The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Fixing The Gut Is The Key To Healing Chronic Disease with Dr. Todd LePine

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

The impact the gut has on the entire body should not be underestimated, but unfortunately in conventional medicine it often is. We are shuttling pounds and pounds of food into this tube we have called the digestive system several times a day and we don’t give it a second thought—it’s pretty crazy when you think about it. The gut is responsible for our ability to turn food into fuel; to absorb and even create certain nutrients; to rid the body of harmful toxins on a daily basis. We rely on it to do so much for us.  It’s also one of my favorite topics as a Functional Medicine doctor—poop, the microbiome, the gut-immune and gut-brain connections—there are so many angles we need to look at with gut health and they can tell us an amazing amount of information about the rest of the body. That’s why I’m so excited for this week’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, where I sit down with my friend and colleague Dr. Todd LePine to take a deeper look at digestive health and the fascinating collection of life forms we carry around inside and on us, called the microbiome.  This episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is brought to you by Joovv and Thrive Market. Recently I shared with you that I’m really excited to be working out with a trainer. And while I’m loving these new workouts, I am not always loving feeling sore the next day. That’s why I’m so excited about a new tool I found that helps me recover faster, it’s a red light therapy device called Joovv. Red light therapy is a super gentle non-invasive treatment where a device with medical-grade LEDs delivers concentrated light to your skin and cells. It helps your body produce more cellular energy and reduce oxidative stress, which helps tired and damaged muscle tissue repair and regenerate faster. To check out the Joovv products for yourself head over to joovv.com/farmacy. Once you’re there, you’ll see a special bonus the Joovv team is giving away to my listeners. Use the code FARMACY at checkout. Make sure to also check out Joovv's website for some special holiday deals while supplies last! Thrive Market has made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my intense travel schedule. Not only does Thrive offer 25 to 50% off all of my favorite brands, but they also give back. For every membership purchased, they give a membership to a family in need, and they make it easy to find the right membership for you and your family. You can choose from 1-month, 3-month, or 12-month plans. And right now, Thrive is offering all Doctor's Farmacy listeners a great deal, you’ll get up to $20 in shopping credit when you sign up, to spend on all your own favorite natural food, body, and household items. And any time you spend more than $49 you’ll get free carbon-neutral shipping. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com/Hyman. Here are more of the details from our interview:  The patient who first lead Dr. LePine to observe the gut-brain connection (6:01) Why the gut microbiome is so central to overall health and what to eat to best feed your gut (11:15) Fatty liver and the disruption of the gut microbiome (18:14) The gut-immune system connection and treating autoimmune disease (24:46) Functional Medicine vs conventional medicine (29:18) Why skin issues require you to treat the gut (33:32) Your mitochondria are actually ancient bacteria, how Dr. LePine tests mitochondrial health, and how fasting can benefit your health (37:39) Treating and preventing Parkinson’s disease (48:25) How toxins affect the body and why clean water, food, and air is so important to detoxifying  (53:00) How Dr. LePine stopped and reversed Alzheimer’s disease in a recent patient (1:02:46) Learn more about working with Dr. Todd LePine at The UltraWellness Center at https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/team-member/todd-r-lepine-md/. 

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Most of your immune system is in your gut. Yeah. So when you disrupt that ecosystem, that rainforest inside of you, you are disrupting the immune system. Hey everyone, Dr. Hyman here. Recently I shared with you that I'm really excited to be working out with a trainer for the first time in my life.

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Hyman. That's thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. I think you're going to love them as much as I do. I'm proud to have them as a sponsor and be an investor in their company. All right, let's get back to the episode. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've struggled with any chronic illness, this is the conversation you need to listen to because it's with one of the leading experts in the world on how to deal with chronic disease, which is my colleague here at the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Todd Lapine.

Now, Todd and I go way back. In fact, Todd knew about functional medicine before I even heard about it, way back at Kenya Ranch in the 1990s. That's right, 1990s. We are old, but we look young. And he was way ahead of the curve, and he still is. He's still really one of the most brilliant minds in functional medicine. He teaches everywhere. He's certified by the Institute for Functional Medicine in functional medicine, obviously. He worked with me at Kenya Ranch for 10 years, and now he's worked here for a decade at the Ultra Wellness Center. And collectively, we have literally probably five decades worth of experience in functional medicine between the two

of us, seeing so many thousands of patients who've struggled for so long with so many issues. When they finally get here, they find there's a new way of thinking about disease and it gives them an opportunity to actually get healthy again. And we're just so grateful to be able to have you here at the Ultra Wellness Center and be able to do the work we do. You really help work on some of the most leading edge concepts in medicine around bio-detoxification, systemic inflammation, GI health, and neurobiology of mood and cognitive disorders.

He's given lectures all around the world at age management conferences, at American College for the Advancement of Medicine. He's taught at the University of Miami Integrative Medicine Conference at Kripalu. And he's on the side of advisory board of Designs for Health and consults with Diagnostic Solutions Lab. And he's very active. He skis, he kayaks, he hikes, he camps, he golfs, he loves the Berkshires. And yeah, he's just been an extraordinary addition to our center. So welcome, Dr. Todd Lepine. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mark. That was really nice. Okay. So you started off your career working as a resident at a VA hospital.

Yes. And you had- Best learning experience ever. Yeah, pretty much. You see everything. See everything. And you get to do everything. Exactly.

You've been there. And I have. Well, I have. And you had this patient who had a problem that gives a lot of insight into functional medicine, which is called hepatic encephalopathy, which in English means that when your liver fails, you can't detoxify and all your normal metabolic toxins makes you delirious and can even put you in a coma and gives you all these brain symptoms. So what happened when you treated him with the typical treatment?

And tell us what that is because it's kind of an unusual treatment for a brain problem. Right, exactly, exactly. So yeah, so the story is I was a resident and I was, you know, wet behind the ears and I had a patient at the VA and a lot of patients at the VA, some of them had alcohol and tobacco abuse and he had liver failure and he came in in a coma with hepatic and cell. By the way, just an aside there. It used to be the most common source of liver failure was alcohol. Now it's sugar.

Yeah, right, right. Which is a big reason for liver transplants. Right. Anyway, keep going. Sorry, I had to interrupt you on that one. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so he comes in completely in a coma. I mean, he could stick a pin in him. He anyway, so he comes in completely in a coma. I mean,

he could stick a pin in him, he wouldn't move. And so we worked him up and I had to learn about hepatic encephalopathy because I didn't really know what it was. And so we treated him and, you know, I found out that it was related to his liver not being able to detoxify. And he had also had a high protein meal intake And the protein gets digested by the gut bacteria. And all the blood from the liver goes, or all the blood from the gut has to get filtered through the liver before it goes into the systemic circulation. So what we did with him is we basically treated him with nothing by mouth. We gave him antibiotics. I believe it was neomycin.

You stopped feeding the bad bacteria that were producing the toxins. Yeah, exactly. So we basically cleaned out You stopped feeding the bad bacteria that were producing the toxins. Yeah, exactly. So we just, we basically, we cleaned out the food for the bad bacteria in the gut. We sort of gave his gut a rest, gave him antibiotics and neomycin intravenously. Also gave him laxatives, specifically lactulose at the time. I don't know if you've heard of it. Yeah, lactulose and neomycin orally though. Don't you give the neomycin orally? We actually, I'm trying to, you know, it might have been orally. It might have been orally. You're right.

It could very well have been orally. So we gave him lactulose. And then we also actually, believe it or not, gave him probiotics. And within 24 hours, this guy who was in a complete coma completely woke up just like, you know, the proverbial Lazarus. And it was like, it was amazing to me. So I've been looking at it and I'm saying. That'll wake you up.

