Top 5 Ongoing Immune Supports | Podcast #341
Your first line of defense is to select a healthy lifestyle. Following general good-health guidelines is the best step you can take toward naturally keeping your immune system working correctly. Every part of the body, plus the immune system, functions better when protected from environmental strikes and bolstered by healthy-living strategies such as taking vitamins and some natural herbs that are evidence-based and fit you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:35 Benefits of Glutathione and NAC
7:31 Vitamin D Levels
9:14 Zinc and Quercetin
11:11 Vitamin C as an antioxidant
13:38 Herbal Compounds
15:41 Medicinal Mushrooms and Herbs;
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, guys! It’s Dr. Dr. Justin Marchegiani here today. I’m with Evan Brand and we’re going to talk about the top five ongoing immune supports. These are nutrient and or herbal compounds that we use to our patients to support a good, healthy, strong immune system. It’s obviously a couple of different areas and avenues we may use these preventively and as well as acute onset issues. So we’ll kind of talk about our experience clinically and how we use these in our practice. Excited. Evan, how are you doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Awesome! Doing really great and ready to dive in. So it’s going to start out with maybe that most important nutrient of all time, and certainly the most important nutrient for the past one to two years which is glutathione. And you and I did a podcast early on, I think it was last spring, all about glutathione and how we use oral acetylated glutathione. We’ll use liposomal glutathione, we’ll even used nebulized glutathione, and it’s been an absolute game changer for so many people. I would even go as far as to say I’ve saved lives using glutathione. I will just leave it at that but, it’s an amazing compound, probably the most important compound, and our our mentor, awesome guy, Dr. Kalish. He did a great talk very recently about glutathione, and he was showing how important glutathione is with the body, and the body will prioritize production even over methylation and how important it is to really get this system working properly, and everyone is focused so much on methylation and they’re ignoring glutathione production. Everyone gets so caught up in mthfr, and genetic defects, and all that but they’re totally missing the boat on glutathione and this is your master antioxidant that is depleted during times of stress and during toxin exposure. So that could be any type of pathogen that could be mycotoxin we know that moltoxin will deplete glutathione, and you and I measure this routinely on urine testing, and I see low glutathione all the time. If we see organic acids that are too low or too high, we know that there’s a dysfunction going on, and this is something that can easily be remedied and supplemented and we have very very high quality sources that we use for people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So glutathione is a tripeptide, right? So when we use glutathione, we’re going to kind of put glutathione and NAC in a similar camp. It’s good to have both, NAC helps with your, helps your body with endogenous production. Meaning, helps your body make it, as cystine tends to be the rate limiting amino acid in making glutathione. So glutathione is a tripeptide. So it’s got cysteine, glutamine, glycine. Glycine is really great in collagen and bone broth. Um, glutamine you’re going to just see in a lot of gut healing formulas because glutamine is needed for healthy gut function. So if you have healthy guts, or you have an unhealthy gut and inflamed gut, you can see how glutathione, one absorption, and um, of course stress is going to deplete a lot of those amino acids just in the stress process. And so then uh, you make glutathione via those three amino acids and then also you have exogenous glutathione that’s giving someone’s acetyl glutathione or liposomal, or some kind of a reduced glutathione which are all great. Um, those are all going to be exogenously you know, from the outside in. Endogenous is making it inside with the amino acid. So it’s good to help with both. We know the data on glutathione, it helps with inflammation, it has and effect on modulating the immune system, modulating the or t regulatory cells and balancing that th1, th2 immune response . Th2 is going to be the antibody response the, the th1 response is going to be the natural killers of the special forces of our immune system, and then of course, glutathione helps produce compounds like um, catabolic enzymes like catalase and a lot of good natural disinfectants like superoxidise mutase and things that help with lung, and inflammatory health inside the lungs. You’re going to make a lot of these compounds with glutathione which are very powerful on the immune side. Excuse me, I need some glutathione now. On the immune side and also on the anti-inflammatory side. So like for instance, with a lot of lung health issues or breathing issues, we may even give reduced gluathione and a nebulizer because, that is shown according to research, to help with inflammation, and help with vasodilation in the lungs. So very powerful anti-inflammatory, very powerful disinfectant because of the superoxide dismutase, and that catalase enzymes which is really important for inflammation.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. I mean every hospital, especially every ICU, especially when it with luncg issues, I mean, every ICU should be passing out glutathione nebulizers. It’s amazing that that’s not standard practice, that’s not standard procedure. We would see much, much, much healthier people faster recovery times if that were part of the protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. That’s a patient with some serious lung issues who we nebulized some reduced glutathione and within a day, we saw a massive massive improvement. And we know things like NAC for instance is shown to reduce virus replication. So that’s very powerful. So when you’re, when a virus kind of gets into your cells, it replicates and that’s how it create symptoms. The viral load has to replicate and if you have nutrients in there like NAC , android glutathione that’s going to prevent the virus from replicating the higher number. So very very important there and of course, the higher the viral load is, the more you can spread it. If you keep the viral load down, the less chance of spreading and infection so that’s powerful there. Anything…
Evan Brand: An you and I take that ongoing. Yeah, you and I take that ongoing. We do depending on what’s going on. We’re not telling you to do this dose but, what you and I are doing, at least I know for me, I’ve got a combo product. So we’re using glutathione, give or take a couple of milligrams per day of an s-acetylated glutathione which in studies is just as good if not better than liposomal because with liposomal, we have some really sensitive people, me included. I don’t really do well with ethanol, and a lotof the alcohol that is in some of these liposomal formulas so I personally stay away from those. I like the acetylated, I fell great. It works really really well. Papers prove how well it works and then about a gram of give and take of NAC. So that’s kind of my on going protocol. And also for toxin exposure, that also helps protect against the oxidative stress that also helps to deal with mold tox and we know glutathione can help mobilize toxins. So that’s something we use in detox protocol too. Not just for immune and viral support .
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and virus replication, prevention, prevention, acute respiratory issues, all wonderful applications. I do about two grams a day of glutathione of and acetylcysteine, and one to two hundred milligrams of a glutathione whether it’s reduced as acetyl or liposomal. I’ll kind of rotate between the two. So that’s powerful out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Last call. Let me make one comment on the NAC and then we’ll move on. So at the time of this recording, uh, amazon has taken all NAC off of its marketplace. And there’s a lot of reasons that I could get into and probably and get deleted for but, we’ll just say that NAC is gone but, you and I, we work with professional healthcare companies. We do still have availability so we will put link in the show notes because this is something I would recommend you have on hand, and if amazon’s going to take it away, at least we have it. So I think that’s important to know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think so too. I like it, NAC. In my product detox aminos, we have reduced glutathione plus NAC in there as well. I know you have a product similar as well. We’ll put links below so you guys can see that. And we’re gonna kind of a lot of the compounds like five herbals slash immune compounds and then we’ll kind of look at the nutrients. And I always tell patients like focus on the nutrients first just because they’re nutrients. They have other roles in the body and it’s good there. So NAC and I think glutathione are going to be there. Low-hanging fruit, next is vitamin D. If you’re not getting enough sun, or you have darker skin, you’re going to need some vitamin D. Vitamin D plays a major role in th1 th2 balance. And also helps modulate t-regulatory cells which keep your immune system in balance. A lot of studies showing people that have lower, higher vitamin D levels are more resistant to different virus, infections. Our vitamin D also produce an antibacterial enzyme called cathelicidin which helps decrease bacterial load so there’s a lot of powerful benefits of vitamin D and of course, in the winter months, when colds and flues are at the highest. Guess what? That’s when the vitamin D is the lowest on average because of the sun. So vitamin D is very powerful there out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Man, I just got my blood work back. My vitamin D was like a 45 which is too low. And I was kind of putting a false sense of security I guess into my sun exposure. I mean, I’ll get my legs exposed, my chest, my back. I mean, I’ll be outside for sometimes, couple of hours few hours a day, during the peak hours and my vitamin D was still below optimal. We like poeple give or take, we want to be 60 to 80, and I was at a 45 so I’m back on supplementing 5000iu plus a k1 k2 formula just to try to make sure I get up to that peak where I need to be so if you’re like oh, I’m outside in the garden. Don’t use that as your reasoning for not supplementing. If you have to supplement, it’s okay. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. And I would just say 50-70 on an average is probably reasonable. If you have an autoimmune isse, or any cancer issues, you know. Being 70-100 is probably even better. But at least 50 I think is good. So you’re not too far away from that but yeah. If you’re like below 20s or 30s, or below that, you get problems for sure. So vitamin D is really good. Obviously, I think next low-hanging fruit is gonna be zinc. Zinc has major effects, zinc fingers have a major effect on your genetics and DNA activation. Zinc also plays a major role in hormones, making testosterone, making uh, stomach acid. So zinc helps with digestion. Zinc helps with on the hormone side, and zinc also plays a major role on helping viral loads. So lots of studies on zinc losses, zinc helps get into the cells, and it decreases virus replication, so we have natural zinc ionophores, right. Their medications that do it but there’s also some natural compounds like quescitin that actually help zinc get into the cells at higher level and zinc, zinc levels when higher can prevent the virus from replicating kind of like NAC. So zinc is a very important natural compound and so is quercitin as well. We could add quercetin and zinc together ro really help flood ourselves with good high quality zinc.
Evan Brand: And we don’t go too crazy. I mean, we’ve had people that are doing like 50-100 milligrams of zinc long term. That’s too much. Maybe on going for females, maybe 10-15 milligrams, males maybe a tiny bit higher but, I had one lady doing 100 milligrams of zinc and she was not feeling good. So that was too much.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. If your’re doing that much probably 50, it depends on the type, right? If you’re doing a crappy like zinc acetate or something, if you’re doing like a zinc biscynade or eally good zinc bound to an amino acid, probably 50-70 acute like an acute type of situation. But outside of that, probably 10 to 30 max kind of from an ongoing basis. You’re gonna get zinc in pumpkin seeds and a lot of your grass-fed organic meat and or high-quality animal products.
Evan Brand: yeah. That’s the question. I mean, if you’re eating the way we are, I mean, I’m doing a grass-fed steak for breakfast some mornings. I mean, I wonder if I even need extra. I guess it depends on the situation. I will throw a little in; I’ll sprinkle a little in but, it’s not a big one I take all the time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean it’s more going to be during stress and your immune system being more compromised, your nutrient levels are going to need to be higher and so that’s powerful there. I would say next out of the gates, vitamin C is important. Vitamin C are really important nutrients. Obviously, it has major role in oxidative stress; it’s an antioxidant. I would say the macrophages which are like the little pac-man, pac-woman that gobble up bacteria and viruses in the bloodstream. There’s a docking station for vitamin C on to that macrophage. And vitamin C can help potenciate the strengthof those little pacmen and pacwomen; very powerful. Now vitamin C has a molecular structure; very similar to glucose. Guess what happens if you consume too much glucose or I.e sugar. That glucose can dock on to that macrophase and actually weaken it. And so it’s important when you’re sick and your immune system is compromised, higher levels of glucose will mimic vitamin C and kind of dock on that receptor site and will make your immune system weaker. So keeping your immune system stronger by keeping the glucose under control is important. And then getting that good vitamin C in there is going to be important especially you know, acute right? You can always work on what I call a vitamin C callibration where you get your vitamin C levels up to just before, or just past the point where you have loose stools and then back up until they solidify, and you can do that during acute phase, if you’re sick, to keep your immune system nice and strong.
Evan Brand: I love my vitamin C but, I over did it because then, my iron was too high and I think I was doing like three grams of vitamin C for a long time and I was drinking my vitamin C powder with my grass-fed bison steak so that will increase iron absorption. So for anemic people, that’s a great strategy but, for males if you irons are really high, that’s one thing to consider and just track it with blood. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Retract your blood. You know, the natural solution for high iron if you’re a guy is gonna be therapeutic phlebotomy. So getting your blood tested, giving blood all those things are wonderful out of the gates. So we talked about zinc, we talked about vitamin C, we talked about NAC, glutathione, we talked about vitamin D… Is there anything else we missed there? We can add more nutrient. What would it be, Evan?
Evan Brand: Mm. I would say the B vitamins would be very important because, B vitamins are going to be helping mitochondria; we know that a lot of the toxins and things we’re exposed to damaged mitochondria. B vitamins can help support the kreb’s cycle. So in a roundabout way, I think that would be part of an ongoing protocol. If I wanted to keep myself up, keep myself feeling great, I think some Bs would be in the picture.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think some B vitamins are always good. So I think we have vitamin C , D, zinc, NAC, and glutathione so we have five there and we’ll add a little bonus with um, with what you just said with the B complex. So that’s fine right there out of the gates. Why don’t we switch gears and talk about herbal slash compounds? So we have silver, colloidal silver or we use a nano silver so it’s better absorbed; you need less of it. Silver is very helpful because it can it moves through your body; it’s very small in its molecular structure; you’re not going to worry about algeria, or turning blue when you use a high quality silver because, the silver molecules are so small, they flush right by your body and go out through your kidneys, no problem. If you make silver, you have really big silver molecules, you know. Bigger than 20 part per million; like in the hundred per million plus then maybe that can get stuck in yous cells and turn you blue; but most of the archery are turning blue and turning blues and come from home made crappy silver. Uh, we use manufactures that have been around decades, and have never had a case of argyria or turning blue because one, we’re just using high quality silver and it’s going to be tested, so we know the exact ppm-part per million. And so silver is great. Natural antiviral, and it also um, actually an anti-biofilm; so it actually helps the body deal with bacteria better because it decreases bacterial biofilms, which are the little protective shields if you think of the movie 300, right? The spartans, they have their shield and their spear, right? Well biofilms on bacteria are like the shield, right? So imagine like in the movie 300, you pull away their shields, now they’re a lot more vulnerable to attack. Well that’s what silver does to a lot of these biofilms on bacteria; and so it can allow the herbs that you’re using to actually kill that bacteria better. So silver is really powerful. Conventional medicine is even using silver. They use a lot of silver cellophane now. So If they do a total joint or total hip, or total knee, they’ll actually take the joint and they’ll wrap the cellophane around the joint because they found that it prevents mersa or antibiotic resistant bacteria which is powerful.
Evan Brand: Wow! That’s cool. I didn’t know that. So it’s funny a lot of things we talked about eventually will be mainstreamed. Like we talked about, I think glutathione with nebulizers should be in every ICU especially for long and viral issues and it’s not. So maybe one day that will become true just like the silver.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So we have silver there, I will also hit some medicinal mushroom. There’s a couple that are out there. I mean, I like reishi. There’s some other ones that are really good but, reishi and a lot of these mushrooms one have an affect on in increasing the immune system. Whether it’s usually the th1 immune repsonse, uh some of them can actually deactivate viruses, right? A lot of the beta 1, 3 glucan, or the tritipines that are in there can deactivate viruses. That’s pretty powerful out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’d say turkey tail. I think turkey tail and reishi. Those would probably be my top two. I mean you and I do cycle in some mataki and chaga, and some lions maine. I really love lions main for cognitive issues or for helping with ngf which is called nerve growth factor. I had a woman who had chronic burning tongue for 20 years, and we’re able to completely reverse that using lion’s maine mushrooms. So we suspected it was a nerve injury because after a general procedure, her tongue was burning, and dealt with there for 20 years. Lion’s mane took care of it. So I just love lion’s mane but, for this conversation I think rishi, and I’d say turkey tail would be the best if you are having issues with oxygenation, and chronic fatigue, a lot of people having some post viral chronic fatigue, cordyceps, I love cordyceps mushrooms. I use that quite often as well. So those three would be awesome. Turkey tail mushroom, uh, rishi, and cordyceps.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So rishi, cordyceps, I like other compound like golden seal’s wonderful. I had that on my Gi Clear four. That’s kind of in the berberine family. Um, that’s wonderful. I see a lot of berberines do amazing, working great, barbary. I like golden seal; it gets wonderful out of the gates.
Evan Brand: In what form? What are you referring to the berberine compounds for? What are you talking about?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well it’s an antibacterial. Berberines mix with wormwood. If you look at Stephen Buehner’s book, he talks about that having a very powerful anti-viral kind of synergist? So berberines with artemisia are very powerful there as well so I like that too. I would also say um, astragalus is also powerful. It’s a good blood cleanser, it helps with the spleen, it helps with B cell antibody production; helps clean out the blood a little bit. Any feedback on astragalus?
Evan Brand: Oh, love astragus. I’ve got tons of bottles of it and we made, we made astragalus for, for a long time. We had really good quality source, glass bottle, good stuff. I take astragalus all the time and especially for tick bites. If you’re listening and hey I want to improve my immune system and all of a sudden, I got a tick bite, uh per Stephen Buhner’s protocol, he recommends three grams of astragalus for the first 30 days to really ramp up the immune system. IF you have chronic lyme, though that would be a situation where you don’t do that because it can send the immune system the other direction. So that’s a one of my favorite herbs. I’m glad you brought it up and it’s often the root. Technically, we say the herb but astragalus root is what’s being used.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. So we hit astragalus, we hit golden seal, we hit some of our medicinal mushrooms, we hit silver. Let’s hit one more out of the gates. Andrographis is another good one. And again, a lot of these herbs work by one, supporting or stimulating your immune response, and typically, a lot of them are going to work more on the th1 side, so they’re going to really help mobilize natural killer helper cell production and of course, that the also help support antibody production later in the game. And a lot of these herbs can also decrease the virus from being able to replicate. And so that’s helpful because the more replication of the virus we have, the more the symptoms increase. So we can decrease virus load while improving our immune response, then we kind of hit it in both angles. Now, people that are autoimmune, some of these herbs could make you feel worse right? But the way I look at it, as most people are going to be th2 dominant in a lot of these autoimmune issues and so naturally supporting th2 could be a good thing out of the gates. So I always say, work on supporting the nutrients first, and then you can kind of come in there with the herbals come in there one at a time and just see how you deal with them, and then add that to your medicine-functional medicine toolbox later on down the road. So if you get sick, you know different strategies that are going to help you.
Evan Brand: Yeah. It’s a good point. You’re hitting on the multiple mechanisms right? You’ve got vitamin D increasing the immunity, and reducing cytokines storms, you mentioned some of the antimicrobial benefits to it, you’ve got the biofilm support in there, you’ve got the intracellular support with the zinc and the quircetin, you’ve got just the standard immune support with your mushrooms, you’ve got your protection from glutathione and NAC. You know, last thing I’d like to mention on the herbal front, I would say some sort of adaptogen, we kind of talked about this off air.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah.
Evan Brand: Adaptogens in a roundabout way, would be very beneficial and that’s something you and I take every single day, as far as I know you do at least.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right here! Ashwagandha is one of my favorites. My ashwagandha supreme. Um, ashwagandha has been shown to be taken long-term, very helpful for immune function, immune modulation. Obviously, ashwagandha can help cortisol surges too. We know that high cortisol stress can decrease you immune function. So if you’re having high cortisol due to some kind of acute response, ashwagandha may be a good solution to help get that cortisol response under control.
Evan Brand: If I had to pick two, I I think ashwagandha is up there. Maybe number three for me. I’d say number one based on what’s going on, rhodiola because of the antifatigue effects, the anti-anxiety, the anti-depressive effects. Also, amazing for hypoxia. For athletes, for anybody struggling with oxygenation issues, rhodiola is amazing. Second, I gotta go with eluthero, I love siberian ginseng, that combo of eluthero, and rhodiola, oh man. Holy basil’s also awesome too! I mean, God! You know we love adaptogens. So I would just say that any or all of those could be worked into a protocol, would provide an extra support to keep you up on your feet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And also with vitamin D, yeah. Taking vitamin D with k2 is going to be helpful or at least vitamin k. Again, if you’re going to have a tablespoon or two of high quality grass-fed butter or ghee a day, that’s great. If you’re getting any sauerkraut or good greens, that’s gonna be more k1. So you have those good quality fat soluble vitamins in your diet, you’re probably going to be okay. But if you’re not, that’s where it’s good to just have a little bit of vitamin K2 in there as an insurance policy.
Evan Brand: Cool! I think we covered it unless you want to throw any other herbs? And I think that’s a good, good stack though.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, yeah. We hit a good amount, you know. Now regards to the amounts, I mean typically we may double or triple that the typical recommended dose on the back of the bottle if it’s an acute type of phase depending on what’s happening. And so that’s kind of a goo I think rule of thumb out of the gates, is at least double or triple for the first few days to a week during an immune response. Evan Brand: Yeah. On going though, for me rhodiola a couple hundred milligrams is plenty for me too much. I get over stimulated, same thing with elutheral couple hundred milligrams typically per day, early in the morning. And ashwagandha, I mean, you could go up to 500 milligrams or so would be I think a great ongoing dose for actually.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think, I think 500 to a 1000. You can go up to 2 grams on that, and again, it matters if it’s like, this is a whole herb right. Some are like a standardized extract but much smaller that could be more concentrated but, if it’s a whole herb you know. A gram to 2 grams is usually going to be fine, a gram on the lower one’s fine.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and we’re not. Yeah, and we’re not making your protocol here, so like if you go and you look at the bottle, and like well this is 80 milligrams of ashwagandha, so I’m gonna go take freaking 40 to get to what he recommended, no. You gotta pay attention like you mentioned to the label. Because like you said, standardized extracts , 80 milligrams could be equivalent to 800 milligrams if you’ve got like a 10 to 1 extract. So you gotta pay attention to your labels and know what you’re getting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And also if you’re really night shade sensitive, and you have a lot of autoimmunity, be careful because ashwagandha is a night shade. But again, if you’re really sensitive to nightshades and via tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, then be careful with that. Do it one at a time.
