In this instructional video, Dr. A, an integrative medicine physician with decades of experience treating chronic illness, answers a viewer’s question about his favorite interventions for digestive health. He begins by discussing probiotics, noting the mixed research landscape and explaining that orally‑taken strains are only partially colonizing; he emphasizes obtaining beneficial microbes through diet and reserving high‑dose probiotic supplements for patients who have undergone antibiotics, chemotherapy, or other immune‑suppressing treatments. For immunocompromised individuals he recommends human microflora blends (HMF) that contain only bacteria native to the human gut, avoiding strains that could pose infection risks. He then covers magnesium, describing how its various salt forms differ: poorly dissociating forms act as osmotic agents to draw water into the colon and relieve constipation (but can cause loose stools), while well‑absorbed forms support neuromuscular function and can calm cramping. Next, Dr. A highlights prebiotic foods—naturally occurring fibers in fermented and traditional diets—that feed existing gut microbes and can often replace the need for supplemental probiotics. He moves on to amino‑acid based supplements: L‑glutamine, abundant in cabbage and other foods, is a primary fuel for intestinal cells and is used to promote mucosal repair after infections or inflammation; zinc‑carnosine (a chelated zinc‑carnosine complex) offers a similar protective effect for patients who cannot tolerate glutamine. The video then introduces demulcents—botanical agents with a slippery, mucilaginous texture such as slippery elm, marshmallow root, and okra—that act like a “liquid bandage” coating the gastrointestinal lining. Dr. A advises mixing powdered demulcents into yogurt or applesauce and consuming immediately to maximize the soothing gel. Finally, he outlines an elimination‑and‑rechallenge protocol for identifying food sensitivities that may perpetuate gut inflammation. He recommends reviewing one’s habitual diet, removing common trigger groups (e.g., dairy, gluten, eggs) for 2‑4 weeks, then re‑introducing them one at a time while monitoring symptoms. He shares anecdotal success where removing three problematic foods allowed patients to heal their gut and later tolerate those foods without issue. Overall, Dr. A presents a tiered, personalized approach: start with diet (prebiotics, diverse foods), add targeted supplements (probiotics, magnesium, glutamine/zinc‑carnosine, demulcents) as needed, and use elimination testing to address specific sensitivities, especially in patients with compromised immunity.
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I've had plenty of patients where we found 3 food groups or 3 foods that were really bugging them, and we get their gut healed up and they're healthier and all this stuff, and a year later they can eat those foods with no problem. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A, and I've been treating people with complex chronic illness for decades. I've also been involved in teaching and research around integrative medicine for the last 30 years now, and I love to use this channel to answer people's questions. And so one of the questions that we got was, what are your favorite things for digestive health? Now, this could be a lot of things. The first one is one everybody's probably heard of, probiotics. And here's the thing, there's a lot of both really good research and writing about probiotics. There's also a lot of really conflicting and complicated research about probiotics. And then you get some articles that say, well, we know that the gut microbiome, so all the good and the bad flora that's in your gut is important, but we don't know enough to treat it. Here's the bottom line with probiotics. The ones that you take orally are going to be partially used by your body. They're gonna be partially, you know, set up shop and live in your digestive tract, and then they're gonna be partially digested and not used. But one of the things that's important, and this has been around for probably 20 years in research or more, is that there are pieces of the probiotics that don't need to stay alive to have an interaction with receptors or other biota, other creatures in your digestive system to help turn them to the correct way. So when it comes to probiotics, what I normally tell people is if you can optimize them through your diet and the way that you eat, et cetera, that's the best way to get 'em, 'cause that's kind of how nature gets them into you. If you've gone beyond that, and let's say you just had a whole bunch of antibiotic treatment or you had chemotherapy or some other thing, we may have to give you some extra probiotics to help you out. So taking probiotics There's nothing wrong with it. It's not gonna hurt anybody for the most part, but you should be able to get to a point where you heal your gut enough that it can take care of the good flora, the probiotics. Now there are some, and this is, they even have advertisements on television now, probiotic strains that have been researched for things like irritable bowel syndrome symptoms or constipation or diarrhea and other things like that. Those have