Exactly. That'll wake you up. And I said, you know, this guy can't, you know, it was amazing to me. So I've been looking at it and I'm saying, I don't wake you up. Exactly. That'll wake you up. And I said, you know, this guy can't, you know, woke up from the dead. And I was like, it actually left an indelible impression on my experience as a physician saying there is a huge connection between the gut and the brain. And then that has led me on the quest that I've gone on for all these years and seeing the connection, how our internal ecosystem, the microbiome, and the food that we eat and the food that we feed the bugs affects our health in good ways

or bad ways. Yeah, it's so true. And I remember learning about the disease and I was like, how come doctors don't connect the dots with the gut and everything else that goes wrong in the body? Because the treatment for this coma that's caused by liver failure is essentially giving antibiotics that aren't absorbed you kill all the bugs in the gut that are producing these toxins that make them crazy or make them in a coma so and then you give them a lot of laxatives to make them poop everything out yep and that's just kind of a miracle happens right it was a miracle happens, right? Yeah, it was a miracle.

Wake up from the dead. Exactly. Wake up from the dead. Exactly. And that led you to kind of understand the interconnectedness of everything. Right. And then, you know, when we see patients all the time, a lot of patients come into us and say, Doc, I've got brain fog.

That is low-grade, you know. You're not in a coma, but it's the same thing. Yeah, you're a zombie. I call it a zombie. You're living dead. You're walking around, but you're not really there. Your brain is being affected by some of these chemicals. And there's a lot of different chemicals that are produced by gut bacteria.

Some of them are putrescine and cadaverine. You know what cadaverine is? You don't want a whole lot of cadaverine unless you're a cadaver. That's right. Right. Those sound like terrible things. Putrescine and cadaverine. Those are the toxins that get released from bad digestion, right?

Yeah. Well, even one of the compounds that we measure now in the office here is TMAO, trimethylamine oxide. It's the same type of bacterial byproduct of metabolism of certain food products. So certain bacteria will eat certain foods and produce these compounds which have psychoactive properties or anti or actually inflammatory properties because TMAO is one of the risk factors for heart disease. So one of the central ideas of functional medicine is you start with the gut. Yeah. It's almost what you start with with anybody who's got anything which is kind of a weird thing because like how can you treat everything with one thing but it actually is a foundation of our health. And when our microbiome is out of balance, it leads to a whole host of problems, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And the big thing that, you know, I don't treat children

with autism, but the biggest thing that I think that is affecting this country is the microbiome that we're not inheriting from our mothers. Because what happens so often now is that when mothers go into the hospital, they're getting antibiotics beforehand. Half of them, 40%, 50% are getting C-sections. So we are destroying our- And then we don't breastfeed. Don't breastfeed, exactly. And then we give kids antibiotics. And give antibiotics and vaccinations on day one, you know, for hepatitis B. And this microbiome that we have literally inherited from generation to generation,

because it's something that's really passed down from the mothers to the daughters to the granddaughters, is being lost. And the loss specifically of Bifida bacterium infantis, it's actually been in, I think it was in the New York Times, that it was talking about this loss of this one of many beneficial bacteria that we are losing in as part of the human species. And it's affecting our whole health. So let's like back up a little bit and talk about this whole thing of the microbiome. Because we started with functional medicine. There wasn't the word microbiome, but we still focused on normalizing the gut function. We talked about the 4R program, which is a restoration program for the gut and how that can help so many different diseases. But

what is the microbiome? Why is it important? What does it do? I mean, we thought it was just poop. And now it's like, basically the holy grail for figuring everything out. Yeah. So it's gold. It's gold. And actually, you know, in fact- Brown gold. Brown gold, right. So down in Boston, you know, so the microbiome is the sum total of all the organisms that we have and carry around inside of us. And that also can include viruses. It can also include fungi.

And it's not necessarily, we call it good and bad, but it depends really upon the situation. Because like, for example, all of us carry around C. difficile bacteria. C. difficile bacteria, when you take an antibiotic, it'll wipe out some of the good bacteria, and then the bad guys, if you will, they'll sort of start to overgrow, and then they can produce toxins. That happened to me, and I almost died from it.

Yeah, exactly. And the treatment of choice for that is, if you have a really bad case, the treatment of choice is a stool transplant, which is like an organ transplant. And the interesting thing is that one of the companies that does this is Open Biome in Boston, which I think you're aware of. And they use freeze-dried stool. And that is one of the cures, literally, for a really

messed up gut microbiome. Because if- You can even get poop pills now. Poop pills. Crapsules. Crapsules. Cra, I've never heard that. How many craps? Right. And, and, and so, so, and, and, and what it is, is, and I, my, I always make analogies because that's how patients understand things. It's sort of like, you know, the ecosystem of the microbiome inside the body is like a rainforest. And at some point, some people's ecosystems are so disturbed and so messed up that it's like napalm has hit your rainforest. It's like a corn monocrop. Yeah. And so what you need to do is you need to repopulate the microbiome. These are good. We're going to get a little puns here. Yeah, you need to repopulate the microbiome. And you can't do that just with probiotics,

although we use probiotics and we use prebiotics, and we use those together. We call them synbiotics. And those are oftentimes very helpful. But for the really sick people who have things like refractory C. diff, stool transplant is the number one treatment. Yeah, interesting. So you've got this whole ecosystem of bacteria. It's been disturbed by all these reasons you talked about C-sections, antibiotic use,

lack of breastfeeding and so on. And our diet also plays a huge role in the growth of good or bad bacteria. So you can feed it certain things and it makes it worse and other things and it makes it better. So talk about that. Yeah. So I always tell patients that when you're eating food, you want to be choosing your food, not just for you, what you like, the things that are pleasurable for you, but you also want to be feeding the good bacteria. And we talked earlier about this acromantia mucinophilia. That's a specific bacteria that is in the body and that you want to have on high levels. And when we do the testing, we can actually determine, do you on high levels. And when we do the testing, we can actually determine, do you have high levels of it or do you have low levels or do you have no levels or very low levels? And there are certain foods which you can incorporate into your diet,

things like pomegranate and maca and acacia fiber, cranberries and things like that. These are foods which are basically prebiotics. And when you incorporate them into your diet, it's like putting Miracle-Gro on that garden. They start to flourish, they start to take over, and they help balance out the whole ecosystem. Yeah, I think it's one of the biggest advances in our thinking about gut. We just didn't give probiotics and that'll fix it. But you're giving like 50 billion is a lot, right? But you have 100 trillion trillion bacteria. So it's like a drop in the ocean.

And one of the big insights I had was actually from an experience I had last year where I developed colitis. It's a long story, but I had been sick from mold and I've told that story and I had a recurrence of my gut because I had the C. diff and that was kind of really messed me up. And I checked my stool and I had really low levels of this acromantia, which has been linked to autoimmune disease, been linked to poor response to immunotherapy for cancer. It's been linked to cardiometabolic disease and diabetes. And I'm like, whoa, this is not good. So I started to

research it and created this cocktail of cranberry, pomegranate, green tea, acacia fiber, some probiotics, other prebiotics. And I took it. And it literally, within three weeks, I went from full-blown colitis to completely normal, perfect. And it was sort of a wake-up call for me, which was, you can't just get probiotics. You've got to feed the whole inner garden. And what it likes is certain foods. And it likes all the polyphenols. Yes, the polyphenols.

And the colorful, dark, rainbow-colored chemicals that are in plant foods. There are certain plant foods that have more of them, like the berries and so forth. Absolutely. Yeah, the polyphenols are gold. To me, I think that's actually probably one of the things that plays a role with the French paradox, is the polyphenols that are found in red wine. I think that's definitely what you're doing is you're actually feeding, you know, patients love me because the two things that I always prescribe to my patients

is chocolate and red wine. Depends. And they're high. I would say people like wine drinking, but I wouldn't give it as an extra thing. No, right, right. But I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, yeah, razzing. But the polyphenols are the miracle food prebiotics for the gut. Absolutely.

