Dhru Purohit Show - #221: A Functional Medicine Approach to Treating Crohn’s and Colitis with Nishtha Patel

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

A Functional Medicine Approach to Treating Crohn’s and Colitis | This episode is brought to you by Birch Living and InsideTracker. We see it all the time in Functional Medicine: when the gut isn��t functioning properly, the whole body suffers. For those struggling with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the symptoms can be so severe that every day is painful and filled with uncertainty. Luckily, by taking away instigators (like gluten and dairy) and looking at the ingredients needed for healing, patients with IBDs can regain digestive balance and take back their quality of life. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Nishtha Patel about her experience in helping her daughter heal from Crohn’s colitis, which is when Crohn’s disease specifically impacts the colon. Symptoms of this disorder range from diarrhea and rectal bleeding to ulcers, fistulas, abscesses, joint pain, and skin lesions. Not to mention, most people dealing with IBDs carry very real emotional burdens as well.  Nishtha Patel is a Functional Medicine practitioner and clinical nutritionist who specializes in gastrointestinal health. Her journey into this arena started 10 years ago when her child was diagnosed suddenly with indeterminate Crohn’s colitis. She was told that the disease was chronic and there was no cure.  In this episode, we dive into:  -Nishtha’s experience helping her daughter heal from Crohn’s colitis (7:22) -The difference between Crohn’s and colitis (25:58) -Why IBDs are on the rise (31:04) -The problem with gluten and dairy when it comes to IBDs (34:56) -Foods that are considered healthy, but may impact someone with Crohn’s and colitis (43:20) -Why nightshade vegetables may be challenging for some people (53:07) -How to prepare beans and legumes so they are easier to digest (56:49) -How stress impacts gut health (1:02:31) -How Nishtha’s daughter is doing today (1:22:27) -Cure vs. remission when it comes to IBDs (1:24:31) For more on Nishtha Patel you can follow her on Instagram @TheGutExpert_, on Facebook @TheGutExpert, and through her website https://www.thegutexpert.com/. Follow her daughter Sasha on Instagram @TheNotecook_, and through her website www.thenotecook.com. Also mentioned in this episode: -Listen to your Gut by Jini Patel Thompson - https://listentoyourgut.com/listen-to-your-gut-the-complete-natural-healing-program-for-ibs-and-ibd/ -Dane Johnson - Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle - www.instagram.com/crohnscolitis_lifestyle -Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle Course - https://cclifestyle.thinkific.com/courses/shield-course This episode is brought to you by Birch Living and InsideTracker. Right now they are giving my community $200 off all mattresses, plus 2 free eco-rest pillows. Just head over to https://birchliving.com/dhru. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 25% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whenever you have surgery for Crohn's, the disease can spread in three more places. And she was like, how does that make sense? So they're cutting pieces of me out. And then I'm going to get it in three more places. And they're going to cut another little piece out. Like, am I going to be having surgery for the rest of my life? Hi, everyone. If you care about the topic of inflammatory bowel disease, which is Crohn's and colitis,

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Welcome to the Drew-Peroet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Nishtha Patel. Nishta Patel is a functional medicine practitioner and clinical nutritionist who specializes in gastrointestinal health. Her journey into this arena started 10 years ago when her child was diagnosed suddenly with indeterminate Crohn's colitis. She was told that the disease was

chronic and there was no cure. Suddenly her daughter was put on a cocktail of different medications including steroids, immunosuppressants, anti-inflammatories, and chemotherapy drugs, but nothing was working. She was told repeatedly that food, diet, and lifestyle didn't make a difference. Nishda decided to take control and start researching every patient. paper, book, and resource she could possibly find. She changed her daughter's diet and implemented lifestyle, supplement, and other recommendations. And after nine months of doing so, the doctor was shocked to see that she had a completely clear colon. It was at this time that she started studying nutrition and then went on to study functional medicine. Today, she's helped hundreds

of patients get to the root cause of their illness. Nishtha, thank you so much for joining on the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be on your podcast. Well, you're a good expert. And I think there's no better way to dig into this

than to talk about the hero's journey that you've been on and that your family's been on over the last few years. And then we'll go and, you know, parse apart that story and start talking about some of the basics, when it comes to IBD, irritable bowel disease. So let's start from the beginning. Tell us about how you and your daughter, and also your husband too,

ended up in this crisis of health that started the journey off. Okay, so my journey started in 2010 on a vacation to Alaska. We were on vacation and my daughter was jet skiing and she fell in the water because her cousin turned the boat. She fell in, she swallowed some of the water. A few days later, she started getting sick, tummy aches,

you know, all the usual things that start with inflammatory bowel disease. When we got back to London, things were really, really bad, some urgency, lots of running back and brought to the hospital, and they examined her. I thought it was an infection from the water. I thought something, you know, there's pathogen in the water. I had no medical training. I had no functional medicine training at the time.

I had no nutrition training, nothing. So I just went when I'm married to a pharmacist. So we just went down the conventional route. The doctor, the pediatrician said to me, right, this is proctitis. And, you know, you need to give the steroids. You need to do this. and we were just doing anything that the doctors asked us to do. And it sort of improved for a little bit, but not much.

And then it got progressively worse, worse and worse. And every time it got worse, there were more medications given. So it started off with predeterminemones, and then it was steroids, like a little bit of prednisolone here and there, which is, you know, the side effects of that anyway for a 14-year-old child. It's designed to either kill off bacteria or suppress the immune system because they thought something was overreacted. Exactly. And then that went to, okay, let's put on the five ASAs.

That was giving her horrendous headaches and lots of side effects. And then that wasn't working. So, right, let's put her on azopsypricin. That is a drug that is used for inflammatory bowel disease. it works for some patients. It is another immunosuppressant, but it's used for kidney patients when they are going to get a transplant

to suppress the immune system so the kidneys don't reject. And if you look at the mechanisms of fact, there's another drug that works very similar, six mekeptopureate. She was then put on that. Some of the side effects of those drugs can be cancer.

Later on, they check your bloods very regularly to see if the liver's getting damaged and things like that. This is a 14-year-old child who went from 14 to 16, looking like an old lady, the joints were hurting, she was doubled over in pain, the skin, acne breakout, steroid phase. And you can imagine what it does to the whole morale and the whole mindset of a young teenage girl. and I just thought every time I said to the doctors, does diet matter?

Is there something I can do? You know, is there anything we can do? And I was told repeatedly by the paediatrician, diet doesn't matter, lifestyle doesn't matter, you have to do the drugs, let her eat what she wants. And we ate pretty healthy anyway. But obviously, gluten and dairy was in our diet at that time. I then got to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore because not only were she on this cocktail of drugs, she was then given other drugs to counter react to the drugs, the side effects, mitigate the side effects of the drugs that she was on.

So, and some of them looking back, I mean, if my husband wasn't a pharmacist, we wouldn't have known this. Like all the steroids that she was given on were not enteric coated. She was then given like ibuprofen for the headaches and things. And it's one of the worst things you can do to somebody who's got a problem already with the digestive tract. And I just, stem a till was given. If you could just explain, why would be ibuprofen for somebody who's having? What it does is it can, if things are not enteric coated, ibuprofen, they can cause ulcers and problems with the stomach lining. And so you end up with even more problems than you started off with.

And then there were drugs given to her because she was feeling sick. She had headaches. She couldn't go to school. She couldn't concentrate. Brain fog, joint pain, acne, uviitis where your eyes start to inflame. Because this disease doesn't just, it's not just in the gut. It's systemic. It goes everywhere.

It can, you know, can affect all different parts because the proctitis then start to becoming colitis and then so many colonoscopies were done. I think she must have had about six or seven colonoscopies to date. This was 10 years ago in the last 10 years. But most of them were done in those early years where they couldn't figure out what was going on. And then I was told, right, you have to put on biologics. And when I looked at the side effects of biologics, It scared me. Like, I was like, okay, so none of these medications have worked. She has gone from bad to worse.

