Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. Oh boy. Okay, where to begin? First of all, you're going to want to be going on a good long walk for this podcast. Hopefully you're doing that, or you're lifting weights, you're doing something moving and are good for yourself. And we're going to reinforce all the good things you can do for yourself. And I promise you that we're going to share my guest's 5 pillars that you can use to actually heal your gut, save your brain. But you're gonna realize really quickly, at least I did, that 3 out of 5 of these are like no sweat, don't even raise a finger. You could be changing your thoughts about these things immediately. So first of all, I want you to know you've got number 4 knocked out of the park. Because you're here, you're in our Flipping 50 community. Now, the further in you are, hopefully the better. But finding community— I just gave you a spoiler alert, that was number 4. But there are 4 others, and you don't want to miss these. So let's dive in. My guest today is a returning guest and favorite, Dr. Partha Nandy. He is the creator and host of the internationally syndicated medical lifestyle television show Ask Dr. Nandy. Dr. Nandy is the chief health editor at WZYZ ABC Detroit, a practicing physician and a renowned international speaker. His appearances include TEDx college commencements, numerous charity functions, and premier medical meetings such as Digestive Disease Week. Dr. Nadez delivered keynote speeches for esteemed organizations like Medtronic, Fatum Pharmaceuticals, and Eli Lilly, showcasing his expertise and passion for advancing medical knowledge and patient care. He's partnered with the Ministry of Health in Jamaica and India and collaborated with the World Health organization. Dr. Nadi delivers passionate and inspiring talks to diverse audiences and continues to travel to international conferences and symposia, meeting with global health leaders on his quest to improve healthcare quality, access, and advocacy. Dr. Nadi's mission to be your own health hero is at the heart of his work, and he empowers individuals worldwide to take charge of their health. His latest book, Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain, published by Mayo Clinic Press, delves into the crucial connection between your gut health and cognitive function, offering practical advice and insights drawn from his extensive medical expertise and personal experiences. And already I'm sure you have some smidgen of an idea about the gold that you're about to hear. So tune in. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal to to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman, and it's not just about you but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause-and-beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone-balancing fitness and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. Welcome to you, Dr. Partha Nande. Thanks so much for being here.

Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Every single listener on my podcast, I would bet my hat on it, is curious about how to heal their gut, not just the connection between their brain, But you know, gut issues are really pretty prominent for midlife women if they admit it. And that is the second part. A lot of times I'll get to be working with a client or a group of people and asking them questions, oddly, that their other trainers or fitness instructors have never asked them before. And there's no connection there for them. So super glad we're unpacking this. But first, before we go there, I want to know what inspired you. To write Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain?

You know, it's a good question. What happened to me, I'll go back a little bit. When I was a little child, 6 years old, I had a disease called rheumatic heart disease and nearly took my life, Debra. And that inspired me eventually to become a physician because the doctor who was there saved my life. And during that process, my dad was always there. My dad was a very talented person and he was, you know, needed and wanted at all times. But when it came to my health, he stopped everything and was there. And he really taught me what you're supposed to do. So he, throughout my life, was my health hero. He was my first hero. I'll give you a little perspective about my dad. You know, if you ever drive down the road and it's night and you see those little reflective, you know, tape that's on the side of the road, he made that. And it was his invention. If you have runways that are bombed, He had a polymer that you could pour in and you'd have a runway in 25 minutes. So he was a brilliant man and just amazing. He knew how to cook, he knew how to do everything. He was a Renaissance guy. And then fast forward, I'm a practicing doc and doing well and he's doing well. Healthy guy, never hospitalized. Then one day suddenly he has a stroke and not just any stroke, but a devastating stroke that really robbed the last decade of his life. Couldn't play with his grandkids. So he couldn't do the things that he enjoyed, couldn't impart his wisdom. My dad was the kind of guy, Deb, that when my mom and he would go on a cruise, within an hour or two, there's a line of people, he was reading their palms. And this guy is just, he had all those gifts that he could have shared with people. And in the last decade of his life, it was taken away. And at the time I thought I was a good doctor. I thought I was, I knew what I was doing, but I said, I'm missing something here because he should not have had this devastating stroke, right? And then they did the whole massive workup. Everything was negative. And they said, well, this happens sometimes. So, you know, and then he eventually passed from the stroke a decade later. And I kept thinking to myself, there's gotta be something that we could have done that we could do so that at least others don't face the same fate that my dad did. And that the family like myself and my mom, my sister, didn't have to go through, and my wife as well, go through what we did. So at the time when he had the stroke, I really didn't have much to offer. But now, and you may know I'm a gastroenterologist, so I look at this all the time, and now we have the evidence to show that the gut is intimately related to the brain. So I wanna write a book, and I partnered with the Mayo Clinic Press to write a book that talks to people and says, you know, maybe you can do something, not when you're having symptoms. Of course you can try to help when you're having symptoms, but maybe before. Maybe decades before to prevent the fate that my dad had and that robbed him of his life. So that was my inspiration. I wanted folks to be able to prevent one of the most devastating things that they have. My patients almost fear losing their mind more than losing their life.