So tell us a story about a patient who had a screwed up microbiome and what you did and how they got better. Oh, I've had, I mean, multiple patients. I mean, for example, I just had a patient that I followed up today, 18-year-old with fatty liver disease and sort of pre-diabetes picture. And lo and behold, I did the testing for him, and his acromantum mucinophilia was almost undetectable. And now fatty liver, typically, like you said,

we used to see that in some patients who were drinking alcohol. What we're now finding out is that fatty liver is the thing that is being driven by disruption of the gut microbiome. So what's happening is when you destroy the mucus, the protective mucus lining of the gut, some of those bad bacteria get into the body, get into the circulation. They go into the liver and causes systemic inflammation, which in turn causes fatty liver. And it was just, I don't know if you saw the recent paper about this, about what is termed non-alcoholic fatty liver and it was just i don't know if you saw the recent paper about this about uh what is termed uh non-alcoholic fatty liver is actually from alcohol produced by gut bacteria yeah so some bacteria will actually produce alcohol which in turn poisons the it ferments right it ferments

it's like you know you get this bloating food baby that's actually your bacteria fermenting the food you're eating and certain foods are more fermentable like starches and sugars exactly yeah we we uh we actually have seen cases of patients who literally had elevated blood alcohol levels yeah auto brewery syndrome from the bacteria in their gut yeah and they literally got pulled over and found you know they had like for drunk driving exactly it actually the auto brewery syndrome is and i've had a couple of patients with that and they they typically that's usually been attributed to uh yeast overgrowth but there also are cases specifically with bacteria that can also produce alcohol i mean

you're basically it's like a it's a brewery in your body in your gut in your body yeah you don't need a budweiser no but this buds for you so the uh So what happened? You have this patient and you... Yeah. So, I mean, basically you work on doing dietary interventions. Do you get better when you fix this or you just... Well, this was just, I was just offhand because I just had this patient this morning and it was a very interesting case because the thing that really stood out is that his protective anchorman's immunosynophilia was quite low. He was also a vegan, which, you know, we could discuss, you know, what is the best diet? I don't believe that veganism is actually the best thing. I think we're omnivores and, you know, I come from a family of dentists. So I always talk to my patients,

see that thing right there? That's a canine tooth. And a canine tooth is designed to chew meat and to chew fish. And we have specific enzymes in the body, which are pancreatic elastase and proteases, which are designed to digest protein. So we are, you know, like Michael Pollan said it best, eat plants, eat food, real food, mostly plants, not too much. So a plant-based diet with healthy amounts of fish and lean meat on occasion is really probably the best type of diet. Yeah. And I think some of my most difficult patients are the ones who are sort of strict vegans for whatever reason, ethical or spiritual or whatever, religious, can oftentimes get into really difficult situations because it's like a cat chasing their tail.

They don't have the specific nutrients to patch up and heal the body. Doesn't all that plant stuff help the microbiome? It does. Absolutely. It's going to help the microbiome. But he had almost no omega-3s. It was really nutritionally deficient, which you see. Unless people are supplementing, they get super nutritional. Well, exactly. You can have a person, like it was just in the news recently. It was a 22-year-old, I think it was over in england who was living on potato chips white bread and french fries and went french fries and went blind there's no vitamin a yeah went blind so you can be walking and talking but and you know you can be severely malnourished

yeah because there's a you know there's about 40 nutrients that your body needs on a regular basis. And I like to also make the analogy to my patients is like your body is like a house that's being built and broken down 24-7. You need all those building materials to make that house. You need carpeting, you need wood, you need glass, you need all these materials. And if those materials aren't there, then the structure may still be standing. But if you don't have glass, the wind comes in, the rain comes in, the snow comes in, and then you're going to have problems with your body. The problem with traditional medicine is they don't look for those building blocks.

They don't test for them. And that's what's different here at the Ultra Wellness Center. We actually look for these things. We find them. I mean, when was the last time a doctor looked for acromancy in someone with fatty liver? Probably never, right? Other than us here or some functional medicine. Or check their omega-3s or check their vitamin D. Exactly, yeah, right. And so those kinds of diagnostics are available and help us really think differently about treating disease. I mean, most doctors understand hepatic encephalopathy, but most doctors who are treating fatty liver don't actually think about what's going on in the gut microbiome or how to treat it. They don't even

know how to fix it. Well, you know, the thing that one of my pet peeves, Mark, and I'm sure you've heard this too, is that patients will go see the expert endocrinologist for their diabetes and the expert gastroenterologist, and they tell the patients to eat anything they want. That is absolutely... Wait, you mean food has something to do with our health? It does. Oh my God. What a radical idea. My favorite was once I was at Canyon Ranch, I was playing basketball at lunch because they had these basketball pickup games. And there was one of these people there was playing and he was a gastroenterologist. And I said to him, you know, have you ever thought of

like how, you know, food might impact what's happening in the gut because you're putting literally pounds of this stuff through that tube every day. You think it might have something to do with why people have digestive symptoms? He's like, gee, you know, I never thought of that. That seems so interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm like, holy crap. You know, but yeah, I mean, your microbiome is dependent on what you feed it. How you grow your inner garden depends on what you're eating. And you can create a nasty garden with weeds and toxins and bad stuff and poisonous plants, or you can create a really flourishing, rich garden that actually takes care of you. Yeah, absolutely.

And then also the other thing that a lot of even physicians aren't even aware of is that most of your immune system is in your gut. So when you disrupt that ecosystem, that rainforest inside of you, you are disrupting the immune system. And we're talking about fecal transplants. There's a recent study that showed that children with autism who got stool transplants had a marked improvement up to two years out from just replacing the gut microbiome. I mean, that's pretty powerful. So there is no pharmacologic- Because autism is like an encephalopathy. It's a metabolic encephalopathy. To some degree, absolutely.

It's like a hepatic encephalopathy. Yeah. I mean, to me, that's sort of the canary in the coal mine in our environment today. We have one in 68 kids having autism now, depending on where you are living in America and around the world, that is a big, big issue. And what we're finding out is there's more and more connection to the microbiome. Yeah. I mean, so 60% of our immune system is in the gut. And essentially there's a sewers that's on the other side of the lining of your gut, which is only one cell thick. And on the other side is your immune system.

And there's a breakdown, which can come from having C-sections, antibiotics, acid blocking drugs, stress, poor diet. All that stuff damages the gut, creates a sleaky gut, gluten, dairy, all those things. Then you get this inflammation. So we treat a lot of people with autoimmune disease here at the Ultra Wellness Center. And often the place we start is the gut. So tell us like how that works and about some patients you might have had with autoimmune disease and how working on their gut helped them. Yeah. So I mean, I had one patient in particular who I saw who came in. It was a great

story. She came in and she was having MS as her diagnosis. She also had autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis, and she also had infertility. And I did a complete workup on her. She had dysbiosis, had bacterial and yeast overgrowth also had sensitivity uh to gluten and had also some not a heavy not a big level but some level of mercury in the body so i worked on a diet worked on uh you know both prebiotics and probiotics to clean up the gut got her completely off of uh gluten and lo and behold guess? Her multiple sclerosis went away. Disappeared. All right. Not to say that- And you got her metals out too.

Yeah. Not to say that all cases of multiple sclerosis are due to that, but there are many pathways to multiple sclerosis, just that there are many pathways to Alzheimer's disease. Or any disease. Or any disease. Exactly. Because the body will manifest it in only certain inflammatory pathways. So ultimately, she got off of her medications. Her MS to this day is in complete remission. She has no symptoms, on no meds. And as a side effect, she got pregnant. Wow. That's a good side effect. Yeah. And she was happy.

