Gut-Emotion Connection with Dr. Peter Kozlowski

Hi, everyone, it's Dr. Donny and I'm looking forward to introducing you today to Dr. Peter Kozlowski. He is a functional medical doctor who specializes in, well, gut health, but also mind, body health. We're going to be talking about, I think, a lot about really the gut connection to our overall wellness. He has a recent book out called Unfunc youk Gut. So he's going to be telling us about that too. Thank you so much for joining me, Peter.

It's such an honor to be with you. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. Let's just start a little bit about you and how you got to be doing what you're doing. You completed training as a family practice medical doctor. But talk us through. How did you start to open your thoughts toward looking more at functional medicine and alternative ways of healing?

So I got into functional medicine just through total and utter luck. I say it was not something that I was interested in. My parents are both doctors. I went through with a very traditional mindset. I followed what I was taught in medical school and residency and.

Was very egotistical. Thought I had it all figured out.

My own personal story is that I ended up in rehab. So I was. I had an issue with alcohol and that's what kind of changed my life. And to go a little bit deeper back, I'm a first generation American. My parents are immigrants from Poland. And my whole life I grew up very, I didn't know it, but extremely insecure in my own skin. I never felt good enough. And that I learned to mask with alcohol starting like at a very young age in early high school. And it was always what I thought was a social thing for me. I drank throughout.

High school, college, medical school, and never thought I had an issue because I was successful in everything I was doing. I was passing all my classes, I was doing good. And then when I started residency, I tried to stop drinking and I didn't know how to manage life.

And after a few months of residency and just all types of new stressors as an intern, I ended up taking a six week break to go to an inpatient rehab for professionals. So there was doctors, lawyers, businessmen, all these people there that I was like shocked that these people were called alcoholics and that I was there. But the whole thing, the whole six weeks basically consisted of group therapy all morning and then in the afternoons we would do stuff like acupuncture and yoga and meditation and exercise and all these holistic approaches towards healing our issues. And nothing was really about the alcohol. It was all about peeling back the layers of the onion. Getting into why. Right. And so that obviously changed my life and just made me. I mean, I. I couldn't even identify, like an emotion or feeling. And this was at the age of 27.

And.

I basically just got woken up that I didn't have it all figured out. I wasn't perfect. And so I finished that and I went back to residency. And as a family medicine resident, you do different rotations, so you're focusing on different specialties every few or months. And every attending that's teaching you has a different style. And we had a doctor named Dr. Batra who put all of his patients that were hospitalized on a multivitamin and vitamin D. And we thought it was a joke. Like, we would make fun of him, we would get upset because we had to waste our time writing an order for a multivitamin and vitamin D when we could be writing an order for some opiates or something else. And so this was something that I observed. And one day I kind of just talked to him. It was in the middle of the night on call one night. And I was like, Dr. Batra, why are you weird? You know, what do you. Why are you doing this?

And he's just willing to ask.

Yeah. And he's like, well, I'm studying something called functional medicine. And I was like, what's that? And he kind of explained it to me that it's basically getting at the root cause of disease.

He took me to their website and it looked interesting. So I signed up for like the Applying Functional Medicine conference, which is a week long conference. And within the first hour of being there, I kind of knew my life would never be the same. Everything was taught from like a biochemistry, a physiology and anatomy level. Everything made sense. And I couldn't argue with anything that was being taught. And so at that conference, there was also. I was probably the youngest person there, at least youngest, earliest on in my career because I was still an intern. And.

I was meeting all these doctors who had been practicing for 30, 40 years in all types of fields, whether it was like.

Naturopath or neurosurgeon or ophthalmologist or internal medicine. And I was like, what?

A whole different variety. Wow.

And so everybody was telling me the same thing. They're like, if you found this now, you got to stick with it. This is what you should focus on in your career.

So that's what I did. I continued the training all through residency. Luckily, my residency director was extremely supportive and allowed me to do away rotations. So they let me leave my residency program for months at a time to go study other things. So I studied at, I worked at Dr. Mark Hyman's clinic, I worked at Dr. Deepak Chopra's clinic, and I worked at Dr. Susan Blum's clinic all during residency and.

Just took notes. And I mean, I was learning from everybody, from the receptionist, the nutritionist, the life coach, health coach, the doctors, the nurses, Everybody was teaching me something.

And I finished soaking it in for. That is so awesome because otherwise there isn't a residency for medical doctors that includes any of this. So you really created it, it sounds like.

Yeah, and now I teach other doctors that are trying to figure it out, because you can take all the functional medicine courses, pass your board exams to get certified in functional medicine, and still have no clue the first time you order a stool test or a sibo test or organic acids test or.

Yeah, so I was very lucky to get trained by some really great people. And I try to give that back now. So that's my story of how I ended up in functional medicine. It was kind of just really, I feel like I got lucky.

And now. How long ago was that? How, how. What have you been doing since then?

So I started, my first conference was in 2011. Um, I graduated 2014 from residency. So I've been in private practice since then.

