’cause, he’s only had one ear infection, and it happened because we couldn’t get snot mucus from up here out. And again, that’ll change as he can blow his nose, right? But when your kids are younger, it helps and if you have sinus issues, it’s awesome too! Totally great. And you may not need the nasaline, you may just be able to do the regular s- you know, regular spray ball that comes with them, but that’s helpful.
Evan Brand: And this is nasaline like N-A-S-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A-L-I-N-E. If you go to justinhealth.com/shop, and click on recommended products, we have the links there, I’ll have my staff put the links below in the comments section, so if you’re listening to the podcast, or the YouTube video later, you can go and look for those links and we’ll have ’em there for y’all.
Evan Brand: Perfect. Well, I think we talked about a bunch. So, are you ready, do you wanna hit some- some nutrients? Things that can help-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I wish to. One more thing here, I know, I’m- I’m a little long-winded, so we have our 5 major immune, uhm cells, right? 5 major immune cells, we have- in- in school they’ll teach ya, Never Let Monkeys Eat Bananas – Neutrophils, Lymphocytes, Monocytes, Eosinophils, Basophils. Okay. Basophils are the big ones we’re worried about with allergies ’cause basophils, outside of the blood, when they go into the tissue, they turn into mast cells, and mast cells produce histamine, and histamine has that vasodilating kind of mucus forming allergy-like effect. And a lot of the medications like Pepcid ac, these 5H2, 5HT2 blockers is antihistamine meds, lot of times they’re working on that response. So, we’re trying to really get that immune system to relax and to chill out into also not over stimulated with stress, and food and poor diet and lifestyle.
Evan Brand: Yup. I think that is important to bring up mast cells, ’cause, yeah, I mean, when you talk about people with mast cell problems, I mean, they’re allergic to anything. Some of those people have to even travel with uh, EpiPens, because if they have some huge mast cell explosion.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, yup. Totally. So, I’ll let you go through everything here Evan.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well, I was gonna say which I was calling like a silly yet, I was calling it coricidin, but it’s really quercetin. Justin’s like, “Dude, it’s quercetin”. So, quercetin, uh it just [crosstalk] but anyway, so, this is- this is a bioflavonoid, and this is very helpful to stabilize mast cells. So, actually, uh, Neil Nathan had a good book on mast cells. And he was talking about how- the number 1 thing he found from a natural nutritional perspective to stabilize mast cells, meaning, if you have a mast cell activation problem where someone is just overreacting to everything like they breathe in cologne, and get a headache, that’s likely a mast cell problem that’s creating a lot of excess histamine in dumping that into the system. So in his book, he discussed using quercetin, and how some people can’t even tolerate a low-dose like 40 milligrams was too much for some people, that’s gonna be a very sensitive person. And most of the time, we can go up to 2, 3, 4, 5 hundred milligrams of quercetin, and then usually there’s other uh bioflavonoids like rutin, R-U-T-I-N that come with it. So, that’s what you and I use a lot. And I would say that’s probably 1 of the top 5 nutrients that you can use, but, don’t just go to Walmart and buy some there. You wanna get a professional quality version because, just ’cause it says, it’s “XYZ” on the label, that doesn’t mean it’s the quality in purity and, if it’s garbage and you bought it at Walgreens pharmacy, it could have a bunch of extra fillers, corn and gluten and who knows what else. It could be in a tablet versus a capsule, versus a powder, so then the absorption in the gut is not as good, ’cause you have low stomach acids. So, you can’t just assume because it’s on the label that it’s gonna work for. So I have to give that a little disclaimer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Yeah, one thing I wanna highlight, is uhm, reishi mushroom or Ganoderma lucidum is excellent. Rishi is known- I’d one article right here called the suppression of inflammatory and allergic responses by a pharmacologically potent fungus and Ganoderma lucidum or reishi mushroom. And essentially, rishi really helps modulate the immune system but it also helps push up that TH1 immune system. Now, why does that matter? ‘Cause people that may have a lot of allergenic issues, they may have this really high bit of TH2 going on, right? It’s on a see-saw. So it TH2 is high, guess where TH1 sits? So, by- it’s- it’s low, right? Just like with one end of the see-saw, is up, the other end has to be down. So think of the side that’s down is TH1, think of the uhm, which is the side that rishi supports, and think of the allergenic side is over here, on the TH2. So if you bump up this TH1 and guess what you’re doing to that TH2 allergenic immune response? You can kind of bring it back in to benefit.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’m gonna call on the- I call it rishi, maybe call it rishi [crosstalk]-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So- you- we’re pronouncing quercetin differently, and rishi differently. I love it man. [Crosstalk]
Evan Brand: I love it, I mean, I take it almost every day. There’s a couple different-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah.
Evan Brand: -supplements I take that does have mushrooms in it, so, I- I’m a huge fan and there has been- I mean, they call it the mushroom of immortality, so, I mean, this is something been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years before Americans picked up on it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So let me just read you part of the abstract here. I talk about here, “A number of herbal drugs have been identified in the past that can target inflammatory, cytokines among these Ganoderma lucidum aka rishi, a powerful medicinal mushroom has been found to possess immune-modulating and immune potentiating capabilities, and has been characterized as a wonder herb”. And this article right here, I will put- put the link here below, link here below is this review will focus is on the molecular mechanism and the inflammatory and anti-allergenic reaction this mushroom has especially with allergies. So we’ll put the link below you’re not gonna see the whole thing because a lot of these things are stuck behind paywalls but it just- we- you know I’m just putting it out there because I want people to know there’s a lot of research on some of these compounds and how they can help modulate the immune response. Now I haven’t read the whole article because it’s behind a paywall but I’m gonna guess part of that mechanism and how it’s helping allergies is to that t1 th2 seesaw analogy I just gave y’all.
Evan Brand: Yeah I would say the same thing with the astragalus, you know I love astragalus, I think it’s time of the year we’ve already started to see a couple of ticks on our dog so we’re back in two tick season already and if you do get bit supposedly if you get bit, uh by a tick, and you have astragalus in your system, that may help to prevent the transmission of the Borrelia burgdorferi that causes lyme disease. So, I basically stay on astragalus starting in the spring throughout the rest of the year. But I think that would be a good TH1, TH2 balancer as well for allergy season.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So we wanna make sure we draw line here, right? The line is, these herbs and nutrients can be used palliatively in the same category that drugs- the drugs are, right? But, if we’re actually fixing the root underlying issues that may create the environment for allergies to form like pet danders in house, mold in the house, poor diet, inflammation, low- you know, not enough stomach acid, poor adrenals. If we don’t fix that, then these issues may not have a root cause supporting benefit. So we draw the line, these are nutrients but they can still be used palliatively as well as to support the root cause. So our goal is to always support the root cause, by addressing these issues we already highlighted, but they can also be used uh, without addressing the root cause as well but they’re always way more effective than synergistic when we- when we’re fixing the diet, the lifestyle, stress that are causing everything to dysfunction to begin with. So I like to draw that line, ’cause most people, they use allergy medications today, without any focus on the root cause. We always wanna delineate and draw that clear line for y’all.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I was pulling up a study here that was talking about prenatal, perinatal, and childhood vitamin D exposure, and their association with childhood allergies, and basically, this uh study discusses, they were measuring vitamin D levels, through different ages of kids. And the lower the vitamin D level throughout pregnancy or through childhood, increases risk of allergies later on. So, long story short, if your pregnant mom listening, make sure your vitamin D levels are up, you know, preferably like 60 to 80, uh, we like to see it, it’s typically in the U.S., it’s gonna be NG over DL. That’s gonna be the uh, the unit. But if you look at your reference range, you wanna be on the higher end of your reference range of vitamin D, that’s an easy one to fix.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A hundred percent, yup. So let’s go to the list here, we mentioned vitamin D, and how that modulates the immune system. We talked about medicinal mushrooms, Ganoderma lucum- lucidum or rishi is our favorite herb. If we’re Evan, it’s- how do you say it?
Evan Brand: I say rishi.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Rishi, rishi, potato, patata. Probiotics, quercetin is excellent especially with a lot of the- the bioflavonoids, I think you mentioned the histidine, the rutin. Uh, bromelain, which is an enzyme found on pineapple which is great for helping with allergies, stinging nettle is an excellent one. In my line, I’ve a product called aller clear which has a lot of these compounds in it, it has a stinging nettle, it has some of the vitamins C, the bioflavonoid, it has some potassium bicarbonate, these are really good kind of, I say first line natural medicine, functional medicine type of compounds. Anything you wanna add to that Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I would just say make sure you’re working back towards the root cause, so, someone can go buy those supplements, great job, but still make sure you’re looking at your gut, make sure you’re looking at your home environment, do you have new carpet that’s off-gassing toxic chemicals, do you have new paint, did you move into a new apartment, a new condo, a new town home that has all their pollutants in the air that are messing up your sleep at night. So maybe you need to have a high-quality air purifier in your bedroom while you’re sleeping, maybe that’s gonna reduce the stress in your bucket, but you can still do these other things. Just make sure you’re- you’re checking everything else off the list, I don’t want people just taking quercetin and thinking they- they’re gonna be cured.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, 100%. Alright, so let’s continue to roll through some of our other things on our list here. My list, let me pull back up here. Alright, good. So we talked about the medicinal mushrooms, really-really important, we talked about the stinging metal. Uhm, couple other things I wanna highlight, is just poor breathing. A lot of people could have like a deviated septum, and that could require surgery. Some people, it may be more functional based where you can do a specific chiropractic technique called nasal-specific, where they can go up there, and they could put a balloon up and they can- they can kind of balance out those little bones that could be misaligned. So I always recommend the nasal specific chiropractic technique first because that’s- doesn’t require anesthesia, medications, or invasive surgery. So, that’s always better first. And then just making sure you have good posture, right? Making sure your external auditory meatus sits right above your top of your shoulder there, good posture, and then making sure you- the- bones in your neck are moving properly. Soon as you start to go forward head posture, one of the things that starts to happen is your airway starts to close down a bit, okay? The more your airway starts to close down, you start recruiting as you start going more forward, you start recruiting from these intercostal muscles to breathe. So now you’re here, and your breathing from this- your chest muscles, right? So we take a deep breath, if you put a hand on your tummy, and a hand on your chest, you want the bottom hand to be the one primarily moving your chest shouldn’t be. So, you should- when you breathe, [inhales], by chest breath, this is the hand that moves first. No go. If we’re belly breathing/diaphragmatic breathing, [inhales], this is the one that you should be breathing with. A lot of people, they don’t naturally wanna do that ’cause it- make sure tummy look a little bit bigger and everyone wants to have those- that- that beach body. So you see guys walking around like this, that means they’re automatically breathing through their chest which is activating that sympathetic nervous system response, which then will throw off the immune system too if it’s done chronically.
Evan Brand: Yeah, for people who are listening audio, they didn’t see Justin, he was showing the kind a turtle head basically when you’re standing and, if everybody is looking down at their smartphones these days, everybody has that kind of turtle head, head launch forward kinda down and forward, he was saying, that’s gonna be recruiting some of those muscles there in the front of your neck and then he was kind of hunch over at the same time at his shoulders. So he was showing what you want. ‘Cause you wanna be basically your head, you want on top of your shoulders, you don’t want your head in front of your shoulders, he’s saying that’s what’s leading to the more chest breathing, and not the belly breathing. So that’s important, I mean, I’ve noticed, just watching my daughter, that, you know, young children, they’re naturally belly breathers. And as we age and become stressed, we become chest breathers. And chest breathing causes anxiety. You don’t wanna be a chest breather. If you look at somebody having the panic attack, they’re not breathing in their belly, their breathing in their chest.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think a lot of people, number 1, they- they don’t wanna look like they’re 5 or 6 months pregnant ’cause they’d really do a deep belly breath. You know, basically, all your organs, all your intestines are going down as your diaphragm is pushing out. Then- and so, make sure you should look a little bit bigger in the tummy but it’s just, you know, it’s just your body trying to get a- a good diaphragmatic breathing, it’s just moving those organs around, that’s all.
Evan Brand: Yeah, who cares? You gotta- you still care what people think, then, you gotta get over that first.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Alright, anything else you wanna add on the breathing postural side?
Evan Brand: I think you did good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, cool. Now we already talked about, you know, what these various things could be, right? Pollen, danders, animal dust, mites, right? Uh, things in your fur, right, these kind of things, you know, could be topical things like latex or eating gluten, or anaphylactic things like peanuts, of course, right? And a good air filter will help with some of these ones that are more environmentally based. Now, I- I have one, justinhealth.com/air, there’s a good one there that I like. There’s 2 or 3 brands that I like as well. If you go to justinhealth.com/shop, you’ll see couple the ones that I like and then I personally have about all 3 in my house. I know Evan talked about the uhm, uh, what was the one that you have Evan?
Evan Brand: The molekule?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The molekule, and I have the molekule as well. Molekule I think is great. One thing I like about the molekule, it’s- looks nice, doesn’t it?
Evan Brand: It does look good. Yeah, I don’t know if you- I don’t know if you have a coupon code. Do you have a coupon for people ’cause if you don’t, I do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Good. Why don’t you put your- let’s do this. If you’re listening here, Evan will put all the- the links and stuff below, if you’re listening to his, and then vice versa for mine. So we’ll put that in the show notes here too.
Evan Brand: Okay. We can save you lot of money. Air purifiers are not the cheapest thing in the world, but they are priceless, I mean, it’s one thing that I would not live in a house, eat, no matter how clean the building materials, I would not live in a house without air purification because-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%.
