Dr. Kirten Parekh: Healing Autoimmune Issues, Gut Health, & Truth About Fiber | MMP #223
Doctor. Kiernan, thanks for joining me.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Dude, this has been a long time coming, right?
Speaker 2:Yes. A few months now, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some of the benefits of going to these Austin Connections, which is such a hub for the health and wellness space, is you just never know who you're going to meet. And so we were at that superpower event, you spoke before me, and when you hear someone else that has a similar autoimmune disease, you instantly connect with them because of all the pain and suffering and everything that you've been through, but especially for you and I, with you having Crohn's, me having colitis, it's so similar, and I think one of the things when we went up to each other afterwards is, like, the similarity between both of our stories. So it's cool because you kinda have, like, a brother in arms, and then you can, like, share different strategies, healing stories, things like that. It's almost like we've lost that power to heal through anecdotal stories.
Speaker 1:So I'm glad that, obviously it's unfortunate that we both had those diseases, but it kind of brought us together in a way, too.
Speaker 2:Definitely. I'm sure you were in a position where you were on forums, on Reddit, looking for answers, looking for some sort of online community, and the truth of the matter is there's not much information out there. Yeah. And I know a lot of people feel shame when they have something like this going on, it's autoimmune, inflammatory. It's hard to even talk to your own family about it because they try to help, they don't understand.
Speaker 2:So it was so funny going, as soon as I got off stage, he went on stage and started speaking about the same thing. I was like, What? That can't be. What's the coincidence that that happened?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we didn't we didn't even know ahead of time because we had never met know you did. Nope. And we just had crazy similarities. But you're such an interesting guy because you're you're technically a surgeon by trade.
Speaker 1:You're a podiatrist, right? Yep. So you have classical medical training, but then you also have this degree in nutrition, you have a ton of information and insight into, like, healthy gut, gut microbiome, then you also have your product, Chlora, as well. So you kind of bring this interesting blend of, like, traditional medicine, but then also preventative cure, too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, could go into that if you'd like So on how that I went back to school during the pandemic, because for a short amount of time in New York, the operating rooms were closed for around two, three months. And I was like, great opportunity to go to school online Mhmm. For a discount, and I don't have to attend classes in person or do rotations in person. And there was a program at Rutgers where it allowed doctorate holders to base user credits to get an advanced degree in nutrition.
Speaker 2:So I really wanted to learn about three things. The microbiome Mhmm. Obviously, nutrition, the food supply we have in America, and cellular health and cellular aging. Mhmm. I got all three.
Speaker 2:Rutgers was a fantastic school for that. So I graduated last year in January, officially, and really am leaning towards that more than my own traditional medical education. I've learned more about the body and health and overall aging in that year and a half than I did in four years of school and residency.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. It just shows there have been so many incredible, like, beneficial changes and pivots that people have taken to their career. I know, obviously, gut health, like we mentioned, is something very personal to you. So maybe for the listener, why do you think you got sick? How old were you?
Speaker 1:What happened? And then maybe even just some of the things that you did to maybe holistically treat that would be cool for the listener.
Speaker 2:Definitely. So I'll tell you a story. I spent ten years in school trying to get this degree and, become a surgeon. And as soon as I graduated, I got hit with this, ailment. Basically, I woke up one morning and had left lower quadrant pain, started losing about a pound a week.
Speaker 2:And I'm about five'eight, and I lost I went from, like, one hundred fifty five, one hundred sixty down to one hundred and ten pounds in three months no reason. I mean, no signs of bleeding, nothing, like, literally nothing. Even had, a bunch of testing done, everything was clean. But my theory is in residency right before I graduated, I went to Asia to do this, like, surgical mini residency or mini fellowship, if you would like to call it that. And, it was in a hospital called Civil Hospital in Asia.
Speaker 2:One of Asia's largest hospitals. It's got 6,000 beds. Did a ton of cases. Was really interesting. While I was there, though, I got an E.
Speaker 2:Coli infection and, took some antibiotics for that. Basically, pretty high end stuff where it destroys good and bad bacteria, and it was a pretty severe infection. Was like, almost hospitalized, was that bad. So luckily I got the antibiotics there, flew back to The United States, got better. Four months later, started having these symptoms.
Speaker 2:And I remember doctors asking me, hey, are you stressed out? What's going on in your life? I'm like, bro, I am healthy, I'm working out, I'm the happiest I've ever been, I got my dream job, and then this happened out of nowhere. Literally out of nowhere. I was eating the same things I was my whole life essentially, going out of my way to eat healthy, in quotes, and then this happened.
Speaker 2:So my theory was, yeah, could have been antibiotics, could have been infectious, a kind of trigger, which happens to a lot of people as well. Sometimes it's stress, sometimes it's autoimmune related, but I'm of the belief now that this umbrella of Crohn's, colitis, even some autoimmune disease isn't entirely genetic. I really do think a lot of it has to be has to contribute to environmental factors and food supply, especially in America. If you look at the trend over the past even ten, twenty years, it's like autoimmune diseases, these types of diagnoses are rising exponentially. Why?
Speaker 2:There's a reason why.
Speaker 1:One hundred percent. Yeah, if you look at the chart of autoimmune diseases over the last fifty years or so, they were essentially non existent a century ago. And now it's like, I know so many people were, especially after creating the show, the number of young men in particular that were like, I have Crohn's, I have colitis, I have IBS, I have eczema, I have psoriasis, it's insane. And it's like people are turning to these alternative health resources, whether it's like podcasts, blogs, Reddit, because you're like, you're so desperate for an answer, and you're on medication that's supposed to be helping you. And, you know, I think it does help you to an extent.
Speaker 1:Like, I think the biologic drugs that I was on got me maybe like 80% of the way there, but in terms of like fully getting free of flare ups, clearing out all the micro inflammation, it was really like running towards animal products and the carnivore diet for me was what really got me to that, like, 80 to 100% feeling healed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. I can understand. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For I
Speaker 2:can understand the frustration.
Speaker 1:So, yeah. And so for you, so you didn't have blood in your stool, but you were still technically inflamed and had Crohn's disease, is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I did eventually start getting, like, really bad flare ups. But I would always go back to baseline where I was getting clean scopes. Basically for the audience, scope is basically endoscopy, colonoscopy. Basically you get a tube down your throat, tube up the other way, check your colon, check your GI tract, check your upper GI, including your stomach, esophagus, part of the mouth, a small intestine, and, that's the best way diagnostically because you get to see what clinically you see in the images, but then they also take little snippets of tissue to send to the pathology lab to see the micro inflammation.
Speaker 2:And unfortunately, there's a piece missing there. What's that piece? It's the microbes. It's what's going on even further down the line in terms of diversity, what commensal bacteria are there, and the microbiome houses your parasites, your bacteria, your viruses, your fungi. It's a whole host of things, and it's something that traditional medicine doesn't really address, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so interesting too, to your point, like, I feel like so many, you know, I'm 29, I think your early thirties, it's like how many people our age just like, they probably have undiagnosed IBS or something like that, and we just accept this irritated gut 20 fourseven. It's like there's no internal ability to actually take stock of how do these foods actually make me feel. And we just accept it and accept it, and we don't give the genes what they want, and the next thing you know, it's like you're in a full blown flare up, and then you're just on drugs for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a collection of things, whether it's habits, food supply, environment, and correcting those. It's like in surgery, like I tell my patients, Hey, have this foot pain. I have this little immobility, and why is it happening at 45? Well, you've been taking thousands of steps unconsciously every day, it accumulates over time, and maybe it's leading to this pathological state.