And yeah, so I've been practicing my, basically my whole career in a private practice.

That's awesome. Yeah. So be able to go straight into functional medicine. Like you said, a lot of practitioners who go to learn functional medicine have had their other practice and then they're trying to switch gears and you really have been, you know, able to kind of start there from the beginning. And I think, yeah, that's, that's super exciting. When I was, I mean, it reminds me because when I first learned about, I was a pre med student when I learned about naturopathic medicine and ended up having this thought, you know, this is back in the 1990s, you know, I was like, oh my gosh, is there a type of medicine that integrates nutrition? Because I was looking at medical schools that had no nutrition at the school. You know, I'm like, wait a minute, it's got. Have. This is how I learned about, you know, Basty University and naturopathic medicine way back then. And, and when I made the choice to go from going to a medical standard medical school to going to a naturopathic medical school, it was, it was quite a shock to, you know, My family to other people who knew me in my life because it, you know, especially back then in the 90s, it was, you know, that it was like, what are you doing? So, you know, it's, you're reminding me how, you know, how grateful I am that I learned about it back then and made that choice. And there were medical doctors who were in my naturopathic medical program. They left their practices to come do the Bastyr naturopathic program. And it was really awesome to have them also in class with us just to, you know, saying, here's what, here's what they were learning in the naturopathic degree that they hadn't learned in their medical degree. And so it really is something. And of course, then even graduating from naturopathic medical school with all of that training in, you know, not only the sciences, but also using these more natural or functional approaches to health still, I mean, I did a residency and then it was, I think, you know, years of practicing and continual learning that I, you know, was able to really, like you're saying, learn how to look at which testing to do and how to interpret and really also how to see the big picture. Because I think this is sometimes what gets missed is it's one thing to just kind of replace, right. A standard conventional approach. Like we could say, okay, instead of taking a pain medication, take a natural anti inflammatory, you know, so you can kind of do a swap. But is that really shifting the whole approach to health? And so I'm interested in your perspective on that too.

Yeah, I totally agree. And a comment I'd like to make about what you were saying is that in the beginning too, when I started, I, even though I had this great training and all of that, like, I still like, had no clue what I was doing. Like, you know, I had a clue, but not really. Like I'd never done it before.

And so yeah, you learn as you go.

I learned a lot from my patients. So people that are coming to see a functional medicine doctor have been in the more naturopathic world for much longer than me. So I still learn from my patients. So it's. But especially in that beginning, I mean, I was applying what I learned from the books and from colleagues, but, but also listening to my patients and learning from them. This works. This doesn't work. This, you know, and so it's, it's an always growing process.

It really is. And I think acknowledging that, you know, I suppose that's what we always say it's practicing medicine, right? It's. And, but it's I mean, I think being willing to. And maybe your experience going through the alcohol recovery helped you to be more humble with yourself and therefore humble with your patients. Because I think that's a different kind of doctor doctor who can show up as ourselves and say, hey, I'm not. I don't have any magic information or perfect way of being. I'm just here to help guide you through the same process. Really, we're all in because whether we have degrees as doctors or not, we're still humans with human experiences and learning.

To go through in our lives, too.

I tell my patients all the time, like, I don't know. You know, there are things that I don't know, and people come to me as an expert, and sometimes I'm like, listen, I'm not going to make this up. I'm going to just be honest and say, sometimes I don't know. And yeah, if it wasn't for recovery, I don't think I would have ever been able to do that. I think that I would follow the traditional medical approach, which is to talk down on people, be brief, blunt, rude, egotistical. And my own experience of being extremely humbled, as humbled as one can be, I think definitely helped me as a physician to help people and.

Admit when I don't know.

Yeah, I think more and more people are drawn to that too, because they see that it's more real. And even if you don't have all the answers, to have someone who can just be with you in the not knowing is more helpful for healing sometimes than the alternative. You know, to be with someone who isn't saying what they don't know or isn't willing to be present in the. In the not knowing. I know that I.

My patients seem to respond to that too, and I think I respond to it as a patient with my doctors. You know, when I can find a doctor who's just willing to say, hey, we're on a team here, and I'm going to. I'm showing up with my expertise, but that doesn't mean I know everything, and we just have to learn together as we go. And so I think that's a kind of a new medicine that's developing a new way of doctors being. And I'm glad for you to be really showing us that and talking about it. And I think it's. Maybe we can talk more about how that. How that then can.

Relate to patients and their way of being with themselves. Because if I think I observe so much of the time that when patients feel separate from themselves or angry at their own body for the symptoms they're having. Let's say gut health, for example.

We can get stuck in a process of like, oh, why is this happening to me? And why can't I find a solution? And this kind of like, being stuck in that state can feel horrible and not really lead to the person, to the healing that they're really seeking. Whereas if we can help them to have more compassion for themselves and understand that their digestion is having these symptoms because of the stress and the disconnect that they're experiencing, then we can actually solve gut health by solving things that are not that seem like they have nothing to do with the gut. Right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Talk me through your interest in digestive health a little bit more. How did you get to there?

