How Your Gut Microbiome Can Help You Feel, Look & Think Better with Dr. Edison de Mello.

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I give you the latest cutting edge intel to help you look, feel and think better. Now, today's show is all about gut microbiome and I have got someone today to talk to you about this. And I know that this is a subject I love talking about, but I've got someone who is really one of the pioneers in the field and he's going to show you how your gut microbiome and balancing that out can help you look, feel and think better because it impacts everything, which is what you're going to hear. It impacts your skin, it impacts your mood, it impacts your sex drive, impacts your weight. So let me tell you a little bit about our guest today. It's Dr. Edison DeMello. He's a board certified integrative medicine doc. He's also licensed as a psychotherapist by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences and the founder of the world famous Akasha center for Integrative Medicine in Santa Monica, California. By the way, loads of Hollywood celebrities go to the Akasha Center. He has treated thousands of patients. He has a very cool east meets west approach. And he believes strongly in really that personal touch of really getting to know the patient. His kind of philosophy line is meet the patient before meeting their disease and and puts that into everything that he creates. So super excited to have him on. He's written a bunch about the gut microbiome. He's published in HuffPo. He wrote a chapter on food addiction in the Andrew Weil, his latest book. And he's working on a very cool book about how bacteria can hijack your gut and steal your life. So you know, I looked at that title, I'm like, oh my gosh, I gotta have this doc I on the show. So please help me welcome Dr. Edison DeMello. All right, let's do it. Dr. Edison DeMello, welcome to the show. I am so glad you're here. With me today.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So this is a super cool topic that my listeners love. We always love to talk gut, and especially when we start to talk about all the different things that gut bacteria can do to us, from our mood to our weight. So before we get into that, which I'm excited to tackle that subject with you, how did you get into this?

Well, I got into this, jj, because before going into medical school, I was in a PhD program in clinical psychology, and I was doing a lot of research on gastrointestinal illness and found that a lot of those patients that I was researching were presenting with a lot of gastrointestinal issues. But in reality, underneath the gastrointestinal issues, there was a lot of emotional issues that had not been addressed. And so secondary to that, I started researching more about the connection between the gut and the brain and wrote a paper called Gut Feelings, Psychosocial Factors in Gastrointestinal Disease. How long ago? And I got so excited about seeing.

What was this, like, 20. How long ago?

Oh, it was about 22, 23 years ago.

I mean, they must have thought you were crazy.

They did. They thought I had three heads when I presented it to them. Yeah, yeah, they were not very interested in that. They thought, who is this guy coming in from nowhere presenting this theory? But I had a lot of documentation. I had a lot of patients whose interviews were very powerful, and I was able to convince them to really let me write this paper. And I did. And I got so excited about finding out, in very detailed terms, this connection between the brain, the gut, and the skin that I decided to. When I went back into my psychology practice, I felt that something was missing.

And.

And what was missing was a better understanding on how the physiological systems, not just the mind, but your whole physiology, was being affected by your gastrointestinal symptoms or by your gastrointestinal health. And subsequent to that, I decided to go into medical training. And today I practice integrative medicine, which I love to say. It's. It's when I get to meet my patients before I meet their diseases.

So I just have to recognize how, like, ahead of your time you were with this, because, you know, it's only been the last couple of years that we started to go, oh, gosh, your gut microbe. I mean, even talking about gut microbiome, but talking about the fact that it could cause things like weight gain and overeating and impact your mood. And you were. You. You found this out 23, 24 years ago. That is. That is amazing. And, you know, let's dive in, because a lot of the people listening are interested in, of course, like, what causes cravings and overeating and what could lead to weight gain. So how does exactly this all work? Like, how does the gut bacteria lead to weight gain?

