How To Feed Your Gut

Coming up on this mini episode of.

The Doctor's Pharmacy Podcast. Your brain can communicate anxiety and stress.

To your gut microbiome. These days, everyone is talking about the gut microbiome and for a good reason. Our gut bacteria regulate many of our bodily functions from creating vitamins to controlling our immune system, our brain function and of course our metabolism and weight. They are critical to our long-term health. Dr. Hyman recently sat down with his colleagues at the Ultra Wellness Center, Doctors Todd LePine, George Papachristou and Elizabeth Boham to to take a deeper look at how the gut microbiome plays such a vital role in the health of our entire body.

Let's 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 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. 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. So, you've got this whole ecosystem 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 some 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 the this acromania, mucinophilia. that's a specific bacteria that is in the body and that you wanna have 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 Grow 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've done give probiotics and that'll fix it. But you're giving 50 billion is a lot, right? But you have 100 trillion bacteria. So it's like a drop in the ocean. Exactly. 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 for 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 Akkermansia, 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.

And the polyphenols. The colorful dark rainbow color of chemicals that are in plant foods. Certain plant foods have more of them.

Like the berries and so forth.

Absolutely. 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 acid thing that a lot of even physicians aren't even aware of is that most of your immune system is in your gut. Yeah. 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. 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 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 both prebiotics and probiotics to clean up the gut, got her completely off of gluten, and lo and behold, guess what? Her multiple sclerosis went away. Amazing. 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. Aromatic disease. Exactly, because the body will manifest it in only certain inflammatory pathways. And then, 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.

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 personalized medicine and personalized health, which is a radically new way of thinking. And we just lump everybody with the same symptoms into the same categories, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cause. And I always say, just 'cause 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 to look at some of these things. So the microbiome is this ecosystem of bugs in our gut. It's trillions of bacteria. It outnumbers our cells by 10 to 1 and outnumbers our DNA by 100 to 1. And it has been linked everything from autoimmune disease to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to obesity to autism to Alzheimer's. I mean, the list goes on and on.

Let's talk about the gut in connection to some of these diseases. What we know about the microbiome is those bacteria actually train our immune system. They're very closely related to our immune system. And they will, our immune system identifies antigenic material from the bacteria and it, a bacteria is able to tell the immune system, here's what you need to be worried about, here's what you don't need to be worried about. And so when we alter that gut immunity, we can create inflammation and we create inflammation, we begin to break down that membrane that's responsible for opening and closing and letting good compounds and good nutrients in and keeping the bad guys out. When that breaks down, we have leaky gut. And now all of a sudden, our immune system starts to see proteins that have not been completely processed down to the peptide level that they're accustomed to, and they start making antibodies against commonly eaten foods. So stress is probably the start of all disease. It impacts everything from your hormones in your own body, but stress actually creates some neurochemical changes in your brain. and there's a communication between your brain and your gut microbiome.

And your gut, it's called the second brain.

It's the second brain. Well, some people think the gut was the first brain. Maybe. Right. You know, and that our brain only developed once mitochondria, we're starting to make energy for us, and then we're able to convert, use that energy to make a second brain that allowed us to reason and so forth. However, once you have that gut-brain connection, stress can actually, you know, we have this vagus nerve. It's a superhighway from the gut to the brain.

And more, there's actually- It's the relaxation nerve.

It's the relaxation nerve. And your brain can communicate anxiety and stress to your gut microbiome and actually change the makeup of your gut microbiome.

And your nervous system. And your nervous system. And it literally paralyzes, stress hormones literally paralyze your gut. Your sympathetic nervous system and your fight or flight, you don't want to be digesting your food when you're running from a tiger.

You want your gut to shut down so you don't have to poop or do anything else. So your gut shuts down. And that's what happens. We live in a state of chronic stress.

And our gut's not working.

And anybody who's kind of gone through this whole cancer thing or just gotten a disease or, you know, gotten a diagnosis that sort of throws you back, you're like, why would this happen to me? I really wanted to ask that question, why? 'Cause I didn't, you know, I didn't want it to happen again and I wanted to recover from it and I wanted to help my patients get better and not, you know, kind of figure this whole thing out. And functional medicine really helped me put all those pieces together. So just learning functional medicine helped me figure out, okay, you know, okay, maybe I was eating well and exercising, not, you know, for some people that's a really important area that we focus on in terms of prevention of cancer, but for me, we needed to, I needed to focus on, you know, managing my stress better, right? Or helping my body detoxify.

And that's the beauty of functional medicine. And that's what you said for yourself, you figured out your gut was a mess. you were detoxifying, your genetics were off, so how did you fix that?

So when I'm working with somebody who's had cancer or any disease, but let's look at breast cancer for here, you know, when you take that functional medicine approach, you want to look at all aspects of their health to personalize their treatment plan for them.

So this is powerful. So what you're saying is someone gets diagnosed with cancer, you just don't say, well, come back every six months or a year for a scan. You go, Wait a minute, there's a lot of stuff that can be addressed. Your diet, hormones and insulin resistance, looking at hormone metabolism, which is something that most doctors don't look at. We'll get into that in a minute. Looking at toxins, looking at your gut microbiome, looking at your nutrient status. These are all things we test here at the Ultra Wellness Center. Even at Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Tara Singh, who's the head of the genomic personalized medicine program there, is very focused on the microbiome of the gut. and how changes in that lead to breast cancer.

Right.

So tell us about that connection.

Well, you know, so there's this enzyme in the digestive system called beta-glucuronidase. So if you have too much of this one enzyme, we know that that ends up leading to higher levels of estrogen in the body. And we know that estrogen is associated with breast cancer, whether it's causing breast cancer or just causing breast cancer to grow. We know that when estrogen levels are high in the body, that can cause more breast cancer. So it's interesting to note that when there's a shift in the microbiome, there is a shift in this one enzyme, beta-glucuronidase, and then that can cause that uncoupling allowing that estrogen, as opposed to just getting released and pooped out, it gets reabsorbed into the body, resulting in higher levels of estrogen in the body.

Basically, the liver packages up the estrogen, sends it down into the poop, and it's supposed to just go out, but this bacteria sort of unwraps it from its package, and then it's free and.

It can get reabsorbed in the body.

And then you end up with these chronically high levels.

Yes, there's some types of estrogens that are healthier for us and other types that are more concerning. And we can influence estrogen metabolism with a bunch of phytonutrients, which is really, I mean, part of why that metabolism occurs. There's some, of course, genetic components, but you can influence that based on some foods. So broccoli is this amazing food like your cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale. They have some phytonutrients like glucosinolates which gets converted into sulforaphane in your digestive system.

And that by the way is like a patented thing that's used by John Hopkins to treat breast cancer, which is a broccoli pill basically.

Yeah, and that can help with influencing metabolism of estrogen.

The specific makeup of bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses that create the gut microbiome are unique to each person. This is one of the many reasons why functional medicine treats the individual and not just the symptoms when it comes to managing illness and creating health. If you'd like to learn more about the functional medicine approach or how to become a patient at the Ultra Wellness Center, please visit www.UltraWellnessCenter.com that's UltraWellnessCenter.com Thank you for tuning in to this mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Until next time. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make.

Changes, especially when it comes to your health. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad-free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.