Dhru Purohit Show - How Stress Damages The Gut And How To Create True Emotional Resilience with Dr. Vincent Pedre

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and ButcherBox.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Vincent Pedre to discuss the impact of chronic psychological stress and unresolved childhood trauma on the gut. They also discuss the importance of a diverse microbiome and a diet rich in fiber and fermented foods, what we can learn from modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes, and how to tune into our body’s own intuition. Dr. Vincent Pedre believes the gut is the gateway to wellness and has helped thousands of people around the world resolve their gut-related health issues with his bestselling book, Happy Gut: The Cleansing Program to Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Eliminate Pain, which features his proprietary “blueprint” for healing the gut, the Gut C.A.R.E. Program. Dr. Pedre is the Medical Director of Pedre Integrative Health and founder of Dr. Pedre Wellness, CEO and founder of Happy Gut Life LLC, has worked as a nutraceutical consultant and spokesperson for NatureMD, and is a Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner with a concierge practice in New York City since 2004. His newest book, The GutSMART Protocol: Revitalize Your Health, Boost Your Energy, and Lose Weight in Just 14 Days with Your Personalized Gut-Healing Plan, is the culmination of years of research and clinical experience as a functional gut health expert. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Pedre dive into: -The top factors contributing to poor gut health (1:37) -The impact of psychological stress on gut health (12:44)  -The top drivers of pervasive stress in today’s world (16:27) -How the pandemic affected Dr. Pedre’s patients’ gut health (23:29) -Lifestyle strategies to support a healthy gut (32:38) -First steps for noticeably improving gut health (46:22) -Letting go of old narratives (53:45) -Energetic tools for restoring gut health (1:06:43) -Resources for unpacking childhood trauma (1:09:09) -A personalized approach to gut health (1:13:08) -Depression, fermented foods, and gut microbiome diversity (1:17:26) -What we can learn from modern-day hunter-gatherers (1:20:56) Also mentioned in this episode: -https://www.gutsmartprotocol.com -https://www.gutsmartprotocol.com/gift  For more on Dr. Vincent Pedre, follow him on Instagram @drpedre or through his website, https://www.pedremd.com. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. ButcherBox has a variety of different boxes, and you can choose your box and frequency. For a limited time, you can sign up today and get two pounds of ground beef free for a whole year PLUS $20 off by going to butcherbox.com/dhru. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think of stress as an attack on your gut. It's going to shift the microbiome, but it's also going to affect gut permeability. And gut permeability is everything. If you're curious about how stress and unaddressed emotional pain and trauma from the past is impacting your gut health, today's interview is absolutely for you. Welcome to the Drew Proit podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset.

This week's guest is Dr. Vincent Pedre. Dr. Pedre is passionate about gut health and especially helping people address the underlining root situations that might be causing poor gut health, including bloating, digestive issues, all the way to full-blown IBS. And in today's podcast, we're highlighting and primarily focusing on how stress and unaddressed emotional pain could be at the root, or at least further escalating.

escalating a lot of your gut symptoms. Dr. Pedre has written multiple books on this topic. His first book is called Happy Gut, and his latest book is out now. It's called The Gut Smart Protocol. It's a 14-day personalized gut healing plan based on the culmination of years of research and clinical experience as a functional gut health expert. Dr. Pedra, welcome to the podcast. Pleasure to have you here. I want to start off with a big picture question. Every year, it seems that when I talk to people, their gut health, is either struggling or getting worse, and often this happens for even people

who think of themselves as healthy. What do you think of some of the top, most underrated things that people aren't talking about that are adding to this soup of people having worse and worse gut health? I mean, first I want to say how big this soup is. It's about 11% of the world population has IBS or irritable bowel syndrome,

which is not one of those conditions that, like, you know, it's not going to kill you, right? But it is a huge impact on your quality of life. And that means there's about 896 million people in the entire world that are suffering from reversible gut issues. And that's just diagnosed. And that's just, yeah, either. There's plenty of people that are not diagnosed or just have. This is kind of like the prevalence, like the, from multiple, different studies like looking at what is the prevalence of IBS so it's about 11% whether diagnosed or

not diagnosed and you know when you think about what are the things that have been happening in the world over the last hundred years antibiotics were introduced antibiotics are overprescribed there was actually a study that came out that I don't know if it was the CDC but showed that actually it's even stratified where Hispanics and African Americans tend to to get antibiotics prescribed more often than other ethnic groups for unnecessary reasons. So we're writing millions of antibiotic prescriptions, but then if you go worldwide, you can go walk up to a pharmacy in Mexico and just pick up an antibiotic for yourself. Whether you know whether you need it or not, and you can do that in Southeast Asia,

you can do that in many countries around the world. So we've been over exposed to antibiotics, which completely destroys your gut floor. And depending on what your health habits are and whatnot, your gut is either going to recover or it's not going to recover. So that's one big thing. I think there's a lot of interlays here, like the billions of pounds of pesticides that are used worldwide, especially glyphosate, but so many other pesticides that are basically antimicrobials when they go into your gut.

They're also affecting the makeup of the gut flora. And then on top of that, you know, I think of all these issues, kind of like those old transparencies, like when I work with patients, like here's the person and then I'm putting one transparency. Okay, been on antibiotics, eating pesticide-ridden produce. They're under high stress. And we know that stress is going to affect the makeup of the gut microbiome. The Trooper Foundation has done research on this and shown that there are shifts.

in the microbiome that happened under stress. I think of stress as an attack on your gut, basically. And what I mean by that is that it's going to shift the microbiome, but it's also going to affect gut permeability. And gut permeability is everything. So everybody here is leaky gut, and we know the gut can control the influx of nutrients and substances, like a dimmer switch.

So it can increase permeability, it can decrease permeability. And it's very subtle. And you want to be somewhere in a place where you're allowing the absorption of nutrients, but you don't want that floodgate to open. And then all these inflammatory substances, they found bacterial DNA, bacteria in the blood of people. You find a bacterial product called endotoxin,

which is secreted from the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria in the large intestine. and that causes inflammation, which I know you've talked about many times, is the root cause of pretty much every chronic degenerative disease out there. Now, the interesting thing is that we think of its body inflammation causing that. But what I've found and why I'm so passionate about gut health is that, you know, you can tie it back to the microbiome. And the cool thing is that you can see this by doing, they do studies on germ-free mice,

where they do a stool transplant of, you know, someone with some condition, whether it's obesity, or they did this with mice that had an Alzheimer's model of mice that built beta amyloid plaque. And you had the germ-free mice that do not build beta-amaloid plaque in their brain, and all they did was stool transplant.

The mice, it's maybe a TMI, but mice will eat their poop. So if you put them in the same cage, the germ-free mice will eat the poop of the other mice. Their gut gets colonized with those bacteria, and those mice then started building beta amyloid plaque in their brains. So it's really fascinating. You know, when you look at these studies, like, well, okay, all this time, we thought These were internal processes in the body that are dependent on the foods that we're eating,

that, you know, there's nothing going on outside of the body, meaning like in your gut, inside that ecosystem that might be affecting this. And yet now, you know, it's almost like if you don't look, you're not going to find it. And now that we're looking, we're finding all of these interconnections with gut health. And I think, you know, we're in many essence, and I know there's so many places to go with this because I talk about in my book the connection to the soil and how we're not isolated islands. You know, what we're doing to the land, what we're doing to the soil is going to affect us. It's going to affect our gut.

The way we're living our lives, the over sanitation, you know, like using too much hand sanitizer, there are too many antibacterial soaps like trichlacin used to wash your hands has been shown to absorb into the body and can alter your gut microbiome. So there's all these practices that have merged, especially over the last, you know, 70 years from the mid-20th century forward and eating more processed foods than we've ever had before that are all affecting this kind of like seemingly like onslaught. of not just gut issues, but gut-related health issues, which is a really big thing because people think that you have to have a gut symptom to have a gut issue, but you don't.

