The Undiagnosed Chronic Gut and Liver Issues with Sinclair Kennally

Today on Listen Up, I'm here with my friend Sinclair Canale, and she is an expert in resolving chronic gut and liver issues. We have not really talked about that yet on this podcast and she's got quite a story of how this even became her niche, why this is so important, and what role this is playing in fat loss, especially with women. So thanks for being here. So, so happy to chat with you today, Sinclair.

I got you, hon. I love being here. Let's do this.

Yeah. So first of all, let's talk about this. How in the world do you become a niche expert with something so specific, like gut health and liver issues? I'm sure when you were in elementary school and they were saying, what do you want to be when you grow up? That was not top of the list. So let's talk about this.

No, I was going to be a ballerina who saved the whales with my dancing.

Yeah, okay.

Yes. Child of the 80s.

Yeah. Amazing. Okay, so this was so far from your scope of things. Take us back. What happened in your life? What brought you to this, to this super dialed in niche?

The short answer is I came to it the hard way, very reluctantly. Michael and I both. That's my sweetheart and partner in all things. We were both in mental health. We were living the dream, building our practices. I was teaching wellness entrepreneurs how to go online. And I actually got so sick that I ended up in the hospital. And it was a real wake up call for me because I thought, okay, hospital white coats, that's where you go for answers, right? So maybe my finally. My. All these weird things that have been happening to me that were finally coming to a head, oh, I'm going to finally get, like a diagnosis or the words that will somehow set me free or a magic pill or, you know, like a medication that will, like, suddenly fix it so that I can go back to normal life. And nothing could have been further from the truth.

Um, when you say so sick, and I don't mean to interrupt, but I want to just set the frame for everybody. Like when you say so sick, what was going on in your world? Like, what were you sick with? And were you, I'm assuming, being in health, being in that you thought you were eating healthy and doing all the right things.

Yeah, But I was also as. As a mental health practitioner, you'll notice that each of us have our lane. Like, there are so many layers to consciousness, mental, emotional, physical. And everybody's got their little. Their preference.

Right.

Their comfort zone. So, yeah, I thought I was eating healthy, but I also Thought my symptoms like my exhaustion, my fatigue, my overwhelm, easy to irritate, my anxiety and depression, even though I was living my dream life, my food sensitivities. All of this, I thought, could be fixed with a workshop like, oh, this is stress related. I will fix this with a rapid change therapy or meditation or a workshop. Literally, that's what I was trying to do. And I was much more aware of the mental and emotional symptoms, to be honest, because when you have gut and liver stagnation, the way that has become so common today, it creeps in so slowly that you normalize it, and that's actually the worst thing that you could do. So people with IBS or constipation or bloating or tenderness when they eat acid reflux, you know, all, all of these things. I had all of them. You know, rashes, weird fluid retention. It was, it was a really strange time. And because it crept in so slowly over many years, I just thought, oh, my body's kind of on the short bus. My body's kind of broken. But it's just stress. It's just stress.

That's, it's interesting because I remember before I was diagnosed with celiac years ago, before gluten was a trend, before people knew what gluten was. But when, when I was diagnosed with that so many years ago, I remember, I remember learning that I just assumed that every time you eat, your stomach supposed to hurt. That's what I started believing.

Yes. Right. I remember sitting at a family dinner with my sisters, and we were, you know, I'd come into town to visit my sister in Berkeley and we were out, and I said, oh, my God, I, I, I think I would feel better if I'd ripped my guts open with a knife. Because it just, the stabbing pain was so intense. And I said it kind of jokingly, and they rolled their eyes at me like, you're so dramatic. You always say this, but that's the problem. We actually get used to it and we normalize it for each other, and it's not okay. It's a, it's a very important signal. And it'd been coming on for years.

You end up in the hospital. What was the final, what was the thing that brought you to the hospital? Like, what was the decision? Or was it just unbearable? Or what happened that got you there?

