Achieving Neurometabolic Balance: Dr. Peter Kan’s Unique Approach to Lasting Wellness

Foreign.

Hello and welcome to the Full Circle Healing podcast where we merge modern cutting edge science and traditional healing wisdom and everything in between to help you come full circle back to your original natural state of health and well being. I'm your host Michael and over the past 15 years I've helped hundreds of thousands of people find the information, practices, tools, resources and experts they needed to find their way back to optimal health. Our guest in this episode is one of my favorite functional docs out there, Dr. Peter Kahn. Dr. Kahn supports and manages patients with chronic conditions using a comprehensive and unique approach by merging the exciting advances of functional neurology and functional medicine. He's board certified in Integrative medicine, Functional medicine and a board certified chiropractic neurologist and the creator of Neurometabolic Integration, a science based program that identifies the root cause of autoimmune and other chronic conditions. He's always sharing a ton of super high value you health education across multiple platforms. Very generous with his knowledge. One of my favorite guys to talk to. In this episode you will learn what it means to be in a good state of neurometabolic health, what neurometabolic health even means and what are the main drivers that contribute to imbalances. You learn what it feels like to be in a positive neurometabolic state and what symptoms might pop up when you're struggling. You learn how to optimize your neurometabolic health, increase resilience and achieve successful outcomes. In reversing chronic symptoms, you'll learn how principles and practices from functional neurology and functional medicine can be blended to create optimal outcomes. You'll also learn about Dr. Kahn's free neurometabolic challenge with a sign up open right now. If you're listening to this episode in the first couple weeks that it's live, you can join his challenge now at rebelhealth Co nmc that's N for Neurometabolic. Oh neuro N M for metabolic. C for challenge. Neuro metabolic challenge rebelhealth co backslash NMC Hey Dr. Kahn, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me, Michael. It's a pleasure.

It's going to be fun. This is a time where I'm going to be asking questions about something that I don't know a ton about, which does not happen very often on these shows where I don't have my questions. Super prepped from an analyst point of view and from an expert's point of view. And I'm excited to to Learn about neurometabolic health. And I always enjoy connecting with you in the way that you teach because you overlap a lot of different, like how the gut and the brain are together, how the nervous system and the gut are together. And we've done a few episodes where it's come up often that one of the problems with conventional medicine, and even to an extent in functional medicine, is like, the silos that the specialists live in, that. That they're. You know, we had one on Hashimoto's, and somebody had to go see their general doctor. Then they got sent to an endocrinologist. They went to a gastroenterologist. They went to this ologist and this ologist, and they all told them, like, no, your bucket of symptoms is not related to each other. That, you know, And I like the way that you teach the overlap of. Of so many different systems because it's impossible to separate it.

Right, yeah, and that's a great point. You know, I think that that problem, Michael, even, you know, of silos even exists within natural alternative field. Right? You have the Lyme specialists, you know, people go online, and then you think, we have the mold specialist, and then you have the. The gut specialist. And everybody, you know, those who are Lyme specialists, just sees everybody come in. It's gotta be Lyme, because symptom of a Lyme overlap with other conditions. But if you're the Lyme specialist, then everything looks like lying to you. You know, if you're a carpenter, everything that sticks out looks like a nail to you. And that can be a problem. Right. There's good pros and cons to both, of course, but the problem comes when people have chronic health issues. Usually there are multiple things going on. So if you become just so focused on one area, you can miss the totality of the picture, because patients don't live in one silo. Their condition, their body is working all of it, all at the same time. So we have to be able to see it that way. And I think the important thing here is to not be stuck in one discipline. You know, I think the thing that I always try to do is be not just really good in one thing, because to really serve people at a higher level, you have to kind of know a lot about everything. So that make you a generalist instead of a specialist. But that's good for the patient, you see, because it's. It's that. That's how the body works.

Yeah, Yeah, I like that analogy. It's come up a few times in our recent recordings of the nail. And if you're either a carpenter or somebody said hammer, everything looks like a nail. And those people mean well. And most of those practitioners that are specialized in those things probably went through that themselves. And that's how they ended up, you know, the Lyme specialist probably maybe had Lyme disease and the mold specialist maybe had mold toxicity. You see that a lot in these stories. But I think that it's good to have somebody on their side who can kind of see the forest through the trees, if that's the right analogy there, and figure out. And there's times to pull in those specialists then too, to either consult with them or to check that out once it's determined, like, okay, this is an issue. But like you said, there's so much overlap in symptoms, and there's so much overlap in conditions where, like Hashimoto's. I asked the guest to name the common symptoms of hypothyroidism, and it was like 46 symptoms that can also align with a whole bunch of other conditions. So today we're looking at neurometabolic health. And if I break that down, I'm guessing we're probably looking at the nervous system and the way that it relates to our metabolism.