And now I'm going to put on these biologic agents. And I was told you're really lucky because we're doing a trial. And, you know, this medication is £3,000 ago. But, you know, you're going to be able to get this because I'm on these trial things. And I thought, no, no, no, no. Side effects work cancer and TB. some of the side defence. Now, biologics have their place when you cannot get the flare-ups under control, I have told patients, yes, you need to take them because you have to get that inflammation

down. It's far more dangerous to have that inflammation riding in the body. However, I was at that point now where I thought, it's got to be another way. There's got to be another way. You know, And being Indian, you know about Ayurveda, you know, my mother was telling me, make sure you put this in the diet, put this in, do this. I just stopped. I did a lot of research and I found this amazing book by this lady called Ginny Patel Thompson. And Jeannie had Crohn's disease herself. And it's really interesting because she's partly Jewish and partly Indian.

And Crohn's disease is quite prevalent in Aztec Jews and the Jewish community. And so we know there's like some genetic variants and things. But I read this book from cover to cover. And I started implementing things. She started getting better. I was just like, okay. So, you know, there's less urgency. First things, if I could just pause and interrupt, what was one of the first things that you read where you thought this is a completely different thing?

You know, you had the doctors on one side, well-meaning, well-intentioned, right, doing the best that they knew how, saying, died in lifestyle didn't matter. And then you're reading about the story of somebody who had reversed her own prognosis that she was in or at least minimized the symptoms to the degree that wasn't interrupting her life. What was one of the first things that you can remember reading that was kind of like an aha moment for you inside of that one?

I just thought, wow, if this lady can do it and thousands of her readers had done this, I can do this. Let's give it a go. I have nothing to lose. And I looked at what she was doing with diet, with lifestyle, with supplements and things. And I'm still friends with her to this day.

I use a lot of her protocols. I'm very well-burst with her protocols. But obviously now I've done clinical nutrition and functional medicine. I've taken it to a whole new level. But at that time, it was when I read that, book, I was thinking, oh, right, so you give glutamine. Elgutamine is an amino acid and it's going to heal the gut and the gut is doing this because of this and it was mind-blowing, like looking at things and listening to her story because

she was told her father's a doctor and her brother was a pharmacist and she was told that surgery is your only option. And when she went and researched it, they said she figured out from something she'd read, whenever you have surgery for Crohn's, the disease can spread in three more places. And she was like, how does that make sense? So they're cutting pieces of me out. And then I'm going to get it in three more places. And they're going to cut another little piece out. Like, am I going to be having surgery for the rest of my life? And the doctor said, yeah, well, you may be, but you'll be on disability. So you'll be okay. And you won't be able to have children. She's got three beautiful grown-up kids now too. You know, this idea of name it,

blame it, and then tame it or cut it out, right? The first approach was trying to tame it by suppressing it through these immunosuppressants, steroids, and in some cases, trying to kill off the bacteria or the other medicines that you were on. When that didn't work, it's like, okay, let's cut it out because in traditional medicine, the idea is we don't know what the root cause is. This area seems to be problematic. So let's get rid of it. Your arm has a lot of pain. The equivalent would be your arm is very painful right now.

We don't know why. Let's get rid of it. Let's chop off your arm. And that's what we're doing to the colon. And I can imagine, give us a little bit of your mindset in that moment. You talked about your daughter and how challenging this was for her and what she was going through. How did this feel as a mom who's there to protect her kids and look after them? What were you feeling prior to this book coming across when they were saying,

you know, this is just something that she's going to have to manage for the rest of her life? I can't tell you. I can't tell you how devastating and destructive that was. Like I'm not a person to cry. I'm spiritual, but I'm not somebody that prays lots and lots, but I'm very spiritual. But I was praying. I was, before I found that book, I actually said a little prayer. And I said, if there is a God, give me the answer.

Come on, universe. Give me the answer. And I googled a million times, natural ways to help colitis. Nothing was of significance. All of a sudden, Jeannie's book. came up. And I got so into this book, I actually contacted Ginny and she was kind enough to talk to me. She's in Canada. She's in Vancouver. And, you know, every time I was stuck with something, Ginny, this is going on. What can I do? And she was kind enough to help me. I was emailing her.

I did everything by that book. And you know what? Nine months after I started this protocol, the doctor, I was too scared to tell the doctor I had stopped or medication. I'm not advocating anybody do that. That was my personal choice at the time because I was just at the end of my tavern. When he did that colonoscopy, he said to me, congratulations. That colonoscopy is crystal clear. The medicine is finally working. What did you say in that moment when you were sitting with him?

You say, well, actually, or you say, you know what? Like, thank the universe, God, whoever was part of this process. Thank you, Jimmy, you know, acknowledging yourself. Like, what did you do in that moment? Do you say something? My husband was kicking me going, tell him, tell him, tell him. I was really scared to tell him. And I told him.

And you know what he turned around and said to me is, you know what? this is really irresponsible. What you have done is so irresponsible. If this child loses her colon, it is down to you and I. And I said, Tim, I'm so sorry, but with all due respect, I have tried every single thing you said. Nothing had worked. And maybe I can help you. Maybe we can help other kids.

And he just turned around, put his hands up in the end, said, not in this lifetime. And he walked away. you know, it's really an important lesson for anybody who's listening here is that we have to have compassion for the medical system and especially doctors who are doing what they're trained to do and are in many categories, they find themselves as the smartest person in the room, especially they've excelled. And some of the challenges come with that is we can literally have smart bias that we know everything about. a particular subject and it's not just doctors it's anybody in any category and you know this is why there was a survey done by the institute of functional medicine and they were asking practitioners like yourself you know clinical nutritionists medical doctors of chiropractic PhDs they were saying what brought you to the world of functional medicine and the number one thing that they found

that brought people to the world of functional medicine is personalized progressive root-based, systems-based approach of medicine was that they or a family member got sick. And finally, they were willing to ask a different set of questions when previously they would have never gone down the route. Previously, they told all their patients to follow the traditional approach because that's what they were taught. But when it hits you, when it hits a loved one, your daughter, your child, your son, somebody that you care about, you are open to explore a different angle.

That's exactly what you guys did. I think the other lesson, if I just add in, is that sometimes when you're going down the pathway, not everybody's going to be supported. And what is watching here today and they're struggling with this and they're not getting that support in sort of exploring and going outside of the traditional thinking, what would you want to say to that? I would say find a practitioner. I have been working with patients now.

So at that time, I hadn't done any formal training. I just used Ginny's book. And then I went on to, you know, at that moment, I thought, wow, I have felt the way I have as a mother. I can help so many other moms, but I need to do this right. So at the age of 45, I went back to college and I studied clinical nutrition. It's probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do. No, functional medicine was the hardest thing. because as soon as I finished my three years doing clinical nutrition,

I kept flying to America to do the functional medicine. And I'm studying all the time, studying all the time. But there's so much more out there now than there was 10 years ago. So find a practitioner that understands autoimmunity, that understands Crohn's colitis. I have just been hooked up with a practitioner in L.A. who nearly died himself of Crohn's and Colitis. And he also used Ginny's protocols.

And this is how the universe works in mysterious ways. One of my patients said to me, listen, you've really got to speak to this guy because you two would be the dream team. You can really help a lot of people. And so me, with my experience of what I've gone through with my own child and him with his own experience with Crohn's colitis, but every single person that works for him also has Crohn's colitis or as a family member that has had it.

And together, we've put together this, we've put together a really solid program that understands the needs of these people. We know exactly how you're feeling. I know that it's affecting young, very young people. I get kids coming into the clinic who are like, you know, from babies, two years, three years, five years. there's so much that can be done. Explore it. Have a look. Just be your own doctor. Be the CEO of your own life.

Dana always says that. It's so true. So a lot to unpack here. We're going to get into some of the step-by-step things that you recommend to people and that also that you, your family and your daughter did, which, by the way, I've met your daughter. She came to visit in LA.

