Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Will Cole on How to Restore Your Gut-Feelings Connection EP 270

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

Dr. Will Cole, IFMCP, DNM, DC, a functional medicine practitioner, sheds light on the gut-brain connection and the correlation between our physical and emotional health during our conversation about his latest book, "Gut Feelings: Healing the Shame-Fueled Relationship Between What You Eat and How You Feel." In This Episode, Dr. Will Cole And I Discuss His Book "Gut Feelings" Based on his patients' experiences and research, he shares insights with me on Passion Struck on how to nurture the nervous system, the benefits of consuming gut-calming foods for mental well-being, and the techniques he employs to help his patients tame shameflammation, regain body awareness, and intuition. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-will-cole-gut-feelings-connection/  Brought to you by Green Chef. Use code passionstruck60 to get $60 off, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/7ImMScaCAIg  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/   

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. This concept that I talk about with my patients and I talk about in gut feelings of the shame inflammation, how do these mental emotional spiritual things, if it has to do with chronic stress, or trauma, body, love, or lack of self-compassion, how do these things impact our physical health, and how they literally can be stored in ourselves,

impacting the way that our body methylated, which is our body's ability to regulate inflammation and detox and make neurotransmitters. How is it impacting us? Our body is a cellular library and the thoughts and our words and actions and experiences are the books that fill up that cellular library. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armyles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer

advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, and welcome back to episode 270 of PassionStruck recently ranked by Intervie Valet as the third best podcast for mindset and thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly. The Listen and Learn had to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member. We now have

episode starter packs which are collections of our fans. Favorite episodes that we organize and to convene your topics, to give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it, earlier in the week, I interviewed behavioral economist Dr. Erie Ganesi about his new book, Mixed Signals, How Incentives, Really Work. Please check it out in case you missed it. I also wanted to thank you so much for your continued support of the show, your ratings and reviews.

Those such a long way, and helping to improve our popularity. But more importantly, we're bringing more people into the passion struck community, where we can give them weekly doses of hope, meaning, and inspiration. Now let's talk about today's episode. Nutrition and health can be a source of frustration and confusion for many as the emphasis on what, when, and how to eat often overlooks the emotional component

of eating. Today, one of the top functional medical experts, Dr. Will Cole, joins me on passion struct to shed light on the link between physical and emotional health, providing a framework for understanding the gut, brain connection, and how to positively influence it. We explore his new book, Gut Feelings, Healing the Shame-Fueled Relationship between what you eat and how you feel. In our interview, we discuss how stress and shame can cause gut inflammation, leading to a process called shameflamation, which can contribute to chronic health conditions like

autoimmune disorders, leaky gut, IVS, and other GI disorders. Conversely, problems with the gut can manifest in mood swings, anxiety, and food cravings. True health encompasses not only what you eat, but how you feel. Fortunately, it's possible to heal the connection between the physical and mental aspects of health through good nutrition and somatic practices that support a healthy gut and brain. Dr. Cole offers holistic tools to help you reassess your relationship with food and your body, reconnecting you with your gut feelings. His 21-day gut feeling plan provides a roadmap to bridge the gap between emotions and health.

Dr. Will Cole is a leading functional medicine expert who consults people around the world via webcam, having started one of the first functional medicine telehealth centers in the world. Dr. Cole specializes in clinically investigating underlying factors of chronic disease and customizing a functional medicine approach for thyroid issues, autoimmune conditions, hormonal imbalances, digestive disorders, and brain problems. He is also the host of the popular the Art of Wellbeing podcast and the best selling author of Hedotarian, the inflammation spectrum, and the New York Times best seller, intuitive fasting.

Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I'm so excited today to welcome Dr. Wilcole to the Passion Start Podcast. Welcome, Wil. Thanks for having me. I wanted to congratulate you on your great new book, Gut Feelings, Healing the Shame Fueled Relationship between what you eat and how you feel.

Congratulations. Thanks so much. It's been labor of love for sure. I'm glad that it's finally coming out. What led you to practicing functional medicine? Was there a significant event that happened or a chain of events? I would say a chain of events

is probably how you would describe it. I wasn't just one thing. I grew up really being just always interested in health and wellness. My first job in high school, I was 16 years old. My first job was working at the finish line telling, selling Nike's and Adidas and Air One, too, at the time. And I used my paychecks at the finish line to go to the health food store and buy the latest superfood that I read

about or latest herb that had some exciting research as a 16 year old. And I thought it was normal for me to do that. And I didn't really pay much attention to the fact that people thought I was kind of weird that I was packing my lunches at 16, like it with bell peppers in it and snap peas. But that's who you're talking to. It was this lightly weird health nerd and biohacking before biohacking was the thing that I just was interested in learning about it and how it could make me feel and improve how I wanted to feel. And then that evolved to beyond just being a hobby at 16, 17, 18 to want to be trained in this formally. So I went to an integrated medicine school in L.A. called Southern California University

of Health Sciences and Whittier outside of L.A. And then I was trained by just amazing medical doctors and acupuncturists and doctors of chiropractic and naturopaths and nurse practitioners in their own craft to really wanting to hone health science, really. And I graduated and we started one of the first functional medicine telehealth centers in the world over 13 years ago. I moved back to Pennsylvania where I'm from and we didn't have the language 13 years ago for telehealth, we called it a virtual functional medicine clinic.