Evan Brand: -it’s just- it’s too important especially if you got your kids like Justin and I do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup. Sup- super important. So now, we talked about some of the- you know, the causes there, we talked about the biochemistry and the physiology, we talked about some of the conventional things, right? It’s gonna be potential antibiotics, it’s gonna be antihistamines, it’s gonna be uh, immune suppressants, it could even be corticosteroids, or even prednisone if it’s really high, could even be to that degree. [crosstalk]
Evan Brand: Your ENT is not gonna discuss gluten, they’re likely not gonna discuss dairy. I’m sure there’s some out there that may but there probably few and far between. I’m guessing the guy right down the street’s probably not gonna say that to you. And it’s unfortunate, hopefully with podcasts like this, we can turn the tide around. And when you go into an ENT, the first thing you’re gonna say is, what’s your diet, do you eat dairy, uh how often do you eat grains, how much sleep do you have, uhm, do you have brand new carpet that’s off gassing formaldehyde, uh, do you have an air purifier in your bedroom, like, err- you know, hopefully the ENT visits will start to become like this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And it’s really hard to do that in the conventional insurance model for sure. [crosstalk]
Evan Brand: …6 minutes or something for an appointment?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know, totally. And we talked about some of the natural compounds that we use, the quercetin, uhm, HCl, or some kind of acidifying agent like apple cider vinegar. We also like a lot of the beneficial probiotics which may be depending upon how sensitive you are as well. And we already talked about- one of the things I like is kidney glandular. Kidney glandular or kidney tissue has an enzyme called DAO, which actually helps metabolize histamine. So, that’s really good. We may do higher dose kidney glandular, get the DAO which will come in there and metabolize the histamine. If you’re sensitive, you may even talk about cutting histamines out, could be citrus, it could be grains, it could be aged meats like Evan talked about, it could even be teasing coffee as well ’cause those- those block the DAO enzyme from working. And we may just add in extra DAO enzyme to help metabolize the histamine as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I find low histamine diet help some people but once again, it’s gonna be and maybe the 10% or less-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup. Hmm-hmm, for sure. Yup. And that’s the thing, when we deal with patients through a functional medicine, you know, we have a lot of experience. So there’s a spectrum in which more patients fall than others, and it’s hard ’cause when people find stuff online, they don’t really have a contact to where they may fit into that category ’cause there an N equals 1. So it’s really important, we wanna plug it in based on our clinical experience which gets us a huge head start.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I think we hit everything really good. I think we did really concise job, I think probably one of the more pod- the more concise podcast that’s out there on these topics. ‘Cause we want to make sure you understand the root biochemistry and understand the physiology. That way, you understand concepts, you’re not memorizing random facts.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Root cause information to stick.
Evan Brand: One last story and then we’ll wrap it up. So, I’ve had a major issue with histamine regarding avocados, I was eating avocados like every day, I start to get migraine and headaches from avocados, so I cut them out for 6 weeks while I was working on a gut protocol, and as soon as I fixed my gut, I added avocados back in, and I had no problem.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Evan Brand: So, go to the nutritionist, then they’ll tell you, “Well, Justin, or Evan, it’s this food, it’s that food. These are the devil. Don’t ever eat avocado”. No, that wasn’t the root cause, the avocado wasn’t the problem, it was my body, I had too many gut infections and other problems creating excess histamine. The avocado just put me over the edge and caused the symptom. So I temporarily removed it, fixed the root cause and then I could add it back in and had no problems. So, you know, these people, they get stuck on a diet because they just went to a nutritionist who put them on like a low histamine diet, but then there’s no other follow-up, there’s nothing after that. It’s just here’s this very restrictive diet, you’re stuck with this forever, the end. And that’s not the way it should be.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Well, hey man, today was a great podcast, if you guys are enjoying it, we’re- we got it on Facebook as well, make sure you subscribe, hit the bell as well. Put comments below, wanna know what you think, wanna get some really good future podcasts ideas from y’all, and I’ll be back personally from my live YouTube Q&A’s later this week, so make sure you’re part of my channel, so you can access that phenomenal content, and make sure you head over to evanbrand.com. Evan sees patients all over the country as well, he has lots of phenomenal content even outside of the ones that Evan and I produced together. So make sure you subscribe to Evan’s podcast and YouTube channel as well. Evan, anything else you wanna say?
Evan Brand: Thanks for the plug man, and uh, check out justinhealth- justin, and then health, justinhealth.com, that’s where you could reach out to him if you wanna do consults, and he has another doc on staff too. So if his availability is crazy, you need to be seen, we can get you in. So, just check out the site, you can find all the resources there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I look forward to having my book come out, and my thyroid masterclass comin’ out really soon. It’s so hard ’cause my first love to seeing patients and I have to kinda clear my schedule from some- for some patients during certain blocks to get this content out. So, I’m in this little pickle here, just try to finish it up, but it- it’s hard ’cause my first love is seeing patients. So, uhm, doing my best ya’ll, so keep an eye out for the thyroid reset book that’s coming your way along with the masterclass.
Evan Brand: Good job. Keep up the good work.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, thanks Evan, you have a great day. We’ll talk soon everyone.
Evan Brand: Take care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye now.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
The Suppression of Inflammatory and Allergic Responses by a Pharmacologically Potent Fungus and Ganoderma Lucidum or Reishi Mushroom
Mast Cell Activation by Neil Nathan
Xlear Rescue Nasal Spray with Xylitol
Creating a Healthy Home | Podcast #201
We all care so much about the sense of wellness around our home. But sometimes no matter the cleaning that we do, we wonder why we still feel not comfy, and healthy. Chances are, we’re missing out important details – details on molecular levels.
Today’s podcast talks about molds, air filters, the scents that we wear, even the healthiness of waters we drink. Watch this video as Dr. J and Evan Brand give us the geeky advice in creating a healthy home.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
01:15 Mold Issues
02:41 Air Filters and Paints
14:30 Bug Sprays
16:49 Chemicals in Water
20:02 Air Filter Systems
27:10 Enhancing Detoxification
32:23 All About Scents
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey there! It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani, Evan how
Evan Brand: Life is good! Look, it’s like 88 degrees in October this is unreal in Kentucky everybody is like
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent man! Love to hear it. So, what’s going on? any other updates for me on the health front? Let’s cook ’em.
Evan Brand: Hmm… Not too much is cooking I’m still working on my course as you know our time these days is so valuable and limited that its– I had this idea in my head like I was gonna get this thing done by the fall and then here it’s comin’ out on the fall and I don’t have it done. So, I know we’ve chattered off here about our– our courses that we’re working on and we just have to make time to do it. But that’s my only update and in terms of projects everything else is just– stay busy with the clinic and us keeps spreading the– spreading the good word, I mean, we get so much good feedback that I know we’re on to something great and we need to keep goin’ until– I don’t know when, I– I don’t see an expiration date for– for– for when our hustle stops.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I hundred percent agree with that, that
Evan Brand: Yeah. So, the reason I– I brought this topic up is because I had a guy who– uh– came to me for his wife’s health issues and what he noticed is that everytime they left the house, her symptoms would get a little bit better. So, even if they went to the grocery store for an hour, if they went to their parent’s house for a night or two, you know his wife’s joint pain, her brain fall, her energy levels her symptoms would all change, it would get significantly better. We’re talkin’ 60-70% better just by leaving her house, okay. So, some would say well maybe that’s EMF, maybe that’s magnetic fields, maybe that’s charged electricity, maybe it’s this or that. And turns out it was a mold issue. And so they had mold in their basement that they weren’t aware of–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh huh…
Evan Brand: –and I guess that mold was circulating throughout the whole HVAC system they got a test on from the E– E as an Evan, M as in Mary, S as in Sam, L as in Larry. em– emsl.com, they’re like the mold scientific laboratory. They got a test kit from them and the mold levels in their house were off the chart. And so they’re moving. Because they already had paid somebody to remediate and it didn’t work. So– they just decided to downsize anyway into a smaller house ’cause their house didn’t need the size than it was but now they’re moving, and so hopefully she gets better but man, this just goes to show you, no matter how perfect your supplement protocol is, if you got an environmental–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh huh…
Evan Brand: –issue, like molded home or other toxins in your home maybe bad paints or lead or whatever else, you can still be sick despite having a good supplement protocol and all the lab testing and all that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, hundred percent agree. The couple things that I do with my home is I got a couple of different air filters. I have uh– an advance air– air filter I have
Evan Brand: Yeah, your hair, your– skin, your nails, I mean you can see a lot of like, physical improvements too. People say, “Well why is it so important to filter the air?”. Well we hit on like the mold piece, VOCs are another thing, the Air Doctor that you and I both use, uh– that does filter out– VOCs which is great so if you did for some reason have like a toxic paint that’s off-gassing, you can’t filter some of that. Now I would say it’s best if you can go in and use like a mineral-based paint. The one I use is called
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ain’t that water-based though?
Evan Brand: —
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it’s water-based
Evan Brand: I guess so, yeah ’cause you mix. It’s half and half.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Evan Brand: You take this bucket they give you, you add water, and then you put it on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean it’s tough ’cause you go water-based, it definitely doesn’t quite last as long.
Evan Brand: Ahh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The oil-based paints, they have a lot more VOCs but they get hard. They get really firm afterwards and it becomes more solid so its– you know, double-edged sword. We’re having some painting on this week so– guess what, we’ll be out of the house for the weekend, just we’re– goin’ on a family trip. So– when I’m gonna have my air filters crankin’ anyway and–
Evan Brand: What are you gonna, are you doing any– are you doin’ any special brand or what are you– what are you looking into for paint?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh I just use the standard Sherwin Williams
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I’m not gonna be in the house so– that way when I’m back, I’m good to go.
Evan Brand: And I don’t know, it’s like cause that stuff’s gonna off-gas after it’s dry, or do you think that the off-gassing is not as much?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, it– it’s after 7 days, it’s– it’s done.
Evan Brand: Really?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But I mean having the air filtrations gonna– you now, mitigate it. Cause that, the air filtration will mitigate all the VOCs.
Evan Brand: True. I just was more paranoid than you so I just got the mineral-based stuff. It’s still on the walls so far but if it– if it fails then I’m– I may switch over to something else.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well it depends like if you’re doing wall stuff, water-based paints’ fine. If you’re doing like cabinets, or things that are opening and closing, and getting wear and tear, that’s where you want like, an oil-based paint.
Evan Brand: Okay, we just did walls.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so for like a harder door that’s
Evan Brand: Okay, okay, good point. So– so let’s go back to the water piece, you know, I was mentioning like hair skin, nails, you know, we have a lo– a lot of compliments from people that– that do start to filter their water, they’re like “Man! I didn’t know my– my hair would get better”. So for example my wife and I with her skin. In the winter time, we used to put on lotion all the time. Now, I never have to put on lotion. My skin is so much more– I would say regulated I guess with– with– the– the filtered water that we bathe in so I had to recommend it if you don’t have it already if you don’t want to invest in a whole house filter. They’re really not that expensive, they’re, you know– with plumbing, paying a plumber included, maybe a thousand bucks for your whole house. And the one I have from the Pelican System, it last for 5 years before you have to change it so– that’s pretty awesome. But if you don’t wanna do that, you technically could just get the shower filters. Justin and I have talked about different brands, the Berkey one is what I like, the Berkey shower filter. And it reduces I think like 98% of the chlorine and some of the other chemicals.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it, yeah, I mean I
Evan Brand: Well, I think the Molekule – correct me if I’m wrong, cause you have one, I do not – is– I believe that thing kills viruses and bacteria too. I do remember reading something on their sales material about killing pathogen so, I mean, not that random people that are sick are coming into your house but if you’re concerned about living in– a place where– you’re– let’s just say you’re having people come in or out, or maybe you’ve got roommates or something, I’d like to have something that kills bacteria and viruses too, and I believe that system does. What about molds? Didn’t they say something about molds’ pores that it can kill too ’cause it’s like a Zepa instead of a Hepa filtration?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah it has this– electrical component to it that– that actually kills a lot of the viruses and a lot of the compounds and it has the– the post-filter afterwards. So it has this component there using light where it kills a lot of these compounds and then it goes to the post-filter. So I mean that’s this interesting new technology so, you know, I have all three of these different kinds of filters. So I’m experimenting and trying them out but, I think it’s something that’s noteworthy; I think a lot of people are using it; also it looks really nice. I like it. It just really– it’s like a nice piece of furniture that sits in the corner and it’s taller and skinnier so– it doesn’t take up a lot of room. A lot of these air filters that look so
Evan Brand: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –where it’s like “Oh, man! It’s just appalling seeing it in the corner of your living room”. Uhm–
Evan Brand: [laughs]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But this new– I like this one. And the other ones, we just hide iin the corners in our bedrooms but this looks really great and it does filter out the viruses. There’s this uhm– this– this– light kind of compound to it that really makes a– a big– a big difference. So I mean–
Evan Brand: [interrupts] Okay. So I– [crosstalk]. I wanna chat about testing a little bit you know, people are like okay, “Is my home toxic?”, “what can I do to test?”. Well the emsl.com – that’s a mold laboratory – I think they also do water testing as well. So just check out emsl.com and you can actually order test kits from there. They have facilities all across the U.S. and maybe internationally, I’m not too sure on that part, but you can do a mold test. I believe what you do is you collect a bunch of dust, like let’s say on your dresser. You just scoop some dust into this, and you send it off, and they’re gonna let you know what the contents of that are. So that’s the first step in terms of testing. The second step is to test your body. Uh– Justin and I use a test from Great Plains, it’s very good called a MycoTox Panel and you can actually test for Ochratoxin and– Stachybotrys and all sorts of other potential pathogens that could have come from food but could also come from environment. And then also, we ran a panel called the GPL-Tox which is a chemical profile test done via urine, and we looked for certain chemicals. One that I look for all the time is Perchlorate. And Perchlorate, is– it’s– crazy how many people in Florida have this chemical off the charts because of rocket fuel. When you use rocket fuel, I guess Perchlorate is an ingredient in rocket fuel. So people that live Cape– where Cape Canaveral is, where they’re lau– launching a– rockets and such, the people that I– I’ve worked with near Cape Canaveral, their Perchlorate levels are off the charts. And on the lab, it says, it disrupts the Thyroid’s ability to produce hormones; and– you and I were looking at some research earlier, the mechanism of this is it’s inhibiting the iodine uptake. So it’s almost acting like fluoride or bromide what it sounds like. Well maybe it’s blocking this receptor and then iodine can’t do its job so– uh– that’s– that’s huge and– and– where this Perchlorate come from, well if it’s not from rockets then it’s from fertilizers, it could be coming from bleach, but then it’s also in your tap water. The good news is, some of the filtrations we talked about can actually filter out Perchlorate. So literally, every single day if you’re drinking your tap water at your house and the fridge filter does not count, because the fridge filter does not filter Perchlorate–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Evan Brand: And you’re cooking, let’s say like you’re doing some steamed broccoli, you put that water in there, that water is now coated all over in your steamed broccoli– that’s Perchlorate, and you could be eating little small bites of Perchlorate every day and you wonder why your thyroid doesn’t get better when you take thyroid supplements. So this is the level of– specificity you have to have in the modern world and I don’t get paralyzed by it, I mean you and I focused so much on action steps that– some people are like, “Oh my God the world’s so scary and dangerous”, but it’s like, there’s an action step associated with this though.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup, a hundred percent. So on the water side, you know, we just really wanna make sure at least and under the counter– slash countertop filter that– you know, that has a– a tank that can filter everything out really well. There’s a couple of cheaper options if we need as well. Of course, we can always go to a whole house which makes it even easier because in all rooms, and everywhere, and showers are taken care of as well. Uhm– there’s various air filters like I mentioned, the– the Molekule, they have– the– the Peugeot technology which is interesting. That’s the– the
Evan Brand: The reason it’s good that we also have the Air Doctor and we recommend you all get one too is because, that one filters down to .003 microns, so most Hepa systems especially something you wanna get at like Walmart or Target, filters down to 3 microns, but like car exhaust and diesel for example, a lot of these industrial pollutants, those are actually 2.5 microns in size, meaning that a 3 microns’ system won’t work. You’ve gotta go smaller, you’ve gotta get .003. So that’s the– that’s the specificity, you gotta pay attention to, cause if you go to Target and you get a Hepa filter for like a hundred bucks, yes it’s better than nothing but we want you to have no pollution, no car exhaust floating around in your bedroom.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Yup, 100%. So, I mean, lookin’ at that, is there anything else you wanna talk about in the chemicals like the Perchlorate, I think it’s really powerful because that’s just the component like you mentioned with the rocket fuel that can kind of come in there and bind in and it– it– affect iodine, the uptake into the thyroid gland and iodine’s used to make thyroid hormone. Remember T-4, T stands for thyroxine, the 4 stands for the number of iodine molecules. And then you have this iodination process where all these iodine molecules are bound up. And then you have
Evan Brand: Yeah, the other thing I wanted to mention in terms of like home toxins, are like bug sprays. Lot of people talk about bugs whether it’s like ants, or roaches, or wasps, or bees. And a lot of these insecticides, these also are tested on the GPL-Tox. And I see most people add elevations in these toxic chemicals. So if you’re spraying for bugs, even if you’re not doing it, and you’re hiring a “bug man” to come and spray. I had one client– she was off the chart with the Permethrin category of uh– toxins, and she said, “Yeah, I’m scared of spiders every time I see one I call the ‘bug man’ and have him come just bomb my house.” And I was like, “Oh my Lord…”. So– there is a uh– a company, I
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep.