So.

Hippocrates, 3,000 years ago said, all disease begins in the gut. And he was very correct. And basically, since he said that, everything we've done is screw up our guts, right, with stress and antibiotics and meds and toxins and genetically modified food, all this stuff that we're introducing to our environment is just making our guts worse and worse. So.

From the first lecture in functional medicine, they just kind of tell you over and over again, start with the gut, start with the gut, start with the gut. And so I heard that enough times that that's where I started most of the time. And through years of experience now.

It. It's true. I mean, the majority of people, we do need to start with their gut. And that also works because the first step in starting with the gut is starting with your diet. And so when we start healing the diet, we start healing the gut and disease goes away. And I think the thing that I like to talk about, one of them. Why, right? Like, why is it so important? A lot of people don't understand, and a lot of people think just functional medicine is about the microbiome. And it is, and that's what a lot of my book is about, the microbiome. But to me, arguably, the most important role of the gut is as a barrier. And the gut is a gateway into your body and also a barrier to keep things out. So it is a long tube that runs from the mouth to the anus with openings on both ends. So the inside of your gut tube is actually considered outside of your body. If you swallow something and poop it out, it's never been in your body. And if your gut is inflamed, then most people have probably heard of this term leaky gut, then your barrier is Lost. And then anything that you're exposed to can get into your bloodstream, which is on the other side of the gut. And once it's in your bloodstream, it's in your body, and your immune system is waiting. So your immune system sees this gluten that didn't look like it used to. It sees toxins like lead and mercury. It sees endotoxins from your dysbiotic bacteria. It attacks, and then you have inflammation in the blood. Well, what happens with the blood? It goes everywhere, from our head to our toes. So I could take a hundred of my patients who have Sibo or Candida or a food sensitivity, and they all have different symptoms or their symptoms change.

And one example is the skin. The skin is the best representation of the gut. I usually say the best exterior representation. So I'll have people that come in with eczema or acne issues or psoriasis without any gut symptoms at all. But I'm like, listen, this is probably coming from your gut. And they're like, what?

So it. That I think is. Is, you know, what now makes sense of what Hippocrates said a few thousand years ago. And it kind of makes sense. Like, I mean, just every year our environment is getting more and more toxic and more and more damaging to our gut.

And.

And that is just letting all this inflammation or all this toxins that we're being exposed to into our bodies and in. Not in everybody, but in a lot of people now the body, the immune system is reacting to that stuff.

Yeah, no, it's so true. And. And that mantra, it starts in the gut was. Was what we heard in nature bathing medical school too. And it's. It made me so curious because my original training was as a nutritionist. So I had learned all about digestion as a nutritionist first and then come in and learn this, These. This whole nother perspective on it. Like what you. I love the way you were explaining it, because a lot of times people are like, well, what. What's leaky gut? Where is it leaking to or from? And like you're saying, it's that these intestinal cells are really lined up to as the walls of the intestines, and they have such an important job to make sure that our food gets fully digested, that our nutrients get in, and that the wrong things don't get in.

Exactly.

And these intestinal cells are really there. Our body's making new ones all the time, but they're. They're also very susceptible to various kinds of stresses. And this is why I. I tend to look at things from, like I say, the perspective of stresses, because whether it's an emotional stress, a physical stress, even we know from someone who goes through surgery or chemicals like you mentioned pesticides or certain foods that are stressed, like gluten, they damage these intestinal cells, and then our body can have a harder time keeping up with this. Like you said, the barrier, the walls of the intestines. And I always really like to emphasize, like you did, that a lot of times people don't have any digestive symptoms. I mean, when I've been. I've been researching gluten for the past 20 years and some of the, you know, original studies that connect it, because I. What. I also am looking at the nervous system and the neurotransmitters, and I was seeing that, and I've always been doing food sensitivity testing. We can talk more about that since. Since I was. Since, you know, late 1990s when I was in nature pathetic medical school. And so I was measuring for food sensitivities and seeing. Because the food sensitivities to me are an indication of leaky gut. If. If there's. If the immune system's reacting to the food you're eating, that's the definition of leaky gut. The foods are leaking through. And as you said, the immune system's ready to. To try to protect you and create an inflammatory response. So if you're reacting to the food you're eating, it means there's some leaky gut. And so I kept seeing food sensitivities and leaky gut. And then at the same time, I was looking at cortisol levels and neurotransmitter levels, and I'm like, wait a minute. There's a correlation here. These aren't just happening separately. It's that.