That was the best I could do as far as describing how I was shipping labs to people and talking to them via webcam when they were in a different states and countries than mine. I haven't changed in 13 plus years. It's all that I do. It's my day job. And the books or the podcasts are really just natural ripple effects

of my passion for my patients, figuring out complex health issues and getting to the root cause of why people are struggling and ultimately a ripple effect of that weird 16-year-old packing his lunch with the random superfoods. Well, you mentioned biohacks earlier, is there one that's more prominent that you've discovered than any other? Well, I talk a lot about in gut feelings. I put together a protocol for that book that is adapted from protocols that we put in for patients based on labs for people to nourish both the gut and the feelings, the physiological

and the psychological, the physical and then the mental emotional spiritual and how both sides of both and approach when you're talking about feeling great or specifically different mental health issues like anxiety, depression, brain fog, fatigue, and also autoimmune inflammation issues. Those are two large part of my patient-based people with autoimmune issues and brain health issues and looking to optimize both or one of those. So biohacking is so many things that I love. I think that one that comes to mind, I think it's one of the aspects of the protocol and got feelings, but alternating cold and hot therapies, one thing that's definitely trending

online, people are aware of it because it's a great tool to regulate the nervous system and support lowered inflammation levels. So it could be as simple as a cold shower and hot bath. If you have access to a sauna, access to steam room, anything like that, even sauna blankets are available. I recommend them to many patients to alternate between that in either an ice bath, a cold plunge or cold shower, whatever they have access to, is a great way for somebody that has inflammation or is dealing with fatigue, brain fog, or dealing with anxiety, depression, some hypervigilant

nervous system issue. That's something that people would classify as a biohack I guess that would be a tool that I get to implement in patients' lives a lot. And I also talk about it in the book. Yeah, it's interesting. I was lucky enough to have one of your peers on the show, Dr. Mark Heimann. And we got into homeostasis. And we were discussing both whole therapy and hot therapy. And what I didn't realize is that they both do very much the same similar thing to the

body. Have you found that one is better than the other? that they both do very much the same similar thing to the body. Have you found that one is better than the other? To answer that question fully, I would say it's down to bio individuality and really looking at the person's case and also their experimentation with this and seeing what they enjoy the most, what the resonates with the most, what the most. I have to say, if I had to give my own subjective opinion on this, I think that most people don't sweat enough. Now, I'm talking to someone that lives in Florida. So maybe you're going to hit me for saying that. But many people aren't,

they're still, if they're in Florida, they're in air-conditioned space during the summertime, right? Most of the time. So unless you're outside a lot with your job, some people certainly are. Many of us live more insular lives that aren't sweating as much as their ancestors would. So if I had to pick one over the other, I actually do like son therapy, more than cold therapy, but I think both and approach is really nice. And I think the alternating between the two really, there's a lot of synergy and magic there, vasodilation, daggers of constriction, and the contrast therapy between the both that actually I think amplify the benefits of both certainly. But if I had to pick one, I would pick Sonna's. I'm glad you brought that up and I'm just going to tell the audience that a couple weeks after

Will's episode launches, we will have Dr. Ronda Patrick on the podcast, and we're going to do a deep dive into sauna therapy. So I can't wait to do that. It's going to be great. Stay tuned. So, if you're a regular listener to the show, you understand the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine, but for someone who's new to the show, they might not realize the difference. Can you explain how the two differentiate from each other?

Sure. The main difference is between functional medicine and mainstream medicine, number one, we interpret labs using a thinner reference range. So anybody that's listening or watching this right now, well, no, hey, when I get my lab, my number, my biomarker, is being compared to this reference range, just x to y interval of numbers that I'm being compared to. We get that reference range largely from a statistical bell curve average of people who go to labs. It's non-sandardized for the most part. If you go to another lab, you'll see that reference range may vary from lab to lab.

People that are predominantly going to labs are people with health problems, sadly. So there's a lot of people that intuitively know, heck, like something's not right here, my fatigue, my weight loss resistance, my digestive problem, my brain fog, my anxiety, something, these things are not normal. And the doctor runs the basic labs. And many times people are told the labs are pretty normal. Maybe you're just depressed. Here's an antidepressant or maybe you're just getting older or many new moms are told,

maybe you're just a new mom or whatever the case may be. All there in those instances, what they're being unintentionally told is they're a lot like the other people with health problems that they're being compared to. Comparing yourself to people with health problems is no way for you to find out why you feel the way that you do.

And just because some things common doesn't necessarily mean it's normal. So we want to look at optimal, not average in functional medicine. So we're looking at a thinner range within that larger reference range. You mentioned Dr. Mark common, my colleague and friend, all of us are trained through the Institute for Functional Medicine, and we're looking at the Cleveland Clinic's Functional Medicine Center, really, any doctor that's IFM trained

is looking at these optimal, not average reference ranges. So that's the first thing. We're looking at the spectrum between health and health problems. And by the time somebody's diagnosed with a health problem, for most chronic health problems, it's about four to 10 years prior to that diagnosis when things were brewing on that, what I call the inflammation spectrum. The second thing we do differently in functional medicine is we run more comprehensive labs, so we want to look at

what we would call upstream or root problems, like underlying gut problems, or chronic infections, or hormonal imbalances, nutrient deficiencies, whatever is relevant to the health history, we want to look at the stones that are most likely to have something underneath it to get data, objective data as to why do I have this problem to use the example fatigue. In the West, we will just label that as fatigue or chronic fatigue syndrome. All right. Being diagnosed with that, just anybody that has chronic fatigue syndrome, we'll already tell you, I already know I'm chronically tired, but why? So it's really the diagnostic, the sort of medicinal matching game of just getting a set of symptoms and then labeling it is really in my opinion and what many of our opinions

would be in functional medicine, in complete perspective, because it doesn't tell you why you're chronically fatigued. And there's a whole variety of reasons of why. And for some person, it's going to be A, B and C for the next person. It's going to be D E and F. So it's just the symptom of fatigue in this example is just the check engine light, the check engine lights on, but we have to look underneath that proverbial hood to see what's

dysfunction, imbalance, deficient to be causing the symptoms in the first place. So that's the second thing. And then with the third thing, we realize we're all different. And that's kind of connected to the first two. But it's bio individuality. And we're all different. And you're not going to have a cookie cutter one size fits all approach to getting healthy.