Speaker 2:So one of the, hallmarks of aging is prevention of disease. And if you look at traditional medicine, we just don't prevent at all. We don't cure or prevent, we basically treat symptoms. That's what the entire system is based on. So, there might be something, whether it's antibiotic use, poor food supply, water supply, your environment, that's accumulating over time to lead you to the disease state.
Speaker 2:And as you know, when inflammation starts, it's like a positive feedback loop, where if you don't stop it, it really gets worse each time,
Speaker 1:or What's over a period of the scientific definition of what an autoimmune disease or illness actually is?
Speaker 2:I guess, in layman's terms, it's basically when your body is unable to either correct its pathology or correct the inflammation that's going on or it's attacking itself. So for example, in Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, the tissue is so inflamed it keeps kind of damaging itself. The immune system attacks its own tissues in a way. That's kind of a layman's term. But if you zoom out, it's probably more of a systemic issue terms of there's something wrong in one part of the body and it's affecting the other part of the body and it's manifesting into a disease state.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of connections between rheumatoid arthritis and gut health, vitiligo and gut health. And a lot of people that have been carnivore and have reversed their vitiligo. Know Joe Rogan talked about this specifically for vitiligo. So there's not just one cause to autoimmune disease for one definition. Just like Crohn's and Colitis, I don't consider that to be two different diagnoses.
Speaker 2:Know a lot of doctors would disagree with me, but I do believe it's in one umbrella of autoimmune inflammation dysbiosis for gut health.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you I guess this flipped off. Maybe I'll just hit the off button so we can keep going. So when you were down to 110, did they put you on any type of biologic drug or anything like that to treat the symptoms?
Speaker 2:The whole time, I would say the first two years I was sick, I was very resistant. I was like, How is this happening? No one answers. Why is this happening to me? I'm healthy.
Speaker 2:I have no history, no family history. I've gone out of my way to eat healthy my whole life. Mhmm. I remember being in college and even in med school and going out of my way to eat better because I just Yeah. Cared about my And that was just something I've always had.
Speaker 2:Even when I got sick in Asia, I didn't wanna take the antibiotics. Yeah. Because I was, like, worried about my microbiome.
Speaker 1:You kind of intuitively knew.
Speaker 2:I just intuitively knew, yeah, for some reason. With that said, my food quality probably wasn't the best because I was eating, like, you know, maybe the not not so good quality meat and some GMO foods here and there and snack foods. I love protein bars. Aceto oils maybe even. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I think I think that plays a role.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so interesting too, because, like, if I look back, I feel like I can pinpoint why I got UC, where there's definitely some genetic component. I have a grandma that has colitis as well. When I got sick, was chronically stressed out. I was drinking, binge drinking all the time.
Speaker 1:There were, like, certain lifestyle things that I was doing where I'm like, that definitely caused me to have that, plus a genetic component, plus a stress component. But it's like for you, you're doing all the right things, maybe that antibiotic incident was what triggered it, but it's weird how sometimes we just don't know why these things happen or why these triggers happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I've seen that spectrum across many people.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:This happened out of nowhere, or this happened, I know exactly why this happened. Yeah. It was this antibiotic, or it was this stress event, or, you know. Yeah, that definitely is very, very true across everyone I've met. And we are individuals, after all, so we can't pinpoint exactly what happens sometimes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's interesting for you, I would have thought that I've just heard that residency is such a stressful time in your life, so my initial thought was like, Oh, he must have just been working insane hours and chronically stressed out, but it sounds like you were actually loving it and just doing what you wanted to be doing that didn't actually have a role.
Speaker 2:No. No, it was great. I had a great time residency. I went to Englewood Hospital across the river here in New York and had a great three years. It was fantastic.
Speaker 2:I was gonna move to California, and then my current boss basically gave me this offer I couldn't refuse. I was super excited to start, and three months of starting got this happening. Had this happen to me. So imagine in my state of mind, I've worked this hard my whole life just to suffer now. Dude.
Speaker 2:You know, and I couldn't even enjoy my life. It was so strange. It was a short amount of time, but I still remember being in that state of mind, being like, what karmic value did this come back to me and made me feel this way all of a sudden when I worked this hard my whole life to achieve this point just to suffer now.
Speaker 1:You're like, What did I do in the past to deserve this? Because I think what people don't understand is when you have this, like, you know, when you have Crohn's, colitis, IBD, your life is entirely revolved around where is the nearest bathroom. And it's like, for me, it was like, I'm going to go to the bathroom in the toilet or it's just happening right now. So you're just, like, making up all these excuses as to why you're going to the bathroom. So it's like, I remember being on a date, and I think I had to go, like, four times during the date.
Speaker 1:And the girl that I was out with probably thought I had, like, a Coke addiction or something like that. I'm just like making up different excuses. Especially as young men, it's like, you don't want to be vulnerable and tell people why this is happening. And then for you, I would imagine you're in this intensive state of learning, you're trying to learn from these doctors, these specialists, you've worked your whole life to get to that point, you finally make it, and now you're dealing with this like, with Crohn's.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was extremely frustrating. And there was initially, I would say when I was younger, this happened when I was 29, 30, there was a sense of shame, for sure. I was this athletic guy that was starting his career, making good money, trying to live this certain lifestyle, and now I couldn't even go out and drink with my friends like I wanted to enjoy that kind of lifestyle that I kinda held off for a few years Yeah. Pursuing my education.
Speaker 2:And now I feel no shame. I feel fantastic about it. Feel like I should tell people about it, and I'm happy to do so because of what happened to me, I'm in better health than I've ever been in my life, and I understand how my body works. I understand what is kinda going on. I'm not 100% there for sure, but I definitely understand a lot more than I ever did and never would have.
Speaker 2:And the silver lining here is that, obviously, I'm part of the health and wellness community now. I've learned a lot about my own body, about this disease state, about other disease states, and what's going on in the environment around us as far as food supply goes. That's important too.
Speaker 1:It's so important, and it's like you never know I've really grown in my faith a lot the last year, and it's like a lot of times you never know why God puts certain events in your life. You know that he has a master plan, but at the time you can't see it, so for something like having Crohn's or UC in the moment, when you're in that flare up, you're like, God, like, why are you doing this to me? I don't understand. Yet, it's you being open and vulnerable and sharing your healing journey. Thousands of young people are gonna be able to learn from that, be able to help themselves.
Speaker 1:That's probably the biggest thing that I learned from doing this show is, for years, I wanted to write a blog about how I healed my stomach holistically, but I was like, I don't have a medical degree, like, who am I? But there's so much power in being able to share your healing journey, and these people that are on Reddit or they're on YouTube or they listen to podcasts, it's like, they don't really care what your medical degree is, they just care if you're actually able to offer insightful knowledge and value so they can heal themselves too. So it's like, I almost feel like when you have something like this, number one, it is a blessing because it's led to you pursuing a degree in nutrition, starting Chlora, you're helping all these people, but it's like you're giving the other people the ability to heal by you being vulnerable. Otherwise, how are they supposed to heal? Because there's no examples of people doing so.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you can stand in a position of power and still talk about what you've been through.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And you can talk about how you have persevered and understood the power of your mind and the ability to use your resources to find a solution. Because for every problem, there's a solution as corny as that sounds. Mhmm. And I've always found a solution to all of my problems in my life Yeah. Every single time, including this one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I will continue to do so. And if I can help others in in that process, I'd be happy to do so now. Mhmm. Know?
Speaker 2:So I am leaning in that direction where I can hopefully eventually leave my clinical practice and do this full time. But that's an understanding that I had over time. It didn't happen when I was sick and didn't happen when I was really suffering, it happened after the fact and after the results came.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been a multi year long process Yeah, for
Speaker 2:five years.