Evan Brand: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So outside of that, today was a great chat. I’m just, for the listeners here, if you guys want to reach out and get specific functional nutrition, functional medicine care, by either Evan of Dr. J myself, feel free to head over evanbrand.com, you can reach out to Evan there; there will be a link for you, as well as my site, justinehealth.com. We are available worldwide via phone, zoom, facetime, we’re here to provide all your natural health services if you need that. Also, click down below, send us a review, give us a little comment on today’s podcast if you enjoyed us. Let us know, kind of put down what immune support is your favourite and what’s been helpful for you in the past. We’d love having clinical experiences shared. That’s how you learn a lot. Anything else, Evan?
Evan Brand: Absolutely. I think it’s, I think you covered it all. Just keep your head up. Keep moving forward. That’s all you can do. So I hope these tools will help people.
References:
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Coronavirus and Low Vitamin D Levels – Is There An Increased Risk | Podcast #286
How’s it going, everyone? In today’s podcast, Dr. J is looking at how we can help quench that inflammation and how to address low Vitamin D levels knowing that the Coronavirus is causing a lot of inflammation in the lungs. Dr. J is honing in on antioxidants, Vitamin C, glutathione (which will help with electrolytes), and Vitamin D as an immunomodulator (which gives us a better, more intelligent immune response). And what lowers our Vitamin D levels? Lack of sunlight is a big one. If you’ve been indoors almost 24/7, you’re probably not getting enough Vitamin D and this is crucial for physical and mental health. The Coronavirus cannot survive outside in direct sunlight with at least 40% humidity for more than a minute, so going out into your own backyard or walking along the sidewalk while keeping six feet away from any passerbys won’t hurt you, it’ll help you get in some Vitamin D, get some fresh air into those lungs, increase your physical movement, and more!
Dr. J and Dr. Evan Brand also look at Coronavirus case fatality by age, lending us more perspective to help lessen stress. Still, Dr. J encourages you to try and get in the foundational nutrients and minerals to strengthen your immune system: Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin D (5000 IUs), glutathione or NaC, and Zinc (30-50mg/day).
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
5:15 Why we need to go outside
07:21 Age brackets of coronavirus cases
10:43 Analyzing online data and stats
17:42 Vitamin D correlation
30:56 Vitamin C levels given to coronavirus patients
39:11 About the coronavirus vaccine
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, guys. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here really happy to be back. We got a fabulous podcast on deck for you today. We’ll be chatting about the correlation and potential causation between low vitamin D and COVID-19/coronavirus infection and symptoms. Evan, how are we doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Doing very well. We got off of this topic for a couple of weeks to go back to some other regular stuff but considering this is still going on—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Evan Brand: There are still everybody on the planet wearing masks everywhere they go and places are still shut down and a lady in Dallas is getting put in jail for trying to open her salon to feed her kids. I felt that it was important for us to discuss some of these things that are coming out in the literature. Things that should be the headlines but they are not the headlines because they don’t involve death directly and they are free mostly or very cheap to implement like vitamin C and vitamin D. So why don’t we go straight into this one paper that you had just sent me over, the one that was titled, “Can Early and High Intravenous Dose of vitamin C Prevent and Treat Coronavirus?” from Dr. Chang because this is pretty, pretty awesome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me set table for everyone here first. Okay? So most of the mainstream, kinda conventional approach is to what is going on with coronavirus are very defensive measures, right? Washing your hands, wearing a mask, okay, right? Maybe some social distancing. Maybe quarantine. These are all kinda common sense, you know, defensive measures that are put in place. There aren’t really a lot of offensive measures, right? So we wanna take the time today and just look at some of the things that are in the literature now that there is some evidence out. Maybe it’s correlation. Maybe it’s causation. Again, to actually have causation you need a lot of money and studies, so that probably will never happen but we can use knowledge guided by experience to extrapolate the correlation and apply it and see how it works from n equals 1 standpoint applied in your life. So we are excited to talk about that. Some of the things that we are lining up here are in regards to vitamin D and vitamin C and some of the data on that and the mechanism really is we know inflammation is being caused especially in the lungs by these infections. We know an increase in cytokines can also be produced. Cytokines are these inflammatory chemical messengers that happen as a result of your immune system and/or the inflammation caused by the virus, and so what happens is your body needs things to kinda help quench the inflammation. So there are antioxidants. We call them redox components, right? Vitamin C is in that pathway, so is glutathione. They really help quench and they help give off electrons to deal with and neutralize inflammation, and then there are also nutrients like vitamin D that are immunomodulators. They modulate the immune system and by modulating the immune system, we can have a better, more intelligent immune response, less maybe internal cytokine production. We can also make natural antimicrobial peptides like cathelicidin and others that can really help knock down even the infection as well, because vitamin D helps modulate that Th1, Th2 immune response. So if we have a healthier immune response, it’s theoretically we can go after and deal with the infection. We know the infection rates are—I went over the data last week. A lot of anecdotal, I shouldn’t even say anecdotal, but a lot of the early antibody testing, for instance, Triumph Foods plant here up in Kansas City, I saw 353 workers tested positive for coronavirus, all 100% of them had no symptoms. They did a 3300-patient study for the jails, for the federal jails, 3300 patients had coronavirus. They tested them antibody-wise, 96% had no symptoms, alright? They did study up in Santa Barbara or LA area and they did a study up in Stanford/Santa Clara area, 50 times plus the amount of people that had the infection actually had antibodies. So we know this is not a hallmark of a, let’s say a very virulent infection, and Evan will go over the data looking at the ages. We see a lot of people that are younger are really not really coming down with it. So that’s important to note and the CDC even said from age 0-17, the flu is actually far more severe than the coronavirus on our young people.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so I wanna comment on one thing. I’ll talk about the age in a second but I just wanna point out one thing you said which is that we are finding the infection rate is 50 to 80 times greater than originally thought. Meaning when you look at all these numbers, oh, 1 new case here, 1 new case there. That’s like headline but the reality is way more people are infected than we even know like we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg just based on some of the antibody testing coming out and what we’re finding is I don’t wanna exaggerate it but based on these numbers that are saying 96% plus in these big groups, almost everybody has it or has had it and they’re already making antibodies towards it. So I wanna –
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well…
Evan Brand: Point that out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ll just say we need about 60% to get really this herd immunity level where it’s hard to pass it around. Like if every other person has antibodies for it, it becomes very difficult to pass it around. So over time, most people will get it, right? You know, you can’t—unless you’re gonna totally be in quarantine forever, which I think actually negatively impacts your immune system. It may make you more susceptible to having more symptoms and succumbing of the virus. I think even if you’re older and you have comorbidities, you should still be outside and having reasonable social distancing. Remember, the virus can’t live more than a minute in 75-degree temperature, 40% humidity, only a couple of minutes because we know UVC light kills the virus. We know that. It’s a national disinfectant. So if you are older and you have those comorbidities, you should be outside getting fresh air, you should be getting vitamin D and still keep your distance if you’re concerned, but you should still be outside. Staying inside is not healthy. They did a study up at New York City and they found 60% of people that came in with the infection actually had quarantined. So the quarantine thing is not what it is playing out to be. I think there is more risk factors in that and how it impacts your immune system just staying inside too long.
Evan Brand: Yeah, explain that. It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I was quarantined for the last month. I didn’t go anywhere but yet you still got the virus somehow” I thought quarantine was the magic remedy. You know—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I think moving—
Evan Brand: So how are these people getting it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think moving is a big thing. I think getting fresh air, I think getting vitamin D and sunlight, I think just being outside does something. You know, we talk about it with—you mentioned in the past with forest bathing how it impacts cortisol levels and helps your immune system. I forget what’s the term for forest bathing? What’s it?
Evan Brand: Yeah, shinrin-yoku.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And it boosts your NK killer cells, too. They found that even—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Evan Brand: Like a 2- to 3-day camping trip in the woods boosted up the NK killer cells which are anti-cancer and many other benefit for a month. So 2 days boosted the immune system up over 50% for a month. So this age thing, you and I talked about this before but you were looking at some Italy stuff and the average age of someone who had a fatality from it was 81 years old, and so we have this picture here from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Korea Center for Disease Control and on and on and on, and long story short, when you’re looking at someone 0 to 9 years old, 0% fatality rate overall; 10 to 19 years old for most countries, 0% overall. It’s not until you really get into the 30-39-year-old, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, that you even break above 0 and then you’re getting into 0.1% in the 30-39 group, 0.3% in Spain for 40 to 49-year-olds, 50 to 59-year-old 0.4%. So still, just really tiny numbers. You don’t get in ’til the—until your 80 plus years old that you’re getting into a 13% plus fatality rate and even then, we know with Dr. Birx who came on TV and said, “Hey, all of the cases that could possibly be related are still gonna be tagged as COVID until further research and then maybe we’ll go back and adjust those numbers later.” So how many 81-year-olds are dying that just happen to have the coronavirus in their system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m not sure if you caught it over the weekend. Dr. Birx said—she was commenting about the head of the CDC. She said that there could be up to 25% incorrect on the CDC data points on the COVID-19 deaths/diagnosis. So she commented that over the weekend which is interesting. I wanna share some data here on screen just to kind of bolster the things that you’re saying. So if you guys are listening to this, you can always jump on the Youtube link as well to get some more information. So here’s the study that Evan was showing here, looking at corona case fatality rates by age. So you can see here 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, so I mean you’re at looking at very minuscule percentage points here, right? Very minuscule percentage points, 30-39 and then it starts really going up significantly once you get into 60-79 but even that, I mean, really it’s 70 and 80 is where it really goes up. You still only have a chance, you know, a 1% to 2% chance in the 60-69, right? Yeah.
Evan Brand: Well, let me point this out, too, real quick while you got that up which is that the percentages are actually gonna be lower than what is showing here because these numbers are based on confirmed cases. So confirmed cases, confirmed death. So if there’s many other people that have had it, they might not even show up here. So, if you know what I’m saying, so on their website. This is a world data website. They’re saying you can’t even take these numbers and really publicly talk about them too much because we haven’t had enough testing. So once we do get tested, let’s say we tested another hundred thousand people and put them in that pool, those death rates would be way, way, way, way lower. Those are confirmed cases and then confirmed deaths. So, basically how many other people are out there that have it haven’t gotten tested and therefore, their numbers don’t get factored in. So it makes it look worse than it even is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So here are the coronavirus deaths from last week, okay? And so how it works is this. You have the top numbers the deaths, the bottom numbers the case. So you divide the top number by the bottom number and then you get a percentage, okay? That’s how you figure out the mortality rate. So when Evan talks about this, this data here is if there are more cases than we know about, right? That makes the denominator the bottom number bigger, right? And what we’re finding is, the cases are actually getting far more bigger because of the fact the asymptomatics. The data is showing a 50X asymptomatic being present. Looking at the Stanford study, they show data there and up at the study up in Chelsea, Mass. in Boston. Study down in the UCLA area. USC did a study. So there’s about 3 to 5 different studies on this already out there. I did a video on this last Friday on my Youtube channel. We’ll put that video in the description so you can go dive into that. So the data’s there. Now, we do know here. This came from Italy. Right here, this study here. It only bolstered what we talked about so you can see it came from a government agency, Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Even though my last name is Marchegiani, I don’t really speak the best Italian. So—
Evan Brand: I had a lady—I actually had a client go, “Yeah, I like listening to you and that Italian guy.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You got it. I gotta brush up on my Italian, right?
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But in general, you can see number 1. It primarily came in 2 major areas here. Right about 60 what, 69%. It came in 2 major areas. There’s a reason why two 2 areas were hit really hard. I can go into it briefly but Lombardi is a big area where there’s a lot of textiles produced there. So a lot of Italian textiles are produced, right? China bought a lot of companies. Italian clothing companies, brand companies, and instead of making it in China, they wanted to keep the Made in Italy type of logo and branding on there, so they fly a lot of Chinese up here to these areas to work on the products in the textile industry in the mills. So part of the reason why these areas were hit so hard is there was a flow of Chinese up here to go work in the textiles. So that’s a big reason why, not to mention there is a just a lot of elderly population up there. Now, let’s look at the data. So if you go down a little bit lower. You could see the average age is a little bit over 80. About 80, 81-ish, and then when you look at the people that actually die, I mean, look you don’t really have an increase until you get in the 60s. I mean, look at that. So this is the deaths here and you can see men are actually being hit, about two-thirds are men and one-third are women, and you don’t have an increase in women until you get to up 90+. That’s probably because most of the men are already dead by then. So you can see that spread right there and then look at the diagnosis, right? So this is interesting because they break down more percent of people had what disease that died of COVID. Now, when you go down at the bottom, a number of comorbidities. Look at this, 3 or more comorbidities, 61%. That is unbelievable. So there—what’s being put, portrayed in the media is that this is an infection that could just take anyone down, right? No matter what. No, that’s not the case. Not even close. The data does not support that. Now, when we actually put reason, logic, and evidence here, there’s a lot less fear guiding people. This is a disease that’s gonna take primarily elderly people, people that have multiple comorbidities. Now is it possible that you’re gonna see a news article with someone who is 20 or 29 passing? Yeah, I mean 0.2% in China, 0.22% in Spain, 0 in Italy, right? Once you hit 30-39, then you had 0.3%. Is it possible someone from this age category could die? Yeah, it’s very possible. You don’t know what their comorbidity status is. There’s HIPAA laws in the United States so, you’re not gonna see reporters saying, “Hey, this person was a type 2 diabetic. Hey, this person eats processed food. Hey, this person whatever.” You’re not gonna get that data. So it’s easy for people to be like, “Ooh, I’m so scared. It’s attacking people that are in their 30s.” You just don’t know about that person and obviously, you don’t even know if the person they’re putting up on screen is even in the last couple of years or their most relevant decade. A lot of times they are notorious for showing younger pictures of people that have passed. That’s pretty common. So I just wanna lay out the data and just look at, you know, what these statistical norms are for these infections so people can get a perspective, and then part of the correlation and why it’s older people is number one, you have had more time to accumulate a disease because the bad habits compounded over time is what creates diseases, right? And then also, certain nutrients like vitamin C and vitamin D go down over age and we’ll look at the data in a second on that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you did good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It is here.
Evan Brand: No, I’m glad you pointed out the three—the comorbidities and over 61% of the deaths and I’m glad you showed for people that are just listening, that’s okay. You’re not missing out on much. We’re just talking about the numbers here, so hopefully it makes sense. But the hysteria math versus the reality math, I really like that you put that together because once you talk about the—which really you did even put what’s coming out now. You put on here there’s 50X asymptomatic. Now, we’re seeing it could even be 80X asymptomatic but the real death rate with your 50X asymptomatic math is showing a 0.01 death rate versus if we go up to 80, I mean, it’s gonna be even smaller than 0.01 deaths.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this is less than the flu already by the way. So the numbers are, just so you’ll understand. Hysteria math is not understanding the full breadth of the case, okay? So not understanding the full population—the extent to which people are affected across the board because the asymptomatics prevent people from being tested that have no symptoms, right?
Evan Brand: Well, can we—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They’re not gonna go to the hospital.
Evan Brand: Now, let me ask you. Let me ask you this real quick, too, based on what you said over the weekend happened. So you’re saying that the hysteria math is even gonna be cut down by 25% now, is that right? Because of what Birx was saying?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. Yup, I’ll pull that article up here in a second. But that is what is showing here as well. The hysteria math may even be cut down more and there’s 2 different diagnostics codes. I’ve already talked about it in the past but the hysteria math, the diagnostics codes are U07.1, U07.2. Let me pull this up here as we chat. This will hopefully help you guys out. It will give you a little bit more info here. I’m gonna help you guys out on this, okay?
Evan Brand: And while you’re doing that, let’s talk about what the whole point of today is, so we can’t spend all day on the stats but what people really want to hear is that, well, I think we covered a lot of which one here, which is that the numbers just are not adding up to what is happening in society, with police arresting people, and you know, using helicopters, the surveillance speech, and they’ve talked about these contact tracer programs and apps to track people, and all that. Just weird 1984-style stuff. But what we’re seeing in some of these new papers here and this is more, as you mentioned, correlation. This is not necessarily low vitamin D causes blank, but we’re finding that if someone has a level of 30—30 ng, it’s gonna be ng/mL but if you get a standard vitamin D test, just look at your number, 25(OH )is what you’re gonna look at on your blood work. There’s little to no death at all occurring if the vitamin D is above 30. So if you’re vitamin D is above 30, if you get it, chances are it’s gonna be mild to moderate at most. All the major, major, major numbers of death, those had very, very, very low vitamin D. You’re talking a level of 10, a level of 20. Those are people that are ending up in real trouble. So the mean serum, 25(OH)D level in the critical cases was the lowest. The highest in the mild cases. So when I’m saying this, it sounds confusing like I’m just thinking of someone driving their car listening to this. It may sounds confusing. So I’m trying to make it as simple as possible. High vitamin D, more mild. Low vitamin D, more severe. It’s basically that simple.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. And then, here’s an article by Washington Post right here. So during the task force meeting on Wednesday, heated discussion broke out between Deborah Birx from the physician administration and Robert Redfield, he is the director of the CDC. Birx and others were frustrated with the CDC’s antiquated system of tracking virus data which they worried was inflating some statistics such as mortality rate and case counts by as much as 25%, according to 4 people present for the discussion. Two senior administration officials said the discussion was not heated. So we have this 25% number that is interestingly popping up. So I just—I wanted to highlight that and then here’s some of data here briefly I wanted to highlight more than 370 workers at a pork plant in Missouri tested positive, right? We go down here and look at the data. What do they say? All of them were asymptomatic. All were asymptomatic, okay? We go here and look at the—in 4 US state prisons, nearly 3300 inmates tested positive for coronavirus, 96% without symptoms, okay? Now, let me just be clear. Asymptomatic means you develop an immune response. You develop antibodies. You are infectious for 2 weeks or so on average. The infection is no longer shedding after about 2 weeks on average. You have antibodies and now more than likely you won’t be able to get sick for years. Now, we go to the USC study, similar, similar thing here. USC study, they found that the estimate 28 to 55 times higher in the antibodies versus the confirmed cases, okay? We have a study here, Science Magazine, similar type of category here. On this thing here, this I think is looking at Germany though. I think this is up in Europe and the same thing, I had it highlighted here earlier. I will have to come back to this one.
Evan Brand: Well, I saw one thing at the top there where it said that the infection rate was 30% higher. I saw that near the top of that article. It was talking about Germany and did it say Netherlands as well? Yeah, there it goes. Survey results Netherlands, Germany, several locations in the US find that anywhere from 2 to 30% of certain populations have already been infected with it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Yup, exactly. There is an actual number down here. I had it highlighted earlier but, let’s see here, 99% false positive—
Evan Brand: There’s a—are you talking about the paragraph right there at the top?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Here it is. There it is, right there. That’s more than 50 times as many viral gene test had confirmed and implies a low fatality rate. So 50 times the amount of viral—meaning there are 50 times more people that had the antibodies than the viral gene test had confirmed. That’s what I’m saying there. So 50 times more people had antibodies which showed previous infection that were actually testing positive for the infection. And then the Guardian right here, coronavirus antibody study in the California, right here in the county here at the high end, was 85 times, okay? 85 times, right there.
Evan Brand: And people are listening and they’re like, “Wait a second. What are you saying? 85 times?” That the infection rate is 85 times higher than previously thought.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For every 1 person that test positive with this PCR-DNA swab, they take the little swab, they put it to the back of your nose and hit the back of your throat, you test positive, right? So when I say 50 times, that means that there are 50 other people that never had the infection symptomatically that are testing serologically positive for it. Meaning they have an immune response showing that they got exposed to the infection. Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: It does. But when people hear that, they go, “Oh my God! Well, 50 times more people are infected, well, I need to stay away from humans ever. Don’t hug your mother for Mother’s Day.” Those were some of the headlines.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, that means that this virus is not as virulent as we thought it is. And maybe—so contagious is meaning, it is easy to spread, right? I think the virus is very contagious. It is easiness to spread. That’s the R-nought number, right? The virulence is how the strong the infection is, right? So you have like a virus like Ebola, it kills 40% of people that it comes in contact with. That’s strong virulence. Ebola, not that contagious. I think it only spread to a couple of thousand people. So usually, in kind of virus world, there tends to be a correlation with the more virulent the virus, the stronger and the more chance that it can kill you, usually the less contagious it is. Now, you have the Spanish flu of 1918, right? Why was that a big deal? Well, we didn’t have antibiotics, right? So there’s a lot of post-viral secondary pneumonia that happens that if you don’t have antibiotics then a lot of times that’s the pneumonia that kills you. Not to mention we had a second wave in 1918 because of people coming back, soldiers coming back from World War 1 in Germany that re-brought back the infection. Not to mention I don’t think we really had a lot of the good sterile things like—we didn’t really have a lot of the hygiene things kinda fully dialed in back then either, and I know there were big, huge changes when they started doing hospitals outside and getting more vitamins. That also made a huge game change there as well.