So we use food as medicine. We use natural medicines. We use medications when needed. We use biohacking, we use my body practice, trauma work, somatic practices, all the things that I talk about and got feeling freely and how we get people that have these chronic health problems like auto, I mean to need like inflammatory problems and like brain health problems like anxiety and depression to get better and heal. So that's my long-winded sermon on functional medicine.

Yeah, I had Dr. Cynthia Leon last year. I'm not sure if you are familiar with her or not, but she's a functional medicine doctor as well. And she gave me one of the best analogies that I still love for the way to think of it. And that is she thinks of the human body as the analogy of a tree. And what happens is in Western medicine,

we like to treat the branches or the leaves, but we're not looking at the whole system of the tree. When we're not, then my pine tree that came down during a storm last year, that's what ends up happening to us because this thing has been slowly rotting, and the root cause of it could have been identified years before it happened, but we end up treating things in protocols instead of looking at the whole system and the importance of it being a balance. So speaking of balance throughout your entire book, that got brain connection serves as a steady foundation throughout it. And you discuss what that means for someone

who's not familiar with it. Sure, the gut and brain are formed from the same fetal tissue. So when babies are growing in their mother's womb, the gut and brain are formed from that same tissue and it's inextricably linked for the rest of our life. Through what's known as the gut brain access or the connection between the gut and the brain. 95% of serotonin is made in the gut are happy

neurotransmitter. 50% of dopamine, our pleasure neurotransmitter is made in the gut stored in the gut from a neurotransmitter standpoint, but also an immune standpoint. 75% of the immune system is made in the gut, inflammation, the product of the immune system. So both from a neurotransmitter and an immunological or an inflammatory component, there's a lot of far-reaching implications of how the gut or what researchers refer to as the second brain. And if you think about it, the intestines kind of even physically resemble the brain, but the far-reaching implications of the gut and its communication with the brain, but it's bi-directional. It's the cross-talk, if you will, between the gut and the brain and the brain and the gut. So this is very academically researched for the past 15 plus years, looking at

the connection between the two when you're talking about things like anxiety, depression, brain fog, fatigue, someone just that wanted to like cognitively opt be optimal to autoimmune issues when you're talking about inflammation is concerned. So it's a major role in many people whether they know it or not. Okay, and I wanted to deep dive on this just a little bit further going into the nervous system and areas that people might not understand. So I was hoping you could go through the enteric nervous system and how it relates to our larger unenomic system and its impact on the gut brain connection.

Cool. So autonomic nervous system has three main branches. We have the sympathetic, which is the fight or flight, stress, response, we have the parasympathetic, which is the resting, rest, digest, hormone, balance state, if you will, and then the interrac nervous system, which is largely the gut, the intestines and nervous system. The gut is innervated also by the

parasympathetic through what's known as the vagus nerve, which is the largest cranial nerve in the body. It gets its name, which translates from the wandering nerve. And it's a master key component to our parasyipathetic nervous system. So many people that have digestive problems, meaning they have maybe some constipation or they have IBS or they have bloating, slow GI motility, or any other gut problem that's causing any downstream issue, like when you're talking about leaky gut syndrome or a lack of what's called a migrating motor complex, which is the gut brain axis,

kind of, innovation between the brain and the gut, allowing the nervous system to move the gut in a way, to keep the bacteria of the microbiome, which is upwards of 100 trillion bacteria, into the large intestines where it should be in a lack of vagal nerve tone and the entire nervous system will cause a overgrowth from the large intestines, since the small intestines in causing something called SIBO, which we see a lot on patients' labs. And I talk about it and got feelings. It stands for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which is a big percentage of people that have irritable bowel syndrome or IBS, acid reflux issues, indigestion, heartburn, is actually caused by seabull,

which in many ways, and for many people, is in part a nervous system issue. It has to do with the interac nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. So a lot of what I see clinically, a component of it has to do with the vagus nerve and the like you saw, the autonomic nervous system is imbalanced. The sympathetic, fight or flight stress state is overactive

and there's inflammation. If some hormonal dysregulations, you people feel anxious but exhausted and the parasympathetic is weakened or there's a poor vagal tone. So you'll see this phenomenon of nervous system dysregulation or a hypervigilance of the sympathetic response, which is the lack of vigilance of the parasympathetic. So that's really what's at play here, and people have to realize we have to ask

the question, what's contributing to that nervous system dysregulation? And as I talk about and got feelings, it's both a gut and a feeling's issue, meaning it's a physical, but also a mental emotional spiritual. And the fact that mental health isn't separate from physical health, mental health is physical health. And we really can't talk about one without talking about the other. And physical things like underlying gut problems or nutrient deficiencies or chronic infections, we see a lot of mold toxicity issues. For example, on patients labs or people

that have chronic Lyme disease or different physical things, right? That will impact how the nervous system is regulating. It's going to really breed inflammation and sympathetic to be high because cortisol will come up. Cortisol was called, it's an endogenous immunosuppressant. So in states of inflammation, one of the many things that cortisol is supposed to do, in addition to getting you out of that threat state from an evolutionary standpoint, it's

also an anti-inflammatory. It regulates your blood sugar and blood pressure. But if cortisol is always high because of that sympathetic, fight or state that neuroendocrine the nervous system and hormonal systems off It's unsustainable and you're not gonna feel good But you really had to deal with the physical side of what's causing the inflammation in the first place to calm down that cortisol Disregulation, but it's not just the gut stuff the feeling stuff is just as important, but it's a lot more maybe insidious to unpack, but looking at things like chronic stress and trauma and what I call it in the book,