That's very good as the name implies. Right?

Yeah. So how does that relationship, I guess just start from square one on the relationship there and what neurometabolic means to you.

And thank you for letting me share that, because this term, neurometabolic health, it actually come to me from years of practice, so there's a little backstory to it. So when I first started practicing as a chiropractor, I was just doing musculoskeletal stuff. And then due to my own family member, my kids had issues. So I decided to dive into neurology and I got board certified as a board certified chiropractic neurologist. So in that work as a functional neurologist, I'm always looking at how can we rehab and stimulate the brain to restore function. But then there were a lot of patients who I was doing these brain therapy based on their presentation and their findings, and they weren't responding to the neurotherapy that I was doing. And then so it's like, what are the other factors? Well, brain cells, just like any other cells, needs fuel as well. Right. And that fuel comes from the food that you eat. So then there's a nutritional aspect to that brain stimulation. Right. So if you're somebody trying to rehab the shoulder, like, if you don't have enough protein, then you're not going to build new muscle and new tissue to heal that tissue. So nutrition and stimulation both kind of goes hand in hand. So that's where I started realizing that there's this whole world of functional medicine that's also need to be looked at. And when I start to combine both work addressing the brain issues and addressing the metabolic issues through functional medicine, my result just started spiking and got really a lot more results. And in fact, back in 2010 is where I already saw the coming together of brain and functional medicine, brain health and functional medicine. And I actually trademarked the term neurometabolic integration back in 2010. Now we're in, you know, as of time of this recording is 2024, that's a good 14 years ago. And so I already saw that coming down the pipe. So that neurometabolic integration is basically integrating neurology, functional neurology with functional medicine. And you mentioned earlier, like the term neuro metabolic sounds like metabolism and brain. It's exactly right. But it's more than just brain and metabolism. See to me, neurometabolic health refers to the optimal functioning and balance of all these various metabolic processes within the brain and nervous system, but also outside the brain and nervous system. So it actually encompasses this intricate interplay between the brain's energy production, the nutrient utilization, overall metabolic activity, and then also how the external periphery metabolism. So the key aspect of this neurometabolic health would include energy production. Right. So when we talk about metabolism, we're really talking about the breakdown of energy so we can extract energy units and so it can drive bodily function. And the brain is the most energy, you know, demanding organ in the body. It requires a significant energy just for the brain to functioning properly. So the brain is very energy sensitive. And so if you have energy issues outside of the brain, it can start to impact energy issues inside the brain. So an example of that would be like blood sugar. Okay, so, so a lot of people have insulin resistance or hypoglycemia, blood sugar instability. When you start either through nutrition, lifestyle issue, you're not eating properly, you're too stressed, you know, you're not exercising enough or too much. It can all create this blood sugar imbalance. And that blood sugar imbalance not only impacts your metabolism, but impact the way your brain function as well. So that's one perfect example of neurometabolic health being compromised by a very important key factor. Now another key aspect of neurometabolic health also involves like Nutrient breakdown. So for you to get energy, you have to first get it from food and then you have to break down that food. So that's where digestion comes in. So you gotta have adequate intake, but you also gotta have adequate breakdown of nutrient. So that's where gut health comes in. And then another aspect of the neurometabolic health is neurotransmitter imbalance. Now, proper neurometabolic health involve the production of neurotransmitter, but also the breakdown of neurotransmitter. And all of these neurotransmitter production and breakdown all involve other things other than the neurotransmitters themselves. Right? It involves amino acid, right? Which is from protein intake. It involves blood sugar stability. If your blood sugar is not stable, many of these neurotransmitters cannot be that. The precursor cannot be transported across the blood brain barrier. If you have iron deficiency, many of these neurotransmitter production relies on enzymatic processes that require proper iron and oxygen levels. So there's a lot of things besides just taking 5 HTP to support serotonin, besides just taking out tryptophan, you know.

It'S so much easier. Come on.

