Functional Medicine & Natural Healing Podcast
Functional Medicine & Natural Healing Podcast
Leaky Gut Q&A
Ever wondered just how impactful your diet and lifestyle choices are on your health? We're going to unravel some answers in this episode with the help of Dr. Gabe. We begin by tackling the aftermath of following a leaky gut repair protocol. Here's the catch - it's not a one-and-done process. Stress, lifestyle, and eagerness to reintroduce foods can all cause a relapse. It's time for some hard truths about those irresistible sugary treats and how they may be secretly sabotaging your progress.
We then navigate to the seldom-discussed link between constipation, estrogen, and leaky gut. Dr. Gabe's advice cuts through the confusion, suggesting effective remedies like magnesium citrate and Cape Aloe herbs for constipation, and highlighting the implications of infections, food intolerances, inadequate water consumption, and caffeine intake. As we delve into estrogen dominance and its contribution to a vicious cycle of leaky gut and fungal overgrowth, you'll be amazed at the interconnectedness of it all. Grounded in a simple diet change and a single herb, Dr. Gabe's approach to treating leaky gut is refreshingly uncomplicated. We also delve into identifying neurotransmitter imbalances and vitamin deficiencies, with a spotlight on dopamine and activated B6. It's time to tune in for a wealth of insights. You'll leave this episode with a renewed perspective on your health journey.
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Welcome to the Functional Medicine and Natural Healing Podcast, where we share the secrets to upgrade your digestion, improve your hormones, restore your immune system and detoxify your body. I'm your host, dr Houston Anderson. Now let's get started. The following discussion is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or disease process. Please discuss any medical treatments or medical interventions with your personal physician. All right guys, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Dr Houston Anderson. I've got Dr Gabe here today and we're going to talk a little bit about leaky gut again.
Speaker 1:Our last podcast covered leaky gut and two of the main questions that we get, like what is leaky gut and the best way to treat leaky gut. So if you missed that episode, go back. Let's go to some of the interesting questions that come with leaky gut. So you listen to that podcast. You're thinking what do I do? What's my next step? You're not quite to the point where you need to see a doctor, or maybe you saw a doctor and you're all better. So the first question I have for you, dr Gabe, is should you repeat a leaky gut repair protocol and, if so, how often?
Speaker 2:I love that because it depends. It depends on are you following a good diet? Generally speaking, are you living a healthy lifestyle? If you are, let's say, let's start with stress. So if your job is stressful or your home life is stressful, you might need to repeat a certain degree of a protocol. But it can be specific, because I've had somebody come in test for one herb and then the next time they come in they test for a different herb. But it really depends on how stressed for your lifestyle is. If you're stressed out, maybe you have to come in periodically for checkups and you might need an herb when you come in.
Speaker 2:Now. Whether or not you have leaky gut again, that's still a question, but something is going downhill because of the stress. So maybe we're being preventative before leaky gut really sets in. Maybe it's starting that sort of thing. Otherwise, this is a common thing that I've seen People want to reintroduce the foods that they're intolerant to and so six months in, three months in, whenever it is, they start eating that food again and then everything goes downhill and that ends up being problematic. Now, if they catch it and they realize, oh yeah, I can't have gluten, I better go off gluten again, it might not be no big deal.
Speaker 2:The last one that comes to my mind just as we're around in the corner, away from summer going into fall, of course, we got the holidays and that's going to be the most common time that somebody is going to say, ah, what the heck, and they're going to eat sugar for Halloween, they're going to eat sugar for Thanksgiving and sugar for Christmas and probably in between all those holidays on top of that, and so almost always that's not going to go well.
Speaker 2:It doesn't go well for me. Whenever I do, it Doesn't go well for anyone, and I can generally give advice for people on like you shouldn't be having sugar every day period. You should be having it special events. So if you're going to have it around the holidays or a really special event like an anniversary or something like that, but when you do that on a day-to-day basis, it's not good. Even on the holidays it's not good, depending on what you're eating. Our local ice cream place is Andes, so if everyone loves to go to Andes, I'm not going to throw them under the bus. You can look at the ingredients. It's generally the same type of ingredients you're going to see everywhere else.