value. And there's also of course a commercial, you know, benefit to Somebody who's selling them, and often you see them mixed into you know yogurts and other things like that. We all know yogurt at least starts out with probiotics in it, so a lot of times they're put in there, and there's nothing wrong with those things. If you really need a lot heavy dose of probiotics, billions of organisms might need other supplementation. But if you're just going to eat something every day to kind of keep something good going through, and you have a chronic digestive problem, nothing wrong with those things. Okay, are they the best way to do it? No. But are they a way that people will do? Yes. So. Something to consider there. The other thing is when you get to people with immunologic deficiencies, so this could be, I'm in chemotherapy radiation, or I just got done with chemo radiation, my immune system's shot, or I'm on certain types of biological drugs that might be used for autoimmunity or cancer, et cetera. So my immune system isn't quite balanced. I'm on high doses of steroids. I'm immune system suppressed. What we generally recommend with people around probiotics then is that they use a human microflora blend. So HMF is just, it's not a brand, it's a type of mixture. And why would we recommend human microflora blend when you have immune suppression? It's because there's other probiotics that, that, that a healthy person might do great with, but they have types of bacteria specifically in them that might be dangerous for somebody who's immune suppressed. On the other hand, if you're using human microflora and you have immune suppression, as long as you're eating the probiotic and not, you know, doing something else with it, you're going to get human microflora in you, which your digestive system is supposed to be seeing. So there's not some weird, you know, streptococcal organism or some other thing they're putting in. It's just the human stuff. Now, if you don't have immune suppression and you need certain types of help, there's other types of probiotics. We do hours on probiotics that may be more helpful and you might be recommended to use. How about magnesium? Now we have a lot of magnesium content. It does everything. But the reason for the gut that magnesium can be good is there's a lot of forms of magnesium. We got another video on a bunch of forms. That will go in. We eat the magnesium, take it as a pill, whatever, and it'll go in. It's always bound to something else, and a lot of that magnesium won't break off of whatever it's bound to. So, that means that magnesium doesn't absorb into your blood and it goes through your digestive tract. Now, there's 2 big ways magnesium affects the digestive tract. One is if it totally doesn't dissociate, that magnesium will go all the way to your colon and pull water in as an osmotic agent, and it will help you with constipation. Now, if you don't have constipation, And it may give you loose stool. You have to be careful with that. But the other side of it is magnesium that does come apart in our digestive system will go and be absorbed, and it can help with the neuromuscular action of your digestive system. So if you're a person who suffers a lot from cramping and other reactions to food that may be cramping-oriented, et cetera, this type of magnesium, the magnesiums that absorb well, will help you out there. So it can be an osmotic agent. If it absorbs, it can be a calming agent, 2 for one. Now, you might say to yourself, well, how did humans survive before we had probiotics in a capsule, right? Because we haven't had that forever. Well, there's a couple of ways. One is generally you have, as nature sets up, good human microflora. And if you are eating enough variety of foods, some of the foods that you eat will be prebiotic foods. Now, I could go into really long lists of prebiotic foods. They include things that are fermented and other stuff like A lot of foods you see in almost every traditional culture around the world are prebiotic foods. A lot of us have gotten away from eating these things. Some people like them, some don't, but that's literally one of the ways that for millennia people have been able to keep their microbiome balanced is by eating prebiotic foods. So again, if you don't need a ton of probiotics, we might just have you eat prebiotic foods to see if we can't build it up naturally in your system. Look, Do a search and you'll find different levels of information as always on the internet. But look up prebiotics. So not pro, P-R-O, but P-R-E, prebiotics. And you'll see, if you look at 3 lists, you'll generally see a crossover with the major prebiotic type foods. Now, people all say, well, I'm allergic to that prebiotic food. Well, then don't eat it. If a food doesn't, you know, make you feel well, there's other prebiotic foods you can eat. So just think of it that way. Another one's an amino acid called glutamine. L-glutamine usually. This you might find really high in things like cabbage, for example. There's a lot of glutamine. There's a lot of glutamine in other foods. Just look, type in glutamine in foods, you'll get plenty of lists. But glutamine is the amino acid in your body in the highest quantity. Okay, there's