Speaker 1:Damn. Half a decade. I'm just curious, so when you found yourself at your lowest, you're one hundred and ten pounds, what were some of the things that you really clung onto and stayed consistent with that you attribute to gaining your health back and getting you into the shape that you're in now?
Speaker 2:So it's funny, and I'm sure people in the audience have also experienced this, every time you're put on a new medication, you get this degree of hope. You get this, okay, three months from now, I'll be better than ever. Six months from now, I'll be back to normal. Every time you're put on another protocol, you get this sense of hope. So about three years of that was that, where, okay, I've been put on a lot of biologics, by the way.
Speaker 2:Been put on probably every medication for this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Can you list a couple of
Speaker 2:them out? I can list them all, you like.
Speaker 1:Just to list a couple of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a timeline, it's funny, that I give to all my doctors now. But yeah, so I've been on Xeljanz, Stelera, Humira, prednisone, mesalamine, and all of them were short stints because I knew they weren't working. So I was like, I'm gonna try this out, and I'm gonna get off because I know the side effects sometimes with these medications. So each time I was put on drugs for very little kind of reason, in my opinion, except that this is the diagnosis and this is the protocol we have to play, I had a sense of hope, and hope is a fantastic thing. Eventually, was like, this isn't working, And my doctors are fantastic, by the way.
Speaker 2:Every single one of them, fantastic, and we still work together. But there had to be something else put into the pool for me to find results. So the healing journey began after I was like, all right, let me try this now. Let me really do some more research into why this could be occurring as a full body picture. Let me start changing these things around my environment, around my food supply to see if I can get some sort of accumulation of results over time.
Speaker 2:And one thing that you have to understand, whether it's autoimmune disease or disease state that you're in, is that these things do take time. It's not like you have a little infection from a pimple. Yeah. You take an antibiotic, ten days later, you're back to normal. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's not like that. Yeah. It takes many months, sometimes up to a year, sometimes even more. And if you just work at it, you will find some results, at least get to something normal. You'll find something else about yourself too, which is fantastic.
Speaker 1:100%. Yeah, it's like of the things I really enjoy about podcasting is like, it's not like Instagram or Twitter or TikTok, where you get these like viral posts that can give you thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of followers. It's like this slow war of attrition, where even if you have a big guest on, it'll increase your performance a little bit, but your overall listener base stays the same, it's just like continuing to pound the pavement three episodes a week, and then you look back in a year and you're like, wow, we've done over a 100 plus episodes, we have a following. It's kind of similar to the healing journey too, where I think we both wish that there was truly a silver bullet or a magic pill that you could take, but it's like continuing to experiment with these different diet and lifestyle measures, and iterate and tinker, but stay consistent with it over long enough periods of time, and then you're going look back and be like, wow, you know, I'm not going to the bathroom eight times a day, maybe it's like three or four times, and then you iterate a little bit more, and now you're down to like one to two times a day, and you have the health that you have now at 35.
Speaker 1:But it's like you said, it's a five plus year journey to get to this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, unfortunately. And again, no blame to my doctors, they were only there to help. And it's funny because I was in a place of privilege. There's so many people suffering in silence. And this is a disease of solitude where you do suffer in silence.
Speaker 2:You can have all the friends and family in the world that want to help you, but sometimes they can't. Yeah. And I'm sure you felt that way too, where you're like, why is this happening? You're kind of sitting alone and you're really understanding this is a real battle and a reward to think that they're gonna win within yourself. So with that said, when you do find solutions, to go off a little tangent, when people ask me if I should become a doctor, I tell them yes, not for the status or the career or any of that, but because you'll be an asset to your friends and family.
Speaker 2:I really believe that. Any specialty. And I do believe that if you go through something like this, you'll be an asset to your friends and family once you figure it out or even throughout the process. A 100%. As long as you don't give up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I know there's a lot of people listening to this that are sitting in solitude, suffering. Don't you're not alone. It's happened to me. And there is a way out.
Speaker 2:There's always a solution to this problem. So I would just say keep pressing on and finding other options that can give you a three month runway, a six month runway. When we look at startups, look at fundraising and seeing like, okay, I have this runway of three to six months with this kind of money. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 2:So maybe you can look at your hope bank and see, okay, let me try this new protocol and give myself another three months of hope or direction and see if my body changes or my disease state changes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's what I did.
Speaker 1:Like that. That's a good analogy. And so for you, like five years ago, did you find that Was it gravitating towards animal products? Was it cooking your meals? Was it bone broth?
Speaker 1:Was it meditation? Was it eight hour sleeps? What are the big things that you can pinpoint back to where you're like, damn, I think doing that over time really helped me get my stomach in check?
Speaker 2:Yeah, think sleep was really important. I thought I was getting good sleep, and then I got a whoop in and understood that I was only getting, like, six and a half. Quality was fair to poor. Sometimes I would get seven. Now I track my sleep, I get pretty decent amount, least seven, seven and a half.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. That was, like, my baseline. Let me try this out. Yeah. But the biggest driving factor for me was food.
Speaker 2:Learning about food was really interesting too in school and how our food supply in America is really quite compromised. How we produce food, and we have different supply chains for domestic in Europe, internationally. Why? Because some of the ingredients we place in our foods are banned in other parts of the world. Why why is that?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Is it damaging? Is it not? I don't know. And I really started to make sure that because I had access to good food to to make that an effort.
Speaker 2:And then I learned about how some of, like, for example, wheat was engineered in in the forties and fifties and how that's affected our monocrop agriculture and how sometimes we can be inflammatory to the gut, and different types of seed oils can be also be inflammatory. Omega six to omega three fatty acid ratios, how they're really important for your cellular health, NAD levels and the mitochondria. Accumulation of little protocols like that really, really helped. But to go back to what happened to me while I was suffering, just to maybe share some stories.
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 2:I remember so I started working. I was losing a pound a week. Didn't think anything of it for around three months because I wasn't I didn't have your symptoms. I wasn't bleeding. I wasn't going to the bathroom a lot.
Speaker 2:I just was losing a ton of weight and not really absorbing the foods I was eating. After about three to six months into my job, I remember having to carry around a silicone donut at work just because the the seats weren't that comfy. And I'm a pretty thin guy in general. Yeah. But I like to stay in shape, and I I had to carry around this little silicone pad to sit because I was having pain sitting on my on my
Speaker 1:thigh. The tailbone?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Tailbone. Yeah. I remember my boss comes up to me, this, like, cardiologist, really, really nice guy, and he's like, You okay man?
Speaker 2:What's going on at home? Are you eating enough? And that was the frustrating thing, doctors give me advice about eating and I'm like, Listen man, I'm gonna fail myself eating 10,000 calories a day for a whole two weeks. I'm going to make you jealous of how little I gain. And, yeah, so I'm sure there's stories of people listening that have gone through similar things, the frustrations of going around and doing things that your doctor's telling you and not getting results.
Speaker 2:And the advice I can give is just finding that kind of hope bank and understanding different protocols and implementing different things Yeah. Over
Speaker 1:When did you really feel like things were shifting and your body was healing and you were getting back to normal?
Speaker 2:So I do believe there's a role in medicine, doctors, and traditional healthcare. And I do believe that my healing process was a combined therapy type of thing. So when I started the medication Xeljanz, it stopped a lot of my inflammation. I'm not on any medication, by way. It's been two years.
Speaker 2:I feel great.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Completely drug free. That's incredible deal.
Speaker 2:Almost two years. I had a clean scope in March.