Evan Brand: Well, good point. I’m really glad that you pointed out that there is the issue of virulence versus how easy it can spread and those often get conflated together. Those 2 things get kinda fused and mended. So the media will make it appear that it is extremely virulent but it could just be low virulence, high contagion. And that’s—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Evan Brand: That doesn’t sell as many newspaper articles or ad clicks or whatever else.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. I wanted to put a couple of studies that came out recently out there. Vitamin D supplementation could possibly improve clinical outcomes of patients infected with coronavirus. Now, these are observational studies, okay? Meaning they didn’t do a clinical control. They didn’t put—they didn’t do someone in a metabolic ward, gave him a virus and then gave him vitamin D, and then did the same thing to another group and gave them the virus and no vitamin D, and randomized it. That’s like the double-blind placebo control study. That’s not this. This is observational and there’s always the healthy user bias. What’s the healthy user bias? The healthy user bias is people that take care of themselves and do the right thing and drink good water and get some sleep and move, and may also have good vitamin D, right? So then people that have good vitamin D, they may be doing a lot of other things right that keep them healthy. And so we may be seeing that in here, so it’s always possible. But in the study, I’ll just put it up here and then people always ask like, “What’s the link? What’s the link?” Right here. This is the link, okay? That’s the link right there. We’ll try to put the links in below the video as well. Let’s look at the study. Let me just go right down to the conclusion. The results suggest that an increase in serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D level in the body could either improve clinical outcome or mitigate the severe critical outcomes. While a decrease in the serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D level could worsen clinical outcomes. In conclusion, this study provides substantial information to clinical—to clinicians and help policymakers. Vitamin D supplementation could possibly improve clinical outcomes of patients infected with COVID-19. Further research should conduct randomized controlled trials in larger population studies to evaluate recommendations. That’s I think very powerful right there.
Evan Brand: And let me just point this was the same stuff that just a month ago people were getting flagged as fake news and videos were removed and whatever else and people were saying this early on, vitamin D, vitamin C, you and I were saying this and not us directly, but others had been told that this was like misinformation and whatever. No, I mean, it’s coming out more and more to be true and it makes total sense. We knew that from the beginning. It’s just good to have some papers to back it up now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah and basically, the cut off was vitamin D status below 30 ng/mL was associated with more severe disease and mortality in the Southeast Asian study, okay? And then in general, one study gave adequate stats was 31.2. So basically, when you went above 30 or 35, things definitely improved. So levels above 34 is associated with an improvement. So that was kinda the general gist. So that’s just kinda highlighting that there and then if we can go here to this study, vitamin D level of mild and severe in elderly cases they found here most male and female subjects had 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels below 30. Also, most of the subjects with pre-existing conditions had 25-hydroxy vitamin D level below 30. So now the question here is, well, is it because they are sick and unhealthy? Now they have a harder time getting outside and getting vitamin D. So maybe the diseases are also causing them to have lower vitamin D and then the diseases themselves make them more susceptible to the infection. So these are always—these I’m just talking about like like confounding variables, things that could be affecting the situation that we’re not really factoring. So I’m just kinda spitballing, you know, off the cup with you guys. Majority of subjects classified as severe 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels were below 30, 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels were negatively related although clinically—clinical trials could provide more meaningful findings are the causation that 25-hydroxy D levels in COVID-19 severity. Basic healthy solutions such as vitamin D supplementation could be raised even in community levels and awareness of vitamin D benefits in fighting infections such as COVID-19 should be disseminated especially in the vulnerable elderly population. So they found it important enough that we should be raising the awareness of vitamin D in our elderly population. I think that was very, very important and powerful. You wanna comment there?
Evan Brand: Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, I just sent you a link in the chat from this New York Post story. So let’s move on from vitamin D and if you need a good vitamin D source, we do have professional-grade formulas. So you can—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Evan Brand: Get a hold of us, justinhealth.com or my website evanbrand.com. What we like to use is vitamin D usually around 5,000 units depending on the case and then we have professional versions that are also gonna have vitamin K1 and K2, which are very beneficial and those can help with reducing any potential blood clotting issues because there have been a couple of papers, a couple of articles coming out on people having blood coagulation problems—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Evan Brand: And having more severity so the K1 and K2 would help in theory thin the blood a little and reduce risk. But check out this New York Post one that—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Actually with Vitamin K though, vitamin K may actually increase the clotting. So you may want to be a little bit careful on the vitamin K. Some of the over-the-counter Naproxen is showing to be a little bit beneficial, maybe a little bit of white willow bark aspirin, baby aspirin, or maybe some natural white willow bark could be helpful or some higher dose like nattokinase enzymes. So maybe the systemic enzymes could also be very, very helpful in kinda thinning things out. So be careful with the vitamin K. Now, if you’re getting it from food, from green vegetables or ghee or butter, you’re probably okay. So I wanted to highlight that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I must have said it wrong.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anything else you want to say?
Evan Brand: I must have said it wrong. Yeah, no you did good. For some reason I was thinking that there was some issue with like the Coumadin and the vitamin K combo. I guess we’re thinking that the blood—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It inhibits the vitamin K.
Evan Brand: It’s gonna mess it up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s gonna mess it up. Now again, like I would never say don’t eat your green vegetables or don’t eat your ghee because I think that there’s enough nutrition and antioxidants in those compounds. Like in this study, we’ll talk about it. They talk about sulforaphane actually helping with a lot of the cytokines and that inflammation. Well, guess what? That’s what the infection is causing. So we wouldn’t ever wanna decrease the nutrients. I just think you wanna hold those nutrients stable and let your doctor, you know, know about that if they’re gonna be adding a blood thinner in there. It’s really only gonna matter if you’re doing something on the more like vitamin K inhibition side, right?
Evan Brand: Okay, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There are other ways to thin out bloods besides that.
Evan Brand: Alright, makes sense. Alright, so check out that New York Post I sent you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, let’s take a look at that.
Evan Brand: That was the Vitamin C one where basically this guy in the US, Dr. Weber, had basically looked at what was coming out of China and so he started implementing it in the US and you know, they’re talking about 23 different hospitals throughout New York.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me get it on screen. Let me get it on screen here for everyone to see.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this is it here, New York Post treating with Vitamin C.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and towards the bottom, he was talking about vitamin C levels in coronavirus patients dropped dramatically when they suffer sepsis and inflammatory response, so it makes all the sense in the world to try to maintain this level of it and there’s something else—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Vitamin C is administered in addition to such as the anti-malaria drug, that’s hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin, versus—and various biologics and blood thinners. Yeah, it makes.
Evan Brand: And then towards the top where his headshot is, go up where his headshot is, scroll up a little bit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so right there. The patients who received vitamin C did significantly better than those who did not get vitamin C.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really interesting. Let me kind of dovetail on that. So this is a study, actually out of China. Medical Drug and Discovery, this is early March. Can early and high intravenous vitamin D—vitamin C prevent and treat coronavirus? So this is interesting. So they’re talking about the acute respiratory distress syndrome and they’re talking about early uses of large dose of antioxidants and they abbreviated it as VC, vitamin C, may be an effective treatment for these patients. Clinical studies also show that high doses of oral vitamin C provide certain protection against viral infection, which is great. Neither of these things have side effects, which is awesome. I mean, if you go too high on the vitamin C, you could get loose stool. You may bypass that if you’re doing intravenous. They talk about coronavirus and influenza are among the pandemic viruses that can cause lethal lung injuries, right? The acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Viral infections could evoke cytokine storm that leads to lung capithelial and endothelial activation, neutrophil infiltration—that’s the white blood cells getting in there and lots of oxidative stress, right? Which create reactive oxygen and nitrogen species. What’s oxidation, everyone? That’s a loss of electron, like when you’re in doctorate school, right? You remember the saying OIL RIG, okay? Oxidation is a loss of an electron and reduction is a gain of electron. So when someone talks about oxidation, they’re talking about losing electrons and guess what? We have antioxidants. What’s an antioxidant? Anti—it’s an anti-loss of electron compound. So basically, they are donating electrons—they’re donating electrons when electrons are lost. That’s what vitamin D—that’s what vitamin C is doing. And so—so talks about it is usually accompanied by uncontrolled inflammation, oxidative injury and damage to the alveolar capillary barrier. So what happens is with the capillaries, there’s the what’s called Boyle’s law where there’s gases exchanged, right? Deoxygenated gases or deoxygenated blood is being exchanged with oxygenated blood and then it goes back up to the left atrium, back to the left ventricle and then that oxygenated blood goes, but if there’s inflammation and damage to the capillaries and the alveoli in the lungs, you’re not gonna be able to exchange oxygen. That’s why you’re seeing this oxygen drop. So increased oxidative stress is a major insult in pulmonary injury and it manifests with substantially high mortality and morbidity. Now this is interesting, they talked about in the case report 29 patients with COVID-19 pneumonia showed an increase in C-reactive protein. That’s a marker of inflammation. It’s a marker of oxidative stress and they talked about that activation of the Nrf2 signaling plays an essential role in preventing cell injury from oxidative stress. So Nrf is like this anti-aging path that people try to increase with magnesium. They increase this with curcumin. They increase it with bioflavonoids like resveratrol. They increase it with compounds like milk thistle which help actually decrease a lot of this oxidation. Alright, I’ll pause right there, Evan, so you can comment. Go ahead.
Evan Brand: No, I think you’ve hit it all but the best part of this paper is right there at the bottom of your screen there, which is showing that they’re doing—they’ve had 50 and I mean, I’m sure the numbers are much higher than now because more time has passed but that in the treatment of 50 moderate to severe cases, high-dose vitamin C was successfully used. Doses vary between 10 and 20 grams a day and there was another part of this. It may have been another paper I have but basically, it was showing that even 6 grams a day oral was enough to reduce the infection risk and/or to improve symptoms so it’s amazing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s right there. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Yup, 100%. I think what you said—and I’m putting all the studies up on screen because I know what we’re saying may be a little bit controversial in case people are watching a lot of mainstream news that may be like, “Well, why the heck haven’t we been—have heard about this stuff?” Well, frankly it’s because certain governmental agencies they’re gonna, you know, tell the partyline in food and supplements and natural compounds really isn’t part of that which is kinda sad as this study over here showed, you know, they mentioned that vitamin D should be disseminated especially to the vulnerable population. Meaning that information should be disseminated. Research is saying it, so it’s not me saying it. Of course, that’s kinda where my bias lies because I think vitamins, especially essential nutrients your body can’t make of course should be at adequate levels. Let me go back to this study here. So the oxygenation index improved in real-time so people were actually getting better oxygen exchange. They were cured and were discharged. In fact, high-dose vitamin C has been clinically used for several decades in recent NIH expert panel, and again I’m not saying by the way, right? I’m not saying people were cured. I’m saying the study said that. So that’s not me speaking that, right? We don’t ever cure disease, right? Of course, only a drug can cure disease, right? That’s my legal disclaimer there. Alright, because of the development of the efficacious vaccines, antiviral drugs, because of the developments in these drugs, how they take more time to occur, right? 18 months for a vaccine. Vitamin C and other antioxidants are among currently available agents to mitigate COVID-19 and then the acute respiratory disease syndrome. Given the facts of the high-dose vitamin C is safe, healthcare professionals should take a close look at these opportunity. Obviously, well-designed clinical studies need to be developed so you can create the right protocols. But in general, there’s good data for this and I think this is a first-line thing that I have been saying from day 1. We look at the nutrients we need to support our immune system. What are the foundational ones? Vitamin A, cod liver oil, vitamin C, you know, your leafy green vegetables and some of your low-sugar fruit but also get it supplementally so it’s more therapeutic. Vitamin D, sunlight, some places mostly supplementation to get at that higher level, right? My goal was about 50 ng/mL on the vitamin D. So I think a good standard recommendation is 5,000 IU for every person. It gets pretty decently standard. You could go 10,000 if you’re lower and you need more of a bump and if you’re uncertain, get tested if you can. But if you don’t wanna leave the home, at least 5,000 is a good starting point as well. And then so vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D and then we could use something like glutathione or an N-acetylcysteine precursor which have been shown to help with the oxidative stress and they also help decrease viral replication. Not necessarily shown with COVID but it is showing with other viruses to decrease replication. So that’s kinda like my foundational nutrient stack for anyone listening and then obviously, we can throw some zinc in there as well, 30 to 50 mg of elemental zinc per day.
Evan Brand: That’s awesome. Well, let’s wrap it up. We talked longer than I thought we would on this thing but I am glad we kinda broke down some of these papers because people need to see this stuff and once again, this is not gonna be seen in headline, you know, 6 grams of vitamin D can reduce your risk X amount of percent. That just won’t be there. It’s gonna be death toll rises. I saw one headline over the weekend, life changes as we wait for a vaccine, you know, it’s all this cure me, cure me stuff, but I’m not personally waiting for a magic cure to come. I’m implementing all these strategies we’re discussing now to reduce my risk as much as possible. So if I were to get it, you know, hopefully I’d be in that mild to possibly asymptomatic case period.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You know, people talk about a vaccine coming, I mean, we’ve had 2 other coronaviruses in 2002 and 2003. We have the SARS coronavirus and then 2015, we had the MERS. So there’s been a lot—there’s been a lot of time that’s passed and we still don’t have a vaccine. So people forget that. So the fact that we don’t have a vaccine for other coronaviruses, odds are there probably won’t be one for this and also, we don’t have even a vaccine for HIV. So, I’m not aware of any vaccine for an RNA-based virus. So people can correct me in the description. I’m not aware of any vaccine that is available for an RNA-based virus so the odds are looking at past history there probably won’t be one this time around but I could be wrong, right? I know they’re doing different types of vaccines that are more like protein. They are like taking a specific protein in the virus and they’re trying to make a vaccine that targets that protein but not necessarily attack the virus so they’re doing different things. I think what’s really interesting is the—is if you have a lot of people that have antibodies, let’s go do platelet therapy. Let’s go spin out the platelet. Let’s do a blood transfusion, take the antibodies out of the platelets and then give them the antibodies in an IV. I mean, I think that’s just a common sense first-line therapy along with all of the nutrients, right? That we talked about and then maybe we play around with the hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc protocol as well if we need. So I think we have some really good treatments, palliative acute treatments now where maybe a vaccine isn’t even necessary if we can get things under control and get an adequate amount of herd immunity. It may be totally moot at that point once herd immunity is in place.
Evan Brand: I saw the president talking over the weekend, people were asking like, “How can life go back to normal without a vaccine?” And he just was like, “I think is gonna go away on its own without it, so maybe we don’t need it after all.” But when you see headlines about, you know, X amount of states or X governor says that people must wear masks until a vaccine is created. What if a vaccine does never come? That means you’re gonna wear a mask for the next 5 years and what if those people choose not to get it? Do the people who choose not to get it can’t go back to the grocery store? Like what, I mean, it’s just, it’s weird. They’re not really talking about that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, how did life go back to normal after the 1918 flu? I mean, like 3 million died. Do you know in 1918, Woodrow Wilson didn’t even shut down the economy? They just kept rolling. 3 million people died. How do we go back after that? We did it. How do we go back after a million people died in the Civil War? We did it. How do we go back to life after World World 1 and World War 2 in Vietnam? We did it, you know. I mean, our country, United States is a very resilient, very resilient country. So I’m confident we can do it and I think there’ll be herd immunity in the background that will provide this extra buffer of support. We didn’t even know about antibodies. I mean, they actually were doing some antibody, you know, infusion back then in the 1918. They really didn’t know what was going on. They didn’t have the testing that we have now. So we are lightyears above and beyond a lot of this stuff and I think we even—I don’t even think we had vitamin D supplementation back then. So we are so ahead of the game. I’m feeling really confident and I’m ready for people to get back to work.
Evan Brand: Yup, I hear you. Well, let’s wrap this thing up. We are available around the world with people. So we work by sending lab tests, unless it’s blood we send you out to a lab, but for the other labs we do, you do it at your home. And so if you wanna reach out clinically, get help, boost your immune system up, if you just need to simply run some blood panels or we can look at CRP levels, and vitamin D and things like that, we are available to help facilitate that if need be. So you could reach out to Dr. J at his website, justinhealth.com. My website, evanbrand.com and we’re glad to be here for you. So take good care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent, everyone. Great chatting with y’all. If you enjoy the podcast, put your comments down below. Really excited to know what you guys think, what you guys are doing, what’s working for you clinically. We appreciate you spreading the word to family and friends. Sharing is caring and if you wanna write a review as well, evanbrand.com/itunes, justinhealth.com/itunes for a review. We really appreciate it, guys. You take care. Have a good one.
Evan Brand: See you later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye. Buh-bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
Foundational Nutrients for Optimal Health – Dr. Justin Podcast # 155
Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand dive into the topic of nutrients and their importance to our bodies. Listen to this podcast and learn how B vitamins, Magnesium, Vitamin C & D, Selenium, Zinc and Omegas contribute to achieving a healthy body. Understand how these vitamins and minerals support different bodily functions and gain an understanding on how their deficiencies affect our health and cause unfavorable symptoms.
Explore other topics related to nutrients as they answer questions about leaky gut, H.pylori and some blood pressure medications which contribute to nutritional deficiency. Know some of the best sources of supplements and product recommendations which have been proven effective based on their practice and professional experience.
In this episode, we cover:
09:00 B vitamins
11:25 Minerals + Magnesium
28:15 Vitamin C, Selenium
31:18 Zinc
33:10 Omegas
36:26 Vitamin D
Evan Brand: A happy Monday. If you’re watching in the future I guess the day doesn’t matter but for us it does.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I had a great weekend, man. I was doing a little waterskiing action today. It was phenomenal—actually yesterday, I’m sorry. Great, great day and back in the saddle for an awesome Monday. Got some patients coming up right after our live podcast. How about yourself man? Anything good happening for you?
Evan Brand: Uh—Actually, Yeah. I’m going to create a pretty cool piece of content as soon as you and I get off the call together, I’m gonna go eat some lunch and a I’m gonna drive about an hour away to a local hemp farm where there’s a guy who has a Kentucky hemp oil company that I’ve been seeing his products everywhere. His son was having a major seizure disorder. His son was having hundreds of seizures within a week. And he started to use cannabis extracts to help his son and now his son has not had seizures for years— several years. And so this guy he moved from Northern California where he was growing medical cannabis and now he’s just growing hemp in Kentucky and so I’m driving to the farm. I’ll probably end up doing a podcast with him coz I don’t think it’s gonna be easy to do it in the field, but I’m gonna try to take my camera and puts— maybe a 45 minute little video together, try to interview him, get a little bit his story and share his products coz I’ve been using the CBD with my clients. And as you and I talk about with inflammation and the anti-anxiety benefits, you can pretty much use it with anyone. And it’s going to help regardless of the case whether it’s like Lyme or Hashimoto’s or H. pylori. Whatever we’re dealing with our clients, I mean we can pretty much use CBD across the board and we might notice some beneficial changes and it’s definitely not gonna hurt somebody. So looking forward to going to meet that guy. And stay tuned because I have a video probably the next week that’s gonna be published on it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Yeah. I think CBD has some really good benefits. I use on handful of patients for pain issues, for sleep issues, uh—for anxiety, just from immune balance. And I do fine. It’s— it’s very good. CBD or Cannabis Diol is the non-psychoactive component of marijuana or hamper cannabis, if you will. THC Tetrahydro Cannabis that’s gonna be the part of the marijuana that gets you high and kinda gives you the munchies. So you get some of those benefits with the CBD without the, you know, the higher the munchies afterwards. And I’ve seen it work very well with seizures like you mentioned, very well with autoimmune and pain stuff. I mean it can be very therapeutic. I don’t think it fixes the root cause but I do think it’s very, very therapeutic. It can help.
Evan Brand: Right. Well said. Yeah. Definitely not gonna fix the root cause but I’ve had some people too that are in California, other states where they can even get recreational cannabis and I tell people go for it if they asked me because if they’re doing a tincture or they’re doing a spray or sublingual, they’re not having to smoke, they’re not having to use a vaporizer if they just don’t want to get the high, there’s— there’s tons of different options where you can do a high CBD. And a very tiny amount of THC where people can help fix their sleep. I had a __ in California she’s had chronic pain. She’s had Lyme forever. She said if she does CBD by itself, does pretty much nothing; but when she adds just like a milligram, so do say, 10 to 50 mg CBD, 1 mg THC, all the sudden the synergistic effect happens and the pain goes away.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. They can be very helpful. It’s a good tool in your functional medicine uh— pockets, so to speak.