You could have arthritis, fatigue, brain fog, joint pains, skin rashes, hives, and not be aware of any issues with your digestion, and I've had those patients. and all of these things are the interrelated issues that are affected by our gut and you don't have to have any gut symptoms to have something happening in your gut. It could be a parasite, could be a leaky gut, that then is causing this domino effect in your body that's affecting all these other systems and you may not have any issues. You don't have diarrhea. You don't have constipation.

No abdominal pain. And yet you're showing all of these reverberations in your body that are originating from a disturbed microbiome from a disturbed gut lining from inflammation that's coming from the gut that's leading to all of these other manifestations. So you were talking about, you mentioned a few things, antibiotics, right, not being in touch with the soil. You talked about stress, right? That being a part of it are sort of overload of environmental toxins, processed foods, et cetera. Yeah. Let me ask you the flip version of that question. For most people that are listening here today, within the context of lifestyle, food, mental health, et cetera, and you see patients a ton, or have seen a ton of patients in your career, what do you think is one or two areas that can significantly make a difference in them actually bettering their gut health?

Like everything matters. But if there's one or two things that people immediately can be thinking about incorporating, right, that you also feel like doesn't get maybe talked about enough, what would you say those two, one or two things are? You can't out diet and you can't out supplement a stressed out lifestyle. It's going to affect your gut health. So for me, it filters down first from shifting the mindsets, shifting the way you decide to live in this world, the amount of time you devote to self-care, mindfulness, meditation, breath work. Because if you don't deal with this, then it's going to be a block. It doesn't matter that you're checking off all the boxes, you're being perfect,

and you're doing the right diet, or you think, quote unquote, because I've taken care of many people over the years that come in and they think they're doing it perfectly. You know, they're eating their kale salads and whatnot and yet their gut is a mess, but they're inhaling their food at lunch at work because they can't take a lunch break. And then right after the work, they're running to a business dinner and maybe they're not eating the best diet because they're eating out all the time. And they're never getting enough sleep.

So their life is imbalanced. and yet they want just the right diet, which we'll get into that, has to be personalized when it comes to gut health. It can't just be a one-size-fits-all. And they just want, you know, the supplements and the diet that's going to fix all this. And yet the elephant in the room is the stress and their lifestyle that they're not addressing. That has to be shifted. And that is what I hope is one of the biggest points. points to get across in my book. And obviously, people want to know, what do I eat? That's one of the

most common questions is like gut my, my, doc, my gut is a mess. What do I eat? What do I eat or what do I not eat? Yeah. Or what, yeah, what exactly? What do I eat? What do I not eat? And but what I hope to get people to see and I call it turbocharging your results is that it's a, it's a non-negotiable. The stress component. Yeah. Yeah. Dealing with stress is a very key component of healing the gut and then healing your body. Because the gut then is kind of like the, you know, I see it as the gateway into so many things, into controlling inflammation, the gateway to immunity. The gut is that portal.

So if you, once you heal here, you're basically going upstream and all these other things start to get better. let's go deep down this topic of stress, right? When you sit with patients and they come to your office, you know, one of the beautiful things about functional medicine doctors like yourself is that you have more time with them. And I've often heard from you and other people is that in a way you're first and foremost kind of like also listening the way that a therapist would listen.

You're trying to understand what's actually going on in their life. from years and years and thousands of patients you've heard, let's go through some of the top categories because stress can look like a lot of different things. What do you find are some of the top categories when you're listening to people, just some examples that are that pervasive chronic stress in their life, that then they may not realize it is tied to gut help. But let's just go through a few of them. What do you hear?

What are some of the stories that you hear? First, I want to distinguish two levels of stress because there are a lot of people out there who have managed to adapt themselves mentally to the stress that they live under. And so they're doing what I said. They're rushing through lunch. They're running from meeting to meeting. They're rushing home. They need to get food on the table. But they want to make sure they get to the gym.

You know, maybe they have kids. They're taking care of the kids. you know so and a lot of times they've just adapted mentally. Everybody's doing this. Yeah, it's just become, so it's become their normal. So for those people think they're like, well, I'm not stressed. Like, yeah, this is just my life. And I tell them, but do you realize that your body is biophysically stressed?

You're not getting enough sleep. You're not creating a relaxed state for digestion. You're rushing all the time. Your body is in this amped up, fight or flight. It doesn't feel safe. So whereas maybe your brain thinks you're not stressed, but your body is screaming at you saying, I'm freaking stressed. So I think it's very important for people out there because, you know, I live in New York City and I don't know how it is in L.A. Other parts of the country, there are parts that are a little slower, parts that are faster.

I can tell you in New York City, people adapt themselves to living under high stress to the point where they lose the perspective that it's actually having a biophysical effect on their bodies that they don't realize because their awareness is not turned inwards. So I wanted to start with that because I think it's very important because someone listening might say, well, you know, I have a lot of things in my life. I have a full plates, but I don't feel stressed. I can't tell you how many people I've told, but do you realize? how stressed your body is.

So true. We all adapt to our circumstances. And then sometimes we also get in this place where we, because it's our life, it's the life that we created. It's the life that we've created with other people. We also can get very defensive. This is what I need to do to operate at this level. Or if I didn't show up this way, I wouldn't get it all done. I don't know if you've had that, but I'm certainly guilty of that.

and when the world took the big sigh at the beginning of the pandemic and all travel was canceled, I had about seven trips that were going to happen between the end of March and the end of June in just a few months crossing the world like I was going to Europe, I was going to South America, all canceled. And when all of that was taken off my plate, which was part of my normal, I realized my body is biophysically stressed. I am, you realize it. What did you notice?

It was like I realized how amped up I was and my sleep wasn't great. I was having late night sugar cravings. And I kind of did an internal review and was like, okay we need to shift something here now I have all this space I'm not even traveling to the office in the morning so now I just gained an hour of my day so I had been in such a busy travel schedule that I'd gotten out of some of the very self-care habits that I tell people they should do so I started doing yoga in the morning I started meditating every day I started doing intermittent fasting I cut up the sweets late at night, I started exploring that relationship that I talk about in the book

about, you know, what do you do when you have a craving late at night? You know, and it's like rises and it feels like it just, you know, keeps getting stronger and stronger until it's like a monster. And you realize the craving is just like an upsurge of your anxiety that maybe is retained from the day that now is making its self-known to you late at night when everything else starts to quiet down. It's the things you haven't dealt with start to percolate up into the surface. So, you know, what are the uncomfortable emotions that are coming up? You know, why is it that I need a cookie right now? Or why is it that I need a piece of chocolate? Like, what am I trying to medicate through food that maybe I'm not aware of or dealing?

with. So kind of when like the world got quiet, you went inward and you started really listening. Yeah. Yeah. And I realize, and this can happen to anybody else. You know, you're busy, you're traveling, you're, you're so busy in your life that you don't have time to realize the things that are happening. And I know I didn't answer your question yet, so I wanted to make sure. You're answering my question. Like, I went on a, on a whole tangent. So I wanted to make sure. I'm answering my question. I went on a, on a whole tangent. So I wanted to make sure to come back to the original question you asked. Yeah, which were what are some of the top drivers of stress that are there, but you gave the subtext, which is so important, which is we don't often think of our core life as being one of the big

stressors. You know, people think of a divorce, a business that's not working out. And definitely those things are stressful. They're events that are there. They can be big T traumas, losing somebody that's there, you know, all different sorts of things. But then There's this background. Yeah, losing your job. Losing your job. So those things are there, but often they get a little bit, they get a lot of attention as they should, but we don't give enough attention to the other side of it, which is

how does your calendar look? If I would look at your calendar and I would see how your day is organized, regardless of where you live, if you're in the Western world in sort of our modern system that we're in, are you operating at such a pace that there's a chronic level of stress that's always happening without and there's stresses that are good for us you talk about that inside the book you know we're going to chat about that stressors yeah medic stressors they're very important out the repair process that's baked in that you've mentioned some of your favorite tools you know cold therapy meditation breath work etc which we'll we'll go into in a little bit um when the pandemic happening kind of

things got slow for everybody, myself included. Curious, did you see people who felt like they were doing everything right? All of a sudden now that they slowed down, even if their diet was the same and whatever, but their lifestyle was shifted. Did you see patients or did you hear from patients who were like, it's kind of weird, like I'm getting better now? Did you come across a lot of those instances? There were two divergences, I would say, with a pandemic. There were those who got stressed and they started eating a lot of junk food and they stayed home.

and they were afraid to go out. And there were those who actually took the opportunity with all the time that was given back to them in their day because now they didn't have to commute. And they started exercising, whether it was at home or just outdoors and really eating better because now they were eating at home and cooking at home. Whereas before they had a lot of business meetings and they were eating out. So it was almost like it was weird. Two paths. It was like two completely different paths. Those who got healthier and those who got sicker.