Speaker 1:If you're doing that, like the custard Andes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I forgot, you guys have one. They're based here, but when you're eating that stuff, of course you're not going to do very well. I had it with some family that we had a big family event and so everyone went out to Andes. But if you can handle a little bit, you know a couple of days, that's totally fine. But if you're doing on a regular basis, those couple of days are going to turn right back into the reason you came in to see me.
Speaker 2:So, that is most of the time to answer your question in a very long way is because we did something to end up needing that protocol again.
Speaker 1:My daughter asked me one time what's the difference between ice cream and custard? And I was like pretty much eggs. Right she's like. So you're telling me custard is healthy because it's got eggs in it. Right, that's protein. Man, I thought that was pretty clever. But yeah, no, I mean, imagine if you're sensitive to eggs and you're eating custard as your cheat. You're not just getting the sugar, you're getting an immune response, a histamine response, and you're going to feel like crap. So just being aware, I mean, it's hard to be aware unless you dialed in. So I would say patients are sometimes the worst-of-advocates. Once they're healthy, they actually can pay attention to how they feel. When you're sick, you have no idea what's going on. Even if you're reacting to stuff, you don't really know what's going on. You're just reacting, and so I think that's important. As far as the food introduction, do you have a protocol there? Because one of the questions here has been on Elimination Diet for four months. I feel great. How was that?
Speaker 2:So it depends on all the foods that they're off of.
Speaker 2:If it's one food, then what I usually tell them let's say with gluten, try a little bit, see how you feel for the next three or four days. Then, if you're okay, you might want to try a little bit more, because not everyone's going to be intolerant to a food for the rest of your life. Now it's really common for, I think, both of us to see one food, possibly long-term, that you're not going to be able to eat. That's really common. But let's say it is that person. They don't have that issue. They reintroduce. It seems to go okay.
Speaker 2:Now with gluten, of course, I'm going to have some caveats. I don't think we should be eating it all the time. I think it is inflammatory period, though it can be in a healthier form, which is the sprouted, fermented sourdough. So you can definitely get it really really good quality and there are some helpful nutrients and it can be a kind of a probiotic food too. But that being said, what you're going to look for is how do I feel Now? I am gluten intolerant. I can handle a whole lot more than I used to. I don't get a migraine immediately, but if I eat it consistently for a long period of time, it'll start to build up and there's my migraine. And so then the question is the first time that I ate it, is it causing some low degree of inflammation? Most likely, most likely it's causing some degree of inflammation. So it's whether or not you're comfortable with that and whether or not that's going to lead to something down the road, because migraines have been not proven. But the hypothesis is out there that it is some sort of autoimmune reaction, which is interesting because of the way it tests. However, because of that, I don't want to mess with that. I don't want to develop some autoimmune thing later down the road, because often autoimmune diseases follow each other. So I don't want to mess with it.
Speaker 2:And so for somebody who say they're off of three or four foods, you're going to do it with one day at a time, one food at a time.
Speaker 2:You're going to wait several days and then you're going to try again. So it's common for me to pull off foods, and this is not a food intolerance, but it's to pull off, pull foods away, because somebody has a fungal issue. And so a lot of sugars, a lot of different other foods could be fructose, so a lot of the fruits depends on the person and so I'm going to pull them off of those and then, as the fungus is gone, or hopefully gone, we're going to reintroduce those foods slowly, one at a time, wait a few days in between introduction and just see how you feel and if it is not going so well, you're going to pull back. If it's going okay, you're going to continue to push forward within reason. You're obviously not going to go back to table sugar and throwing that all over the place and eating custard and cheesecake and whatnot. But yeah, that's kind of how I approach elimination diet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one of the things that patients mess up on this one is that that reaction to that food can take up to 72 hours or so or longer before it really builds up, Like you said. Like I'm corn sensitive myself, I mean honestly I can eat it for like 15 days before I have a single symptom. I choose not to do that because my symptom with corn is typically chronic fatigue and then I don't want to get out of bed or record podcasts or help any patients anymore, I just want to lay there. So I don't enjoy doing that, so I don't do it anymore. But that's one thing that I like patients to have control over their problems. You want to be chronically fatigued all the time. That's cool, Like go ahead, like your game. You want to have migraines every day and you don't care if you eat gluten. That value. I have multiple patients to actually choose migraines over their food intolerance.