Speaker 1:I'm almost two years too, so that's another weird coincidence that we had. A weird special coincidence, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Stopping the inflammatory cycle was really important. That helped me gain some weight. I got to a little bit normal. And then at the same time, I was in nutrition school, and that's when I learned about microbiome diversity and outcomes in cellular health.
Speaker 2:So the analogy I like to give to people is diversity in any situation leads to better outcomes in this world. It's like a universal law. Yeah. So if you look at diversity in genetics, sometimes the babies and adults are healthier adults. If you look at diversity in nature, always better outcomes.
Speaker 2:Diversity in food, always better outcomes. Diversity in microbiome, same thing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which is why I think for this type of issue, testing is extremely important and undervalued. Mhmm. The right kind of testing. Testing your diversity in microbiome, testing different inflammatory factors and understanding what kind of foods you possibly could be sensitive to. All those things accumulated to some better outcomes over time after I learned about those things.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So, yeah, that's where I started.
Speaker 1:I love it. I work with this company called Blokes, which is like a men's hormone health company, and they're great because it's like telemedicine, they send a nurse to your house through LabCorp, they take your blood, they'll take a look at your different levels, they'll talk about what hormones you're deficient in, what vitamins you're deficient in. I think inflammatory markers, too, that seems like that's a really good baseline level test that everyone should do, maybe like quarterly, maybe twice a year. But what other testing from a gut perspective is really helpful? Because I haven't done anything else, so like, I'm almost like selfishly curious, like what else should I be doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Recently, I did something so I believe there's three levels of testing. The first is consumer testing, testing that you see at companies in ecommerce direct to consumer space that I'm sure you've seen online. I don't believe those are very valuable Mhmm. Just from a personal standpoint.
Speaker 2:They're not as sensitive as they should be. Then there's PCR testing, which is more specific. It tests, like, the things I was talking about earlier, like your full microbiome, commensal bacteria, bacteria that you should have, bacteria that are little bit imbalanced that you shouldn't have, and maybe even some fungi and viruses and parasites in there. So you can possibly take a antibiotic, antifungal, antiparasitic, maybe rebalance that dysbiosis. And there's a third level, which I'm experimenting with right now, actually, and that's shotgun metagenome testing, if I pronounce that correctly.
Speaker 2:And what that does is it tests your metabolites that your microbiome produces. So you can see all of the short chain fatty acids, the different basic metabolites that the entire microbiome produces that can give you more insights on specific pathologies that could be occurring. I'm taking that data and I'm sending that out to a lab that is kind of in beta, but they're doing a pro bono to understand what's really going on in the full picture of things. So hopefully that can be a little bit more accessible to people over time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That'd be incredible. So this is the third style of testing that's still kind of in beta?
Speaker 2:Yeah, basically. Yeah. It's available right now. You can get it done through a company called Genova. But interpreting the results is also very important.
Speaker 2:So the interpretation of the results is what I'm really looking into.
Speaker 1:Got it. Right What, like finding a really good holistic doctor or medical professional?
Speaker 2:No, like an AI model. Wow. To understand what the metabolites mean in terms of the whole picture. Maybe plugging it through a PubMed protocol and understanding the database and what it means. But I did work with a doctor last year and this year to go through that PCR testing, which is available to most people, and finding out what we can do to rebuild my microbiome.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:What type of doctor was it?
Speaker 2:It was actually a naturopath, but she was an MD OBGYN that went to the naturopath route, and she dealt with a lot of SIBO, which stands for small intestinal bowel overgrowth, a lot of colitis, Crohn's, and dysbiosis in general. So for me, I've been stable for a little over a year before this started, or before this got better. She was like, Let's get you back to the 90%. And she kind of did, which is fantastic. Do
Speaker 1:you have any recommendations for people that have IBS or some type of autoimmune disease and they don't want to work with a traditional Western GI and they want someone that's going to talk to them about preventative measures? Like recommendations for how they can maybe track down some type of health professional or doctor?
Speaker 2:You'd be surprised at how much your insurance covers this kind of thing. So I would start there. Know, look into your insurance plan and see what doctors are available in your area that kind of do this thing. And obviously, Google is a great resource. But I want to go on a little tangent and talk about what you can do at home in understanding the full body picture.
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 2:So everything is related, everything is connected. And your oral microbiome plays a role, your upper GI plays a role. Your microbiome lives in your colon, your large intestine, the last part of the GI tract. But if there's something going on with your stomach, there's something going on with your enzymes, your bile, your oral microbiome, it's going to affect the rest of your body. And that's something that is not addressed, really, or is not really talked about.
Speaker 2:So let's say you have, poor dental habits. It could be affecting your GI. Let's say you have, gastritis, which is inflammation of the stomach lining. It could be affecting your small intestine, which affects the large intestine, So I think that's why endoscopy colonoscopy is usually done together. But looking at the full picture like, hey, is my bile acids okay?
Speaker 2:Hey, do I have, any overgrowth in my small intestines preventing, absorption of nutrients? Do I have micro macronutrient deficiencies? Do I have, good dental health? Am I flossing all the time with with good floss, like tea tree oil instead of, like, plastic? Am I eliminating you know, I could talk about the diet stuff later, but, you know, it has to be a full picture for you to really understand the power of healing that your body has.
Speaker 2:Otherwise, you're ignoring a big portion. Know, if there's a leak in one side of the boat and you're fixing this side of the boat, what's going on? You're really at that still disease state, you're not really going above water like you should be.
Speaker 1:So you're saying there's so many little cracks in the boat that you need to be worried about, where it's like, it's so easy, like for me, it's so easy to just, if I'm in a flare up, to just singularly focus on, okay, carnivore, bone broth, very focused on the foods, but it's like, dude, maybe it's like dental hygiene, maybe it's these other little things that putting off and not addressing as clearly as you should. They seem super minor, maybe they're even annoying to do, but it's like, no, taking care of these little things is going lead to the macro level of health that you want.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the way I like to put it is one time investment. So these habits build over time, and the one time investment could be Like, for example, for me, I got a whoop band, I got a water filter, I got some good dental floss and toothpaste, and now it's just part of my routine.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:even think about it. Subconscious. Yeah. Not thinking about it. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So hopefully that, over time, has led to better outcomes than I think they have. Small, obviously, but still helps the overall outcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you drinking spring water or just a really good quality water filter in the house?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's funny is, for many years, I was drinking out of bottled water. Many, many years. Could have contributed to the disease state I was in, because I was afraid of tap water. Yeah. And, you know, there's obviously plastics in the water now and these things, phthalates, that are affecting our hormones and affecting just our overall aging and health and wellness that could also be affecting our gut health that I was just ignoring or not knowing about.
Speaker 2:So I do filter my water. I use something called a Berkey filter.
Speaker 1:Berkey, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's something called an Aqua True. They have a glass model. The model I have has Tritan in it, which is plastic. But it's a reverse osmosis filter for the desktop.
Speaker 2:It's just a convenient thing. Yeah. And then I remineralize my water when I can.
Speaker 1:I've heard having a good quality shower filter is really important too. I don't have one yet. I put a lot of attention in the quality of water I drink, but then I was hearing like the gallons and gallons of water that are getting dumped on your skin that are actually getting absorbed through it, like that's just as important as the quality of drinking water, which is super interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I believe it. I do have a shower filter. The two brands I recommend are Jo Lee and VitaClean, I believe.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:VitaClean has better water pressure. But I have both on two different showerheads. But yeah, it was just some of the things I was like, I'll just invest $100 and see what happens. Yeah. But I don't know the science behind that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it definitely makes my skin and hair feel better.