Evan Brand: Yup. Hey, Robert, thanks for joining us. James, thanks for rejoining us. Our topic, well, we figure we’ll do a Q&A but our topic initially is about foundational nutrients kind of what the things that are actually worth your time and money because Justin and I were so many people come to us after they’ve been to other functional medicine practitioners. And we’ve got a kind of clean up the mess and there’s like 20 or 30 or 40 supplements that people are taking. And we like to try to whittle that down to just some of the foundations. And some things people are taking might help and can’t hurt, but if you’re spending a thousand bucks or something crazy amount on supplements, we really want to give you the stuff that just gonna move the needle coz why take something if it’s not gonna do stuff for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And again, kinda foundation before we go in is a Paleo template to start. And again, that’s macronutrient agnostic. It could be high-carb, low-carb, high-fat, moderate fat, high-protein, moderate protein, right? So we’re just focusing on the anti-inflammatory, nutrient dense, low toxin foods. That’s number one. And then from there, the next step above that is making sure we have the lifestyle stressors in order: sleep, hydration, uh—not eating when we’re really stressed, that’s number two. And number three is actually making sure we can digest the foods that we eat. We eat a really good diet but we can’t break it down. That’s the equivalent of going to the grocery store and leaving that food out on the counter, not putting it in the fridge for a week or two. It’s gonna rot. So the next step above that is HCL and enzymes and digestive nutrients so we can break those really good foods down. That’s our foundation. And once we have that, that’s where I think some of the nutrients come in. So with my patients, all of them, they’re on all either the Multi Nutrients Supreme or Multi support pack which has the extra, kinda stress handling nutrients that are gonna be in there which are gonna consist of high-quality B vitamins that are methylated or activated like P5P uhm—of course, like your B1, B2, right? Thiamine, riboflavin right? These are all—niacin—These are all important nutrients. Of course, activated LMTHF folate, of course, methylated B12 or some kind other adenosine hydroxy B12.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh—chelated minerals like calcium and magnesium and zinc and selenium, right? All chelated meaning they’re bound to specific amino acids, so that we can have better absorption. When we have an amino acid, kind of uhm—they’re next to it, it’s like an escort or a bodyguard for that nutrient to get where it needs to go in the body, if you will.
Evan Brand: Yup. Well said. A lot of these nutrients people are—I’m hearing feedback. What’s going on your end? Maybe your speakers are a bit loud.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m good on my end. I don’t hear anything here.
Evan Brand: You don’t? Okay. Leave us a comment in the YouTube if people hear the feedback at all, if you hear my voice echoing. A lot of people are so deficient in nutrients, even with an organic diet. And that is something that you and I see and measure on the stool test and then we see and measure that on the organic acids test, too. You know we’ve got a lot of people that come to us because they’ve heard us talking about like a ketogenic diet or some other high-fat diet. But then we can measure something called the steatocrit on the stool test. And so, if people wanna quantify, “Well how am I actually digesting”, “What can you guys teach me about my nutrients?” and “My diet’s perfect, I’m one of those guys, I want to try to fix everything with diet”, well, we can take a look and see if that’s actually working for you. So if we see steatocrit that’s high, that’s a fecal fat marker. You can look at your stool, of course, but it’s better to have a number. And if we see that your fecal fat marker’s high, well, we know we’ve got to give you some good fat digesting enzymes, help out the pancreas help out the gallbladder. And then also on the organic acids panel, we’re going to look at the amino acid markers, so we can see do you have the raw breakdown materials? Coz your proteins—like your animal proteins and pastured animal products—those are all made of amino acids. That’s like the breakdown products. Stuff like those and that’s what fuels your brain chemicals, your neurotransmitters and so, if we see you’re super low on amino acids, that’s a problem. So we have to fix it.
And like you mentioned, why is it happening? Well could be infections like Robert is uh— he’s a left us a comment here. He is talking about that he’s had Blasto, he’s had Klebsiella, he’s had Citrobacter—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: He’s resolved a lot of his infections through Dr. J’s uh—antimicrobials, which is awesome. I guarantee you are getting robbed for a long time of your—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. 100% So the first thing is, right, we have that kind of diet. So think of like your health is like running a business. So every year that you’re unhealthy is like a business, right, having more expenses than its profit, right? Where then its revenue— gross revenue, right? So you’re going a little bit more into debt, a little bit more into debt. The difference is you don’t go into bankruptcy court, right, and go bankrupt. You have symptoms. And those symptoms eventually may lead into a cluster of diseases or pathology whether it’s diabetes or it’s just obesity or maybe it’s cancer or heart disease or you’re just in this in between where you kinda have chronic fatigue, you don’t feel good, you’re kind of depressed. And then you’re in this in between where you go to the doctor and they’re just like, “Oh yeah, you’re just aging.” or “Here’s an antidepressant.” or “It’s all in your head.” And then you’re stuck with these kinda in between kind of diagnoses where you’re not— you don’t have a disease, but you sure don’t feel good and you’re not getting any answers, right?
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So that’s kinda the big thing that we see. So we’re like, alright, so imagine that that’s the equivalent of business $1 million in debt. Well just because you start having good business practice and start pulling a profit, you gotta now make above and beyond that million before you start coming back in the black. So that’s where it’s really good for some of these supplements to come in because they kinda, you know, act like a mini bailout or a mini—a mini business loan to kind of bring you back in the balance. So things like B vitamins are great because you burn these up when you’re stressed. And if you have a lot of dysbiotic bacteria, these cre— the good bacteria produce healthy amounts of B vitamins. If you have a lot of bad bacteria, you’re not getting the B vitamins and you’re also getting a lot of toxins, too, which create leaky gut and create more stress and cause you to burn B vitamins and also creates a lot of lactic acid which eats a lot of your B vitamins. So B vitamins are really important first step. And we have B vitamins like B1, which is Thiamine or B2, which is Riboflavin or B3, which is Niacin and B6, which is Pyridoxine 5 Phosphate or Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, B9, which is Folate, uhm—B 12, which is amino, B12, right? Uhm—Methylcobalamin Hydroxyl Adenosyl Cobalamin, right? These are important B vitamins especially if you’re a vegetarian. B12 is gonna be one of those that you’re missing. So any comments, Evan, on the B vitamins and how important they are.
Evan Brand: Yes, sir. Absolutely. And I’m gonna address Robert’s question at the same time answering uh—or adding a comment. He said “Can these infections result in high homocysteine levels?” The answer is absolutely yes and there’s a journal that I’ll send over to Justin so we can put it in the show notes. It was American family physician was the literature but it was an article all about vitamin B12 deficiency and basically what happens is whether it’s H. pylori or like they even talk about in this article which is surprising coz most conventional medical people they kinda disregard parasites, but it’s talking about the link between parasites and B12 deficiency and then the link between B12 deficiency in elevated homocysteine levels. So, yes, we may give you some type of supplement, It’s gonna have the B12 like we always talked about. We’ve gotta get to the root cause, too. So we’ve got to fix those infections like I’ve had. We gotta fix those, too, at the same time while supplementing. So let me send it to you, Justin, so we can—we can share with the listeners.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That sounds great. I think B vitamins are really important just number one because of the stress component; number two because of the gut bacteria component; and then number three just to kind of—most people are still stressed so they need those B vitamins just to help kind of breakeven every day. So that’s the first component. Uh next let’s talk about minerals. So one of the first important minerals is gonna be magnesium because it’s a mineral that has over 100 or 1000 roles 1000 and enzymatic roles in the body, right? It has a major effect on dealing with enzymes. So with Krebs cycle, with energy, with blood pressure, with mood, with, sleep, with relaxation, with stress. Lots of different roles in the body and it’s one of those that are just incredibly deficient in our food supply. There’s lots of studies on magnesium deficiency and that’s it literally prevalent over 50% of the population. So this is important and if we’re not eating organic, then the magnesium in our food will be lower. So magnesium is one of these things that we wanna make sure is in a high quality supplement. I put it in my supplement via magnesium malate. So it’s bound to malic acid which is a Krebs cycle kinda intermediary nutrient. So it’s really important for the Krebs cycle and that way we can at least guarantee a couple hundred milligrams but because it’s chelated, we you know, it—more of it gets into where it needs to go which is really important. So magnesium is another one of those very important nutrients.
Evan Brand: Good. Well said. Yeah. And if you bought magnesium at Walgreens or CVS or Walmart or Target probably magnesium oxide, we talked about this before, but it’s about a 4% absorption rate. So if you’re taking 100 mg, you’re getting 4% of that; if you’re taking a 1000 mg, 4% of that. So take a look at your supplement bottle, flipped it around and look at the form of magnesium. If it’s oxide, you could use it for constipation that’s about the only benefit. But like Justin’s talking about the to help fuel the enzymatic processes and help Krebs cycle and promote energy and all that, it’s not going to do anything. You’ve got a look at the malate’s; you’ve got a look at the taurates; you’ve got the citrate’s; the—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Glycinate.
Evan Brand: Glycinate, the threonate. So there’s many, many good ones out there. And Mercola, I don’t know if he’s just saying this like anecdotally or if he’s got some literature on it, but Dr. Mercola’s recent talk about EMF and how he believes that the magnesium can help mitigate the EMF and he’s recommending like 2 g a day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uhm.
Evan Brand: — of different forms of magnesium. It makes sense, but I don’t know the mechanism of how that would help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Well if we look at the big magnesium foods, right? Magnesium is gonna be lower in foods, but it’s gonna be highest in our green vegetables— spinach, swiss chard, uh— pumpkin seeds uhm—you know, kefirs, things like that, almonds, some legumes, avocado, figs, dark chocolate—dark chocolate’s a really good one, uh— banana. Again, you just have to be careful because if you’re kind of having autoimmune issue, more on autoimmune template to start, well, seeds are out, any dairies out, legumes out, uhm— some of these—half your foods are gone.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you have to be careful like the big things are gonna be high quality dark chocolate, uh—lots of good greens. And if you can do one of these nuts or seeds like the pumpkin seeds I mentioned, that’s a really good place. But if not, that’s were leaning on a good supplement is gonna be helpful, but the green veggie, I think will be the key uhm—to that. So we just gotta keep in in mind, you know, there may be some foods that are really good for us made nutrient profile but they may have an inflammatory profile that’s— let’s just say, kinda contradicts or kinda—the risk outweighs the benefit of getting that nutrient coz of the inflammation.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I agree. So if you’re autoimmune protocol, if your digestion’s compromised, which it probably is if you’re on an autoimmune protocol coz you probably had an autoimmune illness and that’s what we’re recommending an AIP diet. Sounds like a magnesium supplement will be much— much, much more necessary and helpful. Uh— we had a question from Linda. She said, should she be concerned if every time she goes to the stool, so every time she poops uhm— there’s an oil slick.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I don’t know if I would say– I don’t know if I would say scared but concerned, oh, right, yeah. I mean I would be scared if there was blood in the stool.
Evan Brand: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like you know decent bit of blood and it wasn’t just from a tiny bit of a hemorrhoid issue. But if I saw blood in the stool, I would be scared, for sure. I would definitely get that—some kind of a hem—some kind of an ulcer or cancer, make sure that’s ruled out. But with just the slick in the stool, I would be concerned because you’re not digesting your fat which means vitamin A, D, E, K your fat-soluble nutrients like your long chain fatty acids like EPA or DHEA or you know, coconut, good fats like that, you’re not absorbing those which means you’re gonna have blood sugar issues and you’re gonna have malabsorption, for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Absolutely. So in that case, Linda, if you listen to us before, we’ll sound like a broken record, but if not, uh— you know, if you’re working with Justin or I, what we’re gonna end up doing with you would be looking at the stool test, we’ve gotta measure that fecal fat, the steatocrit marker, we’re gonna look for infections. So we’re gonna look for parasites; we’re gonna look for yeast; we’re gonna look for fungus; we’re gonna look for anything that’s gonna be stealing your nutrients or messing up that absorption. H. pylori if that’s suppressing the parietal cells that make hydrochloric acid in the gut. Now your whole digestive cascades is falling apart, we’re gonna look at medications. So if you’ve got a history or your currently taking some type of acid blocking drug we’ve got a factor that in coz that’s such a huge factor for fat digestion, too, if you’re just suppressing that. So we gotta look for those underlying causes but eventually, yes, we could fix the situation and probably add enzymes back in. Let’s address uh—Haley’s question, too, Justin, coz uh—it kinda ties into this. She said that she’s— her digestive enzymes can make your pancreas and gallbladder quote unquote lazy. What are your thoughts? We know that’s not true. With melatonin, yes, you can turn down the production of melatonin if you supplement. But with enzymes, my understanding is we’re only feeding the fire. Justin, can you comment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well even with melatonin I talked to Dr. Ron Rothenberg about that and he says long as the dose is relatively low that that won’t happen coz it’s a positive feedback loop with these things. But when it comes to hydrochloric acid and enzymes, one of the major feedback loops for HCl and enzymes is gastrin, right? And gastrin when you take supplemental HCl, enzyme levels are –or gastrin levels don’t drop. So it’s not like you get testosterone testicle shrink in size.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s not like that. So my bigger concern is that someone’s not making enough enzymes because they don’t have enough hydrochloric acid in the stomach and my concern is that’s— there’s not enough HCl on the stomach because of the sympathetic stress response, right? That fight or flight from food or from emotional stress or physical stress, so we, of course, we’re fixing that stuff upstream, right? Eating in a good, stress-free environment, not hydrating with food hydrating before, you know, we’re after biting after an hour or two but after, you know, 15 minutes before. And then we’re taking enough hydrochloric acid to lower the acidity so we can activate our own enzymes. But taking something is gonna be great coz I’m more concerned about that food sitting in your gut and not being digested and basically rotting and rancidifying and putrefying, creating stress by sitting in your gut.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s my bigger concern.
Evan Brand: I agree. So we hit the minerals. You talked about those you did great. We hit our magnesium which is gonna be probably number one. There’s a whole organization dedicated to magnesium deficiencies. If you type in gotmag, it think it’s gotmag.org. There’s like stage 2, 3 and 4 symptoms. You could even have insane symptoms, big issues, heart arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, all sorts of other like heart-related issues due to magnesium, if you’re deficient. So if you’ve got some heart flutters or some weird symptoms, the cardiologist, they’re not gonna know you’ve got a magnesium deficiency, they’re just gonna end up putting you on like a beta blocker or some type of heart rhythm drug like they’ve done to my grandmother. And they’re not addressing magnesium and these drugs they’re using are likely gonna deplete magnesium even more. So we could get into some really, really big serious health implications if we don’t address something that simple as magnesium.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, hundred percent. So again, big source of magnesium, in my line, I have one called Magnesium Supreme. That’s a magnesium malate. That malate’s are– the malic acid so that helps in the Krebs cycle, it helps with energy but also has a relaxation effect. So that’s one of the ones I formulated. I still even like a little bit of magnesium citrate at night. I think it’s great. It may not be the best absorbed, it’s cheaper but it’s still good. So I like my Magnesium Supreme and then we use the Malate— Magnesium Malate in all the multis. And the multi-nutrients Supreme, in the twice or in the Multisuper pack. So that’s kind of what we have. I like those. I use those daily. I think they’re great. And then for kids that may be uh—you know have serious gut issues, we may do like a magnesium threonate kinda gel to help or magnesium chloride kind of uhm—Epsom salt bath, too.
Evan Brand: Nice. And with the anxiety like PTSD, traumas, phobias, the supplement in my line is called Calm Clarity. And I’ve used that one with great success with people especially veterans who come back from war and they’ve just got a lot of emotional trauma or women who’ve been through some type of abuse threonate crosses the blood brain barrier. So that’s another form of magnesium and not any one form is perfect but you can use a combination of these. So like Justin mention, you wanna cycle. Maybe you’ve got some malate here, you’ve got some citrate here—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: You can add different forms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And then we’ll put show notes and links to some of these things. So if you guys want to support the show, we always appreciate that. We’re just trying to get you the best information possible. Now, I talked about the magnesium foods. Some of the B vitamin foods, okay? Again, you’re gonna have like if you go online and look you’re gonna see the fortified ones which are gonna be cereals and orange juices which is basically crappy, crappy B vitamins.
Evan Brand: Garbage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The worst quality. So do not count on any of the B vitamins from those foods. And number one, you shouldn’t be eating those foods, anyway coz they’re very high in sugar. With the orange juices and the grains are obviously gonna be the gluten thing which are gonna be inflammatory as well. So cut those out, nix those out. But you’re gonna do really with fish, with vegetables, with fruits, with meats, with leafy greens, egg yolks. So a lot of the Paleo versions of those are gonna have super, super high amount of B vitamins which is great.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Like Pop Tarts, like fortified with 12 vitamins and minerals. It’s like, “Oh yeah, let’s just eat pop tarts, high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified glyphosate sprayed wheat flour. We’re gonna be just fine.” Not true, not true, not true.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Remember, when you take in a lot of sugar and refined carbohydrate, all that refine carbohydrate converts to sugar and when you look at the Krebs cycle, how that Krebs cycle pumps around and it goes through all these kind of uhm—you know, reduction reactions where all these hydrogens kind of accumulate. It takes magnesium to run those cycles and if you’re basically—if it’s costing you more magnesium to run the cycle than you’re getting in, this is what we call nutrient debt, right? You’re not getting as much from it than you are— for the cost to run it, okay? So keep that in the back of your mind.
Evan Brand: Luckily the human body is resilient. I mean if that— if we we’re like a car, you and I use car analogies, if we we’re at such a nutrient debt like most people are, the car would be dead. But luckily our body will still survive. You just won’t thrive in these situations. You could have hair issues, skin issues, nail issues, like you said, autoimmune diseases, cancer, you’ve got bad skin, you’ve got acne, you’ve got poor sleep problems, you’ve got anxiety, depression, you’ve got chronic fatigue, you’ve got obesity. I mean, a lot of these diseases that have skyrocketed 10,000% over the last 20 years, there’s many, many factors that we can address in one podcast but like you mentioned, just a nutrient— the nutrient density of the soil has been reduced which is why—and I didn’t tell you this yet, but I uh—expanded my property. I bought the acre next door as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, cool.
Evan Brand: I’m gonna have a 1 acre farm and I’m gonna have as much of my food come from that as possible. Not the meats coz there’s a couple restrictions on having animals but my goal is to provide 50% is my goal. Uh— 50% of my own food. I’ve already grown stuff this year. I’ve had watermelons. Last year, I had bunch of sweet potatoes, I had strawberries, I had broccoli, carrots, all organic homegrown. There’s no more local—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great.
Evan Brand: ..that you can get than your backyard.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. And you can even team up with some farmers and make a deal and say, “Hey, you can use my land and I’ll give you half of what’s on there.”
Evan Brand: I know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Coz then you don’t have to worry about it at all. And you kinda make this deal, they get free land but they get half the food. Hey, there’s enough food for you and your family. The rest may go bad anyway, so you may end up giving it away, anyway. So that could be a good deal for you.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’m gonna try to do some pecan trees and I’ve got all sorts of ideas.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool. Yeah. Very cool, man. I think it’s important that uhm— people have to understand that your body is like a business. When a business starts having low profits and starts— the revenue starts dropping, the business has to either get incredibly efficient or typically, more than likely, lays people off, right? It fires people, right?
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it goes off, it fires people that are least essential to driving the profit. Well, the body does the same thing. It just starts allocating resources to other areas. Some dead skin, it’s okay, we’ll have some irritation, it will get wrinkly and creepy, it’s okay, no problem. Fingernails—weaker, more brittle; hormones will be a little bit lower that means you’ll have a lot of cycles, you know, symptoms with your cycle; you’ll have lower libido; you won’t be able to recover from strenuous work out; you won’t be able to put on muscle, that’s okay, no big deal. And uh—yeah, we won’t—we won’t put it– inflammation as much so you’ll be a little bit more achy, you know, you’ll be little bit more prone to osteopenia or osteoporosis. That’s how the body thinks. Uhm– that’s how it allocates. It’s all about survival. We are really about surviving. So those nutrients help run those systems. We really want to make sure that we have enough nutrients to run systems. There a lot of people they’re focused on calories and if you’re eating a real whole foods those calories will have nutrition, but today, it’s possible with the whole pop tart analogy or the junk food analogy, you can get a whole bunch of calories and not a lot of nutrition on the flipside. So you gotta keep that in mind.
Evan Brand: Agreed. You wanna hit a couple more questions or should we try to move the conversation into some more nutrients. I’ve had vitamin C just echoing in my brain that I have to just talk about vitamin C.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let’s hit that. I wanna hit one last thing on magnesium and we can tie it to vitamin C. There’s a lot of the medications that are out there will actually create nutrient deficiencies. And one of the biggest ones are the blood pressure medications, the water pills, the Hydrochlorothi—Hydrochlorothiazide, the Lisinopril, the ACE inhibitors, right, the beta blockers. These will actually create magnesium deficiency which magnesium is really important for regulating blood pressure, so that actually create more blood pressure, which creates more dependency on these medications. So you can see that vicious cycle. So keep in mind the nutrient deficiency aspect with these drugs. Same thing with birth control pills and B vitamins as well and magnesium. So those are couple of common medications. And then the granddaddy of them all is gonna be the acid blockers that will affect nutrients in many directions, B vitamins, minerals etc.