She's such a sweet person. And just a shout out to a shout-out. shout out for you raising just such a great young woman. So we'll get to all that. But first, let's set the stage a little bit more. You've mentioned a couple of things. There are some people that are watching

or listening to this podcast right now that have a diagnosis and are dealing with IBB, Crohn's, colitis. But there's other people that are listening who might be having some symptoms. They might not have a diagnosis now. Or they have a family number who's dealing with some gastrointestinal things.

and they're not really sure what it is. So let's lay the framework. Let's talk about the basis. What is Crohn's and colitis and how does it fit into this context of the general category of IBB, irritable bowel disease? It's inflammatory bowel disease. Irritable bowel syndrome. And irritable bowel syndrome is a whole umbrella term of lots of different symptoms, right?

So someone's got tummy ache or someone's got diarrhea or someone's got constipation. or bloating or acid reflux and they can't figure out what's going on with them. That comes under that umbrella of irritable bowel syndrome. Inflammatory bowel disease is completely different. You get similar symptoms. You may get the diarrhea. You may get the cramping and other things. But the main difference is, so with inflammatory bowel disease,

you've got three types. There's Crohn's, there's colloquium, there's colitis and this indeterminate where you may have some signs of Crohn's and colitis and they're not sure which one you have. So the easiest way of remembering Crohn's disease is from gum to bum. So from your mouth to the anus, it can affect anywhere from the mouth to the People can get ulcers in the mouth. They may have inflammation going down the esophagus, in the stomach, in the small intestine, the large intestine, right down to the rectum. And with Crohn's, the inflammation can be, if it's in the colon, they will find granulomas and like little

cobblestone effects around the colon. So you might have a spot in one area, then a clear spot, then another area. And that, if it gets bad, can go very, very, very deep down through the whole wall. It causes fissure. It can cause bleeding. It can cause pass. With colitis, it does the whole large intestine. So the large intestine is affected. It usually starts in the amus rectum, and it works its way up. And around, you can have proctitis, which is in the lower part, like around the rectum, you can have left-sided colitis where it's just in the left side, and sometimes it can become pancolytus where the whole area is completely inflamed. So imagine if you've got an ulcer in your mouth, how painful that is.

Think about what it's like for these guys who've got their whole digestive tract in Crohn's cases and in colitis cases. And they have an urgency to run to the bathroom. They could just drink a sip of water, can get that. to the bathroom. They could be going to the bathroom 15, 20 times. Some people will have bloody diarrhea with that. So they're going to the bathroom and they're just in blood in the toilet. They're anemic. They're malnourished. They're fatigued. They've got no energy at all. And it spreads the inflammation. It's like everything's on fire. So then that can spread.

You can get theitis where your eyes swell up, your joints swell up. You've got brain fog. so many things, so many things. Yeah, we always talk about in functional medicine, health and disease starts in the gut, and so when your gut is on fire, right? You have this inflammation, it's on fire. Now that impacts all sorts of areas in the body, all sorts of areas that it could show up in,

which can be very challenging for folks. Now, you've mentioned earlier that this is something that we're seeing more. Every year more people seem to be, especially younger and younger are being diagnosed with this disease. So talk about this worldwide, some big picture stats about how many people find themselves in this category now. And I think that would be really important for people to hear it.

I think it is, I can't remember the exact statistics, but it's rising by millions all over the world. The number one country where it's the worst is Canada. And they think it's because of artificial sweeteners, sucralose and other artificial sweeteners. But it never used to be incontinence like Africa and Asia. It was more of a disease of the Western Hemisphere and some of the Northern Hemisphere. And now it is prevalent worldwide. They are finding it in India, Africa. Africa, China, Malaysia.

It's big. Like we Crohn's Colitis lifestyle. We are getting patients from all over the world. It's huge. If we saw a map of the growth and we sort of mapped it out with sort of the processing of foods and things that we consider to be the modernization of society, you probably see a very similar, you know, layout, the correlation, not causation, but a correlation that's there. when you came across this book that got you starting, what were some of the things that you

understood? Now, you grew up in kind of a healthy family, right? You guys were doing things that you thought were healthy at the time, right? I believe that we grew up primarily being vegetarian, right? What you thought was healthy at the time. I did too. I grew up in a South Asian family and I was vegetarian for many years. And, you know, we had home remedies of turmeric and other things like that.

and we thought we were doing a lot of things that were healthy. What did you begin to see when you were reading this book and doing your research of some of the key drivers of why this condition, this disease, was on the rise? What were the lifestyle factors that were going on that were contributing to this becoming a lot more popular? With her personally, everybody's different. Just as a whole.

Why are we seeing more of it? What are some of the big picture drivers that? Okay, stress is a big one. People don't think about stress. You know, you always think about diet. Yes, diet, gluten and dairy. We'll go on to that in a minute and why it's a problem. It's also what's happening with the Industrial Revolution, right,

since the mid sort of 20th century, so many more chemicals and so, you know, we fire retardant everything. our beds are fire retarded, our carpets are fire retarded. We're drinking out of plastic bottles. We're drinking coffee out of those cups, everything, processed foods, all the preservatives, all the coloring. Our grandmas didn't eat any of that. We never ate out, you know, even as a kid, like going out was a real treat.

It's not like going out now where, you know, people grab a coffee, grab a salad, grab this convenience food. We never ate out of tins. Everything was prepared fresh. Most things were organic. The soil was much more nutrient dense. But I think the industrial revolution has had a bearing on what's going on. Genetics play a part.

But as you know, Drew, genetics and epigenetics, that, you know, your lifestyle, just because you've got the gene, it doesn't mean it's going to fire, as Dr. Mark Hyman always says, you know, the gun is loaded and that's your genes. But what pulls the trigger is the epigenetics. It's your lifestyle of, you know, how are you sleeping? What are you eating? How are you moving, you know, exercising and what are you putting in your body?

And he always says, you know, if it's made in a plant, don't eat it. And if it is a plant, eat it because a lot of these things are made in factories and plants. If you can't pronounce something, an ingredient on something that you're buying, you don't know what the hell is in there. You don't know what chemicals are in there and what it's going to do to your genes or to your body. So, you know, those things all play a really significant role.

One of the first chapters that you came across that you were starting to understand a little bit more was when Jenny, right? Is it a name of Jenny that wrote the book? Ginny, Ginny. When Ginny's a book, which, by the way, what's the name of that book if people wanted to look it up?

It called, listen to your gut. Listen to your gut. So when you were reading that, one of the first chapters that you mentioned that you came across was diet. This, as you've always said, diet isn't everything. It's also lifestyle. It's stress. It's sleep. It's all these components.

But diet does seem to be a pillar component. Now, what was, and your thinking has evolved since reading that book, right? It's like you're building on top of what foundation you've got from there. So I'm not saying that everything came from that book. You've continued with your training, your functional medicine training, and your clinical nutrition training. but if you look back, compare and contrast your life when it comes to and what your daughter was eating when it comes to diet.

How are you approaching it before? And then what did you start to do that was different, whether that was adding things in or removing? So gluten and dairy are out now. No gluten and dairy at all. And the reason is gluten is people always ask me, why is gluten such a problem? Like, you know, our grandmas ate it.

And I was speaking to a wheat farmer here in the UK because his wife was one of my patients. And he said, look, the grains are sprayed from when they are seeds. They are then sprayed again when they're ground and they sprayed again when they germinate. Wheat is the number one commodity. That is the fastest growing, you know, the world population is growing.