Speaker 2:It doesn't make any sense to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me, but once again I get it. We all make our own choices. Okay, here's one. I don't know if you have much experience with BPC-157. I can talk about that. If you don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you go for it. Not a ton of experience with that one.
Speaker 1:I mean, I know it.
Speaker 2:I understand it to a degree but, yeah, not a ton of experience with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I was introduced to BPC-157 from a bunch of phone consoles actually, where these were UC patients, all sort of colitis patients, that were saying like, hey, as long as I take BPC-157, which is pretty expensive I mean they're like $100 a bottle and a hundred I don't know if it's 60 caps I mean you're looking at $100 every 10 days or so, but that they're all. They're bleeding stopped, right. And so after I heard it like the fourth or fifth time, I was like, okay, let's try this out. So we did try it out in the office and there's a BPC-157 is really cool actually where I do see an immediate increase in healing effect in those patients. That being said, it lasts about two weeks. So that's my catch. Like it up regulates regeneration of that gut lining for a period of two weeks.
Speaker 1:It's very expensive for doing that and it goes under, in my opinion, the band-aid story of glutamine, of high-dose glutamine we didn't talk about this in the last podcast but essentially, like glutamine for a UC case, social colitis case, the dosage matters. You might need like 25 to 27 grams a day. If you're using that, you can use the cheap brands and that's a little cheaper. But if you're using, like a peer encapsulations or a high intent like in a good brand of glutamine. I mean you could be spending like three, four $500 a month on glutamine to address an acute ulcerative colitis. Now, if you don't have a doctor, I mean maybe that's what you're doing, but it's interesting.
Speaker 1:So my kind of stance on BPC-157 is it has potential, but I haven't seen it last and I have tried it out with multiple patients and I haven't the big thing about peptides in general that I'll just kind of give everyone a warning peptides promote growth. So growth when you have a stagnant growth it can be beneficial, but growth when you already have normal growth is called a tumor. So we have to be careful when we stimulate processes with exogenous things, although maybe natural, but they're very strong, right. So it's kind of like in that drug category peptides just aren't regulated yet. That's kind of the story. Okay, I got a patient that or, sorry, a question here that says constipation and hard pedals. What pebbles, constipation, hard pebbles what do you think you would go to first if someone had like some severe constipation or pebbles coming out?
Speaker 2:So if it's the first time they're coming in, what I'm gonna do is similar to what we've been talking about. I wanna know if do you have an infection? Do you have some sort of overgrowth? Do you have a food intolerance? Those are the two big ones I need to know. I think I had someone here recently with a similar thing.
Speaker 2:I can't remember the food intolerance off hand, but if it's gluten, if it's dairy or something like that, dairy is really common generally to cause that, but for those people you need to remove that and then oftentimes the constipation gets better. Infection you're gonna have inflammation in your gut and it's gonna be really hard for that. Now, the other thing that's involved is whether your gallbladder's functioning correctly, whether your stomach acid is functioning correctly, and that can all cause issues with constipation, of course. Then you got the go-to easy, simple answers, which is are you drinking water? That's a helpful one or are you drinking a ton of caffeine, which is gonna be a diuretic, and then you're gonna be just peeing out a lot of it, and that can cause an issue, though less common than I would see. Last one is are you magnesium deficient? Those are simple ones. Now it depends on what part of the country you are and how much food you're eating Like magnesium is definitely one of the harder ones.