Yeah, it'd be so much easier if we could just eat some turkey and we just don't have depression. But that's not that simple, right? And then the, the one, one more piece here is the, the oxidative stress and inflammation piece. So your brain cells are very heavily dependent on fuel. It's also very dependent on activation, which means that you got to activate your brain, you got to use it. You don't use it, you lose it. And also is very dependent on having very little or balanced level of inflammation. If you have way too much inflammation, way too much oxidative stress beyond the brain cells capacity to quench them, then that oxidative stress and inflammation is going to start cause tissue damage in the brain and in other places in the body. And that can start to lead to this cascade of more tissue damage, more tissue debris, which leads to more inflammation. And this is really when people say, you know, inflammation is the cause of all disease. I mean, it's true, but where did inflammation come from in the first place? And that's what we use functional medicine principles to really identify the root cause. So those are the main things that I want people to be take away that neurometabolic health drives basically your experience of whether you feel good or whether you feel, you know, vitality, whether you have energy, neurometabolic health is really important and it's not just about, oh, I have, you know, fatigue brain fog. What's the supplement for? Fatigue brain fog? You know, it's not just like, oh, I'm a little overweight, so what's the thing for that? It's about seeing the interconnection between them all.

Why do you have the brain fog? Why, why, why are these things happening? Would be a different answer to that question. Which again, why can't it be easier? But it depends on, you know, which which things are out of whack, out of what you named there. Neurotransmitter imbalances can cause mood and mental and memory and brain related symptoms. Blood sugar imbalances can cause brain mood, memory imbalances, amino acid deficiencies, energy like low caloric intake, protein deficiencies, all the anemia. And so if somebody has a certain symptom that matches with an amino acid deficiency, but they don't actually have an amino acid deficiency, they have three of those other things going on and you give them that amino acid because their friend took it and their brain works so much better with this one thing and it won't do anything for them. Right. So I'm curious, you mentioned a few symptoms. There are a few, you know, I feel great or I feel sluggish or anything, but that was pretty wide reaching. So if somebody's neurometabolic health and we'll just, I guess that's the right terminology to use here, is kind of in a good place. In general, what you mentioned, like blood sugar issues, blood sugar regulation is good. Neurotransmitter balance, amino acids, energy production, they're digesting and breaking down their food. This is a person who generally is going to feel pretty good, right?

They feel good because they're resilient, Michael, because when you have all the resources at hand and everything's working as it should, then you're resilient. That means you get pushed and you don't, you get knocked down, but you get back up. People who are neurometabolically compromised say somebody is, have blood sugar issues and their brain's inflamed. That person, when they get a concussion, they'll have more post concussive syndrome and symptoms that come on later and last for longer periods of time than someone who has better neurometabolic health. That's why it matters, because when you don't have good neurometabolic health toxin, you, you sniff a chemical, you feel like all wonky, you get stress, then you're down for the count for like extended period of time. You get Epstein Barr, you get some food poisoning episode, then you don't bounce back, you get chronic issues. That's the, that's the difference maker is that when you have good neurometabolic health, your nervous system's resilient, your metabolism's resilient, your hormones are able to do what they do. That's another piece of the neuro metabolic health is hormones are intricately involved in neurometabolic health in many different ways.

Okay, so yeah, it's the person who says like, well, they did that thing too, but I feel terrible. Or we both stayed up last night but I can't function today, or like a missed night of sleep, or we both caught the same cold and somebody else was sick for two days and I was sick for five days and had extra symptoms. I think people listening who fit that, fit in that category will self identify when they hear those things because it's frustrating. It's frustrating for them that they maybe can't do or can't handle certain exposures, certain stresses, certain situations that other people around them might be able to.

So what for some other people, for some other people, they just have chronic issue ongoing, right? Like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So some people will be like less resilient to stressors, but then some people just have like chemical sensitivity all the time.

All the time.

They have multiple chemical sensitivity, multiple food sensitivity, they're self reactive, which means they have multiple autoimmune disease. That's someone who has poor neurometabolic health because their body cannot bounce back and get back to homeostasis. So it could be someone who's like normally feel okay, but when they drink too much alcohol, they get a quick hit and they don't feel good for days, but could be just somebody with chronic health symptoms. And usually these are people who are having a lot of issues going on. Like very reactive, you know, suboptimal function in all different categories.

Way more people now. And there's so much more of that, and that's come up in like half of our episodes so far is just look at where we are versus even 10, 15 years ago. I remember things like mast cell activation syndrome and histamine intolerance and mold toxicity and Lyme disease and multiple autoimmune conditions and chronic fatigue. Like the big ones, the tough stuff that really makes life difficult for people, those clients, patients, depending on terminology of practitioner, those were, I wouldn't say they were rare. But they weren't super common. And there were the special, the people who handled those complex, oh, that's for so and so, go send them over there, like certain doctors that are known for that. Now that's like half the people that are coming in to see functional practitioners and the like with these multiple issues that overlap together. So how did we, how does this get, and I know this is probably a really long answer, but what are some major disruptors of one's neurometabolic function and health? You mentioned a lot of, you know, ways that neurometabolic health influences how somebody feels and how their body functions. But how does somebody get to that point to where it's all out of whack and not they're not feeling well?