It was really weird, is that I was sitting there on the couch on a normal rainy January workday in Portland, and I was having these intense heart palpitations. Intense. And the left arm pain and the Jaw tightness. I was like, oh, my God, I think I'm having a heart attack. And it would not go away. Got worse and worse. And so I asked my sister to take me to urgent care. It was not subsiding. They were like, oh, you got to go to the hospital. This is not okay. And when I got there, the way they triaged me was really interesting. You know, they did the ekg. No, you're not having a heart attack. And then they started doing my symptom intake, and they were like, oh, you have a lot of gut issues. I was like, I do. Like, yeah. And the joint pain that you're describing, like, they were helping me map out what was happening with my body. I was so dissociated from these chronic symptoms and pain that the only reason I went to the hospital was because of my supposed heart attack, which wasn't even happening at all. It was a really strange time. So that's when they got me into, like, the mri, the CAT scan. They were doing all this exploratory stuff. They were running all this blood work, and they kept coming up with, I have no idea what's going on with you. I had no health insurance. You know, the days are passing by. I'm freaking out. But it actually was a really important moment for me because I realized not only do I actually have a very serious physical problem, this is not stress. It's not going away. It's actually gotten to the point where it's become the most important thing in my life. It was a real moment of reckoning that they didn't have any answers for me. I actually checked myself out. I didn't even do the paperwork. I just walked out in a hospital gown. I pulled my jeans on, and I wobbled out into the parking lot. Michael had to practically carry me. And by that point, I was in so much pain in my gut, in my joints, physically, from head to toe, that I thought I was going home to die.

Wow. And how old were you when all this was happening? Just. I was 26, so really young, so nothing to do. You really do think at that point, you're not relating it to age. You're not relating it to something. So you really are concerned. So what did you do next?

I crawled into bed, and I didn't get out for six months. And I wish I could tell you that I had quick answer from there. You know, it became the primary focus of my life. But I don't mind telling you that I wrote my goodbye letters many times.

You literally thought you were Going to die.

I did. And then I thought, oh, my God, I'm not going to die. It's not bad enough for that. And no one has answers for me. Specialist after specialist. Like, this is. This is consuming all of my energy and my time and my life. Like, when I would have to pee, I would start to cry. Like, just start leaking tears. Oh, my God. I had to find the energy and the will to drag this body to the bathroom.

Were you eating during all this?

I was down to a couple of foods at a time. Yeah, I was. And it was like, the absolute wrong thing. So it was like saltines.

So I want people listening to this. This is interesting because this is an extreme story of, like, letting it go and not knowing there's something wrong. But there's obviously a lot of steps earlier that things like this could be caught before it escalates this. And we're going to get into that for a minute. But I want to hear about your pivot, Sinclair. Like, what change what took you out of that depression? And I'm in bed and I'm going to die to. I'm going to become a powerful resource about this. I'm going to learn this. I'm going to fix this. What. What shifted and then what was next?

I wish I could tell you that there was a single moment, but really that what. What I want people to most hear out of my story is that there wasn't a single moment. I had to keep choosing over and over again. I don't have any answers, and I'm going to show up today to this conversation anyway. You know, and that. That was. I had to do that hundreds of times. And I don't mind telling you that I gave up many times. And Michael was the one who had to actually spearhead my care. He searched five continents for answers. Like, he was relentless. And he managed my entire protocol until I finally started to get, like, these moments of relief. Like, oh, I ate that. And I didn't get stabbing pain and want to die, really, you know, to finally realize, okay, I can do this. I'm going to take charge of my own health. I'm going to. I'm going to take it back from my goal and I'm going to deal with it myself.

So what I'm hearing you as you sort of went from doomsday, I'm going to die. Nothing's going to work to. There's a possibility here.

Yeah. And thank God he held that possibility for me. You know, not all of us get that opportunity. I have so much Compassion for people on this journey. Because 6 out of 10Americans today have a chronic illness diagnosis. You kidding me? Versus 4% in the 1960s. That's really strange. That's really out of whack. And it comes down to a lot of our modern exposures and the way that we eat today. Right. But there's. Because it's happening to all of us at the same time. We're normalizing it and we're ignoring these early warning signs. Like I had years of those early warning signs that I chalked up to stress. Right.

And I want to talk about. What were those early warning signs?

Well, weight gain, for one. I am so grateful to holding extra weight for those years, even though I was so ashamed of my body and would do like these crazy crash diets. And, you know, I was working with doctors too, like medical, you know, prescription based diets and, you know, drugs to. To get off this weight. Because there wasn't. My labs, quote, unquote, looked normal. So there was no good reason for it. Right. I'm sure some of your audience have heard that before from their doctors. But being overweight was the sign that helped me understand something was wrong in my body.