shame, inflammation, the sort of impact that shame can have on the human nervous system and immune system is just as important. And with these metaphysical meals, if you will, that we feed ourselves on a daily basis in the form of unkind thoughts to ourselves or chronic stress and lacking healthy boundaries with their job or family members or unresolved trauma from our past, all will contribute to this dysregulated nervous system and inflammatory response just as much as that fast-fitted meal that people could have too. I want to deep dive all of that because as you discuss in the book in the Western world, we like to separate our mental health from the physical health, but as you just

just discussed, the truth is our mental health is our physical health. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Chris Palmer. He's a Harvard psychiatrist, but he just came out last year with a great book called Brain Energy. And what he discovered through the work that he was doing clinically was that there's a bidirectional relationship between metabolic disorders and mental disorders. And evidence shows a link between an imbalance of the organisms that make up the gut, Michael Flora, and several mental diseases, including anxiety and depression. And he feels, and we had a lot of discussion about it, that one of the reasons we're seeing all mental disorders increase in prevalence is because of our declining gut health.

Why is our gut at the center of human health, including mental health? And why is it so important? Yeah. Well, it's really down to the cornerstone, the pivotal role that it plays in both a nervous system standpoint, the fact that a lot of our nervous system and our transmitters are made in stored in the gut, and also the fact that 2,375 or so percent of the immune system

when you talk about inflammation impacts, and the role of inflammation plays in a lot of these problems. So there's a whole field of research called the cytokine model of cognitive function. cytokines are pro-inflammatory cells. It's research looking at how does inflammation impact how our brain works. How does inflammation impact mental health? There are the studies, the field of research that you're talking about here with different colonies of bacteria and the metabolites they produce They talk about it at length and gut feelings because it's definitely true. It's very clear

That's what's going on in the second brain will influence our actual brain in many far-reaching ways both from a Metabolite or transmitter production standpoint of what bacteria is in our gut And we know that lower levels of different lactobacillus and pifotobacterium, these beneficial bacteria of the probiotics of the microbiome, the beneficial bacteria, lower levels of this are linked to lower levels of serotonin and other beneficial neurotransmitters.

And a lot of people that have lack of bacterial diversity are gonna have not just more prone to things like anxiety and depression, but also have more chronic inflammation levels too. Because the more diversity we have of the beneficial bacteria, they act as regulators of opportunistic and pathogenic bacteria. So you'll see a lot of these things and we run labs, like these are things that we quantify on labs at the telehealth center, you'll see these, it's akin to in my mind, like weeds overgrowing in this gut garden. There's nothing wrong with weeds, right? They are part of nature.

But when we have an overgrowth of these opportunistic bacteria or pathogenic bacteria, some are potential autoimmune triggers as well, like Clubsiella, for example, these things are higher in what are called lipopolysaccharides or LPS, which are bacterial endotoxins that really raise inflammation levels in the body and can trigger what's called leaky gut syndrome or increased intestinal permeability. Things are passing through the gut that shouldn't be able to pass through they got like undigested food proteins like from variety of different foods which can trigger food sensitivities and those bacterial toxins which can trigger something called

molecular mimicry or the case of mistaken identity really when the immune system researchers refer to it as the immune system losing recognition of self which I think is a really something to ponder on because it's happening on a physical level, certainly, with autoimmunity when the immune system loses recognition of self and is tagging the brain or the thyroid or the joints when you're talking about autoimmunity as a virus and attacking it as it's at worth threat, creating an inflammatory cascade. But then as I talk about in the book,

these mental emotional spiritual components of it and what came first, the chicken or the egg, and for some people, when you look at the research around shame and resolve trauma and people that have higher what are called ACE scores or adverse childhood experience scores. And they have things that they haven't really dealt with from their past or even their current stressful life event and how the sort of relationship with yourself that stress that can bring can certainly trigger inflammation for people as well. So that it's multifaceted but ultimately these are the questions that we need to ask, especially people are doing all the things quote unquote but aren't getting better, we need to look at both the gut and the feeling side of this conversation. Yeah, as a veteran myself, I know a ton of veterans, as well as knowing first responders,

etc., who are dealing with lots of elements from chronic pain to emotional distress to other things. And I really think what you're talking about here makes a whole lot of sense because I myself started out by going to a typical conventional doctor and I ended up switching to a functional medicine doctor. When he looked at my labs and he started to look at a lot of my vitamin levels and then my hormone levels, he came back to me and he said, when you were in school, did you like to get A's? And I said, of course, who doesn't like to get A's? He goes, well, right now, many of your readings are D's and F's and we've got to get them to be A's. And I think that is something that a lot of us face unknowingly. What would be some of the first steps that if you're having some of these things that you're talking about,

whether it's chronic fatigue or chronic pain or other things that a person could take to understand what's really going on and where they should start attacking it? Well, it depends. I think the entry point for people is going to be different. Ideally, I would most people are going to benefit the most from a both-and-approach, meaning both the gut and a feeling side of it. And that's really why I wrote the book is because I have patients that are more they will say why the trauma piece, like unresolved trauma is like too overwhelming for them, or chronic stress. They don't even want to go there. It's just overwhelming to even broach that

topic. But the idea of a prescriptive food protocol to support their gut brain access and lower inflammation levels, support their gut health is totally doable for them. So that's wonderful and that's their entry point and if people can stay consistent with the simple or consistent with that for example when they start feeling better inflammation is lower, their brain is sharper, they're supporting their gut brain access and the nervous system, I find that at some point in their journey, they're going to have the resilience and the bandwidth to cross the bridge of dealing with the feeling side. If it's a piece of their puzzle, which for most people, it is at least a component to

it. So at the beginning, like, if I'm not putting my clinical hat on, it starts for me, for my telehealth patients, to asking a lot of questions, and really looking at things like gut health and nutrient deficiencies and hormonal imbalances, all the physiological stuff, as much as we're talking about the psychological stuff, we have every patient fill out what's called an ACE questionnaire, or the adverse childhood experience questionnaire of looking, was there physical abuse going up? Was there sexual abuse growing up?