Who got worse because they gained weight, they got really stressed, they started eating a lot of sugar. And it's interesting because even pre-pandemic, I had a patient who could not lose weight, even though he was eating the right diet, but led a really stressed lifestyle, which stress itself is an inflammatory condition. You know, it triggers inflammation in the body. And it can translate into stunted weight loss. Like you just can't get below a certain level. Like maybe it's stress and your body maybe needs detoxification support.

Well, he decided to leave his job and take his family on around the world trip for a year and live in different countries. It's completely stress-free. diet wasn't he wasn't like really minding like eat this or that or trying to be on a diet and 20 pounds just came off you know and it was this was many many years ago and he's probably one of the people who made me start to think about how there's mental stress and there's bio-physical stress. And biophysical stress affects the body in a very important way in people who don't think that they're stressed. And that you take them out of their stressed-out situation and

suddenly the body can function again. And the weight can rebalance itself because they're not holding on to all of this biophysical stress. It is actually causing inflammation in the body, which is, again, the common pathway through the gut for every chronic degenerative disease out there, including obesity. You know, going back to that tale of two cities, right? One group of people got healthier, another group of people got sicker. I would bet that a lot of it had to also do with sort of the media consumption of those two individuals. It's kind of like if you wanted to stay healthy during the pandemic, sure, in the beginning, nobody knows what's going on. We're all trying to gather information.

is this the verge of a zombie apocalypse or like something else that's going on? But once we got a general sense and we started to see what a lot of people in the health world feel was, okay, after things settled, we're now overreacting out of some, you know, overprotectionism that's there without personalizing the approach and maybe even coming out with recommendations that are the detriment to people, especially in cities that we live in, New York and L.A., gyms closing, don't work outside, don't be outside. You know, we're telling people to do things, but that goes back to this core thing of how also our consumption of media plays an aggressive role on do we feel that the universe is a place of good,

or do we feel that the universe is a place to be feared? Yeah, and I would say that consuming media is another biophysical stressor. You know, even though you're taking it in through your eyes and your brain is absorbing it, But then you translated that into feelings. And I think of the gut as our center where we digest our emotions and process them energetically and assimilate them into our bodies. And if all you're digesting is fear and panic, what is that going to do to your body? So my approach as a doctor early in the pandemic was to inform myself as much as I can.

to be as evidence-based as possible to look at what the research was showing, not to really pay too much attention to the media, just peripherally just to know what they're saying, but I didn't spend a lot of time on the news. I was more interested on what the science was showing, what research studies had we done, what could we pull from what we knew before, and what were the gut-related issues?

Like, they found that people who ate fermented foods had a less chance of ending up hospitalized with COVID, just because they were eating more fermented foods. And we can dive into that, like, you know, talking about what is the best diet for your gut and your body. But you see these things, and, you know, these are, you know, observational studies, but they do start to bring up questions. You know, they did find that depending on the gut microbiome and whether you had more

inflammatory type of bacteria in the gut could predict if you were going to end up hospitalized with COVID. And if you have more anti-inflammatory bacteria, bacteria that can resolve inflammation, and this is the same thing with aging. Like when they look at centenarians and is the gut microbiome of centenarians different from the gut microbiome of people who haven't survived to that age? and there does seem to be a certain gut type, even though it might be slightly different

in different parts of the world where the blue zones are, that are anti-inflammatory that allow that person to withstand getting sick and then resolve that illness and still be well versus people get older and they get very inflamed. And again, you know, they get a pneumonia and that ends up being the reason that they die because their body just can't handle the inflammation storm.

But it's interesting to like review health and then look at it through the lens, like put on new glasses and say, okay, I'm going to look at everything through the gut and through the microbiome and see what's happening there. You know, like a study just came out at the end of the last year where they looked at over a thousand people. This was in the Netherlands and they were looking at, is there a gut microbiome type for depression? depression being the biggest mental health disorder worldwide, 11 to 15% of people worldwide suffer from depression. And they looked at the gut microbiome. They found that there were 13 different taxa that were related to higher risk for depression. And I think of them, it's almost like villains in a Disney movie, like Ergo Thela, Hungatela,

Copacus, Lachnose, Lashnose. Clostridium, these are bacteria that are related that if they are imbalanced or they're producing certain things like maybe too much glutamate or Hungatella, for example, produces a product called TMA, Trimethyl Amin, that depending on your genetic uniqueness gets metabolized into TMAO. And I didn't know this because I had looked at TMAO as a factor in heart disease. because if your gut is producing TMA, then gets metabolized into TMAO in the liver,

and you have high TMAO in the blood, then you have twice the risk of having a stroke or heart attack regardless of what your cholesterol or anything else is. You could have a normal cholesterol, and you're still at increased risk. I did not know until I read this study that TMAO also increased, the risk for depression.

And again, tied to what's going on in the gut. What are some of the questions that you ask people about their lifestyle that give you some sense of where do they fall in the stress spectrum? Because as we talked about earlier, everybody's dealing with some version of stress in our modern lifestyle. And especially if you have kids, right, that brings up a whole other component and how we're all trying to navigate. what are like are you asking about their sleep are you like what are some of the things you're looking at what are the most important indicators like if somebody's telling you how this area of their life is going that's an indication of like you know okay you're probably dealing with a level of stress that's directly impacting your gut health yeah um you know first of all

in functional medicine it's very personalized and the way i think of myself is I'm gut, body, mind, spirit. So when I'm speaking to a person, I'm evaluating all levels of that through our conversation. Part of it is how they speak. Part of it is how they reveal the information. Question might be like, take me through a day. What is a day like for you? What time do you wake up?

When do you eat breakfast? what are you doing like do you work out are you rushing to work like what is your what is your day like like help me understand what your life is like and what that involved because then i'm trying to tease out not the stresses that they're going to present to me because if i rely on them they might be say well i'm not that stressed like oh i sleep okay like okay what time is your bedtime how much how many hours of sleep do you get what time do you wake up because if you're not getting at least six hours but more ideally seven hours asleep, you're increasing inflammatory signals in your body.

And that's going to affect your gut. And then that's going to affect your body. So it becomes like this. So understanding all of those things, do you skip lunch or do you eat lunch at irregular times every day? Do you eat lunch at 1 p.m. one day? So I don't stop at just like, what do you eat for lunch? I want to know what time are you eating lunch?

1 p.m. Well, do you eat lunch at that time every day? no some days i'll i'll you know i'll be busy in meeting so i don't eat till three some days i'm not like finally eating my lunch at four p m i'm like well do you know that by doing that you're actually throwing off your gut bacteria because the time that you eat is setting the circadian rhythm of your gut bacteria and you're confusing the hell out of them by eating at all odd hours and that actually causes metabolic disturbance that will increase gut permeability and then increase insulin resistance and make you gain weight and you're wondering why you can't lose weight.