And I think I want people to understand too, that I think being overweight is the sign in general that something's off, because it's not about, you are not strict enough, you're not working out, you're not dieting. It's somehow we take this blame, like I must be doing something wrong and I'm not to take out accountability where it is important, obviously to watch what you eat and to move your body. And there's a lot of things we can do. But just being overweight in general is a sign that there's a breakdown somewhere on us.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And it's the sign in our culture that we are willing to look at. So let's start there, you know, and let's become friends with our bodies and let's really understand the signals that they're giving.

Yes. Okay, so take us through what did you. So Michael takes. Takes really stronghold, impossibility. He starts working. What do you start doing first and what starts to change?

I tried various elimination diets, so various food filters, what we call them today. And I would get temporary relief from them. I did like juice cleanses and I would go, oh, that's weird. I got color back in my vision and my bloating went down. I didn't know that I was bloated and I didn't know that I Had no color in my vision until I came back, you know, so these, these early signs, and I don't actually recommend juicing as a primary strategy today, but it was part of my journey, you know, and I was, I had such compromised nutrient absorption, which is happening to many of us. We're overfed and yet we're malnourished. Right. So even when we try to turn the boat and start eating, quote, unquote, the right things and try various food approaches, because we have such a state of malabsorption, we're really on the back foot in terms of what our body can repair and what it's in a position to release. And I'm talking about excess weight, toxins, all of it. Right.

So how do we fix it? What do you do? How do you fix it?

I always recommend to people that you take a multi layered approach. So look at what is in your environment that is actually adding to your body burden, and that includes your water quality. I always start there. The quality of your foods, it's really not anything exotic. We are all getting poisoned in our food or in water every day.

Talk about water quality, because I think this is a very, very overlooked. I mean, I know I've spoken many times about being chronically dehydrated, which I think most people are, by the way, and we think we're fatigued or tired. We're tired, we're bloated, we're lack of energy. But honestly, we just need more water. But let's talk about water quality. What does that matter? And how do you know if you're drinking good quality water?

So what's essential to understand is that our municipal water facilities are not designed to filter out the things that are poisoning us today. That's prescription drug waste, microplastics, heavy metals, herbicides and pesticides, and all sorts of other things like air pollution is now in our water. It's not separate. So once you understand that, you understand that not only is tap water not your friend, it's actually a toxic event.

Fluoride too?

Yep, fluoride's a big one. Aluminum, These are all in our water. There's actually 12,000 municipal districts in the United States that had the same level of lead as Flint, Michigan or higher. This is the dirtiest secret of our time.

So what type of water do you recommend people drink? What's like, the better, best and ideal?

I wish I could tell you that it's what everybody wants me to say, which is reverse osmosis, but it doesn't go far enough. The Filters, mold. In fact, that could be the primary reason for your thyroid issues and your weight gain and your brain fog and your joint pain and your digestive issues right there.

Okay, so what would you like someone that orders arrowhead delivery or talk to me about that. That's, that's what I actually think most people do. They think, yeah, that's a good water.

Yeah. Some people are usually on the spectrum somewhere between a Brita and a reverse osmosis.

Yes.

So.

Yes, so help us with that. And then there's other ones that like, really like the kinds of filters that will take swamp water and completely filter it down. Yeah. So help us with that.

So I. In a, in a perfect world, in a traditional world that has not been totally overloaded with toxins and poisoned our groundwater, yes, spring water would be amazing. Spring water would be ideal. But that's no longer the case and you don't have any visibility into the water source and the water testing. And so at this time, based on the independent studies that we've seen, I can no longer recommend that.

Okay, so.

And we've covered this part. If a reverse osmosis, a fancy filter, even the ones with the added bone char, you know, filter for, to filter out fluoride, is only going to reduce the parts per million. It's not actually going to remove it fully. So if spring water is not going to do it and even fancy reverse osmosis with additional filters are not going to do it, what is actually going to take care of this and protect you? We recommend people go all the way to distilled water and add back in trace minerals.

Okay, so for people, because people don't understand what that is from. I mean, I remember that from like fitness, my fitness days like to get super lean distilled water. Can you explain what that is for people that don't know what that means and then why it's important to supplement when you do that?