So that's an amazing story. And I think for people who are listening, functional medicine is a new way of thinking about disease. It's not based on the label MS. It's based on the cause. And you can have one disease that has many causes, like MS, which can be caused by heavy metals, by Lyme disease, by Epstein-Barr, by the gut microbiome, by gluten, you know, like B12 deficiency, right? You can have so many things that are driving this same syndrome. Right. And the personalization of medicine is what functional medicine is all about. And that's

really what's different here about how we practice medicine at the Ultra Wellness Center, because we're looking at each person as an individual. We're creating a personalized medicine and personalized health, which is a radically new way of thinking. And we just lump everybody with the same symptoms in the same categories, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cause. And I always say, just because you know the name of your disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you, right? And that's what we do through very detailed histories here, through very advanced diagnostic testing, the look, some of these things. Oh, absolutely. And I think the enjoyable thing, and I'm sure that you experience

yourself, is that every patient is unique yeah you know i've never treated two patients the same way from a functional approach no completely different even in the same family it's everyone is and that's actually the fun part about it is the i call it you know the person comes in with their own genetic uniqueness their own you know uh personality makeup their own story story, all of these, you know, things that you can paint the picture of, you know, where were they when they got sick? Where are they now? And what are the things that, you know, that we can remove, you know, like the four hour? It's sort of like being Dr. House, right? It's like medical detectives. Yeah, like medical

detective, exactly. And, you know, I think, you know, one of the most important things that I always tell people who are training in medicine is to listen to the patient. Yeah. They'll tell you what's wrong. Absolutely. And when and what. Exactly. And sometimes I just have to sort of bite my mouth because you want to always interrupt patients and say, oh, what about this? And what about that? I just sort of let patients talk more and I just sort of listen and then I'll ask the questions later. And when you really do that and let the patients tell their story in their own way, in their own terms and get that out, you really find out all the little details and you can play house and play detect and try to, you know, piece the piece of the puzzle together. Yeah. You know, we, we in regular medicine,

we are trained to create an exclusive history. In other words, someone comes in with a symptom, let's say they have heartburn or reflux or chest pain, we don't want to know anything else about them except about that. We want all the details about that, but we don't know if they have a rash, are their fingernails cracked, do they have eczema, is there butt itch, like don't talk to me about any of that

because that's not relevant. And in functional medicine, all of it's relevant because it's a clue that could give you a clue to what's actually happening for that patient and that's what's so beautiful about this process you know i i think i used to work in the emergency room i think you did too it's boring it's boring because someone comes in he's like okay it's the heart attack treatment it's the asthma treatment it's a kidney stone it's a protocol it's like it's like you just look at the nurse you go heart attack okay they don't they know what the orders are they know what to do you just barely write it down and it's like it's the asthma treatment it's a kidney stone protocol it's like it's like you just look at the nurse you got a heart attack okay they don't they know what the orders are they know what to do you just barely write it down and it's like it's like rote and boring it's it's it's a it's a formula like a recipe right in functional medicine there is no recipe there's actually

having to think every time you see a patient right right and and you know and you know being trained in traditional medicine and also in a functional medicine approach there's definitely you know if you're having a heart attack, I want a thrombolytic. Now you blew out your knee. You need a knee surgery. I want you to follow the protocol that has been shown to work. But for chronic conditions, acute care medicine, which is basically the scalpel or the prescription pad, are probably some of the more toxic things that you can have. A lot of what I see in my patients here is iatrogenica imperfecta, which basically means the doctor did it, right?

So the patient comes in and they're on a whole laundry list of medications. And these are interacting. You know, they're on proton pump inhibitors. They're causing acid blockers. They're causing calcium're causing a calcium deficiency, mineral deficiency, B12 deficiency. So there's, you know, there's these, these drugs have their, their, their risk benefit and the less drugs you use in medicine, the better off the patient is. Yeah. It's hard. Cause that's what we know how to do. It's what we're trained to do.

It's like, we don't know how to treat people with food as medicine. We don't know how to restore a gut from a messed up gut to a healthy gut. And that's really what we do in functional medicine. Yeah. And I also, another important thing that it's important for physicians out there who are new to functional medicine, also for patients is to realize these things don't happen overnight. It can take time, but usually sometimes you can see a difference in, in, you know, days to weeks. Sometimes it could take months and sometimes it takes years. It depends. It depends on what's going on. So true. I mean, I, sometimes it's like, it's almost miraculous and you go like, it's hard to believe. I remember when I first

started practicing, I would like go, okay, do these things, take this, eat this. And then they'd call back a few weeks later or, you know, a month later, I'm like, how are you doing? Well, I'm all better. I'm like, what? You're better from that? Because it was such a contradiction to everything I learned. But then I started to trust it and I started to expect it. And I just remember this one patient, she had psoriatic arthritis, which is a horrible condition where you've got psoriasis, but your joints are being deformed and destroyed. You're in pain all the time. But she had a bunch of other stuff, which quote was unrelated. She had depression. She had insomnia. She was overweight.

She had terrible reflux and heartburn. And she was having bloating and SIBO and irritable bowel. And I'm like, okay, well, let's see. She's inflamed. Everything that she's got is inflamed. The weight is inflamed. Depression's an inflammation in the brain. Her gut symptoms are about inflammation in the gut. Everything's related to inflammation. So why don't we sort of just start simple and clear out things that are causing potential inflammation? So we got rid of gluten and dairy in your diet and sugar and starch and all processed food. We got her gut cleaned up. I gave her an antibiotic and antifungal and a little gut program and a couple of nutrients to help her fight some inflammation that she was suffering from. And six weeks later, she came back.

Her psoriasis was gone. Her arthritis was gone. Her reflux and irritable bowel was gone. Her depression was gone. She lost 20 pounds. I'm like, and she got off of her medications, even the one that was costing 50 grand a year to suppress her immune system from the psoriasis.

And it seems like a miracle, but it really isn't when you follow this methodology. And that's what we've been doing here for decades, practicing functional medicine up in Berkshire in the middle of nowhere. It's pretty amazing. Well, it's really interesting because most of the patients who have psoriasis are going to see a dermatologist. And most dermatologists do not have a clue about the gut microbiome, nor are they testing or thinking about it. And then if they get psoriasis and they develop psoriatic arthritis, which is arthritis in addition to the skin condition, because I always tell patients is the skin is contiguous with the gut. So if I draw a line on the skin and I keep drawing a line and go down my tongue and I go into my esophagus, down to my stomach, into my intestine, I'm still on the same surface.

Yeah. So oftentimes, and you know this, Mark. That's true. I never thought of that. Yeah. It's kind of a cool thought. That's how I explain it to patients. So the skin is contiguous with the gut. It's an ectodermal tissue. And when there's skin issues, think gut. It's really a tube. It's outside your body. Here's your gut. Yeah. It's

true. I mean, when I'm a patient with psoriasis, eczema, acne, rosacea, I treat their gut yeah and i don't put stuff all over their face or on their body exactly to suppress the inflammation i get rid of that and it's like uh it's like really a miracle i mean it is i mean dermatology is not uh something that i'm an expert in although i was trained as a family doctor in dermatology but uh i feel like it's we get the most amazing results just for something as simple as fixing the gut and changing the diet. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, the body's this interconnected, complex, self-healing organism. I mean, that's the big thing is I often ask patients, I mean, do you think you're going to get better? And if I have

a patient who thinks they're going to get better, then together we're going to get better. But if I have a patient who doesn't think they're going to get better, then I try to get them to change their mindset. Because even though somebody comes to me, they really almost believe I'm not going to get better. Well, that's what they've been taught. Exactly. You have to live with this. Exactly. You have to manage your disease.