There'S a communication happening. And what's happening with the food sensitivities is a stress on the body and disrupting even further and likely the effect of stress on cortisol and adrenaline is causing the leaky gut. So it becomes this vicious cycle of stress causing digestive issues and the digestive issues causing more stress in the body. And that's what I've written about in my books. And to see that a lot of times people don't have any digestive symptoms. You might be thinking, so many patients probably like yours, too, where they're like, oh, my digestion is totally fine. I have a bowel movement every day. I never have heartburn. I feel great, but I have anxiety or migraines. Or sleep issues or skin rashes or joint pains or autoimmunity or some other way that it's showing up in the body. And to really recognize and encourage people to not dismiss the possibility of digestive issues or leaky gut just because your digestion feels okay. But on the other hand, many people come in with say, chronic heartburn or bloating or maybe something even mild, like relatively mild versus inflammatory bowel disease, when it really gets blown out of inflammation in the digestive tract. And that can happen that way too. So being able to hold all space for all those variable ways it can show up. Right. For you, it's so individual how it's going to show up in your body. But when it comes down to it, it's the same core principles that we're talking about.

Yeah, I totally agree.

General theory. Because people are like, well, when did this start? How did this start? And you know, I'm working with people in their 20s, 30s, 50s, 60s, 80s, you know, and doesn't all ages. And this is not everybody. But for the majority of people that come through my office, it starts as trauma. And my definition of trauma is trauma is anything less than nurturing. And most people think of trauma as like, you know, war or violence and. But they don't think of what they've been through as trauma. And I know this from my own story because I started in treatment and they were like, you have trauma? And I was like, screw you guys.

I do not looking at it that way.

Yeah, I was like my. Yeah, my parents, you know, they worked all the time and they had nothing. When they moved here, they didn't even speak English, but they did everything for me. So you telling me I have trauma? Come on, like. No, but my trauma was just not feeling good enough and not feeling like I fit in. And for. It could be as simple as a child coming home from school and wanting to talk about their day at school. But mom's working, dad's cooking, and there's no one's paying attention. So then the thought process is, I'm not good enough. Right. Well, that activates the sympathetic nervous system, right? Which is shuts down our gut. So the other, besides like the thinking about the gut is outside of the body, the inside of the gut, outside of the body. The other thing that I like to talk about the most is the gut brain connection. And that your. That tube, that gut tube is surrounded by its own nervous system called the enteric nervous system. It has over 200 million neurons in it, more than your brain does. And that nervous system is connected to your brain by your vagus nerve. So your vagus nerve sends signals from your gut to your brain, and your brain sends signals to your gut. Well, your vagus nerve works on your autonomic nervous system. Your automatic nervous system happens in your subconscious. You don't. You're not aware of it. But that could either be sympathetic or parasympathetic. Sympathetic is fight or flight. Parasympathetic is rest and digest. So now that I live in Montana, the analogy I like to use is if you're hiking out in the mountains and you see a grizzly bear, your sympathetic response is activated. The blood goes to your brain and muscles, so you can survive. If you do survive and you're sitting by the campfire at the end of the night, that's when you're in rest and digest, right? And people nowadays, we're living as if we're running from a bear 24, 7, right? We wake up and we check. The first thing we do is check our phone. And I do that too. And emails, texts, news, terrorist attacks, all this, you know, social media, breaking news. And right away, the sympathetic nervous system is activated. And then we're. We're eating breakfast, but we're responding to emails or texts or making phone calls. And we're sending a signal from our brain to our gut that's saying, do not digest the food. And your gut is feeling this food in its. In its system, and it's like, well, I need to digest this, but the brain's telling me not to. And when you, when you send those signals, those sympathetic signals down your nervous. Your vagus nerve, you stop your body from producing acid. If you don't produce stomach acid. You don't digest protein. You don't get vitamins and minerals out of your food. You don't activate your pancreatic enzymes, which are released in your small intestine. You shut down your microbiome. So I tell my patients, you can see how stressed out someone is based on their stool analysis, there's specific probiotics that are suppressed. So I tell people like, you can't run from me, because most people that find it, yeah, yeah, I'll find it. And, but this is. I mean, I mean, I've seen so many patients that be willing to follow the strictest diet, order all the testing, take all the supplements, do all the exercise, meditation. But, like, when I ask them to work on their mental, emotional, spiritual health, that's when they're like, no, you're crazy. I'm not the one that has a problem.

And so that it's a struggle to get people. And I get it because, I mean, I spent a lot of years in denial and I went kicking and screaming. So.

But that, so that, that's why, right? That's why, like my book is all about mental, emotional and spiritual health related to the gut. I mean, it's also about sibo and dysbiosis and food sensitivities and food and all this stuff. But Candida.

But if you are sending those signals from your brain to your gut, you'll, your gut will never heal. It doesn't matter if you follow the strictest diet, you take all the right supplements, do all the right tests, you're not going to heal.