Speaker 2:Cheese has magnesium in it. Legumes have magnesium and that ends up becoming a little bit of an issue for us because we're paleo advocates and you don't generally eat legumes when you're paleo. So from that standpoint it can become a little bit difficult to get the magnesium and there is some research saying that most likely our ancestors got it from drinking spring water, which we don't often drink spring water if you live in the city, so you don't get as much magnesium. So that's one of the ones that it's an easy answer, or at least an easy answer until you figure out what could be an underlying root cause. So like giving them some magnesium citrate, like natural calm you can pick up in most grocery stores, is an easy answer until we get to whether it is a food intolerance and infection or something else causing that. But yeah, that's kind of my go to.
Speaker 1:Yep, and I like the citrate form of magnesium too, so I think that's an easy one. There are some other herbs that I use, like if you have severe constipation. I often use a Cape Allo, actually like the Douglas Labs Cape Allo For just you know, for me to heal a gut I need to have bowel movements, so constipation can be really a big problem in the office, like. So if you're only having a bowel movement once a week, I really don't have a chance to clear everything out but once a week. We talked in the last podcast that you could heal in 72 hours. But if you have no bowel movements for 72 hours then you're not gonna get any better, and so that's always like every once in a while I'll use that band and Cape Allo for sure is a band they just so everyone knows.
Speaker 1:But like it's it will stimulate a bowel movement in most people and so that we don't have to use, like harsh laxatives and things like that. But I need a bowel movement for it to work. Like you said, gallbladders like the first thing to go to. You're probably not making enough bile, especially with the pebbles, probably not enough bile, a little dehydration which could be affecting the solubility of that bile, or estrogen dominance causing that bile to be strong or too sluggish. So it's not really like coming out like liquidy, like it should, which takes us to the next question.
Speaker 2:Leaking that estrogen dominance?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the thing, Like like give me a connection there because, I'll be honest, it's not a direct connection in my opinion, like it's not like everyone with estrogen dominance has leaky gut, but where do you see those things connected?
Speaker 2:So oftentimes you're seeing people come in presenting with both, especially these days. How often can you say, Dr Anderson, somebody has estrogen dominance walking into your office.
Speaker 1:If they're female under 40.
Speaker 2:Seriously, it's common. And then how much more common is it in men now? It's becoming pretty common, generally speaking, and so somewhat like leaky gut, someone walking in, you're probably gonna assume. That being said, how you see the connection goes right back to that gallbladder or liver. So the liver sluggish, the gallbladder sluggish, and the gut is often not necessarily root but directly connected to it. Because of that connection, like when you absorb things for the gut it's gonna go through the liver and then through everything else in your body it's gonna go through the bloodstream. So the liver's kind of that. You know one of those checkpoints.
Speaker 2:So if your liver's not working well, you're not detoxifying well, then we're gonna have a huge problem. And since the liver is directly connected to the gut, if your gut is sluggish because you got leaky gut or it's inflamed or it's just not working, great, you're constipated, that sort of thing. So you're gonna see that connection there. The other one that comes to mind is the connection between fungus and estrogen dominance too. So fungal overgrowth you're gonna see fungus like having a good time with that when you are estrogen dominant, because it feeds off of some of that and because of that then your gallbladders not gonna be functioning correctly, you're not gonna be able to excrete bile the like you should, leading back to our wonderful last question of constipation. And then you get this horrible vicious cycle.
Speaker 1:And somebody's gonna be inflamed, they're gonna be overweight and all that fun things and nothing like being constipated, overweight and estrogen dominate, right.
Speaker 1:That's a as I'm sure the females enjoy that scenario in life, and the males too. Like you said, I actually have a patient right now where we're doing, you know, gynecomastia treatment, not specifically an overweight guy, but, like you know, specifically having growth and irritation in the nipples and it's like man. You have to address that because that's not just a nipple problem, right, it's not just a aesthetics problem, it's not just like you don't look good with your shirt off as a guy. It's more to it. It's telling you that there's an internal problem that has to be addressed and it's critical. And on that note, I'm gynecomastia. I don't know why it matters, but I just mentioned it today. Like it can take a while for guys, but you have to get on top of it and keep working on it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's kind of the connection between leaky gut and estrogen dominance. Just because you have leaky gut doesn't mean it causes estrogen dominance. Just because you have estrogen dominance, you don't have to have leaky gut. But let's go to kind of I'd say, one of the last couple of questions here, or maybe the last question. Someone says you know what's the most important thing to do. I'm all online and I'm overwhelmed with how much I can do. What's my first step? What would you say? Give them something simple, dr Gabe.