Evan Brand: Yup. The Omni— is it Omni with an “n” or is it “m”? Omne—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Omneprozol. O-M-N-E and then prozol.
Evan Brand: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: That’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Prilosec that’s the trade name of it. That’s the—Omneprozol is the generic. So yeah, these are the medications. These are the family of meds we got to be careful of. So, kinda tagging into your vitamin C. I’ll let you the ball with that Evan.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I just wanna—one more comment on the Prilosec.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: And the thing that’s scary is these acid blockers used to be prescription and now they’re over-the-counter. So people just go to Target and they just go buy a 48 pack of these, six month supply and they throw that giant value pack 20% more pills into their shopping cart and they just go home, “Oh, yeah, Prilosec.” It’s like, “good God”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s really interesting because you know you get all the people that say, “Oh, you have to be such a super, super smart medical doctor to prescribe these drugs. They’re so dangerous. You need to have, you know, a medical Dr. kinda looking over you. And of course, that it—that is true with in a lot of cases, yeah, they contradict themselves coz then these drugs seven years later when the patent goes out, once they go generic and there’s no money behind them, they go over-the-counter.
Evan Brand: Oh my God.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Look at Ibuprofen, right? It kills 20,000 people a year and now it’s over-the-counter. It’s okay.
Evan Brand: Ugh. Insane isn’t it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So I mean, you kinda talk on both sides of the mouth and you know, we pointed out. Uhm so, yeah, in general, the medications that you’re gonna see that are gonna be out there, primarily are gonna be the patented ones. Once that seven-year patents off or if they can create a mini-me version of it, then it’s over-the-counter and anyone can buy it. It’s up for grabs now.
Evan Brand: Fortunately, beta-blockers and antidepressants are still prescription only. So, that’s good. We’re saving a lot of issues with that. But yeah, let me get back on subject. Vitamin C is huge. It’s gonna be stored in the adrenal glands, typically.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: So Justin and I are gonna measure your nutritional markers when we run organic acids testing on you. We’re gonna look at a lot of nutrients. Nine times out of 10 vitamin C shows up low because people burn through it like jet fuel, just like B vitamins that Justin mention about stress, same thing with vitamin C. There is a reference range most people aren’t even on the map. I’m seeing people at like a point level, like a decimal point level when they should be hundreds of times higher. So I’m typically gonna be using about 2000 mg and I’ve had people say, “Oh Evan, I’ve taken vitamin C for years they still show up low because they were using some garbage they got at like a health food store. Even thought it’s a health food store could still have inferior quality or it’s a consumer break— consumer grade product they bought at Whole Foods or Amazon or somewhere else. And they’re not using professional grade or they’re just using ascorbic acid only, which is decent. But to really boost up the levels, you’ve got to have the antioxidants with it. The quercetin, the rutin, the bioflavonoids.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mixed ascorbate.
Evan Brand: Yeah. You gotta have the mixed ascorbates, too. You’ve got the magnesium ascorbate, the calcium ascorbate, the sodium ascorbates. If you just do—like what is it? emergency that garbage that they sell at the check out line at Walgreens or other places where it’s not only is it just rate ascorbic acid it’s got fructose in there, too, which is gonna destroy blood sugar. That’s not gonna do anything. You could buy a year supply of that and not move the needle. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hundred percent, man. So may—uh—Vitamin C is really important. I also say selenium is one of these things that are very important as well because it’s important for thyroid conversion. Uhm— it’s important for liver detoxification, it’s important precursor for glutathione, right? And we like to give that neither like a Selenium Glycinate or Selenium Methionine kinda bound to one of these sulfur amino acids.
Evan Brand: Let me ask you this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: What do you say to all these people, “Oh, Justin, I don’t need Selenium. I eat three Brazil nuts per day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well I mean I think that’s a really good source of selenium; the problem is the amount of selenium in those brazil nuts can vary tenfold. So you could either be getting 50 µg or 500 µg. So the problem is you just don’t know how much you’re getting in each of them. So I think it’s good if you wanna do a Brazil nut or two a day. Just make sure that the uhm—the multi you’re taking guarantees you at least 200 µg of selenium per day. And I think you’re in a really really, good place.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And we talked about the absorption issue. So if somebody has got some gut bugs, doesn’t matter if you eat the Brazil nuts. You could probably eat a whole bag and not boost up selenium, if you’re deficient and you’ve got things stealing your nutrients or compromising your digestive quality.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And it’s just good to have that insurance policy with selenium. Uh—it’s gonna be hard to overdose with it if you’re in that 2 to 400 µg range and you’re using a good quality like Selenium Methionine. You’re gonna be in really good shape. And again, just kinda tag teaming, we got a lot of people talking about hormone stuff. Selenium is really important for hormones especially testosterone and then we even have Zinc, right? Whether it’s zinc aspartate or zinc methionine or uhm— zinc’s really important. The zinc fingers have a lot to do with the genetics like the DNA the epigenetics. So having enough zinc is really important to activating— having good affects our epigenome. Zinc is extremely important for making HCl. It’s a really good building block for our sex hormones as well. So gotta love zinc and when you’re stressed and you have low hydrochloric acid level, zinc can go low. And you can do is a tally test. We do some Zinc Chloride or—is it Chloride or Sulfate? I was getting confused.
Evan Brand: I think Sulfate for that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. So Zinc Sulfate. We could do a Zinc Sulfate test. The more metallic you’re tasting it is, the better— the better your Zinc is. The better or the more neutral taste, the lower your zinc is. That’s a good little kind of rule of thumb test.
Evan Brand: So people heard that, they’re like, “What the hell is he talking about?” So basically, uh—Justin and I can send a high-quality liquid Zinc Sulfate and based on the status of your zinc, that will change the flavor of the zinc. When I took this test a few years ago, I think they say, “hold it in your mouth for up to 30 seconds” So you put a little bit zinc in your mouth, you kinda gently swish it around. I swallowed it,. I tasted nothing. That was when I had all those infections. I literally tasted nothing. It tasted like water. My zinc was trashed and then as you improve infections, you get your digestion better, your supplementing with the right type of zinc, all the sudden you could put the zinc in your mouth and then it almost tastes like your licking a piece of metal like right away. That’s the goal but would you say, Justin? 95% of people they’re not going to taste the metal right away which means they’re super deficient.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean a lot of them are gonna be deficient if they have gut issues or stress issues or malabsorption those kind of thing for sure. So I think that’s a really important one look at. So we hit the Vitamin C, we hit Magnesium we hit Selenium and we hit Zinc.
Evan Brand: I’d say Omegas and vitamin D would be two others we have to mention.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think Omega-3 is really important which is—the typical Omega-3 fatty acids there is ALA Alpha Linolenic Acid. That’s the omega-3 in flaxseed oil. We have EPA which is 20-chain carbon which is Eicosapentaenoic Acid, that’s EPA. And then we have the_ DHEA. These are the 20 and 22. The EPA or the DHEA are the fats found in fish oil. These are the really important ones. These have all of the anti-inflammatory action. They help block this prostaglandin E2 pathway which gets inflammation jacked up. They also are really good building blocks for the brain and the neurological system. And the ALA are the Alpha Linolenic Acid from the flax seeds and the vegetables, that actually has to get converted via this enzyme, I think it’s Delta 5 Desaturase. And that enzyme converts the 18 carbon to the 20 carbon and things like insulin resistance and inflammation and stress can affect that conversion and knock it decreased function by 80 to 90%. So you’re not getting those really biologically active omega-3 fatty acids when you’re doing a lot of the plant-based Omega-3’s because of those mechanisms I mention. So getting the really good Omega-3’s from the fish is going to the best way. Plus the fish actually bio accumulate how the plants get it which will typically is the algae, right? A lot of the good vegetable, Omega-3 supplements vegetarian ones are gonna be algae based. Well the fish concentrate the algae. It’s kinda like the grass that cows concentrate the grass. So you’re kinda getting that bioaccumulation in a more concentrated form when you’re doing some of these really good fish oils.
Evan Brand: Well said. Yeah. Pastured meats, too, you will get some— you will get some fatty acid. So your bisons, your elk, which are my two favorites.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Your grass-fed beef, pastured pork. I would assume you’d get some from pork.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. More than likely you’re gonna get some from any of the animal products. The healthier they are, the more pastured they—the more pastured, the more biologically appropriate their diet is, uhm— the better chance that you’re gonna get more of these Omega-3 fatty acids than the more inflammatory Omega 6. But again, Arachidonic Acids are really important building block which is an Omega-6 fatty acid, but that’s gonna be a really good fat, too. So you don’t want to say, “Oh, all Omega-6 is bad. It’s just gonna really be a lot more of the Omega-6 that are gonna be driven from vegetable oils like refined vegetable oils, right? The good vegetable oils are gonna be olive oil which is a—a Oleic Acid which is really an Omega-9, your—your uhm—short chain fatty acids are gonna come from your butters and ghee which that’s gonna be more animal-based. MCT oil or your Caproic, Caprylic uhm—Lauric acids. These C6, C8, C10, C12 fatty acids, these are gonna be in the coconut. That’s great. Uh—so those are gonna be some of the really good ones to start with. All avocado oils, another really good neutral one as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I just wanna point out the fact that we’re hitting a lot of really good foundational nutrients but we could do entire episodes just on magnesium, just on vitamin C.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We have that on magnesium. I know that.
Evan Brand: I think we did. Yeah. So if—if we feel like we’re glossing over some deep aspects, then that’s okay. The vitamin D that’s huge. It’s really a hormone called vitamin but vitamin D is important we like to your levels at preferably 60 or above. I say nine out of every 10 people are gonna. be deficient in magnesium As you get older, you can’t convert sunlight into usable vitamin D as much. So even if you’re getting plenty of sun exposure which I’ve talked to people who garden for six hours a day, they are still deficient in vitamin D. And so in less— you’re like Dr. Mercola, where he said he hadn’t supplemented in seven years, something like that, 5-6-7 years, he lives at a very south latitude in Florida. He’s out on the beach hours— three hours a day with so much skin exposed and he keeps his levels at about 60. So I unless you got that amount of time and lifestyle to dedicate—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Evan Brand: ..to sun, it’s gonna be really tough to keep it at adequate level.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I hundred percent agree. So Vitamin D is really important. We try to do it with actual sun exposure, uhm— don’t burn, kinda get your Minimal Erythemal Dose, MED, if you will. And uhm— supplement the rest. If you can— if you just do a really good 25 hydroxy vitamin or a regular vitamin D3, mine’s uh—Emulsi D Supreme and it’s got the uh—MCT oil and the vitamin D3—D3 in there which is a really good form. Again, you can also add some K2 in it. My biggest issue is you don’t get enough vitamin D with the K2 ones but just make sure getting some really good K2 in your foods which fermented foods are gonna have a lot of K2 uhm—a healthy gut bacteria makes some K2 and then also a healthy grass-fed butter or ghee are gonna be other excellent sources of vitamin K2 as well.
Evan Brand: So Designs has one that’s got 5000 IU of D+ K warning K2. I can’t remember the name. But it’s a pretty good one and I’ve used it before think. I think—I think it’s gonna be called the Su—I think it’s Supreme.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Evan Brand: That’s what is it. D Supreme.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The problem is the vitamin D levels in it are very, very low. That’s the only issue.
Evan Brand: I think it’s a 5000. What are you—what are you talking about using? You talking about using 8 or 10 thousand or is 5,000 good in your eyes?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It just depends. I like doing the liquid Vitamin D just because if I need to use it therapeutically like someone’s sick, right? I may do 100,000 IUs—
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that ends up being like 20 or 30 pills. It becomes doing too hard, so it’s easier to take like 30 or 40 drops put in your smoothie and you don’t even know you had it.
Evan Brand: Well said.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I go more with the liquid, but again, your great vitamin K sources are gonna your green leafy’s, fermented foods like—like Natto, of course, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, fermented dairy, prunes, uh—high quality uh— grass-fed butter or ghee. So you really, you know, you can get a lot of those uhm—make sure you’re getting a lot of good nutrients from those foods. Make sure their organic and that will help significantly. So if you’re doing a vitamin D, you really want to make sure that K2’s there and make sure those foods are really good in your diet and a lot of good multis and have a little bit of K2 in there, too.
Evan Brand: Good, good. Well said. Shall we look at a couple questions here?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Let’s hit them.
Evan Brand: Okay. So uh—we had a question about Mercola’s complete probiotic. It’s probably decent, Justin and I use professional grade. So if there’s a consumer grade product out there, we’re always gonna say ours is better because we’ve got healthcare manufacturers that make our products. There is very, very, very stringent restrictions in testing and manufacturing processes that we use and so were always going to push you towards our probiotics instead.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: His is probably good, though.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’m sure their good. I mean Mercola’s, you know, he’s very detail oriented. So I’m sure his are good but we’re biased. So we’re gonna want you to buy ours.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: So you could check out uh—justinhealth.com Check out his line. He’s got several in the gut support section and I’ve got a few formulas, too, that I’ve got on my site evanbrand.com You can check out those.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Perfect.
Evan Brand: Alright. Let’s keep going. What else as we’ve got here? Uh— Robert he asked, “What foods and supplements can you take to speed up restoring low secretory IGA?” What do you think? I think a lot of the gut supports like the leaky gut formulas, your slippery elm, your marshmallow roots, chamomile flowers, anything that’s kinda fix a leaky gut situation maybe some mushrooms to support the IGA for the immune system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think making sure the infections are gone, number one. Making sure the diet’s good. Making sure you’re breaking down the foods that you’re eating. Uhm— number three, once the infections gone, adding in a lot of the healing nutrients. So in my line, we use one called, GI Restore, which is a lot of those same nutrients. Uhm—it’s got the glutamine, it’s got the slippery Elm, the aloe, the DGL, a lot of the healing, soothing nutrients. Getting the probiotics up is gonna be really helpful, you know, the Lactobacillus, the Bifidobacter strands, various strands there. Also very high amounts Saccharomyces Boulardiis is proven to help improve IgA levels. So those are really good things that you can add in there. And just making sure the adrenals are supported.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because a healthy cortisol levels have a impact on your immune system which has an impact on your IgA. Coz your IgA is that mucosal that first-line defense for your immune system.
Evan Brand: Yes. So chronic stress, too, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: If you’re taking all the supplements in the world but you have a terrible boss and you hate your life, you’ve got to address that chronic stress component coz that’s gonna be the number one cause that’s going to drive down the secretory IgA.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hundred percent.
Evan Brand: Uh—there’s another question here. There was a supplement a person had to had a tiny bit of soy lecithin in it should they be concerned? What’s your take?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I wouldn’t worry about soy lecithin. It’s tough. Uhm—soy lecithin is more of an emulsifier. It’s more to help with the digestion and the mixing of that product is typically not gonna be soy protein in that.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The soy protein is really what causes the problems. Lecithin’s more of an emulsifier. So as long as it’s a good quality product uhm— I’m okay with there being a little bit of soy lecithin in there.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And I’ve got a couple formulas that have it in there. I’ve had people say, “Oh my God, I’m allergic to soy.” They’re fine. They have no issue. that’s not actually— it’s such a— it’s such an extracted form that it’s not like you’re eating soy. You’re not eating soybean.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. And then in my line, I think I may just have a few that have soy lecithin in there. But we were able to make sure that it’s guaranteed that it’s non-GMO soy. So you really want to make sure it’s at least non-GMO soy lecithin. And as long as that’s there, I’m okay with it.
Evan Brand: And it’s gonna be a tiny amount. When you look at the formula we’re talking and the other ingredients, it’s not an active ingredient. So could be 1% of the formula.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And less, you know, single digits fraction of percents for sure.
Evan Brand: Yup. Good. What else we’ve got here? If you feel like hitting this and we can, we can save it for another day—symptoms of chronic intestinal infections. I think we hit on that already with the hair, the skin, the nails, the acne, depression, anxiety, fatigue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. All your— all your common symptoms, right? Your uhm— your intestinal symptoms: bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, bloating, acid reflux. And then your extra intestinal which are all the mood-based and energy-based: fatigue, mood, joint pain, depression, anxiety. Those kind of things, sleep,—
Evan Brand: Autoimmunity—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hormone stuff, autoimmunity. And we got a whole podcast on that. So just google digestion or parasites or leaky gut and you’ll get a whole bunch of podcast and videos on that topic.
Evan Brand: Cool. Robert said he loved our podcast on histamine and it hit home prior to having infections no foods were problem, uh—post infection, fermented foods read havoc on him. So thanks for the podcast. Thanks for the feedback Robert. We love to hear that the histamine podcast was a killer one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m looking forward to chatting with you soon, Robert. I know uhm—you’ve been doing good work on your— on yourself there with uh— some of those good informational put in the podcast. But if you need more support, let us know. I’d get retested. Make sure we get to the root cause coz if those issues are still there with the post histamine stuff, there may be some additional critters hanging around.
Evan Brand: Yep. I agree. Another question about chronic dry eyes. “How often have you seen this with your patients? I’m working on healing the gut do you think there could be other root causes to dry eyes?” Justin, what’s your take?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Chronically low cortisol. You’ll see load—you’ll see dry eyes. Typically, get your diet stable. Once your diet’s stable, you can add a lower carbohydrate kinda diet. If those dry eyes are still there, gently taper out that carbohydrate every couple of days. You know, 10- 15 g of carbs primarily at nights. Do the safe starchy versions: squash, sweet potatoes, plantains, those kind of things. And you may see those dry eyes start to go away. You can even try a tablespoon of coconut oil and a teaspoon of honey, right, before bed as well that may help.
Evan Brand: Cool. So what else we’ve got? “Can I re-infect myself with H. pylori with makeup like lipsticks that I’ve used when I had H. pylori? I’ve no idea what the lifespan of that is on the product.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It is possible. I mean I would just look at uhm—the lipstick stuff. Maybe just get a razor blade and cut that end off there. I think you’d probably be okay with that. Uhm— typically, you know, as you knock out the infection, you know, you’d still be using it. So eventually, you’d wear off that but I think if you wanna be on the safe side, I think that’s a good thing to keep in mind. Even more important uhm—things that you can quite excise as easy like partners, right? Spouses. Ideally getting them at least treated semi- “semi” meaning maybe we only use one supplement just coz the compliance is so important. I would really be more—more imperative on the spouses and the partners.
Evan Brand: I agree. Partners are probably much bigger issue, much bigger carrier and reinfection source than your makeup and lipstick. I don’t know of any high-quality lipstick. Maybe they’re out there, but I would just throw that stuff away and maybe does discontinue using lipstick, too. I doubt you’re missing out on much in you know it’s— there’s parabens and all sorts of other stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And they have some really good things on the market now that do a lot like food-based ones where they are like extracting cherries and all these different food-based ones that kinda produces the fruit-based stain and kinda gives you a similar look but it’s using nutrition and foods versus, you know, some of the synthetic things.
Evan Brand: Uhh..okay, okay. So maybe you— maybe you stick with the lipstick then. Alright. James said he had a over sympathetic—let’s see having over sympathetic with sexual activity does blood pressure med Norvasc affect ED issues? That’s kinda like—I don’t even fully understand what you’re saying coz it’s kinda like a piece together thing. Are you understanding what he’s asking?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think what he’s saying is those medications have a potential side effect of erectile dysfunction? I would just go to RXlist.com and put that medication in there and look at that long list of side effects. I can—I can do it from right here while we continue with the conversation. What was the medication called again?
Evan Brand: It’s N-O-R-V-A-S-C. Norvasc.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, cool. I’ll pull it up here in a second. N-O-R-V-A-S-C?
Evan Brand: N-O-R-V-A-S-C. as in Charlie.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Norvasc. Got it. Okay, cool.
Evan Brand: Then he’s saying, even with Viagra, it doesn’t correct lack of sensitivity. So, yeah, I mean here’s my easy quick answer. If you didn’t have those symptoms before and now you’re on this drug and those symptoms are happening, how could that not be a factor?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. This is a an—an—Am—Amlodipine, which is a basically a calcium channel blocker, okay? Which is a calcium channel blocker, which again, magnesium kind of does the same thing, FYI. And if we look at the side effects, uh—feelings like you may pass out, swelling in your hands feet and ankles, pounding heart beat or fluttering on your chest, chest pain, heavy pain spreading arms and shoulders, nausea, general ill and there’s more uhm— side effects as well. So—
Evan Brand: It’s like a commercial all of a sudden.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know, right? Let me see here: dizziness, drowsiness, tired, stomach pain—
Evan Brand: What is this—what is that? That’s for blood pressure? Is that right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. This is for blood pressure medication, but I think what you said is the best advice if that wasn’t there before and then you started taking the medication and it started happening, as long as your blood pressure is not too bad and you could taper down or you could come off with your doctor’s approval, uhm— I would have no problem doing that and seeing if those symptoms improve, then you know. Coz in the end, if it’s not a side effect on RX list.com but you take the meds out and it gets better, does it really matter that they say it is? We know clinically, right?