Yeah. So distilled water is actually make taking water through a state change. So you pour in your tap water or your fancy filtered water. I highly recommend that if you have, if you get a distiller and your spouse is skeptical, like our, our filters, good enough. Don't worry, babe. Pour it into the distiller and find out because it will steam it and then it will reconstitute it for you in its purest form. So it's just H2O and it will filter out everything. The VOC is the glyphosate, the fluoride, the heavy metals, the prescription drug, waste the microplastics, all of it. And you will see it at the bottom of the distillery and your body will have a visceral reaction when you look at the bottom of the distiller and go, oh yeah, I don't want that in me.

So but this is different than going and buying a plastic jug of distilled water at the grocery store.

That's right, because distilled water is hungry water. It will pull the plastics out of that container.

So when you go and buy a distilled water jug that's plant, that's in plastic, you're going to actually get more.

You're actually getting plastic water. Yeah, because the structure of distilled water is that it wants to pick up inorganic material and flush it out. So that's actually what it does in your body that has such a, it's a great side benefit. Distilled water will pick up inorganic minerals, not organic minerals. So not the bioavailable ones that your body desperately needs.

Okay, so in an ideal world you'd want people to buy, actually have a distiller themselves and then there are really.

Cheap ones on Amazon, like treat it like a 30 day experiment within the Amazon 30 day return window.

So if we're doing distillers, if ideally someone's doing a distiller, what do they need to make sure they add in? Because you can actually get dehydrated on distilled water.

So you still have. But it's actually two different problems. What is going to be my clean source of water and what is going to be my source of bioavailable minerals? Because our soil is so depleted, I don't have enough good minerals in my body. So we have to solve both problems for you to be properly hydrated and resilient today. So that means distilled water like, like a mega home, like that kind of, it's very small, fits on a countertop and then add something like CT minerals, which are highly bioavailable. They're the correct PH for the body to take them in. Your body recognizes them as food. When you're choosing a trace mineral supplement, you, if you pick the right one, you are opening a door to health and resilience for yourself. Because everything starts with the right building blocks for your body to repair itself. But if you pick the wrong one, if you pick the junk minerals out there that your body can't use them, it looks at those like, okay, you just added rocks and I can't do anything with these. So you want pre digested trace Minerals, as if a plant or animal had already absorbed them for you and you were actually getting them from your food the way you're supposed to. Wow.

Okay, so I know people are going to have a lot of questions here because. So I just want. I want to sort of like dummy it down, if you will, Especially for me too. So in an ideal world, you want a distiller. Okay. If you. And then you want to add back pre digested trace minerals. That's an ideal world. If. So I have a couple questions on this. So first question is, which trace minerals? Like where do they get them? What do they look for? And then my second question is, if they don't have a distiller and they're not adding trace minerals, what's like the next best option? I know this is the ideal, but what would be the next option? Sure.

So my favorite source of trace minerals is CT minerals.

Okay.

And that's from Cellcore. You can add even one or two drops of that to a large jug or jar of water and it will structure the water. And what that means is it will actually turn it into the fourth phase of water, which means the molecular structure takes shape as if your body has already done the work to organize the water. It's deeply hydrating. The body goes, oh, thank you. I don't have to organize this water to do uptake into my tissues and cel else you've already done it for me.

Okay. Is this easy for people to find? Like they can just. Yeah, easy for them to get that.

Okay, you can get it. Yeah.

So that's choice number one. Choice number two, they're like, okay, let's do much. I'm not doing that. What's the next best option?

So if you're not in a position to distill your own water, the next best thing would be spring water that's stored in glass.

Okay. And I'm starting to see some of these companies are actually starting to shift to glass, which is amazing.

It really is. And also just an important hack for you. The cleanest plastic bottled water that you can find in any airport in any city in the world is Fiji.

Oh, good to know.

Okay.

And I like the taste of it.

Yeah. One of the reasons why it's so great, and this is actually great for not just protecting your brain and mental clarity over time, but it's also great for fat loss, is it's really high in ortho salicylic acid. It's the highest plastic bottle of otter content of orthosolicic acid. And that comes from this natural spring. Okay.

Fiji water is number one choice now. Now the ones that deliver, I'm going to talk about like Nestle and Arrowhead and some of those. What are your thoughts on those? Better than tap water, but not ideal.

Still, it's. I mean there's. You really don't know what you're getting. It depends on where you live. You can actually look up on the EWG water tap water database. Why don't we add that link to the show notes?

Okay.

For folks you can actually pl zip code and see what's in your tap water. And that will help inform this decision for you.