Speaker 2:So that they're just overwhelmed with everything. How are you gonna deal with this? It depends on the person and how willing they are. I've had people that are much more willing, even though they state something like that, to follow some of my protocols. Sometimes I just go really simple and it's good that you brought this up, because I do have somebody here recently that was very much like that and so I'm taking it very slow with them. They have a lot going on, a lot, and so with that in mind, you know it's maybe just a single herb, a simple diet change, and then we take it from there and then, if they can handle a little bit more, a little bit more. But then I have people where you absolutely need to fix your diet. It can't be eating Doritos and Cheetos and all the other stuff and then you go gluten-free and that's it, like that's not gonna do the trick at all. You're gonna have problems with that. So if they're feeling overwhelmed my number one thing, because they have leaky gut I would not doubt that they're not making their neurotransmitters correctly. And if they're not making their neurotransmitters correctly, especially feeling overwhelmed from stress, I am thinking dopamine.
Speaker 2:Dopamine is the one that most people are not paying attention to. You're always paying attention to serotonin, and 90% some 90% is created in your gut. Now there isn't that direct connection between the gut and the brain the way we want it to Like. You can't just take serotonin from your gut and put it in your brain. It doesn't work like that. But the same mechanisms are actually, and so with dopamine, about 50% is made gut, and so if we're noticing something like that, I am going to directly address that.
Speaker 2:So I'm gonna ask questions. I'm gonna be like are you lacking concern for others? Do you have feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness? Do you have kind of a more agitated depression, like you're on edge? You can easily lose your temper. There could be like low libido already present, maybe some addiction issues. But then the big one that I'll ask how's your motivation, especially in the morning?
Speaker 2:And if those are all checked, I'm going straight to dopamine and I wanna know where are they breaking down in the pathway that we create, how we create dopamine? A lot of these people are gonna have thyroid issues too, whether secondary or primary, and so you're just drawing these connections between all of them. And then I wanna know which vitamin or mineral most likely they're deficient in, and probably by most common for me, is the activated B6, paradoxal 5-phosphate. I see that a lot. It's not the only one, but it is common for dopamine and this will help them in the meantime. It is not going to fix the problem. It's gonna help them in the meantime get things pumped, get it going, and so then the diet, the changes, the herbs and so on can do the work behind the scene that really needs to be done, but this can at least help them deal with the stress in the meantime.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you went from simple to complex. I'm going to give you that. But I will say I will say, essentially what you did was two fold. Is the overwhelm? Was that whole second part? If you're just feeling overwhelmed in general, I think he just gave you a lot of insight into that. As far as just going straight, leaky, got what to do, Like you said, clean up the diet, take one antimicrobial that one of us recommends. That's pretty good. I mean, you can go to the last podcast with three or four, choose one. Clean up your diet, call it a day. Whatever. Your version of cleaning up the diet is right If that's a flawless diet, great. If you can't do a flawless diet, great. You know, start cutting back, get your health on the right journey, and I would say that's the basics. That's all the questions we had for today. We didn't have a ton today this week. Do you have any specific ones that you hear all the time that you want to talk about today, Doc?
Speaker 2:I mean we probably covered most of the ones that I tend to hear with leaky gut. Like, most people are concerned because they hear it, they're scared. The only other thing that I could imagine that would show up is leaky brain. I have heard a lot of people talk about the gut brain axis and how important that is, which I kind of just indirectly answered with the dopamine side of things. Yeah, you for sure will have bleed over into that.