Evan Brand: –we had an ant problem at our old rental house and so I just sprayed the perimeter of the house with an Orange Guard, it smelled delicious like oranges and it got rid of the ants in like two days and there
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah in my property here we use the company called “Chem-Free” and they came out and they use some essential oil blends and, a lot of times like for the bees, they would use like a peppermint oil type of blend, and they use that for like the cockroaches as well, and they would spray. That one’s good. I mean, I like it, because a lot of these components, they aren’t super toxic, or they aren’t gonna be as toxic on the essential oil side, and– you can– and they worked. They actually knocked some of these uh– insects and roaches down which is great so you can still have– you can still have y– you know, the effectiveness of knocking some of these animals out but not creating the toxic environment as well.
Evan Brand: There’s another company that you can look up, you can even get them on Amazon. They first were revealed on Shark Tank it looks like, but it’s called the Wondercide. And Wondercide they had like natural pet care products but then they have home pest protection stuff too. So they do have like uh– a p– a peppermint insect repellent. And they have like an indoor pest control, and then they have an outdoor one which is what I use for all the ticks, because the ticks are really bad in Kentucky; and it’s a cedar oil. So you hook it up to your water hose, and you just spray it, and it makes your whole place smell like cedar, which if you like that smell, good. And– we did see reduction in ticks for sure. It didn’t cure it, like it’s not gonna magically eliminate bugs but it sure repelled them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally, yup. I think that’s great. [crosstalk]
Evan Brand: So Wondercide– Wondercide, if people wanna look it up they have like organic soaps and stuff like that too but mainly I’m talking about for their home protection.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. You know, what other compounds are we worried about people getting exposed to that could be an issue. And of course we have the pesticides from our food,
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And again I would say they dilute it down to a certain amount part per million but still uh– not good if you’ll look at the amount of part per million in–
Evan Brand: Yup. And the– the other chemical I forgot to mention so far, lot of it is being banned and removed but it’s Triclosan or Triclosan, and that comes from a lot of your conventional soap, it’s an antibacterial. There’s studies on that showing that it does reduce your uh– T-4 level. So it does reduce thyroid hormone levels. If you’re washing your hands 5 times a day, let’s say you’re a nurse or something in a hospital setting, you’re using this conventional toxic soap, that’s not good. That means it’s no surprise that a lot of people in the healthcare field themselves have issues, I mean, some of it could be the toxic soap they’re using 20 times a day. And then all the skin care stuff that’s in the– that’s an easy one we test for all those chemicals. Nail polish, on that chemical profile test, they look for nail polish, they look for resins, they look for hair dyes, lot of women dye their hair, and then cosmetics so– gotta make sure all that stuff’s clean. If your shampoo or conditioner has like artificial fragrances in it, we know those fragrances can hide Phthalates and all sorts of other endocrine disrupting hormones.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%, absolutely. So the air stuff we talked about, the VOCs, right, the vo– volatile organic
Evan Brand: Well I was just gonna– I was telling you before we got on air here. I brought– maybe you should look into this. It’s really this fun, you don’t need it but it’s fun. The uh– IQAir system, they have a portable air quality monitor system and I can test the levels instantly of the CO2 level in the house as well as the pollution level. It’s looking for the 2.5 micron molecules so I guess in the city or to be– pretty helpful but where I live, you know, there’s not much around to– to pollute the air. But what I’ve noticed is, in the morning, you know, you’re breathing all night, so you’re exhaling a lot of CO2, and we know that CO2, once you hit like a thousand parts per million I believe, the– headaches, fatigue, can start to happen, and my C02 levels in the home typically in the morning are about 1500. And if we just open the windows up, for 10, 15 minutes, we can get the CO2 levels down by like a thousand points. So we go for like the red category to the green category in this meter. So I mean, that’s free, first of all to open your window. Now if you live like in India, and your air is so toxic, you probably don’t wanna open the windows. But if it’s a decent air outside, and– you could open the windows, that alone, is something that could significantly change how you’re feeling.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Yeah I– hundred percent agree. Uhm– anything else with the water component. Of course, we talked about all the different compounds in there, now the big things that I use, one of the good ones that I like is the Air Doctor, that’s a good one. If you go to my site, I have the Air Doctor as well as the advance air setup those are both good units. If you go to justinhealth.com/shops and click on Justin Health approved products, I have some links to those, and again, Evan and I only gonna recommend products that we actually use. I think it’s important that you actually use the product and you believed in it, I think it’s great. Uhm– it’s nice to have people that are guinea pigs that can kind of sign off on it as being a good product which is great, so if you wanna purchase that, you can do that, you can get more information there. Uhm– the other component is the Molekule, is a nice one. It’s a little bit more expensive. So the other two, the Advanced Air and the Air Doctor, are about half the price, that’s a good first step if you’re tryin’ to get your foot into the– into this area of cleaning out air quality and improving it. If you wanna go a little bit more whole hog then the Molekule’s a– uh– a better option uh– on top of that, looks a little nicer as well. So those are my top three. Now there are some whole house systems but you gotta look at the fact that, you know, I like the fact that I can bring my unit with me if I were to travel, if you– if you’re moving, those kind of things and maybe a little bit more difficult to– pull it out, install it so you have to look at you know, are you gonna be in a long term. And also it’s nice to be able to bring it and put it right in your room and be able to have control over it.
Evan Brand: Yup, well said, and a– the whole house system is I mean, they do exist on the market but I do not
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: A blower, where it’s connected to the blower? You have to–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: –that blower has to blow harder through all the multi-layers of the filter. So it makes that system work harder and make shorter the life of it. [crosstalk]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah and you also– yeah and you also have these vents and things. There’s a lot of– there’s a large distance between where the air is coming from and getting cleaned out, and then through all of the vents to where it gets to your room. It’s just nice having it purified right at the spot where you’re at, so it doesn’t have to really travel more than a few feet to get to you.
Evan Brand: Right. Yeah, so, that’s what I would do. And I have test– that’s cool thing. I’ve tested Air Doctor and all the other systems to discuss with a portable monitor. The lower the number the better. The number coming out of the Air Doctor it’s a zero. So, I know that it’s legit, pure air coming out of it which is great. [crosstalk]. Yeah you gotta check it out man. It’s uh– if you just type in IQ Air, and you type in– it’s called Air Visual Pro, I’ll put the link up in the Hang Out for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh great!
Evan Brand: I’ll send it to you. I don’t think the– the– the listeners will be able to see this link but I’ll send it to you. But it’s called Air Visual Pro, and– you know, I’ve got a practitioner account with them so you do get a slight discount as a practitioner. And uh– and that’s what I have and it’s just a little small thing, and it’s like, you know, smaller than a computer but it runs on batteries and I just– I just– I’m ___ [24:15] with it man. I’ll take it to the restaurant and say, “Hey what’s the air quality in your…”, take to my friends’ house and say, “Hey, what’s the air quality in your house?”. It’s just fun.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, that’s really cool! Oh wow. Amazing. I wonder what the– what 2008 Olympics, was it 2010 in China? What they had in Beijing?
Evan Brand: Oh gosh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I heard the air quality was just absolutely terrible. I– I just see on the IQA website it has one looking at– at Beijing, versus the one looking at the office in the Beijing has the ratings that are to the roof meaning mo– more toxicity.
Evan Brand: Yeah the cool thing is there’s an app with that uh– device as well so you can check your air quality and see how it compares to like other cities. It’ll show you what’s the tiniest air, what’s the most toxic air, and– and people they can, if you want, you can have that thing hooked up to Wi-Fi which I didn’t but, that way you can upload your data and people can see it around the map, “Hey, here’s this guy in– wherever, and here’s his air quality”. So it’s pretty neat.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Anything else you want to address here so far Evan? What do you think? Anything missing?
Evan Brand: I– I think– I mean– we’ll always do a part 2, part 3, you can never stop talking about toxins but I think we’ve covered a lot today. Clean up cosmetics, look at yourselves, look at your shampoo and conditioner, don’t dye your hair– Now there is an organic hair dye but I don’t know anything about it. I know it exists, so seek out like organic salons, don’t get your nails done like, “that’s bad”, like maybe go to an organic salon. I measured a nail polish resin every single week in clients, the women who get their nails done every week on the GPL Tox, their certain chemical is off the chart. And it just– it causes headaches, nervous system issues, thyroid issues, so– I don’t– I’m– I’m a guy so I don’t get my nails done so maybe for women, they’re like, “Oh my God, I have to have them done”. Maybe there’s a better way to do it I just don’t know of any.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Evan Brand: But– but look at it, get the GPL To–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or it’s this you know, do your best to find a higher quality organic salon that has some products that are gonna be less toxic. And, or– if you need to, just– take some extra antioxidants and or glutathione before you go or at least support those path while you still spread it out. A lot of those toxins are gonna be more water soluble, so it– it’s not something that you’re gonna like hold on too as much, so if you take good detoxification support you’ll secrete it pretty fast. And you just try to find you know, I know like some of the salons my wife would go to there’s like a small little upgrade where they can– choose an organic product that’s less uh– toxic low. So that’s a good option–
Evan Brand: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –if you– have that.
Evan Brand: Yup, and a– I interviewed doctor Shaw, the guy who invented that toxic lab, if you wanna hear more about detox, just look at
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And also one of the things that shaw said from that interview if I remember correctly, you tell me if I’m wrong, he said something like one of the best things you can do to e– to enhance detoxification is
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s a– that’s a– it was a number one thing. He personally did not use a sauna, all he did was he– likes to go for runs and ride his bike outside and sweat. And he keeps his chemical levels tested and they’re always relatively low. He said, he did not see more of a benefit unless someone was too sick to exercise. To exercise and sweat, versus sauna and sweating. He said the whole near infrared, far infrared, the whole– debate about it all, he said sweating is the key, it didn’t matter how you achieved it in his words.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s interesting too because remember, Shaw also– didn’t really eat organic either.