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It'S such a good point. And sometimes people are, are willing to, right, like to be like, okay, I'm, I mean, I mean, believe me, I can hear what you're saying because you know, I've, I can see that in myself. You know, I had migraines for many years and I would say, okay, I'm going to. I was gluten free, dairy free. I was, I had fructose intolerance. I'm avoiding all the fodmaps. I was, you know, you name it. And following the strictest diet and doing all the things, you know, we can, follow all the list of things, take all the right supplements. And yet like you're saying, if we're not really willing to look at ourselves. And I think sometimes people get weirded out just by the words we use. Like say, we say mental, emotional, spiritual. People go, what is that? What does that mean it sounds too out there? And I think even if you and I can just kind of like connect with. What does that really mean? I mean, I think for me it means knowing yourself more and being more in connection with yourself and more in loving support of yourself can. Can be at least the beginning of it. Because then I'm looking at like you're describing the trauma that you identified from your childhood and being willing to. To acknowledge that again. We're. We're human and we're going to have stress exposures. Now, sometimes it's tempting to just dismiss those stresses. Like, that was just my childhood, or that's just what we all deal with. And we try to dismiss it, but does dismissing it really help us any? Because if we dismiss it, then we're not really giving ourselves the support. We're denying ourselves the support that we need as humans. I would say the more we can go, okay, yes, I. We are trying to blame anyone. We are not trying to be, you know, we are not trying to be mad at our parents, for example, for what they. The effort they put in. We are trying to say, hey, this was my experience, and I am going to be in loving support of myself so I can. Can heal from that and by healing our past, be able to help our bodies stay healthier going forward.

Yeah, no, I love the way you say it. And I mean, I use the terms mental, emotional, spiritual health, because I don't know. As a traditionally trained doctor, we're taught depression, anxiety, ptsd. And I found that even those words can make people shut down even more. Right. So it's. I. Then the word stress, people are like, I don't have stress. And I'm like. So I'm like, constantly searching for what's the right way to present this. Right.

Me too. Me too. Because we want to help. We want to be able to help people and try to find the language that's going to help them kind of soften all of those. Those shields and all of the guards and say, okay, it's. This is not something that's going to, you know, be hurting you. This is something actually, if we kind of can soften and be present with, it could actually help you.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it. But at this, it's extremely painful. Right. And it, It's. It's so I get why people don't want to do it. I've been there. And it. It's a lot more difficult than just taking supplements or medications or avoiding dairy.

You mean to face some of the things you've been through. Yeah.

Yeah. So, but it's, I've just kind of seen it over and over that it's, it's the most important piece. Yeah.

The thing we tend to resist the most is the. Sometimes the most important. Right.

So we can just laugh at ourselves as, again, as humans just be like. Yep. I mean, that's the thing is like we try to find a lot of ways to avoid and avoid and avoid. And of course there's a careful balance where, you know, it's not about just completely letting down all of your guard and giving up either. It's how to learn how to be.

Loving and open, but also protecting your energy and your space and you're protecting your self care and your boundaries at the same time. So it's a, I think it can be a relearning process. Of course, we don't learn this in elementary school and usually not from our parents either because they were never taught. So it's, it's learning, you know, okay, how do you, how can you be, you know, open, Open and compassionate and loving, but at the same time.

Have boundaries to protect you and have tools you can go to, to protect you, but the protection doesn't have to stop you from getting the help you need.

Something you said really triggered something that I've really had to work on and I've had a lot of patients have to deal with is control. Right. And they kept telling me, you got to let go of control. You got to let go of control. And I have this reminder still in my phone from 10 years ago that every day at 3 o' clock tells me to let go of control. And I love to be in control.

So it's like type A personality or.

Just it's a gift and a curse. Right. Because it's made me very successful in my career and I've never given up and I keep working and I'm constantly pushing to.

You know, get to where I want to be, but controlling. Like, my recovery was an absolute disaster. Like, I can't control it. I have to ask for help. And the big thing I struggle with is like when they told me that I'm like, so you just want me to not care about anything? And they're like, well, no. And so the way that I've learned to do it is, is if I have a stressful situation to look at which things are in my control and which things are not, and have I done everything I can towards that goal and if I have, I have to let it go. I mean, once I've done whatever I can do towards a goal. That's it. So spending the next six months stressing about it, every day thinking about it, is it going to happen? Is it not going to happen? I mean, I've been down that road and I can still go back down that road pretty easy, but I have to kind of like, catch myself and be like, okay, what, what have I done? You know, is there anything else I can do? If not, then it's just, you know, give it to God, if you believe in a God.

And amazingly, sometimes when we kind of let go, so to speak, all of a sudden the thing we were trying to resolve just resolves. It's like that, you know, when we hold on tight, it, you can almost sense that things get stuck. And then we just kind of go, okay, I let it go to whatever that means, you know, and then all of a sudden, then it just kind of, the tangle unravels and it's, it solves itself. It's amazing how that works sometimes. And, but I love how you're, you know, really making this connection to gut health because it's something that I've really, you know, tried to also bring attention to. And it's.

It'S not something that.