Right. I don't want to manage it. I want to get rid of it. And the body's ability to self-heal is amazing, as you know, as you mark. It's really amazing. There's an intelligence in the body that we, you know, as much as we know about the body, there's a lot more that we don't know. And the more I practice medicine, I think the more humble I become because I realize

how little I know. It's how complex it is. It's really, really complex. But there's so much that we can do for patients that, you know, they've gone to, you know, the Mayo Clinic. They've gone to Mass General. They've gone to, you know, X, Y, and Z everywhere else. And they, you know, as you say, the resort medicine. We come here for last resort. just walked from my office to here after seeing a patient who went to the Mayo Clinic who had chronic dizziness, chronic constipation, fatigue, insomnia, all these different symptoms that they

couldn't find, quote, anything wrong with him. And I'm like, well, I know what's wrong with you. You've got this, this, and this, and this based on looking at it through the functional medicine lens. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is, is, you know, I think, I think it was a Sid Baker, I think, who made the analogy, or it was in, or maybe it was Jeff Bland, is is, you know, I think, I think it was a Sid Baker, I think who made the analogy or maybe it was Jeff Glenn, is that, you know, if you have a dime and you're on a dark street and you lose your dime over there and the streetlights over here, and you're looking under the streetlight, which is where you're testing. So most of the testing is basically looking where the dime isn't. Yeah. All right. So the type of testing that we do here, which is nutritional, metabolic,

toxic genomic testing is, is spreading out the searchlight to find that. Absolutely. That's such a key point because, you know, you go to the doctor and they say, well, we've tested everything and all your results are normal. And the implication is it's all in your head. But I would say, I don't agree with that because, you know, either two things are true. One, the patient's crazy or the doctor's missing something. And I'm going to bet on the doctor's missing something. Because when we start to look, we find all sorts of stuff in places that nobody's looked before because they're looking under the street lamp instead of actually where the problem really is. Exactly. That's exactly right. And I think, you know, what you alluded to before was really important, which is that functional medicine is about getting rid of the things that impair health and putting in the things that help the

body thrive. And then the body can take over and with this amazing intelligence can repair and heal from all sorts of things. Oh, totally. Yeah. And that's what we do. So one of the, you know, one of the complaints we see a lot is fatigue. Everybody's tired, right? And in functional medicine, we talk a lot about something called the mitochondria, which you're really an expert in. And it's something that is really one of the keys to solving many problems and puzzles in chronic disease, whether it's Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or diabetes or obviously fatigue issues and so forth. Fibromyalgia. Tell us about what are these mitochondria? How do we look at them? And what do we do about it? Okay. So for those who don't know

about mitochondria, it's another area of mine that is really a fascinating sort of interest of mine. So our mitochondria are actually ancient bacteria. See, poop, bacteria, you're in the same track. Absolutely. Right, right. People, one track mind. Right. And I'll never forget, I went to a lecture given by Jeff Bland, and he was talking about how antibiotics, which are designed to kill bacteria, can oftentimes affect mitochondria. Because our mitochondria, which are the power plants of our bodies, are actually way back

when were ancient bacteria that became engulfed in our cells and are now the power plants of our cells. And they have different DNA. They have totally different DNA. In fact, Lynn Margulis, who was married to Carl Sagan, I had the opportunity to meet her and have lunch with her. And? Yeah. It was amazing. For those of you who don't know, she's sort of an icon in the world of biology who first described this whole phenomena.

Yes, exactly. So it was right during the 60s. Everyone was studying the nuclear DNA, which is the double helix DNA. And she made an observation that there's DNA in the cell in a circular form. And she goes, what does that mean? Where did that come from? And she was actually a protist. She studied small ancient bacteria.

And she realized that that DNA reminded her of the ancient bacteria. And then she came up with the hypothesis that eukaryotic cells, which are the cells that we have, actually way back when those little bacteria came and sort of created this symbiotic relationship where you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. And that's really how we have mitochondria. And mitochondria are so important. And this I always tell patients is that if you take cyanide, you will die in a matter of minutes. And the reason for that is cyanide flips the switch on your mitochondria. Turns them off.

Turns them off like that. Yeah, basically that's what happens when you die. You have no energy anymore. Lights out. And your lights are out. And yet there's varying forms of lights out with mitochondria that are really common, whether it's autism, we're finding now, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. Right.

And the interesting thing about it is there's a thing called the bottleneck theory of mitochondria, which is that, you know, let's say- Before you go on. So mitochondria, for those people, there are these little tiny things inside your cells. There can be hundreds to thousands of them. And they basically take oxygen that you breathe and the food that you eat, and they burn them like an engine. And outside, and out comes energy, which is what runs your body in the form of ATP.

So that's what has to happen every day, every minute for you to run every chemical reaction in your body, to run everything that you're doing. And when that process gets bunged up, you get sick. Exactly. That's very well put. Exactly. You get bunged up, especially the highly metabolic tissues. So things like the brain, things like the heart are the highly dense mitochondria. And then the other thing which is new in the medical world is brown fat. So brown fat is highly packed with mitochondria. When you look at it under a microscope, it actually looks brown. And brown fat is the type of fat that we have that generates heat.

And in order to activate our brown fat, we need to be cold. And how many people nowadays ever get really cold? Because we always like that thermostat right at 70 degrees yeah it goes to i go on the ice bath every day yeah so right so the temperature goes to 71 we turn we turn on the air conditioning goes below we turn on the heat right we give them this thermonuclear uh zone and we never actually activate our brown fat and activating our brown fat by being in the cold in In fact, this past weekend, I was at Omega Institute and I actually camped out and it's a long story, but I brought my tent and my tent didn't have the poles to it. So I had to sleep on the ground in my sleeping bag.

And fortunately, the sleeping bag was a warm sleeping bag, but I got cold at night. But guess what? I slept great. I slept great. It's true. The best sleep I've had in years was when i went uh back country skiing with my daughter last spring and we literally climbed six miles six hours straight up to this yurt which was literally six feet under the snow we had to dig it out and i slept my sleeping bag there it was freezing and i slept the best i slept ever yes you're like in a semi hibernation i actually i actually bought something called a chili pad yeah which is essentially a cooling pad that you put on your mattress.

I can turn it down like 63 degrees at night because my wife likes it hot and I like it cold. I think she did a little podcast about that. She did. She did. My wife is a comedian. You can look her up at mymia lux on Instagram and you can watch that funny spoof on how she has to wear a winter coat to

bed with me, which is not quite true, but yes. Yeah. Yeah. So mitochondria, and then, you know, how do we test for mitochondria? You know, when you go to most doctors, most doctors don't even remember mitochondria in their training, nor do they ever test for it. So we test for organic acids for it. You can also- It's a urine test. It's easy to do. Yeah, relatively easy to do. And you can also do genetic testing for mitochondria. There are some labs out there. Cortagen was one of the labs that we used to use,

but they're no longer around. There's another one called Gene Savvy that does testing for mitochondria. And when you get an inherited mitochondrial issue, that's where maybe seeing someone who's- Yeah, that's much more serious. But you can also have a lot of acquired mitochondrial issues. And the good news is that we can heal our mitochondria when we actually go through periods of- But before you get into what he'll, what messes them up?

What messes them up? Yeah, what messes them up? Well, excessive oxidative stress will do it. So infections. Free radicals. Yeah, yeah. So excess up? Well, excess of oxidative stress will do it. So infections. Yeah, yeah. So excess amounts of free radicals, oxidative stress, because your mitochondria is like a fireplace. You throw logs into your fireplace, which is food, and you give off sparks. And you throw too much logs in the fireplace, you get too much sparks, and you get too much free radicals. Too many calories. Too many bad calories. Too many bad calories,

exactly. Like sugar and starch. And too many bad calories not compensated by enough dietary antioxidants is another potential source. Antibiotics are huge. Yeah. Especially the floxins. I mean, that's a whole topic unto itself is being floxed, which I'm sure you've seen patients with that because they definitely are bactericidal antibiotics are definitely poisonous to mitochondria and statin

medications. So, you know, the ones that the muscle aching that people get is because their mitochondria are getting injured. So the cardiologist handed out like Pez candy, right, Mark?