Yeah.

'Cause people, 'cause if you don't have a heart attack, you don't have cancer, what do you worry about? And you worry about losing your mind. Every 3 seconds, Someone is diagnosed with dementia every 6 seconds.

Yeah.

Someone's diagnosed with Alzheimer's and every 4 minutes someone is dying of a stroke. So that's what really drove me to, to work on this book. And we did it for over a year and a half. And now, you know, hopeful people like it.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, listeners here are just probably on the edge of their seats or hopefully they're actually on the edge of a trail walking or moving somehow while they're listening. But, you know, I think a lot of women are in that moment. Who are our listeners and they're taking care of aging parents or they've watched that decline. And it is a huge fear for women who are set up to live longer. And yet there is that, do I want to unless, you know, I can live it my way. So I think we need to unpack this, but can you roadmap for us the gut-brain axis, the connection and how we are wired this way? What's going on? Why is that so critical? For overall health?

That's a great question. And a lot of people don't see the connection. They go, well, what does my gut have to do with my brain? We have a lot of sayings though that suggest that we get the idea, right? I have butterflies in my stomach and they say, you gotta trust your gut and all these sayings. And if I go back even thousands of years to Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese medicine, those practitioners knew that the gut was the center. So, this is something that it's new for us, so to speak, but we're relearning it, what we already sort of knew before. So let's break it down, right? So the gut and the brain, very intricate and bidirectional. So the gut talks to the brain and the brain talks to the gut. They're like two teenagers talking about a Taylor Swift concert. You know, they're constantly chatting and they're texting, you know, metaphorically. And it does it in multiple ways, right? The gut, you have to remember, is the second brain, we call it. I almost think it's the first brain because in the walls of the gut are these amazing nerve cells, right, that make up the nervous system of the gut. And that the nervous system has trillions and trillions of neurons that are there that are communicating with each other and with the brain. Then we've got the vagus nerve, right? The vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body that connects the brain to the gut. And you're having direct signals that are going back and forth. So, you know, and you talked about something very important. You said, I hope that they're walking on a trail, right? Something, because when you're walking on a trail or you're doing something that puts you at rest and at ease, the brain signals the gut, hey, everything is okay. Continue with your work, continue with digestion, continue the integrity of your wall. It's so important to understand that this is not just a one-way street. It goes both ways. And I'll go more into that. But when you have the gut and the brain communicating in a state of homeostasis or in a state of almost peace and not unrest, then they can communicate and say, "Hey, everything is okay." And when the gut, when it produces neurotransmitters, these are the little chemicals that the gut produces that go into the brain and go throughout your body and may even control your mood, your behavior. That, and I'm sure you've talked about this, but maybe folks may not know, is that serotonin, our feel-good hormone, where are most of these produced? In the gut. 90 to 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut. And it's produced by a huge army of folks that are in our gut. We call them the microbiome, right? Trillions of bugs and not just bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa, all kind of living in concert I'll get to that. But the neurotransmitters are a direct way the gut and the brain communicate. And if you don't have the right concentration, what happens is that your brain cannot function in the right way. So it's really important to understand that. So the—

so can I just simplistically say that back for everybody listening? So basically you're saying, listeners, if you ignore the fact that you may be constipated, have diarrhea, have gas or bloating, and you pass that off as that's normal. Lately, that's normal for me, that it's really hard for you most likely to feel good or to feel the best that you can.

100%.

Okay.