We necessarily think about automatically. I mean, it's funny because we know that stomach ulcers are highly associated with stress. We talk about butterflies in our stomach or irritable bowel syndrome we know is associated with stress. We can see this connection even in medicine. But it takes a minute sometimes to really be like, oh, is what I'm experiencing related to my, like, you're talking about that stress response when we're in that sympathetic survival mode because of life, you know, and sometimes we're so stuck in our lives that it's hard to imagine it any different way. Right? We're like, like you talked about, we're just trying to get up and get our kids to school and get to work and get some food and get back, get to bed and to make it through the next day. And it's just round and round and round and it'. Sometimes we, it's hard to even find a chance to stand back enough and realize, oh my gosh, is it even possible for this to look differently or for me to even go through these same steps in my day, but in not as a stressed out way so that I can actually. And so sometimes let's talk about some of the things people might start with. I mean, I was thinking, like, sometimes now I'm suggesting, just trying to make sure that you get to create space in your schedule for eating. You know, so if it's, if it's your lunch, if it's your dinner, to be like, hey, I'm going to actually put this in my schedule, I'm going to communicate with other people in my life. This is when we're eating. I'm going to sit down at the table and just focus on breathing to turn on the vagal nerve and this parasympathetic nervous system and chewing and enjoying the food. Right. It's just sometimes it can be amazing how much just doing that can solve all kinds of digestive issues without doing anything else. Right?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

To me, like this, the, of the mental, emotional, spiritual health, the spiritual part to me is a connection to the present moment. Right. There's a philosopher a few thousand years ago that said anxiety is worrying about the future, depression is worrying about the past. So what's the treatment is the present moment.

Yes.

And so it, it's so incredibly difficult in our environment with our social media and our email and our text and all of that. Like we're constantly, all over the place. But I, in my experience, so many things can be healed just by staying in the present moment.

Yeah.

And it's, but it's, it's a difficult, difficult feat.

But yeah, there's so, I mean there's a lot of like quote unquote simple things like making time to eat that, you know, make a huge difference. And so I'm always encouraging people to explore different, you know, modalities. And the big thing of what I like to talk about, mental, emotional, spiritual health, what works for me might not work for you. Right. I, I might love my therapist. You might see them and be like, this person sucks. I don't, I don't not getting anything. I need to exercise. A lot of people might not want to ex or different exercise.

Meditation. There's so many different types of meditation. So it's like finding which one works for you. And just because like your favorite social media celebrity does this type or this diet doesn't mean that that's necessarily the right one for you. And so it's a journey and it's something that I learned is that I'm very much a checklist person. So when I have goals, I write them down and I check them off. And I did that with my recovery and that, that doesn't work.

So to me, it's a everyday decision, like I have to wake up and, and be like, today I'm going to focus on my mental Emotional, spiritual health. And it's great because I can have a bad day and then just start over the next day.

But it's also. It's, you know, it's a. I think it's a lifelong journey.

Mm, totally. It's in realizing, like you say. I mean, and I think that's even just the message of being in the present moment, is being even in the present day. You know, like, okay, we get to. We get to create ourselves new really every moment, every day. And how do we want to relate to our experience and how we want to relate to ourselves? And. And we can in some ways almost do little experiments every day. Hey, I'm going to just make this little tweak. Let me see what that's like. Okay, now, tomorrow, let me try this little thing differently and see how. And then little by little, you start to gather information that's unique to you. What is. Like, you're saying, it's very individualized. What are the. What are the tools that. And I find a lot of times people kind of go to them automatically. Like, you might. It might be this. Your. What you might call your hobby or the thing you go to do when you're. When you just need some alone time, whatever that is. If it's. Sometimes it's just getting to take a shower, a nice long shower, or a walk, or spend time with your pets or, you know, what are the thing that you. Maybe it's to draw or to sing or to sew or to garden. You know, like those things where you just get to not think about anything else and just be with yourself and let your mind. Sometimes it's just a matter of your mind just needed to process whatever thoughts it needs to process until you kind of find yourself in your center again. And. And those. Those, you know, just allowing ourselves to have that and. And. And to not try to save it up for vacation. So many times I. I laugh with patients when, you know, they're like, okay, I'm going to do that when I have a week vacation. And then inevitably, like, there's a flood and they never get to do their vacation. So it's like, no, these are. What can we do each day to just forgive ourselves and let ourselves be imperfect and make mistakes and learn and learn together. You know, to be like, hey, what did you figure out that helps you? And what did you figure out? And that's why you and I are always learning from our patients, because it's, you know, we get to see what they're trying and what works, or didn't work for them.

Yeah, absolutely.

And of course, some of the testing that we alluded to can be helpful because to me, it's like sometimes testing, it just gives you something on paper that you can visually see. And I think sometimes we need that as humans to be able to like, you know, because it's one. Yes, we can do food like an elimination diet and kind of guess what the most common food sensitivities are? You can do that. And that's kind of another experiment, right? Like, say, okay, I'm gonna spend three weeks and avoid certain foods and see how I feel without them and see how I feel when I reintroduce them. And again, it's a learning process which can be very helpful for people to just get that experience. But sometimes, sometimes with my experience with food elimination diets is sometimes it's. It's a big commitment. It's a long period of time, and sometimes it gets confusing. Was it, was it this food I reintroduced there? Was it that food I reintroduced? And so then to me, sometimes it's. It's just at a certain point you just want to do a really, you want, you got to get a really good, accurate food sensitivity panel. But you can do a food sensitivity panel that's going to show you, here's where your immune system's responding. Because sometimes it's. Otherwise we kind of outthink it, right? We're like, oh, but that piece of cake looks really good. I'm just going to eat it anyway. You know, we need a piece of paper that says gluten is causing inflammation, you know, and now make a different choice based on that. Anyway, I'm giving you, as you can tell, I love to talk about all this.