So I look at all those things and I look at the little hints of aspects of their lives, you know, like, I don't know why this one is coming up, but I mean, it's, I'll just say it. You know, sometimes it's yet another example of where people don't realize the impact always of things that have happened in their lives because obviously in functional medicine we're doing a timeline and all of this is to understand who you are you know in the same way that I created a quiz in my book to understand what is your individual circumstance so then I can give you the best plan for you and had this guy had been referred to me because he was having had some gut issues and had some fatigue. He's 33 years old. And we're going through the history and I'm like, yeah. And then are you

single? Were you married? He's like, yeah, I was married, but my wife died of breast cancer. And then he just kept talking. It was just kind of like a, like mention and keep talking and went on to other things. And I let, you know, I try to let people, you know, and that's what we, we learn motivational interviewing and allowing people the freedom to express themselves without interruptions. So I'm listening and listening, but I made a mental note. I'm like, can we go back to your wife who passed from breast cancer? Like, how old was she?

29. And how did that affect you? The guy cried. And he then told me that he had never shed a tear because he had to keep it together for him, for the family. And, God, it's like making me tear up a little bit. You never know, like, where the healing portal is going to be for someone. So he came to me because he had some gut issues and was having fiducius. referred by an allergist friend of mine.

He thought he was coming because of that, but it was really coming to talk about having lost his wife and how that impacted him. And he had that moment with me where he felt safe enough to cry. And I held that space for him. And then, you know, did the usual, because I'm always operating at multiple levels. so gut, body, mind, spirit.

So I'm always calling in all of those levels in my healing interactions with people. And he came back a month later. And he's like, all my issues are gone. Wow. He had unprocessed emotions from having lost his wife at a young age and having to hold everything together and be positive for her, for the family, for everyone, that he never had given himself the space to feel the impact that it had on him.

And allowing that escape valve to move, you know, because ultimately, you know, like I said before, the gut is where we're digesting. We're like, we're processing, the way I see it is we're energetically processing our emotions through the gut. but the whole the process of healing is processing the emotion is not holding it is feeling it allowing it to have its expression beyond words beyond what your mind can know but the way that your body can feel it and then let it move through you and that's where the healing is and i mean

sometimes like things like that surprise me because i think like You know, I thought it was so simple. Like, let's go back and talk about this. This is huge. And I had no idea what an impact that moment. And me not brushing that off and going back to that one question that allowed him to have that opening and that release that he needed in order to heal.

And, you know, I've seen that a lot with gut health issues. There's always an energetic interlay as well. And that's why I think that, you know, for me, the breathwork and the meditation that I talk about in the book, and we created specific meditations and breathwork, like even breathwork on how do you breathe before you eat to get your body into a state? where it's ready to receive and digest that food. Like, do an internal scan first and see, are you riled up? Are you stress right now?

Then don't put food in your mouth. You're not in the right vibration to receive that food. Check in. Do what we call a physiological sigh if you're really under a lot of stress. That was contributed by my friend Sachin Patel, who's, I just. just interviewed for the book and he's, you know, that's, who knows, panned it down from thousands of years of wisdom, of understanding that we have our own portable stress-busting machine

within our own bodies. And a big part of that is your breath and your lungs. You want to walk people through that real quick? Just the sigh? Yeah. So, I mean, ideally you want to be ground. You want to make sure that your feet are on the floor, like grounded, connected to the earth. Because a lot of us, when we're stressed, we're kind of up here.

We're functioning in the higher levels, but we're not really embodied. So part of it is like bringing yourself back into your body. So then you want to close your eyes and kind of tune into your breath. And we're going to do this three times. you're going to, when you're ready, you're going to take a deep breath in through your nose and you're going to let it out with a sigh or an awe, whatever feels good. Like, ah, you're going to breathe in again. And another big ah.

And one more time, deep breath in. And imagine your body just being filled with light and the energy and then release that. And just three breaths. is enough to shift your internal state. You know, maybe you need more. You do the three breaths and you check in with yourself. And you see, where am I? Am I completely ready to assimilate and receive?

Or is my stress lower, but it's still present? So maybe now you need to do a round of box breathing. Where you inhale for four, hold for four, exhale four seconds, and then hold for another. or four seconds. And that can continue to rewire your system. So then you bring yourself from a place of high stress to a place where your body feels safe and ready to assimilate.

And you've got to imagine that that has all sorts of implications when you're doing that throughout the day. It's going to be easier for you to fall asleep later on. It's going to be easier for you to feel like you're not shoving down a stressful situation. How did that feel for you right now? Just pausing and doing that, just three breaths. Yeah, it felt great. It felt great.

Absolutely. Just brings you back into the present moment and connects, you know, we've had Dr. Andrew Heberman on the podcast a couple of times and he talks about, you know, not too much, but increasing our interception so that we know actually what's going on instead of our body. Yeah. Yeah. Do we know? I would call it embodying yourself, like coming back into your body, which is, which you can do through the breath

and through focus, like bringing your focus down, especially into the lower. energy centers or down here into the gut. Got something was coming up with that for a moment. Well, while you think about that, the thing that I want to add to it is that I've been in this world of wellness for some time now. And not as a practitioner, but as just somebody who gets to hang out with all these great practitioners like yourself and just having a lot of friends in wellness, I, going back to like my first question, which is that, you know, you're seeing more and more people, their gut health is getting worse off. But I'm also seeing more and more people that are getting better who it wasn't fixing that last 10% of the diet that they thought. It wasn't finding that one supplement, not that supplements don't have a role in being

supportive. Often I've been, I had a friend who, you know, never grew up working out, right? And then said, okay, I'm going to make this a regular focus in my life. and just through regularly strain training two to three times a week, started to notice that his gut health was getting better too. I've had friends that we were chatting a little bit before the podcast started. We were talking about cold therapy. I've had friends who started cold therapy,

which brings all sorts of resilience into your nervous system and makes you stronger. And it's a catch-22. It's like cold therapy makes you better at being resilient towards cold. And just getting better with their gut health through that. Like there's been so many people through other lifestyle things that are not the things that everybody talks about, food and supplements. What's the quick fix? The quick component, even than the world of wellness, who just get so much better just by pursuing these aspects. Not that you can't attack them all.

And that's obviously some of the things you talk about in your book. But it really goes back to how much of a role stress is playing with these things. Absolutely. And this isn't in the book, but it's actually something that I've just kind of, came up with an idea after I had finished the book, just to help people understand, like, how you can incorporate these things into your life. And I call them stepwise activations.

Because maybe, like you said, your friend, like if you tell somebody you should start working out, you should start doing cold therapy, you should start doing infrared sauna, but that's a lot of things. A lot of stuff. To do all at once. So then I tell people,

well, let's do stepwise activations. What is the first thing you can activate? You know, is that going to the gym? Is that taking gluten out of your diet, which can be really important in healing for the gut? Is that taking dairy out of the diet? Is that starting a meditation practice? But let's just do that one stepwise activation,

master it, and then move on to the next one. and then the next one. I mean, sometimes it just takes removing that internal resistance, the inertia, and then suddenly you can build upon those habits much faster. So it's more like an exponential curve rather than a linear curve. And I've noticed that with myself, and I was just talking to my son about that because he was feeling kind of down about something. And one of the ways that I helped him find his way out of it was like, okay, let's just talk about stepwise activations.

Let's talk about the different things you could do. And then out of those, let's choose the one that you know you could implement right now. And it's not going to feel good. You know, when you're in a crappy state, you know, whether it's your gut is off, your health is off, your motivation is down. So if you're waiting for the moment that you're going to feel like, you know, like you're going to really want to do something, guess what? It's not coming. You've got to force yourself. And I actually did that at the beginning of this year because, again, like anybody else, I'm just as guilty of falling out of the very important habits that I know are super important.

So I had started meditating and doing Kundalini breath work every morning. And I did that for over a year during the pandemic and then it kind of fell off because I got busy with life and other things. And then I go back and forth, back and forth. And I was finding that it was starting to get difficult to wake up in the morning. I was snoozing that first alarm, second alarm. And then I just decided it's going to feel uncomfortable. But when that first alarm sounds, I'm going to sit up and I'm going to meditate for 20 minutes. and that's going to be my transition from sleep to waking up, and then I'll go do the next thing.