Evan Brand: You know, that guy he– he taught at restaurants every single day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so there was a
Evan Brand: I agree.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –I forget
Evan Brand: Tell me about it, that’s a [crosstalk]–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You know, here’s the deal, like if I’m gonna cheat, right, I get it,
Evan Brand: [laughs]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So the fact that you’re– you’re doin’ it openly in front of people means that you’re probably doin’ it a lot more frequently…
Evan Brand: Right. I know. Well doctor Shaw, I was blown away by that, I said, “So you eat out everyday?”, he said, “Yeah, I don’t pack my lunch”. And I thought, “Man, so you’re getting
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That you don’t want to bless or something? [laughs] or–
Evan Brand: well, well, no, he used to say–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: He knows. He’s not– he’s not– he’s not ignorant but I guess,
Evan Brand: We– well the saying, I was thinking of was something along the lines of like your hero, like a lot of times people have like a hero, or an idol like, “Oh I really look up to this person”, and then they figured out how they truly are, and they’re not what they think they are. There was a movie about that, I don’t
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: Did you see that movie?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I– I saw that movie, that’s a good one and the I think– yeah, I won’t give the spoiler but that was a good movie, yes.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so– so– yeah, so– maybe
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Let me just add one la– last thing, so, the–
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –the key things that we’re lookin’ at on the– on the water side, of course, are gonna be– fluoride, chlorine, uh– pharmaceutical drugs, whether it’s birth control pills or statins or antidepressants, people flush things down and it’s hard to get those filtered out.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh– we’ve mentioned the chloramines,
Evan Brand: Hard drugs–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And–
Evan Brand: There’s hard drugs in there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hard drugs, potentially heavy metals, mercury, lead, parasitic cyst and or infections debris, so those are gonna be the big things on the water side, and on the air side we have the asbestos, right? That’s can create the– the Mesothelioma cancer, we have– various dust mites, uh– pollens, fungus, bacteria, viruses, we have the
Evan Brand: Poten– [crosstalk]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup, we have the uh– the PBDE– the– what is it, the–
Evan Brand: It’s a PDB–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Pyrrhotites.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, PDBEs, yeah.
Evan Brand: So that could be– in your couch cushion, that could be in your the– your office chair, that could be in your children’s pajamas unfortunately, which is ridiculous,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. They put a lot in the– the kids’ mattresses, so we spend extra money to buy an organic wall mattress that didn’t have the flame retardants…
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we also spend extra money to not get the flame retardants in– our babies’
Evan Brand: The car seat?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A, the– the carrier– the carrier. So there was one brand I think it was
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Then we have the leads, especially if you have houses before 1978– 1978, lead could be used in that. We have various pesticides esp– especially spread out on the lawn, or if you live on the golf course there could be a potential pesticides going in that way. We use various
Evan Brand: Oh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –from the food packaging.
Evan Brand: Here’s a– here’s a PSA man, this is the biggest announcement ever, please, everywhere I go in society, I smell people’s terrible laundry. You go in line in the grocery and you stand behind somebody in their flower-fragrance on their laundry. It didn’t
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dryer sheets man. People use, like a– we have the most hypoallergenic
Evan Brand: So that’s what it is…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s the dryer sheets.
Evan Brand: Oh my.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s totally disgusting, I mean, oh my gosh, it just gives me
Evan Brand: I get yeah– I get an immediate headache and part of me thinks well, does that mean I have a leaky brain, or does that mean that I’m just sensitive to it because it’s a toxic chemical. I feel like everyone should get a headache from it because it’s toxic.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well for me it just smells nasty. It’s just so overpowering– it’s so overpoweringly– str– overpoweringly strong. It’s like people that need to– consume very high sugar foods. Like for me, my taste buds get overwhelmed, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it’s kinda like that I mean, I think you just– you get a little bit
Evan Brand: So here’s my– here’s my–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sure.
Evan Brand: –and then I know we gotta–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sure.
Evan Brand: –we gotta wrap up. Switch over to free and clear, unscented laundry detergent, even whole food cells, their own brand of organic laundry detergent it’s all plant-based and packed in so I they help the grease and all that crap. How do you close– Go fragrance-free, and then, do a fragrance-free or free and clear dryer sheet if you absolutely have to have it. We personally use the wall balls on our dryer, and that works as a replacement of dryer sheets and you never have to buy dryer sheets, the wall balls work perfectly. And then number 2 thing is– the perfume. So there’s a chemically can test for called xylene, that’s the parent chemical on the toxin report. So many people wear perfume, especially like I go to the park and you’ve got these women in their work out clothes, and they run past you, and then 2 seconds later comes the breeze with them of their perfume. It’s like good Lord, let’s go to nature, to just pollute it with– with pot– so many different potential toxins from the laundry, to the perfume. So please, please please, nobody wants to smell that crap, and you’re making yourself toxic, I measure it everyday so from a clinician perspective, I’ve got proof– what these perfumes are doing to you and nobody else wants to smell that crap either.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, for me, the deodorant that I use actually has a really nice scent. Uhm– I use a brand called native COS– native COS and they have a coconut vanilla
Evan Brand: It’s real though.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s real, so like for me, the deodorant that I use, I– I can smell it from the outside so it has the slight kind of
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. I’m not against scents completely. But if you have to smell, if you just wanna walk around smellin’–[crosstalk]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow, and you know, sometimes, less is more, right?
Evan Brand: Absolutely, so yeah, look at those natural ones, the native, I do have some of the native too. They sent me
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I’m sensitive like I will react like my armpit will get super red, and their coconut is excellent. There’s
Evan Brand: Good you said that cause my wife had the same thing happen with the
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: She can only do
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup, unscented, try the coconut, vanilla too. That’s worked great for me. And they have
Evan Brand: [laughs] Is that flavors? You could– you could it eat, you could–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, you can– it– I mean, it’s clean, you know. And again for me it’s like, “You know, I’m– I’m busy, I’m working, I’m sweating– I
Evan Brand: The native– the native works man.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good, I mean, at the end of the day, I’m like, “Yeah that smells great!”.
Evan Brand: The listeners didn’t hear that but he sniffed at himself. That one– that one in the Primal Pit Paste was the other one for me that worked pretty good but is a little harder to put on so the native is the best in terms of like, I’ll rate that number 1 for now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And like, the– the Primal Pit Paste is got a little bit more of a sticky coating to it, where like the native is like a very dry coating, so if you like, put your shirt on whatever, you don’t feel like it’s stuck up in your armpit there so that’s kind of a nice thing about that.
Evan Brand: Yup, we went longer than we were supposed to but we just– we started thinking of all these other tangential toxins that people need to be aware of so I hope it’s been helpful, uh– if you wanna reach out to Justin you can, his website is
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Let me just hit the last three things.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right on to another big one which is a– you know, it’s a– element in the soil and that can come up at– you know, for its– its– it’s actually in the rock, you know, in the foundation of where your house would be deep underground. And when you’re there it can come up to the house and that’s linked with potential lung cancer at levels I think greater than 4 ppm as what the CDC wants to blow. Uhm– we tested our house at one point, it was 8, so we have uh– we got a right on kit in there to help filter that out. We haven’t– down below .5 so
Evan Brand: Well said.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Of co– of course just like respiratory particles such as, you know, wood stew, fireplace, kerosene pipes, cigarettes, those kind of things, cigar smoke. And then we mentioned the volatile organic compounds. These are gonna come from paints, paint strippers, woods, aerosols, air fresheners, auto products, dry cleaning, clothing, household products, those are the big ones so. A good
Evan Brand: Yeah, you mentioned that a– the air freshener so I forgot about that. I’ll tell you, uh– one little thing I do, this is a secret, I’ve never revealed this, but now the secret’s’ out of the bag. If I go to a place- a public place and there’s a plug-in air freshener, I pull that thing out and throw it in the garbage before I leave. So if I go in the– if I go in the bathroom, and there’s a plug-in or you walk in and then– [sneezes], and you get sprayed with fake chemicals as soon as you walk in to go pee, I just pull the thing out the wall and throw it in the garbage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%.
Evan Brand: That’s my little public uh– that’s my little public duty. I’m helping all of you guys have
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well you were doin’ that
Evan Brand: Yeah, I got over 2000 signatures on it and there was someone else kind of uh– I don’t know if it was food [crosstalk]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awful.
Evan Brand: They have like– he had a headache, he was dizzy, and etc. after he got out of his uber so, this is a real problem and I hope one day that we can educate people and just do natural fragrance or no fragrance at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, uh– the good– the essential oil, there’s gotta be some essential oil like, you know, the–
Evan Brand: The citrus one. They have a citrus– there’s a citrus like odor-absorber that would work perfect to people can put under the car seat–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, yes.
Evan Brand: No one would know it’s there and it would take care of all the toxic–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It would stop a lot of the odor. That’s to– totally make sense Evan.
Evan Brand: Yup. But that’s all I gotta say so check out the links and then you can check out justinhealth.com for consults or evanbrand.com. We love helping you guys. We really appreciate the good feedback, so feel free to write us a review on the podcast on iTunes because it does help us.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great, and we’ll put the links below on some of the products that we like and use personally so you guys know it’s already betted. Give us a thumbs up, give us a share, give us a shout out, give us a comment down below; we appreciate you guys engaging; sharing is caring, thanks for everything. Evan, you have a phenomenal day, we’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand: Take care man, bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
References:
https://justinhealth.com/water-pitcher
The 5 Causes of Nutrient Deficiencies
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Good nutrition is what our body needs to prevent us from having issues that will compromise our health. Watch this video and increase your awareness when it comes to different causes of nutrient deficiencies.
5 Different Causes of Nutrient Deficiencies:
- Inflammation
- Conventional food
- Inadequate Supplements
- Infection
- Medication
Inflammation
There are couple of different kinds of inflammation. We have an acute inflammation, wherein you cut your finger, a scab forms or above your elbow, a bruise forms. It healed up in a few days and it’s not a big problem.
What we’re talking about is systemic inflammation. Meaning, it’s systemic throughout the whole body based on diet, lifestyle, exercise. All of these factors.
One of the biggest things that affects inflammation is which kind of diet we eat. We’re eating a pro-inflammatory diet, high in sugar, high in inflammatory compounds like grains and sugar. Those are going to put our body in a more inflammatory state. The more inflamed we are, the more we decrease ability of our body to absorb nutrition.
Now we have little finger-like projections called microvilli in our small intestine. Think of these finger-like projections like a vacuum cleaner. It’s job is to suck up nutrition. The more inflamed we are, systemically, think of that vacuum cleaner, each finger being a vacuum cleaner. Each one gets clogged and you see less vacuum cleaner until we have knocked – our vacuum cleaner is essentially fully clogged which does not absorb nutrition as effectively.
Conventional Foods
We’re just eating foods that are conventional. Conventional foods – meaning foods that aren’t organic. They’re not going to be as high in nutrition because the fact they are sprayed with pesticides and herbicides. Even GMO things like Roundup. These compounds with chemicals essentially devoid will make the nutrients in the soil very much devoid. Minerals are needed for the plant to essentially produce an optimal spectrum of nutrients. Studies have shown that certain soil that are devoid of manganese, certain vegetables and the fruit will actually have 50-60% less Vitamin C. If we have low mineral soils due to the chemical that our farmers are putting on it, that’s going to affect our ability to get much nutrition from that in the first place.
Supplements
Having high quality supplement is going to be really important. Even if you are actually taking high-quality organic vegetables and eating high-quality organic meat, you’re still going to have some holes there. That is why supplement is there, essentially supplementing the gaps and the holes in the diet. You never want to supplement and eat bad, either. You really want to do your best to make some big change with your diet and also add those in helping building the gap to prevent nutritional deficiencies.
CLICK HERE to know more about the supplements which prevent nutrient deficiency
Infections
Infections are very common. These are these low-grade kind of inflammatory zombies, so to speak, in your intestinals. Just sitting there and its causing this drain on your immune system, this drain in your adrenals. If we can really cut down and figure out what kind of infection to go along with (H pylori infection, or a fungal infection, or a parasite infection) and if we can diagnose where the infection is, we can create a protocol that will help remove that.
Medications
Medications are common and are known to cause nutritional deficiencies. There are actually textbooks on nutritional deficiencies caused by medications. So did you know the most common nutritional deficiency caused by a medication is a statin? This statin medication, which control cholesterol being produced by the liver, they actually decrease your production of your nutrient called coQ10.
CoQ10 is actually really important because the hearts need coQ10 to actually beat each time. We’re having our heart issues, congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, blood pressure. You should really want to make sure our heart has all the nutrients it needs. Two, coQ10 is really important for muscle production. One of the most common symptom you see when you’re on a statin is rhabdomyolysis or you see infected muscle pain or extra muscle soreness. These are very, very common things. Also, in diabetics taking Metformin or Glucophage. These medications cause mixing conditions B12 anemia.
If you’re on medication, give the office a call. At least make sure you’re being supported or the potential nutritional deficiencies that could be caused by the medication you’re up. If you really want to address the underlying cause of your condition, or what medication to prescribe, let us know and we’ll do our best to help.
CLICK HERE to know if your medication is causing nutrient deficiency
Torea Rodriguez – Toxins, infections and autoimmune disease – Podcast #112
Dr. Justin Marchegiani interviews autoimmune specialist, Torea Rodriguez, in this episode where they talk about autoimmune diseases and how these can be exacerbated by toxins and infections in the body. Find out how one thing leads to another and what types of lab tests are vital in helping to get to the root cause of issues.
Discover what supplements can aid in fighting autoimmune conditions. Learn how important it is to deal with stress or avoid it completely to be healthy along with making diet and lifestyle changes, as well as find out about healing pathways that worked for some people which may just work for you, too.
In this episode, topics include:
13:55 Infections
16:35 Stress
24:42 Biofilms
30:58 Supplements and Herbs
36:26 Toxins
Paleo 101 Part 2: Top 3 Roadblocks When Going Paleo
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Welcome to Part 2 of our Paleo Diet series, where we are looking at lab markers to help you transition successfully to a healthy diet and the roadblocks that can get in your way. In part 1 of our Paleo Diet series. We discussed inflammation, blood sugar, and lipid lab markers and what to look for on these tests as you begin a Paleo diet, or template. Briefly, we want to see your lipids improve, whether it’s triglyceride to HDL ratio of cholesterol to HDL ratio, and we want to see improvement in inflammation and blood sugar. These would be the nice benefits of an anti-inflammatory, nutrient-dense, low-toxin eating plan.