Was there neglect growing up? Was there mental illness in the home growing up? Was there on and on? The higher the A score research shows you're more likely to have different things like chronic fatigue, syndrome, fibromyalgia, autoimmune problems, digestive problems, metabolic issues, like type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance,

the higher ACE scores. So we have to deal with both sides of the coin and we have to lean into these practices. Now, I see some people that the food stuff's overwhelming, right? They just like, man, that's just too much, but they're willing to lean into the feeling side a bit more, but when their nervous system's calmed on that side, then they are willing to talk about the food. So it depends on where you're out and you're helped, Jürte, and what you're ready for. You don't have to do all the things to start moving the needle in the positive direction. I guess it's my way of saying that. And I put together a protocol in the book that has my favorite gut and feeling action items for people to explore what resonates with them. So for the gut,

for one example, I talk about a gaps protocol, which is something we've used for the past 13 plus years, but it's an acronym that stands for gut and psychology syndrome for things like anxiety, depression, brain fog, and fatigue, or gut and physiology syndrome, i.e. autoimmune inflammation problems, like muscular skeletal inflammation, or some sort. autoimmune inflammation problems like muscular skeletal inflammation or some sort of autoimmune problem. And you can use it interchangeably because it's just supporting the gut brain access again using food. So that's an action that people can do and be consistent with or on the feeling side with the latest research was looking at around somatic experiences, somatic practices, or an EMDR, and different trauma therapies, and breath work, and meditation, and some obscure stuff

that I've seen to be very effective. I want people to deal with both sides, to be deal with it from a bidirectional standpoint. And I find that we can untangle a dysregulated nervous system faster with that approach. Yeah, well, I love how in the book, you say that you wrote it so that it could be a call to action for us to slow down, breathe and allow our body to heal

by addressing the emotional component of our health. And unless we do that, we'll never heal. So I love that as the way you started the book. Well, when I think of heating issues, a lot of it gets down to things that we crave. And I think many people go through life suffering because of their relationship with food and giving into their cravings. And I just put out a recent episode with Dr. Amy Shah who has a new book out called I'm So F and Hungry. And I wanted to ask you about this craving and what is food peace and how can one achieve

it? Love it. Amy Shah is a long time friend of mine. Like I've known Amy for a long time. I love her. It's multifaceted. I mean, I've got microbiome plays a role in this. We know different opportunists in pathogenic bacteria talk about the research in the book, how will actually influence how we crave what we crave? I think of the 90s

cartoon, a teenage mutant in tutorials, when you think of that villain, remember Krayang, I think his name is Krayang, where the brain was inside of this robot and the brain controlled the robot thing. And that's kind of how humans are is that we co-evolve with the microbiome, depending on the study that you look at, we have about 100 trillion bacteria. We have about 10 trillion in your cell, maybe a little bit more human cells. We are, by far, more bacteria than human. And we're sort of this sophisticated host for the microbiome, which in many ways, they kind of created us to transport them around the room and around the world and repopulate.

So if we did not have the microbiome, it's collected trillion metropolis of microbes in our gut, we could not metabolize food, we could not make it our transmitters, we could not convert hormones, we could not create inflammation to fight off viruses and bacteria. We would be gone without the microbiome.

In a way, it's symbiotic. We help it as well to get around the world and to we feed it. We are what our microbiome eats. But by far, I think it's, we have the benefit more than it in many ways. So, but we know different weeds overgrowing in this gut garden, different yeasts, and fungal overgrows, different bacterial, opportunistic and pathogenic bacteria, will modulate the way that we crave things. It'll actually influence blood sugar, influence

insulin signaling in a way that satiety and a hunger signals are functioning in the brain and to the endocrine system. So, why we crave what we crave really has to do a lot with the gut majorly. And then on top of that, this inflammatory component of it as well. Because a more inflamed somebody is, the more you're going to have receptor site signaling issues. So things like leptin and insulin and grellin,

the signaling or the communication between these biochemical emails that are hormones are going to be off impacting cravings. So many people are stuck on that blood sugar roller coaster, which is really the term for is metabolic inflexibility or metabolic rigidity where the body stuck in that sugar burning, fatigued, hangry, ravenous, craving state. But a lot of part of it, if you look upstream, there's a massive gut microbiome component to it, for sure. Well, I'm going to just take what you just said and mention something that Mark Heimann

mentioned in the last interview I did with him, which is if you want to look in longevity, the first thing he mentioned you want to get rid of is sugar and carbohydrates really beating wheat and things like that from your diet. But basically to break that cycle that you're talking about. Now, I want to take a step back. You mentioned it earlier, the term shameflamation. And when I think of shame, because the word hat is made up of shame and inflammation,

when I think of shame, I think of Brunei Brown and her focus on it. What are the effects of shame on our inner world? Yeah, it's pervasive. And it's a killer. Brunei Brown, I quote, during the book saying, it's lethal. I think in many ways, it's the common emotion that I see in so many things. When you're looking about the feeling side, I've got feelings, there's a lot of shame when you're talking about trauma. So whether it's trauma that they've gone

to gone through in their life or I even talked about the science around intergenerational, transgenerational trauma, people don't even know why they're ashamed. They're like born in shame in many ways. And certainly accumulative strata trauma over the course of their life will compound shame in their life as well. But also, there's a lot of shame around chronic stress too. People feel with our constant go hustle culture, burnout, seeing as sort of this deified thing of, you're just more successful. It's normal life so much in our culture. There's a lot of shame when someone's chronically stressed. They don't feel like they are eating the way that they should be because they're always on the go.