So that, that's definitely one area where we have similarities and differences. I'm very objective, so I like to run tests. And with the gut, I like stool testing, your urine testing with organic acid test. And then like, the most common condition I treat is Sibo. And that's a two hour breath test.

Yes.

And I fully. I love testing because it does. I mean, it shows people like, hey, you do have a candida overgrowth, or you do have sibo, or you do have dysbiosis. Because a lot of times I can review someone's history with them and be like, okay, you definitely have low stomach acid. And then they test themselves and they don't. I'm like, that's. I tell people, I'm like, luckily I don't have to guess. Like, we can test for this stuff.

Oh, my Gosh. And these, these stool tests, I mean, now, I mean, in years past, it wasn't, it wasn't even accurate, helpful information. But now we have DNA analysis, we can see exactly who's living in your large intestine. And as you mentioned, with the breath test, we can see if there's bacterial overgrowth in it. Again, it helps, I think, for the patient because then they know what they're dealing with. And it helps for us because then we can give specific suggestions that are much more likely to help instead of just guessing and being like, well, let's try some general probiotic. But that's not going to help if, if you have bacterial overgrowth. So it's like being able to test and see, hey, here's what it is. Let's address that. We can be so much more successful. I agree with you with our protocols that way.

The, the one thing that I don't do is that. So I don't do food sensitivity testing. Okay, I totally agree with you about the leaky gut portion of it. And so my experience, I mean, I've had a lot of patients that have done that testing before meeting with me. And my experience is that usually it's a log of the main things that they've been eating over the last few months.

So I always say it's like the best test for leaky gut. And it is.

It is the best test for leaky gut. Yeah, I agree with you.

I'm very pro elimination diet, 21 days with a reintroduction of one food every three days. Basically.

That'S based on the half lives, right? IgG antibodies. When we have sensitivities of a half life of about 21 days. So if you avoid, like, let's say I had a bagel today and I avoid gluten for 21 days, my immune response, let's say it was 100 today, it'll drop to 50, and then I eat it again and the immune system remembers. It is. Yeah, it is way more difficult. So I've actually always said that I would use a food sensitivity test for somebody that, like, just refuses to do an elimination diet. Yeah, those people have either not come back to me or they end up doing the elimination diet. So I've actually never ordered a sensitivity panel. And I, a lot of times, too, it's a cost. Thing is, you know, these functional medicine tests, the cost can add up. So looking at it from a cost perspective, I'd rather have you do a stool test, a SIBO test, an organic acid test, and an elimination diet and then we can get more info. I mean, if cost is not a concern, which is not the majority of my patients.

Then I would order a sensitivity panel. But overall, my strategy has been to use elimination diets.

No, I think that, believe me, in naturopathic medical school, that's what I was. I was trained also by Dr. Alan Gaby, who's really kind of was one of the original, who really was training us about using an elimination diet. And my stress remedy program is essentially an elimination diet, having people do 21 days of eliminating the most likely food sensitivities. And exactly. The reason you're stating is, like, if we say, hey, let's start with the most common food sensitivities so we can drop the inflammation, and in the meantime, you're starting to heal the gut, but you're also giving your body a break. And when you reintroduce the foods, sometimes you can catch a reaction. I mean, based on the food elimination diet, I figured out that I was sensitive to soy. This is, you know, 25 years ago. And so I honor and respect it. And I think it is definitely a well established approach to identifying food sensitivities, which are, of course, very different than a food allergy. You know, food allergy most people think of first, and that's when someone, say, has an anaphylactic reaction to peanuts or shrimp, and they're going to know that, or they can go to an allergist to be tested for that. But with these food sensitivities, they're delayed and they're sneaky. And sometimes we, we don't realize we're reacting to these foods unless we, unless we start to do some investigating. And so I agree with you. The food elimination diet is a, can be a really good place to begin. And if, if a. At a certain point, a person is still stuck and still having symptoms or still needing more specifics or like I said, needing something on paper. Now, my experience, because I've reviewed all different food sensitivity tests for 25 years, and there's many of them that are not very helpful, a lot of times patients will come in with these test results, and I'll say, this test, it's even hard for me to interpret because of the way they do the test and also sometimes the way they report the findings, it's kind of like a vague jumble of foods. And so I agree with you. If you're doing just any old food panel and you get the results back and you're like, what am I supposed to do with this? Then that's unfortunate because now it's not really helping you.