So let’s say you’re one to two months in, and you’re seeing some improvement. It’s going well, and you’re on the right track; but now, you’re hitting some roadblocks. Maybe you’re fatigued or have energy issues, your fingernail quality doesn’t look good, you still have some digestive issues (bloating, gas, constipation, or diarrhea). And maybe they have gotten even worse since you you’ve increased your protein content.
Anti-inflammatory, nutrient‑dense, low-toxin food should not make you feel worse unless your digestive system is impaired in some way or another. So now, it’s time to dig in a bit deeper and get those roadblocks out of the way.
What Are the Paleo Roadblocks?
The three main roadblocks we’re going to address are anemia, infections, and thyroid issues. We’ll also cover the lab markers we would look at when considering each.
Anemia
In people whose hydrochloric acid (HCl, stomach acid) levels are low, anemia can be an issue. Interestingly, this happens in people who eat a lot of easy-to-digest food. Because of anemia, their stomach acid and their digestive secretions weaken because they aren’t staying tuned up with the proper proteins.
This is seen in people who have a strictly vegetarian or vegan diet. There may even be some gastrointestinal inflammation preventing us from binding minerals. And the low HCL may be preventing us from ionizing so the minerals, such as iron, calcium, selenium and magnesium can get into our bloodstream.
Lab Tests for Anemia
When we see anemia issues, the first pattern we’ll look for is a decrease in red blood cells, hematocrit, and hemoglobin. It may not necessarily be low, but it may just be in that bottom 20% of the range. This will tell us if there’s a broad-spectrum anemia.
The next anemia pattern we’ll look for is through the iron panel. TIBC and UIBC are different iron-binding proteins, and they actually tend to go high when iron is low. So the more binding proteins we have, the more iron our body needs. We will also typically see iron saturation and ferritin levels drop. If we see these markers in our anemia patterns, then we know we probably have an iron-based anemia.
We’ll also look for anemia patterns through B vitamin markers. We’ll look at MCHC, MCV, and MCH. These markers just tell us how big the red blood cells/hemoglobin are. The bigger our red blood cells are, the more immature they are. Red blood cells get smaller as they mature. So this will be an indicator of two kinds of anemia—B vitamin and iron.
Infections
A chronic infection, such as a parasite infection, bacterial infection, viral infection, or even a fungal infection, may be present. These infections will affect our immune system. About 70–80% of our immune system lives in the gastric associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) of our stomach and in the mucosal associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) of our intestinal tract. So with so much of our immune system living in our stomach and intestinal tract, it’s clear to see why an infection could be affecting our ability to properly absorb nutrients.
When we have digestive immune stress, it fires the sympathetic nervous system (i.e., our fight-or-flight system). We have two branches to our nervous system. Our sympathetic nervous system is our flight-or-flight nervous system, and our parasympathetic nervous system is our rest-and-digest system.
When our sympathetic nervous system is fired up, it’s going to drive more of our fight-or-flight response. It will decrease hydrochloric acid and enzymes, and it will increase blood flow to the extremities—arms, hands, and feet—to allow us to fight and flee. This is one of the major issues when we’re under chronic stress, and those stressors could come from infections.
Lab Tests for Infections
One lab test we would look at for infections would be a stool panel, and not just the conventional hospital or Lab Corps tests—I run many of those and they sometimes miss the infection. We would run a specialty test, especially the DNA, PCR-based testing. We have a higher level of sensitivity and specificity on them. Also, we can draw conclusions from a CBC with differential panel. This looks at our white blood cells—our neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, and basophils (an easy way to remember these: Never Let Monkeys Eat Bananas). We might consider the following based on an increase in these cells:
- Neutrophils—If we see neutrophils high, we’ll consider a bacterial infection. Particularly high neutrophils, above 60, and we’re automatically going to gravitate toward pylori issues.
- Lymphocytes—If we see lymphocytes low, we automatically think a chronic viral issue; if we see them high, we think acute viral issue. When we see lymphocytes low, however, along with neutrophils high, this is a common pattern for an pylori bacterial infection.
- Monocytes—If we see monocytes high, it typically means our immune system is fighting an infection.
- Eosinophils—If we see eosinophils above three, we almost always think parasites. At this point, we would run those specialty stool tests because they will help us determine exactly what type of infection we are dealing with.
- Basophils—If we see basophils go out of range, typically above one or two, we start to think tissue inflammation and potential allergies.
Thyroid Issues
Next we have thyroid issues. Cold hands, cold feet, constipation, mood issues, and energy issues are all signs the thyroid is not functioning appropriately. So we’ll want to run a complete thyroid panel.
Lab Tests for the Thyroid
We typically run our TSH, which is a brain hormone. This gives us a peek inside the window to what’s happening with our brain and how it’s communicating with our thyroid. We’ll also look at thyroid hormones: free T4 and T3, total T4 and T3. T4 tells us what is coming out of the thyroid tissue, and T3 gets converted by the liver and intestines, by healthy stress levels, and at the thyroid (about 20% gets converted at the thyroid).
We’ll also run our antibodies, too, which are basically looking at our immune system. Our immune system could actually be attacking our thyroid gland and making various antibodies called TPO, TB antibodies, thyro-binding globulin antibodies, and even TSH receptor site antibodies. This would tell us if we are dealing with an autoimmune thyroid condition, such as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.
Conclusion
It takes time when transitioning to an anti-inflammatory, nutrient-dense, low-toxin diet. The Paleo template will get you on the right road, but you will likely encounter a few roadblocks along the way. Don’t let them dissuade you—address them one by one, and before you know it, those roadblocks will be far behind you.
A Six Step Strategy for Healing a Leaky Gut
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
We are hearing the term leaky gut a lot these days, but what exactly is it and how do we heal it?
When we hear the word “leaky” associated with anything, we know that can’t be good, and a leaky gut is no exception. Just as a pipe gets holes and leaks water, causing damage to everything around it, the gut can get holes and leak toxic intestinal contents, causing damage to other parts of the body.
This article provides a five step strategy for healing a leaky gut and preventing a leak gut in the future.
What Exactly Is a Leaky Gut?
To understand how to heal it, we first have to understand what a leaky gut is.
The intestinal lining contains layers of cells connected by tight junctions. The intestinal lining is supposed to only allow the appropriate nutrients to pass through and into the bloodstream. When the tight junctions become inflamed due to gluten or other irritating foods or even infection, they can open up, and food particles can slip through, introducing toxic materials, such as yeast, bacteria, and parasites, into the bloodstream.
The bloodstream carries these toxins throughout our body where they are absorbed in a variety of locations, creating inflammation. As we continue to feed our bodies offending foods, the leaky-gut cycle continues, keeping our bodies in a constant state of inflammation.
The Impact of a Leaky Gut
Leaky gut can present itself in a variety of ways and can lead to chronic conditions. Some people may have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Crohn’s disease, or other pathological conditions. Others may have skin issues, bloating and gas, or gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). Still others may fall somewhere in the middle.
All of these conditions have a common etiology: leaky gut. So we have to get the gut healed.
Click here if you are wondering if your chronic health issues might be due to a leaky gut.
Strategies for Healing a Leaky Gut
1. Remove Hyperallergenic Foods
The first step is to remove irritating foods causing the leaky gut. Physical, chemical, and emotional stressors can lead to inflammation, and inflammation tends to cause our bodies to break down faster. Irritating, hyperallergenic foods introduce physical and chemical stressors to the body.
Stressors cause the immunoglobulin A (IgA) in the mucosal barrier in our gut lining to break down. When this happens, we may see sinus infections, gut issues, irritation, fungal infections, or even urinary tract infections. Removing irritating foods can help remove this stress to the gut.
What foods to remove varies by individual. Common irritating foods include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Grains
- Sugar
- Dairy
- GMO foods
- Processed foods
If there is an autoimmune issue as well, we may need to add a rotation component to the diet and also eliminate foods that include the following:
- Nuts
- Seeds
- Tomatoes
- Potatoes
- Eggplants
- Peppers
Again, there’s not a one-size-fits-all plan here. Each person has to find his or her offending food and eliminate it.
Since 70% to 80% of our immune system is located in our gut, removing allergenic foods is very important to keeping the body healthy.
2. Replace Enzymes, Acids and bile salts
When our body is under the control of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), it’s in a fight-or-flight state. As we get more stressed, our blood rushes toward the extremities so we can fight or flight. As blood leaves our digestive system, we are not able to produce the enzymes, hydrochloric acid (HCl), and bile salts we need for proper digestion. This makes the environment more susceptible to dysbiosis, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and chronic infections.
Our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) is our “rest and digest” state. The PNS actually brings the blood inward toward the gut, and this allows for proper enzyme, HCl, and bile salt production. So getting our bodies back under the control of the PNS is important.
3. Repair with Healing Nutrients and Adrenal Support
There are specific healing nutrients that will help repair the gut. What nutrients, how much, and whether or not they are needed will depend on the specific gut issue, how long it has existed, and if there is inflammation. L-glutamine, slippery elm, marshmallow root extract, aloe vera, and licorice are soothing and will assist with healing the gut.
Having healthy adrenal glands also is very important for healing the gut.
The adrenals produce cortisol, which helps neutralize inflammation and maintain a healthy gut lining. If we have too much cortisol—if we’re too inflamed, and our body’s inflammatory response is too high—we’ll actually break down our gut lining. If our cortisol function is too low, we won’t have enough of it to build our gut back up.
So having an appropriate stress response, having healthy adrenal function is important to creating the right hormonal response, to having healthy levels of cortisol. Cortisol is also there to help deal with inflammation, so if we have inflammatory compounds in the gut, cortisol can also put out that flame before it grows into a five-alarm fire.
4. Remove Infections
Removing infections is imperative, and this step is often missed in traditional medicine. Infections can drive a leaky gut, keeping us in a stressed-out state, which keeps the SNS activated, preventing digestion.
Blood work or a comprehensive stool analysis needs to be done to determine if there is an infection (SIBO, dysbiosis, bacteria, virus, etc.) and what infection we are dealing with.
There is a reason removing infections is near the bottom our list of strategies: it can actually be stressful to your detoxification system and immune system to remove an infection. Also, in some people the hormonal system (adrenals, thyroid, and male or female hormones) must be addressed first to decrease the risk of side effects and other issues.
5. Reinoculate with Probiotics
Imagine you have a backyard garden full of weeds. You can’t plant new seeds in that weedy garden. There’s not enough room for those seeds to grow. You’re going to have to pull out the weeds and prepare the soil before you can plant your new seeds.
In our first four strategies, we removed all the weeds (the bad stuff) and prepared the soil (our gut). Now we can reseed (reinoculate)—put the good bacteria back in.
Many people have issues with adding in probiotics. These issues occur when they are trying to plant seeds in a garden that’s full of weeds. Get the first four strategies in check first, and then introduce probiotics into your properly prepared gut.
6. Retesting to ensure infections are clear
It’s important to ensure infection are cleared after treatment. Some patient may have other new infections that would burrowed deeper into the gut lining that will be exposed on retest. Some patient may need a few rounds of clearing herbs to clear them. Some patient may also get reinfected from a spouse or partner who maybe carrying an infection symptomatically (like in h. pylori).
Conclusion
Following the five strategies presented here may not be simple, but leaky gut is not a simple condition. Taking the challenge and putting forth the time and effort to heal your gut will be worth it when you see the drastic improvements in your overall health.
References:
“4 Steps to Heal Leaky Gut and Autoimmune Disease.” Dr. Axe Food Is Medicine. http://draxe.com/4-steps-to-heal-leaky-gut-and-autoimmune-disease/: accessed 6/12/15.
Reasoner, Jordan. “Leaky Gut Syndrome in Plain English-and How to Fix It.” SCD Lifestyle. http://scdlifestyle.com/2010/03/the-scd-diet-and-leaky-gut-syndrome/: accessed 6/12/15.
Leaky Gut image from www.leakygutcure.com.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, there, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome back to Beyond Wellness Radio. Today we have a functional medicine practitioner. Her name is Torea Rodriguez and she’s right out of Santa Cruz. Right, Torea?
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, Santa Cruz is it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome! And you’re an autoimmune specialist, correct?
Torea Rodriguez: I am. I do functional—err—functional medicine specializing in autoimmune. That’s how I got started. I got sick with autoimmune Hashimoto’s and it’s what I’m most comfortable with and it’s what I understand the most. So that’s what I focus on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What an epidemic autoimmune conditions are today, huh?
Torea Rodriguez: Absolutely. I was reading in the Autoimmune Fix, Tom O’Bryan’s new book.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: And he was explaining that, you know, most autoimmune diseases, what we know now is that it’s more of an autoimmune spectrum–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: As opposed to a specific disease, and so while there’s—I don’t know—there’s over 135 classified autoimmune diseases, it’s probably even more now and that all of those are just what’s known to us right now. Like there could be so many other ones and so it’s really the spectrum effect that happens, and yeah, it’s really prevalent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s really interesting because with autoimmune conditions. If you really look at what the conventional medical establishment has to offer, I mean, it’s not too much. I mean, they have your immunosuppressive medications, corticosteroids like prednisone. I mean, there’s not really even a diet shift or diet modality when it comes to autoimmune conditions, even though we know the research and the literature’s so, you know, rich with that type of information and also the idea of leaky gut really isn’t even talked about. What’s your take on the conventional medicine approach medicine offers—mainstream medicine for autoimmunity?