They're eating fast food, they're eating things on the go. Maybe they aren't the best for them. They just love them back so much, but that they it's really they can all have time to do. Or they are snapping at their loved ones. They're not able to be the best mom, the best partner, the best dad to their families because they're chronically stressed or they're not the best employee because they're chronically stressed. So there's a lot of shame around chronic stress. And then there's a lot of health-related shame. There's a lot of body shame that people have of not feeling good enough because of a way there are formal, comparison, culture, and social media and media itself.

And there's a lot of shame around food and sort of this diet disillusionment that can go on. These are complex issues. But this concept that I talk about with my patients and I talk about in gut feelings of shame, inflammation, how do these mental emotional spiritual things, which is what if it has to do with chronic stress or trauma or body love or lack of self-compassion, how do these things impact our physical health, and how they literally can be stored in ourselves, impacting the way that our body methalates, which is our body's ability to regulate inflammation and detox and make neuro transmitters.

How is it impacting us? Our body is a cellular library, and the thoughts, and our words, and actions and experiences are the books that fill up that cellular library and the thoughts and our words and actions and experiences are the books that fill up that cellular library. So a lot of our work with our patients is really starting to shift that library to one of healing, one of grace, and one of self-compassion so we can start to modulate our body in a positive way. But shame is this very nebulous thing because it's It's prescriptive for me to say

On the food side of things. Well, these foods are gonna raise inflammation These foods are gonna disrupt your microbiome and I talk about it in the book I give a protocol for their gut brain access It's needed but it's in many ways simpler because it's very cut and dried black and white We know how to get people better from a clinical nutrition standpoint. It is a lot more to unpack when you're talking about the feeling side of it because you can't tell somebody to just not stress or not have shame or just drop that trauma. It doesn't work that way, but the work of unpacking that and starting to retrain the limbic system and retraining

the nervous system on the feeling side is just as important, if not more important, for people to deal with these inflammatory problems, to deal with these metabolic problems and deal with these brain health problems as well. Yeah, well, I love how in the book, you point out that chronic stress is the ultimate junk food. Because if you don't deal with it, all the other things start falling down. You can go on as many diets as you want, you can do as much exercising you want.

But until you get that stress out of the way, it's going to severely influence all the other balance aspects of your life. Yeah, it really is true. But it's how do we unpack that? I guess that's the question, but hopefully with the protocol and the book people can start leaning into things that are free or things that are low-cost, accessible, inexpensive things. When you're talking about breathwork, for example, it's completely

free. I talk about the research coming out of Japan and South Korea called forest bathing, which comes from the Japanese words Shinranyoku, which translates from Japanese to English as forest bathing. It's using nature as a meditation, using nature as a medicine. The science is fascinating of how we can use nature as a sensorial immersive bath to lower inflammation levels, to modulate the nervous system in a positive direction. So you don't have to be at wellness offici anato auto. If you are, then fantastic books for you. You can just be consistent with the

simple, even if it's two or three things from the protocol. If you're consistent with the simple, you can start moving needle, the needle in the positive direction in profound ways. Okay, well, we've talked a lot about the background throughout the first chapters that you cover, but I really want to get into now your 21-year-old throughout the first chapters that you cover,

but I really want to get into now your 21-day gut feeling plan and how it's designed to heal. Can you walk us through it? Sure. So, as I talk about in the book, if you're talking about trauma, intergenerational trauma, mainly the trauma, how it's passed down through generations. You're not going to resolve all of that in 21 days. I want to make some profound changes in the positive direction, but more than anything, I want us to get our head above water so we can start to see, all right, we want to keep doing the things that love us back. And avoiding things that don't love us back isn't restrictive, it's not obsessive,

it's self-respect. And you also will get an idea of, as the reader, for it to say, okay, these six different things within the protocol, I like those the most. I want to stay consistent. Maybe there's three gut action items and three feeling action items within the protocol. You don't have to do all of them. But I basically picked 42 of my favorite science-backed ways to support your gut and your feelings. There's 21 things for your gut, 21 things for your feelings. So people can pick up a few things from each one and stay consistent with it. So maybe on the gut side, it's the gaps protocol that I talked about and it's lots of

soups and stews, which the theory around the Gaps Protocol is just almost pre-digesting foods by cooking them in the Instapot or pressure cooker or slow-cooking your soups and stews. So it's easier to digest. So allow that second brain, allow your gut the time to repair and work on healing instead of the work that it requires to digest lots of raw foods. So I even have patients purée some vegetables sometimes. So that's one way to do it. You mentioned sugar, the connection between high sugar diet and anxiety, depression and inflammation is the robust in the scientific literature. So decreasing the amount of sugar they're having, nourishing your body with foods that

love you back and calm the inflammation and support that got brain access is important. But on a feeling side, there's many different practices, but I mentioned forest bathing. I mentioned breath work. I talk about holotropic breath work, which the research around that's fascinating to me. It came out of the research of psychedelics and how psychedelics can modulate the nervous system in a positive way. Well, this isn't taking ayahuasca or psilocybin. This is endogenously tapping into all these mechanisms within your own body, in your own brain, through breath. And I talk about in the book of how throughout history, breath, it's been synonymous with spirit, even in the Bible.