Yeah. It should be, it should be in the water, right? We should just, you know, they wanted to sell it at McDonald's. Yeah.

Right. Have one with your big Mac. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's, but they, they, they are wanted to sell it at McDonald's. Yeah, right. Have one with your Big Mac. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But they are and they do cause muscle damage. And some people are more susceptible to it. And there's genetic, I think, variations in how people respond to statins. And that probably has to do with their mitochondrial function.

Right, right. But it's for sure. So toxins also, like heavy metals and pesticides are poisonous. Too much sugar and starch and calories, oxidative stress that comes from inflammation. I mean, that's why when you have the viral flu, you feel achy and tired and sore because your mitochondria are getting nuked, right? Nutritional deficiencies, right?

We need all sorts of nutrients like carnitine, CoQ10, B vitamins, all play a big role in the mitochondrial function. And phosphorylcholine for the membranes of the mitochondria. The other thing that's also really important, and as you're well aware of that, is the concept of doing fasting periodically. And I find this actually quite fascinating because a lot of religions have fasting as part of their religious belief system. And when you actually look at that,

giving your gut a time period of rest, and when you go through these periods of fasting, your body starts eating up the bad mitochondria. That's autophagy. We call that the body's eating itself. So when- Like the garbage truck coming, cleaning up all the waste from your cells, which helps you renew and repair and regenerate.

Exactly. And actually get younger. And intermittent fasting can do amazing, amazing things for the body. And what is that? That's like when you eat between an eight-hour window? Yeah, there's multiple ways to do that. You can eat like, you know, 16 hours without food, eat during an eight-hour window, or maybe on the weekends, just have water or a juice fast or something like that. There's different ways of doing that. But when you cut back on your calories dramatically and you do that for an extended period of time, your body goes into what's called ketosis, as you well know. And then your body also starts to generate increased antioxidant enzyme systems. And it also starts to clean up and sweep

the house, gets rid of all the bad cells. Eating eating, snacking, and eating all the way till bed, and waking up and having breakfast, that's the worst thing. No, exactly. Well, it's great if you're an age. Unless you're like a teenager and your metabolism has gone wild and you need to be fed all the time because you're just growing all the time.

But three meals a day with snacks is probably not the best thing for you. That's an important thing because a lot of people have mitochondrial issues, and I personally had severe mitochondrial issues because I got chronic fatigue syndrome from mercury and my muscle enzymes went way up and I had severe muscle aches and fatigue. And it was, it was really working on my mitochondria by getting rid of the metals and fixing my gut and giving myself a lot of mitochondrial nutrients that really helped me

recover from that. Yeah. Yeah. And, and the, Yeah, and they're actually working on some of the nutrients like the nutrients that increase the NAD plus in the body or even intravenous NAD, which is another for IV therapies that's been shown to be quite helpful for- For brain issues. Absolutely. Trauma of the brain and-

Oh, yeah. Cognitive disorders. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very powerful. And obviously even for people who are floxed, that's actually one of the treatments. Yeah. So what you're talking about is providing a lot of the nutrients.

So one, you have to stop doing all the bad things that cause to be a problem. And two, you have to provide the basic support to help them work better. Right? So whether it's intermittent fasting or calorie restriction for periods of time or days of fasting, whether it's these nutrients like NAD, which you can now take orally, CoQ10. These are the kinds of things we look at in functional medicine. And at the Ultra Wellness Center, we can test for these things. We can see what's not working. And unless you look, you don't know what's going on. And that's really the beauty of this approach because

we might not see, quote, a disease, but we might see a dysfunction. And I've had patients with Parkinson's disease who, I mean, everyone now, I've had 10 years of Parkinson's and he's doing amazing and hasn't progressed. In fact, got better from where he was by working on all these things. Yeah. Parkinson's is tough. It depends where you catch them. But the big thing is, is to try to arrest the progression and try to reverse it if you can. Yeah. And it's, a lot of it is a mitochondrial disease. We know well that CoQ10 and other things help with Parkinson's. And it's actually a mitochondrial problem like many diseases. Well, also, the interesting thing is that they're also finding a direct connection with

the gut microbiome in Parkinson's. Because actually, interestingly, there were some patients, Dr. Berity, he had some patients who had c difficile colitis the patient also had parkinson's they got a stool transplant for their c diff colitis guess what the parkinson's got better hey wow yes yes actually i remember reading a study that people who um at constipation have a 300 increased risk the constipation is not benign exactly yeah i mean i had a guy today who was like how can you go like every three or four days i'm like uh that's not normal he says no for me i go every three four days i'm like no you should go twice a day he's like twice a day uh what are you smoking like i think that is

is not what people really think of as normal but it really is right and i think it connects the dots the gut the immune system the mitochondria It's all one system. Everything is connected to everything else. It's sort of like the knee bones connected to the thigh bone and all that, but it's actually true in the body. And we treat people in all these silos with all these specialties. And unfortunately, it doesn't help them get to the issues that can really help them get better. Yeah.

And I think the other thing that's also, I think, really important, and I've learned this as the more experience I get, is I always go into each patient with what I call a Zen mind. Very open-minded. I don't really, you know, I just sort of listen. And I don't have any preconceived notions of what's going on. And if I just, you know, listen to them, make notes, you know, and try to then connect the dots. And that way there's no, you know, preconceived. I think you have this or I think you have that.

You can even do that in functional medicine. Like I think you have leaky gut or I think you have gluten. Well, guess what? There is no leaky gut. There is no gluten. Let's got to look somewhere else. Maybe, you know, maybe you've had a tick bite, you know, maybe you have a pesticide poisoning exposure.

Maybe you're a glyphosate toxic. I mean, there's all different pathways that you can go down. And it does require playing detective. Yeah. I remember I had a patient who grew up in the Bronx and was very poor. And she lived in an apartment complex where cockroaches were crawling all over her. And she hated pests. So she moved to the suburbs and she would have the exterminator come every month to spray inside and outside her house. And she had an entire barrel, like a 50-gallon barrel of Chlordane, which is now banned in this country, and was exposed to this over and over and over. And she got Parkinson's at 50 years old. And we helped her by detoxifying her,

by working on her mitochondria and doing all those things we talked about. It's interesting you say that because I distinctly remember reading an article that was looking at Japanese men and they had a higher incidence of Parkinson's as they ate more fruits and vegetables. So the logical conclusion is eat fruits and vegetables, get Parkinson's. We're wrong. Because of pesticides. Exactly. Pesticide-lad eat fruits and vegetables get parkinson's wrong is it pesticides exactly pesticide laden fruits and vegetables i mean farmers uh are the one of the worst the farm workers are one of the worst exposed to pesticides and the highest rates of parkinson's

and then they are we are talking about the herbicide roundup uh the the uh with the glyphosate and the effects on the gut microbiome that's another uh big one that's that's that that to me is is probably one of the big elephants in the room in modern day society. Yeah, glyphosate. I mean, we actually test for glyphosate. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna test it. I don't probably have any because I eat organic

and I avoid pesticides and I'm really careful what I eat. But the truth is I travel half the time. So I don't always have control. No, right, exactly. And I checked my urine. I was like, holy crap, I'm probably in the 50th percentile for glyphosate. I thought I'd be in like the 10th percentile. And I'm like, this is not good. Yes, exactly. And the other thing that's been touted is that glyphosate is safe because it doesn't affect any of the biochemical pathways

in the body. Well, lo and behold, it actually affects the chikinate pathway, which is actually how the bacteria have their metabolism. So when you're using glyphosate, you're actually messing up the metabolic pathways of bacteria, especially gut bacteria. It also affects glutathione and other things. There's transgenerational effects. So that's one of the things we do here as well. We deal a lot with understanding how toxins affect the body, how to help the body detoxify and, and doing it in a way which actually creates profound results. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, what, what, what is, what are the biggest things you think about when you think about toxins and how do we, how do we sort of look at those in our practice and what

do we, what do we do and see? Well, it's, you know on toxins with, God rest his soul, Walter Crinian. He was a big- He died? Yes, he died. Yeah, he died. Yeah. And we used to talk together about this seminal article. I believe it was in Science.