But you may not even have— the other part of it is you're absolutely right. But the other part is you may not have any gut symptoms. The problem is that, you know, people always think that unless I'm having any symptoms of my gut, I'm A-okay. It's not the case. It's almost like Let's talk about walking and then, you know, getting, jumping off a cliff eventually or falling off a cliff. Let's put it that way. So you're walking blindfolded, walking, walking, everything is great until you hit that cliff and then you fall down. You go, oh my God, I wish somebody told me. And that's what happens in many systems of the body where you don't have any symptoms until you do. And by the time you do, then all heck is broken loose. What I would say is that even before you have symptomatic poor gut health. There's poor gut health in folks that are eating, you know, fast food cheeseburgers and fries. I'm good. What do you mean? You guys are crazy. Yeah, you know, this and that. But then what happens is that talk to them a few years later and you'll see all the systems in their body that are disarray. But back to the story about the microorganisms, the microbiome. So you got this trillion-plus member army that is there to really help you. Remember the microbiome, the bugs that are there were there 15 million years ago, way before we were there. And we know that there's signaling between bugs existed before us. And that same signaling is there now between bugs that are in the intestinal system. And why does it, what does it have to do with anything, right? When you don't have the right environment, when you don't feed the microbiome the right material, and that doesn't just mean food, it just means the right environment, it's gonna give signals of distress, not just to itself, but throughout the body. So it's really important that the microbiome, you treat it as your friend because it's been there with us for thousands of years. We didn't know about it. When I went to medical school, we had not a single conversation, not one minute of conversation with the microbiome. And now we, in my field of gastroenterology, Deb, We have an entire session on microbiome now where people didn't— don't even consider not talking about gastroenterology and microbiome. So, so what does the microbiome do? Number one, I talked to you about the neurotransmitters. It also really makes the most sophisticated immune system in the gut, which is the gut, the most functional it can be. Without the microorganisms, without the microbiome, this immune system that lines the gut will not be functional. So this immune system, remember between, here's poop on one side and blood is one cell layer thick. So you have to have the most robust, the most sophisticated immune system so that what's in poop doesn't go into blood, right? So if you don't have the right concentration of the microorganisms that are producing the right postbiotics, we call 'em, or the products that the microbiome makes. But just a little terminology, Probiotics are the bugs themselves that we know make up the microbiome. Prebiotics are the food for these bugs. And postbiotics are the products that they make. So for example, serotonin is a, it'll be a postbiotic because that's what they're making. Also short-chain fatty acids. You may hear the word butyrate. That's what microorganisms make as well. And I talk about in my book, "Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain," I talk about what these microorganisms are doing to be able to make the wall of the gut, the integrity of it solid so that stuff from the poop doesn't get in your blood and that the immune system is protecting it so that stuff doesn't happen. But if you don't have that, if you feed it cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizza and onion rings all day long and processed stuff, guess what happens? You get unfavorable types of bugs in there and they don't protect your gut wall. Can make the integrity, meaning that the gut wall so that stuff doesn't get through. So when stuff does get through, you get what's called leaky gut. And I'm sure you've talked about this leaky gut for decades in traditional medicine, which I'm part of, right? I see patients in traditional medicine as well. When people said leaky gut, everybody rolled their eyes like it was something crazy. But now we have a new term for it, intestinal permeability. When the gut wall has permeability, when it has little tiny cracks, little crevices, stuff from the stool goes into the blood, that activates your body's immune system because it knows it's not supposed to be there. If it happens once in a while, Deb, then nothing goes wrong. But if it happens constantly, it's the beginning of inflammation. That inflammation can go to the brain. Remember, the brain now has its own barrier. It's called the blood-brain barrier. The brain doesn't like stuff coming in either. It only wants invitation-only stuff to come in. But when you have this inflammation that starts in the gut, remember, and goes throughout the body, it can disrupt or break that blood-brain barrier. It also causes holes. And when those holes begin, then inflammation begins in the brain. When that inflammation continues, you have the result of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, even increased risk of stroke. So this is why it's so important to know the gut-brain axis. When you nurture your gut health, right? When you nurture your gut health, you're not just improving your gut symptoms, but you're actually setting yourself up to prevent these devastating diseases that are happening every few seconds in our world. And that's why it's so important.