Torea Rodriguez: I think that they are in a very unfortunate situation to be honest. They’re behind in terms of research. There’s not one doctor that I know, you tell me if I’m wrong–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: But there’s not one doctor that I know that has the time in between their 15-minute consults to also go and read the PubMed and the medical literature to stay up on what’s going on, so I think they’re in a very unfortunate situation. And then the other part about the traditional medical establishment is that they’re focused on special areas. So we’ve got the cardiologist for the heart health and we’ve got the endocrinologist for, you know, the endocrine system and the different hormone systems and all of those different things–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Torea Rodriguez: And they’re looking at it from a very specific point of view from that organ if you will, when really autoimmunity needs to be that 30,000-ft view, big picture view because it’s the entire immune system. It’s the entire body that is having a problem. So yeah, I think that it’s just they’re in an unfortunate situation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I mean, I see that every day. It’ s like unless you have a clinical framework in which you operate in, I mean, you could skim through articles but it may not mean much to you because where do you plug that clinical piece of information into how you treat patients because typically it’s 3- to 5-minute consult, right? With the pat–
Torea Rodriguez: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: With the patient. You have a prescription pad. For the most part you’re looking for a diagnostic code that justifies, you know, you to make money off the patient because they are—they are business and then typically that involves a prescription, right?
Torea Rodriguez: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or some type of procedure for the most part and that’s it. I mean, that’s—it’s really about managing that condition and the whole idea about addressing it or fixing a root causal issue really isn’t even there. I mean, it’s—it’s amazing that people can go to physicians where their goal really is just how can we prevent the symptoms from getting worse down the road versus let’s fix this.
Torea Rodriguez: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It—totally different mindset.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah. Complete different mindset and that was my exact experience when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s back in 2009 and I started working with an endocrinologist because that’s where people go who have thyroid issues. They go to an endocrinologist and start working with them and you know, he prescribed me medication after medication and it’s not working and I can’t get my labs stable and it’s still not working, so we’d switch it or we’d double the dose or, you know, we kinda got to a point where I challenged him because at that the time I needed to pass an aviation medical and I challenged him and I’m like, “Look, I need to pass this exam in a month. We’ve got a month. What do you got for me? Like we gotta do this, otherwise I have to stop flying for a living.” And he just kind of put his hands up and he was kinda like, “Well, you know, the next thing I know to do is to radiate the thyroid and cut out the rest of the tissue.” And I was just like, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Brakes on full.” Like that’s not the path that I wanna go down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Torea Rodriguez: And that was the real foray for me to start looking into functional medicine and to start looking at alternative solutions because I knew that it—there was something else going on. It wasn’t just the thyroid. I mean, there’s countless people out there with thyroid issues and they feel fine. So what is going on? And I wanted different answers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. This is a great segway into kind of let the listeners know a little bit more about you. And most people, they kinda walk that, most practitioners are physicians—they walk the journey of the wounded healer. Right? They have some type of health–
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ailment themselves, they bump their head against a wall a few times—that wall being conventional medicine, and then was able to find a path that actually worked that—that really was focused on root causal health information.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So why don’t you share your story—I know you mentioned you were a pilot. I think you also have a biochemistry background, right?
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah, my undergrad degree is in Biochemistry–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, great.
Torea Rodriguez: And you know—and I worked in the technology industry so I’ve kinda bounced around and cruised a little, but at the time I was a professional pilot, I wasn’t feeling good. I mean, I knew something was wrong and when it came time to really decide, “Am I gonna go under the knife to try and fix this? Or am I gonna try and find alternative solutions?” I really knew in my heart of hearts that I needed to find an alternative solution.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: By under the knife, you mean getting your thyroid removed, right?
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah. I mean–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: He wanted to give me a radiated thy–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Iodine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: And then cut out the rest of the tissue and I did not wanna have surgery to be honest.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So–
Torea Rodriguez: I just did not.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm. So it sounds like you were diagnosed with Graves’? Is that what happened?
Torea Rodriguez: No.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or was it something else?
Torea Rodriguez: Hashimoto’s.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this was Hashi—yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: This was Hashimoto’s. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Torea Rodriguez: And most, for our listeners who don’t know, usually you take out the thyroid when it’s Graves’ which is the opposite, the hyperthyroid situation, and he just didn’t—he didn’t know where else to turn. These were the tools that he had and that’s why–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: I had so much compassion for them. It’s that they—they have the tools that are in their toolbox and they’re not necessarily applicable to the types of diseases that we are seeing right now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It totally makes sense and that makes sense, too, because Hashimoto’s in the early stages can seem like Graves’ because the antibodies are different. They’re not the same kind of antibodies once thyroid stimulating immunoglobulin and TA—TSH receptor antibodies, the one for Hashi’s is TPO and thyroglobulin. So different effect–
Torea Rodriguez: Correct.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But in the early—in the early inflammation response, thyroid hormone spills out and can create that hyper kinda symptoms, so that makes sense.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I started searching for anybody that knew anything about thyroid and natural healing and I had stumbled across Chris Kresser’s writings–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm, yup.
Torea Rodriguez: And this was back early in the day when he was just writing about stuff and he said something that really clicked with me–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Which was that we’re dealing with autoimmunity and we’re dealing with a disease of the immune system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Not a disease of the thyroid, not a disease of–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Torea Rodriguez: The myelin sheath of your nerves. It’s a disease of the immune system and that we need to really focus on the immune system itself, and that just lit a lightbulb. It was an epiphany moment. It’s like, “Of course! That makes total sense.” So let’s go down that path. So I pretty much didn’t know where he was, didn’t care, was gonna get on any plane to go see him, begged myself into his clinic and he took me on as a client, and that’s when I really started to understand the multiple layers that had come into play to cause me to get sick and the work that I needed to do to start healing. Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. So with your working with Chris, I mean, he’s kind of a—a Paleo template guy. I’m a big fan of a Paleo template, right? Where we kinda can adjust the macronutrients and—and dial things in according to what works best for you, the patient. Just curious, if you could lay out just you and your experience as the patient, what worked best for you. What are those top 3 things that really were game changers in your case?
Torea Rodriguez: I think the very first game changer was taking a different perspective on my diet. I had always felt that I was healthy and that I was eating very healthfully and to stay healthy on the road I was keeping to a vegetarian diet and with a lot of healthy whole grains, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Right? And so taking a different perspective and really taking a look at what it was that I was eating and what more importantly what I was missing in the diet. There were a lot of nutrients in my diet that were missing from that and so switching to a whole food Paleo type template was exactly what my body needed at the time and I would say that that in itself gave me a huge boost and huge stair step of healing right away.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you were eating a lot of grains back then or were you eating any meat as well?
Torea Rodriguez: I was not.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Torea Rodriguez: I was trying to stay healthy on the road.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Torea Rodriguez: So I was staying vegetarian because of course, we were eating out all the time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it.
Torea Rodriguez: So yeah, so I was just like, “Oh, I’ll just stay vegetarian. That’ll keep me healthy.” And then you know, in hindsight, looking back the other time I experimented with being vegetarian was in college and I got very, very sick in college. And I know now–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Torea Rodriguez: That for me and my body type, I—I need to include animal proteins in there. That’s the only way I feel really great. So yeah, so I would say food was the other thing and then rest. Not really rest—how should I say this? I had to take a very serious look at my Type A hyper-overachiever lifestyle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right, right.
Torea Rodriguez: And that was really, really hard to do as a pilot. You are used to achieving every 6 months and passing check rides and switching to the next airplane and all of those things, and that was something that was really driving my nervous system into sympathetic fight or flight all the time. And I had pretty much activated it all the time and I really had to take a serious look at that. So that was one of the other things that was really, really key in healing but expressly difficult to adjust to.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you sound like you had some adrenal dysfunction there, too?
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, yeah. They were–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Pretty much—the way Chris put it—and I don’t know if he was trying to scare me or not, but he basically said that you are one step away from Addison’s disease. You need to do something different.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And were those initial tests that you ran for adrenals, were those on—on the BioHealth 201 adrenal panel?
Torea Rodriguez: Correct.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, cool.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Do you remember what your total–
Torea Rodriguez: That was my first panel.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cortisol was?
Torea Rodriguez: I think it was like 12.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow, that’s so low!
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How about your DHEA?
Torea Rodriguez: I don’t even remember. I’d have to go take a look. But yeah, I mean, it was pretty much tapped out. I mean, I was—I was tapped out. This was—I was sleeping 14 hours a night and feeling like I was–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Torea Rodriguez: Hit by a Mack truck the next morning. Like I was not feeling rested ever.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so recapping, you were eating a vegetarian diet. So I typically hear that. I think low protein, I think ex—probably excessive carbohydrate, probably lots of anti-nutrients.
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, it was all carbohydrate. Because in addition to flying–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Torea Rodriguez: The other thing that I loved to do was long distance cycling.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Running–oh yeah, there you go. So that your–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re carb-loading, right?
Torea Rodriguez: Pretty much sugar all day long, every day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How about fat consumption? Were you doing pretty low fat consumption? Were you doing a lot of nuts back then?
Torea Rodriguez: Probably.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, nuts and you know, a little bit of olive oil here and there–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: But butter wasn’t in the profile at all. You know, so I was very fatphobic at that point.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So we had blood sugar issues, we had nutrient density issues, you probably had a lot of anti-nutrient issues, adrenal dysfunction–
Torea Rodriguez: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then autoimmunity which probably was exacerbated by all of the—the grains that you were consuming, too.
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Torea Rodriguez: Most definitely, and there was pretty extreme iron anemia–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, wow.
Torea Rodriguez: That we discovered and which explained a lot of the issues that I was having. I was getting hypoxic at very low altitudes at work and hypoxy is the term for when you are lacking oxygen at altitude and usually you’ll feel hypoxic anywhere between 8,000 and 12,000 feet. Everybody’s a little bit different.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: But I was feeling very hypoxic at 5,000.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Torea Rodriguez: And the cabins are pressurized at 8,000 so I was even more fatigued at the end of my shift because I was constantly “at altitude” all day long and getting really sick from it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so you were an airline–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Pilot where you like flying major airlines or–
Torea Rodriguez: No, I flew charter and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Charter.
Torea Rodriguez: Corporate aviation. Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. Now I’ve heard that—I’m not sure if this is true—but I’ve heard that pilots aren’t able to fly while consuming aspartame, is that true?
Torea Rodriguez: I would have to double check what the regulations are with the FAA–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Torea Rodriguez: But at the time when I was flying–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Aspartame was fine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It was fine. Okay, I wondered if that’s something new.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, it wasn’t a regulated substance, but I’d have to check. That’s curious.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, alright, very cool. And then let’s dive in. There’s one piece of your autoimmune puzzle that I think may have been an issue but you didn’t allude to it yet. You didn’t mention anything about infections. Were infections a piece of the puzzle for you getting your thyroid and your autoimmune situation under control?
Torea Rodriguez: They were definitely a piece of the puzzle but they came later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ahh.
Torea Rodriguez: Like we really started with diet, lifestyle stuff first.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Started focusing on healing the gut a little bit–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: And then also the adrenals, like I was just–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: So tapped out, right? Getting some–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Torea Rodriguez: Support there, but later on we started to find the GI pathogens for sure and I tested positive for H. pylori and then later on tested positive for a—another one that I can’t even remember the name of it and you know, as we started to treat those and heal those, you know, we’ve kinda talked about lingering symptoms like what’s left, what else is going on?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Torea Rodriguez: You know, and—and sure enough we found Giardia but it took–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow!
Torea Rodriguez: A number of tests and a number of passes at that for it to finally reveal itself and that Giardia had gotten—I’ve had it for so long that it had left the intestinal tract and actually had gone into the gallbladder.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: And so I had all these crazy gallbladder attacks that I couldn’t explain and ultrasounds to make sure it’s not stones, like it was kind of a little bit of a crazy path but we finally found the Giardia and treated myself for Giardia and that was another huge stair step is to finally get rid of that pathogen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So 3 major parasitic infections—H. pylori, something in between was a Blasto? Blastocystis hominis or Crypto?
Torea Rodriguez: No, it wasn’t Blasto. My husband’s had Blasto. It was Crypto.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Crypto. Okay.
Torea Rodriguez: Yup, yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow. That’s—that is nasty. Yeah, that’s a Blasty-Cryp—I call that the Three Amigos by the way.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, definitely felt like the Three Amigos were having a party, that’s for sure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? Now when you went to go attack the Giardia, did you have to do a gallbladder flush to get the gall—to get the Giardia flushed out?
Torea Rodriguez: I didn’t. Actually–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Torea Rodriguez: I was pretty lucky with the anti–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Pathogens that we used.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Torea Rodriguez: Actually it turned out to be fine. But yeah–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So we have adrenal issues and that—you know, in your situation, it’s kinda unique in how it unfolds and what stressors happen in your life but how things break down is pretty consistent, right? There’s some level of–
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dietary stress and that’s unique for person, right?
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Whether it’s vegetarian side, whether it’s the standard American diet and lots of conventional meat and grains. You have the adrenal stressors, right? You have imbalanced amount of macronutrients, so I call that blood sugar stressors. You have infections and then you had the autoimmune—the whole immune system all revved up–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because of everything else, because all of the—the things I already mentioned. I see that
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see that with most patients.
Torea Rodriguez: There’s—there’s another thing in there that kinda added to the whole perfect storm which is what I now call acute stress events.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Torea Rodriguez: There was a period of time between 2008 and 2009 when I was being diagnosed where I had lost a parent suddenly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Torea Rodriguez: I had gotten into a cycling accident and pretty severe physical injuries and I had an emergency at altitude and was the only pilot on board to deal with that emergency, so there was a huge amount adrenalin that got pumped out that day when I was dealing with that—that actual emergency, and those 3 things all happened within months of each other.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Torea Rodriguez: And that pretty much a perfect storm on the stress side of things to completely cause additional leaky gut and cause additional food sensitivities and everything else that just kinda added to the whole picture.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you really—you really hit a point there that I wanna emphasize. You talked about the leaky gut and the food sensitivities and I think a lot of people at home, they—they hear stress but they don’t really think about how stress really impacts our digestion or impacts our gut lining.
