The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Reduce Inflammation, Heal Your Gut And Prevent Disease

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and HigherDOSE. Gut health literally affects your entire body. Your gut houses 500 species and three pounds of bacteria. Too many bad gut flora (including parasites and yeast) or not enough good ones can spell serious trouble for your health. This is why if you want to fix your health, start with your gut. In today’s episode of my series I’m calling Health Bites, I talk about the gut-immune and gut-brain connection, what imbalances our gut health, and my top strategies for reducing inflammation and healing the gut.  This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and HigherDOSE. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Elevate your wellness game today by going to HigherDOSE.com. You can use promo code HYMAN at checkout to save 15% off site-wide or just go to HigherDOSE.com/hyman. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Two primary ways the gut affects your health (5:05 / 3:06)  How your gut is connected to your immune system (5:38 / 3:37) Why healthy gut flora is crucial for optimal gut health (7:43 / 5:39)  How to positively influence your gut flora today (11:28 / 8:04)  Our second brain (11:40 / 9:41)  Causes of gut imbalances (14:14 / 12:12)  How to fix your gut (16:43 / 14:52)  Mentioned in this episode Gut-health blogs

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Beside your brain, your gut is the only organ with its own nervous system. Your small intestine, for example, has as many neurons as the spinal cord. Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark. As a functional medicine doctor looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables, it helps me find the most effective path to health and healing for my patients. But such extensive testing can be very complicated and time-consuming for both the practitioner, somebody like me, and our patients. But lab ordering became very quick

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And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy. We're going to have a place for conversations that matter. And today we're going to talk about something that really matters, your gut. And we're doing it with one of our health bites, little bites of information that can improve your health over time using small steps.

And it will make a big difference if you try them on. Now, let's talk about the gut. Over the last 100 years, with the industrialization of our food supply, our diet has changed so dramatically. It's become highly processed, full of sugar, lots of bad fats, low in fiber, and it's dramatically changed our microbiome, our gut bacteria. And it contributes to all sorts of health consequences, from obesity to what I call diabesity, which is prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, to cancer, to heart disease, to dementia, to autoimmune disease, to allergies, to asthma, to infertility. I mean, the list goes on, to acne, to pretty much everything you can think of. Any disease is connected in some way to your gut and your microbiome. It turns out it's probably one of the most important things in your health.

And sadly, doctors learn nothing about it. And functional medicine, we've been talking about this for decades. We've been understanding how to optimize the gut even before they had the word microbiome. So we talked about dysbiosis, which people used to laugh at me for talking about, and leaky gut. And now you can go on pub med the national library of medicine there's thousands of papers on dysbiosis and problems with intestinal permeability and leaky gut so we really need to pay a lot of attention to our gut throughout our life and how to optimize it and the food we eat not only feeds our cells but it also determines our inner garden.

What kind of bugs are growing in our gut? And this garden is so important because if it's full of bad bugs, you're going to be in trouble and you're going to have all these health consequences. If it's full of good bugs, your health is going to be great, including your mental health. So when you actually look at the biology of the microbiome, it affects everything and it drives inflammation throughout the body. It affects our mood, our energy. I mean, our aging process is one of the 10 hallmarks of aging is damage to our microbiome. So getting your gut bacteria healthy is probably one of the most important things you can do to stay healthy

and to keep your health a long time. And if your bacteria are sick, so are you. I remember talking about this to a bunch of Tibetan monks once. I was giving a lecture at a monastery in Tibet, a bunch of Tibetan monks. And one of them asked me, so, Dr. Hyman, if your bacteria are sick, are you sick? And he kind of got the connection. I thought it was great. Now, we're talking about two really key aspects.

One is the gut immune system, which is really almost one system. Another is the gut brain system, which is almost one system. And so these are really two central ways that the gut affects everything through your immune system and through your brain. So when your gut immune system and your gut brain connection are not working, it's going to cause bad health outcomes. So the question is, what are the things that cause imbalances in your gut immune system and your gut-brain connection are not working, it's going to cause bad health outcomes. So the question is, what are the things that cause imbalances in your gut? And what are the strategies to reduce bad bugs in your gut and reduce inflammation and heal your gut and create a healthy microbiome?