So insightful and a bit rude, a bit rude that you could be struggling with a microbiome that is subpar, but have no symptoms. But, 'cause I think we all need that, you know, something tapping on our shoulder to get our attention. And otherwise, we assume, well, everything is going well. Don't fix it if it's not broken. So what is it that a listener can do to be proactive, whether she does or doesn't have symptoms? Is this beyond just lifestyle habits? Is there something more? Hey, this is Debra Atkinson, and there is one thing you can't do in the gym at your age, and that's get all the protein that you need. You've got to do that in the kitchen. To make it easy for myself, not only to get the protein but the fiber, the fruits and vegetables I want daily, I started drinking a smoothie a day 30 years ago. But when I realized all the junk, the sugar, and the extras that you don't want, that I don't want hiding in most protein powders. That's when I finally caved in after years of saying I will never, ever, ever sell supplements. Stop skipping, skimping, and sabotaging yourself in the morning after workouts by always being prepared. Look, yep, I agree, real food first, but it's just not convenient to carry a turkey sandwich sometimes the protein, and don't forget the fiber, they kill cravings and they boost satiety. And you've got to make it easy to do the right thing. You can use code PODCAST for 10% off your first order at flipping50.com today.

Well, you know, I break it down into what I call a 5-pillar system, and I try to make it as simple as possible. The 5 pillars that I feel helps all of health, but especially gut health, is this: purposeful living, number 1. Number 2, this is something people understand really well, it's diet or food, what your nutrition intake is. Number 3 is movement, but not just movement, movement with purpose, and I'll talk about that. Number 4 is community, what you're creating with what you're doing today. Community, whether it's physical, whether it's through podcasts, through, you know, through online forums, whatever it is. But community is 4. And 5 is spirituality. And spirituality doesn't mean that, hey, I'm praying every day. If you want to, that's fine. But you can, you know, meditate, you can do yoga, tai chi, whatever it is. So those are the 5 pillars. And I'll start with purpose-driven living. And I think that's the hardest. It's the hardest for me to understand. And so for me, my wife and I jump outta bed and you've met my wife, so you know we work together. After my dad had his event, I became the patient and the patient advocate. I realized that we had to do more to really be able to have people not have the same experience that we did. To that effect, we created systems of knowledge and knowledge base and tools to be able to help folks. And I used to do it one-on-one with patients, but I decided to do it on a larger scale. So, I started a television show with one station and I went to— and it got syndicated around the country and the world. And so, that purpose-driven living helps me to be very, very focused but also takes away a lot of the unrest. Imagine if I didn't have a reason to do what I'm doing, right? There's a lot of unrest. There's a lot of, "Oh my gosh, I wish I'd never do that. Oh, this is terrible." What does that have to do with gut health? When you have that unease, right? When your body's not at ease and it starts disease, and when you have disease, that's the beginning of inflammation. And I'm sure your listeners have heard about the fight or flight phenomena. And when your body is not in a state of ease and it's unrest and anxiety, even at a microscopic level, it activates this fight or flight phenomena. And what does that mean? When we were hunters and gatherers, right? When we were hunting animals and farming and whatever else, we had one purpose, which is to, you know, have lunch and not be lunch. So we had singular focus and our bodies revved up, right? The cortisol was increased, all your epinephrine was increased. Every time there was a reason to be ready to go. But when this happens, right, in a world where you have most of your necessities met, but you have this unrest because, you don't have purpose-driven living, you can create systems of inflammation all throughout your gut and your body. Not less than a dozen studies that talk about how you can change the course of your life. So diseases like, you know, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, all disease I talk about will be decreased if you just have a purpose-driven life. And purpose is huge. And I talk about it in our book that how do you actually achieve that? So number one is purpose, purpose-driven living. Number 2 is food. And we've touched upon it, but not just going on some crazy diet that makes you look good in your tank top or your bathing suit or whatever it is. It's not those surrogates. It's really a diet that nourishes you and helps your body be the best it can be. So what are some simple things, right? You eat whole foods that you actually make in this place you call your kitchen that you enter and not just have coffee with your friends or your family, you actually cut those vegetables