I've been in Miami, so the next thing was I'm going to go dip in the ocean. So sometimes my meditations were actually at the seashore for 20 minutes, then jump in the ocean. And that became my morning routine. And yeah, like breaking habits, sometimes it's not the easiest thing. And I think it's really important for people to realize, you know, whatever it is, whatever health habit, you want to initiate. If you're waiting for the perfect day where the sun is shining and, you know, the birds are chirping and everything's perfect and you're going to feel like it internally, it's not coming. Initially, you've got to push yourself to do it. But recognizing,

you know, very similar to what I told my son, is that, you know, what I know about you is that you thrive with routine. So even though right now you're resisting a routine and maybe it feels uncomfortable to go to the gym, maybe it feels uncomfortable to get back into meditation, when you do those things, you actually feel better. So you've got to create that internal energy of combustion that can push you through that resistance and just do it even more. you don't feel like doing it because you know it's going to be better for you.

And one thing that I started doing this year because my gym has it is a 37 degree cold plunge. And the first time I went in, I could only be there for 10 seconds. And this is, you know, talking about what you mentioned, hormetic stressors. So these are stressors that are a biophysical stress on the body, but they actually have a net positive effect when you evaluate it over time. You know, maybe in that moment, your body's freaking out, but actually a few hours later, you're actually feeling really great. And I started at 10 seconds and built it up to two and a half minutes over the course of a couple of weeks.

And actually, the last jumps I made was from 30, 40, then I went to a minute. Then I jumped from a minute to a minute and a half. Then I went from a minute and a half to two minutes. and I realized that a lot of it was getting past certain uncomfortable moments where my body was freaking out and saying, get out. I wanted to curse, but I'm not going to curse, but you know what I mean, get the F out. And your mind is playing these games on you. And then if you can get past that, you build this resilience that makes it so much easier

to do things that feel uncomfortable. Because now you know how to push through the discomfort. You know, when you don't feel like going to the gym, you don't feel like going to the supermarket to shop for foods that you know are good for you and cook at home because you're not feeling like you have the energy. You don't feel like you're not in the mood. And yet you know that when you do that, you feel better.

But you're waiting for that moment where it's all going to be perfect and you're going to want to, and it's not coming. It's not going to come. You've got to just push yourself. You got to push yourself past that initial inertia, the resistance. You know, and if you look at chemistry, like organic chemistry, when you're reacting to substances, the initial, you know, maybe the combined energy of the substances are here and the combined energy of the new. compound is a little bit higher, but in order to get here, it's not linear.

You actually have to go through a reaction where the energy has to go up and then settles back down into this new spot. And that energy is the energy of activation. And I think of it the same for people. It's sometimes, you know, you've got to give yourself the kick in the butt to do things that you know are good for you. because I've had so many patients sitting there across from me where I'm telling them these things. And they know they're good for them, whether it's a dietary change or whatever, but they have a resistance to it.

Well, this is what I wanted to kind of get into next, which is, you know, sometimes those, that deeper resistance that we have and we all have it or we all had it at some point in time, we all have it, something we're dealing with, comes from these, old stories and these narratives that we didn't choose but kind of started in like our childhood or were handed to us or the parent kind of we hear the voice of a parent and it usually translates into some form of you know us having a narrative about herself like I'm not good enough I'm not smart enough I'm not deserving enough and when you have that as background noise you know we just had our buddy Lewis house in the podcast our whole conversation was about this and you're not aware that this narrative is driving it, it's sometimes very difficult to shake a pattern.

Awareness is a really important thing, and it is probably the key to healing. Well, I was going to ask you, if you feel comfortable talking about it, if you don't, we'll skip over it. You know, you had mentioned that there was a program that you did a few years ago that was really helpful in helping you understand that sort of awareness.

Do you feel comfortable talking about it? We can mention it. And actually, I want to actually circle back and share something that a patient shared with me. Yeah, please. Very recently. So he came to work with me on his gut health and his weight. His weight was very high, lots of stress. He was in a relationship that was undergoing a great deal of stress.

He's gay and they have a child together and there was a lot of problematic. interactions, but we started diving in like, you know, tell me about your relationship with food when you were a child. And because while working together, I kind of helped him become more body aware and listen to his body and listen to the cues and understand when he's full, right, which is something that I talk about in the book, intuitive eating like before, during an after meal intuition. and we zeroed in on something that was like a huge aha. When he was a child, his parents would make him eat the whole plate.

And he was done, like he didn't want to eat anymore, but they would force him. And this is very common, I don't know if in other households, but very common in Latin households. And his background is Latino. know. And what I brought to his awareness is that that actually what you were being told over and over is that what your body is telling you right now that you're full is invalid. And what's valid is what we're telling you, finish eating all the food on the plate. And it was such a big aha because now he's realized like his relationship with food and his tendency like when go out to dinner, like eat everything on the plate, regardless of whether he's reached that point where his body,

his stomach is telling him, I'm done, was actually tied to old programming from childhood where he was taught to not listen to his body, to override the signals from his body, and finish all the food on the table. And this was operating in the background as a program that was surreptitious, was not in his awareness until we finally brought it to light. So I wanted to highlight, because it kind of relates to what you just said about, like, things that can run in the background. You don't realize that are really important.

And I think all of this is part of the healing journey. you know so for me you know i see a lot of people come to me because of gut health issues what they don't realize is that really they're they're there to see me for many other things that the gut is is the reason that brought them through the door but it's only the gateway to many other issues that we're going to deal with you know and like i said the gut is the gateway to the rest of the body and and so I want to go back to your question. Yeah.

Actually, I kind of want to highlight something that I think was really important in my journey when I was writing my first book. Yeah. I was actually going through really hard time in my relationship at the time to my wife and the marriage was falling apart. And in the meantime, I had done so much work to heal my gut. And so many things were much better. Like I had incorporated probiotics.

I was eating fermented foods. We were really careful about where we sourced our food, organic and all that. And yet I still had a nod in my stomach at times. Sometimes I had some reflux. I felt nauseous. And it kept cycling. And I thought, but I'm doing everything right. You know, and I started seeing this energy healer that was,

was a patient of mine. And she's incredibly gifted in the Brennan method of healing. Barbara Brennan was a NASA scientist that started studying the energy field. She was studying the magnetic fields around rocks and stuff and then decided, hey, I wonder if I could use my equipment on humans. And lo and behold, she was able to detect the aura and the energy fields and start seeing the chakras and all that. It's called the Brennan method? Yeah.

Brennan. It was started by Barbara Brennan, who was a NASA scientist, who then became an energy healer. And so my patient studied that, and she's incredibly gifted, and I was working with her as I was writing my first book, Happy Gut. And one thing that we found is that, and this is something that, you know, is very common out there, is that I wasn't fully embodied. Now, what do I mean by that? I had developed a defense mechanism as a child of living in my upper chakras, so I could just fly up here. And it was a way for me to escape the body when I was in uncomfortable situations, whether it was my dad, yelled at me, punish me, put me in my room, I was punished in the room. And I just learned to leave my body, like, just to hang out up here.

but I never learned to anchor down, which is a very important part of the healing process, is to become embodied to anchor that energy down into the lower energy centers. And if you understand energy and the chakras, there are three main chakras that are the lower energy centers, and they happen to crisscross the gut. So the gut compasses three big energy centers. And when I started paying attention to that, I saw that, oh, so people are presenting with gut issues that are physical, but they could have. Remember how I talked about the transparencies?