It was called the exposome, which is the sum total of all the different toxins that we get exposed to. Or everything. It's our diet, stress, your microbiome, all those are- Exactly. And to some degree, you know, there is a little bit of survival of the fittest. So the people who can detoxify well will actually survive in modern society better. When you sort of like the cockroaches that are resistant to DDT. I mean, that's- That's not me. I'm susceptible. So the toxins that we're exposed to are probably one of the biggest sources is pharmaceutical

industry. I consider pharmaceuticals as toxins. Yes, they're toxins, but just like if you know what to give in a poison at the right dose at the right thing. The dose makes the poison. The dose makes the poison, exactly. And the big dirty secret is that these chemicals get peed out and pooped out, and they go into the water systems. And no water systems are actually checking for some of these chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals. And there's been studies on this.

They find these in there. Totally, totally. And I believe without question that the pharmaceuticals, which are everywhere, when you look, you know, people are, you know, taking, you know, handfuls of different pharmaceuticals. These are getting into the water system. And I believe they're actually probably affecting us in some way. So having clean water, clean food are some of the ways which we can help with our exposure to toxins.

Yeah, and the environmental working group. Clean air, exactly, environmental working group is a good resource. They have all this of how to avoid toxins in your seafood, in your meat, in your vegetables, in your household cleaning products, in your personal care products. It's a great resource, ewg.org. Yeah, ewg, exactly. Yeah. And just being aware of it is important. And I talked earlier jokingly about red wine. Well, the dirty secret about California and all the wines in the United

States is they're filled with pesticides, fungicides, and glyphosate. And arsenic. Yeah. So if you're going to have wine, you want to make sure it's organic or from Europe because they don't allow the same degree that we have in the States. I saw this guy had a wine filter the other day, like a water filter. I was like, wow, that's- I don't know if it'll actually filter all that stuff. I don't know. I'm going to try it. And again, they've shown that Cheerios and all these food products, I have glyphosate in them. Yeah. Even some of the things that are quote unquote organic, you can find glyphosate in them. So.

Yeah. I just read that the Impossible Burger, which is this plant-based healthy quote soy burger, which is GMO soy has 11 times the glyphosate levels of the Beyond Meat, which is made from pea protein because soybeans are sprayed with glyphosate. Wow. That's striking. Yeah. You know, and so you're trying to do something healthy and then you're ending up poisoning meat which is made from pea protein because soy beans are sprayed with glyphosate wow that's striking yeah you know and so you're trying to do something healthy and then you're ending up poisoning yourself with glyphosate by eating a soy burger right right yeah and i and i think that

you know people people right people are trying to be healthy but sometimes they're they're making the wrong choice or sort of you know like i had this one guy who thought though you know well you know uh being a vegetarian is good and eating soy is good. So the guy was eating soy burgers, tofu burgers, and you know, all the, all the soy stuff. The guy literally grew breasts. He was starting to have gynecomastia from all the estrogen effect of the, of the. It's mostly the processed soy. Yeah. Because the whole soy traditionally, if you're eating it in reasonable amounts, won't do that. Right, right, right. But yeah. It was all the process exactly highly processed exactly which we think is quote a health food like a tofu i mean a turkey soy thing or a turkey or soy bacon or soy burger yeah they're all frankenfoods

yeah they're still highly processed and it's not a whole food plant-based diet you know exactly exactly yeah so you know just to come by the mitochondria going back to it for a minute i i was just remembering a patient i had who had heart failure now we think of heart failure as this you know one-way street you know you get it it gets worse you try to manage it with a lot of medication but it turns out that it's a mitochondrial problem and you can actually treat it with mitochondrial nutrients and i i recently had a guy who was a healthy ish 70 year old guy who developed heart failure I recently had a guy who was a healthy-ish 70-year-old guy who developed heart failure. And he had a number of things going on with him that we treated that were underlying inflammation, but I gave him a bunch of support for his mitochondria,

ribose and carnitine and CoQ10 and magnesium and a bunch of stuff. And his ejection fraction, which is the strength of which you can pump blood out of your heart, went from like 30%, which is a few steps away from a heart failure, to over 50%, which is pretty much normal, which is pretty amazing when you see that. And it's, again, not something traditional cardiologists will look, oh, let me see your mitochondria. Like, they don't know how to think about it or test it or look at it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And obviously, you know, your heart doesn't rest, right? Even when you're sleeping, your heart's pumping. So mitochondria is really important for the heart. And obviously, you know, your heart doesn't rest, right? Even when you're sleeping, your heart's pumping. You hope so.

So mitochondria is really important for the heart. And absolutely, there are cases of patients having improvements of heart failure and reversal of heart failure with mitochondrial nutrient support. I have many of those cases. It's pretty amazing. So one of the things that we do also here at the Ultra Wellness Center is intravenous nutrition. Can you talk about, you know, why that's important, what it does, and who it's good for? Well, sure. I mean, there's, you know, intravenous nutrition is a catch-all term for giving nutrients through the veins and sort of bypassing the gut for absorption. And there

are some patients that, for whatever reason, they may not be absorbing their nutrients as well. So some of the things that we use here, uh, and would include things like the Myers cocktail, uh, we might also use, uh, B vitamins, magnesium, um, and, you know, B vitamins are, you know, very, very, you know, uh, Bruce Ames is the one who, uh, brought my attention to the B vitamins because a lot of people have subclinical genetic deficiencies where they need higher levels of B vitamins. So giving B vitamins actually supports mitochondrial function. So when you give these B vitamins and magnesium, you can boost the effect of mitochondria through the augmented effects. And then glutathione intravenously is also a fantastic tool.

IV vitamin C, we use that for a host of different things. And you mentioned the IV NAD. Yeah, IV NAD. Yeah, that I think is actually, that's really amazing stuff. It's really, really cool. And it's, so there are patients who do need, I don't want to say that everybody who walks through the door needs an IV, but if you want to support and people who are sicker, people who have more unexplained fatigue, you can definitely do that.

It was a study with IV vitamin C and sepsis. You know what you're talking about? Yeah. So this is a really interesting thing. So IV vitamin C, we use it here for patients who have potential cancer, chronic infections, Epstein-Barr virus, et cetera, flu or whatever. And so at high levels, vitamin C is actually a pro-oxidant. It's not actually an antioxidant.

