The Dr. Hyman Show - How Gut Health Impacts Sleep

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

How Gut Health Impacts Sleep | This episode is brought to you by Perfect Keto Getting quality sleep is one of the most important things we can do for our overall health and well-being. We know that things like getting outside first thing in the morning, going to sleep and waking at the same time each day, and putting away our devices one or two hours before bed can help ensure quality sleep. But did you know that the health of your gut microbiome also plays an important role in sleep quality? In this minisode, Dr. Hyman speaks with Shawn Stevenson about how the microbiome can affect sleep, and he also speaks with Dr. Elizabeth Boham about the Functional Medicine approach to optimizing gut health. Shawn Stevenson is the author of the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter and creator of The Model Health Show - featured as the #1 Health podcast on iTunes with millions of listener downloads each year. A graduate of The University of Missouri - St. Louis, Shawn studied business, biology, and kinesiology, and went on to be the founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. Shawn has been featured in Entrepreneur magazine, Fast Company, Forbes, Men's Health magazine, The Dr. Oz Show, ESPN, CNN, and many other major media outlets. To learn more about Shawn visit TheModelHealthShow.com. Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices functional medicine at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing she has helped thousands of people achieve their goals of optimum health and wellness. She witnesses the power of nutrition every day in her practice and is committed to training other physicians to utilize nutrition in healing. Dr. Boham has contributed to many articles and wrote the latest chapter on Obesity for the Rankel Textbook of Family Medicine. She is part of the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine and has been featured on the Dr. Oz show and in a variety of publications and media including Huffington Post, The Chalkboard Magazine, and Experience Life. Her DVD Breast Wellness: Tools to Prevent and Heal from Breast Cancer explores the functional medicine approach to keeping your breasts and whole body well. This episode is brought to you by Perfect Keto. Right now, Perfect Keto is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners 20% off plus free shipping with the code DRMARK. Just go to perfectketo.com/drmark, and make sure you try their Nut Butters and Keto Cookies. Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Shawn Stevenson, “Hack Your Sleep” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/ShawnStevenson Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Boham, “What Is Leaky Gut And How Can You Treat It? ” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/LeakyGut

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Now we know that certain bacteria in the gut communicate with cells that produce these sleep related hormones and neurotransmitters. So your gut cascade, your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. And so now the question is, what do we do about it? Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. You know, I'm all about the benefits of healthy fats and I've had some patients find that a high-fat keto diet is the best way to support better cognition, lose some stubborn belly fat,

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one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We all know that getting quality sleep is fundamental to our overall health and wellbeing. What you might not know is that your gut health plays a major role in your ability to get that quality sleep each and every night. Dr. Hyman sat down with sleep expert and host of the model health show, Sean Stevenson,

to discuss the role that our gut microbiome has on our sleep. I want to talk about something that a lot of folks still don't have a big awareness of. And this is the fact that your gut and the health of your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. So your poop and sleep are connected?

What a concept. In a way. Okay, let's dig into that one. Don't do the two together no that's not you know that's gonna blow people's mind and even my mind tell us how the microbiome and your gut affects your sleep and what you can do about it absolutely so let's start with a basic component and i know again these are going to be things people have heard about before probably on your show yeah but let's start with serotonin okay so it's pretty well and by the way there's more serotonin in your gut than there is in your brain exactly upwards of 80 to 90 percent of your

body serotonin is actually located in your gut produced by your enterochromaffin cells by the way all right so those are those are special cells in your intestinal lining yes now just translate all the big words see i like that we're like flipping places because i would do this for you so here's what's so interesting is that serotonin we talked about melatonin being important for our sleep in our circadian rhythm serotonin is a precursor or a seed to make melatonin so already right off the bat your gut environment these cells in your gut are helping to make this compound that's related to your sleep quality. And with melatonin, this is what I want to liken it to.