That's the grain that everybody can use very quickly. It grows quickly. And the glyphosite or the pesticides or herbicides they use on these grains are designed to, if an insect comes and nibbles on that little piece of wheat, it's designed to blow up its intestine, right? And the typical, it's called the sad diet. So it's the standard American diet or the standard Australian diet or even in the UK, we still, you know, eat that diet if you think what most kids eat.

cereal for breakfast with milk. So you've got wheat, you've got dairy. I'll come on to dairy in a minute. And then at lunch they might have a sandwich. In the UK, kids eat biscuits and milk at school. It's a given like at 11 o'clock, they get biscuit and milk. So you've got wheat and dairy again. And then in the evening, you might have like pasta or something like that. You've got wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, dairy wheat, you know, with cheese. If you are doing this, 360. days a year, every single day, year in, year out, you are going to start that. They know now, like if you look at Tom O'Brien, Dr. Trump, Tom O'Brien talks about this quite a lot, is every single time we eat gluten, it opens up the tight junctions in our

gut. So it's starting to allow toxins to get in and out because gut permeability starts licky gut and starts that way. So that is one of the causes of why gluten is a problem. With dairy, it is not manufactured. It's not, the dairy is not produced the same way it was when our grandmothers were growing up because farmers have to produce a lot of milk, a lot of dairy. Milk is consumed, cheese, cream, all of that stuff.

But the cows are pumped with lots of antibiotics. They're pumped with steroids. They have to, they're pumped with hormones. because they're producing milk all the time. And in the UK, I've read somewhere that 3% pus and blood is allowed in the dairy because it's going to be pasteurized and homogenized. So where's the goodness in all of that? Like, it doesn't make sense, right?

It's inflammatory. The animals are inflamed. They're full of hormones. They're pumped, full of antibiotics. That's then coming out in the milk. we're drinking it. What's that doing to us? And we're told you have to have the dairy. The kids need the dairy. They need the calcium. So that's changed a lot. And we've sort of gone down, right, where can we get calcium from? And you've got to make sure it's like bioavailable calcium. Vitamin D was another one.

It was like no one had ever checked her vitamin D status. And her vitamin D levels were seven. That's when I checked it myself. That was my own, you know, when I started reading Ginny's book and I started doing my research and I was like, oh, we've never checked a vitamin D and seven. Wow. Now, let's zoom out for a second here to add a little bit more context. Cones and colitis are autoimmune, right? They're a category of autoimmune. So help make the connection, go one step up to autoimmune and taxonomy and just how people understand what makes something an autoimmune disease and what's actually happening in the body. Then we can come back to things like gluten, dairy, other aspects and talk about how they may be encouraging more autoimmune react. So with autoimmunity, your

body is attacking itself. So in the case of Crohn's and colitis, the gut lining and the gut or with Crohn's is anywhere from mouth, is being attacked. If you've got arthritis, your joints are being attacked. So different autoimmune diseases attack different areas. But basically, something's gone wrong with the signaling and your body, instead of recognizing things that are good, the good guys, it starts to attack it,

and it thinks everything is bad. So it's starting to mount an attack on itself. And with gluten and dairy, there's something called molecular mimicry where you ingest things and then the body again, you know, there's a whole cascade of things where the body is invading itself wrongly. Yeah. A couple of days ago, Batis Karazia and really smart individual

and said, you know, when it comes to autoimmune, molecular mimicry where our body starts attacking, in itself is one of the main components that triggers, and there's also these other pathways, and he said it's a little less known, but we're now even starting to understand that viruses can play a role in sort of the pathway for molecular mimicry and causing our body to attack itself because people always would ask, why would my body start attacking itself? Why would my body all of a sudden start to come after itself? And in a way, it's been hijacked. It doesn't know what it's doing, it's thinking that it's attacking something else.

It doesn't know that it's attacking itself. Yeah, that's exactly what happens. Like, you know, with MS, it starts attacking. The nervous system gets attacked, and the body's just, everything's gone haywire, all your signaling is just gone haywire, your immune system. A lot of it is to do with the microbiome because, you know, the microbiome and the immune system,

they work hand in hand together when signaling. microbiome is like the eyes and ears of your immune system. So the microbes often the first ones that signal the immune system that something's going on. And if a lot of these things like the foods, the stress, pathogens, viruses, those things, they start to cause a disruption in the microbiome and that sends off a signaling problem with the immune. system and the two don't communicate and then everything goes haywire. Yeah, we have to think of it like a war zone, right? If we're in a war zone and there's attacks from all sides, you'll often see in war zones you end up with friendly fire. Because you're being attacked from all sides,

you just start shooting because you feel that everything is an attack. Any vehicle approaches you, you start shooting at it and it could be your own teammates, the soldiers from your side that are part of that and that's what's happening with autoimmune. Now, when it comes to the diet cell, it wasn't just that you guys took out, you know, gloomene and dairy and found substitutes. There's a lot of sophistication because you'll see stories online where, yes, some Crohn's and colitis patients get better just from that alone and that seems to add, you know, at least some relief that's there.

But there's people that are still dealing with Crohn's and colitis years on and they don't have good, and they don't have gluten. So there's more layers of sophistication. We'll get back to stress and we'll get back to lifestyle in a second, but I want to pursue the path of diet and I want to talk about some of these layers of sophistication. So let's talk about even foods that we typically think of as, you know, not necessarily bad, like they could be healthy, but how they might impact an autoimmune or Crohn's and colitis patient or suffer more unique. So let's start up first with saturated fats and let's talk about that category and have a few other categories we're going to go down. So what was one of the things that you saw when it

came to saturated fats? Saturated fats can often be a problem, especially if they're refined, like, you know, people who are eating French fries and chips and things, fats in that capacity because they do a lot of damage to the epithelial lining, the microbiome, lots of different things like that. But also, if you have got digestive issues, I love Dr. Carousian, and I've done all his courses, and the way he describes things is digestion starts in the north, from the brain to the south, you know, north to south.

And if something is not working up north, you're going to have a problem down south. So the first thing, the brain signals the mouth to chew and the amylase from the saliva and the digestive enzymes go down. You need enough hydrochloric acid that then, you know, need pancreatic enzymes. If you've got an issue with your gall bladder, your liver, bile, you're not going to be able to absorb fats. That's your first problem with that whole digestive thing. So then you're going to have an issue with, you know, you'll get stools that are floating, you'll get tummy aches. and lots of other things that go along with not having enough,

either phase one, phase two liver detoxifications not working correctly or that there's not enough bile, it's quite sludgy. So that from the digestive point of view, that is how saturated fats would cause an issue. And I'd also like to add to that, but it does seem that even sometimes healthy fats, like large amounts of coconut oil, and it's case specific,

it seems that there could be a mechanism of triggering some sort of endotoxemia reaction. Not everybody has that, but for instance, for me, even though I don't have groans, colitis, I'm not diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, I noticed after a year, I never thought it would be this. After a year of using large amounts of coconut oil in like smoothies and cooking, I would primarily cook with it because a lot of people were thinking that this might be the best world to cook with. Well, I am one of those people that is actually quite sensitive to even.

healthy, quote unquote, saturated fats that are there. And what was happening for me is that I had a really bad acne in high school. And then by going in gluten and dairy free and vegan at the time, I was able to clear it up. Then later on in life, I started noticing that acne coming back, the skin red pigmentation. I thought, what is going on? I'm meeting the healthiest I've ever eaten. I'm working out. I don't know what's going on.

So I have an interview with somebody here on the podcast, and Karen Fishman, who's with Michael Iron Labs, researcher, and right before that time period, I had a friend of mine who said that they cut out coconut oil just to see how it improved. And I noticed that even though coconut oil is great, it's virgin, organic, everything like that, I'll still use it topically on my skin. When I cut it out, that reaction, that acne, that redness went away. So that is some people in that category. I think you have some thoughts on that.