It's actually a pro-oxidant. And the interesting thing is that there are some studies out now that if you go into a hospital and you have septic shock your mortality Which is normally about 40% of people who die in the hospital if you give them IV vitamin C along with I think Steroids and a little bit of thiamine the mortality went from 40% to 9% Wow, so it's a four-fold Decrease in death. That's unbelievable. Yeah. And there's no drug that can do that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So you go from like 10% to, uh, or 40% down to about

less than 10% mortality. Pretty amazing. It is pretty powerful stuff and it's cheap. Yeah. It's very cheap. Yeah. So you're not going to see a lot of research with that with big pharma because you know, they're not going to make money on it. It's true. it's it's there's a gap in research a lot of things we do know work clinically we've all had experience with for decades doesn't get the funding because the NIH isn't funding it and neither is drug companies so we're kind of stuck having to look at smaller studies or small groups of people are studying this so we're doing all these things we talked about here at the ultra mono center it's it's a really unique practice. We have, you know, four physicians, two physicians assistants, four nutritionists, a whole bunch of nurses, and we're taking care of people in a team approach where people come in, they get this

full evaluation, we're the medical detectives, we find problems that most people have struggled to solve for decades. And often very quickly we know what to do. And we support them over time with coaching and with encouragement and follow-up visits. And it's really a pretty unique center here at the Ultrawana Center. And collectively, you know, we've had probably 60 years of collective experience in practicing functional medicine, which is, I think, pretty unique in the world. We're getting older, but we're just getting smarter. And, you know, we've all personally had challenges with our health and we've used this model to really help recover. And I remember when I was really sick, you and Dr. Bohm came over to my house and

helped me think through what was going on because my brain wasn't working because my gut wasn't working. And it's just so rewarding to see these patients. You had a recent case that you wanted to share about Alzheimer's, right? Yeah, it was a fantastic case. It was a patient who I saw who came down from up north in Canada and was given a diagnosis up there of having Alzheimer's and was pretty much sold, you know. Get your affairs in order. Get your affairs in order, exactly. And there's not much we can do for you. So he came down. The treatment for Alzheimer's is a lawyer.

It's a lawyer, right. And a rabbi or priest, right. So the patient came down and she, I saw her with her husband and did a complete workup. And as you know, through some of the writings of Dale Bredesen, and also a functional medicine approach is that Alzheimer's- And this book called The Ultramind Solution was really good. Yeah, Ultramind, yeah.

But that wasn't about Alzheimer's though. No, but it was. Oh, well, yeah. A lot of Alzheimer's cases were about the brain. Yeah, right, yeah. So, and I love the analogy- I wrote that, by the way. Yeah.

The analogy of Alzheimer's is like a roof with 32 holes in it. And you're not going to fix it by just, you know, doing one hole. So I did a full workup on the patient. And the other thing which most doctors and even dentists aren't aware is the role of the oral bacteria. There's actually some really interesting studies that when you have bad bacteria in your mouth, specifically gum disease, gingivitis, periodontal disease, porphyromonous gingivalis. It highly causes systemic inflammation, which in turn affects the brain and causes brain inflammation and brain deterioration over time.

So her workup included checking for heavy metals, checking for herpes viruses, because herpes simplex is also associated with that, checking for the APOE4 genotype. Which predisposes you, but doesn't predestine you. Exactly. Just because you have it doesn't mean you're going to get it. But you're one of those people who has a more robust immune response, so you have more inflammation, which is great on a short-term, but on a long-term basis, you don't want chronic inflammation.

So she had a whole bunch of things. She had some mercury. She had some oral bacteria. She had some gut bacteria. She had some gluten issues. She had a herpes simplex. She had the oral bacteria. She had some gut bacteria. She had some gluten issues. She had a herpes simplex. She had the APOE4 genotype. So I sort of worked on all of those things. We also changed her diet. And within a matter of months, her husband said, I have my wife back. Wow. Yeah. She was now able to converse, to talk. She can drive by herself now. So you

literally stopped and reversed the effects of Alzheimer's. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It was pretty amazing. And what do you think it was of all those things that you did? Or was it all the holes? It was all the holes. Exactly. And we talk about root cause. It's actually root causes. So I think there's often, sometimes there's one big one, but then there's all these other things that are supporting that also play a role. So I just sort of, you know, addressed all of them in like a, in like a checklist fashion. You know, it's interesting you say that because, you know, traditional medicine is there's, you know, sort of the joke about neurology is diagnose and adios, you know, here's what you got,

nothing to do. I'll see you later. And I think it's certainly the approach now with Alzheimer's because we've spent billions of dollars on hundreds and hundreds of studies with nothing to show for it. It's because we've been looking down the wrong path. Right. Because we've been looking at amyloid plaques, which are a hallmark of actual inflammation slash infection in the brain. Just like cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease. Cholesterol does not cause heart disease. Inflammation causes heart disease. Cholesterol is a bystander. Yes.

Trying to repair that inflammatory process. Like the body's banding. Right. So beta amyloid in the brain is actually an antimicrobial peptide. It tells you that the body is trying to fight off some type of infection, be it a spirochete from Lyme disease, syphilis, a virus, or a fungi. So that's, you know, so yeah, beta amyloid, you know, we've, we've, we've been, you know, saying, well, if we get rid of the beta amyloid, find a drug to remove the beta amyloid. It's the wrong thinking is the problem. And in functional medicine here

at the Ultral Wellness Center, we do a different kind of thinking, which is what are all the treatable things that we can find that could help this patient's health get better in general. And that also helps the brain get better. So it's not to say that we can come in here and cure all cases of Alzheimer's. That's not true. But we can certainly, I mean, especially if you're far advanced, but we can certainly, if we get it early enough,

we can help to slow it down and maybe even reverse some of the effects by using this approach. And not only have you found this, I found this, and dozens and dozens of other doctors doing this approach across the country have done this. And yet it's still in the outside of healthcare. Well, you know, it's also really interesting is I'm seeing more and more doctors and nurses who are in mainstream medicine coming to see me because, and they're in the, they're in like some of the best hospitals, best centers because they can't get help in their system.

Oh, for sure. You know, I mean, it's true. A lot of our patients are healthcare professionals. Exactly. Yeah. And, and, and I think, I think, you know, when a, a, a physician has either themselves or a close family member or spouse or whatever, get a condition and you're, and you're butting your head against the wall with the mainstream approach, that's where you start, you know, you sort of fall into

functional medicine because this stuff's not working. I got to put more tools in my tool bag. Yeah. Well, that's the thing here at Delta One Eastern. We have a lot of tools. We have a different way of thinking. We work as a team and we've been doing it for a long time. So if you're listening and you've suffered with some chronic thing that hasn't gotten

better or you have any one of those diseases or conditions we talked about, or pretty much anything, we can really make a difference in helping people find their root cause, be medical detectives, and help people create a pathway that gets them back to health. And that's really the goal here. Yeah. And the other thing is, you know, so many practices have what I call protocols. And the protocols are sort of like you do the same thing over and over for everyone. We don't really have protocols here. We have certain things that we do use than a lot of

patients. We have an approach. We have an approach, but we don't have a rubber stamp. You know, you're not going to come in at the Ultra Wellness Center and everybody gets the same treatment. That doesn't work. Right. Nada. Exactly. Because it's different for everybody it's it's it's yeah ours is very much personalized and proactive and and uh a deep dive into uh nutritional biochemical genetic uh toxic uh biology yeah as you mentioned with that case with ms you know that's one case with ms another case might be

very different and i think i think what you saw, that patient with Alzheimer's, someone else with Alzheimer's might need a very different approach. So that's really the beauty of functional medicine. And you are one of the pioneers. You are a leader. And it's so great to have you here at the Ultra Wellness Center, Todd. Thank you for joining us on The Doctor's Pharmacy. All right. Thanks, Mark. Enjoyed it. So if you've heard anything that piqued your interest or you know anybody who's suffering or you're suffering, you can find out more about our center at theultrawellnesscenter.com. That's just ultrawellnesscenter.com. And if you love this podcast, we'd love to hear from you again. Leave a comment, share with your friends and family on social media, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The doctor's pharmacy thank you mark hi everyone it's dr mark hyman so two quick things number one thanks so much for listening

to this week's podcast it really means a lot to me if you love the podcast i'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family second i want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks. Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets. I use a few of those. And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list, all you have to do is visit drhyman.com forward slash pics. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics. I'll only email you once a week, I promise. And I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations. So just go to drhyman.com forward slash pics. That's P-I-C-K-S to sign up free today. 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.