It's like that manual gear shifter for you to go through your sleep cycles properly and to actually get recovered. You need melatonin to be produced. And we'll come back to that. So that's number one, serotonin. And you can't just take melatonin? I'll answer that in a moment. Okay, okay. That's tricky.

Okay. So, well, i'll just tell you so i looked around because some of our colleagues would feel that and this was just a theory that if you take supplemental melatonin it's going to reduce your body's ability to produce it itself and that's actually i couldn't find that anywhere there was no evidence of that what i did find was taking supplemental melatonin taking too much or too frequently can down regulate receptor sites for melatonin uh-huh so your body can still produce it but the receptor sites that actually do something with the melatonin can get down regulated is there but the lock isn't yeah so we do need to be mindful of that and we can come back and talk about that but here's the biggest probably aha moment hopefully of this episode is that it's not just serotonin that's producing the gut.

And so check this out. And I just came across this. I'm going to share this with you today. This was in the World Journal of Gastroenterology. Listen to this. They found that there's upwards of 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain because you talked earlier about the pineal gland that's what i was taught in school it's produced by pineal gland in the story this study found that you can actually have

a pinealectomy which is a removal of your pineal gland which i don't recommend by the way don't do that but like a frontal lobotomy you know go there and you don't and you don't actually lose those levels of melatonin that's located in your gut right so you're a gut brain and a brain brain exactly and that that's that's something really important to understand too your gut is really it's often referred to as a second brain you know it's we can call it the enteric nervous system there's like 30 neurotransmitters just like your brain it's like a mass of nerve tissue 60 of your immune system and most of the genes in your body as well yeah that vagus nerve so ucla researchers found that the vagus nerve which we thought was just kind of like the brain communicating

more telling the gut what to do 90 of those the the communication from those nerve fibers from the vagus nerve to the brain is your belly your gut telling your brain what to do in many ways totally nuts and the other thing people should know is that when you're stressed not only is your cortisol high you lead to more fat accumulation stores belly fat but it actually blocks your cells ability to burn calories because the nerves from the vagus nerve help you metabolize your food which is a relaxation nerve it also uh has the effect of of decreasing absorption of nutrients so not only are you not absorbing but your your metabolism just slows down which is amazing it's

just because of the nervous connection between your stress nerves and your, and your relaxation nerves and all your gut function. So profound. But this is just getting out of that isolation thinking, you know, this is what I was taught in school as well. It's like you've got functional medicine. The body's a system. Yes. Everything is interconnected and it's just beautiful symphony if everything's

working well. So Caltech researchers to kind of get to how does this all connect? They discovered that, and this was just, I mean, it's been around for years, but this is more of a recent like, okay, meta analysis. Now we know that certain bacteria in the gut communicate with cells that produce these sleep related hormones and neurotransmitters. So your gut cascade, your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. And so now the question is, what do we do about it how do we protect or support our microbiome yeah and that's one of

the things that's going to help to improve your sleep quality so let's just go through a couple the the biggest thing in my opinion is avoiding things that mess it up all right so one of those would be eating processed foods so that crazy amount of sugar has a tendency to feed pathogenic opportunity bacteria right so that's one thing avoiding haphazard use of antibiotics they have a place but we shouldn't be using antibiotics every time you get the sniffles right and that's literally what when i was a kid just give them some antibiotics right we would even like if my mom had some antibiotics you know just a kid, just give them some antibiotics, right? We would even, like, if my mom had some antibiotics, you know, just totally negligent. Yeah.