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because the biggest thing that really revs up this autoimmune cycle is stress and what it does to the gut lining and then what that does to undigested food particles and then what that does to the immune system as they slip through the tight junctions to get into the bloodstream.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, absolutely. And you know people hear stress, stress, stress, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: I get it, but what they don’t understand is that in the lab and I think this was Dr. Fasano’s work–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Is that in the lab one of the ways that they would introduce leaky gut is hitting these poor rats over the head and causing head trauma.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Torea Rodriguez: And that’s a physical injury that you know, resulted in leaky gut. So when we have a lot of stress whether it’s physical injury or not, that will cause leaky gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And is that mechanism through the head trauma is after decreased activation of the—the vagal nerve?
Torea Rodriguez: That’s my guess.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s what I think, too.
Torea Rodriguez: That is definitely my guess. Yeah, vagal nerve is so huge in recovery and, you know, stimulating the parasympathetic side of the immune system and nervous system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I was reading an interesting study just last week on petting animals and it stimulating the vagal nerve.
Torea Rodriguez: Really? I definitely need a dog again.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I—you think—I know. I practice next to my dog, Butter, all day so I, you know, pet her. I’m like, “Yeah, I’m getting my vagus nerve going.” You know, I’m—I’m practicing what I preach here.
Torea Rodriguez: Excellent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So nice little fun fact there.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, I look for all sorts of different ways to simulate vagus nerve when trying to heal autoimmunity because so many of us get kinda stuck in the cycle of the sympathetic side of the nervous system and it’s very hard to start to retrain the body to start activating the parasympathetic side. So I’m always looking for tips like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s good. And now because you’ve had this history you’ve been able to effectively treat it, which is great, what are you seeing in your patients? Are you seeing similar type of events kind of cascading or what kind of infections are you seeing, too?
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, so lots of GI pathogens.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: I’ve seen the gamut of them. I’m also seeing patients who are attributing some of their getting sick like how I had that perfect storm of stress events to receiving tetanus vac—vaccination—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Torea Rodriguez: Vaccines, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: Vaccinations.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: Or you know, some other kind of trauma. Usually it’s a trauma that can start the whole ball of wax to unravel, and so I see that quite a bit, so I pretty much apply the same technique is to let’s get an understanding of what’s going on. Let’s look for some of those co-infections and start dealing with those, so that I pretty much equate it to the immune system as pretty much over—overloaded at this point. It can’t really deal with these things effectively. So we have to help it to get rid of those things so it can become stronger to be able to keep this things at bay. So it’s, yeah–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I totally see that as well, where like the immune system is compromised. It can’t quite get rid of the infection on its own and it needs just a little bit more help with whether a specific protocol that you create to help kind of knock that infection out, right?
Torea Rodriguez: Yup, absolutely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then you went—you said something about five minutes ago. I wanna kinda come back to it because I think, just through the lens of the patient right now, from a patient talking to you. The biggest thing I see patients that have chronic health issues is when they have multiple infections layered up and they—they get their stool test back or their infectious panel back and they find there is one or two infections. We treat those infections. They come back negative, but a new one comes back. And that’s a really frustrating thing that I let my patients know that there is probably a 20% chance that may happen. And we call it you know, I refer to it as crypt hyperplasia where the infection burrows deeper into the gut lining and it makes its way out as we kinda clean through all the crud if you will. What’s your take on it? How do you explain that or educate your patients about that?
Torea Rodriguez: There’s a couple different analogies that I use for that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: One is that, you know, we are basically going after the bad guys that we see in the beginning of the forest–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: But not the ones that are deeper in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Deeper in, right?
Torea Rodriguez: And so you have to kinda keep retesting for that and then of course, I’ll get a little technical with them and talk to them about biofilms and how biofilms –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Can get you know, resistant to things like oil of oregano and you know, that kind of thing, so you kind of have–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: To play around with some of these agents that we use to get rid of the stuff to actually get after it, and then you know, the other part, too, is that if—if they’ve done a lot of antibiotics, traditional antibiotics, or they’ve done a lot of use of these herbal antibiotics, often times what doesn’t come into play is the re-population of the gut and so basically we leave this like five-star resort open with neon signs that says, “Bad guys, move in here.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: And then they’re easy to pick up on something else. So sometimes they pick up something else–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Through their travels or whatever but sometimes it’s just really just uncovering it and exploring deeper in that forest.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this is helpful because I think a lot of people that expect you know, let’s say they have a couple of infections, they expect that once those infections are gone that they’re gonna feel 100% better. And in your situation what percent better were you after those two infections, the H. pylori and the Crypto?
Torea Rodriguez: At that point, you know we had done a lot of the diet-lifestyle stuff–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: So I would say 60% but getting rid of those only got me about another 10%.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then so it was the last one?
Torea Rodriguez: Then it wasn’t until–yeah, it wasn’t until we found the—the Giardia–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: And start treating the Giardia that things really started to fall into place and then looking at my final lingering symptoms, those are all Epstein-Barr related.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: And so now that’s my focus personally and like I still work on the stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: I’ve been working on this since 2009, you know, so it’s—some of my clients are like, “When does it ever stop?” And it could stop now but I refuse to accept mediocrity and you know, I wanna feel good all the time so I will always pursue it, but some people choose to stop when they feel 80-90% better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right and I guess it depends, right? Because everyone, you know, when do you stop eating healthy? When do you stop exercising? When do you stop going—getting good sleep, right? It just—people, it’s very easy to get addicted to feeling great and then the potential of “Can I feel 5% better this year? What do you think? Is it possible?”
Torea Rodriguez: Exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it can gets exciting, right?
Torea Rodriguez: It totally gets exciting and you know, the thing is that that things will change. You’ll start to feel better and then you’ll decide that you wanna go travel to Nicaragua and you get a really nasty bout–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Of food poisoning. Well, guess what?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: You probably just picked up something that you should test for and see if it’s still hanging out in your gut after you get back. So, I mean, we pick up stuff like this all the time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what are you doing right now for biofilms? You brought that up earlier with antibiotic resistance, people taking in the past. What are you doing for that with your patients?
Torea Rodriguez: Biofilms, I mean, you can use several different agents–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: I like to use interface. There’s a couple other things–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: That I’ve used in the past. Not BiotaGen, that is a prebiotic powder.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -Biotic, yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: It’s the Bio-Botanical Industries, do you know which one I’m talking about?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, there’s a couple out there–
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, shoot.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The big ones that I know for my biofilms are—are ginger–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Silver and cat’s claw or Samento. Those are my–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: My favorites to use for the biofilms. Ginger tea is like mandatory for all patients to sip on, you know, for the first few weeks because ginger—there’s a lot of studies on it on helping biofilm reduction.
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, that’s fantastic! Yeah. Biocidin–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, Biocidin.
Torea Rodriguez: It’s the other one that I’ve used.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: Yup. And that seems to do a really good job with people who have been on the Interface for too long and then all of a sudden you’ve got something that’s resistant to that—but ginger is new for me. That’s really fascinating. I’d love to see those papers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean, you just go ginger and biofilms. There is just dozens of them.
Torea Rodriguez: Excellent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There—there was one cool paper where it showed like a Petri dish of like all this resistant bacteria or biofilms, and then like they introduced a small bit of ginger to it and it was like gone. So a big fan of juicing–
Torea Rodriguez: Fantastic.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m a big fan of juicing it though, like fresh juiced ginger, like just kinda throw it in your Vitamix or Magic Bullet if you don’t like the pulp–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Which I don’t like the pulp. I strain it through a French press, and–
Torea Rodriguez: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There you go. Add a teaspoon of honey especially if you don’t have any fungal issues, you could do it. A quarter of a lime and you’re good to go, and it really helps reduce those biofilms.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, ginger is amazing stuff because not only do you have biofilm disruptor, but you’ve got some really great probiotics that are on the ginger root itself.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: So yeah, pretty amazing stuff. I like it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Also anti-inflammatory and anticoagulants. So keeps the crud that gets you know–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Stuck or sludgy moving along, right?
Torea Rodriguez: Yup. Absolutely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool. So with the patient’s right now, would you say the most common autoimmune condition you’re seeing is Hashimoto’s or thyroid autoimmune disease?
Torea Rodriguez: You know, honestly I don’t see a lot of Hashimoto’s clients–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Torea Rodriguez: I just see autoimmune diseases.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: In general.
Torea Rodriguez: They’re all over the place. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What—what are the big five for you?
Torea Rodriguez: Rheumatoid arthritis.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: Hashimoto’s is definitely in there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: But then I’ve gotten some really strange ones that, you know, that are skin-related.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup, scleroderma or–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, that sclerodermas and those kinds of things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Psoriasis.
Torea Rodriguez: Yup, psoriasis for sure. Those are the big majors really.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: I don’t see a lot of people with MS and I don’t see a lot of people with Crohn’s. I thought I would. I had one client with Crohn’s, but that was it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Are you seeing a lot of multi-glandular autoimmune syndromes like more than one autoimmune condition with the same patient?
Torea Rodriguez: Almost everybody–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: I’ve known that’s been diagnosed with our immune has been diagnosed with two if not more.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: I—I’ve two that I know about. I’ve had psoriasis in the past–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: That’s been healed and I know that’s autoimmune. It was never diagnosed by a medical professional but I also have Raynaud’s in the hands–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: That’s fun. Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see that exact same pattern. Raynaud’s, Hashi’s, and some type of either eczema or psoriatic skin condition is like super common.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, very common for them to go together.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And for listeners, Raynaud’s is just a condition where you get these vasospasms in the—typically in the extremity tips that can cut off blood flow in circulation and create that cold kind of feeling.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s pretty freaky when you look at your hands and your entire fingers are white.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: From the base of the fingers to the tips. The first day that happened to me I kinda freaked out. I was on the bike and couldn’t figure out how to get the blood flowing in the fingers again. It was kind of scary.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I totally hear you. And then talk about the Epstein-Barr in the—I wanna say mono or chronic fatigue that tends to happen from that. How are you diagnosing? What are you looking on lab work to pick up EBV?
Torea Rodriguez: So I’m a big proponent of the Immunoscience’s panel. They’ve got a viral panel and if you want we can link to it in the show notes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: But they’ve got a really great comprehensive viral panel that you can run or you can ask your doctor to run the markers for you if you want, which will take a look at whether or not you’ve got past exposure or current exposure. Most people who are dealing with chronic EBV have had a past exposure, and my theory is that our immune system is just not as strong as keeping it at bay as somebody else. I mean EBV is so common that we think that nearly 95 to 98% of the population has been—been exposed. It’s just most of them can keep it at bay. So a lot of those types of symptoms are fatigue, feeling like you’re getting the flu but never really coming down with the flu, light sensitivity in the eyes, tinnitus in the ears, pain in the lymph nodes underneath the ears, those kinds of things, maybe a mild fever but hardly ever fever associated with it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that is super common and the three major things I looked that—I just pulled up the Immunoscience panel and that’s exactly what I run, Viral Capsid Antigen, Nuclear Antigen and Early Antigen.
Torea Rodriguez: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: IgM and IgGs. Any IgM, that’s a sign of more of an acute or—potential active or reactive infection. And any IgG for the Early Antigen–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is a sign of a potential reactivation. Is that kind of what you go by, too?
Torea Rodriguez: Exactly. Yeah and you know, when I was first starting to look at this at myself I did this with my naturopathic doctor and we ran the whole lab, and while I didn’t have any IgM for active–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Infection, I have had in her opinion the highest titer she has ever seen for IgGs so I—I got the Gold Star award for that. So it definitely tells me that that’s something that my body has been dealing with for a very long time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely and what are you doing right now from a supplement or herbal standpoint with Epstein-Barr?
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, so I am making sure that I stay as far away from sugar as I–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Possibly can because sugar will break down the L-lysine in the body and L-lysine–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Is the amino acid that we need to keep viruses at bay–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: At the most, which ironically now that I know that information is why after I eat a bunch of sugar I feel like crap for three days afterwards.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Torea Rodriguez: And I take L-lysine as a supplement. I’ve also been experimenting on myself doing an n=1 experiment with using supplemental BHT.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: And some people don’t like that approach. Some people love that approach. And that seems to be helping with the constant symptoms that I was having, and not as often anymore. Whether or not it is the BHT or the L-lysine, I don’t know because I’m testing two variables are once. But those are the two things that I’ve been doing and then just making sure that I don’t have a lot of stress, because stress will set me back faster than anything,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love how foundational things are right at the forefront. That’s I think so important. I think a lot of people miss that.
Torea Rodrigue: I think—I think we want to throw them in the back corner to be honest –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Right? It’s like we want the easy button sometimes, and sometimes the easy button is just making sure that you’re consistent with the foundations.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see so many people that come in or have seen me before other doctors and they come in, we have a whole bunch of infections, and the doctors they previously were with just threw a whole bunch of things at them–
Torea Rodriguez: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Didn’t really get lifestyle changes dialed in. Didn’t really get the diet. Didn’t really get blood sugar. Didn’t really get the adrenals or any thyroid or hormone stuff. And they just went after the infections right away and they just shut down.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I think echoing on what you said the lifestyle piece and the diet piece, and even the hormonal—hormone piece before that is so important as a foundation so you can go after these infections and not create a healing crisis.