Speaker 2:The other big one is like GABA, because people are just overly stressed or anxious and a lot of times they just need some GABA. So there are great herbs for that. There is also just, you know, taking B6 or zinc or something like that can help. And the only other thing like, yeah, you mentioned, I want complex. You'll probably always going to hear me kind of do a little bit of that, because one of the things that bothers me when I listen to podcasts is people hold back. I don't want doctors or anyone to hold back. As much as it's difficult maybe to understand, I don't want anyone to hold back when you know your health is on the line. It's not necessary that I'm trying to hide this behind a paywall or anything like that. It's information that I've learned, that me and Dr Anderson have learned that we really want to help people get better, and so if we can provide just that one little thing that could help you get better, we're going to do that instead of talking only in generalities.
Speaker 1:I like that. It does get complex, hence I mean that was the other thing I thought about what's like the easiest way to get better from a leaky gut? Give Dr David call, get on the phone, have him figure it out for you and just follow instructions. You know, he says take three pills a day. You take three pills a day. That's really, that's a really simple way to do it is get someone else to do it for you, someone that's trained in things like that.
Speaker 1:But no, I love the passion for healing people. I think that one of the questions we went over when we were going to add Dr Gabe as a co host was you know, are we going to put all this research out there? And my direct answer was no, we're not going to put any research. You can, fact check me all day long. I don't care. That's your time, but I'm not going to spend my time providing research articles for you to verify what I see, and my job is to go and do my own research and come up with conclusions clinically. But I think that that's the evolution of holistic medicine. What you need is doctors that can think on their own, assess the tall, the, all the articles that you read all of the research that you read and then how does that apply to the patient? So, like you said, like you probably wouldn't treat a leaky gut with depression without getting them something for that depression, even if it's as simple as B six. So I love that.
Speaker 1:Last thing I'll say is just because he was mine and, like you said, don't hold back right, but everyone takes these be complexes and I just drives me crazy. So let's say that you do have anxiety and you stack like a or dopamine issues. Let's go back to your example dopamine issues and you're feeling like a target in the morning, low motivation, you know, not not really interested in doing anything with life right now. And if you take a B six and a five mthf, most of the time you'll actually end up neutral, right. So not always. Sometimes people do need all the B vitamins. But I, my experience is this if you're doing B vitamins, you want to do them individually to see the response. And even that B six is required, you know, for healthy metabolism, the glutamine that you're taking. So there's a lot of reasons to take that B six.
Speaker 1:I'm not opposed all the methylation products, I'm just saying probably be six was more common in my office previously. I use a little less now, but definitely probably one of the most common. I do use some combo products of B six and B nine, just to be transparent right there, but there's only specific brands that actually seem to have the right ratios, that that promote brain health the way that I want to. So once again, I think I think just paying attention, and once again calling a doctor. If Dr Gabe can figure out that it's low dopamine versus low serotonin, both of them feel bad or somewhat depressed.
Speaker 1:Both of them are somewhat not so happy in life. But the doctor can tease that out for you a little bit, and so that's all I would say. You can reach out to either one of us. I'm easily accessible on Instagram. Probably for about another month I'm still answering DMs, but if you listen to this over a month from now, that's going to be blocked off because we get too many DMs in a day and it's hard to keep up. So definitely you can schedule a phone console with me or you can schedule a phone console with Dr Gabe. Any final words, doc?
Speaker 2:No, I love it, love everything you just said. Yeah, 100%, I like you. I mean I am easy to get a hold of and stuff, but yeah, I start to get overwhelmed, like you. Same thing, it's just I got to have focus for the patients that I do.
Speaker 1:So, once again, not a paywall thing, just trying to make sure that we can serve the people that we do, making sure we can get back to the emails and the people that have committed to seeing us financially. That is but long story short. Find me on Instagram. We have all some of the video from this podcast as well as like just replays so it can remind you of the stuff that we talked about. You'll find both Dr Gabe and me on Instagram and then come find us there and hang out with us and find more information that you may be missing, and we'll bring another podcast and another week for you. Thanks a lot for listening.
Speaker 2:Yep, see you next time.