Yeah, well, that's a great question and one that I'm very passionate about. Your gut has, as you referred to earlier, the microbiome. The microbiome is to our gut what a beehive is to honey. You have a beehive that has a perfect location, perfect pollination, but it needs to be left alone and yet cared for so that the end product is this amazing honey. Imagine if you went and you sprayed that beehive with antibiotics or with pesticides. What would happen is that the quality of the honey, if any honey, would not be there. So in our gut we have this agglomeration of good bacteria and bad bacteria. The function of the bacteria is to assist you with digestion and elimination. And with digestion, of course, there is all these receptors that come in and connects with your brain. And the reason you eat is because your brain tells your gut it's time to eat. The reason you sleep is because your brain tell your gut it's time to slow down metabolism and to go to sleep. And the reason we do most of everything in life is, is because of this very beautiful, complex connection between those two organs. And so when I look at disease, I look at what is it that may be underneath the symptoms that my patients are presenting with. Let's say somebody comes in with an inability to lose weight. Most of us, physicians, nutritionists, counselors, of course we have the patient's interest as the best for us. But what we are missing is to find out what is it that leads this patient to eat more than what she is supposed to, more than what she wants to. And so in connecting with that, what we know is that the bacteria that is in that beehive like structure there kind of nudges you to feed itself with what it needs to be able to survive. No different than any other organism, be it a one cell organism or a multi celled organism. The function of every organism is to survive. So now you have this gut bacteria that because of stress, because of emotional issues that we may have because of lack of sleep, has grown out of proportion. Meaning that the good bacteria is now overwhelmed by the bad bacteria. And so the bad bacteria's function now is survival and it will do anything to be able to survive. So what I often tell my patient is that Sometimes that kind of midnight urge to eat, maybe this bacteria trying to nudge you to go get the food that it needs to be able to survive. And so the goal of looking at this microbiome is first to understand it. It's amazing, amazing complexity. And then secondly is to be able to balance it out. And the way to balance out is with proper lifestyle, like how you would eventually help a beehive to be more productive is to find a better location, is to find better ways to feed it, is to make sure that it's being cared for without being interrupted, without its function being disrupted. So the gut bacteria needs the kind of same approach. So eating a healthy diet free of a lot of the bad things are out there, what are some of the.

Worst bad things that you could eat that would feed the bad bacteria in your gut and create more imbalance? What would those be?

Sugar. Yay.

I'm so glad you said that.

In fact, jj, you probably, or your listeners probably remember in high school when we had to, in an experiment, we had to grow bacteria in a petri dish. And we do that in high school, we do that in college. You'll get the bacteria in a petri dish, and you feed it sugar so that it can grow. So a lot of my patients says, okay, I don't eat sugar, but I eat honey. And I say, well, that is one opportunity organism. It doesn't discriminate. Sugar is sugar. So sugar. Thank you.

Did everyone hear that? I swear I have to have this conversation. This question comes up on Facebook at least usually a couple times a week. But isn't honey okay? It's all natural. And I'm like, no, sugar is sugar. I am so glad you said that. It's not just me saying this. Thank you.

We get confused, right? There's something out there called marketing or food. As you know, in your own work and in your presence. Presence on the Internet, patients gets confused because they hear so many messages from all over the place. And if you take a step back and you say, wait, if bacteria like sugar, it doesn't know the difference between table sugar, honey, stevia, or even the sugary fruits that we eat. Sometimes it's really. They're really working against you. In addition to sugar, the other bad things that we can do to ourselves is to really not keep our stress at bay. You know, looking at how we process stress can lead to so many incredible changes in our lives. And I'm not saying that, you know, we can be free of stress. I mean, we certainly can't in the 21st century in the life pieces that we live. But can we do an inquiry into the stress that we have? And can we ask ourselves, if I'm gonna have distress in life, how can I have it instead of it having me? And what I mean by that is basically by just asking the question, can I distance myself from this for a few minutes a day? Be it your work, be it your cell phone, be it your Facebook, that sometimes can get us, you know, pretty upset. Also without the posting. Our children, you name it, sometimes taking a step back and looking at a stress as if you're looking at a TV screen can add you, and it can give you an incredible insight. And in a way, it takes you out of this whole paradigm of you having the stress. You take the stress out and you look at outside of yourself and you say, okay, how can I control it? How can I minimize it without saying, how can I get rid of it? Because then you're setting yourself up right.

Well, and you don't want no stress. Actually. It's like, so just like, you aren't going to have no bad bacteria in your gut. It's all the balance.