I have, through the process, identified a lab that gives me very clear information for patients. And to me, that means information that I can interpret and be able to help a patient know if there's a sneaky food that they didn't identify already. And also in terms of the patient implementing it and seeing positive outcomes. So to me, then I'm looking at test results that are helpful because it's actually helping the patient to feel better. But this lab that I work with is a private lab that's not as well known.

So I just like people to know that if you tried an elimination diet and you're really getting stuck and you feel like maybe there's something missing, it. There are some tests, but you have to be careful because you're right, you could be just spending money on food tests and it's just giving you vague information that's not really helping you solve this. And ultimately, I always tell my patients it's not about just avoiding all these foods. You know, we're not just trying to give you a list of 20 foods to avoid or even 10 foods to avoid. It's so we're looking at these food results and the food elimination diet to say to us, is there leaky gut? How severe is it? Because to me, leaky gut is not just yes or no. Leaky gut is mild, moderate, or severe. And I'd rather know if a patient has moderate or severe leaky gut, because that's going to change my treatment. I'm going to be helping them in a different way than maybe someone who has mild leaky gut. And so to me, it's more a matter of we need to be careful about not just restricting foods randomly and long term, it's how do we help the gut heal so that you can get back to eating at least some of these foods because you don't want it. It doesn't work for you to have a highly restricted diet either. That's also a stress to your body.

That's definitely something that I write about in my book. And the most, I mean, chapter one of my book is basically just why you should stay off the Internet when it comes to your health. And I think it's pretty funny, and most people have told me it's pretty funny. But I did an experiment of Googling abdominal pain and all the different ways that it took me in a matter of minutes. But what I've seen over and over is people in our patients, in our world are people that are falling towards a more alternative path on way too restrictive of diets.

The biggest one I've seen is Candida. Patients that assume they have Candida or have Candida. And there's just been a lot written, I think, online, that there's no way to heal Candida without the perfect diet. Well.

Even if you're following the perfect diet, but it stresses you out. Like you are struggling to decide what to eat, how to eat, how much to eat. That diet's going to do more harm than good.

I so agree.

Elevates your cortisol. Cortisol suppresses your immune system. Cortisol increases sugar. What does Candida love? A suppressed immune system and sugar. Right. So you could be following the perfect Candida diet, but if you're stressed out over it, you're doing more harm than good. So I do agree in. I mean, typically, if I have someone do an elimination diet and they find a sensitivity, we're also trying to work on their gut, and then we try that food again in six months and see is it now tolerable? Because the food sensitivities can change. Right. What you are sensitive to now might not be the same five years from now. What you were sensitive before might be you are not any longer. So I definitely, totally agree that there's just a lot I don't believe in too restrictive of diets. I've even told people, I'm like, I'd rather have you eating at McDonald's every day than, like, going nuts trying to find the perfect, you know, low fodmap meal. And they usually think I'm nuts, But that's just my experience.

Well, and that's the challenge of it. I mean, I think that's really what we've been talking about all along, is trying to just find this middle place where we can be finding the middle between being all this stress and having all the negative symptoms of that versus if we just swing the pendulum over here and we end up restricting our diet too much and restricting ourselves too much. It's just a different. It's still stress. It's just the other end of the pendulum swing. And we how to find this middle where we go, okay, what are the foods that are being the most inflammatory that are really working against you at this moment in time? Let's see if we can reduce those. While we work on healing your gut. How do we help your vagal nerves start communicating better again? How do we help address, say, overgrowing bacteria or Candida or any other factors that we identify so that we can get your digestion back to healthy because then your intestinal barrier is going to be protecting you and you're not going to be reacting to these foods anymore. And really, it means that our optimal outcome is for you to get back to health and then be resilient, be able to continue with that healthy digestion and hopefully not end up back in this stressed out digestion place again.

Totally agree.

Mm. Well, it's been so great to talk with you. Thank you so much. I. I appreciate it. And I. I feel like these are really important, you know, areas of this healing path to touch on and because, yes, like you're talking about, sometimes people are in a long time trying to solve these things. Sibo and Candida and so on. And. And sometimes it's these new. It's in the nuances that actually creates the most healing.

Yeah, I agree.

Well, thank you so much. And I want to make sure everybody knows you know where to find you. Your website is under Dr. Kaz, which is the short version of your last name, doc-k o z.com and I said, looks like on Facebook and Instagram, same thing. Right, Dr. Kaz. And your book Unfunc youk Gut is available everybody, everywhere. Someone would think of finding a book.

Yeah. And I always say it's un funk with a C. Oh, there you go. At my practice, we had a slogan that said we put the func in functional medicine.

Oh, I see. F u n C like functional instead of F u n K. I love it. Very cute. I love how you bring this humor into it because again, it just lets us all kind of let down a little bit and be like, okay, let's just not be so serious all the time. Let's just have a little fun and get to the healing here.

Exactly.

Well, thanks again for joining me and I look forward to staying in touch with you.

Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much.

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