Okay.

Because you may be shocked. Like for us here in San Diego, our radiation is 10x in the last five years in our tap water. That's not cool.

I don't drink tap water, period. End of story. I know that. But I do drink. We have, we have two things here. We have like the delivery that comes in the big plastic thing. So I've known that's not ideal, but I've assumed it's better than tap water. And then we have. Is it called a beaker? Something like Berkey. Berkey. What about those?

So I hate to be the bummer police because Berkey is beloved especially in the natural health community, the detox communities. But here's the deal. Berkey is only guaranteed for the first hundred gallons with each set of filters. And when you think about that, for a family of three, four or five people in a household, that goes really fast. And it's also that there's been many independent tests of sending pure water through Berkey and then having that water analyzed by independent labs. And guess what? Lots of junk is coming out of those filters, including but not limited to aluminum in the fluoride filter add ons. That's not a good trade off, guys. No, it's not worth it.

I think the selling point on a Berkey is that you could literally take swamp water and make it drinkable.

Yeah. In a. Without power, it's just gravity based.

Yeah.

But the problem is it doesn't go far enough. So if you're looking at optimizing your health, if you already know that you're on the back foot in terms of nutrition and you have some catching up to do if you're trying to lose weight, if you want to protect your longevity and vitality for the next few decades to come, this is so worth looking into.

Okay, Got it. Okay, so you said multi layer.

So.

So water quality is a Must. And you put that before quality of foods, and then quality of foods is second. What's your theory on foods? Give me like the general, like, what should people be? You don't have to go through like an entire diet process. But what's your belief? Is it like mine is. Mine has always been eat as much as close to an unprocessed natural, real food diet is that you can and get in lots of fruits and vegetable that grew because of phytonutrients and antioxidants. So what's yours?

Yeah, we're really on the same page. It's about eating simple whole foods and asking yourself, like, everybody's in a different position here. So. And we can talk about this if we have time to unpack this. I'd love to talk about women and their livers at this stage, wanting to. That's so important.

For sure. Yeah.

So we'll, we'll unpack food from a different angle when we do that. But in general, you want to ask yourself, what is my body in a position to digest and absorb? So it doesn't matter if you're seeing on goop or in a magazine that something is a superfood if your body isn't in position to break it down. Like, goji berries are a perfect example. They're, you know, have all these great, you know, phytonutrients and all these, you know, like, oh, really high in super important minerals in a lab. But most people's guts are not in a position to break those down because you're getting microdosed with herbicides, pesticides, you know, all sorts of weird heavy metals and, you know, drug waste in your water that you, you know, your food has been irrigated and cooked in. So you have to ask yourself if in today's day and age, my body needs a little bit of extra help breaking down and absorbing food. How can I make it easy on my body? So it's not about what is the how, how can I cram in a bunch of superfoods today? It's more about what is easy for my body to break down to get those basic building blocks, the essential fatty acids, the amino acids. Like, let's just get back to the basics so your body can do the repair work and then you can optimize.

Okay, so, so this is what we've been talking about so far is this multi layered approach. This is mostly for your gut health. Is this correct?

Yeah.

Okay. Anything else that we need to know about that before we move on to sort of liver and issues that we need to be aware of there.

I think it's really important for people. If you, if you're listening to this and you have, if you're one of like the 6 out of 10Americans that has chronic gut issues, like digestive issues, and that could be anything from acid reflux to bloating to constipation or diarrhea to, you know, food sensitivities, et cetera. It's worth looking at food filters. So food filters and the way we look at them, we look at lectins. If you have autoimmune issues or leaky gut, you can do. You can really benefit from taking a short term conscious pause from lectins. That includes nightshades and a bunch of other plant toxins. You may also want to look at histamine. Eating low histamine for a while.

Yeah, I've heard a number of people, actually, it's interesting because I've done this for so long where they'll start adding a green juice or a smoothie every day and they think they're doing amazing things, powering in a ton of spinach, for example. Then they start having really bad chronic and it's, it's, it's happened. I've heard this story more times than I can count where it ended up being a histamine reaction.

Yeah, exactly. Spinach is actually one of the worst foods that you can eat when you're trying to recover your gut health because it's so high in histamine and so high in oxalates. And it's really hard for your gut to break down. If you're asking, let's talk about oxalates.