And then the third thing, jj is physical activity. Why? Because when you exercise, you know, a lot of us exercise for a lot of reasons. A lot of us exercise because we want to look good. And that's a great reason. But there's much more to exercising than to looking good and to feel good. There's more to it. That is exercise adds an incredible physiological benefit to your body. It's thermogenic, meaning it increases the temperature in your body. Your vessels dilate, you're able to breathe better oxygen come into your lungs at a higher rate because you're breathing differently. You are utilizing that oxygen in a better way. And when you do that, you increase blood flow. And blood flow first goes to your brain. Our brain is very selfish. It will take everything first from glucose to oxygen and to blood flow. And then it goes into your gut, because the gut is the second largest organ in your body. Your first largest organ is your skin, which has the function of absorbing and excreting. The second one is your gut, which, incidentally, is very connected to your skin. And so as you get better blood flow, you're balancing your gut bacteria a little bit more. You're giving it more of kind of a relaxation that says, okay, I'm now paying attention to myself being a little healthier now. And in terms looking into looking good and feeling good, good bacteria equals better skin equals better vitality. Increased vitality it equals better hormone utilization. Our hormones are all metabolized in your gut. So your brain and your body may be very smart in releasing the hormones, but the key for that hormone to function is in your gut. Sort of like a key and a lock, right? Without a lock, a key has no function. Without a gut that is healthy, that is optimized, your hormones will have very, very decreased benefits in your body because it's not being utilized the way it was designed to.

So the bottom line is, if you pay attention to your gut bacteria with managing stress, eating well, exercising, it can help get your gut back into balance, which will help your weight, it can help your mood, it will help your skin, helps hormone balance. So it's really the starting point for just getting everything working correctly.

It is correctly. And it's. And I think, sadly, a lot of my colleagues out there miss that point. They miss that point in that most of us, given all the circumstances in our lives, are unable to meet our patients, to get to know who they are, to understand what is it that makes them who they are. And if we take the time, you know that as a friend, when you spend time with somebody who you care for, that in of itself is very healing. So when I sit with my patients and I look at them and I get to know them a little bit about for who they are right there, I'm saying to them, I'm interested in looking at you as having a condition without the condition having you. And then the second question that I ask them is, how can I join forces with you and use what I know, what I've been trained to do to help you get the life that you want to get, to help you get the vitality that you want to get, to help you feel motivated, vitalized, beautiful, sexy. How can I do that without saying, I will do that for you? But I give them the responsibility for them to pose the question, yeah, how can you? And right then, I think the difference comes in empowering people to realize that they can make a change which starts in your gut. What's very interesting, that in this language, the gut is very. Oh. Is very beautifully utilized to basically to define our state of mind, our state of feelings. We often say, what's your gut feeling? Right. When. When we want to know somebody's intuition, we say, what's your gut feeling? Right. We feel like we are. Somebody hurt us or that we are hurting emotionally. We sometimes say, oh, that hurts so much. It feels like I got kicked in my stomach.

Yeah.

When we have anxiety, we say, like, I feel Like I have butter, it feels like I have butterflies in my stomach. So even without knowing, the gut plays an incredible role in helping us define our physiological as well as emotional well being.

Now, I know I'm going to turn this back on you and ask you a question about what you do in a moment, but I know you've also written a lot on this. You've written stuff on HuffPo, you've got a very active blog on your site at the Akasha center, and you've also written some stuff. I was reading one of your blogs that was fascinating about how intermittent fasting can help bacteria. I what I'd love to ask you. So I'm going to encourage everyone to go and read up on this because it's fascinating and again, you're really a pioneer out there and I want to recognize you as that in this whole area because I mean even the people I know who were pretty forward thinking were talking about this 10 years ago, not 24 years ago. So. And for you to jump, jump schools and change your focus because of this is just, it's incredible. Now just looking at you, I wanted to make this personal. What's one thing that you do every day that you feel makes the biggest difference in your life?

Gratitude. I wake up every morning with a sense of being grateful for what I've been able to do, what I've been able to accomplish and who I've been able to bring into my life. Into my life. And for all the things that I've been able to successfully complete and even the things that I have not been able to successfully complete. They gave me data. They gave me data information for me if I wanted to try it again. So gratitude is the first thing that I do when I wake up in the morning and second to that is to drink two glasses of water with a splash of lemon.

Excellent. What you don't know about me is I actually teach in one of my programs to get up every morning, pull out a journal and write down at least three things you're grateful for. So I think I, I listen to that with a smile on my face. I super appreciate it and I want to thank you so much for joining me. I will have in the podcast notes I'll have how to get to your blogs and what I do think I'll do to make it stand simple for everybody is just if you go to jjvirgin.com forward/akasha a k a S H A that will lead you to go deeper with Dr. De Mello. And if you happen to be so fortunate to be in the LA area or can jump on a plane. This, you are an amazing physician and practitioner. So and I know you have quite the practice going on out there in la. So if you're in the area, this is the guy to go to. So I want to thank you so much for joining me today. I super appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. Jj, it's been a pleasure talking to you and feel very passionate knowing that you're out there really basically reiterating what I believe in so passionately, including how gratitude can really help us heal.