Yeah, and then that's a, that's really a great, great question because answering that question is really how we help someone. Right? Because it's really about root cause. So how does somebody get to the point where the neurometabody health is not working? Now just keep in mind, normally your body has certain degree of resiliency, right? That resiliency gives you a bandwidth to deal with stressors. So you can be too high in blood sugar, too low in blood sugar, but if it's within a certain range, you're not going to become insulin resistant diabetic or you don't have problem. Right? So, so, so what I'm saying is that for you to have neurometabolic health problems where your brain's not working, your metabolism's not working, your hormone's not working, your gut's not working, your immune system not working, that's really the symptom of poor neurometabolic health. It's like your brain, immune, gut, none of it's working and your hormone's not working. For you to get to that point where your neurometabiotic is compromised, you gotta be pretty darn compromised for a while because your body have a degree of resiliency to kind of handle that. So by the time you feel like, man, everything's not working, you already have this cascade going on for a long time. Okay, so then the question is, how do we get there in the first place? Well, it could be different for different people, but here are the main ones, and it's the main ones that you typically hear in a functional medicine type of setting. You know, it's going to be from your diet. And really, you know, these days, most people, I say most people, but I think, I guess most people listening to your podcast are aware of the problem with blood sugar issues and processed food and eating too much sugar. But you know, out in standard America land, standard American diet is still the standard American diet. So a lot of people still just, you know, drinking soda and eating hamburgers and buns and breads and cookies, crackers. So they're just carbing themselves up too much, right? So the diet makes a big difference, you know, now. So for some people, they're like, hey, I'm doing like Paleo. I'm like low carb keto. Why am I still having issue? Well then it may be something else, but, but even then, for those group of people who claim they eat healthy, that you can still have food sensitivity reaction to a specific food that maybe you're not aware of, right? So it's always some kind of dietary exposure. And then secondly, it's going to be some type of environmental exposure and that's something that's more insidious, right? It's not like everybody, you know, I mean, even if you live next to a golf course, you know, they spray. If you live on a golf course or near a golf course, you basically there's a cloud of pesticides that's there all the time, right? Because they spray the golf course, the wind, the stuff dries up, the wind blows all the particulate matters of these pesticides.

And then like main farming areas too.

Farming areas, golf course, anywhere they potentially might spray. You're basically inhaling that stuff pretty much all the time. Now that doesn't mean like you inhale it, take one sniff and you're going to be sick. It's a gradual accumulation. So these are more insidious. But it does build up, right? So it's a, it's a cumulative thing. So and that's just the pesticides. It's also plastic, it's also flame retardant material, it's also metals and all these other things. And when they build up in your body, it disrupt enzymatic processes, it disrupt, you know, nerve function and various different function creates oxidative stress and then that can lead to this cascade of neurometabolic health. But I will say the most obvious things, it's actually the most basic things for most people. How do people get neurometabolic health messed up in the first place is the blood sugar's unstable and they are eating in a way that's promoting leaky gut because it's got too much chemicals or processed food. They're not eating enough real food to promote the microbiome or they're not exercising correctly, either not enough or too much. That's, it's. I mean, if you want energy, Michael, I'm hoping the audience, if there's one takeaway, they just remember one thing is, yeah, neurometabolic health drives how you feel. And lack of it's going to drive these chronic problem that can make you want to go down the road of do I have malign, do I have mold, do I. When in fact it's just neuromatabolic health and what the most common driver is, stuff like, you know, energy production and why. So people always talk about mitochondria, energy mitochondria. So it's mitochondria. Then, you know, the biggest driver for mitochondrial function to drive it to work is exercise is movement. But yet people are looking for PQQ and, you know, a special form of CoQ 10 and, you know, ribos, like when the biggest thing that you can do for your mitochondria is actually exercise. Now granted, somebody have mito fibromyalgia, you know, and stuff like that, and they can't, they're so sick they can't exercise. Then we got to get them well enough to the point that they can exercise. But once they're able to exercise, then exercise is actually what's going to get them better all the way to the end. Right. So I just want to make sure the audience, like, I'm not saying supplements and sometimes there's not Lyme or mold and specialized thing that we need to do, but as a matter of the podcast, to benefit most people, most people will benefit from getting their blood sugar really fine tuned, getting the exercise really dialed in, getting the sleep really dialed in. And really a big thing that you talk about a lot, Michael, is stress, you know, because part of this neurometabolic health issue is really this intricate interplay between your brain metabolism and hormones. So the way that works is through the HPA axis. So when you're stressed, you're firing your hypothalamus pituitary to drive a cortisol response. And then also there's a nervous system response that drives your catecholamines, your adrenaline response through the sympathetic nervous system and all of that. We know that when you drive cortisol and your sympathetic response, you're going to drive more inflammatory cytokines. So basically stress equals inflammation. And so everybody's trying to say, oh, I have inflammation, so I'm gonna take turmeric. But yet you're stressed every day. So it just Kind of the fire just starts over again every day. So we have to really look at these things and say, okay, what are the things that's gonna be the most. The biggest needle mover that's gonna give me the benefit like throughout the entire day where if you take turmeric or resveratrol, it might have a half life of an hour, you know, or whatever and then you gotta take it again. So then it's, you gotta take it enough to sort of saturate your system. Where if you manage your stress and change your framework and your, and your frame, how you look at stress, then that's going to have an impact ongoing because the stress is no longer stressful because you're seeing it through a different light. Right. If you exercise, there's a post exercise effect where your metabolism still goes, you're getting this rebound in time. So exercise is going to have long lasting effect. So we want to do things that's going to have this biggest needle movers and sometimes the supplements. If you're really deficient in something, it's obviously going to be helpful. But I think I'd be remiss if I don't remind the audience that we want to do the most important things first.