So first of all, let's talk about the gut and immune system. Your gut is where about 60 to 70% of your immune system lives. All the immune cells are things we learned in medical school called Pyre's patches are right underneath the lining of the gut. They're like, basically your gut is one cell thick. The layer of the gut lining is one cell thick. And right under that is your immune system. Why? Because it's where you're exposed to most of the foreign substances every day called food and bacteria. So that's why it's there. And when, you know,

people have all sorts of issues, they don't think that it's related to their gut because they might not have digestive symptoms. So if you have allergies or arthritis or autoimmune disease or irritable bowel or acne or chronic fatigue or mood disorders or dementia or cancer, you know, you might think, oh, what does that have to do with my gut? It has everything to do with your gut. So if you want to fix your health, and we do this all the time in functional medicine, it's sort of central to our practice. You start with the gut. If you fix someone's gut, usually everything else gets better.

And there may be obviously other things, but sometimes I had mercury poisoning before. That damaged my gut. I had to get rid of the mercury to fix my gut. But fixing my gut became a key part of my health. It affects your whole body. It's the most important thing in your system because it helps to digest and break down food, to absorb nutrients, to keep out toxins, to regulate your immune system. It's a lot of work. And so if you want to have optimal immune function, optimal detoxification, optimal brain function, and get

the nourishment you need from food, your gut has to work properly. So most of us should not know about our gut. It should just do its job, make an urge once or twice a day or more to go to the bathroom. We should have a nice formed log. It should float ideally, which probably doesn't go to the sinks because most people have fiber. And that's it. And we go about our business but when you look at the prevalence

of gut disorders in this country irritable bowel reflux heartburn i mean these are among the most popular drugs sold today in the world the number one visit to doctors today is for digestive problems so this is a real big problem now you got a lot of flora in there. You might have 500, 1,000. We're constantly discovering new species. You might have three pounds of bacteria in your gut. And this whole field of the microbiome is so important. In fact, you have 10 times as much cells maybe from bacteria as your own cells. Some people say it's the same amount or more but

it's a lot but what's more important is you have probably a hundred times as much bacterial dna in your gut as your own dna in your body and dna produces proteins so metabolites compounds and the bacteria if you have bad bacteria are producing a lot of bad compounds that you absorb and maybe a third to half of all the metabolites in your bloodstream right now are from your gut microbes and the proteins they produce, the metabolites they produce. And too many of the bad bugs, and it can be just bad bacteria, but it can also be yeast or parasites or worms. And none of the good bugs can cause huge issues for your health and even make you gain weight and cause obesity um and they've done these studies where they've

transplanted you know the uh the bacteria from a obese mouse into a thin mouse and that thin mouse becomes obese even independent of eating anything so it's really important to understand the complexity of our health. Now, one study, they looked at 123 non-obese people and 169 obese people who were all from Denmark. And the researchers found that people with low amounts of healthy bacteria had way more body fat, worse insulin resistance, worse cholesterol, and more inflammation compared to the people who had a healthy gut. They also noted that the people with the lowest amounts of healthy bacteria actually gain more weight over time. So we think, oh, it's just what we're eating.

No, it's not what we're eating. It's what our bacteria are eating and what we're feeding them and what they're producing. In fact, there's a whole term for this. It's called metabolic endotoxemia. When you have bad bugs in your gut, it produces toxins that drives inflammation when they're absorbed, and the inflammation interrupts your insulin signaling and insulin function, and you end up with insulin resistance, and then you produce more insulin, and then you gain more weight,

and just this vicious cycle goes on. Basically, gut bacteria are controlled by what you're feeding them. So, you're the master of your bacteria. If you understand what they like to eat, you can feed it to them. Scientists are talking about, for example, now fecal transplants for weight loss, for autoimmune disease, for all sorts of problems, for Parkinson's, for Alzheimer's, for autism, to take basically the poop out of a healthy person and put it in someone who's sick and they get healthy. Now, I'm not a big fan of that for most things yet. I think it can be useful sometimes.