So we know that maybe you might have an ulcer, whatever it is. But over that, let's interlay an energetic imbalance that's maybe happening in that third chakra here, the power, the will power center. So that's where my issues were. And through meditation, through breathwork, and actually, I call it Meditation Breathwork Plus, because it's not just sitting in meditation and doing breathwork. I'm using my mind and with intention moving energy. And so I was anchoring and focusing all of my attention on a point right below the belly button

that's called the Don Tian, which is a very very, powerful energy center that's used in Chi Gong, Chinese martial arts, Chinese medicine. And so I would sit in meditation when I was writing my first book for an hour just focusing on this one point to the point where it would become the color is red. So when you're focusing on it, you're thinking red with eyes closed and it would actually start getting hot like it would feel like a furnace and as i started anchoring myself and becoming more embodied my relationship started falling apart even more as i was shifting that vibration but the other thing that shifted was all of that stomach knot tightness the the angst i would feel in my upper

stomach was his third chakra which is willpower and has to do with interrelationship stuff like power struggles it could be with your significant other it could be with a boss doesn't matter who it is so i've seen patients come in who had issues with their boss who were also struggling with problems in in the stomach region like acid reflux nausea all that stuff and what surprised me was that without intending or thinking that this would actually help my gut, and this is why I became so passionate about the mental component and the mindfulness and meditation and breathwork part that's in my second book, those remaining symptoms, like you were talking about your friends that have like symptoms

that then they start exercising, they start doing cold plunges, and then they feel better. Well, for me, it was the energy work that shifted that because I started running, I stopped chopping myself in half and running energy through my entire energy field and the symptoms disappeared. And what, and I managed to also, the other thing is for anybody out there who's a high sensitivity person, an HSP or an empath, you know, that's that's me. so I could take on stuff that a patient had when they come see me in the room. And so part of what I was trying to learn is how do I create an energetic boundary so I can be present, fully present, fully there for the person, but not take on what they're bringing.

And especially again, like for me, we're taking it through the gut. That's where we're processing and digesting all of this energy, our emotions, all that. And through this work, I was able to develop a very strong energetic boundary where I could be fully present and yet permeable. So it's interesting because, you know, I did a post once on Instagram where I just had this insight that if you have leaky boundaries, you're going to have leaky gut. And leaky energetic boundaries. Like you don't know where to put boundaries with people where you probably also have a leaky gut as well because you, You're not giving your body the signals on how to know how to manage that interface. And it was through this process that I learned, and I think that's why it's so important

the healing process to incorporate meditation, breathwork, all that stuff. Because then you reclaim your autonomy as an energetic being, interacting with all of these other energetic beings on this planet, but not taking on their stuff because it's not yours to hold. Powerful that you had that experience. And I think it's also insightful for people who are like, what is he talking about, chakras, these things that, hey, this is, there's all these different modalities that are out there. And to be open-minded to try something, you never know what comes along with it, right? Like that in that category, are there other stuff that, you know, as you started to kind of see and open up and kind of be more open to all the tools in the toolbox.

Were there other tools that were part of that energetic work that you found were either helpful for you or for your patients? Oh, God. So many, so many things. So many people with IBS have a history of having had childhood sexual abuse and uprooting that and then dealing with and doing some trauma work. around that with a specialist can actually improve a lot of the gut health issues that are just the symptom of what really is going on in the background. So inner child work is really important.

And inner child work can be really surprising because you think you're not holding stuff. But cellularly, you're holding something that happened to you when you were three years old, five years old, 10 years old. There could be multiple things. There could be different things at different ages that you're still cellularly holding on to that are affecting your entire system, your biology, and then your health. You know, so when you're... Can I bring up something?

Yeah, yeah. Are you familiar with like the work of like Dr. Gabour Matte? Of course. Yeah. And, you know, his last book, The Myth of Normal. Yeah. And this idea of like how pervasive. we're also used to this world that's normal,

but it's a dysfunctional world that's creating disease in many sense. And yeah, that doesn't mean that you can still eat only processed food all day and take a ton of antibiotics. Of course, those things matter. And that's why I love functional medicine because it's like, hey, everything matters. Those things matter, but also this energy work matters,

this matters, that matters, friendship, love in your life. And you don't know what you're holding. And you don't know what you're holding. Because there's little T and there's big T traumas. Sure. And both of them could be buried in your memory banks for X, Y, and Z reason. And they come up when the time is right. You know, maybe you couldn't handle it when you were younger.

So I see a lot of people in their 40s where these things start to percolate up. And for those people that it starts to bring up, like, are there books, resources or things that are out there, that have you found that are helpful for people to kind of unpack that a little bit? Oh, man. There's so many avenues. I mean, first, the myth of normal by Gabord Mate, a whole new mind by Poland, Michael Poland. Those books, I think understanding that there is a way to transform our wellness,

both mental and physical through that inner work that is so important. Yeah, journey. I don't know we were going to go in there, but psychedelics, ayahuasca, they can be vehicles to deep healing of those little tea and those big T traumas with the right guidance and the right setting, with the right people that can hold the space to allow very, very vulnerable thing to happen because you do feel very vulnerable in those settings. But that can be the, you know, that could be what's been holding everything back. We don't give enough attention

to stress and emotions and the mind and spirit part of the conversation. That was actually a part of my book that when we were reaching, I know you've, you've been around a lot of books. And books are real estate they have and their real estate is word count and there's a certainly only a certain amount of word count and it's funny because happy gut was a 75,000 word limit and I ended up writing over 100,000 words so we had to chop it down. This book, my publisher Ben Bella gave me 40 to 50,000 word count and I thought oh that's going to be super easy because happy gut was bigger than that. guess what I did? I overwrote

because I just want to share so much with people and you always think that you don't have a lot to share and then you get writing and you realize like you just keep like layers and layers and you're like, well, if I say this, I got to tell them about this and I got to say this and make all of these interconnections so they can really understand this because I really want to take care of the reader and help them through the process. So when my book was over word count, they were asking, well, do we really need this section on

turbocharging your results on the mind, body, gut connection? I'm like, yeah, this is not going out. This is part of my vision for the book, and this is a key component. And yeah, a big part of the book is understanding the science behind the gut, the science behind leaky gut, how leaky gut is connected to the skin, the airway, the brain, the muley system, metabolism, your energy, all those things. And then what diet to eat and probably the biggest distinguishing factor of this book, which is unlike the majority of health books out there that are one size fits all, is that it's personalized based on a quiz that gives you a score,

your gut smart score, that then tells you what category you're in and how you can eat based on your gut type, which is very different from any book out there, but it's based on my experience. And it's different from my first book. My first book was a one broad, one-size-fits-all diet program for people to cleanse and heal their gut. But what I realized in writing the second book and also before when the vision of the second book started to materialize in my mind is that I'm working with people and I can't tell someone with severe gut issues to eat the same as someone with moderate or mild, it's different.

I've got to meet the person where they're at. And there's not a lot of books out there that do that. So for the folks that are listening, and of course, we have a link to the book in the show notes, Gutsmart Protocol. People can pick it up, and I hope they do. How do they think about that personalization approach? Like, just give us the big picture of how you talk about it with your patients. So first, you want to know where you stand, and the quiz that I developed is not just about gut symptoms.

It's about a lot of other gut-related health issues, including things like weight gain that you might not think is related to your gut, but we know is related to the gut. And actually, you know, again, just I'm going to go on a little tangent on mice studies where they took germ-free mice. And they did a study with what they called discordant twins. So one twin is thin. The other one was obese. And they took their poop and they put poop from an obese human twin in with the germ-free mice and poop from a thin twin with germ-free mice. Now they gave the mice all the same diet.

So we're not eating a different diet. So it was low fat, high in phytonutrients. So plant polysaccharides. The thin mice stayed thin, the thin germ-free mice that got the poop from the obese twin gained weight and became obese and became insulin resistant. So we understand that there's a much bigger role that is being played here from diet perspective, the gut. So I stratify people based on their gut type, and then depending on what their gut type is,

we know that there are certain things that they're going to be able to tolerate and certain things that are not going to sit so great. So, yeah, I mean, in functional medicine, we say, you know, eat a plant-based diet, eat more plants. But if you have severe gut dysfunction, you might not be able to eat a salad. All those raw foods are going to be really hard on your digestive system. So maybe instead what you need to start with is eating more cooked vegetables, not too many raw. You're also not going to tolerate fermented foods. So even though, and we can talk about that, how important fermented foods are for microbial diversity in the gut, but also for developing resilience in the body and improving, lowering inflammation, all that.