Speaker 1:Love it. I definitely need to invest in one then. One of the things I was curious to ask you is, I talk a lot about just the balance of being very intuitive with your health and being very mindful of these things, but also not overly stressing out about it and also making the time to really like enjoy life. Like, I'm back in Jersey, right, I'm traveling from Austin, you know, there's no good pizza in Austin, there's an amazing pizza spot, Di Lorenzo's in Hamilton, it's like some of the best coal fired pizza you'll ever have. So, like, I went out with my parents on Saturday, I got some pizza, and like, old me three years ago would have never even touched it.
Speaker 1:Like, I had such a stigma around the foods that I was putting into my body, and sometimes I wonder if I was, like, overly stressing out, and, you know, I had the pizza, I definitely had, like, a little bit of bloating, my stomach didn't feel great the next day, but I just got back on my normal diet and routine, and I feel totally fine now. So, I'm just curious for you, with the level of knowledge and information and also having, like, an inflammatory bowel disease, how do you balance all that knowledge with also being healthy but living your life at the same time?
Speaker 2:I tell my patients the same thing. I tell them this. First, I start off by saying, Everything I'm telling you, I do myself. So don't think I'm talking down upon you or or talking down upon your habits. I eat really clean at home five days a week, sometimes more, right, if I'm home for longer.
Speaker 2:Military style, strict diet. I I actually enjoy what I'm eating at home. Yeah. It's not like I'm suffering. Right?
Speaker 2:When I go out and I'm with my friends or family and I wanna have that slice of pizza, I don't say no. Yeah. I do it within reason. I'm not having a whole pie. I'm not having eight slices.
Speaker 2:I'm enjoying what I want, and I really enjoy it at the time. If you look at the pillars of longevity, blue zones around the world, have it in my head, I have it in gut microbiome nutrition, sleep, environment, and one of the pillars is love and family. So if you can't enjoy food around your loved ones, it's a bonding experience. If you can't enjoy that cocktail at zero bond every now and then, then what's the point of living?
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:I do believe and I also, with that said, let's say I went keto for three years or a certain vegan for three or whatever. Strict diet for three years, did nothing else but did that diet. And then all of a sudden I had a pizza or all of a sudden I had a burger. My body would react violently Mhmm. To say the least.
Speaker 2:So you don't want that. I think your body does need some stressors. I don't encourage bad eating or poor food quality eating, but every now and then, enjoy yourself. I think that's a good thing for your body Yeah. And mind, and just life, like enjoy yourself.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Like tonight, we're gonna go to Bowery Meat Company.
Speaker 2:Yes, are.
Speaker 1:We're gonna have some really good quality steaks. We're gonna try and stay somewhat clean. But like, at that restaurant, you literally can't control. Do they put seed oils in the dressing? Do they fry vegetables and seed oils?
Speaker 1:You can ask them, they probably don't know. They might even think they're cooking in butter and it's some butter canola mixture, which is super common in the commercial restaurant industry, but dude, it's like you and I are getting together for the first time, Sean's gonna come, it's more about like just enjoying the three of our company and having a good quality meal and not over stressing about that Like, don't wanna live a life where I feel like I can't even go to a steakhouse because I'm so worried about the quality of cooking oil that they're using.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And it's worth noting that, yeah, if you're, you know, in in a certain state and you have to be strict on your diet, then do that for yourself. However, in the overall zoomed out picture of life, I think that you'll find a better quality of life when you have a balance. Mhmm. And you're aware of what's going on with your body.
Speaker 2:You're aware of what's affecting your body and what's not.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's such a good point, man. Fiber is such a contentious topic in the alternative health community. I'm curious, do you think fiber has a role? Do you not think it has a role?
Speaker 1:Do you have a perspective on that? I'd love to just get your thoughts on
Speaker 2:it. Yeah. Definitely. I do believe it has a role. And one of my theories behind why carnivore works is because it gives the body a break in terms of microbial activity.
Speaker 2:I do believe that carnivore diet, for whatever amount of time you decide to do so, is like putting your body in some sort of microbiome fast. Mhmm. It doesn't activate the bad and good bacteria, and maybe there's some sort of healing microscopically that's happening to help restore the balance there. That's what I think. Because I've done it before too, and it does work to an extent.
Speaker 2:For me, at least, it did. When I tried it I tried it after I met you. Yeah. Yeah. I tried it for a little over a week, and I felt pretty good.
Speaker 2:However, I was in such a stressful stay with work and physical physically, like, working that I went to into, like, basically, like, keto flu a little bit. And so it also I was like, I had to go back to to normal, you know? Yeah. But, it's nice that I know that I have a tool now that I can use when I am inflamed or something's going on. I can go on carnival for a week and feel pretty good.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So with going back to your question with fiber, prebiotics, resistant starches, something called HMOs, hemoglobulosaccharides, which is from breast milk that acts like a prebiotic, different types of fiber that we find in plant fibers, play a role in feeding some good commensal bacteria. And if you look at the protocols to restore dysbiosis, generally, it's a phase of getting rid of bad pathogenic bacteria, restoring probiotics with supplements, and then using some sort of fiber, prebiotic, or dietary measure to help feed that bacteria. So I do believe it plays a role. I know Paul Saldino, CarnivoreMD, and other health care doctors and influencers talk about carnivore and fiber and and different schools of thought on that.
Speaker 2:I do believe it plays a role. I do enjoy eating plants every now and then for sure, but I believe that growing up, meat was felonized, especially red meat. And I believe it played a big role in my healing journey. More so than just a fiber diet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The meat was one of the levers that you pulled, incorporating that, all the nutrients, the bioavailability of it, the absorption.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I really appreciate about you is the honesty around your healing journey, and I think that there's this, like, you can almost self identify with the fact that, okay, I had Crohn's, I did these things, I healed it, now I'm just good, I don't have any flare ups, or like, maybe you don't want to publicly talk about those things because you know you have a platform, you want to show people that you're healthy, but I think it's important for people that have these chronic diseases to be able to share the fact that this is an ongoing journey and flare ups happen. Like for me, the last year, I've had too many flares for the last month, and I typically will show bleeding pretty quickly, so I'll see symptoms of it very quickly and then I'm like, all right, need to course correct. So I'm curious for you, if you ever find yourself in a flare or a mini flare, what does that protocol look like to just kind of get yourself out of it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The first thing is I kind of track my sleep.
Speaker 1:Like making sure,
Speaker 2:I don't think that one thing triggers the other or, you know, sometimes it happens when I'm not stressed out at all. So I have been through the same thing in the past two years. I haven't been completely flare free, but I haven't been a hundred and ten pounds either.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:But I know that I can live this way my whole life without feeling conscious about how I look or conscious about, where I need to go to eat or that was part of my kind of like, okay. I am at homeostasis. I'm at balance now. With that said, as far as, you know, what my protocol is to get back to normal, I definitely first thing I do is sleep. Second thing I look at is my food, what I ate the past week, and what could have possibly triggered it.
Speaker 2:Usually, it's, you know, a form of eating out, drinking, not sleeping, partying, that kind of thing. And then for course correction, I do believe in the power of supplements. I really do. And I think a combination of getting restorative sleep, a supplement protocol, and proper nutrition and hydration will get you back to normal before you reach that pathological state. Because in IBD, it's one of those things, it's like a positive feedback loop, where once that inflammatory cycle starts and you don't really stop it in time, you'll move down that path where it can be bleeding or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are your go to supplements for that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I use butyrate as a postbiotic. So in the form of tributrin, which is a glycerol backbone with three butyrate molecules. It gets down to the colon better than sodium butyrate alone. And then I take something called ADP, which is oregano.