But a much easier way is to learn how to feed your healthy gut bacteria and learn what food they like and how to fertilize them and create a healthy inner garden and give them the right foods, whole, fresh, real food, nutrient-dense food, polyphenol-rich food, fiber-rich food, prebiotic-rich food. When you feed your bugs junk, the bad ones grow. And that causes leaky gut. That leads to excess toxin absorption from the bacteria, causes more inflammation, food sensitivities. And then you get all sorts of problems, like I mentioned, because when you have inflammation from the bad gut bacteria, that causes your insulin not to work so well, and that causes more weight gain, and you get more visceral fat, and then that's hungry fat, and then you want to eat more, and it just creates this vicious cycle. So I've seen patients literally cure them of cravings by fixing their gut bacteria and make them lose 40 pounds by fixing their gut bacteria. The good news is your microbiome changes with every single bite of food.

So you can positively influence your gut flora right away. Starting with your next meal. You don't have to wait. Now, let's talk about the gut-brain connection. We talked about the gut-immune connection. Your gut is considered your second brain. And really, there's two reasons, I think. One is that there is actually a whole nervous system in the gut called the enteric nervous system. And it's connected to

your brain. So your gut brain is connected to your actual brain. And it's constantly communicating back and forth. But there's also an enormous amount of neurotransmitters in there. So your gut is almost like a second brain. It's called the second brain. And it plays a huge role in how we feel, in our mood, and in so many different factors of our health. You know, beside your brain, your gut is the only organ with its own nervous system. Your small intestine, for example, has as many neurons as the spinal cord. Your gut nerve cells, like the brain cells in your gut, let's call them, they produce 95% of your serotonin. And every class of neurotransmitter in your brain also resides in your gut. In fact, your gut contains more neurotransmitters than your brain, believe it or not. So that's why the gut is so important and why it has to be in balance for your brain to be in balance.

I've had patients who've had depression with fixing their gut, who have OCD, who have schizophrenia, who have autism, who have anxiety simply by fixing their gut. I recently learned that there's a company that makes acromantia, which is a very important keystone species in your gut that loves to eat polyphenols like green tea, pomegranate, cranberry, and it regulates metabolism, autoimmunity, and many, many other things. Well, actually, when this bacteria was grown in Nevada, which they grow it for commercial use to produce the bacteria for a probiotic, they found that the liquid, the soup that the bacteria was grown in, was full of GABA. GABA is a neurotransmitter which makes you relax. It's basically the body's natural valium. And so these bacteria producing all the stuff, so you have bad bugs, they can produce things

that cause you to be anxious and depressed and irritable, whereas good bacteria can make you calm and relaxed and happy. So if your gut's not happy, you're not happy. So your gut has to be really healthy for your brain to be healthy and it can really be not that hard to do. Now, we also know we have gut feelings, butterflies in your stomach, gut instincts. Japanese people see the gut as a seat of the mind the soul so uh when your gut's not healthy your whole sort of mood emotions uh your your brain is just not working and it's

important to get that sorted out so what what causes imbalances in our gut why do we have a bad microbiome i mean historically you look at indigenous cultures they didn't have all the problems we have they didn't have autoimmune disease they didn't have cancer they didn't have heart disease they didn't have allergies they didn't have any of this stuff it's not like we're born defective we just live in a way that destroys our microbiome so even in a perfect world today in the 21st century it's very hard to keep your gut healthy and in balance but there's a lot of things that really do harm and i want to go over those and then we'll talk about how to get your gut healthy first is our diet our diet is so bad it's processed food it's full of additives emulsifiers thickeners sweeteners chemicals

that destroy your microbiome it also is full of sugar and starch which fertilize bad bugs they love the bad food just like you do, but they actually consume it and then they produce all these dangerous metabolites. And you get bad bacteria, you get yeast overgrowth, and you get a whole damaged ecosystem in there and a leaky gut and the rest of the cascade we just talked about. Certain medications can be quite bad.