I like that you emphasize that because I remember when I haven't worked one on one with clients in a number of years, but when I did last, I started to get really complex clients and they would come to me and they would have listened to a lot of podcasts, read a bunch of books, kind of watched the summits. They'd hear about this protocol or this thing or this supplement or this lab testing. Once that all became like talked about in summits, then the patient people would hear the about this lab test or this lab. So I would get these people that would fill out my intakes and they would say, I have this, this, this, this, this and this. I want to run this, this, this, this labs. I want protocols for this, this, this, this, this. And I would be like, okay, hold on. What time do you, what time do you go to bed? Like what's your day? Like, what's your job? Like, how much time do you spend outside? What food do you generally eat? Do you cook your own food? Do you eat outside of your house more than you cook your own food? Like what, what's your morning like? Like, you know, like all these kind of questions and more often than not, I wouldn't even get to the third or fourth question of like really foundational like you're talking about. Sure. The Biochemist talked about when you went through that list around blood sugar and diet and exercise and catecholamines and stress and sleep. And the biochemistry can get really. Our biochemistry is infinitely complex. It's absolutely incredible that this thing actually functions and works. And we don't even understand the half of it. But what we do understand is incredibly complex. But this foundational stuff is not complex. Exercising, if you can, is not complex. And doing it where it feels good and doesn't make you exhausted, are in pain, not complex. Eating food that's actually food that you make at home, not complex. Like these things can be made very, very simple. And I was finding that so many people were wanting to jump to these super complex testings and protocols and this and this and this and this and this. And their foundational stuff was sideways. And I love that you point out that the lab, all that stuff isn't going to outweigh foundational, healthy, natural to our physiology, living. You could try. You're going to spend a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of frustration. But so you're saying the things that. Any one of those things that you mentioned, too. Sleep, stress, that could be looked at as both ways. So good sleep and circadian rhythm, positive impact, staying up late, lots of screens, poor sleep quality, negative impact. Same with the. You know, I like the reframing of the stress because I've done a lot of study on how to view challenges in life, I guess I would call it. And most of the body's response to those things is determined by how we perceive the thing. Like, I always use this example. I used to skydive. I was a licensed skydiver. I've jumped from many different things. And when I first started doing that, I had the same reaction that most people would have. The body's in like a complete state of near panic, fear, et cetera, et cetera. By the end of the time, I did that for about three and a half years. By the end of that time, my heart rate didn't increase on the plane or in free fall. There was no, like, adrenaline crash afterwards. I could just kind of go and pack it back up, go back. Like, no, none of this. I didn't feel exhausted. There was no sweaty. These reactions. Now, the thing I was doing never changed, right? It was at first I viewed it as like, oh, my God, I'm gonna die. And at that, towards the end, I viewed it as like, this is really fun. And can you talk a little bit about that? You mentioned that. So I wanted to bring that up because I think it's important to people how they like perceive stuff. Really does have like a real change in how the physiology responds, right?