people advertising now. I just saw an ad for glutamine, and it's been used for a long time in medicine. It's been used in weightlifting and all sorts of stuff. But glutamine is used by the digestive tract cells and other cells in your body to help maintain. So we will often give people L-glutamine orally to help with repair, say after a treatment for H. pylori or after any other digestive inflammatory problem. We may do L-glutamine or we might have them do juicing of high glutamine foods or make, you know, soups or smoothies or something out of high glutamine foods. So glutamine would be very helpful. The next one is less known, but it has a similar effect to glutamine and that's called carnosine. It usually comes in a supplement form of zinc carnosine. So this is one of those chelate things where the zinc is stabilized on the carnosine. You're really getting more carnosine than zinc in those supplements. But carnosine, there are some people where we might not want to give them glutamine, and so carnosine can be a good backup or good primary treatment. The next are demulcents. Now, demulcent is from the world of botanical medicine, and it includes plants that have sort of a slippery, you could even say slimy sort of nature. So lots of demulcents in the world. Ones that you've probably heard of are slippery elm, hence the name slippery. Slippery elm in a capsule, or sometimes the powder mixed into something, you know, like yogurt or applesauce can be used. Really soothing. Demulcents kind of coat your digestive system. Another is marshmallow root. So not the white things that you put on cocoa, but marshmallow root. That's another demulcent. Okra, if you've made okra. It's kind of slimy. That's another demulcent they use. There's lots of demulcents, but what we use them for, I always tell patients, is kind of like liquid bandage. You know, it goes through and— just give you a quick tip— if you're going to take a demulcent like slippery elm or okra or marshmallow, something like that, and you're going to mix it in your applesauce or your yogurt and then you're going to eat it, eat it right away. Because as soon as you put the powder into water, yogurt, applesauce, whatever, it's going to get gooier and gooier and gooier. And that's what you want inside, but it gets really hard to eat when it's that And the last is not really a supplement, but we're talking about, you know, kind of global treatments. And that is— talked about this in a bunch of other videos, but everybody has things that they may not be allergic to, but their body just does not like them to eat. It's a sensitivity to a food. So food sensitivities are things that we want to eliminate, especially when we have an inflamed, dysfunctional digestive tract. So as we eliminate these things, we do what's called an elimination and rechallenge diet. And I've described it on other videos. And there's tons of resources on elimination diet. But normally what you do is you first look at, well, what do I, what I typically eat? Because the things that we eat repeatedly every day can have reactions in our body, but we eat them so much we don't, there's not a cause and effect we notice. Normally, if you eat a food and you get really nauseated, or you eat a food and it gives you a headache, or you eat a food and it gives you diarrhea or something, you probably stopped eating that food, right? Or if you're truly allergic to something like you eat shellfish and you have anaphylaxis, you're not gonna eat shellfish anymore. But food sensitivities It's just my body doesn't really gel with, you know, whatever the food is. Now, people normally pick the big things like, you know, dairy products and grains or gluten products, you know, other stuff like that. Eggs are commonly eliminated, but it depends a lot what you eat. If you don't eat eggs, then you don't need to put them back into your diet to try and see if it's a problem. Just don't eat them, right? If you've already eliminated gluten foods and that helped you out, don't put them back in. So look at what you normally eat. Look at what you eat a lot of and commonly. And then do an elimination of rechallenge. And again, you can look up how to do that because it's a fairly straightforward process. But the bottom line is, if you rechallenge it and if your body hasn't seen a food in 2, 3, 4 weeks, and then you eat it, and then you challenge it day 1 and challenge it day 2, and you get some symptoms, you'll know that that food— it's again, you're not really allergic, it's just a food that's going to inflame you. And there's a, there's a million reasons for that, but the bottom line is just don't eat it right now. Take it out of your system. I've had plenty of patients where we found 3 food groups or 3 foods that were really bugging them, and we get their gut healed up and they're healthier and all this stuff, and a year later they can eat those foods with no problem. And so a lot of it has to do with how healthy things are in your digestive tract. All right, that's our video for today. I hope that answers the questions that we got asked. If you like this video, we're going to put up a video or 2 here for you to take a look at, and I will see you guys all on the next video. Thanks