There's a paper out showing that coconut oil can cause lipopolysaccharides and endotoxemia. So, but I can't remember which paper it was, but there is a paper on, on how lipopolysaccharides endotoxyme is caused by coconut oil. Yeah, it's very interesting. Just another reminder that this is all about personalization. there are big picture themes, and this is the importance of working with a practitioner who's kind of seeing those big picture themes,

but then also knows what things people can try, what things people can A, B, test, right? In sort of the world of web design and software design, we talk about A, B testing. Does this work better? Does that work better? We don't know. Let's test them both. Let's test them both out. With diet, like when you've got Crohn's colitis,

This is something that Dane and I teach. When a patient comes to you, there is no one, you know, people be like, I've done low Fodmap, I've done specific carbohydrate, I've done autoimmune paleo, nothing's working. When these people come to you, their guts and their mucosal lining, their microbiome is completely trashed that mucosal lining is all degradated. You have to teach them. we teach them. Look, right now your gut is not in a good place. We're going to repair it and it's not going to be the case always, but it's food philosophy. What do you put on your plate? Food doesn't heal you. It creates a space for you to heal. And when you've got a plate full of food, we get

people thinking, right, so your gut's not, if you gave a baby, a raw carrot, even, you know, like a toddler, a raw carrot when it can't chew very well. It's not going to digest that. it's going to come straight out in its poop. When you're first weaning a baby, you're going to give it baby food. You're going to get the carrots. You're going to really puree them. You're going to make sure that, you know,

those carbohydrates are completely broken down. And then the baby can digest it. It's not going to digest a raw carrot. It was the same with like a piece of kale. You know, it's got too much insoluble fiber that a person with this kind of problem is not going to be able to digest. Does that mean they'll never be able to eat kale? No.

Once we repair things, yes. So when we get them to think, we think, right, is it squishy? If it's squishy, it's going to be more, you're going to be able to digest it better. You know, you think of a banana or you think of butternut squash soup. Then you think of things like we will give the analogy of a blackberry and a blueberry. A blackberry. is going to be higher in lectins, it's got seeds in it. That's going to cause problems, especially if you've got ulcers and, you know, it's got to come

through. So go for the blueberry. If you can go without skin, you go without skin. White rice or congey, I know white rice is not ideal for everyone because it can spike up blood sugars and things, but for these patients, they need some kind of nutrient, something going in, right? So congi or white rice is very easy. is very easy to digest, especially if you've washed it up. So you get them thinking, is this going to harm me or is this going to heal me? You know, is it going to help me to get to that place of

healing? So we start getting patients to think about that. But it's not even just diet because people don't think about the way food is cooked, right? So if something is cooked slowly and you've got like it's juicy and you've got like, I know, bone broth in there or meat. It's cooked really well. Like a stew. Like a stew. Yeah. And it's cooked really slowly.

You've got all the nutrients in there. You're going to digest that better. If I gave you that piece of meat and I barbecued it and it was burnt, do you think you'll digest it the same way? You know, it's not going to digest the same way. So it's also about food philosophy. too. So you mentioned one thing, which is this category of anti-nutrients. And anti-nutrients and lectins would be part of that is a growing area that is getting a lot more attention when it comes

to gastrointestinal disorders or irritable bowel syndrome. And then in this case, inflammatory bowel disease. And one of the reasons it's getting a lot more attention is that when we went through this sort of health revolution here in America and then that kind of spread throughout the world and veganism and vegetarianism got very popular, there was a lot more promotion of eating raw foods, salads, other stuff, eat just as all vegetables are great. But tell us how in the category of anti-nutrients and lectin, separate from the fact that things may not be that easy to break down because of the fibers, why is it that not all fruits and fruits and vegetables work for people with inflammatory bowel disease?

Because they may not have enough digestive enzymes, they may not have enough hydrochloric acid to be able to break these foods down and you need enough hydroglyricorac because your stomach doesn't have teeth, right? So when you chew, the food goes in, if the particles are left untued properly, we've got bigger particles going in already there's like dysbiosis, is going on, you then get, instead of all that melting away, dissolving and then going into the small intestine and forming amino acids and then doing its thing, you've got bigger particles, it's causing more of a leaky gut issue. So you need digestive enzymes, you need hydrochloric acid before you can do any of, digest anything. So a lot of people also know that sometimes nightshade,

Nightshade vegetables can be problematic for sometimes people with Crohn's and colitis. Why would a category like, first of all, what are nightshades and why would a category like nightshades be challenging for some people, not everybody, but some people? Nightshades have lectins in them. So it's things like tomatoes and bell peppers and obejines. And they are proteins in the lectins that can attack and cause autoimmunity. So what was an example of maybe a type of meal that you were making for you, your husband, your daughter previously? And then you said, look, you know, we've already talked about gluten and dairy, right?

Like biscuits and milk and other stuff. But what would be another example of something that you would find that you thought was healthy, but would be kind of problematic for her and could cause a flare up or some reactivity that you kind of left behind? Can you think of any examples? Yes. Okay, so I'm South Asian too, and so we would have Asian meals, South Asian meals, Dahls and lentils. Which are beans and legumes that you're having? Yeah. And these beans and legumes can be quite problematic for these people because they've got like an issue with their microbiome. They've got issues with pancreatic enzymes, elastase, often hydrochloric acid, things like that.

But these plants themselves, plants have to protect themselves from the environment and from nature and from birds and from being attacked. So they led off their own kind of mechanism, like it's almost a form of protection for them so that they don't get eaten or they don't get attacked. And we can't often, we have got, we're lacking the enzymes to be able to digest them, but they can also cause problems with our gut. can start causing like more of a leaky gut and issues with our gut. So I had to stop all the beans, all the lectins and things like that. I learned that in time, if you want to use those things and you're able to, you've got the enzymes and you've got the capacity to digest them, they have to be soaked really well.

You've got to soak them and rinse them very regularly to get rid of some of you. You know, like even quinoa, you know, quinoa, everybody thinks, okay, this is a super food, this is great. But we don't have the digestive enzymes often to digest quinoa the way somebody in Peru, you know, they've grown up with that genetically. They have been raised that way. Their bodies are used to breaking those things down. We've never had quinoa in Southeast Asia, right? We've also never had an eggplant and tomato, you know, until like the 1600s. anybody that's read the work of you've all know, Harari and Sapiens would know that like even hot peppers,

Indian food, South Asian food is known for being very spicy. That didn't really start until around the late 1500s, mid-1600s that food was super spicy because peppers are not from India. They were brought over from South America, Central America, the Mexico region, and then brought over. So it's just, it's so funny how sometimes food is so cultural, but then we forget how recent that cultural changes have, has happened that's modified the food.

Absolutely. It's true. So you also are talking about, so one of the ways, so now do you and your daughter have those foods? And if you do, how do you prepare them in a way that is easier to digest and process? Yes. So like I said, with any kind of beans or legumes and lentils, I will soak them. If I am making something tomorrow, I will soak it in the morning today. Every time I go in the kitchen, I will rinse it and we put water in it, rinse it. So it might be rinsed maybe eight, ten times. And soaked overnight, rinsed again really well. Like if you soak kinoa, you know that like, piece sort of layer you see, that is all this stuff that's coming out that needs to go. You should, your water should run clear.

And then I pressure cook it and make sure it's cooked really well. Yeah, I think the pressure cooker is key because that is how traditionally a lot of it was prepared. Either pressure cooking, which is a more recent innovation in terms of, you know, human history. But before that, it was slow cooking. Things would slow cook for a really long time. And so you'd cook out the anti-nutrients. You'd cook out all the things that were there.

You'd have a lot of different things, especially of societies. We're eating meat. You'd have some meat, vegetables, other things that all put in. And as you had mentioned, the juices of that all sort of accumulating to be the most digestible, the most broken down version that's there. So just going and running to the grocery store and getting a can of beans and then just plopping that into a salad, those beans are not going to be pressure cooked. They're not going to be slow-class.

The tin is probably got BPA in it. It's probably got chemicals. I mean, it will have chemicals in there to preserve it. That water is pretty disgusting when you pour it out too, right? So there's nothing. What I would say to people is if you want to do it, I know it's time consuming, bulk cook it. And once you've bulk cooked it, you can then freeze it.