Give them whatever's in the cupboard. Also, pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides. The metals. Yeah. These things, side literally means to kill, by the way. Yeah. But these have a pretty, because they're meant to kill small things, guess what your microbiome is made of, you know? And so. And how many millions and millions of people are taking acid blockers,

which also terribly disrupt your gut microbiome. Yeah. Simply put, your gut microbiome must be healthy for you to be healthy, which is why functional medicine puts a major focus on the gut. Dr. Hyman recently spoke with his colleague at the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Elizabeth Boham, about the functional medicine approach to gut health. I call it the weeding, seeding, and feeding program. So you weed out the bad things, you seed it with the good things, and you feed it with good nutrients and all that stuff. So it's really, it's so powerful. I can't tell you, as a functional medicine doctor for the last 30 years, and you've been doing this almost as long, the results you get from focusing on the gut with so many conditions, whether it's autoimmune or whether it's allergic, whether it's digestive, whether

it's your skin issues like acne, eczema, whether it's your mood, whether it's weight metabolism, whether it's migraines, whether it's Alzheimer's, I mean, autism, ADD. It's just amazing when you start to focus on this. So let's break down the five-hour program for everybody. So we got the remove. So what are we looking at? We're removing-

Removing unhealthy foods or inflammatory foods for that person. So they can be food sensitivities, things like gluten and dairy, the big ones. Food allergies, food sensitivities. Yep. And then we're removing- Processed food and junk food, right? Oh yeah, and dairy, the big ones. Food allergies, food sensitivities, yep. And then we're removing- And processed food and junk food, right? Oh yeah, that's for sure. Right.

And sugars and excess sugar, which is feeding the wrong bacteria. Yeah. And then we're removing the unhealthy bugs or yeasts or viruses or fungal, yep. You might have bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, a parasite. So you remove-

Then we replace- But you might also remove things like heavy metals or right stress or right toxic people in your life or whatever is giving you a stomach problem right right right replace means just to replace some of those digestive enzymes if needed um re-inoculate as so the replace also could be like prebiotics, right? So putting in the fibers to feed the gut and to actually maybe use hydrochloric acid sometimes for people who aren't digesting their food as they get older. And to help get them off of the acid blockers, which we know are creating a lot of problems because we need that acid in our stomach to digest our food.

So re-inoculate, giving all the good prebiotics and probiotics, the good bacteria, and all the things that feed the good bacteria. And then the fourth R is repair. How do you know what probiotics it take? Oh, that's a great question. I don't know, what are you prescribing? Oh my goodness, that's such a,

that goes on and on. We could talk about that for the next hour. Yes, it's true. Right? There's more and more probiotics on the market every day, and they all have different roles and different functions. And we're just sort of, honestly, I think, you know, we've been doing this forever, but it feels to me like we're at the infancy of this understanding of how to use these in medicine.

Yep. I mean, there's some great brands that I trust and I use all the time, but when somebody is, you know, doesn't maybe know what to do um i'll say you know get one get go to a reputable place a reputable pharmacy or or um a good wellness store pharmacy and and get a probiotic you know try it if it makes you feel worse then stop it you know um because there's some there's some good bacteria that make people feel worse well they have bacterial overgrowth exactly you have bad bugs growing in there and you put the good bugs in there they have a fight yeah and they cause and so that means we just have to do more work before we can start it yeah so um so you got to re-inoculate and then you got the and then repair yeah and that's the fourth hour so that's things like that's like giving good protein good amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein.

To repair. Yeah, to help repair that barrier, that coffee filter. We have to repair it with good protein. And sometimes we'll use amino acids like glutamine that help repair it. We'll give more zinc, whether it's from food sources or as a supplement. Maybe we'll give some vitamin A, which also helps with healing that barrier. It helps with healing the endothelium in the gut. So those are things we will do to repair.

And then rebalance, right? That's the fifth R, which is really focused on managing our stress and how we're reacting to the world. Because we know that when our parasympathetic nervous system is engaged, when that calming nervous system is engaged through meditation and yoga and breath work, that our body has the ability to heal. And it heals better when our body is at rest. If you'd like to learn more about improving your sleep or fixing your gut, I'd encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length interviews with Shawn Stevenson and Dr. Elizabeth Boham. If you enjoyed this episode or if someone you know could benefit from it, please share or leave us a comment below.

Until next time, be well.