up and you work with your family in this really collaborative way to create this amazing meal. And so I'll talk about this whole community that you develop when you cook together, but whole foods, avoid processed anything, right? So I tell my patients very simply, try not to eat anything in a box or a can most of the time. I live in the real world, right? My kids have a birthday party. I don't send the menu ahead of time saying, "You have to give me this or I'm not coming." We don't go to extremes like that. But even if you do what I'm talking about 80 to 90% of the time, you're far ahead of most populations in this country or any other country. So again, whole foods, avoid processed foods at all costs, processed carbohydrates, bad fats. You try to have fermented foods with every meal. Every culture has fermented foods, right? So if you like sauerkraut, if you like yogurt, if you like kimchi, if you like tempeh, whatever it is that you like that you can fit in your diet, I actually say with every meal you could have it with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why that's important is because you're directly feeding good bugs into your microbiome. It's like taking your army that you have and keep supplying you with good army cadets every single day. And if you do that with every meal, it changes your life and it changes your gut health. All the stuff I talked about, the neurotransmitters, right? We're talking about gut wall integrity. We're talking about gut immune function and the direct relationship with the brain is gonna be positive. It's like harmonizing. So when you just do something as simple as that, you can get ahead. Now you can take supplements, right? Along with that, you can take probiotics and prebiotics and that's fine. But I think we can do it with food. We can do it pretty simply. Third pillar in talking about gut health is movement and movement with purpose. So I practice in, you know, in gastroenterology. I'm a traditional doc every day. And I love this hobby of vulture watching when I'm out just kind of looking out into the parking lot. And so people go, wait a minute, you're in Detroit? You had vultures in Detroit? I didn't know that. Well, I have a certain type of vulture. Next to me is this giant gym, you know, where 1,000 people work out. So I always love to see the vultures circling, circling, circling, circling for several minutes until they find the exact parking space that's right next to the gym, because then they don't have to walk a single step. And if they could, if someone could lift them directly from their car on some kind of a chariot and place them on the treadmill and press go, That is what they like, but that's really not purposeful movement, right? And so people think going to the gym twice a week, 3 times a week, it's all you need to do. And then you sit on your butt the rest of the time and order DoorDash and all this kind of stuff, right? Again, it's movement with your kids, right? Instead of having them have their device and you have their device and you have a family of devices that you see sometimes when you go to, when you see, you know, at a dinner table, they're all texting each other. But instead, you know, go out there and break a sweat with them, right? Or do some gardening or walk up the stairs or do something that's purposeful, that serves a need and that you need to do. So you're not, you know, dreading, oh, I gotta go to the gym. Again, it's that concept, mind-body, right? So if you are at, if you're at unrest and you are not feeling good about doing your movement, you're defeating the purpose because you're increasing your cortisol, you're increasing your inflammatory factors that you're trying to decrease with this movement. So it's really important for, for your ladies who are listening that, you know what, try to find, all of us can try to find something that we feel serves a need and also has movement. Remember, your gut is a muscular organ. When you move, the gut moves. In addition, we know studies in animals that there is also that if you are moving, the energy homeostasis, the signals that are sent is perfect for your microbiome to thrive. If you're not moving, if you're sedentary, we know the composition of your microbiome, the composition of your gut health is poor. Just simply moving every day. If you can even do 30 minutes a day of some sort of movement and some of you may say, listen, I can't, you know, I have disability, I can't walk or my legs hurt. You can at least do some chair exercises, chair yoga, whatever it is. You can do some movement. So that's my third pillar, very important one. The fourth is community. So whenever you think about community, there's a, and you could look this up for your listeners, is the Roseto effect. So Roseto, Pennsylvania, 1950s, an Italian immigrant group came and settled there and a physician was visiting there and he found something remarkable. In the 1950s, you hardly found anybody with heart attacks people living to their 80s and 90s and thriving, not in a nursing home, not with a feeding tube, thriving. And he said, what gives? And after multiple studies, what they found was this Italian immigrant group was