Evan Brand: Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely.
Evan Brand: There’s so many ways. Didn’t we do a whole podcast—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Don’t—don’t come off. If your blood pressure is 160-170 and you’re on blood pressure medications, coz it will go that high afterwards, don’t come off it. You really want to make sure that if you’re on a medication and you wanted to try and see if there’s an issue, one, fix the root causes; but two, talk to the medical doctor that prescribed it and make sure they’re in concurrence—you know, in agreement with you on the taper that you’re going to do. Make sure they are on the same page.
Evan Brand: Yes. Some people they go to the other end of the spectrum where there are so anti-pharmaceutical that “I’m getting off of this.” That’s bad. You— that’s like stroke territory. So don’t do that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You just gotta be careful. Some people if you’re like 130 or 140 over like 80 or 90, not too bad. You could probably come off as long as you’re fixing other root issues, but just have a blood pressure cuff by your bed, test it in the morning, see where you’re at. Just you— you want to do it responsibly. If you do it and you want to get to the prescribing doctor on the same page as you. You don’t want to go rogue.
Evan Brand: Yup. Well said.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Any other questions you wanna hit up?
Evan Brand: Uh let’s see. What else we’ve got.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I have one here. We got one on Facebook here from Michelle or from
Mitchell. “Can L- tyrosine for dopamine support be too stimulating? How much should be taken to minimize side effects?” Yeah. It can be for some people. Uhm— tyrosine can kinda provide precursor supports to dopamine which then above that can go to adrenaline, so it can be. I think starting at 500 mg and working up to maybe, potentially 3 to even 6 g a day is okay. But start low and slow and if you know that it is stimulating, use it more in that first half of the day not the last half of the day.
Evan Brand: Yup. That’s a simple fix. Good answer. Uh—Nora had a follow-up here. “Thanks for answering the question. So can I successfully eradicate H. pylori and other pathogens as if I live with people who have it. Do they have to do treatment in parallel with me?” Well, if you’re sexually active with people, you’re kissing or simple enough, even just sharing straws, sharing cups, drinking after each other, that’s enough to infect them. So even if it’s not a partner, but it’s someone, “Oh, hey, let me have a drink of that.” That’s enough to still pass H. pylori. Justin and I have seen it hundreds of times.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The stronger your immune system is, it becomes less of an issue so like with Evan and myself, we have stronger immune systems coz we work on that. We maybe less prone because our IgA levels are up high enough where the tiny bit of that in your system, our IgA would squash it. But if your IgA is lower and you got more the stress going on and you have poor hydrochloric acid levels, then for sure. That could happen.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And I had low IgA, too. So that’s something that you’d want it measured Nora and check with the stool testing and look for your IGA figure out which your first line of defense is looking like. If it’s low and weak, you’ve just got a lot of chronic stress, then, yeah, you’re gonna be more susceptible to—to pick it up. But to answer the question, “Could you eradicate it?” If you live with other people, yeah, you could but there’s gotta be a lot of things in your favor and you’re not sharing or sharing cups or drinking for most people or kissing them etc. Uhm— Anthony—well there’s one question about—from Anthony. He said, “It’s been over five years with gut issues, irregular stools, many doctor visits.” He found out that he had a whey and casein allergy. “Where should you start to get help?” Oh, wow! That’s a hard one to answer. Uh—right here. Justin and myself. justinhealth.com evanbrand.com I mean we’ve dealt with people who’ve already been to many doctors. I mean it’s such a common story. We always asked the question, “Hey, kinda give us your history. What—what’s been your experience with other practitioners? What have you tried to help? What have you tried that hasn’t helped?” I’d say 90% of people we talked with they’ve already been to a either a Gastro doctor or some other type of doc for their gut issues and they’ve had no success and only prescription drugs like I got recommended to myself anti-spasmodic, anti-acid drugs. If you’ve got a regular Bell’s, man, you’ve got infections. I can put money on it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I’m a huge believer— I want every patient to at least go in the conventional medical workup before they come see functional docs or functional practitioners like ourselves just to rule out big picture pathology stuff. You know, it just makes it so we at least know that the big glaring stuff is at least been looked at and addressed and assessed. And now we’re looking more functional imbalances which is really what functional medicine is treating. It’s not medicine from a conventional disease based medicine; it’s medicine from a uh— nutritional kind of support perspective working on supporting systems, not treating symptoms and disease.
Evan Brand: Yup. We’ll take one more question here. Uh from Charlotte O: “How do you feel about NOW foods brand supplements my health coach is using them on me. I think NOW foods is okay it’s once again, a consumer grade product, so it is going to be likely less high-quality. I have seen some fillers and some of their products. I have seen them do some inferior forms of certain nutrients; however, they’ve also got a lot of really good products, too, where they’re stepping up their game in they’re using the methylated bees and the higher qualities with the Omega’s, so.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And plus, people doesn’t know. NOW has another line. It’s a higher up line. It’s called “Protocols For Life” That’s their higher-grade line. So if you like NOW, look at Protocols For Life.
Evan Brand: Is protocol uh—will that have to be through practitioner or is that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Couldn’t say it’s a practitioner one but it’s a little bit higher grade but it’s—it’s made by the same company. It’s their one step up.
Evan Brand: But overall what’s your take on NOW?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean I think they’re okay for certain things. You know, uhm— so as a kind of initial kinda get in your foot in the door kinda thing, I think it’s okay. But of course, you know, we—we have are our bias because were trying to get the highest quality in everything. And part of that is because we actually work with patients face to face. It’s not like they go online and buy something, we never see them again. We’re working with them face-to-face so we have to know that what we’re recommending is the best because we need to seek clinical outcome. So we have to know that. So it’s a little bit different for us because we gotta go all out and make sure that nothing is held back.
Evan Brand: Right. So when you’ve got these other companies and people out there promoting stuff, they’re not working with people one-on-one. So it comes directly back on Justin or directly back on me if we give him our product and it doesn’t work. That’s not very sustainable for us. So that’s why it’s much, much better enough for us. That’s why we have access for people that don’t work with us. We allow other people outside to access our uh—products because they’ve been tried and true and tested. And if they didn’t work with people, we wouldn’t carry them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And if it doesn’t work, too, then it allows us to say, “Okay, there’s not some crappy filler or there’s some sub—sub nutrient in there. Let’s look a little bit deeper.” So it gives us the confidence that we just need to look deeper now. So it’s gonna be on both sides.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And just a firsthand experience with NOW foods and the secondhand, I guess, through clients. I’ve had people taking like their super enzymes, for example, and I get their digestive health markers investigated on the urine and stool test, and it looks terrible. Their digestion is not working at all even with the high dose of their enzymes. So does that mean the quality is bad? Does that mean they’re not dosing it properly? Maybe they’re not consistent as much. I don’t know. Probably a combination of factors, but I always switch over people over to my professional enzymes and then I retest and then all of a sudden, it’s fixed. Is it compliance? Is it quality? Probably both.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And you know everyone has got their bias and we kinda state our bias there. You know, we’re trying to be uhm— super transparent. Uhm—but yeah, I think there 95% of companies that are out there are bad. But I think that would be in that—I would say they’re in that 5% at least are better, for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s it for questions. Anything else you want to hit before we wrap it up. I think we did pretty good today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think James uh—who is it—someone came out there—was it James—Yeah. James asked about Tom Brady. Again, love Tom Brady. Huge Patriots fan. Again Tom Brady does lots of things I would say go back and check out the podcast I did on him a year and a half ago for more specifics but he does use the green stuff. He does kinda promote like a Paleo-Alkaline diet. A lot of people have really uh—let’s just say Tom Brady like have a vegan cook. So because he had a vegan cook, Tom Brady was now on a vegan diet. No. He eats 20% meat. That’s far from vegan, okay? So just kinda keep that in the back of your mind. A lot of misnomers about Tom and he has a lot of a different training uh—modalities, too, that I’m hoping— I would love to get Tom Brady’s coach or strength coach on there.
Evan Brand: Or just get Tom Brady and the coach in a three-way podcast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I would love that, man. I would love to hang out with Tom and get some secrets down. That’d be awesome. I think he may need to wait til he retires to truly unveil some of the stuff. But we’ll see.
Evan Brand: That’s true. That’s true. Well, reach out. I’m sure there’s a media/press person and tell him, “Look, we’ve got insanely popular health podcast. Uh— we’d like to interview Tom and his coach.” But yeah, they’d probably be like, “No way, dude. We’re not giving you the secret sauce, hold on.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know. I know. Exactly, so— I know Alex Guerrero is— is his—uh coach that does a lot of the stuff. So I mean— really, really interested to get Alex on a uh— podcast. That’d be freaking awesome.
Evan Brand: Never hurts to ask.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, absolutely, man.
Evan Brand: Well, let’s wrap this thing up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We had a great call today. I’m late for my next patient here, but uhm—keep dropping knowledge bombs all day, man. Really enjoyed this call with you. Anything else you want to add or say?
Evan Brand: Well I think we mentioned it all. If people wanna work with us, we work with people around the world. So Skype and phone consultations is what we do and all the lab testing except for blood you do at your house. So if you want to get help, get to the root cause, reach out justinhealth.com or Google Dr. Justin Marchegiani or myself evanbrand.com or type in Evan Brand. Find us. Subscribe. And if you have more questions, concerns, get a hold of us. That’s what we’re here for. We love helping people. That’s what makes us thrive so we won’t help you thrive, too. So, have a great day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And leave some comments below. If you like this podcast, tell us. Tell us what you like. If you don’t like stuff, tell us what you don’t like. And tell us what you want us to talk about next time and give us a thumbs up. Give us a share. We really appreciate it, guys. And you all have an awesome day, Take care you all.
Evan Brand: Take care.
References:
https://justinhealth.com/products/magnesium-supreme/
https://justinhealth.com/products/emulsi-d-supreme/
https://justinhealth.com/products/gi-restore/
How to Create Healthy Hair and Skin
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
How to Create Healthy Hair and Skin
Thick, luscious hair is an immediately visible sign of good health. However, many of us struggle to obtain shampoo commercial locks. There are many ways we can target healthy hair growth, including dietary changes, the use of topical aides, and determining any possible medical interferences.
Dietary Components
There are several foods and supplements you can consume in order to aide in hair growth.
A Vitamin B complex containing both biotin and other important B vitamins, which have been shown to strengthen hair as well as improve skin and nails.
Collagen promotes the growth of not only hair but also supports skin, nails, and joints. One of the best sources of collagen is in bone broth. Read more about the benefits of bone broth here! Sometimes bone broth isn’t enough and a high-quality grass fed collagen supplement is needed. Click here to see the one Dr. J recommends.
More foods to eat for hair growth and full-body health include the omega-3s from wild-caught fish, antioxidant-rich green tea, and foods rich in vitamins A and C such as bell pepper, broccoli, and sweet potato.
Note: Be sure to avoid the common culprits of many modern diseases and health issues: trans fats, sugar, and alcohol.
Topical Aides
You probably already have several items in your pantry that can be applied to your hair and scalp to stimulate hair growth and prevent breakage!
Coconut oil is extremely moisturizing and prevents damage to ends, which means less split ends. Applied to your scalp and roots, coconut oil can stimulate hair growth and healthy follicles. You can also use coconut oil as a conditioner in the shower!
Aloe Vera contains many vitamins and minerals that are vital for strong and healthy hair. It is also powerful against dandruff, as aloe vera is antibacterial and antifungal. Whether used as a topical aide and left on the scalp or taken internally, aloe vera is a powerhouse for luscious locks.
Rosemary oil is believed to increase cellular metabolism that stimulate hair growth. There has even been research showing rosemary oil working as well as conventional hair loss medication!
Medical Issues
There are several medical issues that may prevent hair from achieving its healthiest state, including disruptive medications and nutritional deficiencies.
Medications can cause more damage than one might realize. Blood thinners, steroids, antifungal medications, antibiotics, cholesterol-lowering medications, birth control pills and other oral contraceptives, NSAIDs, chemotherapy medications, thyroid medications, antidepressants, acne medications, and high blood pressure medications are just some of the commonly prescribed medications that can cause hair thinning, amongst other issues.
A zinc deficiency due to stress, poor diet, leaky gut, use of medications (NSAIDs, acid blockers, antibiotics, etc) will inhibit hair growth. Grass-fed beef and pumpkin seeds are two great sources of zinc to add to your diet.
Poor digestion and gut function will wreak havoc on more than just your hair growth. Many people experience thinning hair and hair loss due to incomplete protein digestion as a result of insufficient stomach acid. Likewise, a healthy microbiome is necessary for your body to carry out its daily routine. Leaky gut and other gut problems affect all areas of your health, so it is important to keep your gut in check.
Hormone imbalances can be due to stress, pregnancy, menopause, PCOS, as well as thyroid and adrenal issues. In fact, even male-pattern baldness can be attributed to hormones. It is very important to have your hormones checked if you are experiencing hair loss or other issues that may be linked to your hormones. Luckily, once the issues are resolved, normal hair growth should resume.
Tackling healthy hair growth both inside and out is sure to see some results. Working with a functional medicine doctor to help you determine any hormone imbalances or interferences from medications can help make the process go a lot smoother.
Sources:
http://drjockers.com/healthy-hair-care/
http://drjockers.com/10-nutrition-tips-for-healthy-hair/
https://draxe.com/vitamins-for-hair-growth/
https://draxe.com/natural-treatments-for-thinning-hair/
https://draxe.com/how-to-thicken-hair/
https://draxe.com/hair-loss-remedies/
https://draxe.com/coconut-oil-for-hair/
Micro-nutrients, Vitamins and Minerals Deficiency – Podcast #33
Dr. Justin Marchegiani gets into an engaging and informative discussion with Baris Harvey about minerals and mineral deficiency and how to test for minerals. Get to know about magnesium and selenium deficiency, as well as the importance of selenium to T4 and T3 conversion and activating thyroid hormone. Listen to the podcast and learn about the Jod-Basedow effect versus Wolff–Chaikoff effect. You can also find out about the different types of iron and what you should be taking depending on your health issues. They also tackle interesting issues like how our soils have become depleted by our conventional agricultural system.
In general, this interview discusses about the overview of the things that might be helpful when it comes to supplementation and where you can get your nutrients and minerals from. Towards the end of the podcast, you can also discover the general tests you can do to look at nutrient levels across the board.
Podcast: Play in New Window|Download
Baris Harvey: Welcome again to another awesome episode of Beyond Wellness Radio. Before I get into today’s show, I wanna tell you guys a little bit about the newsletter. Go to BeyondWellnessRadio.com and hit the button that says Newsletter Sign Up. By doing this you will never miss out on an episode. Be the first one to hear it as it is sent to your inbox each week. You want even more? Click on Just In Health. It links directly to Justin’s–Dr. Justin’s page and you get direct access to him.
Are you having any thyroid issues? We’ve got your back. Hit the link that says Fix Your Thyroid and by doing so and signing up to the newsletter, you get a video series that tells you exactly how to do just that, fix your thyroid. Also you can have direct contact to me when you go to Beyond Wellness Radio site and click the link above. I’ll leave you guys to go over and check that out.
So how’s it going, Dr. Justin?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Baris, it’s going great today, man. Very good day, looking forward to the weekend.
Baris Harvey: Oh yeah, definitely. It’s always–always great to have–have these Friday mornings, conversations about health and nutrition and kinda get the day started right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, man! And I’m gonna already jump the boat because I already know your question. What did I have this morning?
Baris Harvey: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Today’s is–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Today’s an intermittent fast. So not–not too much today. Just took some probiotics and little bit of coffee and butter and MCT, so I’m just tapping into my fat reserves right now and we’re gonna have some nice lunch so I got some kale salad with some olive oil and ginger vinaigrettes, and I’ll have probably some chicken thighs that are sautéed in cumin and bacon with the skin on. So I am super stoked. I actually posted the meal last night on Instagram. So if you wanna see what it looks like, it’s pretty darn good. @Justinhealth on Instagram.
Baris Harvey: Oh, yeah, definitely. Can’t go wrong with chicken thigh, it’s funny because like–I mean, it–everything about chicken is just delicious, but I mean chicken thighs are really underrated like that–they’re really good dark meat, so that’s one of my–and so easy to make, too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, and they’re cheaper. Dude, they’re cheaper.
Baris Harvey: Yeah. Cheaper.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cheaper than regular chicken. Like when I was like a poor doctoral student, right? I would go to Whole Foods and the secret was you get the family pack, you’d order 3 lbs or more, they knock off I think 10% per pound, and I keep the skin on because you get the extra nutrients from the skin. I keep the bone in–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because the bone would act–give you that extra little bit of flavor.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, and the juiciness, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it was like $3 a pound and I’m a poor college student at that time and I’m eating like super clean and organic and when I have patients now, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have the money for to eat this good.” I’m like, “Oh, no. You do. Believe me. This is how I did it.” And I get a first-hand experience.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what I did, too. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t have enough money for cooking oil. Well, luckily I have the skin on, so–.” Yeah. Everything just like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Baris Harvey: So I’m doing the same thing this morning but later I’m gonna have some–some tikka masala which is a–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah?
Baris Harvey: Like a–like an Indian spicy tomato curry, so–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, I did–I just saw this video last night on YouTube of a–I think it was a French guy cooking, it’s–what’s his name–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: So I can give a shout out to that guy and his tikka masala that he made was–was really good. So anytime you–you make like–like Indian food, you–you get to–you get to play with a spice for like a lot and that’s–that’s what I love. It’s like super flavorful food.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it, man. Absolutely love it.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, so today in this episode we’re gonna be talking about minerals and mineral deficiency and how to test for minerals because oftentimes we hear, you know, you gotta take your multivitamin, multimineral thing, you know, your–your supplement. But people don’t really talk much about what you’re getting in your minerals or what minerals that you need. I think often we hear a lot about calcium but that’s about it. And the main thing we just know, “Hey, make sure you drink your milk to get your calcium,” but besides that you don’t hear too much about magnesium or your selenium or your iodine, or–or all these other minerals and–and what do they do for us? And–and you think someone who focuses on gardening or farming, they know a lot about minerals because that’s–that’s kinda what your food eats, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: And depending on where it comes from, so they might have a certain different–a different balance. So we’re gonna go ahead and today and we kinda talk about minerals and get–and go through it all. So the first question that I would wanna ask you and I think that our listeners might be thinking of this as like, it’s like, “What is a mineral and like why do we need it? What’s the difference between mineral and vitamin?”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great question. So both vitamins and minerals and water for instance, these are all micronutrients. So we have our macronutrients which are like our proteins, fats, and carbs and this is kinda where, you know, calories come from because macronutrients are your protein, fat, and carbs, right? There’s gonna be 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate, 4 calories per gram of protein, and then 8-9 grams or calories per gram of fat. So the whole calorie model is, oh, well–that’s it, more calories so avoid it, right? That’s kinda that thinking and that’s really looking at macronutrients. The problem is we’re not looking at the micronutrients. So macronutrients are important and in a Paleo diet or anti-inflammatory diet, we can actually be macronutrient agnostic. Meaning the ratios of proteins, fats to carbohydrates can be tweaked up and down based upon your needs, right? If you’re a CrossFit athlete or a triathlon, yeah, you’re gonna need higher levels of carbohydrate. But on the same standpoint, if you have metabolic syndrome and you’re coming into a Paleo diet or a primal diet, we may have to really ramp those carbohydrates much lower. We may need to rely more on just non-starchy vegetables before we touch any other carbohydrates, and then we’re really being higher in fat and moderately in protein depending on where we’re at, and again, that approach we’re really looking at the quality of these macronutrients. So, hormone-free, antibiotic, organic, like no pesticides, no chemicals. So that’s kinda like the macronutrient-end. I know I’m kinda like side-stepping your question a little bit but I’m kinda giving it a little foundation.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So macro–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so macro is like protein, fats, carbs, but we also wanna make sure there’s quality and cleanliness in those carbs, right? Not the pesticides, not the chemicals, not the hormones. Now on that note, underneath we have our micro. We have our vitamins, minerals, and good quality water. So on that standpoint, vitamins and minerals are gonna be activators. So Paul Chek always had this great analogy. I loved it because it really resonated. Vitamins and minerals are like nails in the wood. So the wood–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is gonna be like the macronutrients. So if we have like rotting wood and we’re putting golden nails into rotten wood, meaning we’re eating crappy macronutrients with poor quality but we’re talking all these expensive nutrients and vitamins and minerals. The vitamins and minerals are alike golden nails and the rotten wood are like the macronutrients. So you can see, right? Golden nails–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And rotten wood is not gonna get the job done, so we wanna make sure the macronutrients stand on top of everything and then once we get down to the micronutrients–once we get down to the micronutrients, that’s where the vitamins and minerals matter because they’re activators. They’re gonna help solidify the foundation on the macronutrients. I’ll give you just a minute there to kinda break that down and ask any follow ups there, Baris.