Speaker 2:It's like an activated form of oregano to clear some of the, upper GI dysbiosis that could be occurring in the small intestine to help my body absorb. Glutamine is great. There's difference between meat broth and bone broth, which I didn't know. I if you're aware of this, but I learned about it recently. Making bone broth is usually done over time, a longer period of time, should say, twenty four, forty eight hours with, obviously, bones, meat, whatever.
Speaker 2:Meat broth is done in a shorter amount of time, and you get less histamine production, supposedly. So I'll make a meat broth and use that as, like, kind of like a supplement to heal my gut. Other things are glutamine. I use zinc L carnosine, which kinda helps heal leaky gut as well. There's something called zonulin.
Speaker 2:Are you familiar with that? No. Okay. So a little lesson for the audience and maybe ourselves
Speaker 1:And me.
Speaker 2:Is the cell wall sorry. The everyone's heard of leaky gut. So the gut lining is actually only one cell thick. So you have the inside environment, the outside environment, basically the tube that runs your whole body from mouth to end. In the large intestine where the microbiome live, it's only one cell thick.
Speaker 2:So there's one cell separating this environment. And when that cell is straight apart, then toxins, bacteria, other bad things can move into your bloodstream and cause an inflammatory reaction which then proceeds into, in its most severe form, ulcerative colitis or Crohn's. So that glue that holds those cells together is called zonulin. And sometimes when you have large zonulin, which that PCR testing can also test in your stool, then it means that, hey. You have leaky gut clearly.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that ZEC L carnosine does is it helps kind of, seal that gut lining along with the mucus lining that's there, along with the Betray, along with all the other supplements that you can possibly take with the nutrient component as well. So, yeah, I kind of try to address this consciously in my head.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like that. Something else that you changed my perspective on, I think much more strongly about this now over the last few months, I think there's this misconception in the carnivore community to just be like anti herbs and spices, where it's like meat is solely the answer, like that's the pill that you need to be taking, where herbs for thousands of years have been viewed as medicine, they have medicinal properties, and when I was going through my flare up in June, had me, early June, you had me take that Ching Dai herb. Yeah. And literally, dude, within four days, the bleeding of my stool completely stopped.
Speaker 1:It was insane. Like, I've never seen something that's worked that quickly before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'm glad. Yeah. Because it worked for me, too. One of the things to realize is a lot of our prescription medications come from plant sources. And just because something is a supplement doesn't mean it doesn't have clinical results or clinical effects, negative or positive.
Speaker 2:And that's something to be a warning too, to be aware, like, hey, if I'm taking a supplement, treat this like a drug, because it could be And, for the reason why I chose to give you that, or I took it myself, usually I experiment on my own and
Speaker 1:then recommend Yeah, is
Speaker 2:there was an Israeli protocol that helped the disease state with curcumin and tangatli, the indigodialis. And I used that to kind of use on my own, and that's what helped me. So whenever I'm in a flare, I take that first too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you can buy it right off Amazon. It's like Ching Dye, is that how you pronounce Ching
Speaker 2:Dye, yeah. It's some sort of indigo dye that's used to help with that, yeah.
Speaker 1:I've also, per your recommendation, I've the peptide, I've been taking the peptide BPC-one hundred fifty seven for the last two weeks. And anecdotally, I've noticed really nice improvements in my stomach, like urgency to go to the bathroom, no blood in the stool, fully formed stool, whatever. I don't know if it's just helping with inflammation or whatever, but since I've been using it, I feel great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. BPCM-one hundred fifty seven is interesting. It's pretty popular as far as the health and wellness community goes when people talk about it on podcasts. But not much is known about it. It stands for body protective compound one hundred fifty seven.
Speaker 2:One hundred fifty seven is the amino acid sequence. Because you haven't heard about it the reason why you haven't heard about it is because it's not really patentable to my knowledge. Mhmm. So it's not a pharmaceutical drug. You So have to get it at a compounding pharmacy through a doctor, through someone who understands peptides.
Speaker 2:And it's made, to my understanding, naturally in your stomach. It's something that protects the stomach lining from the stomach acid. And when injected in areas of tendon injury or even parts of inflammation, it can help accelerate healing. And I've used it myself with some of the athletes in my clinic and in my own healing journey. Peptides have been pretty wonderful.
Speaker 2:Collagen peptides, BPC-one 107, among other things, you know?
Speaker 1:What's the difference between a collagen peptide and BPC-one 157?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so anything that's a peptide moniker is basically something that is an amino acid that produces a response in your body. Collagen peptides are just something that's from either bovine, marine sources, other animal sources that kinda helps build type one, type two collagen when you ingest it. Collagen peptides can be found in meat products that we eat, even bone broth. So as far as a supplement goes, usually, they're just, a more, I guess, pure, easily absorbed form in a powder form or it's a capsule form that you can buy over the counter, an higher Awesome.
Speaker 1:Cool. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you and the team are building out of Chlora as well. I know you brought me some supplements. I can't wait to try it starting tonight.
Speaker 2:It's funny, I'll tell you the story of how the company started. My co founder, Dan Snow and John Snow, we grew up together and Dan was having gut health issues while I was in nutrition school. So the story is that I learned about HMOs, which are human milk oligosaccharides. We're the only mammals that produce them in breast milk, and they act like prebiotics. So I was, like, fascinated by this.
Speaker 2:Apparently, there's whole sections of pharmaceutical companies that are researching this kind of stuff for pregnancy and prenatal health and all this other, you know, just infant and toddler health. And it's available over the counter in baby formula.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:So if you go to Target right now, anyone in the audience, you can see two FL, two Focal Lactose, I believe that's how you pronounce it. It's the most abundant HMO in breast milk. Mhmm. And it acts like a prebiotic to help build the microbiome of the of the of the baby while they're being breastfed. So when you can't breastfeed, they added it to baby formula.
Speaker 2:So I had some baby formula when I was in a flare.
Speaker 1:Got your
Speaker 2:hands on the No, no, not the problem. I went to Target and got some baby formula.
Speaker 1:Baby formula. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I felt a little bit better. I didn't feel better because there was lot of Cetol in the baby formula, but I felt better from the two f l. Then I bought a two f l supplement. Felt good on that too. Talked to Dan about it.
Speaker 2:Long story short, he's like, hey. I I like gut health. We should build a brand around gut health, cellular health, aging, longevity, whole body wellness. And that's exactly what we did. So we the two things that helped me when I was kind of flaring was when I eat out, I take digestive enzymes.
Speaker 2:Digestive enzymes are essentially things that can help you, break down the food that you're eating. Usually, your pancreas does that with with bile acids and different types of enzymes that it produces in in the stomach. So, you know, for example, lactase breaks down milk proteins. Bromelain breaks down other proteins and and meat and stuff like that. So, you I built up a SKU on that.
Speaker 2:It's called Bloat Digest for bloating. So you take it before you eat out. I don't eat at home, but when I go out to restaurants, take two capsules before I eat.
Speaker 1:Did you bring some of that?
Speaker 2:I did.
Speaker 1:All right, we'll take Awesome. Some And
Speaker 2:then the other SKU is, it's a pre and postbiotic. So butyrate helped me in my healing journey, and I wanted to find a form of butyrate, which is tributarine, that goes down to the colon, unlike sodium butyrate. I took a supplement called dbuter from Poland when I was flaring, and that helped. So I developed a skew on that, and the prebiotic is made from the the two FL. So I found two FL supplier in The United States that we can make a pre and postbiotic kind of supplement you could take daily.
Speaker 2:It helped my skin health.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:And that was something that our customers talked about as well. Like, yeah, my acne got better and my skin health's better, now we've kind of marketed towards that as well.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's because they're improving their gut health and just decreasing inflammation in general?