And histamine because these are some trendy words right now. But let's talk about what are, what does that mean with. And I especially talk about. And I don't, I don't love the extreme of the carnivore method, but carnivore diet really talks about oxalates and why they don't do vegetables. So could you speak a little bit on that, on oxalated and histamine?

So think about it this way. Yes, we evolved to eat whole foods and we also evolved without the presence of environmental toxins. Now we're getting so many, so much exposure to these herbicides, gut pesticides and other gut irritants every day. That plant toxins that never used to bother us in previous generations. Like, think about grandma and grandpa. They smoked two packs a day. They ate, you know, very simply, but also pretty poorly, and they did fine. And they outlived our parents, you know, or they had way less chronic illness at the end of their life than our parents did. So we need to look at what has changed in the last 20 years and understand that all of our guts are to have a baseline of irritation now that was not there 25 years ago. So that's why lectins come into play. Those are plant toxins. So are oxalates. Oxalates are higher in plants now than they used to be. They're jagged little crystal shards because plants are actually producing more of them to help bind to the aluminum in our air pollution. So plants are under attack as well, and they're not. They're wise to this. So they're trying to overcompensate. So oxalates are actually higher today. So that's why something like spinach to a gut today that's already irritated with leaky gut and is so much more irritating with higher oxalates in it than it was, say, 25 years ago.

So what's the solution here? Because, for instance, I know I've got people listening that follow my plans, and they've had huge shifts eating an unprocessed natural food diet. And we talk about adding unlimited vegetables. What's your advice on that? Because we don't want to go the opposite extreme where we're now afraid of every food too. And I would say I'll tell you my answer, and then I'm curious. Your answer. My answer would be just to vary it up.

Like, you.

You, instead of getting so worried about my spinach, is going to have this. Just don't have spinach every day. Like, it's about varying it up and changing things around. So I'm curious your. Your take on this.

Yeah. So the reason why. So, okay, when we're trying to eat healthy, we have socialized ourselves to price certain foods and we have accidentally gone overboard on them. So, like, for me, I only became oxalate sensitive when I was having three almond milk lattes a day. Almonds are super high in oxalates. And I was juicing spinach and kale. Yeah, super high in oxalates.

You're overdoing it on those.

Yeah. And doing beets and beet greens.

Right. Whereas you had like that once a week. Maybe that wouldn't have created an issue.

Yeah, exactly. So oxalates. I think about this in terms of, like, what is an easy first step and treating this as an exploration and taking consciousness pauses, whether that's a few weeks or even a couple of months. Depending on the severity of your symptoms, it may even be longer. But conscious pause from certain types of food toxins, including these plant toxins, so that you can learn about your body. It's a. If you're in a state of curiosity about this, it's not overwhelming. If you're like, oh my God, everything is scary and it's trying to kill me, then not only you're not going to heal, but you're going to exhaust yourself. So I think in terms of, if you have gut issues, take a pause from nightshades. That's an easy thing to do out of the lectin family. See how you feel. You don't have to eat tomatoes every day. It's not going to kill you to take a couple months off of them. I know it's summer, maybe you wait till September.

Eggplants. Yeah. Anything.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Peppers. So. And then if you have, if you have listened to this and you're like, oh my God, I am eating all those things, spinach, kale beetles, beet greens, almonds. I'm eating an oxalate bomb every day. You don't have to walk away from oxalates, simply adjust gently down.

I talk, think about nut butters or see, like, I just tell people to alternate. It's like maybe you have cashew butter one day or almost like it's just not piling in the exact same thing.

Yeah. And also you can't, you can't go oxalate free because then you will trigger oxalate dumping and you will cause more symptoms for yourself. So give yourself a break. Go gentle, just reduce and start varying your foods more.

Yeah.

And think about cooked, broken down foods. You mentioned something that's a really hot topic right now, the carnivore diet. I will say, as a vegetarian, I feel a responsibility to tell you that I see faster clinical gains for people who are eating heavy in meat than those who are not.

Yes. And they also rapidly age quicker how they. Like, there's a lot of, there's a downside to things. So you might get lean, you might change your blood sugar, you might change your insulin response, which obviously sugar and insulin responses is a key to many diseases, many of them. So we change that. But I also see the opposite, the other problem happening with rapid aging or things like that, because you're not getting the nutrients from vegetables and fruits. So that's. So I see both sides of that.