Yeah. I mean, what you practice the most is what your brain's going to do, Right. I mean, your brain's an efficiency machine. It's meant to be adaptable. That's what the term neuroplasticity means. I suspect some of the things you said that about skydiving you've been doing for three years, you just develop a lot of plasticity for like, you know, you have things you do checklist, check, check, altimeter. Right. So you develop the plasticity so it becomes like second nature to you. So it's an expectation now where at first you're doing it. Is this going to work? Is that going to work? Is the shoot going to open? Yeah.

Did I forget this thing? Did I forget that thing?

There's neuroplasticity, but also it is an expectation. Because what it is, what is expectation? It's a change in your frame, right?

Yeah.

Like if you go into a situation expecting, like this is going to go awesome and it didn't go as awesome as you think, even though it's still pretty awesome, but just not 100% as awesome as you thought, then you're going to be disappointed. So that's a frame situation. Right. So it's. Everything in our life is all dictated by our internal dialogue. And you'd be surprised how our internal dialogue drives your neurology then therefore drive your physiology. So if we're going to talk about healing, it's not just about, you know, how much magnesium and vitamin C can you cram in there. It's also about the mind right Now, I'm not saying, by the way, I'm not saying that supplements and vitamin D and things like that is not helpful. And also, by the way, the lab testing you mentioned earlier, you can spend thousand doing lab testing. I actually don't do that much lab testing. I only do what's necessary. But there's a time and place for lab testing.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I wasn't trying to throw it out. I was just saying like when people want to jump into it and they're not doing these basic things, it's not a replacement.

Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely not a replacement for doing the foundation. So the way I look at it is like, just like Michael says, Are you sleeping well? What is your sleep pattern? What are you eating? Are you drinking too much alcohol? Are you exercising? Let's check those boxes first and see how you feel. And if you don't feel better or you're already doing all of that, perfect, like your lifestyle is nothing to be picked at, then we probably want to run a bunch of tests to figure out what else is wrong. But I think a lot of people kind of like what you described. They come in, it's like, hey, doc, run me these 10 tests. It's going to tell me everything. It'll tell you something. But sometimes it's telling you things that's not very useful and not relevant, then becomes too much data, and it's not helpful either. So it's like, do the foundational things first, and then we can layer on the more complex stuff as we go along to see if it fits.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah. I didn't mean to throw anything under the bus. I think there's places for that. But people would come to me and they'd be like, can I share my old lab test with you? And I'd say, sure. And they'd send me 70 pages of labs that go back 10 years, and they're like, what does all this mean? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm still going to ask you the same questions I was going to ask you.

Well, I have something to say about that because I get a lot of that, too. Same experience. One thing people got to realize that just because your Lab shows something 10 years ago doesn't mean that's what your lab showed.

Right.

The second. Right. Things change. Sometimes people, yeah, they hang a test, like, say, hey, this test, I have SIBO 10 years ago. So I've been, like, doing sibo diet for 10 years. Like, okay, what is your symptom now? You know, I don't. Well, I don't have bloating. I don't have gas. Then why are we doing that?

You know, why are we talking about that? Yeah. And then the identification with the symptom and the identification with the diagnosis. And like, I think a diagnosis can be valuable at times with certain things because it helps the practitioner figure out, like, an approach, and it helps people feel validated, like something is actually going on. Because I know in the conventional medical system, a lot people are told they're fine and they don't feel fine, so it can be nice. But then there's this, like, grabbing on to. I'm that like, the identification with it. And you mentioned expectation. So then the expectation is, I'm going to feel like this because I have this thing. And so the neurochemicals and neuro pathways there are strong. Like the brain runs with that. Right. Like it'll. It'll form that person's like, reality out of that. I'm not the neurologist here, but I know that there's. Those pathways of. It will reinforce that as like their identity. And then it becomes more difficult to shift in some way, I think.

But Dr. Joe Dispenza talk about this in a very, very useful way right now. You know, he's. I think he describes it in the way that most people can understand, which is basically you practice what you. The more you practice what you're doing every day, then you get stuck. Right. So barn. And things become unstuck. Right. Get outside of yourself because you repeat the same pattern every day. You're grooving that pattern deeper. So if you say you have fibromyalgia and you really identify with it, and then all day long, I have fibromyalgia, I have fibromyalgia, then you're basically grooving that pathway to say you have fibromyalgia. And then your physiology, therefore, is not going to change. It's going to just stuck in the present state of having fibromyalgia. So at some point you have to step out into the unknown and say, hey, let me try this on for size. What if I don't have fibromyalgia?