But you can't eat those foods if you have severe gut dysfunction. you're not ready. So you've got to do some gut healing. So you do the protocol for 14 days. While also, and I hope everybody who's listened to this podcast understands that the turbocharging your results where you learn about the vagus nerve, you learn about the stress response, and you learn about how to activate the vagus nerve and use breathwork and meditation, that that is an essential part of this process.

This is not a cherry on top. Maybe you have it. Maybe you don't. No, this is part of the program that's going to make the physical part of choosing the right foods have a greater impact on the entire healing process. So you go through this process and then you recheck after 14 days, find out where you're at, and then either you repeat it or maybe you've moved on and now you can start testing having a little bit of fermented foods. Now, there was a study done by Stanford University that came out towards the end of 2021. And they took a group of, it was a small group. So it ended up being 18 and 18 people in each branch.

But this ties into something, a really important key message in the book. And also a key message that for me is evolving when I look into, like one of the things that I feel very passionate about is the gut, brain connection. and the connection between how we eat and depression and what can help resolve depression from the point of view of the gut. Again, putting on my gut lenses, looking through the microbiome, through all that and seeing, well, how does this affect mental health? So they were looking at, does a fiber-rich diet improve microbial diversity better than or less than a high-fermented foods diet?

And so they had people split into two groups. And granted, there wasn't a control group. So that would be one critique of the study. They should have done a control group. They had two groups. One fiber rich, so meaning they're eating five to eight servings of fiber per day. So vegetables, insoluble fibers, soluble fibers, like oats, grains, things like that. And the other group was eating a high fermented foods diet, which was mostly for them yogurt

or fermented vegetable brine. So it's just a vegetable drink. And they actually did a ramp up, and then for six weeks, the study participants were following the highest recommendation of the diet, which fermented foods with six servings per day. That's a lot. Six cups. What did they find? You know, because I know you've been around functional medicine for a very long time,

and actually this can actually sort of segue us to talking about Africa and the hot sauce and all that. in functional medicine, we're taught, eat the rainbow. That's what's going to create microbodiversity. It's full of all those fibers, both insoluble and soluble fiber that are prebiotics that feed our microbiome, which then produces all these incredible postbiotic nutrients like butyrate, which is anti-inflammatory and goes to your brain and actually activates the production of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, that then creates new neural connections. So your gut is helping you create these neural connections. And in functional

medicine, you know, we learn eat the rainbow. That's going to create microbial diversity. So fiber-rich diet, that's not what they found in this study. Instead, they found that the fermented, the high-fermented foods diet was the one that increased microbial diversity the most. And on top of that, lowered 19 inflammatory markers. And they were looking for not just blood inflammatory markers, they were looking at intercellular activation through cytokines. And all of that was lowered through fermented foods, which kind of takes me, you know, I just want to make a tie-in for everybody who's listening to remember what I said about COVID and people eating a higher fermented foods diet were less likely to have more severe COVID

or end up hospitalized than people were not. So, you know, just to kind of continue to make those those interconnections for people who are listening. And so what was different about the fiber-rich group, so they looked at that group and they noticed, oh, there's actually three groups in here. There's one with higher microbial diversity, and there's one with middle, and there's one with lower. Well, when the group with the higher microbial diversity, when they just looked at that data and what fiber did for them, it lowered immune activation. But for the group with the lowest microbial diversity, even though they were eating high fiber,

their immune activation was increased. So again, it comes back to, I like to say that diversity in the gut is the holy grail of health. That's what you want. And yet, my time in the hatsa, the hatsa are eating root vegetables, which are brown and white.

They're eating berries, but these berries are not the bright, beautiful, like, these are muted-colored berries that are growing out in the bush. They're eating honey, like wild honey, honey comb, everything. The honey, the honeycomb, the little bees. I know you grew up in Africa, and I don't know if you know about these honeybees.

They look like little flies. They're tiny. Yeah, they're tiny, and they make the honeycomb inside a tree trunk and then they build a little chimney. It's tiny. And I don't, these, these track, they're such amazing trackers. Like we were just like running through the bush. And then suddenly they stop.

They're like, look at this. And there was that little chimney. And inside, so we cut it open. And there was a honey and I was given like honey to have right there in the field. And there were like bees that got stuck in the honey. And I'm like, I can't be rude. like I'm here with the hot so. I'm just going to do exactly as they do.

So I ate the whole thing. And, you know, you're getting all of those nutrients, the propolis, all the immune boosting, all that stuff. And then they eat animals. So small to medium size animals, anything that they can hunt and gather and buy about fruit, which is also brown. It's not a rainbow. They're not eating the rainbow. And yet they've studied their gut microbiome and they have a more diverse. gut microbiome than a control group from the West, which they use an Italian cohort as the control

group, they have greater microbial diversity. So where is it coming from? It's from being out in nature, from not washing their hands, getting their hands into dirt, dirty, like eating that root vegetable that they just dug up from the earth. And, you know, thankfully they've got like areas of land that have been reserved for them that hopefully are clean, that don't have pesticides, there's nothing, you know, industry going on there. But what's really important to tie in with this and why microbial diversity is the Holy Grail, the Hadza have no diabetes, they have no heart disease, they have no cancer, they have no obesity, and they don't even have a word for depression. Depression doesn't exist for them. They get rained upon. They're wearing like minimal

clothes. It gets cold, hot. They're used to hormetic stress. They don't even have a concept of depression. It doesn't exist. In the West, we have so many different words to describe depression and mental illness. So can I talk about that for a moment? Yeah, absolutely. For depression? Because I mean, you know, I feel really passionate about this. Depression is...

The Hudson also probably have some symbiotic like parasites as well. Oh, my gosh, yeah. You know, I also think that parasites were all bad. And then it turns out... Parasites also are immune modulators. Yeah, they're immune modulators. And their gut can deal with it because they've grown that way and their gut. Their gut ecosystem can regulate all that stuff.

I unfortunately picked up a parasite from Africa, probably from reading that root vegetable that was cut from the ground. And got really sick a couple of weeks after I got back to New York from Africa. So that's a whole other story. But sorry, where were we segwaying? You were going to go to mental health, depression? Yeah, because what we're learning now is, what is the avenue again where do we approach mental health from the top down are we going to treat it with medication to alter the brain chemistry to make things better are we going to look

from the bottom up looking from the gut again putting on my gut microbiome glasses and looking like i said before in that rotterdam study where they found that there were shifts in the gut microbiome towards more inflammatory microbes that then increase the likelihood of depression and were found to be related to people who were depressed had these shifts in their microbiome. So there was another study that looked at, it was a healthy group, so not depressed group, but they wanted to look at what is the effect of diet on stress, on a stress score. And they did a pre-and-post stress scores on two groups of people. this time they had a control group.

This was about 45 people split into two. The intervention group, the control group just got general dietary advice like, you know, avoid processed foods, don't eat too much sugar. But they didn't get very specific about how much fiber and fermented foods to eat. So they weren't eating a big ton of that. Most people get about a third of the fiber that our bodies need on a daily basis. Whereas the hatsa are eating anywhere. So the regular American is eating maybe 10 to 20 grams of fiber per day.

The hodzah are eating upwards like 40, 50 even higher than that per day. So in the other group, what they did is they asked them eat five to eight servings of fiber-rich vegetables every day. You're going to include some grains. And you're going to up your fermented food servings not as high as six, but two to three servings per day. and they monitored them over four weeks, and what they found is that in the diet intervention group, they had a 37% drop about, I kind of remember.