But we're talking in the context of gut issues right now. So if you want to heal your gut, one of the things that you could explore if you are a meat eater is taking a conscious pause from high irritants, plants and vegetables, and going heavier on the meats while your gut regenerates itself. Your gut lining regenerates in three days, guys. If you have chronic digestive symptoms, it's because you are recreating the problem with your lifestyle and environment and foods right now. So this is really important to understand. Your body will respond. It never forgets how to heal if you give it the right inputs. So it may not be that you eat heavy and meats for decades. You know, the idea is to go back to resilience, to open back up a wide range of foods that can nourish you, that you can really enjoy because your body can break them down.

Okay, all right, let's talk about liver a little bit. Yeah, that's a very, it's a different topic and it's a very overlooked, sorry, underlooked, overlooked place.

Yeah. This I'm so passionate about sharing with women because 80% of women over 40 have toxic, sluggish bile. Now, what does that mean? Bile is basically your liquid gold detergent. It's made by the liver and it's very expensive to make. So your body wants to reuse it and it wants to flush out toxins from your liver through your gallbladder, into your digestive tract and out the door. That's what bile is for. It's also highly anti cancerous. It helps promote healthy gut motility and it helps break down and absorb crucial foods. It emulsifies your fats. So those essential fatty acids, those A, D, E, K, like even our calcium absorption, these are crucial topics that we're trying to understand right now. Right. Especially for this age group. And we are overlooking the fact that most of us have sluggish bile. So if it's not moving with ease, you can't break down your foods. If bile is not moving with ease and flowing quickly, then you are holding on to extra weight. If it's not flowing quickly, you have a toxin buildup, which means you're starting to get mental, emotional and physical symptoms from that. Joint inflammation, gut issues, brain fog, fatigue, extra weight, bloating, these things can all be a direct result of sluggish bile.

How do we attack it? How do we fix it? How do we know if we have it or do we just treat it, assuming we have it?

So the problem is even in functional medicine, there's not great testing that will reveal this for you until it's already a huge issue. We know for example that 1 in 4Americans has non alcoholic fatty delivered fatty liver disease. Are you kidding me right now? So 1 in 4 women has non alcoholic fatty liver disease, and 4 out of 5 women have toxic sluggish bile that's like the precursor to non alcoholic fatty liver disease. And once you finally discover you have fatty liver disease, your doctor says, well, just eat low in fat. There's not really a whole lot I can do for you. That's not true. You can deal with this with diet, you can deal with this with supplementation, you can deal with this with detox therapies. One of the things you can do is just remove your high load of toxic exposure every day. Like we've already covered through your water. Get. Do yourself a favor, revisit your air filtration. You know, open the windows. That's the free thing to do. Or get a really great quality air filtration system because the air indoors can be up to 400 times more toxic than that outside. And your liver has to deal with all of that. And it only takes, you know, a tiny amount of industrial chemical molecules to drop bile acids out of that liquid form into the solid, sluggish, sticky, toxic.

So you, you left out. And I'm wondering if there's a reason or if, if you just hadn't gotten to it yet. What I think is the biggest issue with liver right now, and that's the amount of prescription drugs people take. Yeah, let's get into it. Like strong NSADs, things like that.

Yeah, exactly. And maybe we should do a different episode about cholesterol, because that's a huge byproduct of the stress that your liver is under. And trying to artificially suppress those with statins is only going to add to the problem. And it doesn't actually reduce your risk of cardiac events. But I'm going to resist the temptation to go there because you're right. It's pharmaceutical drugs in general that really take a toll on the liver like we have. And now in our practice, we have people. God, what is that? Why am I blanking on the name? It's that acne medication that's so Accutane. We have people who took that as a teenager and have had their liver under distress ever since. And by the time they show up at 40 or 45 in our practice, they have thousands of stones, not in their gallbladder, but in their liver from it. They have unlivable skin conditions. They have such distress in their guts, and they are an anxious wreck. And it really started with the accutane shutting down their liver. So we have to ask ourselves, anytime that we're on pharmaceutical drugs, what are the side effects? Do I understand them and think through what is this going to feel like for me 10 years down the line with my liver? Because your liver is your master regenerator organ. It balances your hormones, it help helps break down and digest your food. It's a major part of your immune system. And yeah, it's a major part of anti aging. So all these things that we care about in this age group we have to take a fresh look at.

Right.

We got to protect the liver.