What if I don't?

Yeah. What? But you can't just.

What if I didn't? Yeah. No. What would it be like if I didn't?

Right. And then, then you take the actions that are consistent with that belief. So then things will start to materialize. So it's not just belief alone, but you also got to do the work. Yeah, yeah, but it, it can start with the belief and. Or I should say, if you do the work without the belief, it may not work either. Right. Placebos. The force is strong with this one.

I think both kind of need to be there, though. You need to be able to see the positive outcome and know that it's possible because otherwise your physiology may not come along with you and what you're trying to do. I think there's still a vast underestimation of how powerful that is in the mind and the way that the mind controls the physiology. I mean, we joke about placebo, but, like, I think we should probably investigate it more than joke about it and disregard it because, like, if that's possible to do. And I know one of Joe Dispenza's books is called you are the Placebo. But, like, if it's possible that that happens and it's unintentional, like in a, in a trial, like in a drug trial, it's unintentional. The people don't know what pill they're getting, but they think they might be getting the pill that does the thing that they're trying to measure. So then their physiology changes as if they're getting the pill. And in a lot of drugs it's. And most people don't know this, the placebo beats the drug in a lot of the trials, which means the drug is actually having a net negative effect. But we won't get into that because then if they gave the placebo to everybody, everyone would have a more positive outcome. But we don't. We just say, oh, well, it didn't beat the placebo, let's throw it out. Well, how about we look at the. What we look at the placebo. If two thirds of the people feel better, why don't we look at like what just happened right there?

Right.

Can we do that intentionally?

How can we increase the magnitude of effect for the placebo?

Well, where's the money in that? So that's my cynical side. That's why that doesn't happen in those trials. But it's fascinating. And then that's all neuro and neurochemicals and neuropathways and neurotransmitters. And I think I like the. You talked about what you do every day kind of gets in a groove and then that's how the mind and the brain will go. Somebody once used the analogy for me, and I don't even ski, but it makes sense, is that for people who ski, at the beginning of the day, the ski slope is like white powder and you can go any which way and it's all up to you, kind of. And by the end of the day, there's these grooved paths where everybody's going to go. Basically, you can go off it, but most of the people are going to end up down the grooved path. And that is kind of how the neuropathways work and what they're learning. Because I do have friends that work in like psychedelic therapy and what they're learning about ketamine therapy and a couple other things like that is it kind of wipes some of that clean default mode network and a few other things. And that's what they're thinking is the mechanism behind why those things can help with treatment resistant depression because it wipes that ski slope of those beaten pathways clean. And if there's good re patterning right afterwards, they can shift those things a little bit easier. I don't know if that made any sense or if I went way off topic there.

That makes sense. I'm not very familiar with ketamine therapy and the mechanism of it, but that would, that would make sense that if you can clear off some of the pre existing path, then it's easier to create a new synapse, a new pathway. And this is where it goes around back to what we're talking about, neurometabolic health. Right?

Yeah.

If you want to create a new pathway, it takes energy to create a new pathway. New pathway don't just more than to.

Go on the old one.

Yeah. It's like you have to groove. It's like you got to dig a new trench, basically.

Yeah.

So. So to, to create neuroplasticity it takes energy and that comes from nutrition. Right. So this is why it's called neurometabolic health. Goes back to my very first point. I was trying to do neuro rehab for people to try to get them better. And for some people it wasn't working because the nutrition is not there. They're so inflamed that until we calm down the inflammation, heal the gut and give them the necessary nutrients, they couldn't. That the rehab didn't take. Right. So even with ketamine, even with whatever we're talking about, even creating a new belief, even just to unthink yourself, un f yourself, you know, to. To create a new thought process so you can actually live your life in a new way. It requires more energy. That energy comes in the form of nutrients, partly. Right. So and then oxygen. Right. And then good sleep. So all of that matters. This is why I'm talking about neurometabolic health. I want people to know that, hey, you want to make changes like you got to mind the brain, which is all the stuff that we're just talking about. New thinking, new, new patterning.

Yeah. But it's also fuel for the brain. It's the amino acids, the neurotransmitters for the brain. It's the things the brain needs to do the things we're talking about. Right.