Rua Kakodesh is the Holy Spirit. It translates as breath, it's the word, Rua Kats, breath and spirit. So it's really looking at how prana and Eastern tradition. So it's looking at how breath can be a way to connect with your spirit and metabolize stored trauma and shift our nervous system in a positive way and strengthening that good old vagus nerve that we talked about that's regulating the parasympathetic resting and adjusting chilled out proper healthy gut brain access. Sematic practices, I talk a lot about them within the protocol too. Things like yoga and Tai Chi and dancing and drumming and body tapping, there's so much people can do, but again, do they have to do all the things? No, I want them to

experiment with these things and see which ones resonate with them the most and then get enough tools within their toolbox to stay consistent with over time because that's when you start to see the nervous system shift, inflammation lower and then start to achieve their health goals. Yeah, I had to brand Yates on the podcast last year. I'm not sure if I'm familiar with him, but he's one of the foremost experts in EFT tapping. And it's amazing through the techniques that he and others

teach how much that can help you with everything from having issues going to sleep to waking up in the middle of the night to calming yourself down if you're experiencing stress and other things. And I know for me, I'm out of practice right now, but when I was doing yoga as a regular routine, it just made me feel so much more

and balanced to my inner core. And I know you recommend also adding mindfulness practices to the wellness routine. Why is that so important? Meditation as a whole, there's a lot of research to show it's supporting of this gut feeling connection, the parasympathetic connection, and one study specifically improves the thickness

of the prefrontal cortex, the brain, which is really our to master regulating effects of the executive functioning of the brain. Because a lot of people, they're a migdala, they're reptilian part of the brain, that fight or flight, feared, stressed, anxiety, which social media and our media are really playing to that sort of a migdala state. Meditations a way to strengthen the grown up in the room, the prefrontal cortex.

And many other ways, it'll lower inflammation levels, it'll help balancing hormone levels because of this modulating parasympathetic supporting mechanisms of the body. So there's different ways of meditation. I mean, mindfulness meditation, like one, just being my present moment awareness or at guard totally called the inner body awareness, anything that anchors you into the present moment, being even mindful of your breath,

where it's not even specific, like, holotropic or a breath box breathing or something like that, it's just your natural rhythms of your breath can be also an anchor into the present moment as well, but different meditation practices are a great way to Support this parisipid that estates so important for many of us to rectify that seesaw and balance of the sympathetic being overactive in the parasympathetic being underactive. Okay, and I can't do an episode with you without talking about intermittent fasting. And I think we have another person in common who we both know, Dr. Dom D'Augustino,

in the mine here in the Tampa Bay area. Yes. And Dom and I did a great talk on ketosis, but also an intermittent fasting. And he actually told me I was doing it too much. But I know there's a difference between time-based eating, which is what I do. I try to give myself 16 hours between my last meal and the next meal. And then I try to box in the other one somewhere between 6 to 7 hours. But I think intermittent fasting is when you take a full day off, maybe a week or three days a month. Can you kind of go through the differences

and why intermittent fasting is so important to regulating our gut health? Absolutely. This is one of the gut action items in the book too. It's something that I've studied a lot over the years, implemented many different types of fasting protocols and time-compress feeding protocols and patient's lives. My last book was called Intuitive Fasting. It was also exploring sort of the indigenous, like using fasting as a medicine and a meditation and how humans would have done that for a long

time for different reasons. We've talked making the connection to the gut. The research shows that our gut has a circadian rhythm similar to our hypothelimenpututut are higher in the morning, some are higher in the evening, and we have this wave like rhythm, this diurnal rhythm of the microbiome. This gut gardens, gut ocean, whatever analogy you want to think of, that's influencing our neurotransmitters, impacting conversion of hormones, like for example 20% of the thyroid hormone is converted into God and inflammation levels we talked about. So on labs and certainly in the research, there's a lot of bacterial overgrowth yeast and fungal overgrowth things like seabow small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that I mentioned earlier that are associated with all types of inflammatory problems and digestive problems and brain health problems like anxiety and depression and fatigue. Fastings a way to sort of reset that gut clock in a way. By doing some days of intermittent fasting and actually some of the studies that I know around this was actually just what you're doing. It's some nice gentle, moderate, time-compress feeding that helps to kind of clean and slough off in a way or prune that gut clock to allow

the gut time to repair and help to be a supportive tool to support gut health. And on top of that, we know especially longer fast, you you're talking about the deeper 24 hour fast done intermittent lane all the time, it really lends itself to ketosis, which intermittent times of ketosis, which Dom talks all about too, is the neuro protective benefits of it, sort of the nervous system support of it, which times of cyclical times of hormesis, or the good stress the fasting brings, can make our nervous system more resilient, which in part the stronger your nervous system is, the stronger that migrating motor complex is going to be that sort of gut brain communication, which keeps the bacteria in check, because the more we have that wave

like motion of the intestines, innervated by the nervous system, keeping the bacteria into the large intestines, the more the bacteria is going to be kept in the large intestines, the colon, where it should be. Because most people, how would it, I would venture to say, the vast majority of people have dysbiosis because of this epigenetic, genetic, mismatch, the way that we're eating, not just what we're eating, but when we're eating, and how we're eating, and the stress that we're in when we're eating, not just what we're eating, but when we're eating and how we're eating and the stress that we're in when we're eating always playing a part to the disruption of this gut microbiome, which is influencing so many things in our life. Well, thank you for that explanation and I wanted to talk about one other area and that is hormones and I am a person who

both playing collegiate division one sports. And then when I was in the military, unfortunately suffered a number of traumatic brain injuries. And I kept having post concussion syndrome symptoms until I saw this functional medical doctor, Dr. Mark Gordon, who really started looking at if the hormones aren't properly operating at the right capacities, the impact that it has on not dealing with amyloid plaques and other things that you would suffer from traumatic brain injuries or even the clearing things out that could lead to dementia or Alzheimer's. But what I wanted to ask you is the hormones are also the internal communication system

for the body. Can you just go through a little bit of how they work and why they're so important, regulate properly? Certainly, and this is a chapter in the book that's important for me, because it is going to, in fact, help people feel, but in many ways, it is a downstream response. So why I wrote that chapter in the book was to show people the ripple effect, the cascade, when their gut brain access is off, and they have both physiological and psychological and stress trauma, things going on, the downstream ripple effect that it's gonna

can play on hormones. You mentioned traumatic brain injury. So first of all, so sorry you went through that, but also that's a good example to explain how Physical traumas just like mental emotional spiritual trauma will impact how hormones are expressed anybody that has some Damage or dysfunction to the gut brain access the downstream response of that will be a decreased of neural output From the brain to the endocrine system. So a lot of endocrine issues, i.e. hormonal problems are most, I would say most, but a big

chunk of them are brain-based. So when you're dealing with the hypothelamic pituitary, adrenal axis, or the brain thyroid axis, the brain of variant axis, or the brain-testicular axis, there is normally a neural endocrine component to it and could be part of that a neural inflammatory endocrine component to it. So in many ways, when we just look at the downstream effects of, let's just say low testosterone or for women like low progesterone or higher estrogen, those things don't often happen in a vacuum.