I know it's one of the key, the key pieces of health and I love that you put the stress piece in. It's very interesting. I always see people, you know, their gut bacteria goes totally and crazy and I know I went through that when my son was hit the minute you go under any kind of stress. So I love that you included that in those pillars. So thank you again. Now after the break, I'm going to be answering the listeners questions. So stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. Now today's question comes from Jennifer in Long island and she says, help. I'm struggling with constipation. What do you recommend? So couple things I want you to think about here is, you know, and this is great with having Dr. Demillo on the show is you always want to look at why is this happening. And one of the classic signs of low thyroid function is constipation. So the first thing I would always do is go find a functional medicine practitioner, have your thyroid assessed, your thyroid stimulating hormone, your free T3 and T4 thyroid antibodies, really dig in, look at everything, look at the whole picture. Other signs of low thyroid function are elevated LDL cholesterol, thinning of the outer eyebrow, a yellowish tinge to your skin, feeling cold, having difficulty losing weight, being depressed, having difficulty building muscle. So if any of Those are ringing true for you. Go, go check that one out. And now I'm going to give you a couple quick, quick tips to help. And the first one is to really look at your diet and to make sure that you are getting good levels of fiber into your diet. One of the things that I love to focus on is eating in both the virgin diet and the sugar impact diet. Eating by the plate of good, clean protein, healthy fats, and then slow, low impact carbs, loads of non starchy vegetables and a little bit of low impact, high fiber carbs. Things like legumes, wild rice, squash, berries, and making sure that you are getting in. My goal is to have you getting in 50 grams of carbs of fiber a day, which might sound crazy, but when you're adding, you know, fiber into your morning smoothie, I add in a product I have called extra fiber. You can add in avocado, you can add in chia or flax seeds. When you're doing loads of non starchy vegetables, some wild rice, some quinoa, some legumes, some nuts, you can easily get it up to 50 grams a day. But here's the big caution. Do that over time, not overnight. If you're in the standard American diet, 9 to 14 grams of fiber a day, don't go from that to 50 overnight. It'll be not happy with me. And make sure you're also increasing your water as well as you do this so that you can help move things along, improve your transit times and give you poops that you can be proud of. Had to say it. Now a couple other things that can be super helpful here. Magnesium and Epsom salts baths is a great way to relax at night. You know, Dr. DeMillo talked about managing stress. So Epsom salts bath could be a great thing to add in here. And then taking magnesium to help here. Actually, magnesium ascorbate or citrate, magnesium bound with vitamin C actually can help with improved constipation here because both magnesium and C can help. You can help. So I'd look at both of those and another one to look at are probiotics. So probiotics can help improve constipation. So vitamin C, probiotics, magnesium, improving your fiber and drinking more water, and then finally movement and making sure that you're getting in some movement every day you want to be moving more and then getting in some, you know, more intense exercise at least three times a week. Somewhere in the three to five times a week, intense exercise. And every day just adding in daily movement into your life. Walking Cycling, yoga, you know, more easy stuff. And then go intense on the other days. Alrighty. If you'd like to submit a question, just head on over to my Facebook page @jjvirginofficial and hang out with me there. I do Facebook lives there. It's very active on Facebook. And now it's time for the gratitude portion of the show. And what I do here is highlight a review of the week. And by the way, our team reads every review on itunes and we like it's how we get our grades. So hugely, hugely appreciate it. Now today's review is from Ms. Midwest and Ms. Midwest from the USA says Nice podcast, JJ. I always learn something new about living healthy on this podcast. Thanks, JJ. All right, and that's a five star review. Super appreciate you for leaving that Ms. Midwest. And if you'd like to leave a review, just pop on over to itunes and while you're there, subscribe and share it with some friends. I super appreciate that and I appreciate you being an active member of the community. And remember, the most important thing you can do when you listen to these podcasts is something. So you've heard some cool information today. You heard some ways to help balance your gut microbiome. My biggest advice here is not to just put this one on the shelf, grab something, something in there and say I'm going to take action on that and do it. All right, thank you so much for joining me. Until next time, see ya.

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