Antibiotics obviously cause problems. Anti-inflammatory drugs like Advil. Acid-blocking drugs like Prilosec or Prevacid or Aspex, Nexium. They're terrible. They block acid and they change your whole microbiome. Steroid use, certain hormones all interfere with digestive function. Certain infections, you might get a parasite. You might have bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth.

All of these can cause damage. Toxins, heavy metals, pesticides, chemicals, mold, all interfere with gut function. That's what I had. I had really bad mercury in my gut. It wasn't working for years because it was interfering with my gut function, with the enzymes, caused yeast overgrowth. Also, you might not have good digestion. Your digestive enzymes might not be that strong. And you basically have trouble with

with actually digesting your food and we can measure digestive enzymes on stool testing so stress can cause that acid blocking and medication can cause that low zinc levels can cause that but it's important to have optimal digestive enzyme function and you might need to take digestive enzyme or hydrochloric acid. Stress also, by the way, your bugs are listening to your thoughts. So if you're angry or upset or having negative thoughts, those bacteria are listening and they're changing and you're actually growing the bad ones and killing the good ones. It changes the gut nervous system, it creates a leaky gut and changes the good bacteria in your gut to bad ones. So basically, how do you reset your gut?

Well, in functional medicine, we talk about the 5R program, which we'll get into in a minute. But essentially, it's a methodology for resetting your gut. And I've used this with thousands of patients with great success. The first thing is focus on what you're eating and eat real food. So get rid of all the junk food, the crap. So the first R of the 5R program is to remove. And this means remove the bad food, remove bad bugs, remove drugs that are interfering with you, remove food allergens,

parasites, get rid of all the bad stuff. And then you can also do an elimination diet, which can be really effective, which I find helps to identify leaky gut and food sensitivity issues get rid of gluten dairy sugar corn yeast soy for at least a week or two maybe three if you want to do more aggressive detox you can do my blood sugar solution 10-day detox diet which has really specific instructions on what to eliminate and how long and how to add foods back and how to identify what's going on with your body. Really, really important to actually try to do an elimination diet because you don't know how bad you feel until you start feeling good when you get rid of this stuff. And then

the second thing you might need to do is you might need to treat yeast in your gut with any fungals or bacterial overgrowth or a parasite or a worm. And that really is important to reduce the load of the bad bugs and allow the good bugs to grow. It's like a garden. You got to, I call it the weeding, seeding and feeding program. You got to weed out the bad stuff. You got to feed the good stuff and you got to seed it with good bacteria. The second R in the 5R program is called replace, which means replace digestive enzymes, extra

fiber, prebiotics. Prebiotics are amazing they're in food like jicama and artichokes and asparagus and plantain and there's all kinds of foods that contain prebiotics you want to include those in your diet you want to actually replace fiber so lots of extra fiber in your diet through fruits and vegetables nuts and seeds some grains and beans re-inoculate your gut is the third step. So re-inoculate with good bacteria, probiotics, probiotic foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, tempeh, natto, all basically prebiotic foods, even pickles.

But you might need to take probiotics. And there's a whole way to do that, and there's many different kinds of probiotics. Also, you want to repair. The next step is to repair the gut lining with things that help heal a leaky gut. Glutamine, omega-3 fats, zinc, even primrose oil. Many things can be used as part of this. And the fifth R is to restore, which essentially is restoring your nervous system through meditation, relaxation to reduce the stress level because stress will damage your gut even if you're doing everything else right. So that's what we do with

our patients. And we see remarkable, else right. So that's what we do with our patients. And we see remarkable, remarkable changes. So anybody that comes with any inflammatory disorder, almost any problem, I always focus on what's their gut history, you know, and what can we do to optimize their gut. And I've written a lot about it in many of my books, but lots of free articles. We'll link to them in the show notes of the podcast. But getting your gut healthy is a super important part of your long-term health. Okay, everybody, that's it for today's Health Byte.

Be sure to share it with your friends and family. And let us know how you dealt with your gut issues, how you reset your gut. We'd love to learn. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know

and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get

healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey,

seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.