essentially had one factor, and that was community. When they walked to work, they said hello and they talked. When they came back from work, they conversed. Nowadays, if somebody asks you how you're doing, and you tell them more than just, "I'm doing fine," they cringe because they don't want to hear about anything that's going on. I mean, it's the world we live in. And for it to go, "Oh, God, he's going to tell me all about his problems." Well, these people wanted to hear about their neighbor's problems. They wanted to eat with them, cook with them, and live with them. That protection that they had protected them from disease. And they're not unique. You can look at multiple, multiple civilizations around the world that have centenarians and we call them blue zones. They have this in common. They have communities that work together, right? The Okinawans, their communities, Loma Linda, they're well known. And this community offers protection. And I feel it's because the same factor of purposeful living. You are more at ease when you have support. As human beings, we thrived as a community. This is what our body and our mind is made of, that we have a supportive community. You know, in Western society, which is not bad, we really really, really stress independence, right? And you have a society, you have a societal crisis of loneliness, depression, and suicide. And again, this is not exactly talking about gut health, but it's related because when you don't have that support, it results in gut inflammation, it results in increased cortisol, all the hormones at a microscopic level. We're not talking about like you're sweating and your heart's racing. It's not that. At a microscopic level, all the signals are on that you are active and the reticular activating system is on. That creates unrest, inflammation in your gut. So it's as simple as having a group like yours that are supporting each other. You know, if you have a family, that's great and your family can support you. If you don't have a family, you can have a work family. You can have a family of people that play sports or even go online. There are thousands of communities. But that support that you get that reinforces your goals, reinforces your dreams is so important. It's so important. That's my fourth pillar. The fifth one is about spirituality, right? It's about really saying, I want to know what my place is in the world and the planet. All of us, right? After you realize what's going on, you're not a baby, you get a sense, where do I fit in, right? And what spirituality does is takes away that feeling of who am I? What am I doing here? And what do I belong? When we were hunters and gatherers, I'll go back to that. We didn't have time for that. We didn't have time to even speculate where we're from because you're running, eating, finding a place to rest, and then rinse and repeat, right? It's only modern day when we look at our Instagram feed and say, wow, my life is just not as great as, you know, Mrs. Whatever or that guy. They have a great life and they have a great figure. Whatever it is, right? As funny as it seems, this kind of stuff causes unrest, or whatever it is that you're not quite feeling that you're up to it or feeling worthy or good enough, or just not understanding where you fit. What spirituality does is brings it back, right? It brings you back to where nature and earth is, whether it's yoga, whether it's prayer, whether it's just walking in the garden. You know, it just gives you that sense of peace. And that sense of ease, which is the opposite of disease. Again, same combination of mechanisms that you get, right? With having purposeful living, having a community. We now know when you practice spirituality, your microbiome changes. Isn't that interesting? That when you actually don't give the gut the environment of inflammation and unrest, your friends that have lived with you for thousands of years can also live in peace. Because if you don't have that, if you do have that unrest, then the signals are coming from the brain. Something's happening. You can't, it's not about you, it's all about the rest of the body. So if you get that signal all the time, it changes your gut health. So those are my 5 pillars. And what I tell folks is that, listen, you may be 70 years old and you may have done things a certain way for a long, long time, right? I've been doing this for 60 years, doc, I can't change today. And I tell them is that pick one, one small activity from each pillar every day. That's it. Just once, the smallest thing and do it consistently, right? It's not about being a superhero all the time. If you ask my kids, Debra, today and say, what is dad's favorite superhero? It'll never be Superman. It'll never be Spider-Man or any of those. It'll always be Batman. Why? Because Batman's an ordinary guy just like me. Who has a bunch of tools, right? He has his cool cars and weapons that make him very powerful. And to me, with these tools, you can really enhance your gut health and enhance your overall health by just using these pillars. It's a simple methodology, but if you look at all the cultures that have great gut health and longevity, they have these in common.