And for me, except for really special occasions, I went down to Mexico City with my fiancé. We went on like a little bit of a food tour. down there. I personally, even though I don't have colitis and have Crohn's, I don't have even irritable bowel syndrome, knock on wood. I've had my own challenges gastrointestinely just from bloating and then knowing that like my acne was connected to leaky gut and other things like that for me personally. I just choose because it takes a lot of time to prepare them correctly and I tend to get bloated or react. I just don't eat quinoa. I don't eat beans. I don't eat lent.

except for, again, traveling overseas. I'm not worried about it as much because I'm not having those things in a regular basis. And that might sound crazy to some people, especially if anybody else who's South Asian, but feeling better is better than no matter how good something tastes, I'd always rather choose feeling better. And there's plenty of other things that I have that I can eat that make me feel like I can indulge and enjoy the taste. I just have minimized those grains and beans, except for, as you've said, white rice.

I'll still have some white rice in my diet and I feel great with it. And I'm just mindful to not have so much that my glucose gets out of control. I can have small amounts and mix it with other fibers and high quality meats. So that is a topic that I would love to touch on just for a second is that, again, I was raised vegetarian. I think you probably were also raised a vegetarian. And you might, I'm not sure of you're vegetarian now. I'm still vegetarian.

You're still vegetarian. And obviously we respect anything that anybody wants to do. If you feel like going into this and if you don't, don't worry, we'll just edit this part out. Did you shift the focus for your daughter in terms of plant-based, I mean, well, being vegetarian or not being vegetarian? And what was that journey like? Absolutely. Because, I mean, she did eat meat and she ate fish. But primarily our diet was vegetarian for most of the week.

I changed overnight. There was bone broth, there was collagen, there was fish. All her food was really well cooked. Everything was steamed really well. Or if I boiled it, I would keep the water. And then I would mash it so it was easier to digest in those early days. And bone broth and collagen are still a big part of her diet. And she doesn't eat beans and legumes and things because they just don't

make her feel great. So she doesn't. And she's actually started her own journey into cooking and trying to help people too because she cooks pretty much gluten-free and dairy-free. She tries to not use refined sugar, but she wants to show people there is another way of being able to enjoy your food and a healthy way. So she's developing lots of recipes and doing things in her spare time. And it's really great because she's learned now how to, she does her own cooking. I don't do it. But there is always meat there. There is always fish there. And there are always vegetables there because she can now digest the vegetables. So, you know, she can do salads and things. But if she has been traveling, she's been somewhere, she hasn't had her vegetables and

her salad. She's actually craving that stuff. So she does have that. But every day there is always protein and she's fine with eggs and things like that. So she's always thinking, where's my protein, where's my protein? And it's always meat-based or egg-based. Let's come back to stress. Now, one of the things that people forget is that even though stress is very much, probably even the primary driver after, especially you've made a couple dietary shifts, like stress still can be a primary driver for a lot of autoimmune conditions in an umbrella.

but the most stressful thing is constantly feeling like you're not making progress in your whatever pathway, whether you're engaging with traditional medicine, whether you're going down the route of experimentation. So I do want to acknowledge that the most stressful thing for somebody who's dealing with any kind of disease, especially autoimmune, it's very stressful because you get discouraged when you don't see progress. You're still continuously, you know, suffering. So separate from that, what would you say in both your personal experience and your daughter's

personal experience, what were the things that were also contributing to stress? And if there wasn't much, what are the big picture things that you see that drive a lot of stress in people's lives? So let's talk about stress for a second. So these days, stress is very different to how it was ancestrally, right? So when we were cave men, what do we worry about? We worried about getting up when the sun rose and going to sleep when the sun went down. We'd pick a few berries.

The biggest stress that we'd have is you'd be really starving and there's a bear running after you. So you've either got to kill that bear or that bear is going to kill you. You do one or the other and your stress response comes down. Nowadays, you wouldn't think of it as stress. But we wake up, how many of us wake up to an alarm block? You know, you've got your phone there. I don't, but people will have their phone there beside their bed, right? So you've got Wi-Fi and things.

People don't think about that, but that is mounting a little bit of stress on yourselves. But every time that alarm goes off, that is the stressor. Because you should be getting up with your circadian rhythm when the sun gets comes up. You should naturally, I should be naturally opening. When that alarm clock goes off and you're in a deep sleep, that's one stressor. You put the snooze button on. That's a little mini-stress. You then, we're in lockdown, so we don't really, unless you're going to work, you know, on the front line, most people are at home, but non-lockdown.

If you had to take a train to work and you've missed the train or the train's running late, you've got a meeting, you've got to drop the kids off somewhere. It's like little stress, little stress, little stress, little stress. It adds up. We're eating our desko. People aren't sitting, they're eating mindfully, right? Digestion begins when you're sitting down, eating your food, chewing it slowly. that's so important. That's another stress.

That's affecting your secretory IGA. The more your stress, the more the secretory IGA goes down. The secretory IGA is your first line of defense. You know, you've got this mucosal lining everywhere in every orifice. So your nose and your bottom and everywhere else, your lungs, all of that. So if that secretory IGA gets lower and lower and lower, you're going to be more prone to getting infections, viruses, colds, flus, things like that. So that is one aspect of stress.

The other aspect of stress is, I think kids are so stressed these days. They've got like exams and homework and clubs and, you know, they don't get time to be kids half the time. They're going here, they're in everywhere, right? And so that's another form of stress. But stress can come in lots of different ways. But for kids generally, teenagers, it might be, they've got social media stress now as well, haven't they? Everybody, we didn't have that, I didn't have that when I was growing up. But now they've got that added.

I think that's more stressful. Kids are just not kids anymore. And those are other areas that will affect them mentally, physically. You know, it's things that you wouldn't think of, but are very important. families don't eat dinner together anymore. Everybody's eating on the go. Those things have, you know, before when everybody used to sit down calmly, you ate your dinner, you digested it well,

your stress levels would come down, you talk about things, and that has a big bearing on your microbiome too. So keep going on about the microbiome, but it's so important. Because if that is dysbiotic, it's going to cause an issue. Absolutely. And we talked about environmental stressors. You mentioned fire retardants, pollutants in the home. You know, often people forget, but their indoor air can be up to sometimes there was a study

done by the EPA in the late 80s here in the United States. They found that indoor air because of carpets, because of mold, because of a lot of different things, off gassing from furniture, fire retardants, as we mentioned, indoor air can sometimes be up to 300 times more polluted than outdoor air. So those are part of those environmental toxins, the water that we drink, right, making sure that we get a chance. Now, one question I had for you on the topic of water is, let's go back to that original story. When your daughter was on the jet ski and she fell off and she swallowed a little bit of water, did you find out, was there anything inside of there?

Like, why was that a triggering event that things led from there? What are your thoughts about that? There was Clostridium difficile found in the tests in the UK. My hypothesis of the whole thing is she was a 14 year old girl who was very conscious of the way she looks. So she was very careful with what she ate back then. And I didn't know this at the time. So I think there weren't enough essential fatty acids in her diet. And you need essential fatty acids for fluidity in the cells and for hormones.

It's such an important age for hormone signaling and things like that. So I think she was quite depleted in things like that, first of all. There was a lot of stress because it was a lot of peer pressure at school. Again, with like social media stuff and keeping up with your friends. And they all were aspire. I didn't know it at the time, but they were all aspiring to look like Victoria Beckham, which is like they were slim, but they wanted to be really slim, you know. So that was more of us, I think mentally internally, that stress was like driving it.

And I think that pulling in the water was just the icing on the cake. It just tipped it. Maybe the secretory IJ was going down with all that stress. There were hormone signaling issues because there wasn't enough essential fatty acids in the diet. This is all my analogy after studying functional medicine and trying to do a timeline and going back on it myself. How was her sleep hygiene? And also a lot of people find out that while you're trying to get a family member that you love, healthy and you're making changes in their own life, you start to make changes in your in your life too.

So let's talk about sleep because that seems to be a huge part of the way that the body begins to repair, especially broken down and goes through its own detoxification system. We've done episodes about the lymphatic system in the brain and the body throughout the system at night, sleep seems to be a big part of the repair process. So how is her sleep? And also, How was your sleep at the time? And did you guys make any shifts? With sleep, we have tried a lot. I'm still a really bad sleeper.