Baris Harvey: Oh, yeah. This is an easy break. It’s basically, you can’t eat McDonald’s and take an expensive pill–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Baris Harvey: To make everything work, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you.
Baris Harvey: So just sayin, “Hey, y’all.” And–and that’s often what a lot of the researches says, “Well, vitamin supplements are beneficial,” sometimes because people think that they can eat like crap or have a bad lifestyle, and you said like, “Oh, okay, well, it’s okay, I can do that because I take a multivitamin, so I don’t need to eat right.” We have–so that’s–that sometimes messes things up so–for people make sure you know that that’s–that’s not how it works. You wanna make sure that you’re eating the right foods first, and then–and isn’t it the same way that you do it in your practice as well? Like some people they wanna get tested for their–their nutrients and you wanna make sure that you’re–they’re eating the right diet because if they first get tested before like everything’s gonna be off and you–and you kinda already know that, right? Then they start to change their diet and then you see like, “Okay, what’s still missing after you get the food right?”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Exactly.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That totally makes sense. And here’s the thing, right? I love this–this little slogan. I saw it on Facebook and I just saved it. It’s such a great slogan. If you wanna look like a million bucks, you can’t eat from the Dollar Menu.
Baris Harvey: Embarrassing–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It really–it really rings true. And supplements are important these days just because of the fact that our soils have become depleted by our conventional agricultural system. So the quality of the minerals and vitamins in a certain food is gonna be dependent upon the soil and if that soil has been eroded by lack of organic farming or excessive fertilizers especially with NPK fertilizers, this can disrupt the topsoil. This can disrupt the soil quality itself and we need healthy soil, healthy minerals, healthy microbiotic in the soil for the–for the nutrients to then produce adequate vitamins and minerals in the grass and the vegetables, right? Which again meats, the animals, the cows. They’re gonna eat the grass, right? They’re gonna–the chickens are gonna eat the bugs, right? So we need healthy vegetation so our animals become nutrient replete as well.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, so we need good, good minerals in our soil for our–our animals so they can be healthy but also for us, right? So that when we eat our spinach, it’s supposed to be loaded with these minerals that we’re like–that we’re actually getting like I don’t wanna say, “Oh, eat spinach, it’s gonna have a lot of magnesium,” and then you go to a farm that has a bunch of pesticides sprayed on them, so it doesn’t actually have what it’s supposed to have. So then you’re just like chewing on like just a bunch of cellulose and nothing else.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Exactly.
Baris Harvey: So, it’s–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it’s really important.
Baris Harvey: Organic is important.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, and there’s this Senate report. It’s called Senate Document #264. This is a really interesting Senate Document. Basically what it show was–it’s a document that came out in 1936 and it was basically done by the government and what they found was that there was significant nutrient depletion, so there’s a one summary of it, right? “The alarming fact is that foods, fruits, vegetables, and grains are now being raised on millions on acre of land that no longer contain enough certain needed nutrients, and are starving us no matter how much we eat of them.” And that comes from the US Senate Document #264. So feel free and Google that. Now this is important. This is why we need organic farming but even organic farming may not be enough because of the damage to our soil. So for instance, the find that soil that’s depleted in manganese, the plants that then grow in that soil will have 50% less Vitamin C. This is important, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We’re talking micronutrients now, vitamins and minerals, that if the soil is disrupted, even if we’re eating organic; if that organic food is grown in a depleted soil, that product, that animal, that plant may not have the full spectrum of nutrients that we want. So we wanna make sure we’re trying to get organic farming standards because organic farming means that there’s no pesticides or chemicals used for 3 years in that soil. There’s typically crop rotation, we’re not depleting soil, and then there’s idea of like putting certain things back into the soil whether its humus or whether it’s whatever type of organic farming techniques there are to help replete the soil so the minerals and the topsoil can then be nutrient dense and really help utilize the minerals and feed them to the plants so we have higher vitamins and minerals in our food. So that’s always the foundation, is making sure we’re eating organic nutrient-dense food. That’s first and then second would be taking highly–high quality absorbable nutrient-dense or a micronutrient-dense vitamin and mineral support to kinda fill in the gaps of what we’re missing just based on our diet.
Baris Harvey: What would you say would be some of the more common mineral deficiencies?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So one of the biggest ones out there is gonna be magnesium deficiency.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There’s a couple of reasons why, and this is–you can just go on PubMed and Google magnesium deficiency. This is kind of–this isn’t even controversial. Even in the mainstream, this is–there are studies in the 70s and 80s talking about this stuff.
Baris Harvey: Yeah and it’s still going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s still going on. Basically, magnesium, one is used for over 300 different enzymatic systems or processes in the body. So there’s a lot of reasons why we need magnesium. That’s step one. Step two is if we eat refined sugar, magnesium’s also needed for blood sugar or sugar metabolism. So if we’re eating a lot of refined sugar, hey, I mean, have you looked at how our sugar consumptions increased over the last 100 years, right? In 1900, 4 lbs per year; today, 140 lbs per year, right? That’s like pretty insane how much we’ve increased, you know, about 40 times. So that’s a lot of extra refined carbohydrate that’s gonna cause us to go through our sugar reserves faster. That’s one.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Number two, we’re living more stressed, right? Magnesium is a stress buffer. It is a natural beta blocker. It is there to help relax us and chill us out.
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s why people use Natural Calm at night to kinda wind down, right?
Baris Harvey: Exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So magnesium’s important to wind down. So if we’re stressed out, we’re eating a whole bunch of refined sugar, we’re automatically gonna be setting ourselves up for magnesium deficiency issues.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. And–and you know what else it helps with? Is muscle cramps and like pushing and all that stuff if you’re having, you know, problems after your workout or you wake up in the middle of the night and having cramps, like that’s a–that’s a key sign that you might be deficient in this essential mineral, and you know, you need this for–for–like you mentioned, so many different processes but especially when it comes to the, you know, neuromuscular activity, right? This is one of the common things that I would tell people. I would tell people when they would come into, you know, the natural food store. You know, what are–what are some of the things that, you know, that are–are definite that we–we see even western medicine taking a closer look at, and magnesium was–was one of those few things that if you’re having like a heart attack, they might pump some magnesium into your body to regulate normal heart rhythm. You know what I mean? So magnesium is definitely one of those things that you want to–that you wanna take in and your body does a good job regulating it. That if you taken too much, you’re body has a good–that there’s a good sign, and I think you might know what it is if you–if you’re taking in a little excess.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, so magnesium’s one of those things you take too much, you’re gonna have loose stools.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So that’s one of those extra minerals that I would–I would get looked at.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We can just do a red blood cell magnesium. Now not your magnesium serum, right? Because–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: When we do a blood test, we’ll see magnesium on there, and that’s typically your magnesium serum. That’s just looking at what’s in the blood. Red blood cell magnesium is actually look at what’s actually in the cell.
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So in the blood is kinda like you’re in the ocean and there’s a like whole bunch of magnesium like floating around you, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Red blood cell magnesium is actually what’s inside of you. If you’re the cell and the water is the blood, right? The magnesium in the water is the magnesium serum. The red blood cell magnesium is actually what’s inside of you at the time.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So that’s a better marker for red blood cell magnesium and I like to see it in the upper 5’s, 5.8, 5.6, 5.7. The top 50% is a really good range to be at for magnesium.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. So–and like we mentioned before, it’s one of those great, great, great minerals. I mean, you can also do like trans–transdermal to make sure that you’re having enough and make sure that you’re–you’re eating as many leafy greens as possible to get–to get your magnesium through–through food first, but you know, you’re–because of what we’re–done to our soils you might need some supplementation as well. So if you want normal heart rhythm and nerve transportation, bone growth, body temperature, I mean, you name it, testosterone boost, calcium absorption, like make sure you’re got your magnesium in check.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And again, you can go on Google Scholar and you can jump pump some of these things in there–magnesium deficiency, like there’s lots of studies on there. And there’s some people that talk about the Senate Document that I just mentioned, it being kinda debunked, but again there’s lots of studies individually on all of these different nutrients that show deficiencies, like magnesium deficiency it can cause congestive heart failure. Oh my gosh, like that’s one of the top causes of death today. What if–what if magnesium could help that person, it may not be the–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cure because that person’s probably low on Vitamin D, has insulin resistance, maybe as sedentary but maybe that magnesium in conjunction with a full holistic program may be helpful outside of just statins and blood pressure medications, right?
Baris Harvey: Yeah, exactly. Definitely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So also take a look at the research of Dr. Bruce Ames out of UC Berkeley. He has done lots of research on some of these micronutrients. I had the ability to speak on the same stage as him last year over at the Smart Life Forum at the Silicon Valley Health Institute. He’s got a lot of interesting information on a lot of these different nutrient deficiencies. Now, shifting from magnesium, I like to shift to selenium deficiency next. You ready for that, Baris?
Baris Harvey: Oh, yeah, let’s go selenium. That’s–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So selenium.
Baris Harvey: That’s one that a lot of people don’t know about, so let–let everybody, I just want to–before you go into it, make sure that you’re paying attention because a lot of people–this is one those sneaky ones that people aren’t really paying attention to.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, selenium’s one of these really important nutrients. It’s actually a precursor to glutathione. It helps with glutathione. It’s actually a precursor, it kinda gets absorbed with Vitamin E. Selenium and Vitamin E are like brother and sister, kinda like copper and Vitamin C if you will, so you see selenium and Vitamin E together. Selenium is of these nutrients that’s really important for gluthathione and detox like I mentioned. It’s also really important for thyroid hormone health. When our thyroid gland spits of T4 which is our inactive thyroid hormone, it has to get converted to T3, right? So T4 is inactive, T3 is active, and part of that conversion process, you need these 5 prime deiodinase enzymes, this deiodinase enzyme, deiodinase means deiodine meaning pulling off iodione, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: T4 stands for tyrosine with 4 molecules of iodine, T3 stands for tyrosine with 3. So this deiodine means pulling off one iodine and the enzyme that does that is a selenium-based enzyme, so we need that selenium-based enzyme to pull off the iodine so we can activate our thyroid hormone. So one more time, selenium is important for activating T4 to T3. If we’re low on selenium, we won’t be able to make that conversion happen.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, so this would also, I’m guessing, help with if there were any excess iodine exposure possibly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, love it, Baris.
Baris Harvey: Right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it.
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, there’s a whole thing out there with iodine being evil, right? We have Dr. Kharrazian’s camp saying iodine is evil, it causes autoimmune conditions. We have Dr. Brownstein’s camp that says we need iodine, it’s super important and I kinda walk right in the middle and I say they’re both right. Now the reason why they’re both right is because there are some people that, yeah, they are in iodine-deficient areas of the world, right? The goiter belt and they’re–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Not getting enough iodine, but at the same standpoint if we just go jack their iodine up, that could cause–there’s a couple of different effects. There’s a–a Jod-Basedow effect and there’s also another effect, I’ll look it up here and just–just a second, where having too much or too little iodine can actually cause an autoimmune type of response. So really, really important that if we have iodine, one, we also wanna make sure selenium levels are balanced first. The reason why is the process of iodination where we’re making thyroid hormone, if we don’t have enough selenium, the process of adding in tyrosine and adding in iodine, it spits off hydrogen peroxide and that hydrogen peroxide is very, very inflammatory and can cause your B cells, right? Your B cells will start infiltrating and start attacking the thyroid tissue, so we really wanna make sure that we have enough selenium because that selenium will actually buffer the hydrogen peroxide and take it and cleave off an oxygen and make it H2O and oxygen. So we have water and oxygen which is very benign where the hydrogen peroxide is more inflammatory. Does that make sense?
Baris Harvey: Yeah, it definitely. And then, so yeah, that–that just is a great way to put it. Because a lot of people like to eat at their shoes one side of the other and you have to always just have an open mind and kinda be looking at why–why are they thinking that it’s this way and let’s kinda see their side and see the other way but yeah, definitely. I can see why, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so again I wanna just touch upon a couple of things, right? We have the Wolff–Chaikoff effect, right? That’s where too much iodine can actually cause this in the short-term, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The Wolff–Chaikoff, right? Now on the other side of the fence, we have the Jod-Basedow phenomenon in which low thyroid causes an enlarged gland, an enlarged–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thyroid gland. So those who are given too much with go into a hyperthyroid state with Jod-Basedow and people that have the Wolff–Chaikoff effect, there’s too much iodine can cause a hypothyroid state, because the body goes, “Oh, we’ve all this iodine, we don’t wanna make too much thyroid hormone, let’s shut down, we go into a hypo state.”
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then Jod-Basedow is the opposite where we have super low iodine, the body is ready and geared up to actually make thyroid hormone, when we give it too much we go into a hyper. So we have Wolff–Chaikoff on the–on the low end and we have Jod-Basedow on the high end. So we have this really–this interesting balancing act, so we–it’s–it’s very delicate way, you have to go in there and we make sure we give some good micronutrient support in my opinion, working on the adrenals and also working selenium levels, also magnesium and zinc as well, before we even touch iodine. Because iodine can–we can easily go too high or too low and cause this type of hyper or hypo effect depending on where we’re at without iodine levels.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. So being that, we’re talking about iodine and it being a player in the thyroid. Have you seen–just because you know, we wanna talk about all these minerals as well–have you also seen that as being something that people might be missing because I know one of the main ways we have it in our–in our food is in iodized salt, right? And it’s kinda like, everything’s stripped away and we artificially like put it back in because if we didn’t, there would be a lot of problems.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Baris Harvey: At then so, but at the same times, because I know this, even myself, I’ll put–I’ll salt my food, very vigorously–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: And my mom would–my mom would tell me like you don’t have to put that much salt, and I said, “Why not? I don’t eat processed food, so actually I don’t get enough salt” and like I guess my family has a–I know my dad’s side of the family has a history of high blood pressure and she’s like, “Oh you know like aunt–and you know you’re part African-American like that’s more common,” but I’m like, if anything, and I’ve–I’ve had it tested multiple times, like my blood pressure is usually, if anything on the low end–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: And I’m like, “Mom, like, I actually need salt so that way, I don’t get lightheaded when I work out. I need to conduct electricity. I need salt.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: So if we’re telling people not to eat salt and one of the main ways we get our iodine is through salt, are we causing people to–to become iodine deficient? Because unless they’re eating a lot of seafood and like saltwater fish, like I can see that they can possibly be missing out on this essential micronutrient.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s very possible. There are some studies though showing iodized salt actually being a stimulating factor for autoimmune condition. There’s some study showing when society has introduced iodized salt, they start having more incidents of autoimmune condition. So it’s like this double-edged sword. I mean, you know, do you best to get high quality iodine in your diet–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Whether it’s fish or you know, high quality seaweed, I think you should just make sure you have a good multi that has the minimum, again the RDA–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Which is your–the minimum kind of amount that you want. Dr. Brownstein calls it rat’s drugs in assumption, I love that because basically that’s kinda like the minimum and I think having a 200-250 mcg level of iodine in your multi, it’s just a good baseline, and then trying to get the rest from good high quality food, is a–is a good next step. Now if we see that you have thyroid issues and we’re not seeing autoimmunity and we’re seeing potentially low-level, lower levels of T4 and such, maybe giving some iodine may be a good next step, and I always give iodine–I give out Lugol’s second generation. The reason why I give the second generation is because it has higher amounts of Vitamin C in there, selenium, fulvic minerals, and it has some extra B vitamins. So, and I try to make sure that all of the co-factors are there and I try to make sure we have repleted selenium even before so that if any of these reactions happen, we’re not gonna be having an inflammatory cascade and we also start way on the lower end and taper up and be careful for things like hair loss or palpitations or you know, symptoms that may indicate that we’re having an autoimmune type of episode or a hyper type of response to the thyroid.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or even a hypo–or even a hypo–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like we talked about with the–with the Wolff–Chaikoff.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. And that’s why if you get salt, pink Himalayan salt, Real Salt, and I think there’s like another one, Celtic salt, like go for one of these really good brands so that way you make sure that is not just stripped away sodium chloride and then oh by way, maybe we should add some iodine back to it, like things work–work like a lot of these nutrients and stuff like from Earth have been here a lot longer than us and they know what they’re doing, so when we take out that–that balance, like we cause problems.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it right. That’s why I’ll use the Himalayan, the Celtic, or the–the Real Salt, just because they haven’t added in extra iodine. It’s just kinda what’s in the minerals, what’s in the–the ocean salt, or what’s in, you know, for instance, Real Salt, what’s in Redmond–the Redmond salt reserve over in Utah, and you’re not gonna get a super saturation of iodine in that. I mean, you get it–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A couple–a couple dozen micrograms worth, and then if you’re eating good quality eggs, if you’re eating some fish, then you’re good to go.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That tend to be a good starting point. I am concerned there is some–a lot of controversy over what’s happening in Fukushima, you know, there are a lot of people out there that say, “Hey, you know, it’s not really a big deal,” but then when you actually study what’s really happening, yeah, it’s not a big deal because they keep on raising the–the lower safe limits–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So the lower safe limits at this level, we go above it, you know, with–with the radiation and then they just raise the safe lower limit. Oh, look, it’s no longer a problem. It’s like yeah, it’s because you got a moving goal post going there.
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It doesn’t take a genius to say. “Wait, a minute. Why does this goal post keep on moving?” So I’m just a little more skeptical at, you know, trying to get your iodine from seaweed sources that may be coming from Japan or anywhere near Fukushima.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. You mentioned Zinc earlier and this is–especially with–with athletes, some of that can easily get depleted or they might not have enough and when it comes to being–being at your best, something that’s super important to have is a proper amount of zinc. What are, I guess, some of the sources that we can find zinc and what are some of the signs or some of the reasonings why we might be deficient in it in the first place?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, love that question. So zinc’s one of my favorite minerals. Zinc is a co-factor for hydrochloric acid–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it’s also a co-factor for testosterone.
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I love zinc for those reasons because it builds testosterone and it helps your digestion. So that’s kinda like number one. So one, if our digestion isn’t good, even if we’re eating nutrient, you know, supportive foods, nutrient-dense foods, we may not get a whole bunch of zinc, because we may not be able to break it down. But some of our like really Paleo-friendly foods, oysters are gonna be great, you know–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Grass-fed beef, liver, lamb, venison, any of your animal foods are gonna be super good, dark chocolate, pork, mushroom, sesame seeds, tahini–these are all really good sources of zinc. So that’s a really good way to maximize to make sure that you’re getting enough is that make sure you’re eating nutrient-dense foods. And now on that standpoint, if you’re having–if you’re having problems with absorption, we may wanna take about getting some hydrochloric acid on board there, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: To help break down and make sure we could ionize the zinc and on top of that, really simple do a zinc tally test, right? Zinc chloride–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really simple you can get it from the Designs for Health and Metagenics, you can now just email and I’ll send some over to you. And basically how it works is this, really simple, really simple. You’re gonna take about a tablespoon or about a 5mL shot of zinc sulfate, you’re gonna swallow that zinc and depending on how the zinc tastes will tell you, generally speaking, how you are. The worse and faster it taste, or I should say, the more–the more unpalatable or the more bitter it taste, the faster and the more bitter it taste means the less you need the zinc. So better and faster, most deficient.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bitter and fast means the most sufficient. I’ll give you an opportunity to break that down, Baris.
Baris Harvey: So it’s almost like if you’re putting–putting something in–into like pot, if you–if that spills out really quick, oh, wait, we notice you already have too much but if you just keep pouring, it’s like, oh, nothing’s happening, it tastes just fine like that’s–that’s what it’s like, okay, you’re obviously on empty that’s why you haven’t noticed anything.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, and that’s–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re basic zinc chloride, that’s called a zinc tally test and you Google that. That’s a really good baseline. There’s actually a couple of studies that have supported. They, you know, they’ve tested like intercellular zinc levels and they correlate it to people doing a zinc tally test and they do find it correlates pretty well. So it’s a really good initial screening for zinc deficiency. Zinc also affects your DNA. We talked about this I think at last podcast with the immune system–zinc affects your immune system but it also affects your–your epigenetics due to zinc fingers, right? These are these little–thee little, essentially, they’re almost like epigenetic triggers. They play a role in DNA recognition.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? Which is really–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really important, they’re like a transcription factor that really helps with activating DNA.
Baris Harvey: You know, I also thought, too, because often athletes–this is one of the things I see like with–with athletes is being zinc deficient. If you’re an athlete and you’re sweating a lot, you losing some of these minerals, isn’t it like if you’re excessively sweating, you can–you can lose some zinc to your sweat?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely.