Wow. What I find really intriguing about your 5 pillars is really 3 of them seem very connected, and yet they're more intangible than tangible. They're things that you don't have to break a sweat. You don't even have to go to the grocery store to work on those. Those are more a lot of reflection. And I find it interesting that it is such a parallel. Like at one point in our lives we had no time. We were trying to survive. That was it. And now we don't, we think we don't have time because of things we're putting in our own way. So, so very interesting. But you also, that makes it so very accessible. It's like it's one thought away. It's like I can start right now. I don't have to wait for something. I don't have to wait till tomorrow, which is so very easy to say. Do you have some real, you know, gut health life success stories to share? I'm sure that you do. Maybe the question should be, can you share anything that, that really sticks out with you?

Yeah, I had a patient, I write about this in my book, Kill Your Gut, Save Your Brain, Jimmy. Jimmy had Parkinson's disease and Jimmy was 30 when he started having symptoms of Parkinson's and it was a slight tremor. And, you know, like most young people, he was like, ah, there's no way I don't have this. And he was in denial. But when you ask him maybe even a decade before, this is to your point, you know, he had some GI symptoms, which he just kind of said, ah, you blow off and like, whatever. It's, he had some constipation. We now know that people with Parkinson's often their GI symptoms predate their Parkinson's symptoms by nearly a decade or two. So Jimmy, through, you know, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's and with the help of his neurologist, he had some treatment. But then when we actually treated his gut, so if you know anything about Parkinson's medications, sometimes the medication is worse than the side effects worse than the cure. But when we started working on his gut health, all the things I talked about, you know, it didn't happen overnight, but within weeks he was noticing that the medications were actually working better and he could decrease some of the medications and decrease the dosage. And this is an example that I talk about with the gut-brain axis because for example, Parkinson's by itself, there's something called a gut-first hypothesis on Parkinson's, What that means is that like if you went to a person's, you know, with Parkinson's, you look at their brain, they have these Lewy bodies. They're called Lewy bodies based on, you know, what you find in the brain. They're misshapen proteins, Debra, that accumulate in the brain and stop the brain from functioning the way it's supposed to. So you get the tremors, the rigidity in movement, and eventually, you know, your cognition goes. But guess what? You may be able to see the same misshapen proteins in the wall of the gut. So you're like, wait a minute, what is, what are Lewy bodies doing in the wall of the gut? And in animal models, not human models yet, in animal models, you see in mice that these misshapen alpha-synuclein proteins, they're called, that are Lewy bodies, are in the wall of the gut. And one misshapen protein actually makes the next one and the next one misshapen. So you kind of have this cascading effect. And then they ascend up into, and you see 'em in the brain over time when you have the Parkinson model, but you take, you sever the vagus nerve or you stop the connection with the vagus nerve. Guess what? That stops that. You don't, you no longer have this progression from the gut to the brain. So what does that tell you? It tells you that internally you can make changes with your life in your gut even before you have clinical symptoms of Parkinson's. It's a— it's— this is not easy because, you know, how do you know you're going to get Parkinson's, right? To me, if you have a family history of Parkinson's or if you had multiple generations that have had these types of diseases, then obviously you're at risk and you should really, really be very, very, you know, particular about making your gut health optimal. But the rest of us, you don't have to be at risk, right? If you just do these simple things that Jimmy did, Nothing that I ask people to do are complicated because I know the moment it's complicated, the moment it's potions and notions, 90% of people are not gonna do it, right? My goal is not to be able to make it difficult or make it, you know, so unpronounceable so it sounds smart, but rather to make it simple. So you look at Parkinson's disease, you look at Alzheimer's, when you look at the gut of Alzheimer's patients, Debra, you'll see that they call it an Alzheimer's gut, that the microbiome is similar in multiple patients, that they're deficient in certain organisms. They have too much of certain organisms that are giving them the toxicity. And remember Alzheimer's, people thought, well, you're just getting old, right? That's why you got Alzheimer's. But we now know it is a disease that's completely preventable because if you stop the beginning of inflammation in your brain. So in Alzheimer's, you have these amyloid bodies and these what are called neurofibrillary tangles that happen. But before that happens, if you take, it's like kind of like watching a movie, right? You rewind it and you'll see the gut inflammation precedes this. And so if you can then take a lot of my patients when they're coming to see me because they have GI symptoms, I often ask them, hey, what about how are you doing with your brain? And you feel like you're functioning optimally because a lot of these folks are executives or high-powered people. You know, I just last week, in fact, his name is Henry, and he said to me, Dr. Nandi, I want to crawl up in a ball. This guy's running a company. I want to crawl up in a ball and just disappear. I feel terrible. He had GI symptoms, but he couldn't think clearly. He was becoming forgetful. Like, you know, I can't remember where I put my keys. And this is now years in the making. And I asked him, how many— when you go see a neurologist, do they ask you about your GI problems? He goes, no. And when you see a GI doctor, I wasn't the first one, do they ever ask you about your neurological problems? No, because we have not made the connection. So I told him is that we are going to— for him, I made it very strict, right? I said, you know, please don't go out to eat at all. You know, I have the 80/20 rule for myself and my family, meaning that 80% of the time you do the things I talk about and 10 to 20% of time you have to still go to birthday parties and places and be real. For him, Henry, I said, no, we can't do that. We're too far. So I asked him not to go out to eat his prescribed diet that involves whole fruits and vegetables. I gave him recipes. I have it in my book. I have recipes in my book specifically for these conditions. And, you know, listen, I'm going to see him again next week, and I'm hoping that there's some improvement right away, but it's going to take weeks. The one thing I want to let people know is that there are no magic bullets, right? This is consistency. These are small changes made every day that results in big, big changes in your life. One of my favorite athletes, Debra, is Tom Brady. You may have heard of him. He's like a Super Bowl quarterback, right?