I think that's something I'm trying to work on. And I am not a great example there. And I'll put my hands up and say that. But I know how important sleep is for everybody. It's crucial. You know, your brain is clearing out amyloid plaque. You know, your brain's clearing things out. Your body's reprimed.

pairing when we sleep, we don't need to get up and eat. We don't need to, you know, go to the bathroom. Everything is happening. That whole process is so, so, so important for the immune system, for the brain, for your cells, everything. And so some of the things that we have tried to do is get the blue light blocking glasses, come off of any devices, at least two hours before bed, burning lavender oil, making sure the blinds are and blacked out, the room is at the right temperature, weighted blankets, things like that. But her sleep is also not great. And I think with autoimmunity, that can happen. And exam time at university, that was the worst. And you could get her out of a flare-up. But as you know, with these diseases flare-ups can come back. And it was

always exam time that the flares would be at their highest. Yeah. Sleep expected stress. It was a nightmare. I mean, when she did her A-levels, she was so, so, so bad. I had to get a hotel room next door to the college. She was in the hospital the night before, and they wanted to give her steroids.

And she refused to take the steroids because they give you the moon face. But she was in so much pain because when she gets flared up, it goes to her back. her back just starts to ache really badly. And she had a temperature and we were staying in this hotel room and I said to her, just take the medicine. Just take the medicine. She refused to take it at 3 o'clock in the morning.

She went, okay, give me the medicine. She barely got out of bed, shuffled to the exam. It was only across the road. Did the exam, came back, slept for an hour, went back and did her second exam. I don't know how that girl did it, but she got. like on that one A level paper, she came up with 100%. Wow. I don't know how the brain was working at that point in time.

You know, some of the themes that I like about that I want to acknowledge from that story that you shared is one, we're all human beings just trying to do our best, right? You're trying to do your best. Your daughter's trying to do her best. And in that moment, you know, you have competing things that you're trying to work on and decide,

do I take this medication, do I not? And, you know, she's working through that. struggle. The other side is that, you know, just I appreciate you just acknowledging and sharing, you know, hey, listen, there's a lot of things that I have figured out. And sleep is one area that I need to work on a little bit more. We all have that thing in our lives. Every single one of us has that. And I hope anybody who's listening, you know, even though your daughter is doing so much better today than she was at the beginning. And your health also has improved too. We still have things that we're working on. And that's what makes us human being. And we want to

give human beings and we want to give attention to that. So, you know, it's, I hope everybody listening can see the humanity in that and also have some self compassion for themselves to know, like, we're not going to be perfect with everything. There's things that we want to improve on. Maybe that's working out for somebody, even though they know all the data about working out and how that helps a lot of different conditions. It's okay. Have some self-compassion, have some self-forgiveness, know that there's only so much you can take on at any given time. and also how amazing it was that you were doing all those other things because if you weren't having the diet, if you weren't having all the, we'll get to supplementation in a second because

that's obviously a category that people are very interested in. If you didn't have the diet, if you hadn't make all those lifestyle changes, if you hadn't reduced the toxic load where you could in your life, maybe that exam time would have put her completely back in the hospital and she would have had to leave school. That's happened to a few people that I know that their Crohn's and colitis is so bad that they actually can't continue working anymore. They can't continue school or their education anymore. So the beautiful thing is when you do these things,

it gives you at least some resilience to protect you from the natural stressors and challenges that just come with modern day living. So let's pivot over to supplementation. That's always a category that people are curious about. How did you navigate it? And what were some of the things that you guys saw personally that made a difference? and could those be things that could potentially help other people who are dealing with Crohn's or colitis? First thing I would say is, yes, supplements have their place.

But if you don't fix certain things, the supplements can't work. Like if the microbiome is not in the right place, the immune system needs to be, you know, people think, oh, to right now we need vitamin A and Z. and selenium and things to get the immune system boosted. But if the microbiome is not in the right place, the immune system is not going to be able, you're not going to be able to absorb things, things are not going to work. So you need to figure out what is going on.

Are you getting mucus in the stalls? Is there, what is your cow protecting level? You need to work with a practitioner that really understands these things and you look at these things and you're looking at which area that needs to be worked on. you need correct probiotics, but you might not be able to take lots of probiotics, and you shouldn't be just taking them stabbing in the dark sometimes.

Your gut is so bad. You need like a single strain and you need a pinch, just a pinch to get you started and you work your way up. You might need, like sometimes people say, yeah, I've tried aloevira, it doesn't work, you know, it's made me worse. Okay, so aloevira can help quite a lot of people, but with inflammatory bowel disease patients, the aloe vera must have no aloe in there.

There's a substance in the inner leaf called aline. That can actually cause more irritation in the guts. If you're just taking any old aloe, it's going to cause more issues. This is why you need to work with a practitioner that understands herbs. They understand supplements and they understand how to dose it and they work with you.

And the thing I like about Dane's program is you're getting coaching. So every week, if you're doing the coaching session, every week you would speak to the practitioner and you'd be like, yeah, I haven't had any pain this week. Last week it was on a scale from zero to 10. It was a seven. This week it's gone. I had 15 bloody bowel movements last week, but now it's down to six. So we know something's working. Or no, that hasn't improved. So we need to put some more of this in. But, you know, the supplements that I used at the time were L-glutamine, aloevira, marshmallow root, de-glycerized licorice.

They were all things that sort of start helping your mucosal lining start to repair. That's the first thing. And then putting in probiotics, pinch by pinch, to get the microbiome to start modulating the immune system better. also one thing that apart from supplements is healthy relationships. Healthy relationships are so, so, so important because they release opioid factors which then activate your TH3 and your TH17. And if you haven't got a healthy relationship,

you can be doing the supplements, you can be doing the diet, you can be doing the nutrition, it's not going to work. Like everything, the whole package has to be there. Your sleep, your relationships, you know, the way you breathe, exercise, meditation, mindfulness, what you're eating, how you're eating it, what you're cooking, when you're cooking it, you know, what time you eat it, how do you eat it? Do you sit down at the table? Do you chew your food slowly? Are you cooking it slowly? are you putting the monosaccharides in there rather than polysaccharides?

Is there a lot of grains in your food or not a lot of grains in your food? All of those things matter just as much as the supplements. The supplements are helping, but they're not. People that go in thinking that just the supplements alone are going to do it, they don't need every single part of this puzzle, which is why if you can work with a practitioner, really work with a practitioner that understands this. needs. Yeah, because a good practitioner, you know, whether people work with you or they find somebody

in their local area or they're doing this program that you and Dane have put together, you know, when a puzzle is a great analogy, because it is a puzzle, but nobody assembles a puzzle by figuring out how all the pieces work together at one time. You start in one section. You do your best. You start with one piece. It's often a corner piece because those are easy to to identify when putting together a puzzle. Then you build from there. Then you might see that there's a face in there. So you start there.

So a puzzle is a great analogy because it can feel so overwhelming and it can feel like you have to do everything right all at the same time. And just it doesn't work that way. So if somebody can hold your hand and walk you down the pathway, then you're much more likely to take it piece by piece by piece and then ultimately be able to step back and say, wow, look how much progress we've gotten a chance to make. And the best bit about this is this is something I had to learn myself. But the best thing I like about this program, why I said yesterday,

is because we are teaching the patients to be the CEO of their own health. We're just teaching you. You are in control of your health. If you take a supplement, you need to know why you're taking it. You need to know what it's doing to your body. and you will learn that. We teach you, you know, if you're eating a food, learn the food philosophy. And it's, Dane says, you know, if I want to eat gluten, I can eat it.

Do I choose to eat it? No, I don't. But on occasion, if he's been out, he can have a pizza and a beer and he's okay. You know, it's okay for him and his body, but he's learned how to do it. And his whole program is called Shield. So it's supplements and imagination because you do a lot of mindfulness and visualization and you get yourself there. herbs, exercise, lifestyle. Yeah.