Baris Harvey: Like it probably be important for an athlete, especially you know with all the benefits converting, you know, your DHT to like to testosterone and–and all of the other benefits you know, being sick doesn’t help you if you have to work out and now you’re sick. So helping your immune system healing you from, I know it’s really common to heal from wounds–wounds and protein synthesis and collagen, like this is like, you know, something really important I think all the athletes out there listening to, you should really pay attention to then zinc levels when–absorbing B vitamins like if you’re an athlete and you’re low on zinc, that’s a real low-hanging fruit that you have to make sure that you’re–you’re paying attention to.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So making sure you have good zinc levels is gonna be important. Do a zinc tally test. We’ll talk at the end, there’s some general test you can do to kinda look at nutrient levels across the board. Some of the best test that I used in my functional medicine practice and just to kinda recap zinc here. Zinc’s important for testosterone. It’s important for hydrochloric acid and–and breaking down food, right? We can’t break down and ionize our minerals, we can’t absorb them. And it’s also important for our immune function and for DNA, right? Zinc fingers, they have a–a huge effect at–at binding RNA and in mediating these protein interactions and they’re really important for essentially these DNA specific binding sequences. So–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really important kinda confusing stuff, you don’t have to understand it to get the benefit, just make sure you’re eating zinc nutrient-dense foods, make sure that you’re able to digest it and if you’re concerned make sure you’re taking a high quality zinc supplement and just make sure in general you have a little bit of copper with your zinc supplementation because if you go too high on zinc and no copper, you can actually create a copper deficiency.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, so you kind of moved right onto the next one. So speaking of copper, what–and you–you mentioned zinc I know one of the other ones is like anemia, that sometimes is when you’re–when you’re deficient. Talk about the deficiencies and what are the functions of copper in our body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a great one. I don’t have a ton of information actually on–on copper mainly because people will tend to be low on zinc so you kinda–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Have this copper–this copper-zinc balance so when people will tend to be low on zinc, they tend to be a little high in copper. So–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I–and if you go high copper, right? You have it’s called Wilson syndrome. You have this Kayser rings or Kayser-Fleischer rings. These like basically this little ring around where you iris is and you see the change of color. You can see copper issues or copper excess with that. So tend to see a lot more neurological issues when we have higher copper, right? We have Wilson syndrome.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a big one. So I don’t tend to worry about copper deficiency as much. I’m more concerned about zinc deficiency potentially being caused by a copper excess. Does that –
Baris Harvey: Yeah, okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Make sense?
Baris Harvey: Yeah, it definitely. So it’s more so unless someone’s like anemic, are you’re really looking into like something like copper?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I’m more concerned about people having a copper excess because of the zinc thing, right? Because of–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: All that. So that’s kinda where I put my focus that. Again, you’ll sometimes see this, like we’ll talk about some of these tests like on a NutrEval or on a SpectraCell test. Sometimes we’ll see some of these things, but again like some of the foods that are high in zinc are also high in copper, right?
Baris Harvey: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Seafood, oysters, right? Kale, mushrooms, seeds, nuts, right? Avocado. So a lot of these foods being high in zinc. So it’s like you’re eating real food–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re gonna be in pretty good place and if you’re having malabsorption, right? Because of digestion stuff, well, you’re–those malabsorptions are probably across the board, right? You’re probably gonna have malabsorption with copper and zinc, right? It’s probably not gonna be specific to one. That’s why making sure the nutrient–nutrient supportive foods are there at the foundation and then we can go deeper with specific testing and target the deficiencies. Again, I don’t see copper being a huge issue but I’m not saying that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen them on a SpectraCell or a NutrEval either.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. I think one that, you know, I mean we know that as coming and that everybody needs to pay attention to is iron and having this is one of the–one of the big ones that a lot of people are deficient in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Baris Harvey: But it’s important to–to make sure I guess not just over-supplementing and just say, oh well, just in case, I’m just gonna supplement a whole bunch of iron. We have to like kinda pay attention to this thing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Baris Harvey: Especially with women and especially with–with women athletes. So let’s talk about iron’s role in health and in function, and what are some of the deficiencies.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, this is great. So I just had a patient that came to me yesterday that was super anemic, right? We looked at her blood tests. She had her MCV, MCH, MCHC all low across the board. All those markers mean is they’re basically indicative of how big the hemoglobin molecule is.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then we looked across the board with low hemoglobin, low hematocrit, and her red blood cells were actually fine. So when we start seeing the size of the hemoglobin and the size of the hematocrit and the size of the, you know, these different blood cell markers drop in size–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: This is indicative of a microcytic anemia, right? The blood cells are getting smaller due to lack of iron and iron’s super important because it carries oxygen, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s helping to carry oxygen throughout the body, so we need oxygen because cellular metabolism, aerobic metabolism is oxygen-dependent. I mean, go hold your breath, right? You’re not gonan get too far. Go take a–a candle, right? Light a candle, put a glass jar over the candle. What happens to the candle? It goes out because–
Baris Harvey: It goes out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oxygen is needed, right?
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So on that note, you’re mainly gonna see this problem in women. Why women? Because women have this awesome system called they–their female hormone system which creates menstruation, bleeding, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: This is their period where they bleed every month.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So typically on day 27, 28, there’s a sudden drop in estrogen and progesterone. That sudden drop then causes the uterine lining to shed and that shedding of the uterine lining causes bleeding. So we tend to have this recycling of iron or this disposing of iron every month so we tend to never really get too high with women that have a healthy hormonal cycle.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now women that don’t, let’s say their more estrogen-dominant, they don’t have that sudden drop in progesterone. They’ll bleed excessively, right? And we know–
Baris Harvey: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: that cause of that because they’re going through more than 3 or 4 tampons a day, you know, 4 more is kinda like, oops you’re getting into like anemia territory, right? They’re bleeding more than 3 or 4 days. They’re starting to lose more iron. So when we run blood tests to rule this out, we’re looking at iron saturation. Are you in the low 20s?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We’re looking at TIBC. We’re looking at UIBC. These are binding proteins that go higher when our iron’s lower, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So if you’re trying to grab more of something, you’re grabbing more and faster when you’re low in something. So binding proteins go higher when iron is lower. So we’ll see these binding proteins start to go high. We will start to see ferritin actually drop beneath 30 or so. Now like we talked about with magnesium. Magnesium serum is not a good way to assess magnesium deficiency. We want red blood cell magnesium. Now the equivalent for iron is ferritin. Ferritin is more of our storage form of iron. That’s the marker we wanna look at along with iron saturation. Along with low or higher levels of TIBC and UIBC. So we wanna look at all of those and then we’ll even look down the list at RBC, hematocrit, hemoglobin, MCV, MCH, MCHC, we’ll start to see these drop but again we’re not gonna see them all drop, right? We have our pathological anemia where it’s like, “Whoa, like you are really bad, you’re iron is super low, like we gotta give you a blood transfusion,” to the–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: “Hey, you know, you’re iron’s really low. Take this iron supplement,” to the “ Hey, you know, you’re iron’s starting to get low.” And where functional medicine comes in, we can really start to see when you’re starting to get low and/or when you’re starting to need supplementation to fix that.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now, giving an iron supplementation is palliative. It will never fix the underlying issue because if it’s a hormonal issue, we have to fix the hormones.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If it’s a fibroid issue and the fibroid is stealing all of the iron, well, we gotta work on the fibroid. If it’s a low hydrochloric acid thing and we’re not breaking down the hydrochloric acid, or we have a leaky gut and infection and we’re not absorbing it, we gotta fix that. So it’s never for the most part unless you’re a vegan vegetarian you’re not eating much iron–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s never gonna be fully fixed or addressed with a supplement. The underlying hormones, the underlying fibroid, the underlying low hydrochloric acid, the underlying malabsorption due to infection, those all have to be fixed individually to get to the root cause.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, and also, even with that being said, a lot of times when people are going–coming from their doctors, because this is something that I had to deal with–had to help with my mom with–and my sister with anemia and getting them even the right type of supplementation to just help them in the meantime of fixing that underlying cause, they’re usually given a form of iron that’s–and their supplementation–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ferrous sulfate, that’s awful.
Baris Harvey: That’s ferrous sulfate, which is like not like that absorbable and people know because guess what, like if you’re having diarrhea or constipation or nausea or vomiting, like that’s your body saying like, “Oh, this isn’t working,” either if you have diarrhea or you’re vomiting, that’s saying, “Whatever you just gave me, get it out of me,” and if you’re having constipating, it’s just slowing everything down, It’s like you just backed up your toilet and–and it’s like now everything’s stuck. So–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, exactly.
Baris Harvey: Yeah. Let’s talk about–so even the people that aren’t deficient and then they go to their doctors and it’s like, “Okay, well, here. Here’s some, you know, ferrous sulfate or gluconate.” Like both of those aren’t–aren’t really–they’re not like a chelated form that like actually absorbs very well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So I like–one, I like giving my iron with–in a little bit of liver, so we have some predigested liver fractions.
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I also like iron in ferrous succinate. Succinate is a good amino acid chelate but we’re giving it again with the liver and then we’re also giving it with vitamin C and–and even some B12 because this will all help with the absorption of it–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It makes it absorb a lot better. There’s also a great one called Floradix that’s very good, too. That’s liquid. So if we’re having absorption issues, Floradix can be really, really helpful.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Again, ferrous sulfate, you know, the big thing is you start to see constipation, you start to see really dark stools. It’s not a real highly absorbable iron so getting a good one is gonna be important to start, and just to note, again, non-heme iron sources–non-heme meaning getting iron from plant-based sources does not have a really good impact on your iron levels. I mean, people will say get it from spinach, right? It’s a not–it’s a non-heme source, not the best. Much better doing grass-fed meat, much better off doing liver. Liver is your ultimate. These are better sources. Animal products are gonna have much higher levels, much more nutrient-dense levels of iron.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, it definitely. Make sure it’s that–when you said the Floradix, I know they have 2 different kinds. They have one that–that is–that is like yeast-free and doesn’t have any gluten, so make sure you–you keep your eyes out for that one. It’s I think, it’s like a lighter box, but it should say yeast and gluten-free on your–on your box.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I actually–
Baris Harvey: Look out for that one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s a good one. I actually use Energizing Iron by Integrative Therapeutics. I carry them on my site. The only issue with them, they have a little bit of soy in there–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Which I’m not a fan of but they have, in my opinion, the best product because you have a little bit of Eleuthero. Eleuthero is an adaptogenic herb but there’s also a natural iron in Eleuthero which is great.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They have the liver. They have the vitamin C. They have some of the–the B12 in there. So a lot of the co-factors and it’s non-GMO soy and it’s a small amount. So it tends to be worth–worth it. So I have that on my site, if anyone wants to take a look at that, feel free and check it out.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. And then so another one that I wanted to–to mention briefly was potassium.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Baris Harvey: And this is something that–that I think maybe it’s because–because of the, you know, we talk about magnesium a lot and–and the different things about, you know, the muscle contractions and the nerve impulses and you have to understand that potassium is another one of those things that have said that interplay with it. I mean, if you think about it, the way that our–our cells works, it works is you know kind of sodium potassium like ion chain–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: So talk about a little bit about potassium and its roles.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So potassium is like a really important electrolyze and we have like our electrolytes are like magnesium, potassium sodium, calcium, they really help conduct like the nerves. They help conduct action potential in the body. Without them, right? We have hyponatremia. This is what happens when we drink too much come marathon time, right? There’s always someone every year that drinks too much and dies because they don’t have enough of the minerals, right? The activators in our body–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So when we drink too much water we can dilute them and then we’re not gonna be able to help, you know, conduct nerves as well. And this is important because nerves and muscles and the heart, that’s a muscle, right? The lungs are a muscle, so we need them to be super, you know, super healthy.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So we’ll see hypokalemia, right? We’ll start to see weakness, right? We can start to see heart issues, again the big thing is we wanna make sure that we have enough of these electrolytes. So one of the first things we can see is cramping. So if we’re sweating, if we’re having maybe diarrhea, excessive sweating, or getting dehydrated. Maybe we have an eating disorder, maybe we’re taking too many laxatives or just eating super poor diet, we can start to have lower potassium, right? Palpitation, constipation, fainting. So getting good potassium-rich foods are gonna be, you know, essential, and even taking a–a electrolyte support product–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Would be helpful. There’s a couple that I use. But getting good quality sea salt in your body will be super healthy. Again, like a lot of our potassium-rich foods are gonna be like leafy greens, even white potatoes, squash is super good, fish, salmon, avocadoes, mushrooms, you can even do a little bit of banana, it’s high in sugar but these are great ways to get good levels if you’re low. I have an electrolyte synergy product that has all of the electrolytes in there without all the sugar and dyes and crap like you get in Gatorade.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That can be helpful. Just making sure you salt your water with a good quality sea salt that will have some sodium and potassium in there is a really great way to make sure you have enough, too.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, it–its funny how that works, right? Like people will drink like so much water and it’s–and if it doesn’t really get to the cells, like it doesn’t matter at the end of the day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: But if you just put–sprinkle a little bit of high quality salt and sometimes I tell people, and they’re like, “Eww, that’s not.” I’m like, “You can’t–you can’t really taste it.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: But like, if you put salt in the water, it will be–it will be good. Trust me. It will be good for you. That’s–that’s what I do when I–when I go for a sauna session. I just put–put a little bit of salt in my water because I know that I’m not just losing water from the sweat but there’s also like sweat is salty. There’s–I’m losing electrolytes as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So having good potassium, making sure you have a good potassium in your supplements. Again, there’s a couple things you can do if you’re seeing your urine in the morning, it’s too acidic, it’s in the lower 6s, 6.5, on a pH strip, first morning urination, you can supplement with potassium and magnesium together. These are you know, bicarbonate alkaline sources–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That can help alkalize the urine. Again, I’m not a huge fan of this. I–I-I’ve been taught this in my functional medicine education. It can be very helpful with people that are chronically ill, is just taking, you know, making sure you do all the diet stuff, take your first morning urination–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: See if your urine is on the lower end, right the low 6s, and try to get it to the upper 6s, low 7s, by taking a potassium-magnesium bicarbonate glycinate support before bed that can be helpful, I don’t think it’s getting at the root issue but I have heard some anecdotal evidence that people do see a benefit with some of this supplementation before bed.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. Is there any specific ones–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Moss Nutrition–
Baris Harvey: That you wanna talk about?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, Moss Nutrition makes a potassium-magnesium bicarbonate product that’s really, really good. Dr. Moss formulated it himself. You go to mossnutrition.com you could find that one.
Baris Harvey: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about that before. You said Moss Nutrition, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm, exactly.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. Are there any other nutrients that–that you wanted–wanted to mention that would make things–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, we have things, yeah, we have things like calcium for instance.
Baris Harvey: That’s a big one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I think calcium is, yeah, I think it’s one of these overrated nutrients, because we need vitamin K with calcium to have calcium go into the bone. We need healthy–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Vitamin K. So getting healthy fats in our diet, eating healthy grass-fed butter, getting these nutrients up are gonna help calcium work better. So, I mean, calcium is one of these things. We’re worried about bones but half our bones are made from proteins. We gotta have adequate protein levels–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we got 12 other minerals in our bones outside of just calcium. So we wanna have a spectrum of–of minerals. So really making sure you’re eating nutrient-dense foods like if you look on the healthy mineral list, right?
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The foods that you see come up time and time again for minerals are dark, leafy greens. You see squash–
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: it’s over and over again. You see avocado, you see fish, right? You see mushrooms, you see grass-fed meat, you see liver, you see oysters, so it’s like, “Hello, just make sure you’re getting some of these foods in your diet–“
Baris Harvey: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: “On a daily basis, if not weekly basis.”
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, the greens should be every day. The fish should be a couple times a week. The squashes and sweets and potato a couple times a week, depending on your blood sugar and such.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, like kale, mustard greens and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Baris Harvey: Like what else? Avocadoes? These are–these are not hard to get it in and if you have a blender, just like blend it. Just do something, like it’s a, yeah–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, just get in, man.
Baris Harvey: You see these foods come up over and over and over again, probably a good idea that you should include them into your diet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely and I think it’s good to have a–a good quality multi in your support product–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: In your kinda regimen, just so it’s gonna give you a baseline of–of certain nutrients. I call it my insurance policy, right?
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m trying to eat nutrient-dense foods but you know, we know based upon our soils that they just aren’t the way they used to be 100 years ago. An apple a hundred years ago isn’t the same apple today, nutrient-wise. So having a good quality supplement is my insurance policy. Using it from high quality brands like whether it’s Thorne or Douglas or Designs for Health, or Pure Encapsulations. I formulate–I’m actually in the process of formulating my own kind. Basically, these companies are gonna have the highest quality, the highest cleanliness, their independently tested, third-party tested. They’re gonna be chelated meaning they’re gonna be bound–bound to other amino acids. They’re gonna be highly absorbable. They’re gonna make sure they break down in water so you’re able to absorb them. You wanna make sure you’re getting a high quality supplement that meets your needs. That you’re gonna be able to–to break down and absorb, assimilate, and utilize.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely, definitely, I feel the same way. Yeah, so that was a lot of great information. We went over a lot of different topics, a lot of different micronutrients and I hope that this was really helpful for the listeners out there, kind of wanting an overview of–of essential minerals, so we’ve talked about the vitamins before. So getting that scope over into what are some of the minerals and actually getting an idea because they’re probably told all the time about–about “Oh, you need calcium,” or “You drink more milk,” or “You need–you need these vitamins or these minerals,” but they–they don’t really know why. You know what I mean? Or they just go to the doctors and they’re just like, “Oh, okay, I’m supposed to take this iron. I don’t–I just–I have anemia but that’s about it, that’s all I know why I’m taking it.” But they might not be taking the right one so I’m glad that we were able to kinda give everybody an overview of some of–of some of the things that might be helpful when it–when it comes to supplementation and where to get your nutrients and minerals from. Was there anything else that you wanted to add today, Dr. Justin?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, just–on one thing on the calcium, right? One of the best things for calcium–I’m not even talking about dairy. If you can handle raw dairy, that’s great, but again–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Salmon, right? One half can of salmon. Eat the bones, you’re getting, you know, 25 ounces of calcium. Sardine, right?
Baris Harvey: Yeah, bones.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sardines, bok choy, kale, like we’re not even talking about like the milk mustache, drinking your–your skimmed milk, right? We’re talking about things that aren’t even, you know, dairy-based. So if you’re dairy sensitive, if you’re like, “Oh, these Paleo diets, they cut out milk, they cut out grains, where am I gonna get my extra minerals?” It’s like, well, right there, you know. Right there, there’s lot of nutrient density in these Paleo food. So start with there, and then on that note, if you’re thinking like, “Alright, great, I’m eating good. I’m Paleo, what’s next?” Alright, well, one, you can make sure you’re absorbing them, making sure you’re tummy is infection-free. That’s number one. But number two, I recommend some micronutrient testing. There’s 3 tests that I recommend off of that. Again, depending on–
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Where you’re at, I may recommend one for each person that may be different. So essentially an organic acid test is a great test to run from Genova or MetaMetrics. Number two, a SpectraCell micronutrient test is another great test to run. And number three, a NutrEval urine/blood test from Genova or MetaMetrics is another great test. So we have organics, organic acid, we have SpectraCell and we have NutrEval. I’m gonna put the links for these tests in the show notes. I’m also gonna put it under the–in the iPod or the iPad info thing if you’re–if you’re listening from the podcast on iTunes, or I’ll put it in the YouTube descriptions, so wherever you’re at, you could see it. Click it on the link and that will bring you right to my store where you can actually get these tests so you can actually see where you’re at if you wanna dig deeper. Just wanted an option for people that–alright, they’re already doing good, but now what’s next? This is–this is the next–this is the next step if you will.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, definitely. Well, sounds good, Dr. Justin. Again for all the listeners, make sure that you go to BeyondWellnessRadio.com. This will allow you to get the first information, you’ll be the first ones, so make sure you go to sign up page and sign up for our newsletter. We really appreciate the–the activity lately. We’ve been getting a lot more downloads. We’re almost to half a million lifetime downloads–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Baris Harvey: So that’s really amazing. It–it makes us happy, we know that we’re doing our–our thing and that we’re giving the information that you guys wanna hear. So again, make sure that you continue with the feedback. iTunes rating, we really appreciate it, we’ve been getting some more iTunes ratings, and we really appreciate that as well. So if you guys have any questions, make sure you go to BeyondWellnessRadio.com/questions and you can–tell us what you like, tell us what you like, tell us what you don’t like and really–and become a part of this. You can add in exactly what you wanna hear because I know, we–we see the numbers they keep going up so we know that more people are listening, but don’t be shy. Go ahead and reach out to us and let us know exactly what you wanna hear.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome, Baris. Yeah, we’re gonna be at a million downloads in June, that’s our run rate. I just ask everyone that’s listening, this is your show. Baris and I are here to–to research and bring cutting edge information for you. So we ask if you like this show, just share it with one person that know–that you know they can benefit from and please give us feedback. We want your feedback. Feedback is the breakfast of champions. We wanna provide information for everyone listening.
Baris Harvey: Yeah, so thank you guys so much and for next time. You guys have a good one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks, Baris.
Baris Harvey: Thank you.
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In this episode, topics include:
13:07 Common mineral deficiencies
29:57 Proper amount of zinc
35:55 Copper deficiency or excess and the functions of copper
39:00 Iron’s role in health, its function and deficiencies
47:10 Potassium and its roles