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, absolutely. Like I see this quite often. Of course, everybody wants to end the pain, like I get it. I totally get it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: And you know, we want those results right away but I have seen clients do the same approach with other practitioners and you know, they get thrown a whole bunch of antimicrobials for example. Yeah, that practitioner didn’t look at the liver function and didn’t realize that there are liver wasn’t ready to process all those toxins that are created when we go after the microbes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: And yeah, and they completely shut down so that’s why I do a bunch of labs upfront so that I can see like what’s the status of the liver, what’s the status of the neurotransmitters, like let’s look everywhere and then figure out a strategy, and it does take time for sure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you mentioned earlier, the butylated hydroxytoluene, the BHT.
Torea Rodriguez: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Can you talk more about that?
Torea Rodriguez: So yeah, so butylated hydroxytoluene which is a mouthful–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: BHT—that is the same BHT that used to be in breakfast cereal when you and I were young.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, is that–
Torea Rodriguez: Like it’s the same stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s the preservatives. So there are–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It keeps it crunchy when it sits in the milk for a while, right?
Torea Rodriguez: That’s right. Totally.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, I noticed.
Torea Rodriguez: Capt N Crunch, in fact.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Torea Rodriguez: So it—there’s research out there that says that it’s a neurotoxin. There’s research out there that says it’s not a neurotoxin. And as you know when you read PubMed research you are always gonna find both sides of the picture.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Torea Rodriguez: But what they have found is that with lipid encapsulated viruses, so the herpes style-type viruses of which EBV is one. It’s actually herpes simplex virus IV. That it has a really good ability to disrupt that lipid bilayer of the viral body and help keep the actual attack of that virus down. And so you know, there—there’s a lot of research out there. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there that it works which is why I decided to do an n=1 experiment on myself and it seems to be definitely helping; whether or not I wanna do it long term, I’m not certain yet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I will.
Torea Rodriguez: If I wanna do it long term. But that’s the only—the only negative of it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I will put a link to the show notes. So if anyone that wants to get more intel on that they will have that at their fingertips. That’s great.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah. I’ll also send you a link to include in the show notes. There is a PDF or an eBook out there called the—the BHT book I think is what it’s called, and it was written by a biochemist by the name of Stephen Faulks and he put together a bunch of the research on its effect on lipid encapsulated viruses.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know Steve. He wrote the book on smart drugs, right?
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, okay.
Torea Rodriguez: He is also known for a—what is it? Aspartame, no, not aspartame. Araspid—araspertam?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yes. Yeah, the—the various racetams. Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: Yes, those. Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup. Big—yeah, he’s a big fan of those. Very cool, awesome.
Torea Rodriguez: Brilliant biochemist though and he really knows his stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I met Steve over at the—I think it’s Smart Life forum down in Silicon Valley over at Palo Alto.
Torea Rodriguez: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, he’s a big guy over there. He gives a lot of informative talks.
Torea Rodriguez: Yup, yup, really nice guy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Now you’ve kind of alluded to something earlier. I’m gonna go back to it.
Torea Rodriguez: Great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: My—my brain thinks. It kinda scatters a little bit, but I—it’ll all make sense at the end here. You talked about toxins and being able to check liver functions. So are we talking about just like in an ALT, AST liver enzymes on a blood test, or were you talking about organic acid testing for the liver?
Torea Rodriguez: I use both.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Torea Rodriguez: I wanted to take a look at both. So when I take on a client we do a full blood chemistry workup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: And an organic acids, and a look at both. I wanna make sure that both phase 1 and phase 2 processes are functioning properly. If they’re not, then I probably won’t go after microbials or pathogens or environmental toxins right away because we want to make sure that the body has a—an appropriate way of clearing this stuff. We don’t want to just add a whole bunch of extra burden to the liver if we can help it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what you’re cut off for the ALT and AST on your lab test?
Torea Rodriguez: Umm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Less than 20?
Torea Rodriguez: Pretty much, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, I wanna make sure that, you know, it’s—it’s not too high. We want to make sure that it’s working efficiently. So–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s exactly what I do. Now let’s pivot here. You mentioned in our pre-interview, you talked all about the organic acids. You talked about, and I love the organic acid test, I know there’s—I do the Genova testing in my office. I know you mentioned you do the—the GPL, the Great Plains Lab testing–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And he also mentioned about their tox screen, which I’ve—doing more and more frequently. I’m actually gonna be doing a panel of myself as well as the one for the Roundup, the—the glyphosate, too.
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So—so let’s pivot there. Talk to me more about the organics and how you’re using it with your patients and then kinda stack on how you’re interchangeably using the toxic screen, too.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, sure. So organic acids, I was taught by another practitioner how to interpret organic acids, and I’ve—I’ve used the Genova as well as the Great Plains and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: The thing that I love about the organic acids is we’re looking at metabolites of various different biochemical processes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Torea Rodriguez: And when there’s a problem with one chemical changing form to another chemical in that cycle–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: It will kinda spill over, just like if we had dammed up a reservoir; it kind of spills over and it gets into the urine and this is how we can see where there are problems in those functions in the body. And I think I love it so much because it’s one, simple collection for the client–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: And there are so many markers that look at so many different areas, so we can see bacterial overgrowth in the body pretty easily. It’s super, super sensitive for yeast. Whereas in any kind of stool test, like if you find yeast then you know you’ve got a raging yeast infection.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah. So I like that it’s super sensitive for yeast. You can look at neurotransmitter balance. You can look at–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Torea Rodriguez: You can look at methylation, nutritional deficiencies, like there is so much information in the organic acids that–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mitochondria.
Torea Rodriguez: It’s just really—yeah. Mitochondrial function which is huge–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: For people without immunity like of course, you’re feeling fatigued because your mitochondria–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Huge.
Torea Rodriguez: Are not generating energy the way that they should and they are the energy powerhouses of the cell. So you know, knowing that allows me to be able to fine tune somebody’s wellness plan so that they can start feeling better sooner in looking at those kinds of things. So I love the organic acids for that reason.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What major areas of the organic acid test are you seeing out of balance in your patients right now?
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, gosh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Just myself, I see them all–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But there are certain ones I see more frequently. I’m just curious just kind of like your intuitive guess.
Torea Rodriguez: In the—yeah, in the last year there’s been a lot–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Oxalate and yeast issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: I’ve seen not so much neurotransmitter imbalance but definitely mitochondrial malfunction.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it.
Torea Rodriguez: And then the rest is the bacterial overgrowth.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah is really nice because it gives you that extra net to pick up gut issues outside of what you may miss on a stool test.
Torea Rodriguez: Exactly, which is, you know, we were talking about that forest, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: And trying to find the bad guys in the forest, this gives us another way to do that with a different method which makes it a much better sweep of that forest.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. And what about the tox screen? What kind of toxins are you seeing? How much Roundup, how much benzene, toluene? Whatever else you’re seeing there–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, I really like it. I mean, there’s 172 markers on the—the labs. So it’s–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Unreal.
Torea Rodriguez: It’s pretty comprehensive but, you know, that is allowing us to not only look at what somebody is biologically infected with like a co-infection but the environmental toxins from everywhere. So if you are getting exposed to lots of gasoline or gasoline exhaust fumes for example, maybe your work is—maybe you’re the person that holds the construction sign on the highway, you know, and you’re breathing in fumes all day long, or you’re a dental hygienist in Europe being put in the face of chemicals all day long, like we get to see those things but more importantly we are seeing pesticides that are used either in the yard or in the garden. We’re seeing the chemicals that are used for cleaning in the house or you know, the insecticides, right? In the house and cosmetics. I have to say it–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: Cosmetics and you know, self-care products, the shampoos, and the soaps, and all of that stuff that we put our skin shows up in this test. So I really love it because it—this is what hammers down the lifestyle piece of it, right? Making those changes to make sure that you’re not getting exposed to plastics for example.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and what are the top three toxins you’re seeing come back on that screening?
Torea Rodriguez: Honestly, they’re all over the map. I’ve just started running it–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: And it seems to be a little bit different for everybody.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: So I haven’t seen something that’s very common. Now the glyphosate that you had mentioned–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. The Roundup. Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, so that’s pretty much coming back on almost everybody.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know. It’s scary. It really is scary.
Torea Rodriguez: Yup. And that one, you know, not only is it Roundup but that’s—you know, people hear about GMO versus organic food—GMO, 9 times out of 10 is a plant that has been modified to be able to be a Roundup-ready or Roundup resistant.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Torea Rodriguez: Right. So they’re spraying it, like this is the whole deal with GMOs, is like there is spraying it with pesticides, folks, and you’re eating it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Tons.
Torea Rodriguez: Like that’s what’s happening. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like billions of pounds a year. I just got my—my whole lawn in my yard here in Austin replaced. We put down sod, and before they were saying, “Oh, typically the protocol is you know, we’re going to throw down a whole bunch of Roundup.” I said, “Nope. You’re just gonna—you’re gonna, you know, go and scalp it. You know use the bulldozer, whatever, do what you gonna do. No Roundup.” They say, “Oh, everyone does it. It’s innocuous. You know, turns into a sod, goes away.” But I’m seeing exactly what you’re seeing, lots of glyphosate or Roundup is found in people’s urine. So it’s obviously getting extracted or it’s coming out but the question is, I mean, “I’m not eating or—you know, pesticides and things like that. How are we getting exposed to it?” So it’s—it’s gotta be ubiquitous in the environment.
Torea Rodriguez: It is pretty ubiquitous and I’ve talked to the folks at Great Plains and they’re seeing it in almost 100% of samples.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Scary.
Torea Rodriguez: I mean, it’s—it is really scary.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: And thank you for putting in sod and not turf.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. You got it.
Torea Rodriguez: Thank you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You got it.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Try to be–
Torea Rodriguez: Because I can only imagine the amount of plastic chemicals that I’m gonna find in somebody’s tox screen, then they tell me that they have a turf lawn.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know and I called up the people over down here at—at Chem-free Lawns in Austin and I was talking to them about chemical-free fertilizers. They use a lot of probiotics or they’ll use–
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Natural herbs. They’ll even use various Helminths or worms to kill various infections.
Torea Rodriguez: Oh, cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And—and we were chatting about that for a bit and they were talking to me about the demand to switch away from these more carcinogenic conventional pesticides to these more natural ones, how it’s just the demand is out of this world, and I think people are catching on, you know, if you follow The Truth About Cancer series that was out again this last month, a lot of these chemicals are associated with various lymphomas and leukemias and cancers that are carcinogenic and hormone disruptors. So I think it’s great that people are—by and large are starting to get exposed to this information.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it—you know, it’s one of those things that can—can contribute to autoimmunity.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Huge.
Torea Rodriguez: Because, yeah, it’s huge. So super important.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, was there anything you wanna just kind of leave us with here? I’m gonna go onto my last question that I ask every guest, but is there anything else you wanted to share with the listeners that you find just really impactful or you’re just really passionate about right now that you wanna share?
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that I found in my practice that has been extremely powerful is not only is it diet, lifestyle factors, looking at the functional medicine piece of it, but it’s also really taking a look at your life and what’s important, and sorting through what matters the most, and once you identify what matters the most, like get rid of everything else that doesn’t because it’s just added stress, and we don’t need it, right? So really kinda coming—becoming clear with that, and I think a lot of times people feel like they are expected to have this career, do the—be the perfect wife, you know, all of those things and it’s—it’s really fascinating to determine that sometimes I end up counselling people through career changes–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Torea Rodriguez: And relationship changes like those are really key parts of health so don’t ignore the emotional side either. That’s my point.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think that’s really important. Where can our listeners find out more about you?
Torea Rodriguez: So they can go to my website which is ToreaRodriguez.com. We’ll include that in the show notes because that’s a handful to spell out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s only one R. T-O-R-E-A Rodriguez.com. We’ll put the link–
Torea Rodriguez: Correct.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For it below. Anywhere else? Do you have a YouTube channel? Do you have a podcast? Do you have anything else going on?
Torea Rodriguez: If they subscribe to my newsletter and blog, I do a video blog every week, so they’ll be able to get that in the newsletter, and then the other thing that I’m working on right now is the five-week course that’s gonna launch in January. That’s an environmental toxin course, so it’s five weeks to help clean out the home and the body without getting overwhelmed, and that’s gonna include that environmental tox screen that we talked about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. I’m doing that more and more–
Torea Rodriguez: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I got one on my test, sitting on my desk here that I gotta get done soon on myself, so I’m excited.
Torea Rodriguez: Excellent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So last question. If you are stuck on a desert island and you only could bring one supplement with you, what would it be?
Torea Rodriguez: Supplement.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It could be like an herb. It could be like coconut oil. It could be like anything. Just supplement or compound or tincture or whatever you want.
Torea Rodriguez: Well, the first thing that came to mind is what I’m gonna go with. I’m gonna say an avocado tree.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: An avocado tree, there you go.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, so essential fatty acids essentially.
Torea Rodriguez: Essential fatty acids, lots of fiber, it’s–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Torea Rodriguez: You know, it’s awesome. So I love avocado. That would definitely be it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. Getting our monosaccharide fats going. Very cool.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And also fun fact about an avocado. Avocados have more potassium than bananas. Everyone thinks, “Oh, you know, potassium. Leg cramps, right? Grab a banana.” Well, actually avocados have more and less sugar.
Torea Rodriguez: Avocados, awesome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Awesome, Torea. Great chatting with you and well, look forward to have you back on the show soon.
Torea Rodriguez: Yeah, thank you so much. Super fun.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks. Take care.
References:
http://www.immunoscienceslab.com/Viral/Viral%20Comp%20Panel.pdf
http://www.torearodriguez.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butylated_hydroxytoluene#Applications
http://www.growyouthful.com/remedy/BHT-butylated-hydroxytoluene.php
http://www.torearodriguez.com/
Detox course: torea.co/WholeLifeDetox
December’s Webinar on the course (06 Dec): torea.co/WLD-DEC6
BHT Book: http://www.projectwellbeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/BHTbook-StevenWmFowkes-100903.pdf