Speaker 2:Definitely. There is a huge connection between gut microbiome, gut health, and how we think. I do believe there's a skin gut axis as well. But to go off a little tangent, when I was flaring or when I was having my issues, I would have horrendous nightmares and night sweats. Interesting.
Speaker 2:If this ever happened to you.
Speaker 1:It happened to me too. It did, right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And most of your serotonin is actually made in the gut. I think 90% of it or something along those lines. And the gut is connected by a nerve, a cranial nerve called the vagus nerve. And this plays a role in how we think, how our emotions regulated, how motivated we are, how tired we are. It plays a role in a lot of things.
Speaker 2:And I've noticed a huge difference between point A and point B in my healing and when I was sick and how I think and how I just behave and the nightmares and dreams I have now. I don't have night sweats anymore, so I can sleep deeply at night. But just goes to show you that SSRIs, antidepressants, play a role in your gut health as well. And I do believe that optimizing your gut health can also produce good outcomes for not just your skin, but your mental health as well as clarity.
Speaker 1:When I was on Remicade, I would get the worst night sweats. Would like You're telling me I would soak through the bed. And I don't know if it was really because my stomach was just flared up still, it was like that was just a byproduct of that, or if it was from the Remicade itself. But what pushed me to finally get off the drug was that I had been going carnivore for a few years, my stomach felt amazing, my symptoms were completely gone, and then it never happened the first three years, and then right around 2020 into 2021, the Remicade was causing this terrible cystic acne, and it started off as like a really small patch, like where I would sweat, so like on my chest, on my back, and then it just spread where it was like, dude, all over my back, all over my chest, like my neck, on my face, and I'd never had skin issues before. Wow.
Speaker 1:And that for me is like And I did so many testing, so many different types of tests, I went to dermatologist after dermatologist, you know, medications, antibiotics, skin cream, and I'm like, this has to be the Remicade, I don't know what else it would be. Finally, was able to convince my doctor to get me off of it after a colonoscopy where I had no inflammation, and then within the first month or two, all that cystic acne went away. But that was just a really weird byproduct from Remicade. So it's like, you're taking a drug to do one thing, and then it's causing all these other health issues, too. It's so weird.
Speaker 2:It is so weird. And we need our immune systems.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean? Luckily, was on the medications I was on for such a short amount of time, I didn't have any severe, severe reactions like that. But in the back of my head, was like, I need my immune system. I want this to, work when I'm older. You know?
Speaker 2:And I have friends that have been around the cave for twenty years, so I'm not trying to really shy anyone away from proper drug use. However, I do believe that there is a role that you can have in your healing process that doesn't involve exclusively Remicade. And what is Remicade? Believe it's a TNF A inhibitor.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, tumor necrosis factor alpha is something that is seen in inflammatory bowel diseases, and stopping that helps heal the lining of the gut, along with other inflammatory factors like cytokines. But, yeah, it's just interesting how it plays a role in our healing and also could play a role in something else popping up. I have patients, and I'm in the unique position. I want everyone to understand that I see 30 to 40 patients a day, four days a week. After a month or so, that's four hundred five hundred people.
Speaker 2:I've been doing this for five years now. I've seen thousands of people. I've seen thousands of medications that they've been on. I've seen their disease states. I've seen them in surgery.
Speaker 2:I've seen the intimate settings. There's a superpower you kind of understand and you get as a physician, I believe, that you understand some of who they are pretty quickly. And then on the back end, I'm seeing their medications. And some of these patients, unfortunately, I see them on one medication and then I see them on another medication to treat a side effect of previous medication. And then that ladder keeps going down.
Speaker 2:I see a patient on prednisone for their rheumatoid arthritis, and now they're on famotidine for their gastritis. And now they have bone density issues because of the amount of famotidine for three years, or omeprazole for three years, which is basically a PPI, proton pump inhibitor for gastritis. And then I see them have a fracture four years later in their ankle and that healing to be delayed because of the previous mentioned medications. So this is something that, again, education plays a role too. And I'm not talking about academic or college, I'm talking about just telling your friends and family about the knowledge that you can have and the power of healing with food, and it doesn't have to be expensive, but the power of habits, the power of healing with food, the power of healing with habits and environment that can prevent that sort of spiral.
Speaker 1:I've heard that the average doctor patient visit is less than like 10 Oh, So you probably see this stuff and you don't even have time to be able to dig into these medications and advise them I on different things that you want to do,
Speaker 2:I probably shouldn't be saying this, but post pandemic, I do believe that I have to see like 1.2 to 1.5 x more patients to make the same amount of money just based on insurance reimbursements. And I'm spending time with my patients as much as I can, but I'm a procedure based physician, so I don't have to go through their medical history or their, detective mode like a primary care physician has to. My scope is essentially healing fractures, doing wound care, along those lines. But I can only imagine what it's like for an endocrinologist, a rheumatologist, a primary care physician, the physician you go to to be like, Hey, doc. I'm having these issues.
Speaker 2:How can you help me? And that doctor, depending on the situation, may only have ten minutes to give you. What can really ten minutes solve, or twenty minutes, or even thirty minutes if you're lucky, with something like as severe as autoimmune disease or pathological state?
Speaker 1:It's crazy. What do you think the ideal physician patient relationship looks like?
Speaker 2:I think it's transparent. I think it's communicative. And I think it's something that incorporates not just traditional medicine, but also technology. Whether it comes down to testing, really good testing that we can just send you out for and get some more results. Because what happens when go to a primary care physician to get a physical?
Speaker 1:I wait an hour and a half and maybe see him or her for
Speaker 2:No, I mean, what happens in the visit itself?
Speaker 1:I mean, they literally just do a very quick scan for like five minutes max.
Speaker 2:Right. They check your pulse, they look at your weight, look at your height, look at your blood pressure. If you're lucky, they'll maybe check your a one c, which is your blood sugar and maybe some CBC labs. That's it.
Speaker 1:What about by myself.
Speaker 2:Right. Exactly. That's the general primary care physician or the the annual physical that you get. It's that. That's where it incorporates.
Speaker 2:What if you went to a doctor that gave you a full body testing protocol where they test your PCR testing with your microbiome, they test your apolipoprotein b, your cardiovascular risk at 25, at 30, at 35 to help at your testosterone, your hormones. Hormone health is so important. I know testosterone and other vital hormones for even women like thyroid is dropping like crazy or being not optimized. So imagine having those types of things being tested and covered under your insurance on a once a year physical. What things can we prevent?
Speaker 2:What things can we understand? What insights do we have? And as testing gets cheaper and cheaper and more and more accessible, I would hope that that will be implemented into preventative disease management.
Speaker 1:What is the average age for a man to get a colonoscopy for the first time? Is it after 50?
Speaker 2:I believe after 50, you should be getting one once every five years, I believe. Yeah, don't quote me on that.
Speaker 1:How often do you think someone should actually be getting a colonoscopy?
Speaker 2:I think it's an appropriate age. However, I think if you have issues, and you're having symptoms, if you have your insurance, get the scope done.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I even think about how many people just don't go under the hood and have any They don't feel good and they don't even know what's actually going on internally. In some ways, I almost felt like it was a blessing where I was like, at least I'm able to get a colonoscopy once every two years covered by insurance, so I at least know what the hell is going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, definitely. With that said, I've definitely spent close to probably 75 to 100 ks of my own money in the past five years just getting sucked on out of insurance. And that hurt, but I got some insights out of it. With insurance, I spent millions of dollars. Millions, literally.
Speaker 1:Me too.