You think I live under a rock? Come on.

I don't know. So just in case, but maybe your listeners know. I think most people know, right? And Tom says something interesting. He says, listen, I'm not any better than the rest of anybody, my colleagues or my players. Let's just assume that's true. He said, but what I do is every single day I'm consistent with my activity. Whether it's practicing, whether it's stretching. I mean, this guy didn't get injured for a very long time, right? He had longevity. And what I offer is that, and I told this to Henry, is that, listen, if you do this consistently, it'll make a change in your life. And the last one I'll tell you is that a gentleman who had stroke, and what I told him was this, that when you look at, again, they're all animal studies because we're still at the cutting edge, animal studies with mice and mice models of stroke, Debra, when you have older mice, right, at the kind of the end of their lifespan and they have a stroke model and you actually place a young mouse's microbiome in that mouse, their stroke recovery is very similar to a young mouse. Wow. Conversely, take a young mouse and have a stroke model and you give them the microbiome of an old mouse, traditionally old mouse, many of them die or have horrible outcomes.

So, wow.

Again, we're suggesting— I wish I knew this when my dad had a stroke, right? I mean, we just didn't know this. Nobody was teaching this. It's even still 90% of folks that are treating strokes don't know this, right? They just don't know this. And I'm hoping by writing a book like this, talking about this, will change at least a few people to ask their neurologist, what about this? So I told my patient that if we can change your diet, the family was there, right? His diet. Because let me tell you, when my dad had a stroke, we were just trying to get his nutrition right. I gave these little Boost cans every single day. And we were doing the best we can, right? I'm not saying I was a bad person or anybody next to me was a bad person, but we didn't know that processed gunk was possibly changing his stroke outcome because we are feeding the microbiome poorly. If I knew the research then, what would I do, right? We would figure out a way to have the same consistency to give fermented foods, 'cause my dad loved all kinds of foods. He cooked all the time. He would like sauerkraut. He would love kombucha, all that stuff, right? So we would do that for him and not do the things even today that people do. So again, the point is that even with these neurodegenerative diseases that are devastating, I mean, the slope for Parkinson's is not just going up, it's exponential because the Western life and Western diet is popular everywhere. I was in an airport in India, right? I had to give a talk there and I said, oh, I'll see what they have there. You know the biggest line they had, Debra? KFC. The biggest, all the choices, right? I'm not saying, listen, I'm not saying KFC is the worst thing ever, but it ain't the best thing for sure. And you have this kind of diet that's now going all across the world. So these problems I'm talking about will be spreading ubiquitous, not just here, but all over the world. So a couple examples I give you, but the idea is that we have proof now, the beginnings of proof, the best we can to show that it's not only just an association, but we can actually change the paradigm. We can change the equation, change the outcomes. Your destiny is not in the hands of your genes or something else. It's in your hands. And that's what it means to be a health hero. If you do this and do this decades before you worry about the symptoms, you have a great shot of living a life with not just great physical health, but mental health as well.

So love it. So, so rich in tips as well as stories and proof. So everybody's gonna wanna get their hands on this book, number one, for themselves and/or somebody here, many people here are caring For aging parents, and I think one of the biggest messages I'm walking away with is never too late, you know. And so what can you do now? There were some gold nuggets in there about things that we may think are maybe boosting their protein, but there could be a better way to do it potentially. So where can they, number one, follow you, get their hands on the book, and also engage? Because I know that your social media channels are just so rich with tips.

Oh, thank you for that. You're very kind. So, you know, the book is called Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain. And if you go to healyourgutsaveyourbrain.com, you can get a copy. You can get it from Amazon, Barnes Noble, anywhere books are sold. And in our community, it's askdrnandi.com. So it's A-S-K-D-R-N-A-N-D-I.com. And that our social media is all of it is Ask Dr. Nandi. So please reach out to us if you have any comments or suggestions or if we can help you with anything, let us know. But this has been such a pleasure talking to you.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for the work you're doing in the world and the greater vision you've given everybody here. It's been a pleasure to see you again.

Well, thank you so much. Thanks for the opportunity and thanks for everything you do every day. Appreciate it.

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