There's a larger puzzle, whether it meet for some person traumatic brain injury, for other person underlying gut problems, raising inflammation levels, impacting the gut brain access, which is then impacting the brain hormonal access. So there's a whole number of reasons. For some people, it's unresolved trauma that's keeping their nervous system in that fight or flight stress state, which is causing cortisol to be off, which will impact testosterone estrogen and progesterone. So the whole number of chicken or egg scenarios that I really want people to start asking

these questions to see what do I need to do to start healing? Because you can overcome these things. People don't have to settle with just their lot in life or they're just big because it's their everyday. They should settle for it. Because these things are largely overcomeable, healable, reversible things if we give our body the chance to repair. So these are things we quantify in labs and we need to deal with it.

But ultimately, there's normally a bigger context as to why these things are off in the first place. That's not to say that downstream support, like hormone replacement therapy, isn't going to be palliative or be a tool within the toolbox, because it can definitely provide symptom relief for many people. And especially if somebody's paramedic, a puzzle or a postman, a puzzle, that's certainly an example to say, look, that's a normal transition of life. Can some judicious hormone replenishing based on labs with a doctor, be appropriate for them? Maybe, but many people are just put on hormone replacement therapy and they're not tested for their hormones in the first place.

And it's not really dealing with the root cause of why you had the problem in the first place. So I think this is an important conversation because so many people maybe saw and allowed the hormones are off, but ultimately, what's the bigger context of why these things are off? And oftentimes, it's this gut feeling component that I'm talking about in the book. Okay. And then one last one for you. And it's completely going in a different direction. But why is crying healthy? So I laugh because it's not like a sad crying per se, but it's a catharsis, right? It could

be sad in the moment to release it. But I quote Glennon Doyle in the book, how she calls it, crying on aganic baptism for you to kind of submerge and reemerge again, a new. And there's a Japanese practice called Ruikatsu, which translates to English as tear seeking. So it sees communal institutions within certain communities of Japan that come together to cry together as a community and how it impacts our endorphins and our opiates in the body to support that parasympathetic to lower inflammation levels back to that whole modulating of the nervous system into more of a parasympathetic state and support lower inflammation levels is part of that. So yeah, it's how can we use

crying to metabolize stored trauma going back to the somatic practices of yoga, and I think of all the yoga teachers that talk about the hip openers of class, and I've heard so many yoga teachers talk about the hip openers, people start crying. Why are they crying? Well, that can be stored trauma, just like crying can be for some people.

So there's a lot of different somatic ways we can release stored trauma. Doesn't have to be crying, crying can be for some people. So there's a lot of different somatic ways that we can release through a trauma. It doesn't have to be crying. It can be. But there are many ways to release these things that are keeping us not well. Okay, and then I always close on this question. If there was a takeaway you wanted for a reader of the book or a listener of the show, what would a main one be? The back cover of the book. It's a major mantra of the clinic. You can't heal a body you hate and you can't shame your way into wellness or obsess your way into health. And ultimately, the book is predicated on bringing a grace and a lightness into wellness because I think biohacking

is wonderful. We talk all about it in the book, but ultimately I think it can be a source of obsession and orthorexia, which is disordered eating around healthy foods. If people are not checking themselves, I really wanted to have a massive heart to the health community and the wellness community of which I've been a part of since I was at 16 year old, weird kid buying bell peppers and putting them in my lunch box is why are we doing these things? And stressing about eating healthy is in good for your health. Like obsessing about the latest like oral ring score, a loop band score, or how long we stayed in the cold bath

and it becomes sort of the source of dread and obsession and shame. It is really the antithesis of sustainable wellness. As much as I'm talking about the research of trauma and stress and underlying got problems in this gut feeling connection, I really couldn't have that conversation without talking to the main people that are going to be reading this book, which are health officianados, that tend to take everything to an extreme level, which is an established tour to actually regaining health.

And believe me, I look at labs all day long. And most of my patients are extremely aridite people who know more than most doctors do about health, but I look at their labs and they're better off than they would be if they weren't doing their good things. But part of what's keeping them stuck at these plateaus is this sort of unhealthy obsession or shameflammation, as I call it in the book, around these good things. So it's a paradigm shift, a hard reckoning of why we're doing what we're doing within wellness. So I guess that would be my answer to that.

Well, I love the book. I will make sure it's all throughout the show notes and I always put a picture of the book as well. So just link on that. It'll take you right to a place where you can buy it if you're part of the audience. Will, if someone wanted to know more about you or they would like to set up an appointment with you, what is the best place for them to do so?

Thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it. Everything's at DrWillCool.com. That's drwiolcoil.com. The links to gut feelings there, the telehealth center center all the telehealth new patient options are there and my podcast the art of being well that links to that as well. Yes and I've checked out a number of episodes please go check it out if you like the passion strike podcast you'll love Will show as well. Thank you so much for coming on the show it was truly an honor to have you. Thank you so much I appreciate it. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Will Cole,

and I wanted to thank Will, Penguin Random House, and Alyssa Fortnotto, for giving me the honor of interviewing him on today's show. Links to all things will be in the show notes on passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show.

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