It was like 32, 37% significant drop in their stress scores, whereas the placebo group was down at 17%. So there was obviously there was a statistically significant difference by eating more fermented foods, eating a fiber-rich diet. And again, anybody who's listening to this, you know, and I think this is the sometimes the problem with and what I wanted to address with my book, because you might listen to a podcast and hear resistant starch is great, or you should be eating more fermented foods. And what I'm saying is yes, and find out what your gut type is to see if that advice is right for you at this moment.

And if not, this is the way you need to eat, and this is how we're going to personalize it so that we can start healing your gut so you can get to the place where you can start to incorporate the things that we know generally are going to make you healthier. I love it. I mean, it's where everything is heading is towards that personalization piece. And sure, there's big themes that are out there. Generally, we know from the total body of literature that's there, that having more fiber compared to less fiber, at least right now, until we come out with

some big carnivore study that's out there, we know that that leads to better diversity. And we know, based on the American Gut Project, other things, that that diversity is generally a good thing. And like I said, diversity is the holy grail. Yeah, diversity is the holy grail. But the question is, how do you ramp up to that in a way that makes sense for where you are right now? Exactly.

I'm in a place right now in my life where actually, even over the last three weeks, and I have no idea actually what this is related to. I don't feel particularly more stressed. My schedule is the same. My workouts, everything. But I started noticing some of the same foods that were working for me before will all of a sudden causing like a lot more bloating. I'm even talking about like things as simple as like, you know, simply cooked broccoli with like olive oil. And I just naturally found myself having a little, having a lot less fiber for a period of time over this last week. This is a, you know, very new thing. And as just part of this little bit of reset, it's not how I'm planning on living forever. And my gut feels better.

And like I don't feel that feelings of bloated. And again, I have no idea where it comes from. That's like the body is so sensitive sometimes. Different things can happen. Who knows what it is. But I've naturally done this in the past where I've gone a little bit simpler. A lot of bone broths, a lot of other things, you know, just simple foods that are there, still fermented foods that I'm having that are like targeted dosages.

And I've generally seen I've done that for a little while. and I have a little reset and then I can go back to eating some of those same things. What you talked about just now is a very key thing that I also want to get across in my book and wrote about intuitive eating. And realizing that it doesn't matter. I mean, I've filtered down and created a quiz and personalized it and, you know, divided people into mild, moderate, severe. But even within that, it can't be all dogmatic. because I don't know you personally. So even with that, and I filtered it down, but I also, at the same time, want you to become intuitive about your eating.

I want you to become aware of what is it that you're craving before you eat. What is your body asking for? Then as you're eating, how is that sitting for you? Like, is it okay? Or did you take a few bites and you're already your gut? that happened to me the other day. I took a few bites of something and I was like, it's weird. Like, this isn't quite sitting right. Sometimes it's the energetic signature of the food, maybe where it came from. Maybe, you know, there's so many things that could be involved in how a food

is affecting us. But becoming intuitive about that and then understanding that we are a system in flux. right so if you treat yourself rigidly like you never change and yet you're you you continue to feel worse because you're not changing your diet and yet there's an intuitive part of you that's saying you know I should eat less broccoliini right now and have some bone broth you know um when when I was in Guatemala over the pandemic I went down to Guatemala Lake Atitlan It was amazing because it was like no one knew that COVID existed there. I think they had only had one case. And, you know, you could be outdoors, not wear a mask.

I end up getting Gyardia and got really sick. So I seem to. I love travel, but somehow it seems like I always, I'm a magnet for these parasites. They're there to teach me something. And so I got Gartia. I got extremely sick. I get back to New York. And I did the bonebrose.

but my intuition, which I'm gluten-free, dairy-free, so I don't have any dairy. And yet the ping said, you need to start drinking kefir to heal this. So I went and got a fermented kefir that was made from organic milk, and I started having small dose every day, along with bone broth and other things that I was doing. And it helped heal my gut. It's amazing. And again, it's about, you know, I think even within the dogma and there's very clear guidelines in my book. But even then I tell people, you know, do not ignore your body over what you think might be dogma in this book.

I still want to teach you that the intuitive part is an extremely important part of this. As Sajn Patel, the doctor of the future is the patient. It's like, be your own doctor. learn how to read your body and listen to your body because you know your body best than anybody else. And a lot of the work that I do when people work one-on-one with me is basically, you know, I said this before. I think of myself as just a body whisper. And I'm basically talking to people and telling them what their body is telling them because a lot of times they're not listening. But I'm also teaching them how to do it because I want them to be their own doctor, to be their own.

own healer. And I'm just the guide to that. I love it. Well, you're a great guide. And this book is another part of that, you know, pointing people in the right direction. This has been a fantastic conversation. I feel like we covered a lot of different bases, all the questions that I had, and plenty more which are on these beautiful tangents that we've gone on. And I find that those tangents are some of the most helpful things for people. And they're also the most fun to talk about as well. Before we chat about where to pick up the books and free gifts and other things, anything else you wanted to mention. So we were talking about, you know, someone might think, like, what is the best diet for gut health? Like, how do we filter these things that are coming

through the research now and decide what is the holy grail of our diet? What are we seeking, you know, this, paleo, keto, this, that, carnivore, like, eat more this, more of that. And, And I think ultimately it's a balance, but in that ideal diet that you want to work towards, there's fiber and you're getting at least five to eight servings per day, and there's fermented foods, and you're getting several servings of that per day, because then you're taking care of your gut, you're taking care of your little helpers in here, your gut microbiome, and then they're going to do wonders for the rest of your body, because by doing that, you're magnifying their diversity. You're creating a more robust ecosystem that then lowers inflammation,

regulates your immune system through the gut, which is your master control center for your immune system, and then has this domino effect for the rest of your body, including your mental health, which could improve. I mean, 11 to 15% of people worldwide suffer from depression. That's, again, from an 8 billion number of people in the world, that's almost a billion people approximately that suffer from mental health issues and it could be so easy i mean obviously we talked about a lot of layers of this and like i said you can out diet you can out supplement a stressed out lifestyle you can out diet you can't out supplement hidden trauma within that needs to be processed and released hidden emotions that need to be processed so the the process of healing has multiple layers

and it doesn't have to happen all at once. It can happen in steps. And sometimes those steps happen when you're ready for it. It's a beautiful message and a perfect one to end on. Take us through how people can follow you, pick up the book. I think you're giving out a free chapter as well if people want to check that out. Yeah. I mean, I wanted to help people like see the breath of the book.

And so I wanted to make this available. to them if they go to gutsmartprotocall.com forward slash gift. They can get a free chapter of the book plus Dr. Pearl Motors forward. He wrote a forward to the book, beautiful, insightful forward about the where chronic degenerative disease comes from in the connection with the gut. And a little bit about, we didn't even go into that. We talked about many of my journeys, but we didn't go into my own gut healing journey and why I ended up here, which is really I was patient.

number one myself and that's what made me so passionate about this when I was able to heal my gut. I mean, we did talk about like a little bit of my energetic healing in that process and the importance of meditation and breathwork and all that. So they'll get all of that. And I mean, if you listen to this podcast and this sounds like what you need and there's at least 896 million people out there who really need this advice, I would say just go to gut smart protocol.com. Purchase the book from your favorite retailer. There's so many Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever it is, and come back to the website and

claim your bonuses because I have five bonuses for you that can get you started on your healing path. Beautiful. And you're active on social media. People can follow you there too. Instagram is my jam, I guess. You could say at Dr. Pedro, D-R-P-E-D-R-P-E.

That's where I put out a lot of, you know, my goal is to educate at multiple levels and meet people where they're at. And maybe everybody isn't ready or maybe you just need some free content to convince yourself that this is the path you need to go on. And I want to educate and elevate and help lead people into the path to their best self, you know, to shine that inner light. And so I put a lot of inspirational content on my Instagram. Plus, I try to make it fun and sometimes shoot a silly reel.

I believe that you can teach through serious. And sometimes, you know, we get serious and we talk about some heavy things. And sometimes we want to just be fun and teach through laughter and playfulness. Well, you do it well. Dr. Pedre, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here and to talk about all the things. Yeah. having me, Drew.