And the things that can break this fuel and metabolism in the brain is stuff like environmental toxin, leaky gut, gut dysbiosis. So then that's where the functional medicine we're talking, the stuff that we're talking about that applies here. So this has now become a very. Right now we're really going to 50,000 fee view. But that's how I see it and I want people to see that. So then when they're doing the microbiome stuff, when they're doing the whatever thing that they're doing, they have more context with how that fits into the overall picture and maybe magnify the placebo effect for them.

Yeah. Hey, and I meant to bring this up, it was one of the first things you talked about, but you mentioned that when people have poor neurometabolic health, they get more affected by concussions. And I think that probably would apply to severity of infections too. There was all this mystery with the pandemic a few years ago of why do these people get so much more sick than these people get? And they say, oh well, if you have metabolic syndrome, if you have diabetes, and they listed off all of these metabolic conditions, then your likelihood of death or severe symptom side effects, long Covid, all those kind of things is like, like skyrocketing high. And I'm sure that there's a number of factors related to like neurometabolic health that would make someone far less resilient to recovering from those type of infections too. Right.

Well, if you look at some of those metabolic diseases that are risk factors for complications of COVID like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, those are all conditions of inflammation. Either the inflammation caused the heart disease or the hypertension or the diabetes or the disease causes more inflammation. Either way there's an inflammatory component. So when your metabolic function is poor, you're going to be more inflamed. And then when your metabolic function is poor, your brain function is poor, and when your brain function is poor, your brain also gets more inflamed. This is why they all matter. Right? And then, so then on the same token, you take that same type of concept where if you have a pre existing health problem or your neurometabolically compromised, then that becomes a fuel for the fire, if you will. So when the real storm comes, when the real trauma comes, like from stress, from layoff, from divorce, from a concussion, from smelling some chemical, then the person with poor neuromatopolic health are the one that's going to fall apart faster than the one who's doing better.

It all makes sense. And we could go on and on about this. I know we're out of time, so thank you for sharing so much about this and I'm impressed that you trademarked the term 15 years ago because I think a lot less was known how interrelated all of these Things are then as kind of more widespread knowledge where it is now. And for people who want to learn more, we're going to get this podcast episode out in time. If you're listening to this right when it comes out, you can go over and join a upcoming very soon neurometabolic challenge with Dr. Khan. Can you tell them a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So thank you for letting me share, Michael. So this challenge is meant to give people the foundations to start to see the interconnection between brain function, metabolics, hormone function, how they're all interrelated. But moreover, it's a challenge. What does that mean? That means I'm going to give people every day for five days very simple things that they can do to start to improve their neurometabolic health. And they can start to see like wow, how easy this is to do and how for some of these things that you do has really fast impact. And once you see the impact, then hopefully they give people more inspiration, motivation to continue to do those things so they can continue to benefit from them. Now it doesn't mean like five days going to solve all your problem and turn your wind back the clock, you know, 50 years so you become a 15 year old again.

But again it's really helpful for people just to notice something though, like any little thing because it changes the, it.

Changes and the expectation changes the expectation.

What if I didn't feel this way?

Yeah, especially if you've been stuck with some kind of symptom for a long time. Even if you feel 5, 10% better in just a few days, that means that you're capable of getting better and sometimes that's all you need to be.

Able to sustain for sure. So this is October 15th to the 19th and we'll have a link that is going to be rebelhealth co backslash NMC that is N like neuro, M like metabolic and C like challenge. So rebelhealth co nmc and you can go there, sign up for that. That's free to sign up for, right?

Absolutely free to sign up.

And it runs October 15th to the 19th. We're going to get this podcast out in time. So if you're listening to this then you can sign up if you're listening to this later or maybe even way later, where's the best place for them to go just to find you and your work and general information and non timed specific options.

Thank you. They can find me on YouTube. If they just Google Dr. Peter Kahn, they'll find a ball headed Chinese guy pretty easy to find. And then they can also go to our website@askdrkahn.com great, perfect.

And we'll have all the links in the show, notes and all that kind of stuff, too. So if you're listening to this right away, go check out the challenge. If you're listening to this later, go find the bald Chinese guy on YouTube and he'll share a lot of really great content there with you. So, Dr. Khan, thank you so much. I always enjoy our conversations and learn a lot myself. And I just really enjoy the way that you can explain complex interrelationships in a way that people understand. Because, like I said, this can get. If you go into the nitty gritty of how these things all interlink, it's. It's very, very, very complex. But it's important for listeners to be able to get it and to be able to self identify and know, like, hey, this is. This is a good way for me to go. And you do a really good job of that. So thank you.

Thank you so much for letting me.

Share my goal, Sam.