Would you recommend if someone is taking a pharmaceutical, if they have to take one, that they test their liver numbers regularly?

Here's the problem with that. The liver will lie to you. On normal labs, your liver can be down to 60% of normal function or less and still appear within normal ranges.

Wow.

We do not have great ways to test for toxic sluggish livers right now. Wow.

Interesting. Okay, so this could actually, this is an interesting. This could explain. So when someone's on a straw, because I think of NSATs as being one of the, the number one prescriptions, like so many people take NSAIDs. If you're taking high doses of NSAIDs, people associate that there's weight gain with that. I'm wondering now that if a big part of that is the liver issue with that. Yes, it's making sense to me that it's more than just NSAIDs and bloats or whatever that is, but it also could be how it's affecting our livers.

Yeah. And think about how many people are also on thyroid medication. So Most of your T4 gets converted into T3 in your liver. So you have to look at that thyroid liver axis. If you're not happy with your thyroid numbers, if you're not happy with your metabolism, you got to consider that if the liver is under distress, the thyroid is going to. That light is going to start blinking sooner than actual liver pain or elevated liver enzymes, et cetera. So good.

So much information. We'll probably have to do a part two sinclair, but this is, this is great. So just some sort of takeaways from this, what I'm hearing and please add to it or correct me if I'm hearing wrong, but some added takeaways is one about once again being your own health advocate and being a detective because had you just accepted what the hospital said or whatever, you'd be in a very different space now. So taking accountability. I'm also hearing to get really Clear on understanding what's going on. Listening to your body, not just listening to what someone tells you to take or eat, but really listening to how is my body responding? How is it responding? And then taking your gut health and taking your liver health very seriously and really looking at, number one, water, how is that affecting me? What am I drinking, what am I hydrating with? With not just am I hydrating enough, but what am I hydrating with? 2 foods, am I eating too much of the same food? Really looking at variety, sticking to natural, unprocessed food, but really looking at how can we clean that up? No hormones added, no antibiotics added, no pesticides added. How do I, how do I look at cleaning that up? And how do I keep a variety of foods so that I'm not creating a problem with oxalates or histamines?

Yeah. And the last thing I'll add to that, because that's such a beautiful summary of what we've covered and what you can do with it from here, is to take a fresh look at your sources of fat.

Fats.

Right. So if you want to help your liver out, one of the best things that you can do is to provide healthy fats that are non rancid, not processed. So real fats. So that would be tallow, organic, grass fed ghee, grass fed butter. Whether it's, you know, maybe you have a lactose intolerance, but you can do coconut oil. Right. Or you can do pure avocado oil.

These are, I would say, olive oil too. Are you online with olive oil?

Olive oil is great dishes. Exactly. And people forget that part.

Start.

So it's got to be first, press cold pressed extra virgin olive oil so that it's not rancid.

And then I would notice that she did not say any seed oils because seed oils have a level of toxicity on those too.

Seed oils are the devil. Yeah. They are highly inflammatory. They will actually, your body will use rancid seed oils to build your cell walls if they have nothing else. And they can stay in your body for six to seven years or even longer. And what happens when you have rancid oils in your body is your cells cannot take in nutrients and they cannot expel metabolic waste or toxins. So you just guaranteed extra weight without.

Because the last decade was a big focus on seed oils. Not just canola, cottonseed, and some of those that got replaced, but even sunflower oil, safflower oil, like all of those, grapeseed oil. They're all seed oils.

Yeah. And if you look at the original data that where they marketed seed oils from. You have to remember seed oils are not food. They are industrial lubricants and they are processed as such. They are bleached and deodorized and they have so much toxic compounds in them the way that they are high heat expeller pressed by the time they get to your table. They are not food, they are industrial lubricants. And all of those original studies like these are heart healthy have been completely debunked. So you've got to catch up with the times and just know that vegetable oil, seed oils, canola oils, sunflower oil, all of these are actually adding weight to your waistline because they're adding stress to your liver.

So good. Thank you so much, Sinclair. This was super helpful today. This is amazing. Where can people learn more about what you do, Reach out to you? Where can they find you? Where do you want them to look?

Oh, so such a joy to do with you, Natalie. So they can find me@detox rejuvenation.com we also have the popular podcast your Health Reset that I host, which is super fun. And this is all the stuff we talk about.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Sinclair. This was great. Thank you.

Yeah, this is so much fun.