Speaker 2:MRI, I've had nine scopes done. I've been to the best hospitals in the country. I've spent out of pocket to see the best GI doctors in the country. I've done every protocol known to man. I've done some wild stuff with stem cells and this and that.
Speaker 2:So I've spent a lot of money. And I've spent a lot of insurance. I've had CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds. I've taken know, the medications are covered to a certain amount, so you have paid rest, paid for all of that. So, yeah, I've been through it all.
Speaker 2:And it's a shame how all this technology we have isn't being utilized to prevent disease. It's only utilized to kind of recognize disease.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you heard of this company in Austin called CrowdHealth? I forget if we talked about it when we met.
Speaker 2:I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Their founder has a really interesting podcast that you should go on, but it's a crowdfunded alternative to healthcare. So they have a few thousand members that are part of their community. And I think you pay some version, like equivalent of a premium, it's like $110 a month. And so if some type of event happens to you, the community will get triggered and it'll be like, Hurton had, you know, broke his leg or whatever, this is the cost to be able to reimburse that, and then the members will kick in, you know, a couple dollars, it will cover your cost, and then CrowdHealth will actually negotiate with the hospital or the procedure room and they'll pay in cash. So the bill is way lower.
Speaker 1:But it's really interesting, there's all these different types of decentralized medicine that are popping up, and they'll actually, when you go on their platform, it's like they have resources on carnivore diet, connecting with a local rancher, buying beef in bulk, so it's just interesting to me to see a funded company like that that's really taking this, like, preventative type approach to medicine.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That sounds amazing. And that's what we should do as a country. Yeah. Don't you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Look at our health care costs. Why are they happening? Because we're on a unhealthy country.
Speaker 2:You think COVID was bad? COVID was bad in this country because we're all unhealthy. Look around you.
Speaker 1:A 100%.
Speaker 2:Look around. We're in the city, and even here, it's it's not the best looking. Mhmm. You know? And you think COVID's bad?
Speaker 2:You think COVID's a pandemic? Let me tell you, diabetes is is a real problem too. Yeah. Most of my patients are diabetic that I see. I do amputations almost on a weekly basis, which is a shame to say, but it's true, from diabetic neuropathy and just the disease states that we see people in.
Speaker 2:And actually, you can't see it on camera, but I have a CGM on, which stands for a continuous glucose monitor. I do it two weeks out of the year, two to four weeks out of the year, and basically see what kind of foods that I react to, and avoid those at times, and avoid those between certain times of day, like late at night before bed.
Speaker 1:I wore CGM for like two months last year.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:nice. And yeah, and one of the things that I was noticing, I was really surprised by this, when I would drink a lot of raw dairy and cream, raw cream, my glucose was like incredibly stable and super low. Wow. And I don't know what it is, and then I had on doctor Brian Lenzkis, who's out of San Diego, he treats whatever type of doctor treats diabetic patients, and he's gotten them on Endocrinologists? Endocrinologists.
Speaker 1:Sure. He never got a single patient off insulin in twenty years of practicing traditional through Western measures. He started, he went to this seminar called Low Carb USA, went low carb, primarily carnivore, lost like 100 pounds, started getting his diabetic patients on it, and has gotten dozens and dozens of patients off of insulin by going low carb, and he's actually, I think he volunteered and would treat diabetics in Guatemala, and he was saying that he noticed a similar thing patients that were drinking, like, it was either I don't know if it was pasteurized dairy or raw dairy, but it was lowering their blood sugar for whatever reason. So I don't know the science behind it, but I just thought that was an interesting That
Speaker 2:is interesting. Could be just the enzymes that are in the raw dairy or, you know, the I don't know. That's really interesting. Yeah. What was I gonna say about glucose?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So funny story about glucose. I was eating a burrito. This happened, like, two years ago when I first started using CGMs. I was eating a burrito from this local burrito place, by my job every day for lunch.
Speaker 2:I don't feel lethargic afterwards. And I was wondering why. So I put the CGM on, eat the burrito, blood sugar spikes like crazy. And then I'm like, alright, let me try the burrito without the tortilla. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Just a burrito bowl. And my blood sugar stayed pretty steady. Yeah. Actually, it wasn't a spike like this, it was more like a curve. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like you need, right? And then I started experimenting with corn and why corn would spike my blood sugar. So now I avoid corn for the most part. And my blood sugar stays pretty normal. So that's my body.
Speaker 2:It may not be your body. Exactly. So having that kind of insight, that kind of data, and this is a pretty slim device. It's only 2023. What's gonna happen twenty years from
Speaker 1:now? Exactly.
Speaker 2:Right? We'll have more insights on that kind of thing. But, yeah, so if, corn spikes my blood sugar or somewhat bad for me, then I avoid it. If ice cream is bad for you, then you can avoid that. Bananas are bad for you, they can avoid that.
Speaker 2:But everyone's individual, we might react to different foods, our bodies may produce insulin differently. It's important to understand those insights.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's all these tools that are available now and they're gonna be coming out in future years that allow for that self observational science, where it's like, like you said, maybe something for you doesn't work for me, maybe something for me doesn't work for you, but it's like, we're gonna just keep testing and just developing this internal sense of what are the things that make me feel really good and what are the things that don't make me feel good, because now most people have no internal sense, they're just kind of at this consistent low, so they don't even know what it feels like to go carnivore or go animal based, they don't even have this ability to measure what a more healthy version of themselves feels like, because they've been in this rut for twenty years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's extremely true. And speaking of food, one of the things we learned about in school was potatoes, for example, and rice. When potatoes are cooled, the fibers go like this, the starch specifically, it goes into a lattice lattice and becomes more resistant. So you'd be surprised at eating a hot potato and a cooled potato, how little your blood sugar spikes between the two.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:It's so interesting. Yeah, so the state of food is important, the quality of food that you're getting is extremely important, how your body reacts. Maybe there's something to be said about someone that makes food for you versus you make it for maybe that's an energetic thing going on, like when your mom makes you food and you eat it, it's like more tasty. Definitely. I don't know.
Speaker 2:That's like energy spiritual stuff, but I do believe in some form of love and energy in your healing process too.
Speaker 1:It's definitely there, man. What's the best way for people to connect with you if they want to get more insight into what you're doing and the things that you're working on?
Speaker 2:I mean, can check out Chlora. We're pretty active on there. We're producing new SKUs in Q4, so look out for that. I can't say what because it's a secret. It's gonna be pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's gonna be the hair in the hair loss space.
Speaker 1:Hell, yeah.
Speaker 2:So with the with the gut health connection. But you can find me on Instagram. It's my name with a y, k I y r t e n. Pretty active on there. Otherwise, yeah, trying to, I guess, talk more online.
Speaker 2:I've been pretty busy this summer. It's been a summer of just work for me, so maybe I'll build the personal brand and try to be a little bit more active online. I did have a TikTok a while ago at prescriber. Oh, nice. That was pretty popular in twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, but I haven't posted there since.
Speaker 2:So I would just say, yeah. I mean, Instagram is probably the best way to do Nice.
Speaker 1:Well, we're definitely gonna work on that personal brand because you have so much good insight to share. I mean, even in this conversation, I literally wish I had a notepad because there were so many amazing nuggets, and I think the audience is gonna get a lot out of this conversation. And dude, I'm just grateful that we've become friends now, you've helped me a lot with my own gut health journey the last couple months, and I'm just really excited to just see everything that you go on to do over the next couple years, and definitely gonna need to have you on for a part two in Austin. Absolutely. We've got a Russian sauna and then a steak to dig into, which we're very excited about, but I appreciate you, man.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for doing this.
Speaker 2:My pleasure, man. Nice seeing you.
Speaker 1:Appreciate you, dude. Cool.
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