Supplements, herbs, imagination, exercise, lifestyle diet. And you shield yourself. You learn all of those things. And then if you do go into a flow. up, you're going to know what's caused it. Was it because I had that one night's less sleep last night? Was it because I had that argument with my wife or my husband? Or was it because of this?

And then you know how to get out of it again, rather than going down that whole rocky road of, oh my God, I don't feel I've got 15 bloody bowel movements today. And what am I going to do? Nope. Okay, I had that right. Let me go off and do some meditation right now because I know that I had that argument.

My stress response is probably really high, and I need to just give my gut a rest today. So I'm going to have bone broth with blah, blah, blah. And, you know, so you're teaching yourself. You're teaching yourself how to empower your own self, your own being, your own health, mentally, physically, emotionally. Talk about your daughter today. And we've already alluded to the fact of how well she's doing,

but give us a compare and contrast when it comes to her lifestyle before you guys went on this journey, which is now, you said, over 10 years ago, and the lifestyle today. Like, compare and contrast how those two are different since going through this healing journey. I think she has had to grow up quite a lot with this healing journey faster than other people over the years. She's learned a lot about her own body. She knows what works, what doesn't work. And she is phenomenal.

Like her mindset is stronger than anyone I know. She is ambitious. She lives her life to the fullest. And she just goes out there and does it. There's no victimization. It's not like I've got this disease. I'm a victim. Her friends didn't even know.

this is probably the first time it's going to come out really. Most of her friends don't know about this. She's given me permission to talk about it now and to put it out. She didn't want anybody to feel sorry for her. She didn't want anybody to know about it. She just got on with it. Even when she was at her sickest at university, people didn't know about it. She just got on with it. But she's living her life to the fullest now. She's not on any medication. Does she get flare-ups? Yeah. once in a while she does but she knows how to get out of them she knows how to deal with them and um she's she's doing anything that a young 25 year old would be doing so it's great she travels you know everything that anybody else her age would be doing yeah she's getting a chance to live

her normal life and go explore all the things that are there this is a good opportunity to talk about as we conclude the interview. Tell us about cure versus remission, just so everybody's clear in the context of what we're talking about here, right? There's no official cure for inflammatory bowel disease. So help us understand, you know, what happened to your daughter? If she wasn't cured, what happened? So let me ask you something. If you get the flu, right? You've got a strain of flu and you take like burn broth and you take vitamin C and you sleep and you rest and you get better, right? Are you cured? I would say so. Okay. And then what happens if you get the flu the next year? You got the flu again. So it's were you cured or were you in remission? Right. It's it's that

kind of thing. So there is no I when you've got autoimmune disease. what you do, and this is what DeTis teaches us, you know, because I'm a Karazian Institute. I do all his causes too. When you've got autoimmune disease, the aim of the games to find out what your triggers are. It triggers are different for everybody. We've spoken about a few. You find out what your triggers are. You try and get out of that flare up as fast as you possibly can,

and you go into remission for as long as you possibly can. If you flare again, you generally will know what your triggers are and you can get out of it just as quickly. But I don't like that word cure and even remission. Like, you know what? You get better and you get on with things. If it happens again, it will happen. You're never going to not get the flu again just because you've had it once.

You know, so it's the same kind of analogy. Yeah. And the important part about it is that the reason that. cure, the word itself can be quite polarizing is because there's also disagreements or, I would say, lack of awareness in terms of the driving root factors of the actual disease. Right now, if you look up on WebMD, inflammatory bowel disease, and this goes for a lot of autoimmune conditions, they'll say, we don't know, we don't know what causes it, right? And yes, it's not that here we are, you know, two people having a conversation saying that

we know everything, but we're saying there's clues. There are systems in the body, like our gut, that seem to be a major part of it. And when we take care of it, when we watch out about how we eat, when we are mindful about our sleep and our repair process at night, when we pay attention to our stress, it seems to be, even though we don't understand everything about this disease, that seems to so limit the flare-ups and the reaction that people with the right guidance can ultimately end up getting off a medication, can end up living a normal life just like your daughter did. And again, we don't know everything, but we know enough of what's related.

And the other beautiful part about it is, like you said, what do you have to lose? As long as you have a little bit of guidance that's there for you, you're not just shooting completely in the dark on your own. as long as you have a little bit of guidance, what do you have to lose if the traditional path wasn't working? Most of these interventions that you've been talking about here, the potential side effects are just going to be super minimal for the lifestyle interventions that we're doing. So there's not a lot of risk to trying, and then you have everything to possibly gain, again, if you have the right guidance that's there for you.

And one final thing I want to say is I am not against allopathic medicine. If you are inflamed or you need it, it's necessary to keep that inflammation down and those inflammatory markers down, then you have to take it. There's no, you know, if you need some fibre ASAs because with inflammatory bowel disease, people get quite frightened because they're told that you've got a higher risk of cancer. But nowadays, colonoscopies are done much more routinely. these things can be picked up so much earlier. So even if something happens, there's changes nine times out of ten.

It's picked up and it's not a problem for most people. And drugs like five ASAs keep those inflammation markers down. So doctors are doing their best. They do what they can do, but you be the CEO of your own health and you figure out what's working for you, what's not working for you. and try other methods to bring that inflammation down too. The folks who are listening here on the podcast or watching on YouTube, they want some guidance.

They want to work with you. They want to reach out. Tell us how they can be in touch and find you. And how do you end up typically working with people who are looking to go down this pathway because it's not just you work with Crohn's and Collitis. You're also supporting people as a clinical nutritionist with the expertise and functional medicine, you're working with general gut health as well. So who do you typically work with and how do people reach out to you? So I work by myself and I've got a website the guttexpert.com. And I also

have now just joined forces with Dane Johnson. As I said, one of our patients put us put us in touch. And the nice thing was he was doing Ginny's protocols. I was doing Jenny's protocols. And this guy just said, you guys need to meet each other. We met each other. And it was just, we took off. And he said, can you help out? We are so inundated. We need a lot of help, especially in Europe and India, Europe, and these parts of the world. And so I said yes.

So there's a link I've given to Melanie. We have the link of the show notes. Yep. So we can get in touch with us there. If it's specifically Crohn's colitis, you want to get on the Shield online program or work with one of us one to one. and we can do that too. That's amazing.

There's a community there. The thing I like about that, there is a community. There are other people there that have got the same thing. We link people up with similar symptoms, similar journeys. So you've got somebody to talk to you, not on your own.

And that's the hardest thing with this because people, it's a disease people don't like to talk about. It's something that's embarrassing for a lot of youngsters. But when everybody's in the same situation, it's really nice to be connected and get somebody there that understands your journey where you can help each other out. There's Crenzicolitis Lifestyle University.

So there are lots of different things on there. The Shield Online program has got, you know, we teach the food philosophy on there. You get a couple of coaching sessions. There's lots of different options. But I think, I wish I had something like this when I was going through this by myself. It's by far the best thing I've seen out there. That's incredible.

And again, we have the links to all those in the show notes, including your social media that people can keep in touch with you. And I just want to say, Nishita, it's been a pleasure. And I think anybody who is a parent that's out there or just a human being. And if you've ever loved somebody, whether that's a partner, a niece, a nephew, a child. And you can just imagine for a second them being just sick in and out of the hospital, going through challenges, and you feeling like a place of being, helpless, not knowing exactly what to do, trying to comfort them, but not knowing the best way to go about it.

But ultimately, you have a choice and that choice is, do you give up or do you keep on digging? And you kept on digging. And my heart goes out to everybody who feels like they're at that paradox or that place where it's like, I don't know what to do. But you did keep on digging. You asked the universe for answers, which is actually, I love that. I love that you ask the universe, like, show me, show me the way. I'm open. I'm open to other ideas.

and I want to commend you for continuing that process and digging and now taking that journey that you went through to help other people and make the world a better place for people who are suffering from chronic disease. So thank you for coming on the podcast and telling us your journey and story. Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor.