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Lindsey: So can you tell me about your history with skin issues that led you to focus on skin as a nutritionist?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah. So probably when I was 18, 19, my ear was super itchy, and I went to the doctor. She said I had eczema in my ear, and of course prescribed the steroid creams and all that stuff, but I didn’t want to put goop in my ear, and I’ve always taken a more natural approach to my health.

So I went down the Google rabbit hole of trying to find a solution, but everything was still topical. It was aloe vera and colloidal oatmeal and bleach baths. It was hard to find the solution that really helped. Back then there wasn’t really anything about gut health or how it’s more of an internal issue, so I did struggle with it for over 10 years.

It spread from my ear, went to my face and scalp, and it wasn’t something that I could hide. It wasn’t put clothes on and it’s gone. It was something that people always saw in me, and that was hard. I always thought, are people staring at me? Or they’d be like, “Ew, what’s going on?”

So it wasn’t until November 2018 that my dad came across a documentary on the microbiome, and we’d always had some kind of knowledge of nutrition. My dad and I were making kombucha since I was eight years old, decades before anybody had heard of it. I don’t even know how he found a SCOBY or anything like that. So it was when pieces started coming together, pieces of the puzzle were like, oh, now this is starting to make sense. The microbiome just explained so much for us.

So I wanted to learn more. I became a functional nutritionist. I started healing my eczema, and that also led to learning how our thoughts and emotions and nervous system all contribute as well.

Lindsey: Okay. Thanks. So when you proposed coming on the show, your proposed topic was why the skin is always the last to heal, and that resonated with me because I have found in working with people with tricky skin conditions that skin is often one of the last things to heal.

Not in every case. Some people just say, “Yeah, my main issue is my gut, but, seasonally I have some eczema.” So yeah, not those people. But for most people it is, does seem to be the last thing to heal. So why do you think that is?

Krysta Harcus: I struggled with acid reflux and all those sort of things. Doctors said I had GERD, and it was really just when I started eating better, not living off of pierogis and Mr. Noodles and all the gluten-filled things like that certainly changed before my skin. I started feeling better. My gut wasn’t so upset. I wasn’t getting acid reflux all the time.

And obviously our food has a lot to do with how we’re feeling, and I think that the skin is last because there’s so much more to it. Everybody’s heard of the placebo effect, but there’s also a nocebo effect. So our beliefs are controlling so much of our biology. We can literally get better by believing a pill is helping us.

So when we’re constantly thinking “My skin is never going to get better. I’m going to be stuck with this forever,” we can just perpetuate it just from that. So I think that the skin is also the last thing, just because the process of how everything’s fixed, you’re going to look at your diet, your hormones, and all those sort of things, and then the skin just follows in place after all that because there’s deeper layers to be fixed and healed.

Lindsey: Yeah. So how are skin issues different from gut issues in how people feel about them?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah, having eczema and psoriasis, it’s a chronic visible skin condition. It’s a whole lot more … I work with a lot of people, and myself included, that shame was a big thing, a big part of it.

So it’s different in the sense that you’re presenting with this visible skin condition and there’s so much shame, embarrassment, people making random comments all the time “Oh, are you contagious?” … there’s just so much that people are judging us by, and that’s why skin conditions are so different than a lot of other autoimmune conditions.

A lot of autoimmune conditions are invisible in some ways. So yeah, I think that’s the big reason. I had eczema, so I’ve healed it for six years, no flare-ups or anything, and that’s a big reason why I want to help people with this is because it’s unique in that sense.

Lindsey: Yeah. So can you go into the different common skin conditions and what they look and feel like?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah. So eczema, it’s super itchy. They’re both itchy in that sense. But eczema’s going to be on the inside, so like the inside of your elbow, the back of your knee, that sort of thing, whereas psoriasis is the opposite, so it’s going to be on the outside of your elbow, the front of your knees. So they do present differently in that sense. I’m still trying to figure out; Louise Hayes describes these things, like how one side of your body is maternal and one side’s paternal.

There’s hands, if you have eczema on your hands, there’s different kind of past trauma issues that are linked to that. So I’m still trying to figure out if you have eczema on your elbows, it means this. If you have eczema on your hands, it means this. Because so many people think maybe there’s a link there, so I’m still trying to connect those dots.

But yeah, there’s definitely … it can be all over. Like for me, it was just my face. For some people, they can have dyshidrotic eczema, which is just on your hands. And again, with psoriasis as well, it can show up wherever. It could just be on your scalp. It could be on your body.

It could be guttate, which is more on your torso in little spots instead of big patches.

Lindsey: And they’re red and itchy, both of them?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah. I think for a lot of people there’s more of an immunity issue, which is interesting because of course, psoriasis is considered more autoimmune. But with eczema, a lot of people with eczema will have allergies. They’ll have asthma. All those can be linked as well.

Lindsey: Yeah. My son, when he was born, had some eczema, and then he also had an incident of asthma. It was just one time, thank goodness. . .  

Krysta Harcus: Yeah …

Lindsey: Yeah, no I recently saw a friend whose baby had eczema and I thought “you need to get on those baby probiotics,” and I told her.

Yeah. So do you treat people differently depending on what the skin issue is? Or do you find that they all have common origins?

Krysta Harcus: There are different approaches in a lot of the foods, focusing more on autoimmune and inflammation for psoriasis. And eczema can be a little more general, like healthier diets, healthier products and stuff like that.

Probably the supplements are more focused for each individual for eczema and psoriasis. Yeah, I go through all that in my programs, just the specific supplements for each condition. But in a lot of senses, I work with both because there are lots of similarities and just the whole visible skin condition, so going into the whole thoughts and nervous system and those sort of things can really help a lot of people because not a lot of people talk about that side of things.

Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, we’ll get into that but you mentioned the supplements, so are you testing people for nutrient deficiencies or things like that when you’re recommending supplements?

Krysta Harcus: I don’t do any specific testing. What, sorry, what’s that?

Lindsey: Or food questionnaires or tracking or…?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah, I do partner with a couple outside companies that do some testing if people want to go down that route. But yeah, for the most part, I just focus on the same supplement stack for each eczema or psoriasis.

Lindsey: And whose testing do you use?

Krysta Harcus: Viome and Self-Decode.

Lindsey: Okay, so one DNA and a microbiome level test.

Krysta Harcus: Yes.

Lindsey: Okay. So then those, I think the Viome tends to – do they recommend supplements or just foods that people should eat?

Krysta Harcus: All of their products, packages, whatever you want to call it, do food, but depending on which level you get, if you get the higher ones, they’ll also do a specific supplement stack for your results.

Lindsey: Okay.

Krysta Harcus: Yeah.

Lindsey: Okay. So yeah, let’s talk about the nervous system issues and, when did you discover that there’s nervous system issues behind skin issues, and what’s the order of healing and like what kind of modalities are you using to then heal the nervous system?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah, ironically, I discovered it in myself after healing my eczema.

I started realizing, hey, I was doing the diet, I was eating the right things, and it wasn’t until I addressed more of the self-beliefs, the limiting beliefs, all those sort of things, until I addressed those things, that was really the game changer for me. And nervous system, yeah. To me it makes sense.

People are talking about it more nowadays anyways, and it’s more known. But I think that, yeah, there’s always been that connection, again, like I said with the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, like it’s just this nervous system thing where if you’re going to be stuck in fight or flight, how are you going to heal in that sense? They always say if you’re in this fight or flight mode that digestion goes down, everything, all your resources are in your muscles and in extremities, in your heart, whatever else. You’re not going to digest foods properly in that state. So that is going to lead to nutrient deficiencies and whatnot.

And so many people are stuck in this fight or flight even though you’re going about your day to day. Yeah, there’s stress. Everybody has stress, but there’s, I think, more people stuck in that chronic stress state than a lot of people realize.

Lindsey: Yeah, so how do you get them out?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah, there’s different modalities and stuff like that.

I like breathwork. I like just simple things, you know, breathing, getting outside. I really connect with nature myself, so I think that so many people have been disconnected from nature, and that’s a big thing of why we’re so stressed out. You go camping or you go for a walk and it’s just “Oh, I feel so relaxed.”

There’s a reason for that, because grounding is a big thing. Just getting your hands, feet, whatever you can on the earth really does promote those kind of stress relief things. There’s scientific evidence that inflammation goes down. So yeah, connection with nature is a big one for me.

I’m the weird person that goes on a hike and hugs trees.

Lindsey: So yeah, what is your Reclaim Radiance method?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah, so the Reclaim Radiance method is Regulate, Remove, Repair, Repattern.

Lindsey:  Can you dig into the details a little bit?

Krysta Harcus: So many people, you’re starting with diet, but when you dive into diet first, then you don’t know what’s causing inflammation when everything is reactive, and so many people try to do an elimination diet or something.

When you dive into that first and you’re cutting out all these foods, you’re just adding more stress to your body, thinking “I have to be perfect. I have to follow this diet. I have to cut out everything that I normally eat and stick to this strict diet,” and that sort of thing. So we always start with nervous system first, because then you can let your body relax.

You can get out of that chronic stress a little bit more, even if you’re not totally stress-free, just allowing your body to regulate first. And then we dive into diet, so you know, making sure that we’re cutting out foods that cause a lot of problems for people, gluten, dairy, sugar, and processed foods.

And I like to do a lot of swaps, so you’re not necessarily, “I’m never eating gluten,” it’s addressing different meals at different times because that makes it a whole lot more accessible for people. So starting with, maybe breakfast, where it’s easy if you’re having a muffin and coffee and running out the door maybe have some eggs and coffee or something like that.

So just making simpler swaps like that because a lot of people, dinner is a family meal. You want to make the whole meal together, and you don’t want to make just a meal for you and a meal for everybody else. So making accessible changes. And then next we dive into lifestyle and products. So

This is where you might add in grounding and yeah, just going over all the products that you’re using.

And then focusing on more of the mindset stuff, so the gut-brain connection, how what you’re thinking literally affects your cells, and yeah. That’s why that’s the last one, because it can be more of a process, you’re not going to be like, “Okay I’m getting better,” and the affirmations and those sort of things, they take a long time. It’s not like one day and you’re fixed. So the last process could be a shorter process, or it could be years, and that’s just dependent on what you’ve been through.

Lindsey: Yeah. So I have recently been looking at my HRV from my Apple Watch, my heart rate variability.

And so I noticed that over the course of a given day, I could have a random HRV anywhere from the 20s to the 50s, say, maybe 60s on occasion. When I meditate, if it actually catches me while I’m meditating, I’ve seen numbers in the 120s, even 130s, as high as that. This is a 20-minute meditation that I do in the morning.

Krysta Harcus: Yeah.

Lindsey: And so then that, if it catches that, then of course that pulls up my average. But, I was getting numbers, when I had a ring that was also measuring, I was getting numbers in the 50s on average. Now my numbers are in the high 30s. So I’m just curious, like, how many times a day does somebody have to do something like that to impact what’s in between?

Because the in between seems to be… Like, if I’m stressed while I’m working, I’m stressed while I’m working. Like the fact that I meditated in the morning or meditated in the evening doesn’t probably change that number. I’m just wondering, like, when you see people who succeed in making real changes to their stress levels, is it a couple bouts of something, or is it more addressing their whole life situation that’s causing the stress?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah, again, I like baby steps. It makes it so much more accessible to people. So yeah, maybe you’ve never done any meditation or anything before, so just starting that once a day or something. A lot of the times, we’re stuck in this shallow breath, so just as often as you can remember, take a deep actual healing breath, shorter inhale, longer exhale, and just reconnecting with that nervous system in that sense.

I don’t like to promote this whole, “I got to change everything in my life, my diet, my lifestyle, my products all in one go” type of thing. But yeah, just making those changes, like something daily when you haven’t done it before can certainly help, and then compounding. So if you’ve done the short meditation in the morning, maybe another one in the evening once you’re got that as a habit.

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. So what are some of the supplements that you’ve found particularly useful for skin issues?

Krysta Harcus: Yeah, I’ve started with the normal ones, omega-3s, because so many people are using vegetable oil and all those sort of things that increase omega-6s, which can be inflammatory. So omega-3s*, vitamin D because a lot of the times we’re stuck indoors so much more than we used to be, and just balancing those essential vitamins and stuff like that.

And then as I go on, you start learning more interesting things, like I started taking black seed oil* every day, so that’s a big one that I like promoting.  

Lindsey: Black, right? Or flax. You said black, right?

Krysta Harcus: Black seed. Yeah. That used to be considered the God supplement or something like that, whatever they call it, but it just, it fixes, it helps, it heals so many different things.

So yeah, I started incorporating stuff like that. Evening primrose oil*. And then yeah, depending on if stress is a big issue, maybe ashwagandha*, probiotics of course. Those sort of things.

Lindsey: Okay. So are there other modalities or lifestyle changes that you’ve found helpful for skin issues?

Krysta Harcus: I think the big one is just getting outside.

So many yeah … we live our lives and get stuck in a routine, and it’s work, eat, sleep. So I’ve seen tons of people change so much just from getting a daily walk. I’ve helped people with topical steroid withdrawal, and yeah, it’s super uncomfortable. There’s so many things just beyond the skin.

Temperature regulation is a big one for people that struggle with topical steroid withdrawal, and depression, all those sort of things. So just getting outside daily, even for 10 minutes to start with, 5, 10 minutes, has really contributed to healing

Lindsey: Yeah, I know. Whenever I take a walk, if it’s nice out anyway, I just feel so lucky and happy. It’s just such a simple thing that brings me such joy.

Krysta Harcus: Yeah.

Lindsey: That and a good bath, which I am also addicted to.

Krysta Harcus: It’s one of those free things, just… Yeah, so many people are, you don’t want to spend all the money, get outside. Super easy. Yeah.

Lindsey: So you’re not doing any food sensitivity testing, are you?

Krysta Harcus: Just the Viome, if people want to do that it’s an extra thing. But yeah, I don’t have anything within my own program.

Lindsey: Okay. And how long do you typically see it taking for people to permanently resolve skin issues when they work with you?

Krysta Harcus: A lot of people start seeing massive results in two to three months.

Yeah, probably three to six months is common. Even topical steroid withdrawal, that can typically take a couple years to see results, and I’ve had people get results in a couple months. So depending on, obviously, it’s going to depend on how dedicated you are, if you’re making the changes because a personal trainer can’t do your pushups for you, I can’t do all these changes for people I’m helping. So yeah, if you’re making changes, then two, three months is normal to start seeing big results.

And then clear skin, yeah, I’ve had six months to a year, depending on what you’re doing, again, that it’s totally gone.

Lindsey: Okay. So are you working with people only in groups, or do you also work with them one on one?

Krysta Harcus: More so one on one right now. I love groups because you can feed off each other, and you may have a question that you’re too scared to ask or you never even thought to ask, so group does help.

But I like one on one right now, just because in this AI age, we’re missing that human connection, and I really love connecting with people more one on one.

Lindsey: Yeah, okay. So that’s an interesting question, since I’ve begun to approach this with almost everybody I’m interviewing. How have you been handling AI, and are people coming to you with, “Oh, here’s my AI solution. What do you think of this?”

Krysta Harcus: Yeah, it can help in some ways. It’s got all the answers, but again, it’s got all the internet answers. And, you can change your diet depending on what it says, but it’s just looking back at what everybody’s saying on the internet. Cut out all these different foods, gluten, dairy, sugar, eggs, nightshades, red meat.

They list so many things depending on the week, the year. The list just seems to get longer. And yeah, I definitely think there’s the four main things, like I mentioned before, gluten, dairy, sugar, and processed foods. But a lot of these other ones, red meat and stuff like that yeah, it may be contributing because you’re so inflamed, there’s everything else going on, but in a lot of ways, you cut down the inflammation and these foods don’t bug you anymore.

So AI can recommend these things, can spot patterns really well, but there’s just no comparison to people like someone like me who’s been through it, who’s helped other people through it, and knows more of the emotional side. There’s so much in the emotional side that AI just will never understand.

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. Tell people where they can find you.

Krysta Harcus: Yeah. I’m on Instagram and YouTube @krystaharcus. My website’s krystaharcus.com*.

Lindsey: Okay. Great. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.

Krysta Harcus: Thanks for having me.

If you’re dealing with gut health issues of any type (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, SIBO, IMO, H2S SIBO/ISO, IBS, IBD, gastritis, GERD, H pylori, diverticulitis, candida, etc.) or have an autoimmune disease and need some help, I see individual clients to help them resolve their digestive issues or reverse autoimmune disease naturally, You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session to see if you’d like to work with me. I also have my own two products, Tributyrin-Max, which is particularly helpful for loose stool and diarrhea as it slows your motility and firms up your stool, and SBI powder, which is an all around gut pathogen binder, which is super safe and won’t harm beneficial bacteria, and is usually the first line of treatment I educate my clients about in order to avoid stronger antimicrobial herbs.

*Product and dispensary links are affiliate links for which I’ll receive a commission. Thanks for your support of the podcast by using these links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Lindsey: Welcome to the podcast, Dane.

Dane Johnson: Thank you so much for having me, Lindsey. I’m excited to be here, and excited to share experiences and chronic disease and help people who are dealing with IBD, if you have it. Thanks for having me.

Lindsey: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. So why don’t we start by having us tell you about your own journey with Crohn’s disease and how it led you to helping others?

Dane Johnson: Wow. Yeah, pain to purpose. I really just was a guy who didn’t want anything to do with learning about bowel movements and learning about food and I just wanted to live my life. I was a country boy from Virginia, just living a normal life, and at 19 years old, I started getting blood in the stool, and I was ashamed to tell anyone, and I didn’t know why.

I didn’t know if it was from some beetroot powder I had eaten or some cranberries or something. I didn’t know what was going on. And it started getting a little worse and a little worse, where I couldn’t keep hiding it. And by the time I was about 22 or 23, the doctors had finally diagnosed me with left-sided ulcerative colitis.

At first, they thought IBS, maybe a little hemorrhoid or a wound. Then, okay, you have left-sided ulcerative colitis, and then it kept progressing. I went on medications. Mesalamine was the first drug they gave me, plus prednisone, which helped, then stopped working. And then I went on 6-MP, which gave me toxicity of the liver.

I had to come off of it. My body freaked out. And then I went on methotrexate and Remicade, and then Entyvio and TPN feeding tubes. I kept going further and further until I was about 26 years old, where I nearly had died from Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis complications. So I was diagnosed with both forms of inflammatory bowel disease by two different doctors.

One, the doctor at UCLA, said it was Crohn’s disease 100%. The doctor at Mayo Clinic in Cedar Sinai said, “Nope, it’s ulcerative colitis,” and one thought it was gastritis with ulcerative colitis. So I just kept hearing different terms of how I was chronically inflamed. No one knew anything about root causes. No one had checked on any of the root issues that you and I look at.

And I just got more sick and more sick, and it seemed like the more we suppressed my immune system, the more the underlying root issues festered, to where it nearly killed me in 2014 on my 27th birthday.

Lindsey: And how did you come out of this to being able to help others?

Dane Johnson: So I came out of this and started helping others because I was looking for answers everywhere. I think a lot of people listening have been looking for answers, and it’s hard to see the truth through the fog, through the dark night. And I did not get results quickly. I tried diets, I tried supplements, I tried working with different naturopaths, and I had a really tough case, and I did not get results.

Took about four years of trying and spending over 50, $75,000 of my family’s money. I didn’t have any money, and that was debt money. We were not wealthy. We were just middle class. To finally start getting some results. And I can tell you about the things that I changed immediately where it finally worked.

Past the diet, past the supplements, what were the things that finally worked? Which I’ll share in a second. But once I started to get my life back, Lindsey, I went from 120 pounds, 6’2″, all right? I was 190, 185 pounds down to 120 pounds in a wheelchair. I couldn’t walk. I’d failed biologics. I’d failed steroids.

I’d been on four different antibiotics. And I had already tried bone broth fast, paleo diet, carnivore. I had tried the fruitarian diet where you eat 20 bananas a day, try to get 2,000 calories, 100 calories each, right? I tried all these things, and I just kept getting worse and losing more weight and just feeling more lost.

And everyone who loved me, and I’m so grateful to have those people who love me, but they were doing everything they could with their time, energy, and money to support me, and it wasn’t getting better. So when I finally figured out how to get natural healing to be effective, which is not easy, it’s one of the hardest things, anyone listening, you’re ever going to do.

When I finally started getting results, I just had developed something that was so specific that I could be great at and that really mattered to me, and I could really resonate with the pain, that I found that I was all of a sudden connecting in ways that people had never been able to connect before.

And I think, like Jordan Rubin and Elaine Gottschall and some of these other people out there with building gut health books were trying to do through their books in the ’80s and ’90s. But all of a sudden, we were in this environment with social media, podcasting, Zoom meetings, telehealth. I found a way that I could help people in a way that I never imagined.

The first time I ever started helping someone, I just shared my before and after. Here I am in a wheelchair, not being able to walk, completely housebound for a year, told I was going to die in December 2014, and here I am medication-free with a 95% normal colonoscopy, normal calprotectin, eating 10 times more food variety, 185 pounds with a 300-pound bench press, and medication-free, and I never got a surgery. I willed that into existence.

It wasn’t like I just had this secret recipe, guys, behind me where I’m like, “Ooh, here it is. It’s this one supplement. It’s this one idea.” It was really hard to do, and it took a long time to figure it out, but I did accomplish that. And once I accomplished that, there were a lot of other people who didn’t want to just talk to someone talking out of an ivory tower, metaphorically.

I don’t know about your experience, when I kept meeting a lot of doctors, it was just like people were talking about what they read in a book, what they thought the clinical was telling them. But they had no real experience doing it. They couldn’t show me any testimonies of helping people do it.

They never had to normalize colonoscopy. They never had to gain 60 pounds of natural weight again. They never had to go with the shame of friends and family, and they never had to lead a new life and divorce this Western world while everyone else is eating gluten and drinking alcohol around them. So I just saw a lot of people who actually hadn’t done what I needed to be done, even though they were brilliant and smarter than me in so many ways, but they just had no real experience, no intrinsic experience with one foot in front of the other, I’m not meant to be sick, I’m going to take my life back from this.

And that’s how I got into it. And I posted that before and after, and a bunch of people said, “Can you just help me?” This was 12 years ago. And I said, “Sure, and I started meeting people online who just told me about their story and sickness, and I said “here’s what I read, here’s what I did, here’s what I learned, here’s what I tried,” and I find that we were looking in a lot of the same directions.

And I was able to help advance them on places they hadn’t gone yet. Now, it helps when you’re housebound for a year and you’ve got no job, no kids, no responsibilities – all I had to do was read, learn, try, implement. I was dying. So that was one of the benefits of such a terrible tragedy. And I found that I started helping people get their life back.

I was able to help people start getting rid of the blood and the mucus and see inflammation go down, and I kept learning and growing. And then I started working with my naturopath professors at a deeper level, and then I started, all of a sudden I had, a few years later, I had worked personally one-on-one with 1,000, 2,000 people around the world.

And I became passionate about it. I had two other jobs. I worked three jobs for three years because I wanted to make sure I could keep working as I was healing. And that’s another thing, to stay healthy while you’re stressed, Lindsey? When you’re working hard and you’re doing great things in life, and to try to keep yourself healthy while you’re trying to help other people is a whole other ballgame.

You really have got to know what you’re doing when you’re trying to help other people and you’re taking on their stress and taking on jobs and travel and work and trying to make sure that you don’t go into a deep reaction in your own life is another ballgame. But yeah, one foot in front of the other, and I’ve been dedicated to this.

I’ve probably put 20,000 hours into it, and I’ve been doing it for 12 years, worked with thousands of people, and I built a team of practitioners. We have two naturopath doctors on staff, an RN, a chiropractic doctor. We have an herbalist. Eighty percent of my team was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease themselves, and we see about 250 clients at any given time around the world, and we’ve worked with a few thousand.

And our mission is just creating a home that specializes, that actually has walked the walk, that can really understand what you’re going through spiritually, energetically, mentally, and start making sense of how we get our power back So that’s kind of my story, yeah, if I could just sum it up and give you a bubblegum version. Yeah.

Lindsey: Yeah. So I assume that you’ve arrived at functional medicine as the sort of framework of how you deal with this. Is that accurate?

Dane Johnson: It is, but I’m more of a cherry picker. I will look at any form of medicine and say I think there’s something great there, in Eastern medicine, Chinese medicine, when, you know, functional medicine or conventional medicine.

There’s certain people that do need to use conventional medications to support themselves so they don’t have to get the surgery, or they don’t go into a life-threatening situation. So I believe you have to know all of it and build a custom plan. Don’t just put one flag up, but learn what everyone’s doing, and now in functional medicine or naturopathic medicine is really looking at what is the root cause driving the imbalance in the body, and that is the root of how the body heals. I think that’s the best way of understanding what else you can do besides taking a steroid, an antibiotic, immunosuppressant, immunomodulator or surgery, which is eventually what conventional medicine does.

So you have to look at root cause and how to empower the natural homeostasis of the body to regain balance, and I think functional medicine does that best, but there’s some really good stuff that can be really impactful both on the TCM side (Traditional Chinese Medicine), or the Eastern side that you can sprinkle in there if it fits the client or patient or fits their needs and, is making sense and congruent with their plan.

Lindsey: Yeah. So I just actually finished publishing and then publicizing a podcast with another gut health specialist and posted it in a Reddit group, and I got a negative reaction from somebody because there had been obviously one person who had posted about a negative experience with this person’s group, in a similar situation where it’s a practice with multiple people working there.

Dane Johnson: Oh, wow. Sorry to hear it.

Lindsey: Yeah. And I got the impression that this one negative post essentially poisoned the entire group against this practitioner who for me was a very intelligent, very informed person.

Dane Johnson: Yeah …

Lindsey: I’m curious, like anticipating that a similar reaction could happen, what preemptively would you say to somebody who criticizes functional medicine or naturopathic medicine as a whole if a group is already very oriented towards the conventional approach

Dane Johnson: First off, let’s all recognize something. Health and money is a bit like oil and water. They really don’t go together very well. In this world, we do– anyone in functional medicine needs to do their best to operate from a place of trust and integrity and operate from conscious capitalism.

We all have mortgages, we all have bills, right? And money is how we trade time and energy and effort, and you want it to be worth it. No one bats a thousand. No one’s going to be perfect, and sometimes people who are angry and resentful and are in so much pain are going to take it out on something outside of themselves, and they’re not going to hold personal responsibility for what they actually did and what they haven’t done.

And I bet if I talk with this person that they’re giving a hard time to, I would just be looking for flags that this person is in a very traumatized state or they’ve just been hurt. And I think a lot of people who are ready to really heal and are the right people can approach it with logical questions where they can hear a negative review and say, “Hey, how much of this do I need to watch out for? How much of this is applicable for what I want to achieve, and what can I take away from this negative review?” And also look for positive reviews. If a person’s only– has got a bunch of negative reviews and then all positive reviews, I think that’s a huge red flag. And I think that sometimes a negative review can scream louder than five positive reviews, but you really have to just put it into context.

So my opinion on it when you’re looking at working with someone is things that are going to be worth your time, energy, and money in functional medicine is number one is the plan needs to be customized to you. Okay? If someone is  selling you cookie cutter supplements and cookie cutter protocols and cookie cutter diets, there’s a good chance that you won’t get great results.

Number two, I think the best impact is going to be private coaching. If you really do need a private coach, it’s really hard to scale as a CEO of a company. You can’t scale a multimillion-dollar company off the back of private coaching. Good luck. It’s really hard. But I only do private coaching because of the impact, and it also keeps my brand really strong, and it lets me sleep at night.

And I’d rather have a smaller company with bigger results, honestly, is how I come down to it. I think that number three is you want to work with a functional practitioner who specializes in what you’ve actually going through. If you have some rare disease and this person is just generally good at naturopathic medicine and they don’t specialize in what you’re seeing, there’s a good chance that they’re not going to be able to help with the little bit of details that you’re going through.

If your underlying problem is mold or Lyme disease and this person doesn’t specialize in mold or Lyme disease, it’s probably not the best person for you. But that practitioner could be great for somebody else. So I also like holding space for patients and clients, and I like holding space for practitioners.

I think we all need to love on each other more, as long as we deeply believe that the practitioner and the client are coming with integrity, with trust, showing up as our best selves. I work hard for you. You work hard for yourself. We come together, and we work at this together because healing is not linear.

Okay? It is tough. You go left, you learn. You go right, you learn. Let’s stay in the pocket, and let’s make sure that we’re being honest and we’re here for the right reasons. And that’s one of the reasons that, personally, I will still get on and record testimonies. I’ve probably recorded 3 to 400 just video-recorded testimonies that are 15 to 20 minutes long at a minimum of four months of private coaching each person.

We’re talking years of work because it helps to validate the experience of knowing someone. With a practitioner or a program, you need to go through with someone. That’s the oil and water of the money, is that if someone just puts together a bunch of videos and just tells you to do all these things and doesn’t hear your personal experience, you’re just not going to get that much impact.

Now, it can be really useful that if you are assertive and you could be the CEO of your health and then someone teaches you a bit about drainage pathways, they teach you about mycotoxins, hidden mold in the house, they teach you about parasites, they teach you about biofilms, they teach you how to unlock phase one, phase two detoxification in the liver, you might say, “Hey, this is great because I got what it was and I got what I needed to implement into my plan and I’m disciplined and assertive enough to implement it.”

But a lot of us aren’t. So I think we’re just lost in what we think we’re getting sometimes, what we want. If you think you’re going to spend $5,000 and every problem is going to go away, and you’re going to live in remission for the rest of your life of any problem, you’re going to walk on water, it’s probably not going to happen.

But can you get major symptom relief? I think so. Can you get empowered? Can you learn the traits that can help you not just now, but for the next 20 years? That’s what I would be looking for. If you’re looking for something that’s worth your money, it’s like, am I learning things that are going to make me empowered for the next five, 10, 20 years?

Is this something I would teach my children? Is this something I can help my parents with? Man, that might be worth more than symptom relief, if you really think about it. That’s the golden goose, to get self-empowered. So I think anyone who’s looking at natural medicine, I’ve bought programs for 10, $15,000.

I’ve spent over $100,000 learning about natural medicine myself. The things that I’ve gotten the most impact on is, I want a company and a leader who’s mission-driven, who’s passionate, who specializes in this specific thing. I like niche programs and need to be able to talk with the community members.

If you won’t let me talk with other people who’ve bought your program, that to me is a big red flag. So I want to be able to talk with other members. I want to be able to grow with them. I want to learn with them. I want to see testimonies of people doing what I want to do specifically. And that point, I’ll roll the dice.

Me personally, that’s when I would invest the money. And if it doesn’t work out perfectly, I still probably have enough that I can keep working off of to get better and better from that program, and that’s where I’d say it’s worth it

Lindsey: Yeah. I think the important part is that, yeah, nobody does bat 1,000.

That is, everybody does not help every single person, and often the reason that you don’t help people is that whatever your approach is not the approach they want to take. They’re not prepared to, say, take the supplements that need to be taken or change the diet or whatever it is that you’re asking them to do. They’re not prepared to make those steps and therefore can fade away … or not follow your advice or don’t do it in a timely manner. There’s a definitely a give and take in this whole process, and we’re all doing our best to try and help people, and some people are not . . .

Dane Johnson: . . . I know.

Lindsey: … pulling up their end of the bargain and then blaming the practitioner maybe.

Dane Johnson: And, yeah, and let’s talk, for everyone listening to this, we all have been in a position where someone didn’t like us or didn’t like something we did, whether it was high school or middle school or business; and we’re in consulting. Lindsey, you as a practitioner have to guard yourself with knowing what you’re doing and the integrity that you come with, and you’re going to be right for the certain kind of person.

You are so detailed. You were on my podcast a little while ago, and I heard you. You are detailed. You are educated. You are well-read, and you are specific on what you want to do. The hard thing, and I think that’s going to be right for certain people, and other people are going to need something else, and that’s okay.

Be where you really want to be. Guys, if you’re going to get real results though, here’s some things that can really help you with when you’re choosing natural medicine and health, is the people who are paying did not sign up to become doctors. They don’t need a PhD in gut microbiome. They need to get a simplified, doable action steps that’s customized to their experience that fits their life.

That’s where a lot of people are getting overwhelmed is I come in, and yes, I should stop eating this. I should start eating this. I should add all these things. But how does that fit my kids’ schedule? How does it fit my work schedule? How does it fit my mental load? Because I’m overwhelmed. I’m probably battling a little bit of depression.

I also am dealing with insomnia. I have no weight gain. I’ve got stress on my marriage. There’s so much going on that what I think the answer is and what the world needs more of, if I’m being quite honest, I think we need more coaches. I think we’ve got a lot of people out there who are looking at the science and training on the science, but how do we take this huge overwhelming science base and simplify it into daily things that people in the United States or Canada or Europe can actually say, “This is applicable. It makes sense to me. It’s simple. I can be consistent with it, and I’m not overwhelmed”?

That is where the results are. It’s not the pro-. . .  it’s not the answer. It’s how to integrate the answer in a consistent fashion where I can actually do it and keep doing it. Lindsey, I failed for all those years because people were telling me to go gluten-free, and I was going, “What? Gluten free? Everything I eat is gluten. Are you crazy? I worked at Papa John’s Pizza for four years.” I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve gotten so much success is I am the patient. I was the kid on McDonald’s, Papa John’s, drinking soda, chugging beers- … throwing a football down the beach to try to get a date.

I didn’t care. I grew up in South Carolina and Virginia, farm boy, and I wanted nothing. I didn’t want this. How did I go from that guy to now specializing in gut microbiome and giving speeches to doctors and working and having naturopath doctors on my staff and helping thousands of people?

Because I’ve tried to simplify it in a way that’s integrated. I’m not here to try to win an award of the smartest guy on Dr. Oz. I’m here to build solutions that work for everyday people, and that’s what we need. It’s like, how do I take this idea of food and make it happy and make it celebratory and make it fun and make it taste good and get the gut microbiome as good as Lindsey’s?

Like, how do I do both? How do I make sense? How do I get rid of these toxins out of my life without feeling like I have to be wrapped in a bubble, like, how do I not freak out that I have polyester underwear and I have to rebuy all my underwear and spend $500 because the organic cotton is double the price as the stuff at Walmart?

It’s like I think we’re just overwhelmed with stuff. We need to make it bite-size, and it’s how do I just look at my day to day? So I call that the daily blueprint, and we can talk about some of these things. What do I integrate that has the biggest bang for my buck, doesn’t cost a lot, that’s easy to do now, and then can start just being a part of my life and I don’t get overwhelmed with?

Because it’s overwhelming to try to do HBOT [hyperbaric oxygen therapy] and peptides and coffee enemas and castor oil packs. It’s like maybe I’m not ready- … for all that, I’m not ready. Yeah. And here’s the line that everyone will want to hear right now. Write this down. And at the end of the day, the practitioner’s not healing you.

You’re healing you. Your divine body has the ability. Anything a naturopathic physician can teach you is just igniting the body’s natural state. It’s signaling the body. Like when we add that more fiber, we’re signaling the microbiome to grow, like nitrogen on a garden.

When you do meditation, you’re signaling to have a healing response.You’re signaling the parasympathetic, the vagal nerve. You’re signaling for your body to salivate, to create natural digestive enzymes in your saliva. We’re getting the aha. When you learn from the science, it’s just reinstalling God’s creation. You are the answer. Your body already can do it. Get out of its way.

Stop poisoning it. Start giving it what it needs. Get into a place of happiness so you get the right hormone receptors and enzymic reactions released and then start stacking it. Because once it’s easy to be gluten-free, once it’s easy to get rid of alcohol, once it’s easy to start going to bed at time, once it’s easy to start making your own meals, now Lindsey can come in and start going, “Let’s double black belt this thing on higher levels.”

You’re not ready. You have got to get through phase one before you can go to phase four. And I think that person I bet was just overwhelmed with what they were being asked to do when they just weren’t ready, right? Yeah. And so start with the simple things.

Lindsey: Yeah. So let’s get into specifics of how you work with people. So from testing, to diet. Tell me what it looks like to start working with you.

Dane Johnson: Yeah. And so it goes into what I’ve built my whole plan and how I help people is really what we just talked about. I’m looking to try to meet the person where they are. I’m trying to figure out what excites them, and sometimes it’s an eight-year-old kid and we have to do it completely different than a 14-year-old or a 40-year-old or a 60-year-old who’s been studying this for 20 years, has a PhD, and has been trying natural medicine for a long time and says, “I already know probably 90% of what you want to teach me.”

And so there’s a lot of different energies. You have got to meet them where they are. So when I look at it, when I look at any case, and this is how success is done, you have got to get simple to get successful. If your life is too hard, that is the number one equation to get failure, okay? If life is too hard, you’re going to end up with some sort of failure.

If you can simplify it, that’s how greatness is done, right? LeBron James makes it look easy or Messi makes it look easy. Michael Jordan made it look easy. You have got to take something hard and make it simplified to start getting consistent and get more success. So I want to do whatever I need to get out of overwhelmed, get consistent, and build a plan that makes you happy and healthy and you feel you can do, okay?

So if I have to say, “It’s not the perfect plan, Lindsey, but I can get them consistent,” I’ll take 80% of the right plan with consistency over 100% of the perfect plan that they can’t be consistent with. Because if I try to give them the perfect plan, they’re going to get overwhelmed, they’re going to quit, and it’s going to end up with this didn’t work, right?

So when I look at lab work also, lab work is very expensive and it’s not perfect. Me and you both know that quantitative PCR stool tests, that urine analysis, that blood analysis are not perfect. They don’t find Lyme disease well, they don’t find parasites well, they don’t find viral load like cytomegalovirus or EBV well.

They can’t really identify biofilms very well, that there’s obvious multi-factor issues that make them constantly get false negatives. Also, if you haven’t even built the foundational plan and you’re spending $2,000 on lab work, which is what I was doing, if you’re on a budget, that money could have been spent better, I think, in the very beginning just building a foundational plan that’s low risk and high reward.

Because if I’m going to do $1,500 of lab work and then I needed to redo it in two or three months, I’ve spent $3,000 on a budget of, let’s say, $5,000, and all that is a North Star that might be false negatives and I might have been able to fix half of what’s in the lab with a basic plan, just getting rid of alcohol, getting rid of poor snacking habits, getting to sleep better, getting more sunlight, and if I can get those results in the first two or three weeks, it might change what labs I want to do. Because if you’re sick as a dog, yeah, I could justify spending $1,500, $2,000 wholesale, right? What it costs a practitioner to order, no profit, to check what’s going on with you.

So I think that labs are very important. I like them, I use them, but I always go with what that person is. I’m here to spend every dollar, every minute, every piece of time on what I think is best for that client, and if we don’t agree, we’re not doing it. That’s how I build trust. So my big thing is I work for you, I want to build trust with you.

Are you ready? What’s going on with budget, time, energy, or money? And then based on everything they’re telling me, I’m saying, “This is my recommendation. Do you agree? And don’t take anything, don’t do anything or take anything unless you can give me one to two sentences on why you’re personally doing it.”

Because if a person doesn’t understand why they’re doing it, they’re just choking down 30 pills, you are on a Russian roulette table of this client getting over you because they are just choking down what you are saying based on your authority. So if they’re overwhelmed by it and they’re saying “this authority said I’ll get better in three weeks, I’m going to watch it. If I don’t feel better shoving this stuff down my throat in three weeks, then they’re a hack.” And that’s energetically where a lot of people will go.

So I don’t build anything that this person doesn’t agree with, and if they’re telling me they’re overwhelmed and they can’t do it, I say, “Okay, why don’t we just do 60% of what we’re talking about? Let’s go ahead and see if you can incorporate it where you feel safe. Then let’s meet in another two weeks, 10 to 14 days later. Let’s just do a quick 30-minute check-in. Does it make sense? Were you able to do it? What was overwhelming? What started to make sense, and are we ready for more?”

I got to win that we are on the same page and we both like this.

Because if it doesn’t go right, we both agree that this was a good move. I’ll help build it for you, right? I’ll move on the chess match for, with you and for you, but I got to get you on the right team. I do not bark orders at people, and that really helps me with a person who’s brand new or someone who’s advanced.

With someone who’s advanced, I’m ready to go double black belt, right? Frequencies, biohacking peptide, stem cells, exosomes, red light therapy, meditation, hyperbaric oxygen, fasting, bone broth fast versus water fast, biofilms, parasites. Which antimicrobials work the best, why? Do we need to use antibiotics for a specific reason?

Why? Do we use conventional medicine? What’s the research say? Yeah, we can jump in. But if I’m also dealing with a 12-year-old or an 18-year-old who’d never asked for this and never knew anything about this, I’m going to build them a basic plan, and I’m going to be teaching them why I want to do what I do so I can get them excited.

If they’re not excited, maybe a little overwhelmed if they’re brand new with this by the end of the call, then we’re not going to win. I got to get out of fear, I got to get excitement, and I got to give them some really simple to-dos and then check on them again in two weeks.

Lindsey: Okay. So I’d love to get into some actual specifics of particular situations so that people can pull some value out of this.

For example, mycotoxins I’ve discovered in talking to other people and in working myself that’s a root cause for a lot of people. What percentage would you say is that a root cause for the people you work with?

Dane Johnson: Yeah, IBD, that’s great. Very interesting. I don’t think I could give you an actual number. I’d have to guess because we work with a few thousand people who are actually going to spend the money to check for mold, but then mold’s hard to check for.

You’ve got Dr. Andrew Campbell’s test in blood the MyMycoLab Test by Dr. Andrew Campbell that’s checking for mold. You can check that. We’ve seen a lot of positive come back where it was negative in a urine analysis, which is what Vibrant America and all these other labs do, is a urinalysis of mycotoxins where it might come back negative.

And there’s also just the symptoms. Sometimes we’ll go on symptoms and think it’s that, or we have to do more testing for CIRS, chronic inflammatory response syndrome. So I think it’s a really deep avenue with mold. I think that mold, the biggest thing is mold is weakening the immune system. It’s making you more likely to have autoimmune reactions.

It’s making you more likely to not be able to handle viral replication or Lyme disease or some of these other pathogens. I think they’re more likely to take over your body when you have an underlying problem of mold. And common issues I see with mold is they feel worse just walking into a room. They can go into a musty room and just feel terrible or headaches or systemic inflammation.

Or if they’re making all these changes and it’s not going away, some of these core problems are not going away, even like calprotectin, it can be underlying mycotoxins. People with poor drainage pathways and people who have a background of living in basements or living in areas that we know are notorious for mold, people with poor epigenetics, I’m looking for with mold.

So what percentage? I think a larger percentage. I’d say if I just take a guess, I’d say 25 to 35, 40% people with IBD are dealing with mold. But once your immune system is weak, anything can become a problem with that. And it’s never one problem. It’s always multiple problems. So I think the bigger question is, how can I start identifying if mold is a problem for me?

I would check your C4a in your blood work or your VEGF. These can be acute inflammatory markers that can be signs of chronic inflammatory response syndrome. So your doctor probably won’t know what these are, but you can keep asking for them and go check LabCorp and see if you can get those tested.

I think also the MMP-9 is also really good to check in the blood or the stool. The Gut Zoomer does check the MMP-9, so if I see that elevated in a quantitative PCR stool test called the Gut Zoomer, I’m going to think a little bit more about mold. And obviously, doing a urine analysis can be easy to check there.

But one of the notorious problems I see with mold is someone with backed up toxin load. If they just don’t seem to have good liver movement, good lymphatic movement, sinus infections, constantly swelling around their nose, I’m always going, “Okay, I think there might be a mold issue here that could be causing this problem.”

So those are some signs I see right off the bat and yeah, I think it’s a notorious problem for a lot of people dealing with chronic inflammation or chronic disease.

Lindsey: So you mentioned Andrew Campbell’s antibody test. And given that antibodies like an IgG can elevate from an exposure 20 years ago and stay elevated-

Dane Johnson: Yeah

Lindsey: . . . how can you trust? Like to me, mycotoxins coming out in the urine, then you know for sure there are mycotoxins coming through the system right now- … versus an elevated antibody could be from… obviously, if it’s an elevated IgM, then you know that’s a recent exposure. But if it’s an only IgGs elevated or IgA, how can you know that’s anything recent?

Dane Johnson: They do IgG and IgE, and you don’t, and no lab test is perfect. And what I’m looking for is further signs that mold could be an issue. But the people that we have said these symptoms are correlated with mold, and even the patient believes that they have mold, we’ve seen a lot of positive tests in the MyMycoLab’s indicating that when the urinalysis comes back normal, and where we say we know they’re living in mold.

Because another thing is to get the mycotoxins to actually move through the urine. So if your liver’s not moving and you’re overwhelmed with toxins, it’s going to show a false negative. Yeah. So one thing I also do to help with that is I’ll use a little biofilm disruption and liver support about anywhere from four to seven days, sometimes 14 days, prior to doing any urine analysis.

So I like one to two grams of N-acetylcysteine*. If they’re very sensitive, I’ll go on maybe 500 milligrams of N-acetylcysteine to support, and maybe a castor oil pack. If they’re super stuck up, I might need to use a little extra DMSO to support in that, and I’m going to stop the binders to make sure it’s more likely to show up in the test.

But also, do they start getting better? If I start putting them on specific binders, if I get them out of that house, if their house tests positive for mold, that’s also indicative. So there’s a lot of ways to skin the cat. I think the harder time is even finding the mold in the house. I personally have not found great results with ERMI tests, open air tests.

I think the best bang for your buck looking for mold in a house, if you believe it is, it’s in-wall air cavity sampling, where you actually need to draw a little incision in the drywall and vacuum out the air from that area, that cavity, and then that vacuum goes right into a sample.

And you need to do probably about 12 of those, 12, 15, depending on how many rooms you think is a problem, and probably multiple ones in a room. I actually just opened up my walls where I thought there was mold when I bought this house. I just opened up my ceiling, and I just went up there and had- got a mold guy also come and visually look and then scrub the actual wood and test that sample, and we found large amounts of Stachybotrys black mold up there when two different ERMI tests had tested negative in the house So-

Lindsey: This was prior to buying it or after you bought it?

Dane Johnson: This is after I bought it.

Lindsey: So you didn’t pre-check for mold?

Dane Johnson: No, I did, but sometimes you’re in a case where it’s like, it has got to go off the market, you got three different buyers who are trying to buy, you’re trying to take their word for it. Oh, like buying a house, yeah, and trying to get a good price on it.

I bought a house in southern California. It’s not easy. Yeah, you got it. But I knew that I thought there was mold in there, but I got such a price in there that I said, “Okay, I can justify spending $10,000 on mold remediation in here because of the price and the deal I’m going to get on this.”

Lindsey: Yeah.

Dane Johnson: You sometimes have got to come out with your deal-making situation. But here’s something also just to help everyone. If you work on the foundations of functional medicine, natural healing, no matter what the underlying problem is, there’s a good chance your body will start feeling better, even when living in mold.

One of my coaches is super sensitive to living in mold, and we’ve gotten him, he got about 70% symptom relief without moving because he couldn’t move. He couldn’t afford to move. So I do think, yes, you can’t get fully better unless you get out of the mold if you are one of those people who has mold sensitivity or mold allergy or really bad epigenetics, you can’t release these mycotoxins at all.

But you can help your body in a great level of ways. So if you think there’s any underlying problem, you’ve got to focus on enhancing digestion, repairing the gut lining, rebuilding the microbiome, opening up the drainage pathways. The five drainage pathways I like to focus on, there are more, but these are the big ones that anyone starting out needs to fix: the kidneys, the liver, the ability to poop, the ability to sweat, and the lymphatic system.

And then if I was to add a bonus that I go more advanced, it’s the cellular detox that I know Dan Pompa talks a lot about, but that’s at that more advanced, deeper level. But I like to start on those because if you can’t get those moving, you’re going to feel terrible with Lyme, parasites, biofilms, candida, proteobacteria.

You’re going to feel terrible with any of it. So you’ve got to get the drainage pathways open. You’ve got to enhance the physiological imbalances in the gut. The five that you have to fix: digestion, microbiome, gut lining, the nervous system, and the drainage pathways. So, okay, you hit those five physiological imbalances, and every single disease will start getting better, and that’s something simple that everyone can understand.

We’re not talking about the woo of parasites. We’re talking about how the body actually works. Every doctor you’ve seen knows and believes digestion is real, right? Digestion is a real process that could cause… That if you have low digestion, it’s likely you’re going to get bloating, gas, more likely to get SIBO, parasite infection, undigested food in the stool, or inflammation from undigested food in the gut lining, or damage to your epithelial cell lining.

It’s just obvious. One plus one equals two. Digestion needs to be enhanced no matter what disease for a better gut experience. Every doctor will believe microbiome. Every doctor believes in the epithelial cell lining, the mucosal membrane. These are real. It’s not up for debate. It’s not woo. So I love to start there with clients, where I can say everyone can wrap their head around it.

“It’s like you’re right. I have IBS and IBD. If I enhance my digestion, I’ll probably feel better. You’re right. If I rebalance my microbiome, I’ll feel better.” Now, it can help to do labs, but you and I both know that there is no stool test that can perfectly assimilate how strong the microbiome is because it’s a flash shot.

It’s one day, and it can change day to day, week to week based on what’s going through. Or if you’ve got the flu or a virus could change those, the inflammatory markers, right? And if leaky gut, I can look at gut permeability in the Wheat Zoomer, right? I can look at it in the blood. I can look at it in the Gut Zoomer with zonulin or anti-lipopolysaccharide antibodies, right?

So I can start to see the signs of gut permeability. Your stool can tell you, right? If you’ve got these broken down, weak, broken apart stools, and all of a sudden you’re getting more formed stools and you feel fully relieved, and they look more like the Bristol stool that you want it to look like, that’s a good sign that the leaky gut is going away, the microbiome’s getting better, and digestion is enhancing, so we’ve have got to go with symptoms. We have got to go with intuition. And then we also look at lab work to give us a little bit more data on what that means.

Lindsey: So I know there’s sort of two schools of thought on fiber and IBD. One school of thought is just pull all the fiber out. Do like an SCD or an IBD- AID or even just a low FODMAP diet.

And then another school of thought is throw all of the fiber at once. Just try and absolutely fiber max somebody, and I’ve had both kinds of speakers on my podcast before. I’m curious where you fall in that spectrum?

Dane Johnson: Yeah, I think one thing that’s just made me successful, I said it earlier, Lindsey, is I love to cherry pick.

I look at all avenues. I have worked with people who cannot handle animal food. They just cannot do it, and they don’t want to do it. That’s fine. And then we have got to handle fiber. If you’re eating plants, you have got to handle fiber. You have got to work that in. It’s just the kind of fiber. I’ve worked with people who absolutely cannot handle fiber.

They cannot do it. They only feel good on the carnivore diet. They wish they could handle plants. Every time they eat them, they freak out. Their body does so bad. I think you and me dived into this a little bit. In a perfect world, and as you go, I want you to be able to handle fiber, okay? So I think I’m pro-fiber, but I like to be strategic about it and intuitive about it.

So how much fiber? What kind of fiber? Where do we get the fiber source? Is it food or supplement? A lot of times I’ll start with a supplement, because I can control it better, all right? I can control it a little bit better, and if I use foods with fibers, I’m just going to take my time on it. I’m going to look for really gentle, light fibers, or I’m going to cook it in such a way that I’m really breaking down a little of that insoluble fiber.

So I’m like a chess player. I’m looking at the fiber game. I’m just trying to win it for that person. So we’re talking generic, guys, which takes my power away. I don’t do generic. I do customization. So for instance, if I’m hearing someone on one side or the other, I’m trying to help with what other side of the fence they land on and how they’re feeling.

But I think the end goal is if you can’t handle fiber, that means you can’t handle a wide variety of food, and if you can’t handle a wide variety of food, I don’t think you’re that healed. The one thing I would say to a carnivore person is, if you can’t tolerate oats, you can tell me and you and Dave Asprey can tell me that oats are crap.

Great. If you can’t tolerate sprouted, rolled oats, that tells me the integrity of your gut is weak, and do you intuitively, just I’m going to ask them the answer with a question, “Do you feel healed? Do you feel robust if you can’t handle these variety of whole foods, right?”

Foods that have been here for thousands of years. And so that’s where I got. If I can’t handle quinoa, I don’t really feel that strong. I might say that it’s not part of my therapeutic response, and I don’t want it because of plant defenses, great. Okay, cool. But if you can’t handle it, I think that’s something going on, unless you’re actually allergic.

But for most of us, it’s not a true allergy. It’s a sensitivity or Herxheimer reaction due to poor digestion, weak gut lining, weak microbiome imbalance. And that’s where I took like– I think Dr. Gundry is one of these people that lands on the really intense fence, and I’ve really learned some stuff, and I like to use him as an example because I interviewed him a couple times, and I really like him, and there’s things he said that I really like, and there’s things that I absolutely do not use that he says, but I still love him, and I think we can all do that.

The power is just to take– There’s things I’m saying, take what works and leave the rest. That’s how you win. Stop trying to raise the flag of some famous diet and just win where it makes sense to win. What he said about grains and reducing lectins and phytates and some oxalates with some of these plant foods, that really helped me when I was chronically sick.

It really worked, where I started adding in more polysaccharides and not having a response because I was stuck on the SAD-type style or the paleo-type style, and I wanted to add more food variety because I didn’t feel healed living so restrictively. And I wanted to add more fiber because there’s way more research to suggest fiber is better for you than there’s research to suggest that fiber is bad for you

Right? It’s 100 to one in the research column. But when he talked about how fruit was high in lectins and it’s bad for you and you shouldn’t do it, I said, “You can keep that. Then you just go ahead and keep that card.” I actually completely disagree with that, and fruit’s been very healing for me, and I’ve found it to be really good at evacuating the toxins.

We’re helping with constipation. It’s high in water. It’s a natural, raw food that we can do really well with, and I can get alkalizing fruits that are high in antioxidants, polyphenols, like berries. So I just said, “No, the research is going to go against that one.” So take what works. So my theory I’m thinking with fiber is, okay, if you can’t handle fiber or you’re wondering about fiber, I’m always going to start with prebiotic soluble fiber. Okay?

So if it can’t absorb water and it’s not delicate, then it’s not the best place to start. So think no seeds, no skins. If you can’t squish it, don’t eat it. That really helps you with the fiber game. All right? So it’s about that food, and then realize that it’s not the type of food that is good or bad.

It’s the manner in which it’s prepared that actually means more. So you might do bad with lettuce, right? But if I break down that lettuce in a certain way, you might do better with it, or an almond. If I have sprouted almond, stone-ground nut butter, you might do great with that. But if I give you a raw, organic almond, you eat it now, you’re probably going to freak out to that.

You’re not going to feel as good. And those oxalates might be irritating you. So the manner in which food is prepared has to be awoken with the idea of food is good or bad for you. You want to be aware of plant defenses. You want to be aware of fiber. But there’s a reason why a baby can handle applesauce but not a raw apple.

Because it’s produced in a way that they can handle. So you can cook something to also change that amount of fiber you’re getting. When you cook it down, it’s breaking down some of those insoluble fibers. So I’m always going to start with soluble fiber. I’m going to start– I like acacia fiber to start with.

I might start with a little blueberry, I might start with a little banana. Depending on a person, if they’re constipated, how they handle fats or histamine, I might start with a little avocado because it’s really soft and really easy. But a lot of us who can’t handle fats, have histamine reactions, or are having bowel movements too quickly can’t do avocado.

That’s why some people are so in love with avocados, and some hate avocados. So that’s what I call food philosophy. So I teach people food philosophy, no famous diets. I just learn from famous diets and customize you a plan. So from there, I agree with you, Lindsey, on there. Like from there, I want to start scaling.

Can I add psyllium husk, psyllium seed? Can I add in sprouted flax and chia that has a nice mix of insoluble and soluble with natural omega-3s? And can I add things in that feed the good bacteria? And I actually was beginning to bring up Dr. Gundry. He said this thing that he thought that a bit of doses of things every once in a while can really help build up your microbiome diversity.

I agree. Having a little bit of arrowroot, buckwheat, quinoa that are gluten-free and are ancient grains that are clean, I think is good for the microbiome integrity. And I’ll also note this, I’ve worked with thousands of people, some of the best bowel movements and most consistency I’ve seen actually was from vegans, where people were eating Swiss chard and artichoke and asparagus every day.

And everyone I’ve known with severe IBD would die on those things. But I’ve seen people work that up where they’re eating that, and they never worry about a bathroom because their microbiome can handle it, the diversity’s so strong because fiber is nature’s binder, and it cleans the colon. Last thing I’ll say about fiber is like physical therapy.

In this metaphor, if you have a bad knee and you do too intense of physical therapy in the beginning, it’s going to make you worse, and you can mistakenly demonize the fiber. All of us are different, and you might not be ready for a long period of time to handle any plant-based foods or fiber. So customize it to you and work up based on what your body’s experiencing.

But just make sense of the type of physical therapy you’re doing on your body and why.

Lindsey: So there’s lots of anti-inflammatory supports for IBD while you’re working on the root cause, like curcumin or omega-3s or PEA. So I’m curious if there’s any that you particularly like or favor or find have been more effective?

Dane Johnson: I have found, I like what generally has worked for a lot of people. So if I’m recommending something, I would prefer that 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 people have used it. I would prefer that there’s more clinical research on it. I would prefer that their doctor has heard of it, so when they tell their doctor they’re using something, no one has an aneurysm on this wild new thing.

And so I like curcumin as my favorite because it is most well-known, it is most studied. Everyone agrees, even conventional doctors will agree curcumin’s going to be good. Obviously, you have got to watch out for contraindications with certain medications or liver issues. I also like to use a curcumin… I think a big mistake the market’s making is they’re looking for bioavailable anti-inflammatories.

When I’m dealing with IBD, I want to coat the gut with anti-inflammatories. I want it to get to the colon. I don’t necessarily want it to absorb in the jejunum or ileum, right?

Lindsey: So you’re not looking for the super advanced, expensive forms. You’re looking for the regular Joe curcumin with some bioperine kind of thing, or?

Dane Johnson: That’s it, Lindsey. I want the most basic stuff. I want C3 curcuminoids* with no MCT oil, vitamin E fat solubles to increase it. I want no black pepper [bioperine]. Black pepper is the antithesis of the value of curcumin. Never take a curcumin with black pepper unless you’re trying to deal with arthritis or something of that systemic.

But I’ll tell you right now, all autoimmune disease is a weakened gut lining. I don’t like black pepper in my supplements. And the whole point is it damages the gut lining to drive in the curcumin. That’s the whole point of it is it helps drive the curcumin in, but at the same it’s injuring the epithelial cell lining.

I just don’t understand it, I don’t need that. I need the gut to calm down, which will also help systemically. Work on the gut and then systemically it tends to work better. Now, if I’m dealing with someone with severe arthritis, I might put them on something I call, like a product called CurcumEvail*, which has annatto E, an organic raw sunflower lecithin, and an MCT oil to help drive in the curcumin for more bioavailability.

So unless I’m dealing with severe arthritic issues, I like a local, a gut topical curcumin, and I’ve even seen it work in suppositories or enemas to help with fissures, things of that nature. I then like fish oil. Now fish oil has a bad rep because a lot of it is trash. It is crap.

The best you’re going to get is anchovies, wild mackerel, or wild-caught salmon. That’s your best source. If you’re going to get omega-3s, you actually don’t need as much as you’d think. I don’t really think you need 1,000 milligrams of these triglycerides. I think you need much less that’s actually usable and living by your body.

The brain only needs to operate on 10 to 20 milligrams really. And so I think high dose is good. It can be therapeutic, but a lot of it’s just trash, and I think if you get better stuff, it’ll just work better, and you don’t need to do as high dose. So my favorite is a product by BodyBio. It’s called Resolvin*, but it’s a CO2-extracted fish oil from organic sardines and mackerel, and it’s wrapped in a phosphatidylcholine lipid fat that protects it from going rancid or oxidizing.

Because omega-3s in supplements, it’s like probiotics. Omega-3s and probiotics are the hardest supplements to get that are actually clean and work and are- aren’t bad. And I think 99 out of 100 products in the world, you wasted your money with both probiotics and fish oil from what I’ve just seen. And I think that you can get both of these things in nature.

If you’re uncertain about probiotics, work up your ability to handle fermented foods. It’s nature’s natural ferment, probiotic. Now obviously, if you have histamine problems, mast cell activation, SIBO, you have got to be really careful with this because you could Herx on it, so you just need to take time to work up on it.

But that’s why I only use single-strain probiotics. But in the anti-inflammatory, I’d say it’s C3 curcumin directly to the gut. Then I like an omega-3. I do like PEA*, but it’s a little bit newer. Not as many people know about it. It’s a little bit harder to get in a supplement, but I think it’s really impactful.

I’ve seen it most impactful with systemic pain with people. That’s where I’ve seen it work. But I usually can get the job done if I fix the gut lining, I clean out the liver, I calm down the inflammation in the body, or I’m sorry, in the stomach that has a systemic reaction. And obviously calm down the nervous system, better sleep, stretching, sweating.

There’s a lot of ways to quote unquote, “skin the cat” to calm that down. So if I can get the job done with really well-known products that I’ve used thousands of times that everyone feels comfortable with, I’m going to go with that before I use less-known products

Lindsey: So I’ve discovered in dealing with mold more now than I actually would like to, or had planned on, but, you find the mold, you have got to deal with it, right?

That there seems to be two camps of people in terms of treatment for mycotoxins. And one camp seems to be the Shoemaker camp, where it looks like it’s mostly prescription binders, cholestyramine, and the other camp is more like the Neil Nathan camp, and I think Andrew Campbell might be more on that side in terms of treatment, but not in terms of testing but using itraconazole and natural antifungals and compounded nasal sprays. So I’m curious where you fall in that that?

Dane Johnson: Oh, you’re taking me to no man’s land. You’re taking me to the great debate I like to call. The functional medicine arguments of the 21st century here. Yeah, I know all those practitioners. I’ve spoken with them. I’ve heard their arguments, and I cherry-pick. I look at everyone. They know more about mold than I do, than you do. Let them go run. They could probably run circles in a debate, but at the end of the day, what do our patients or practitioners need to get results? And so I kind of look at all that. Here’s what I’ve found that I feel works the best.

Mold is so hard to test. I’m pro the MyMycoLab test. I’m pro cholestyramine, but it’s really hard to get one that actually works that’s not filled with the crap natural sweeteners and binders. So if you just get a cholestyramine from your local office and you don’t get it custom made, it’s crap, because they put a bunch of sweetener in that can aggravate the gut lining.

I think another way of doing that is just getting a really good binder like a high-dose TUDCA*, get bile salts where you’re moving that bile, and then get a plethora of different binders, like GI Detox* by Biocidin I think works really well. I think Carboxy* by CellCore works really well too. That high-dose carbon technology of fulvic and humic acid I think works really well.

I do like the cholestyramine. It does work. You just need one that you go to a local pharmacy that they can make it proper without the sweeteners in it, and then slowly work up on it. So I do think that’s good. The itraconazole, I haven’t seen as much positive results as I’ve wanted. It leads me more that we actually need the real Sporanox.

And Dr. Campbell says that too, that you actually need the Sporanox.

Lindsey: Ooh, okay … not the generic itraconazole. The brand name.

Dane Johnson: But it’s, Lindsey, it’s freaking crazy expensive. I had a client. We did six months of itraconazole because she was testing normal in her urine analysis but high in the blood analysis through the MycoLabs, and she believes that mold is still in her body and driving acute inflammation.

She just, “Dane,” so I’m letting her. “Do you believe it? What do you think? Here’s my thoughts. What are your thoughts?” She goes, “I think it. I want to keep pushing.” We do six months of itraconazole. The MyMycoLab barely moves. Barely moved. She’s doing 200 milligrams a day, one cap morning, one cap night, just like we’re recommended, right?

And I’m also putting in other stuff in there, all this stuff, and it’s just not working. And she also noticed this with her cat who had a fungal issue, because Sporanox is sometimes used on animals, and she felt like the Sporanox was the only thing that worked on her cat. So we decided, okay, we’re going to go with Sporanox.

It’s costing her eight hundred dollars a month just to get Sporanox in its real form. because itraconazole is in generic form, and it’s got fillers, and a lot of times it doesn’t work as well. So now we’re trying the actual Sporanox. I’m going, man– And I’ve talked with other, like the naturopath medical doctor on my staff specializes in mold, and she says she’s gotten great results using fluconazole and even other antifungals.

And I’m going, maybe other great debaters in this case are saying these antifungals are not working as well, that you actually need something like Sporanox to really work or using natural antifungal properties, like herbal ones, black walnut, olive leaf, wild oregano. What I think is the number one thing you have got to do, you have got to work your drainage pathways, you have got to work your mitochondria energy.

You’ve got to do advanced biofilm disruption, advanced liver detox, and then you should be throwing on antifungals, and you should be stacking them. I think that itraconazole, I’ve seen some good results with some. Some other clients, I feel like it hasn’t worked as well, where Dr. Campbell says to work the Sporanox.

I get a little worried about, no one in this world– I was just listening to Sinclair Kelly do a lecture at this, at the last conference I was at, and she was saying “We don’t know which binders work best for which mycotoxins.” We don’t have enough research around it. And I think both Neil Nathan and Shoemaker are still studying and trying to learn how much is this causing a problem and what binders, what antifungals do we use.

But I think our best bet is, I think Campbell’s onto something. I have seen people recover quite well. I think the problem is we have terrible ways of identifying mold in the house, and I think that broad-spectrum anti-pathogens with advanced biofilm protocol and advanced detox pathway protocol is the best thing you can do.

So my takeaway is get the mold out of your house, go advanced, spend some more money on there because that will last you, okay? And put systems in place so mold doesn’t keep growing in your house. Two, work advanced drainage. Three, work advanced anti-biofilm, anti-pathogen protocol, and then add in some natural antifungals.

If you want something a little stronger, Sporanox. Itraconazole seems to be the strongest. Maybe fluconazole. I think it’s still hard to tell. And then binders. You have got to work advanced binders. I think if this is a big problem, you want to work up to two or three different binders. I’m going to go with Carboxy, I’m going to go with GI Detox, and I’m going to go with cholestyramine made properly.

Lindsey: Yeah that’s interesting about the Sporanox. I didn’t realize that the generic versus the brand made such a difference and had not,

Dane Johnson: Yeah …

Lindsey: pointed that out to anybody. But most of my people can’t get access to prescriptions anyway, so they’re doing the natural. And I’ve actually, I’ve-

Dane Johnson: We test. Yeah, we’re testing this …

Lindsey: as I’ve had to work with so many people with mold, I’ve seen more results come back with the natural antifungals like Biocidin*, for example, has been working pretty well, has seemed to have eliminated, in a round or two, two-thirds, three-quarters of the mycotoxins. So I’ve seen some pretty positive results.

Dane Johnson: Yeah. because it might be biofilms or it might-

Lindsey: Yeah, I’m using biofilm disruptors too, the SFI stuff, the Interfase.

Dane Johnson: Yeah. Or Biocidin is also is, it’s just stronger because it’s able to break apart some of those films, and mycotoxins, and I’ve actually seen more mycotoxins in a urine analysis after going on Biocidin/

Pushing it … because it’s releasing toxins. Yeah, it’s pushing it out. So it’s not a perfect scenario, but if you do those things, I think it’s going to really change the game for you, and you’ll feel better. I think sometimes we’re getting neurotic about the labs, where it’s like at the end of the day, don’t stress about things because it’s going to make you more sick.

The stress of it might make you more sick than the actual problem. If you see a little bit of a mold in there, if you get a little bit of something, there’s not one lab, not-

Lindsey: Yeah, if it’s down pretty well. But I’m also conscious of the fact that like mold can be at the root of cancer. So you don’t want to just leave it in your body. You do want to keep working on it. If it’s there, you want to keep pulling it out.

Dane Johnson: Absolutely. But there’s also mold in our forest, and there’s mold on the beach, and there’s mold in every house and elevator

Lindsey: Sure, you’re going to be exposed, of course, yes.

Dane Johnson: And that’s why, when you build these ideas, you really just support your body’s ability to handle this. So yeah, I try not to stress about it because I think the biggest one is going to be living in a chronic state of stress. So if you’re stressing about health, and you’re stressing about the fact that you’re stressed, that’s a problem, right?

We have got to let go but be empowered. So binders, drainage support, get yourself sweating, get yourself happy, get yourself moving. And a lot of people aren’t having this problem with mold. If you take a person who lived in the forest for 30 years, why aren’t they dying of cancer and then mold?

Lindsey: Well-

Dane Johnson: Because it, first of all-

Lindsey: The microbiome of the forest …

Dane Johnson: Yeah. And I know we’re out of time on this, but just one thing that’s going to answer. The mold that’s growing in our houses is transforming because we put antifungals everywhere that’s making the mold transform into something new that makes it more aggressive and more intense.

It’s fighting for its existence here as we try to spray it with things. That’s the same problem with antibiotics. The bacteria’s getting stronger. So it’s just a core problem you have to be aware of. But, also the people’s epigenetics are getting worse. Some people have no problem.

A person could walk in and have massive exposure to mold and get no health issues because their body can handle it. Their genetics can handle it. Their liver can handle it. So we’re all a little bit different, so also be aware that a problem isn’t always a problem for everyone else. And there’s other people who feel like they’ve been able to reinduce certain things like foods or gluten or stress because they’ve worked on the nervous system, and that’s where low-dose naltrexone or low-dose allergen therapy gets interesting. This pipeline goes very deep. But no matter who you are, work on electrolytes, minerals, cellular health, work on your drainage pathways, rebuild those five physiological imbalances, okay? Use lab work as an idea of what’s happening.

Get empowered. Don’t be a victim to this. Have something more to do than just those medications the doctor throws at you. And if you do that, your chance of living your best life ever goes way higher, and your ability to serve others goes way higher. And just get a part of a community who thinks like you, because now we learn together, we grow together, and it’s not out of fear, it’s out of desire.

And when you’re acting out of desire, now I’m excited. I’m just moving forward into a place of love, possibilities, creativity, and I’m building relationships and friendships that matter because we carry the same values. And you can’t win. And we all, we’re all going to pass one day.

There’s fear every day. We might be stressed about this and get hit by a car tomorrow. So use it as a way to get free. Use it as a way to get empowered. Use it as a way to get happy. You have got to get happy to get healthy. You do that, you’re going to continue to get better with this. Don’t solve it all in a day.

You’ll get better at this, it’ll get easier, and then all of a sudden you’ll just eliminate these Western world, false ways of living and you’ll know how to take care of yourself, and you’ll know how to take care of your children, and that’s a gift

Lindsey: Great thought to end on, but let me just also ask you where people can find you.

Dane Johnson: Guys, you can find me online, Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle or Dane Johnson. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube. Do some research. Make sure you feel good about who we are and what we want to do. If you have IBD and you really feel like you need someone who specializes in IBD in a community, private coaching, you can schedule a free one-hour session with our team.

We hold space for you, no hassle, no gimmicks, no tricks. Let’s just deep dive in your case and learn about it and see if we can support. But make sure whoever you work with, you have trust, integrity, and they specialize in what you specifically want to achieve in your life.

Lindsey: Okay, great. Thank you so much.

Dane Johnson: Thank you.

If you’re dealing with gut health issues of any type (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, SIBO, IMO, H2S SIBO/ISO, IBS, IBD, gastritis, GERD, H pylori, diverticulitis, candida, etc.) or have an autoimmune disease and need some help, I see individual clients to help them resolve their digestive issues or reverse autoimmune disease naturally, You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session to see if you’d like to work with me. I also have my own two products, Tributyrin-Max, which is particularly helpful for loose stool and diarrhea as it slows your motility and firms up your stool, and SBI powder, which is an all around gut pathogen binder, which is super safe and won’t harm beneficial bacteria, and is usually the first line of treatment I educate my clients about in order to avoid stronger antimicrobial herbs.

*Product and dispensary links are affiliate links for which I’ll receive a commission. Thanks for your support of the podcast by using these links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Adapted from episode 175 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability with Dean Mitchell, MD and Lindsey Parsons, EdD.

Lindsey: So as an MD, I’m curious, how did you come to believe in candida as a diagnosis for people other than those who are immunocompromised?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, that’s a really good point. That’s usually where my book actually starts off because when I tell people the story, I always say I trained in the late 1980s, early 1990s in New York City at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and every week working in the hospital I was taking care of AIDS patients that had a lot of examples of very unusual opportunistic infections we call them.

One of them was candida. A lot of these patients had oral thrush or white tongue. They could have other fungal rashes on their skin. They could have lung infections. A whole host of things, really severe stuff. So that was my intensive exposure to candida at the time. And then I went into private practice a few years later with my wife, Dr. Ricki Mitchell, who was also actually doing functional medicine a little bit before I was, and she trained with a doctor that had exposed her to this idea, this concept of candida overgrowth, which was very controversial then, little bit less now. And I really wasn’t involved in that part of the practice initially.

I was doing a little more allergy work and immunology. But interestingly, we worked together in the same office, and occasionally a patient would ask me, “Oh, I see your wife does functional medicine nutrition. Can I see her?” So I said, “Of course,” and sometimes it’d be a case that I couldn’t really figure out, and when it really hit me was when my wife saw a patient, there was a male patient, because I always thought only women could get candida infections, candida yeast infections, and this was a patient who was interesting.

He was a male. He was having a lot of body odor, fatigue. Really very not typical symptoms of anything. And when he saw her, afterwards I saw him leaving the office and he was so happy and he thanked me for letting him see my wife. I said to her, my wife Ricki, I said “What’s wrong with him? What did he have?” And she goes, “He’s got candida.” “Candida? He’s a guy,” and that was the beginning. And then over the years being in the practice and expanding my own practice into functional, holistic medicine, I started to recognize these patients, and I did the deep dive into the work that I could find, and I started to see also how well some of these patients responded to the candid diet, to vitamins, to antifungals, and that just took me to another whole level.

And I guess what happened after a decade or so of doing this, and also doing my podcast The Smartest Doctor In The Room, I got to interview so many top doctors in the microbiome and everything. I realized, it just dawned on me one day, candida is the classic, probably the most classic microbiome illness right now, and it’s all due to the excessive use of antibiotics, proton pump inhibitors, sometimes even topical steroids like inhaled steroids for asthma.

So it was all there, and I really felt that Dr. William Crook, who was the originator of this whole yeast syndrome as he called it, and got a lot of flack for it, but he sold hundreds of thousands of books to the public, that he was onto something. But now is the time to really validate the work that he did because the science was there. Long-winded answer to your short question. Yeah,

Lindsey: No. It’s an interesting journey.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah.

Lindsey: So what symptoms do you typically see in someone with systemic candidiasis that distinguishes itself, say from SIBO or other GI diagnoses?

Dean Mitchell, MD: So that’s where you have to really keep your head on, seeing the big picture.

And the reason I’m saying that is that so many of these patients have been to multiple specialists. If they have skin infections, they’re seeing the dermatologist. If they’ve had GI issues that would have been unresolved, they’re seeing just the gastroenterologist. And the gastroenterologists and the dermatologists and the other ologists are not really, because they haven’t seen these kind of cases, are just like looking from their viewpoint. And so what ended up happening from doing a lot of this work, I actually have a chapter of this in the book, I actually staged the candida in patients because I was seeing from these stories that I was hearing over and over again an evolution.

So typically we all have candida in our gut. That’s normal. It should be there to some degree. But when it overgrows due to, as I mentioned, the antibiotics, proton pump inhibitors, stress is a big one. I always tell people it’s like eating 10 cookies. That it starts in the gut, and a lot of these patients present with an irritable bowel type syndrome where they’re having bloating, constipation. Some more than others, but typically a lot of the patients have that. Then what happens is I say it goes to stage two. It’s very clear in women because when they start getting the candida vaginitis, that’s from the gut. That’s like what we call the leaky gut.

The candida overgrowth has escaped the bowel and now is headed into the vaginal area, and the women get very uncomfortable, and they go to the gynecologist, they get a couple of pills, but no one changes their diet or treats the long-term issue with that. The other very interesting thing was, like with women and men, I see chronic sinusitis, because the sinus tissue is very similar to the vaginal tissue.

So I saw over the years too, so many, especially men treated for chronic sinusitis. They would go to the ENT, they would get more antibiotics, more steroids. This would just repeat itself over and over again till they were really full-blown candida. And if I treated the candida issue, their sinuses got better, and I saved them from an operation.

The third phase I used to find was what I would call the brain fog. When the candida’s been floating around for a while, it actually produces compounds called acetaldehyde and ethanol, which is alcohol, and that’s why these patients get this brain foggy feeling. And the fourth stage I’ve seen, a lot of times that’s when patients were coming to me initially because they’d been suffering for ten years or more, was the chronic fatigue and what we would call fibromyalgia.

Lindsey: Okay. And so do you often see that candida in conjunction with mycotoxins. Is that something you also test for?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Interesting. One of my other expertises is in toxic mold which it wasn’t originally, it was really more candida, but the last decade I got involved with that. A couple of patients had asked me.

I ended up training with some of the original founders in this area like Dr. Richie Shoemaker and now more Neil Nathan. And that opened my eyes because unfortunately too, toxic mold is so much more prevalent than I think I ever realized. So many people get exposure and if they also have candida, it’s like a big frat party going on. People get really sick.

Lindsey: Yeah. no I’ve been finding it a lot more than I would like to because as a health coach I can’t prescribe obviously so I have to send them off to their doctor hoping they might be able to get something, if that’s the route, but yeah. Yeah that unfortunately seems to be behind a lot of cases of IBD too. I’ve discovered.

Dean Mitchell, MD: It is kind of like the mysterious occult condition. Yeah.

Lindsey: So what do you do to test for candida or do you not?

Dean Mitchell, MD: That’s a great question and again, I have a chapter on that in my book and it is a little bit of frustration because there really isn’t a great test.

That’s why the history and the person taking the history – that’s why when I see patients, I’m the only one who takes the history. I don’t have the assistant or you know like telephone taking the history and me walking in for five minutes. I’m listening. I want to hear the whole evolution of the story because the history is key.

There’s just nothing that separates it. I also have in the book 15-question questionnaire that really helps detect whether you have a lot of the things that make you predisposed to getting candida. Unfortunately stool testing, not very helpful. Candida is rarely picked up in the stool.

Sometimes it is, but it’s rare. Urine also indirect methods. You can sometimes check some mycotoxins like gliotoxin, but again, not absolute. Blood testing, I don’t find valuable. You know those immunoglobulin antibodies, a lot of people have them. I used to do a skin test for candida which I thought was helpful, but I’ve moved away from that.

What I’m really hoping, the big secret, I’m really hoping, and I’ve been talking to some companies. I’d love them to come up with a breath test very similar to SIBO because it makes sense, and I think it’s doable, and I’m just trying to get in touch with some companies that will help develop this.

The thing is Lindsey, it’s interesting, and I just did podcast on this myself that’s going to be released next week, is auto-brewery syndrome. I don’t know if you’re familiar, but Dr. Crook described that in his book because there were cases of that even back in his day in the ’70s or ’80s where people literally became intoxicated without having a drop of alcohol from eating carbohydrates.

And the reason these cases came up, because a lot of times these patients ran afoul of the law. Like they would go through a stop sign or something, and they’d get pulled over, and the policeman would smell alcohol on their breath, do a Breathalyzer test which measures the alcohol, and these people would fail.

And then the patient, the person would say I wasn’t drinking alcohol, and meanwhile they’re going through a whole DWI issue and so got me thinking that, gosh, if the police can measure this, I think as scientists and doctors, we could measure that, and some other things as well. So I think a lot of cases where I find, like with SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, when patients don’t really get better, and there’s unfortunately a lot of them, I find that it’s really more likely what we call SIFO, small intestinal fungal or candida overgrowth.

Lindsey: So you don’t find the organic acids to be useful in measuring it?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, very limited.

Lindsey: Okay. So what prescription and natural treatments do you use for candida, and for how long?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah. So I came up with my protocol, and it was a combination of a lot of other good people’s work, and I’ll tell you why I do it the way I do it.

So the first part obviously is the diet. If someone’s going to continue to eat foods that are going to aggravate the condition like fast food, simple carbs, pizza, pasta, all that stuff, rice all the time, it’s going to be tough to get better. So we do put them on a diet, but we do have, we have coaches also. I have a dietician, my coauthor Joelle Mitchell, who’s now my daughter-in-law. And I really worked with her closely to come up with, I think, a very doable diet, so we have that in the book, like a 30-day plan. Because, yeah, it is a tough diet, but it is doable if you learn to make substitutions.

But as one of my interviewees on my podcast, Dr. Marjorie Crandell, who was a candida researcher for many years, a PhD, she used to like to yell out, “You can’t cure candida by diet alone.” And she knew from her own experience with this. That’s why she was such a proponent of being treated, and that’s why when patients come to me and I’m able to make the diagnosis, I will use antifungal medications with them, which are very effective.

It’s just unfortunately a lot of times, even the gynecologist, they do it for too short a period of time. The candida is a very hardy organism. You need at least three weeks. Dr. Satish Rao in Georgia, who’s done work on SIFO, has shown that, to get these patients better. But I will say, with the other thing I do, which is part of the functional medicine that I do, I usually put these patients on some form, depending on their stage, some form of vitamin therapy injectable, either intramuscular injections or IVs.

And the reason being is that early in my career when I didn’t do that because I didn’t know, about 30% of these patients had what’s called the die-off or Herxheimer reaction, and they were very upset, very. They were already feeling bad. They started to feel worse. And I found by doing the vitamin therapy, we’re really able to decrease that significantly.

So I’ll typically while I’m doing the antifungals, I have them getting vitamin therapy, which they can either do at home or in some cases, obviously, if it’s an IV, they have to come to my office, or they find someplace locally that can do it

The last part of the treatment, which is also I find effective, is I do special sublingual candida immunotherapy drops. I was one of the pioneers in sublingual immunotherapy about 25 years ago. And when I was doing just pure allergy, I was frustrated with doing the allergy injections. A lot of times people had bad reactions to it. The compliance was very low, like 20%, because again, people just don’t want to come every week for a shot.

And when I learned the Europeans were doing immunotherapy sublingually, I was like, “This sounds brilliant. Why aren’t we doing this here?” And of course the answer is insurance, and the medical societies. They really wanted more control. They didn’t like it. But the literature was there. It showed that it worked, so I jumped in.

It was a little controversial as I can be in my own way, but I just saw the upside was huge and the downside was quite low. So I was doing… I’ve been doing that for 25 years, and I extended that to candida. Because I found that when I use the sublingual immunotherapy drops, which are basically natural immunotherapy drops, I’m able to get the patients off the antifungals and get a more permanent protection.

Lindsey: So back to the treatments. So prescription, are you using nystatin or fluconazole?

Dean Mitchell, MD: I typically start with something stronger, because again most of the patients coming to me really need a more systemic antifungal. So I’ll typically start with Diflucan or fluconazole.

Sometimes I need to go to strong ones, because sometimes patients have been on that already and are resistant to it, so I’ll use Sporanox or itraconazole.

And sometimes I’ll use even the more powerful ones like voriconazole or posiconazole, which are more powerful. They’re also more powerfully expensive. So I try to use the other ones first, and usually most of the time, probably 80% of cases, I could get away with the first two. And then in the more resistant, difficult cases, I have to use the stronger ones.

Lindsey: And you said that’s usually three weeks’ worth?

Dean Mitchell, MD: That depends- Yeah … on each case how somebody responds.

Lindsey: Okay. And are there people that for whatever reason maybe they’re out of state that you need to use natural treatments on?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah. So this is how I work out of state because I’ll do what’s called an educational consultation for people who really want to be guided.

And then they really have two choices. They can fly into New York where if I see them, I can prescribe for them. And a bunch of patients do that. If not, I tell them I’m totally willing to work with them and their local provider if they can find somebody that’s open to understanding, and maybe get my book, show it to them, and let these doctors know that they can help them with the proper treatment.

Lindsey: Yeah. How do people talk to their doctors about this? Because, as I said, I’m often sending people to their doctor to get itraconazole for mycotoxins.

Dean Mitchell, MD: No I do feel that the patients have a better chance if they find a functional medicine doctor who tends to be more open to this and is aware of this. I find more of my allopathic conventional colleagues are still in the dark, where the patients with their ChatGPT and Dr. Google really have a lot of information. They come in super well versed in this. So I love having discussions with them, but I just try to give them my experience to get them better faster

Lindsey: Yeah. So you don’t work with the natural stuff, you always work with the prescriptions?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Basically? I use it occasionally. I do find it works gentler. I think once a patient’s very stabilized, it’s fine. I just have found in my experience… I’ve had people on the candida diet sometimes for years, they’ve been taking a whole bunch of supplements, and their symptoms will get 20% better.

And then they go with the medications and my candid immunotherapy, and then it rockets to 80, 90%. But then I’m fine with it. Yeah. I just don’t like people spending a lot of money on a lot of things that have varying success.

Lindsey: Yeah. So you said you don’t think the blood immunoglobulin markers are valuable, because I did the Candida + IBS Profile from Vibrant and had a positive. It’s not necessarily indicative of an infection, or it is..

Dean Mitchell, MD: I don’t think it’s really telling you anything, because we have some antibodies in our body. I’ve seen it up, down, nothing, nothing impressive. And it just, you know- Yeah …”Doctor, I really need something.”

Whereas I will tell you the mycotoxin test, which you’ve mentioned a couple of times, you know, the work that I do in, the Real Time urine mycotoxin test that I use for people exposed to toxic mold, I find to be excellent, and I really can use that to help guide a patient detox from toxic mold, which is a pretty bad condition to get.

Lindsey: So you mentioned, let’s talk about the diets. So there are more and less extreme candida diets. So mushrooms, yes or no?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Before I answer all that, which is fine, because a lot of people have all the specifics, my approach to diet is this: back in the day, like diabetics, it was extremely severe because we didn’t have the arsenal of weapons we can use to help people get better.

So that being said, I also try to be… I want people to get better, but I want to be practical. I don’t want people becoming antisocial. These are things I really emphasize in the chapter in the book. So I say, “Look, we want you to be about 80% good. There are some no-nos,” I’ll get back to the mushrooms in a minute.

Try to be good 80% of the time. We’ll help you through the rest. My big keys are high fiber foods, so good for your microbiome and your gut. Low glycemic foods in general. So there aren’t a lot of foods with that. Again, I have a lot of people on ground flax seed, which helps their microbiome. I love people taking berries and apples.

Sometimes the old candida diets are like no fruit. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think your body and your intestines need the good fiber and the water that vegetables and fruits give you. I don’t think fermented foods… I know fermented foods are not good for candida patients, so I will have them stay away from mushrooms.

And I tell them, because, some of the patients that I’ve cured hopefully over the years, sometimes when I hear from them years later, the typical conversation goes like this: “Dr. Mitchell, everything’s back. I’m really bad.” And I’m like, “Okay, what happened? Were you on antibiotics a lot, something happen?”

“No, I’m so healthy” and she goes, “I’ve been, drinking kombucha all the time, and kimchi, and this, sauerkraut.” And I’m like, oh no. Fermented foods really are never good for a patient with candida. It just, that’s something that tends to have to be avoided. So mushrooms are a no.

Lindsey: What do mushrooms have to do with fermented foods?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Well, they’re like also in that fungi family also, so it’s not a great idea.

Lindsey: And so do you also have them avoid things with yeast like vinegar and..?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Again, when people want to drink alcohol, which is always the big thing, I always tell them, bring your lawyer when you come to me so we can negotiate. But, I tell them, you’re better off like what the women do with the skinny martinis, the less sugary kind of drinks. If you have vodka or something like that, put with a splash of something to make it enjoyable. But beer and wine not the best choices really.

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. And so the injectable vitamins you were talking about, is that like glutathione so for detox or . . .

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yes. We use B12, magnesium. Glutathione is very important to help the liver cleanse itself, and especially when we have them on the antifungals. Yeah.

Lindsey: Okay. So if you treat somebody for candida, and it just keeps coming back, are there genetic factors that may be at play?

Dean Mitchell, MD: I don’t really think that it’s genetic. Again, I think it’s microbiome, but I tend to find that the patients get… honestly get better. We have a pretty high success rate once they’re treated properly.

Lindsey: Yeah. And so they can go back to a less severe diet?

Dean Mitchell, MD: There are two patients I would be concerned about in my experience who chronically are not getting better. One, if they’re in a toxic mold exposure. That was the trick that I didn’t realize for a while.

I was like, in the beginning before I really understood about toxic mold, I’m like, “I’m treating this candida patient. Why aren’t they better?” And then we found out, oh my God, their house has mold in the basement, this and that too.

And the other one, if somebody really had a true immune compromised state, and I check, their immun-… That, that’s the other great thing about my medical background as an immunologist, I know how to check T cells, B cells, immunoglobulins, in case somebody is at . . . but I’ll give you an example too actually what’s interesting, like patients with celiac disease.

Now, that gets a little confused a lot with candida because a lot of people always come in “I’m allergic to wheat,” or they’ll come in and say, “I have celiac.” And I have to tell you, nine times out of ten it’s not celiac, it’s candida.

But a lot of the celiac patients, if they… And I have had some that are true celiac. A lot of them are sometimes deficient in certain immunoglobulins. I actually have a great story though I should share. There was a case several years ago, a woman in New York came to me. She was a Jewish Orthodox woman, and she came to me. She goes, I’ve had a lot of bowel problems.

I get these yeast infections, but she goes I’m almost positive I have wheat allergy or celiac or something like that, and, can you help me?, ” et cetera. So I was getting ready to do all the tests that I wanted to do, but it’s funny, at one point she said something that really struck me.

She goes, “Dr. Mitchell,” she goes, “I feel so much better when I avoid wheat, so it’s got to be gluten.” She goes, “But the only thing I can’t figure out” she said, “is that during Passover when I eat, matzah, the flatbread”, she goes, “I’m fine because there’s no yeast in that, but it has a lot of wheat.”

So again, I’ve seen cases where there’s a lot of confusion between those two diagnoses

Lindsey: I thought it was in your book maybe that there was the pointing out that candida can lead to celiac. It wasn’t in your book?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Two separate things, but they can be confused. And I always say too, I tell my candid patients today, “You should be so grateful for celiac patients,” because they started such a movement getting gluten out of, or giving, making sure there were choices when you go to restaurants and everything.

Today, to go to a reasonably nice restaurant, you have so many options. You don’t have to feel like you are a pariah socially or, with the restaurant establishment.

Lindsey: This is true, yeah. So are there nutrients that may be important for keeping candida at bay?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, that’s a great question. Thanks for bringing that up. One of the things that I do when I, before I even start the vitamin therapy, is I check patients’, besides their regular cell counts and their liver functions, I check their certain vitamin levels, like B12, magnesium, and zinc, iron. And, more often than not these patients tend to have low levels.

Now, what would happen a lot of times is the patients’, sometimes their doctors won’t even check those things, but even if their doctor did check it, what I find is that it’s overlooked because they’re in the range, but they’re in the lower end of the range. And I always try to explain to patients if you ever checked your B12 level and you see the range, it says from 200 to 900.

If you’re below 450 or 400, you’re already starting to get into a danger zone. So the lab is really misleading you in a way. And again, a lot of times I understand doctors look at what the reference range is, but when you’re in that lower category, that’s not a good thing, and that to me is indirectly telling me your intestines are not working properly to absorb the vitamins and minerals that you really need to keep your immune system strong.

Lindsey: Yeah, and then the serum B12 is like the latest marker. Like so many other things will go south before that one goes south. So the immunotherapy for candida, where do you get it first of all? And do you give it to everybody or you assume there’s sort of an immune overreaction with everybody, or is it… Who is it appropriate for?

Dean Mitchell, MD: It’s selective. We make it in our laboratory, the same way allergists can make their allergy extracts in their laboratory, we have control. We know what we’re doing. Again, it really would be for patients that are suffering with a chronic issue, that want more protection so that they can hopefully decrease their need for antifungals.

Like I’ll tell you another interesting story. I saw once a gentleman, very athletic guy. He was in his mid-30s, and he’d been… before he came to me, he was seeing another doctor who’s very well known in the candida community. He had been around for many years. And that doctor didn’t have as many tools as we have today.

And so he was treating this young man who really had severe candida. Like he said, he couldn’t eat a simple carb. He would just go to sleep. And it was kind of funny actually once because he came into my office one day with a big duffle bag. So I was like, “Oh, you’re going on trip?” He goes, “No, that’s my food in there.”

Wherever he went, he had to travel with his food, and because he had to have what he needed to keep him feeling good. And he was also on eight Nystatin a day, which is really a lot. He goes, “Dr. Mitchell, this is… I can’t drop it. If I go any lower, I’m…”Pshh, okay. So I said, Let’s get to work,” so we did the vitamin therapy with him.

I did a little bit of the new antifungals slowly but surely because he was a little nervous. I lowered his Nystatin, and then I got him on the drops, and we were able to get him off the Nystatin completely and he was very happy.

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. And it’s just a tiny amount of candida in . . .

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah. It’s like typical desensitization.

The way I like to explain to patients is it’s like a 10-story building. We start at the basement. We start at the lowest doses, with the protein from the candida. Get your body exposed to it. You do that for a month, then you go to the next higher level. Almost like working out with weights.

Just slowly till we get up to high levels, and your body’s generating its own specific antibodies to the candida to keep it in check.

Lindsey: Okay.

Dean Mitchell, MD: I think what you were going to ask me, but I think it’s important and worth repeating, again, people are so educated and being proactive in their care, which I think is fantastic.

That’s one of the only best things about this whole AI revolution, that they’ll put their symptoms into the chat now, that used to be Google, and it would give them some very good information and say, again, based on questionnaires and everything, whether they’re likely to have that. And then that’s when they start searching to find somebody that’s an expert in that area.

Lindsey: Yeah. Anything that I have failed to ask about on this topic?

Dean Mitchell, MD: You covered a lot of really good things. But I want to just repeat one thing that we just started talking about, I think before we went on air, because you mentioned how you do work with irritable bowel. And I mentioned that on my podcast, The Smartest Doctor in the Room, I’m so lucky I get to interview a lot of other top doctors or PhD researchers.

So I… People always laugh when I say the name The Smartest Doctor in the Room. They look at me like thinking, “Oh, I’m the smartest doctor.” I said, “No, it’s all the people I interviewed.” But I could change the name to Becoming the Smartest Doctor in the Room, because after talking for five years to these people, I think I have gotten a lot smarter.

But one of the people that I so respect is Dr. Mark Pimentel at UCLA. He is really one of the leading GI microbiome researchers in the world. He has his own Pimentel labs. He puts out amazing work on this. But, in our conversation I’ll bring up two important things for your listeners.

When we were discussing about the microbiome, he made such a great analogy. He said, “A healthy person has a very diverse microbiome,” especially in the gut. That’s what is the hallmark of a very healthy person. He said an unhealthy person or problems they see with irritable bowel in his clinics, they have a more homogeneous microbiome, and that can be due to a lot of factors: medications, aging, all the things we were talking about before.

And he made the analogy that it’s almost if you take a city. He goes, “The city works really if you have a whole bunch of different occupations there: lawyers, doctors, plumbers, you know, sanitation workers. You need them all. If you just wiped out and just got stuck with lawyers, you’d have a lot of people suing each other but nobody taking out the garbage.”

So you really need that diversity. And the other really important thing just for your listeners also, which is always shocking to people, I had asked Dr. Pimentel about probiotics, because we always assume probiotics are a good thing, and I didn’t really find that in my own practice. I don’t take it personally myself. It bothered me.

And over the years interviewing different researchers, most of them also said the same thing. They didn’t take it for themselves and the data was questionable. And Dr. Pimentel definitely pointed out there’s some big studies that in IBS probiotics are not a good thing. They can make things worse.

Those are things I pointed out in the book because again I thought all this information was important. And I thought, as I said, I opened up very quickly for the science part of this to get… even if a doctor is reading this book, which I have had; many colleagues read it, let them see the science behind this that this is not just some made up diagnosis.

Lindsey: Yeah. So speaking of a diverse microbiome, is there a role for fiber in rebuilding the microbiome then post-treatment or during?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Absolutely. Again, like I said, I think in the diet part I stress so much… what I think the best thing you can do for your microbiome is natural prebiotics through high fiber foods.

This is what the good bacteria like in your gut. You don’t have to take a pill, and also I mentioned this in my section on herbs. As I said, the only herbs I really like are the ones that you sprinkle on your food, whether it’s turmeric, basil, ginger, that’s good stuff.

Once you put it into a pill, now it’s closer to a pharmaceutical than an herb

Lindsey: Yeah, there’s a lot of strong stuff people are using and-

Dean Mitchell, MD: You start putting the dosing, you-

Lindsey: Wiping out their microbiome with it.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, if you go up to 2500 milligrams with like turmeric, you’re thinning your blood. It’s like people need to know that it’s now a medicine. It’s not an herb anymore.

Lindsey: So you’re talking about just heavy fiber foods as opposed to added fiber?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Oh, that’s all, all the good leafy green vegetables, cruciferous vegetables. There’s a whole list of them, and they can really make… Joelle has a lot of suggestions how to make the meals delicious and appealing.

Because I don’t want people being bored or not looking forward to eating or eating out with their friends. Because you could go to a restaurant, and I do this all the time, my… A lot of my friends tease me, “Oh, he’s going to eat the healthy stuff.” But I feel better after. If I ate the crappy stuff, I’d feel horrible after.

I might feel good. I might enjoy myself for a few minutes, but it’s really not worth it. I’m not saying I don’t cheat once in a while. I do. I tell patients, I’m very honest with them. I’ll probably have a pizza once or twice in the summer and then I’ll enjoy it, and if I have one, I’m good.

If I had it every day, I’d probably start feeling sick, because I’ve struggled with candida myself earlier in my life. So it’s really just making those substitutions, having the right foods in your house so you don’t end up eating the wrong foods.

Lindsey: Yeah. So tell people again the name of your book and where they can find you.

Dean Mitchell, MD: It’s called Conquering Candida. You can get it on Amazon. Think it’s hopefully an enjoyable read with a lot of practical advice. And like you brought up before too, Lindsey, for any patient that’s outside of New York State and really wants to work with their doctor, they should bring them this in with them.

I hopefully, if you really have a doctor, like the new type of doctors would be open to this type of thing. I know back in the day doctors used to be intimidated or defensive, I should say, if a patient came in, “Oh I read this, I did that,” the doc went, “Ah, sh…you, what could you know?”

And it was kind of true because we had… one thing that’s true, we had the cartel on information. We got all our stuff from the medical journals. Great. But now information is so widely disseminated that doctor and patient are on equal footing, and I feel, I tell my patients after we have a whole in-depth discussion, I said, “The only reason maybe you’re coming to pay me to help you get better is if I’ve treated a thousand patients with this, I know the path to get you there the fastest.”

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much for your time, and for sharing this information, and writing the book so that other people can have access to it and other doctors can look at it and open their minds.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Superb. Thank you, Lindsey. It was a pleasure being here.

If you’re dealing with gut health issues of any type (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, SIBO, IMO, H2S SIBO/ISO, IBS, IBD, gastritis, GERD, H pylori, diverticulitis, candida, etc.) or have an autoimmune disease and need some help, I see individual clients to help them resolve their digestive issues or reverse autoimmune disease naturally, You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session to see if you’d like to work with me. I also have my own two products, Tributyrin-Max, which is particularly helpful for loose stool and diarrhea as it slows your motility and firms up your stool, and SBI powder, which is an all around gut pathogen binder, which is super safe and won’t harm beneficial bacteria, and is usually the first line of treatment I educate my clients about in order to avoid stronger antimicrobial herbs.

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Adapted from episode 174 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability with Harry Massey, Founder of Energy4Life and Lindsey Parsons, EdD.

Lindsey: So can you give me the abridged version of your own background story and how you ended up founding Energy4Life?

Harry Massey: So when I was 21, I had these three accidents that led me to be being bedridden for the next seven years. Actually, I was climbing in the Alps. I got a fever. Six months later, when I was getting a bit more tired, because I had post-viral fatigue, I was climbing in Ben Nevis, fell ice climbing, fell like 100-odd foot, hit the mountain below. Shattered my spine, but I didn’t actually know I fractured my spine that day till about a year later.

I had another paragliding accident, because by that time I was losing my brain’s ability. So when I was climbing and paragliding, I was getting much more accident-prone. And I was rushed off to hospital then, and they said “you didn’t break your spine or your head today, but you do have a fractured spine from before.”

I was like, “So that was curious.” And I then actually just took my first job in London, but by that time I was so sick I was fired. I went back out to the Alps once more to see if I could heal all this fatigue I was having through climbing and French food and wine. That didn’t quite work out.

I ended up getting so exhausted, I got stuck in a tent for 10 days. Got myself back to England, enrolled in an MBA. The MBA was honestly too hard, but I completed it in a wheelchair. After that, I basically spent the next six odd years totally bedridden and homebound with – well, actually I had Addison’s, but I didn’t know I had Addison’s at the time, but I thought it was chronic fatigue syndrome, and tried every type of diet, functional medicine, fasting, everything you could possibly think of.

But all of those sort of nutritional chemical approaches basically didn’t work or didn’t work for me anyway. They do work, but it wasn’t working in my case. After about five or so years, I began to think about where energy comes from because I’d studied the opposite of energy, like fatigue and all of these horrible books that say if you’ve had chronic fatigue for two years, you basically don’t recover.

But I didn’t like that idea. I then just started to look into where energy comes from. Ended up meeting this scientist from Australia who’d been mapping out the energy and information of the human body, which is really seen as this overall master control system above the chemical control system. He ended up emigrating from Australia to England to form an R&D company with us.

But also in parallel, I say in parallel to that, he was treating me as a patient. And over the next two years, I basically got my health back through what was then… Then it didn’t have a name, but basically today they’re called an infoceutical, where it basically imprinted information onto a colloidal mineral.

And by looking at where our control system was distorted and correcting it I basically slowly started… Not that slowly. It was over a two-year period I got my function back. That’s the brief version.

Lindsey: Wow, okay. So Addison’s I believe, because my niece literally just went through this, it’s like a tumor on your pituitary that’s producing a lot of cortisol, correct?

Harry Massey: That’s the opposite, actually.

Lindsey: Oh.

Harry Massey: Addison’s is when your adrenals fail. But yes, there’s a hypothalamus pituitary dysfunction, which in my case was from falling off all those-

Lindsey: Oh, is it the autoimmune one where it’s killing your adrenals?

Harry Massey: Yes. No what you said about the pituitary is correct.

But in my… It wasn’t from a tumor in my case. In my case, it was from falling off all the mountains, so basically having a lot of concussions, it dislodged that whole axis, so it didn’t… Basically it wouldn’t control my thyroid or adrenals.

Lindsey: Okay. So you didn’t have enough cortisol essentially?

Harry Massey: Correct. Yeah. I didn’t have enough. Nor thyroid, nor anything. It basically blocked the whole signaling-

Lindsey: It cascades …

Harry Massey: From the pituitary downwards. Yep.

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay.

Harry Massey: Which wasn’t a nutrition problem, so that’s why nutrition didn’t help me. Yeah.

Lindsey: So my first interaction with Energy for Life was a voice scan, the results of which I’m going to put on the show notes page so people can look at those. And this scan, if I recall correctly, consisted of me saying maybe five numbers. Is that right?

Harry Massey: Yes. Who did you have a scan with, and what came up?

Lindsey: Bri.

Harry Massey: Bri. Okay.

Lindsey: I can show you. So I also had my husband do it, and he was really skeptical about the whole thing, that it was just five numbers, that much speech could determine all these things about his health. So can you explain how you translate a voice scan into a whole-body health assessment?

Harry Massey: Yes, but I think I should firstly explain what the overall body field is and control system, because yeah, without that context it might not make so much sense. So when you look at the overall body, everyone is very used to a chemical control system, i.e., you take a, whether it’s a supplement or a drug or even food, you eat it, it’s digested, and a chemical goes around the blood, and it’s picked up by a cell.

The problem is not that isn’t true, but the problem with that is it’s very slow, and yet the body has 60 trillion odd cells. It has 3 trillion operations that happen every single second. And to get that overall operating system to work properly, it basically can’t work on just slow-moving nerve impulses, because even the nervous system is pretty slow.

But it certainly doesn’t work on just a chemical system. So to get the body to stay alive and react in real time and those 3 trillion operations per second to happen, you basically need a field-based control system, which means the cells also respond to photons, to magnetic fields, and other electromagnetic fields.

So that’s the basis, and that control system sits above the normal chemical control system. Now, to understand the voice scan, that gets into a whole space of physics. In physics there’s this concept of action at a distance, which basically means that photon A can communicate to photon B, or any electron in the whole universe can communicate to another electron.

And when we’re looking at something like the body and the body scan, the body basically contains all information about itself, and basically so in turn does your voice, so in turn actually does a hair sample, a video, a photo. They all basically contain information about the body and you can, using a principle of resonance, get that information out.

So when we look at something like the voice scan, it’s not so much the voice, like it, it’s not to do with the frequencies or the patterns in the voice. However, by using the voice we can connect it up or basically we can connect it to a computer that has a full map of the overall body in it and it can scan your voice against this full map using a principle called resonance, and from that we can tell what’s going on in the body.

Lindsey: And resonance is what exactly?

Harry Massey: So the easiest way of understanding resonance, if you took a tuning fork, if you take a tuning fork here that’s A and you get another one that’s A and you ping this one, this other one just starts resonating. If this one was B and that one was A, they won’t resonate. So all resonant-

Lindsey: You mean like vibrate at the same frequency sort of?

Harry Massey: Basically, yeah. Yeah.

Lindsey: Okay. So somehow you mapped the body onto the resonances of the voice such that you could say that this particular resonance coming out of the voice is related to the heart, for instance?

Harry Massey: Yeah. That’s probably an easier way of understanding it without getting too into physics and resonance.

Lindsey: And how did you know which things mapped to which part of the body to do that in the first place?

Harry Massey: That took … So this company’s existed, I think, 28 years. And Peter, who’s the scientist who helped heal me, he’d already been researching for another 30 years before I ever met him.

So it’s basically a trial and error process. We would look at a little part of the voice, little part of the body, see if we could get any resonance. And it either does or it doesn’t. And if it’s a no, we move on. And that, yeah, that process honestly just took years and years. So it took about 10 years to perfect.

Lindsey: So would you be like, let’s pinch the finger and see if it then changes something in the voice? Or how would you know that corresponded to the body?

Harry Massey: So we used a matching. Basically in resonance, it either resonates or it doesn’t. So yeah. In his case, he actually used a VEGA machine, which is an electrical dermal type testing.

So he would use an acupuncture point that was correlated to the heart meridian. It was on the finger. And basically wherever you get conductivity, that would be a match. And then you would test that against all these different parts of the body. So yeah. So that’s what I mean.

It’s very trial and error. He would just have to test every single little part, and then you would just throw away anything that didn’t work. And then, so there was that side of the experimental side. And then I think we’ve done it on 600,000 people at this point, so now we’ve got a huge database of scans to go from.

And now … That was all done pre-AI, and now we have AI. There’s a whole other AI layer. Our latest iteration that’s coming out around August looks at your tongue. So your tongue in Chinese medicine, you can tell different organ systems, inflammation. It has a white coating, it’ll be red or pink.

There’s a certain amount you can tell in the face. A very obvious one is when you’ve got dark patches under your eyes, it’s related to kidney. Cheeks are related to lungs, et cetera. So yeah. So the future of it is a mix of AI using voice, face, tongue. Haven’t figured out iris, but we’re looking at iris.

… And you can put in blood labs as well, but everyone does that. That’s a bit basic.

Lindsey: Yeah. So how reproducible are the results of the voice scans? If I repeat it three times, will I get the same output?

Harry Massey: You do, yeah. It changes a bit over a month, but if you do it instantly, it’s pretty similar.

Lindsey: Okay. So can you explain the infoceuticals that are prescribed after the voice scan and how they work?

Harry Massey: Yes. So the infoceuticals basically come from this map of the body field, which is seen like a master control system. And what an infoceutical is, it’s basically an informational blueprint of how different parts of the body are when they’re working properly.

There’s a liver infoceutical or a kidney infoceutical, and when you give an infoceutical, you’re basically saying to the body, “Look, this is what an optimal kidney is like when it’s functioning perfectly. Steer yourself towards that.” And what the body does, it’ll then draw resources from the rest of the body to help regenerate that particular organ or area.

And you can stack that, like if you took certain nutrition, like different diets, different foods, different supplements and herbs, you can also give it extra supportive nutrients so it can help to rebuild those organs.

Lindsey: But how are you creating the infoceuticals? Literally, what are you doing to create them?

Harry Massey: Do you mean the research experiments that led to it? That’s a long one, yeah.

Lindsey: No, I mean the in the production of them, how do you create them?

Harry Massey: Oh, like what they actually are. Okay. So ultimately, they’re just information, which are vectors, which is basically maths. In other words, they’re instructions, and you can put that information into the body in a lot of different ways.

You can carry it on sound. You can carry it electromagnetically, like through a device like this that’s on miHealth. So these are two electric plates. You can carry it in light, so we have a wearable that will carry it through light. But you can also imprint it, which is a little bit like the idea of homeopathy.

But you can also imprint the information into a liquid or a sugar solution. So in our case, in an infoceutical, we’re basically imprinting the information into a mineral solution.

Lindsey: And how do you imprint it?

Harry Massey: And how we imprint it is basically we use light and a very strong electromagnetic field.

Lindsey: Okay. So you have these, is it frequencies? It’s resonances? Or what exactly are you transmitting into the . . .

Harry Massey: It’s a mathematical vector that’s translated into binary code. But yeah, it’s just pure information that’s carried on photons in the presence of a strong electromagnetic field.

Lindsey: Okay. So just so people understand, I got these bottles, and I think that was three weeks’ worth.

I think I got six weeks’ worth of the same ones that were prescribed for me, and there was, I think, five different bottles, and I took five drops in water once a day of each bottle. Does that sound right?

Harry Massey: Probably. If that’s what Brianne told you, yeah, they’re anything from five to 15 drops.

Lindsey: Okay. Yeah. That’s what she recommended. So we can look briefly at my scan, and maybe you can just explain a little bit what… Let me just share my screen. Explain a little bit what all this means so people understand what the nature of this is.

Harry Massey: I need the full scan. So all that is the end of this.

Lindsey: Oh, okay. I can start going through the pages if that’s-

Harry Massey: Oh. Source, stomach, liver. Yeah, I don’t know. There’s 400 things to go through. I don’t know if this is the best way to do it.

Lindsey: Okay, maybe not. Maybe not the best use of our time, but I did just want people to see what a scan looked like.

Harry Massey: It’s… Yeah, it’s normally shown in software. This is a PDF report of it.

Lindsey: Yeah. I just printed it out because I could pull up the screen, but it seemed like this might be more efficient because of the fact that people can . . .  

Harry Massey: But yeah, if we go back, we’ll just go back to the top. That’s probably easier.

Lindsey: Okay.

Harry Massey: Yeah. So basically anything that’s purple is showing a very significant priority.

So in your case, the stomach, liver, circulation, and also a bit source energy, which is like an overall energy reading. It’s a bit hard to correlate because I don’t know what the other 400 things are.

Lindsey: I can’t say it was too off in the sense that I have gut issues, so the fact that stomach came up a couple times was not shocking. And-

Harry Massey: Yeah …

Lindsey: I do at least in terms of my family history have cholesterol issues. I don’t know that there’s any problems with my circulation, but anyway. Yeah, it wasn’t totally off on me or my husband, so I will give you credit for that. And then as you dig down into it, I obviously could see that this was corresponding to, the meridians in Chinese medicine, so yeah, all this came through.

Harry Massey: No, it’s good. What are the things that come up from your health? Then I know what to look for.

Lindsey: I’ve had post-infectious IBS and just gut issues for many years, so that was-

Harry Massey: Yeah …

Lindsey: Something that’s, and one thing that did pop up in here, I think it, it pulled up some mycotoxins, and [I found out] I did have some of them when the time came.

Yeah. I didn’t actually have that one though [referring to Zearalenone].

Harry Massey: But- Oh, did you have the Verrucarin?

Lindsey: A? Oh, let me see. I’ll pull up my mycotoxins report and see if I did. That would be an interesting question. I think I looked at the correlation between those two. I had, yes not A, I had Verrucarin J.

But you don’t have every single one of their…

Harry Massey: Yeah, we don’t have every mycotoxin.

Lindsey: . . . the highest amount of [any mycotoxin that I had] was Verrucarin J.

Harry Massey: Oh, interesting.

Lindsey: Nivalenol and Roridin A. Those are the three that I had. So it did pull up the right family of mycotoxins.

Harry Massey: Yeah, we don’t have all the subcategories.

Lindsey: Yeah. And yeah, I’m just running through so people can see what this looks like. But you can pull this up on the show notes and look at different things that popped up. Anyway, I just wanted to share that so people can see what that looks like. I can’t say I felt all that different when I took the infoceuticals, but I’m somebody who generally feels good.

Harry Massey: I would say take 15, 15 drops.

Lindsey: 15 drops? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I probably want to redo the voice scan in any case. But, yeah, can you talk about the research study that you did on these infoceuticals? Because I did see a webinar about that.

Harry Massey: Oh, yeah. There’s plenty. So the latest one was done at UCSD under Professor Hemal Patel, and looked at all sorts of different things, but we’re mainly concerned with energy, because the company’s about energy.

And so we wanted to study if we could make a cell more efficient, and basically we were able to make a cell using one of our products called Cell Driver use glucose in a 25% more efficient way. And we’re also able to increase the level of mitochondrial density in the cell by 50%, able to protect the cell membrane from reactive oxygen species, basically means we poisoned them with hydrogen peroxide, by 67%.

We did other studies like on viral penetration rates. We were able to reduce the viral penetration rate by 40% into lung tissue. We did wound ones as well, like, where we would break skin. They . . . sort of knife through skin, and could speed up a wound [healing] by, I think it was three times the normal rate.

Trying to think what else we did.

Lindsey: Taking these infoceutical drops, basically.

Harry Massey: Yeah. Yep.

Lindsey: Okay. You would cut the skin, do a voice scan, and then give the… Or-

Harry Massey: No. Not on a human. No. No, literally just cell cultures. So you can create- Yeah … You create a skin graft.

Lindsey: Oh, okay

Harry Massey: I say not a human. The skin one was a skin graft, so that wasn’t human. We did a study with our wearable on humans. That hasn’t been published yet, but it comes out in the summer and in a film, and with that we had a… There was a four… I think it was between 40 and 50% reduction in fatigue for people wearing it, and there was also 60% reduction in anxiety, so that was pretty large.

But more interestingly, we also took samples of their blood, and then we basically looked at different factors in their mitochondria. Yeah. And we saw a, I think it was 17, it was 15 or 17% increase in the efficiency of their mitochondria. And in a lab, in just a pure cell culture, we saw a 25% increase.

But anyway, this was in humans, and we saw, yeah, 15 to 17% increase. So yeah.

Lindsey: And you’re talking about the wearable here, the Gem?

Harry Massey: Yeah. Yep,

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. So was that a double-blinded placebo-controlled study?

Harry Massey:  No, it wasn’t double blind, no.

Lindsey: Okay. Was it just . . .

Harry Massey: … controlled? No. So it was 20 patients in a clinic.

However, you can’t really trick the blood, so yes, people in a human study, people can say all sorts of different things, but the blood can’t say different things. The blood is what the blood results are.

Lindsey: And what were the-

Harry Massey: Oh that, that was the 17% increase in their efficiency, in the mitochondria efficiency.

Then in a pure cell culture test, it was 25% increase. And yeah, you don’t do double blinds with cell culture tests.

Lindsey: Yeah. So have these been published in peer-reviewed journals?

Harry Massey: So yeah, the first one was published last year, and the new Gem one, that, I say that one hasn’t come out yet.

Okay. So that hasn’t yet gone through peer review.

Lindsey: Where was the first one published?

Harry Massey: Oh, Explore.

Lindsey: Okay. So can you explain what this Gem device is doing on my wrist? Because I get these occasional… I look, I pull up the app occasionally, and it says, “your current…” I forget what the phrasing is, “harshness to gentleness or something like that is what you should currently be working on” or…

Harry Massey: Oh, impatience to gentleness. Impatience.

Lindsey: I don’t think it said impatience. It was more like hardness or something like that to gentleness.

Harry Massey: So basically it’s looking at different emotional states in your body, but in Chinese medicine-

Lindsey: Intensity to gentleness. Sorry …

Harry Massey: Intensity. There you go.

Intensity, yeah. Not impatient, just intense. So basically in, in Chinese medicine, you have a Chinese medicine practitioner read your pulse and there’s 29 different TCM pulses, and we basically worked out algorithms that can read those pulses so the Chinese medicine practitioner doesn’t have to.

And those got translated to emotional characteristics. So for example, if somebody, let’s say you had a wiry pulse. So wiry pulse is stagnant qi through the liver, and that would relate to frustration or in more extreme case, anger. And then the positive side of that is decisiveness. So the whole reason it says intensity to gentleness is because the opposite of intense, the characteristic you want to, you know bring in within yourself is gentleness. Or if in the case it was, like, frustration, the way out of frustration is actually to make decisions, so you want to embrace being more decisive or, like for instance, like a water element kidney one would be fear to courage.

The way to get out of fear is to have courage, to take action. So that, yeah, the whole point of the readings is to basically help give awareness to where your emotional state is in that moment in time, and to what characteristic or emotional characteristic would help you out of that.

And at the same time, it’ll give you a correction. So those infoceuticals, there’s a little PMF coil in it and a photon emitter, so you can basically imprint those infoceuticals back into your body in an automatic way.

Lindsey: You mean in the Gem, that’s what there is?

Harry Massey: Yeah. Yeah.

Lindsey: Okay. So it’s reading… Am I wearing it the right way? Am I supposed to be wearing it on the inside to feel my pulse, or is this good?

Harry Massey: No. Because it’s doing it through the tiny capillaries in the skin.

Lindsey: Okay. So it’s reading my pulse, it’s taking my emotional wavelengths, and it’s sending me back what I need to be a better person basically, to summarize.

Harry Massey: In short, yeah, in short. Okay. You have to engage your brain as well. The corrections are on the body fields; it’s giving an instruction to your cells on how to be. Okay. The emotional part, you definitely have to do some work yourself. Yeah. Yeah.

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. So I get these three things.

I get vital energy, 68, emotional strength, 83, sleep efficiency, oh, it gave me a good score today. That’s the first one time I’ve seen one like this, 93, but that’s under beta testing I guess still. So what does it take to get to 100? Who do I have to be to get a 100 on these? Who do you have to be? The Dalai Lama?

Harry Massey: . . . Maybe Brian Johnson, I’m not sure. He’s like the world’s best sleeper, or isn’t he? Or he says he is.

Lindsey: Yeah, I know. He’s at something like a year of 100 ratings. I’ve never even looked at a 100 rating. That’s completely out of the realm of the possible for me.

Harry Massey: Oh, what would you have to… There’s all the sleep habit stuff. It’s basically like all those algorithms are based on all these population statistics, so it’s- Yeah … It’s getting into that top 1% of the population will give you perfect scores. But that’s only 1% of people. That’s only 1%.

Lindsey: Yeah. I hover in the same range all the time on most of these numbers, except for that sleep. As I said, I’ve seen a lot lower in that. And I did get a decent night’s sleep last night, so I’ll give it credit for that. Although, sometimes I get a good night’s sleep and I get a terrible score, and my energy’s roughly the same, but here it’s 68. Other days it looked like it was a little higher, maybe 80 or something. But I generally feel like I have enough energy to do the things I need to do. But anyway, so does the voice scan… I got the impression when I talked to Bree that somehow the voice scan results could be translated into what the Gem then sends back into me, but is this essentially doing the same thing as the voice scan by-

Harry Massey: All of these things are being unified around August this, this year.

There’s a film coming out with all the research and innovations of the Gem, and then we’ve done a completely new app that’s not the app you’ve got that basically integrates the voice. We’ve redone all those algorithms in quite a large way. Actually all to a concept of basically health and vitality equaling information times voltage, which is the same as energy, divided by resistance.

And resistance is all the things that will leak energy. Like negative emotions is a great example, but so is physical injuries, pain, so would, viruses, et cetera. So anyway, we’ve redone it to this sort of formula of health equals information times voltage divided by resistance. And then, yeah, it is all unified.

So yeah, what you’ve got there is definitely a beta one.

Lindsey: Oh, okay. And then will this one be able to update to the newer app?

Harry Massey: Yeah. It’s just software. The hardware’s fine. It’s all-

Lindsey: … So what’s in the Gem will stay the same?

Harry Massey: Yeah. It’s all- yeah.

Lindsey: I look forward to that. So should I do a new voice scan at that point to reassess, or will the Gem already be-

Harry Massey: Yeah, it’s all going to be literally in your phone. So all you have to do is record your voice, stick out your tongue. It’ll look at your face, and then it’s got your wearable data, and then you can query the AI all the questions you have about yourself and what it means.

And it’ll basically give you a recommended protocol, which you can just then send to the wearable. And if you want to change it, you can change it.

Lindsey: Okay. And so if people want to be engaged with this, how do they do that in terms of signing up with Energy4Life? Because I understood that there were, like, coaches that work with Energy4Life, and that you, you work with them.

Harry Massey: I don’t know when this podcast is going out, but assuming it’s before August, the best way to … Would be just to work with one of our practitioners or coaches. So you just go to e4l.com, and on there is a practitioner locator. But it works remotely, so you don’t … The location doesn’t really matter. But you do want to go with a practitioner that you like the look of and that . . .

We have people who specialize in hormones or pain or whatever it is. So you want to go with the right type of practitioner for you. That would be the best way. But come July/August, you can do it more as a consumer. It’ll cover sort of 20% or 30% of the things that if you work with a practitioner.

But then from the app itself, you can connect directly to a coach and practitioner and, have the full detail of all the scan. So depending-

Lindsey: And is it going to be a subscription model or-

Harry Massey: Depending whether you like doing things yourself or wanting help …

Lindsey: Is there a subscription model with the Gem device, or how does that work?

Harry Massey: Yes. Yeah, with the Gem and it doing all the detect, correct, protect functions, that’s $24 a month. And then if you’re just doing the analysis and you coach and without a Gem, I think it’s going to be 9.99 or so, like a normal app would be in an app store.

Lindsey: Okay. So I’m not even sure what I have. I’m not paying any subscription. I just have the device and the interface.

Harry Massey: Yeah, you’ve got the Gem with the subscription. Yeah.

Lindsey: I do. Okay. Yeah. I wasn’t sure what I got. Yeah. Cool.

Harry Massey: But you don’t have all the AI and all the tongue and the face and all that stuff. That’s all-

Lindsey: But that’ll come . . .

Harry Massey: . . . later … that’s all coming. Yeah.

Lindsey: Yeah.

Harry Massey: The fun of R&D, but yeah, basically the first version’s getting thrown away.

Lindsey: Yeah. So what kind of timeline should someone realistically expect with voice scans and infoceuticals or with the Gem where they might feel a difference in their condition?

Harry Massey: It all depends on the condition, how many years you’ve had it. But generally, you’ll get a response actually in that first 30 days, like you’ll notice differences. But, if you’ve been sick for years, like I was bedridden for seven years, that took me two years to get to pretty full recovery.

So it just depends. But if it’s… How will I put it? The body has these multiple layers, but like there’s the physical body. Like in my case, I had a fractured spine, concussions, all this stuff. That takes way longer to fix up than if it’s more of . . . if it’s an immune problem or an emotional problem or something like that.

That’s way faster because that can happen directly through the field-based control system. But if you need more physical changes to happen, the control system will start directing in that direction, but it takes time for the body to actually repair things. So it can be almost instant to a year or two.

So it just depends on the physical side of the body.

Lindsey: Yeah. So you had a fractured spine. Why do you need an electrical signal or whatever it is to tell your body to fix that? Doesn’t the body know that there’s a broken fracture and to start fixing it on its own?

Harry Massey: I wish. No, generally not. So the body protects itself. For example, a fractured spine is maybe a bit, not many people have fractured spines, but let’s take a twisted ankle, which everyone has had. You go for a run and you twist your ankle. And so what does the body do? It swells it all up, and it protects it, and then unfortunately for some people, it stays and it hurts for months.

Now why? Why would the body go and do that? The body basically, or the brain, in its great wisdom, is like “I don’t want Lindsey to go and run again, so I’m going to go and overprotect her ankle and not basically reduce that swelling, let it heal.” So basically overcompensates and overprotects. So something like this device, it’ll, when you put it on the ankle when it’s injured, it’ll send a signal back to the brain and say no, actually, you can just repair it and put it back to normal instead of doing all this whole overprotection thing.”

So that’s why. But yeah, I wish the body didn’t overprotect. It would’ve saved me a lot of time. But yeah.

Lindsey: So who do you think this approach to health improvement is most suited for?

Harry Massey: Honestly we really tackle three large areas. So fatigue and energy is, one big area.

Pain and injuries, that’s what this device is for. And then emotions is the other one, and that’s what the Gem is for. But saying that, I don’t think there’s a disease or health condition that doesn’t actually fit in those, that it doesn’t help, so yeah.

Lindsey: Yeah.

Harry Massey: But particularly energy, stress, pain. Particularly those three.

Lindsey: Can you show me again what that device is that you’ve got there and what that’s called, and is this like a practitioner level device? Pretty expensive? My recollection was-

Harry Massey: … it was made for practitioners. I’m just going through an FDA 510(k) to get over-the-counter approval, and then consumers are allowed to have it.

We sell it to practitioners for $5K. I haven’t totally decided what pricing or how feature sets work for consumers, but you’ll be able to get it through that same app. The app will tell you how to use it and how you would address injuries and pain, so you can get it through that. But yeah, basically it has a PMF coil on the inside.

It has an electromagnetic current at different frequencies coming through there, and then right in the middle basically comes out… They’re basically red lasers in there, and then it puts information on the signal, but it also reads through these electrodes… It’s basically measuring the resistance of the tissue underneath the device.

It does that so we know how long to treat, and then you move on to another area.

Lindsey: So you essentially rub it over where you have an injury?

Harry Massey: Yes, but where it’s extra sticky or has a high resistance reading, you put more attention on that until it clears, and then you can move on.

Lindsey: Okay.

Harry Massey: Yeah, you can do it through feel, or you can read the numbers and do it off the screen, depending.

I know men are very into their numbers, and I think women will just do it through feel or, I just do it through feel.

Lindsey: I like my numbers.

Harry Massey: Yeah, you like numbers. Yeah.

Lindsey: What’s that called?

Harry Massey: Oh, miHealth.

Lindsey: miHealth?

Harry Massey: Yeah.

Lindsey: Got it. So you mentioned that there may be some other studies that you did prior to… Did you already talk about all the studies that have been done on this?

Harry Massey: Oh, no, there’s been lots over the years. So I think there was some… God, there was one done in Cuba. That was done on fibromyalgia patients. And we had, yeah, 60% of the fibromyalgia patients got better in a three-month period.

That was through infoceuticals. With this miHealth device, we did a study in Holland, and I can’t remember the Dutch university, but it was a Dutch university that did it, and that was with 291 people. And yeah, I think 80-88% of people felt an improvement on the first treatment, and then 93% of people basically had a, I think it was a 50% reduction in their pain on the second.

But to be accurate, you’d just have to pull up our website to pull up that paper, because I won’t remember – it was done more than a decade ago. We’ve done different other… There was a couple of British universities that did some other patient studies. I think there’s 10 or 12 papers up there in various sorts.

I think Norman Shealy did one. He did one maybe 16 years ago here, that was done on stress. But anyway, there’s been a lot over the years.

Lindsey: Okay. So how might all this relate to gut health?

Harry Massey: How to relate to gut health. A big part of gut health honestly is stress and emotions.

So dealing with those is massively helpful. But I think what’s interesting … I met guys, the CEO of Viome, that bacteria company, and I interviewed him once, and he shared a study where they were looking at how your microbiome and gut communicate to your body using photons.

So I thought that was pretty interesting. But there’s not just a chemical communication system between your microbiome and your body. There’s, it actually works through biophotons. Yeah. In the end from an analysis point of view, I say there’s these big areas that create resistance to your health and vitality.

Negative emotions and stress is one of them. Obviously bad diet, etc. is another. Different bug trains is another. All of those can be detected through our system. And actually at the same time from an infoceutical point of view, there’s all sorts of different infoceuticals for the gut and stomach.

So there’s stomach driver, there’s L1 and L10. Oh, L10, but it says circulation, so that’s also colon meridian. So that’s why it came up for you. It’s not circulation, it’s colon.

Lindsey: Oh.

Harry Massey: Sorry, I just remembered. Thank you for asking. But yeah. Anyway, in short, you can take the information that will help correct that part of the body.

But from an overall point of view, there’s this equation. So health equals the coherence of your information or your control system of the body times your energy input, and then divided by the resistance. In this app it’ll tell you which of those is off. It might be all three actually.

But it’ll tell you the detail of that. Ultimately you want to increase the exchange of energy of your environment and make sure you’ve got good solar energy. You want to decrease the resistance in the body and get rid of all these different energy leaks. We also want to increase the coherence of information in the body.

And when you do all three, or the one that’s mostly identified, because it honestly, maybe your voltage and energy inputs are fine, but you’re just leaking. And that’s honestly the most common, is you’re just leaking energy out of the body. But by correcting those three, that’s how you get your health back, and that applies to, it really doesn’t matter the condition.

It works regardless.

Lindsey: How or where or why would you be leaking energy out of the body?

Harry Massey: Yeah, so one is, like, all those negative emotions. So for example, if, let’s say you’re extremely angry. Like, when you’re angry, all that extra processing power in the brain is off the charts versus if you’re in flow and, what’s that word?

Gentleness. If you are gentle, you don’t use anywhere near as much energy when you’re gentle than when you’re angry. So that’s a pretty easy example. Or, and there’s actually, on the anger thing, there’s a great study done by Yale looking at smokers and angry people. And I think it was 10 or, no, it might’ve been 20,000 smokers.

But it was done over 10 years, and they scored all the smokers’ anger levels and if they died of cancer. And have a guess what-

Lindsey: The angry ones . . .

Harry Massey: Nobody died of cancer who wasn’t angry. So the correlation was to anger rather than the smoking. And it’s not to say that cigarettes aren’t bad for you, but basically if you have toxic emotions, your cells won’t detox, they won’t repair.

So that the anger and negative emotions stop your cells repairing, so then you can’t get rid of toxins like cigarette smoke. But if you’re a happy smoker, you basically don’t get sick, your body will continually detox and repair itself. So if you’re going to do bad things, be happy about it.

Lindsey: Now I’m wondering, so my husband has literally just started hypnotherapy to quit smoking, and he was down to one cigarette a day, but it makes him happy, that one cigarette a day. So I’m wondering, should I just let him keep that cigarette? And if he’s happy about it, if it’s keeping him happy, or maybe he’s using it to diffuse the . . .

Harry Massey: Honestly, I would look up that Yale study.

It’s … So there’s a book written by Gabor [Maté], and he has a whole chapter on, I can’t remember the name of the book, but the book shows all of the links between different diseases and different emotional states. It’s pretty fascinating, but-

Lindsey: I’m thinking of putting this on his wrist and hooking it up to his phone so that I can see whether he gets the same readings I do, or whether he gets completely different.

I assume he’ll get completely different things, recommended corrections.

Harry Massey: You should let him choose as well, I think. Let him choose.

Lindsey: Choose what?

Harry Massey: Oh, what he wants to do.

Lindsey: Oh I didn’t choose what’s on my readings on E4L. It just tells me what I need to do.

Harry Massey: Oh no, I mean choose whether he, like the cigarette or where he wears it, etc. Yeah. Because that’ll … When he has the … It’s when he buys into his own decisions, then whatever those decisions are, it’s more likely to have a positive outcome.

Lindsey: Yeah. Of course. So if somebody wants to do a voice scan and meet with a practitioner, what is the cost of that?

Harry Massey: We have no idea. It’s all over the map.

Lindsey: Oh, it’s not yet a thing?

Harry Massey: We don’t control the practitioners, what they charge.

Lindsey: Oh, I see. They each set their own rates.

Harry Massey: Absolutely. Yeah.

Lindsey: Oh, okay. So they just . . .

Harry Massey: … become trained by- it’s all over the map. I think some people charge 40 bucks, some people charge 200.

It just depends. Okay. Are they like a doctor with a big clinic or are they a health coach who’s just starting up? So it really depends.  That’s why you should choose your own to what you want.

Lindsey: And how do people become trained on your system and become practitioners?

Harry Massey: It’s well over 2,000. Yeah.

Lindsey: I mean, how do you do it? Is it like a course they take or how does that work?

Harry Massey: Oh, how do you do it? Yes, basically. There’s a whole online course that takes you through it.

Lindsey: Okay.

Harry Massey: There’s two different courses. Depends if you’re training to be a Bioenergetic health coach, then we educate you on all the health coach aspects as well.

If you’re a more of a trained practitioner, then we only educate you on our system. So it just depends what level the person’s on.

Lindsey: I see. Okay. But all that’s on the website, e4l.com?

Harry Massey: Oh, yeah. Yeah, honestly, the best thing is just to have a demo of it and, yeah, the person demoing can answer all those questions.

Okay. Which, yeah, is, there’s a form online that says, “Book me a voice scan.”

Lindsey: Oh, okay. So you can just do that for free the voice scan or …

Harry Massey: As long as you’re interested in being a practitioner or coach. If it’s to be a client you should go and see a practitioner, because yeah. Oh, okay.

Lindsey: Got it.

Harry Massey: Yeah. We don’t do … The company doesn’t … Yeah, we don’t see clients.

Lindsey: Okay. Got it. Okay.

Harry Massey: Yeah.

Lindsey: Great. Any final thoughts before we sign off?

Harry Massey: No, all good. But yeah, as I say, yeah, the website is e4l.com. That would be the only thing.

Lindsey: Okay. I’ll put that in the show notes, and thank you for sharing this information and for the Gem device and-

Harry Massey: Oh, I would say one, one more thing.

So there’s a movie coming out called Master Your Energy, and I don’t know how you get to that. Honestly, actually if you just go to e4l.com and opt in, then when that film comes out people will be emailed about it. That’ll be the easiest way.

Lindsey: Okay. Is it going to come out like on Netflix or something or where will people find it?

Harry Massey: It’s going to come out online, not Netflix.

Lindsey: Online, okay.

Harry Massey: Yeah.

Lindsey: Got it. Okay, great. Thank you so much.

Harry Massey: Cool. Thank you. All right, take care.

If you’re dealing with gut health issues of any type (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, SIBO, IMO, H2S SIBO/ISO, IBS, IBD, gastritis, GERD, H pylori, diverticulitis, candida, etc.) or have an autoimmune disease and need some help, I see individual clients to help them resolve their digestive issues or reverse autoimmune disease naturally, You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session to see if you’d like to work with me. I also have my own two products, Tributyrin-Max, which is particularly helpful for loose stool and diarrhea as it slows your motility and firms up your stool, and SBI powder, which is an all around gut pathogen binder, which is super safe and won’t harm beneficial bacteria, and is usually the first line of treatment I educate my clients about in order to avoid stronger antimicrobial herbs.

*Product and dispensary links are affiliate links for which I’ll receive a commission. Thanks for your support of the podcast by using these links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Adapted from episode 173 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability with Elizabeth Aylor, FDN-P and Lindsey Parsons, EdD.

Lindsey: So let’s talk about low-fat diets to start. How can they impact women’s health and digestion?

Elizabeth Aylor: Wow. Okay, so I see so many women nowadays, we go towards these keto and carnivore diets, and fats have such an important role in our body, even when it comes to making hormones.

And when fats get too low too, we have to look at all of our vitamins and minerals in the body. So fat-soluble vitamins are vitamins D, K. We need the healthy fats to absorb them. So when our fats get too low, not only does it impact our body’s ability to absorb our fat-soluble vitamins, but it could take a big toll on your health too in terms of your hunger and satiety.

One thing a lot of women go towards now is we want to have that body composition change, and we look at these low-fat or even low-carb diets, but when it looks at creating that perfect balanced meal, fats actually slow down digestion too. So when we’re dealing with cravings and low energy throughout the day, when we create this meal that has balanced carbs, fat, and protein, it’s going to stabilize your blood sugar.

It’s going to keep you fuller longer. Then you’re going to absorb all those fat-soluble vitamins at that meal, and it’s going to make you feel – just not getting the cravings in between the meals, and really keep you full until that next meal. So talk about feeling satisfied, talk about more energy, blood sugar stability, and then overall, of course, impacting our hormones, which is huge for women over 30.

Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, and vitamins E and A, also fat-soluble … so very important too.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah. Absolutely.

Lindsey: Yeah. So do you find that people on the opposite, the, high-fat diets like keto and carnivore also are having issues?

Elizabeth Aylor: It really comes down to… So one thing that I’m really big on is our gut health, and I find that a lot of women too that are coming to me are struggling with different gut issues, and maybe we even had something like our gallbladder removed.

So maybe you turn towards these higher fat diets, but is our body actually making enough bile to break down the fats in that? So a lot of people may be struggling with weak digestive function, low HCL, low bile production, and maybe you feel nauseous after a meal or the food’s sitting heavy in the stomach.

So I really look at it more on that gut health perspective because everybody’s body is different. If you have no gallbladder and you don’t have the right pancreatic enzymes and you’re not breaking down the bile, keto and these high fat diets may work for one individual while it may make another individual start struggling with either running to the bathroom or having constipation or feeling super heavy or nauseous after those meals as well, which is why our gut health is the key thing when it comes to really figuring out the right, I don’t like to say diet, but the right nutrition protocol for you and your body.

Lindsey: Yeah. I tried keto for a month maybe, and by the end of it, I started having pains in the gallbladder area. It was definitely not for me.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah. Carnivore sometimes made me run to the bathroom. Okay, too much fat is happening right now.

Lindsey: Yeah. No, if I eat pork belly or something that fatty I will feel so nauseous and so gross. Now I just avoid it. It’s too much for my system.

Yeah. So when people stay on long-term elimination diets, how does that impact their metabolism, thyroid, and weight?

Elizabeth Aylor: Okay. So I … Can I bring a gut health perspective to this too?

Lindsey: Yeah, of course.

Elizabeth Aylor: Ah, I love it. So I myself dealt with a lot of chronic digestive issues.

I had parasites, H. pylori, I had SIBO, I had mast cell activation, mold toxicity, you name it. So I’ve tried every diet out there, and one thing I see with a lot of women struggling with gut issues is we go towards these low FODMAP diets or these keto, these carnivore diets, more of the ultimate elimination diet.

And what happens is when you’re cutting out FODMAPs, the fermentable carbohydrates, your symptoms get less because we have our gut microbiome, and that bacteria ferments on those carbohydrates. So when you’re cutting all the vegetables out of your diet or these fermentable carbohydrates, your symptoms become less, but you’re not getting to the root cause of what is actually going on in the gut.

So you do these elimination diets. You have less symptoms. You think you’re better, and then what happens is as soon as you add those vegetables back in or those fermentable carbohydrates, the FODMAPs, your symptoms come back because you didn’t get to the root cause. And I find a lot of clients that come to me, they get so restricted with their diet where they’re down to just a handful of ingredients because they’re so reactive.

And they’re able to expand their diet by healing the gut and getting to the root cause and correcting the insufficiencies of why we’re having them. So when I look at these ultimate elimination diets and cutting out all these specific foods, in order for our gut to have the diversity, the good population of all the good and bad bacteria, we need a variety of foods in.

We should be able to break these down, but when we have those insufficiencies or the imbalance of good and bad bacteria, maybe due to antibiotics or, our different food system – you name it. There’s so many ways for it to be happening. That’s when we start cutting foods out and having a hard time adding them back in.

And, that can create a lot of food fear and everything. And one other thing is coming back to more of these ultimate elimination diets and things like the carnivore diet is when we’re cutting all these carbohydrates out of our diet, carbohydrates, if we look at our cortisol, which is our stress hormone, you need carbohydrates to help balance out that cortisol too, and for our thyroid function, which runs our metabolism.

So one thing I did notice for myself, because I’m a big person on running all my lab work as well as running my clients’ lab work, is when they’re doing these long-term low carb to no carb diets, their thyroid function starts to actually get low thyroid issues. And then that runs your metabolism, and that’s when we start getting the stalled fat loss, the brain fog, the low energy.

So it’s not just about looking at the gut microbiome. It’s also looking at it how is this impacting your body and your hormones because women, we’re different than men. Our hormones are completely different. And what works for one person or for men, it may not work for you.

Lindsey: Yeah. So how do you take someone who only tolerates a few foods and get them back to a more expanded diet?

And I ask this obviously as somebody who sees a lot of people in this situation, and I can think of one client, for example, who we’ve done a lot of gut healing work, but she still can’t tolerate oxalates or histamines because she’s had got interstitial cystitis or any sugar because of what are like candida and vaginal symptoms.

And so it’s not just digestive issues at this point. It’s like external issues. And then I’ve another one who can only eat a very limited diet, and he barely can try any supplements, even the ones that are most indicated based on his test results because he has… It triggers really painful gut episodes and puts him out of commission for sometimes months at a time when he tries a new thing, and yeah, it’s just, it’s hard to… There are some really tricky cases like that I’ve found.

Elizabeth Aylor: Absolutely. I was one of them. I lived off of white rice and chicken for over a decade, and I’ve had people even coming to me down to cottage cheese as being their only food source for, let’s just say, a good year. So I see the struggle there. I take this as an individual perspective.

For someone that, like me, that I had the histamine issue, so my nose was running, I had the eczema, my eyes would water. On top of that, I had all the gas, the bloating. I couldn’t do probiotics, any vegetables. Things would irritate. So when I initially hop on a discovery call with my clients, I ask them so many questions in terms of histamines, our bowel movements, our hormones, and I specifically will run specific tests to figure out what the root cause is.

For example, if someone over here has mast cell activation, they’re not tolerating a lot of foods, where are we living? Is there a possible mold that we have going on? Were we a C-section and were we on multiple courses of antibiotics, and do we blow up before we even drink water in the morning and we just have that six-months-pregnant belly and we can’t go to the bathroom?

Are we burping with a metallic taste in the mouth? That could be H. pylori, so maybe I’ll run a GI map stool test for that individual. So I really look at the whole lifestyle and the specific symptoms that they are going through in terms of constipation, histamine issues, hormone imbalances, antibiotic use, our stools, you name it.

But I never actually treat the test. I actually treat the individual because we know our body, and those tests are just a secondary tool. So I will never just go into a kill protocol with my clients. I look at it a little bit differently, and I think it’s because I went through so much with my health and tried everything that I start with the nervous system.

That plays a huge role, our mind-gut connection. So I look at the environment we’re eating in. Are we eating in a rushed state? Do we have a lot of anxiety around food? Are we a busy mom grabbing on the go? That’s one thing we need to address, the nervous system, ’cause if that’s not fixed, that’s going to impact our body having reactions to food and all of that.

The second key aspect is looking at those insufficiencies. So if an individual is having… They feel like their food’s sitting in their stomach, we can’t go to the bathroom, or they’re feeling nauseous after a meal, adding in maybe specific bitters to help boost stomach acid so we’re getting better breakdown of our food, doing different remedies to start getting our bowels to have that peristalsis, the contraction, to start moving ’cause if you’re not going to the bathroom and it ain’t feeling complete, then that is going to back us up.

Your food is going to ferment, and we’re going to feel even worse. And then I even look at it in a food perspective. So if someone comes to me on two or three ingredients, I’m not here saying, “Okay, let’s expand this diet. Just go to a low FODMAP diet and try it.” I teach them what to eat, when to eat.

Depending on, if we have gastritis and things going on, I am specifically setting up their meals with the right amount of fiber, with the right, gosh, vegetables in there, things that are not going to irritate their gut, and then we’re checking in every single week, and we have an in-between messenger so if they do have an issue, I’m there and I could change what’s going on.

So it’s a very slow step of increasing the food, and I do different things to help teach them how to know if they’re having a reaction to a food, how long it takes- How to slowly expand the diet because you can’t just go add in a, a big volume because you may react, especially since it takes three to four days to have that reaction to a food.

And then the last component, that’s when I really look at the tests, see what’s going on after we got you pooping, the stress down, we got the bloating down. We’re not having fear of food because we’re less reactive. That’s when I would look at, hey, we have this going on, and how can we slowly address it so that you’re not having all of these die-off reactions and feeling horrible and just in a bad place.

And then I bring in probiotics and restore because if we do these things in the wrong way and we’re adding in probiotics when the person’s not going to the bathroom and has overgrowths going on, then that person is going to feel so reactive and not… I feel like they have a lot harder time expanding their diet, and that comes from me having so much fear around food, and I even did…

You know the GAPS protocol? I’m a GAPS practitioner, so I’ve done that extreme where I was making meat stock and living off of eight to 12 cups of meat stock and fermented foods and having histamine reactions and feeling worse on a protocol that’s supposed to heal your gut. So it’s really about that individual.

Lindsey: Yeah. And you mentioned your history involves mold and MCAS. Can you explain a little bit about what that is and then about your story about mold and how you help people with mycotoxins?

Elizabeth Aylor: Absolutely. So when I was a little girl, I had eczema, rosacea from my head to my toe.

I went to every dermatologist. They just put me on steroids, and I didn’t know what to do. Gut health wasn’t a thing back then, and I grew up living in Miami. And I think that my mold started as a little girl, but it was something I didn’t figure out until I got into my 30s. When I ended up in college going through all of these gut issues with the SIBO, the parasites, extreme amounts of H.

pylori, that’s when I started realizing that any time I would have the sauerkraut, the bone broth, all of these fermented foods or high histamine foods, even avocados are another one of them, I would start getting the eczema back all over my head to where I couldn’t stop itching all over my face again. I didn’t know what was causing it.

And other ways that would show is runny nose, signs that you would think are allergies, your eyes watering everywhere, more bloating, higher anxiety. And when I did my gut healing protocol and ended up healing myself, getting rid of the H. pylori and all that, my symptoms went away. But what happened was a few years later, I moved back to Miami from LA, and I got in this nice apartment, but I didn’t know that I was actually getting chronic mold toxicity in this apartment.

So kid you not, within one month I went from perfect digestion, so much energy, feeling amazing, to getting chronic depression. Every food would cause me bloating, nose watering, eyes watering. As soon as I walked into that apartment, I got so deeply depressed that I ended up going to a doctor and they put me on Xanax.

That did not last. I got off of that within a week ’cause I’m like, “I’m not going this route. That’s not it.” I started testing my thyroid. My thyroid started making complete reverse T3, which is the metabolite, up into the 90s, and I figured that out because the doctors weren’t running the right tests.

So I went from big expansion diet, going to the bathroom, gut healed, feeling amazing, to can’t go to the bathroom, chronic anxiety, nose running, eyes, eating down to my white rice and chicken again. And that’s when I went back to school and I became an FDN practitioner*. And I lived in that apartment for two years.

I did not even know really about mold. And once I went through that whole big certification and everything, I tested myself. I had the highest amounts of mold toxicity through my entire body. I have an MTHFR gene mutation, so I have a very hard time detoxing. Another thing is I never sweat. I sweat now, but I never would sweat prior, and I see this as a big thing with my mold clients.

And I ended up healing, detoxing myself. It took a long time to do it from not just the environment, getting me out of the environment. I even got to a place where I felt like I had rheumatoid arthritis throughout my entire body. And I say these signs because I see a lot of women come to me. They don’t know a lot about mold, but they’re like, “I have RA. I have all these issues. I’m having histamine issues going on. I don’t know if it’s my food. I’m doing the bone broths.” And it really takes getting to the root cause and figuring that out.

And one big thing I do want to bring up too, because I figured out my dad actually had mold toxicity, black mold through his whole body. He’s in the construction industry, and his health got so bad that they’re putting him on prednisone and it’s wrecking his immune system, and they didn’t even know what was going on with him. So I figured that out, and I just see so many women that don’t understand why they’re having all these health issues even though they’re eating the cleanest diet.

But one thing I wanted to say is when it comes to testing for mold toxicity, I like to run two tests for my clients. Number one is I always do a mycotoxin test. I love doing it through urine so I can see what the different levels we have of mold in the body are, if they are present. But the second thing is I love doing an OAT test, because you could be living in mold or we could be colonized by mold. I got out of the mold, but I was actually colonized by mold. So I think a lot of my issues with all the histamine issues and the mast cell came from being a little girl living in Florida possibly already being in mold toxicity. And then when I got into the water-damaged building it just brought everything back and heightened it to the next level.

Lindsey: And what markers are you looking at to determine if someone’s colonized? Are you thinking the arabinose markers or just the fungal markers in general or…

Elizabeth Aylor: I I look at the fungal markers, but I also like to look… Sometimes I bring in a full GI Map stool test there, too, to see if we have candida going on.

Because, with mold there’s always things like biofilms, and if we have a lot of dysbiosis in the gut and we have the mold going on, when we break through and start going off of that dysbiosis, that could actually peel, I call it like peeling the onion, peeling the layers, and release more mold.

You could look, get your testing done again after doing a kill protocol. Say you had strep and candida and all of that, and your numbers could be even higher because now we’re opening up the biofilms and bringing out those extra layers as well.

Lindsey: So you’re primarily looking at the OAT to see if there’s candida and gut involvement as well?

Elizabeth Aylor: Yes. I do a GI Map stool test typically when I also do the mold test, too.

Lindsey: Okay. So I’ve been… Yeah I’ve become a reluctant mold practitioner because it, now that I started testing it, I find that 80% of the people actually have it. Now, there’s people who are more and less sensitive, of course.

So I’ve noticed that there are practitioners who very much believe that you have to take antifungals to get rid of it, and then there’s practitioners who believe that binders are sufficient. I’m curious where you fall on that spectrum?

Elizabeth Aylor: Yes. Number one, always coming back to it, I work on first getting our lymphatic system open, getting us sweating again, getting our bowels moving, getting our body able to not be reactive to food.

That is my number one first, before we go into anything. And then I also love to see if we have that MTHFR gene mutation, because that impacts our body’s ability to even detox. When it comes to that, depending on what type of mold we have and how reactive we are, I go into the binders. Sometimes I will start off with something very simple like a charcoal, but that doesn’t get all the different types of mold, but sometimes people can’t do the clays and all of that to begin with.

So I start very low dose on the binder and liver support. I never do one without the other. I’ll never throw liver support ’cause things can start coming. We’ve got to have the binder in there. And then depending again on how sensitive they are, that’s when I go more towards the antifungals.

I don’t typically go the medication route in terms of like the very hardcore medications out there. I haven’t had a client that extreme to where we had to do that. But I love also looking at the dysbiosis because when we do have a lot of gut dysbiosis going on, if we have the binder on, we got the liver support coming in, then when we’re actually going after those specific gut infections that we have, those are also going to be working on, the mold spores as well, as long as we have the right binders going in and making sure that we aren’t living in that environment as well, because you could be over here killing everything, but if you’re still living in it . . .

Lindsey: Yeah

Elizabeth Aylor: . . . then you’re going to keep . . .

Lindsey: The bucket’s getting filled up.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yes.

Lindsey: As you’re pulling it out.

Elizabeth Aylor: You’re going to keep re-poisoning yourself with it.

Lindsey: Yeah. It’s “don’t waste your money”. So what do you, natural products-wise, what do you use as antifungals for mold?

Elizabeth Aylor: It really just depends on the client and what they have with the gut dysbiosis.

I love going more towards… So again, I will go towards, is it GI Assist [I think she meant GI Detox*], the one that has the, gosh, slipping my mind right now. The charcoal in there, it has all the clays. That’s the one that I use for a binder. I love using glutathione*. Sometimes I will even do glutathione injections for my client, just because they’re strong, they go right into the body.

And then I do a mix of things. So sometimes I’ll go more towards things like Biocidin,* the more very strong herbs if we have a lot of gut dysbiosis going, because it actually breaks down the biofilms as well. If someone’s very sensitive, then I may end up just doing single herbs one at a time, low dose, because they’re that sensitive.

But I really love things like Biocidin and stuff just because we get to the biofilms and we start breaking open that layer that’s encasing everything, and then all the bad stuff starts coming out, and then we bind to it, and then we can remove.

Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been using Biocidin a lot with mold. I’m curious how long you think it typically takes people when they finally make it to the full dosing on the Biocidin, like how long do you notice it takes before you see people with a clean retest?

Elizabeth Aylor: Gosh I titrate my clients very slow. I will literally start off, I’m like- Yeah … “Okay, we’re doing two drops today. Three drops.”

Lindsey: Oh yeah. No, assuming they’ve done the whole titration. But once they get to the full recommended dosing, how long does it take?

Elizabeth Aylor: I’ve had some clients where it has taken six to eight months to get rid of the mold, and I’m talking about one of my clients that had breast implant illness. She still had an area in her house that had a little bit of mold in there, and we were doing- … everything to get to it. And at maximum, I had a client take up to a year. I was the person that took up to a year to get there and have clear tests.

Lindsey: Okay. And at what point do you think it’s worth retesting? How long after somebody’s doing the work?

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah. I typically don’t retest a client if they’re still feeling the symptoms. I’m like, if we’re going in the right direction, but we’re still having the symptoms, it’s not time yet. But I do also look at, how we are feeling, because we don’t just want to keep killing everything in our body and keep . . . ‘cause these herbs are very strong.

Lindsey: That’s the dilemma, right?

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah, so it’s kind of okay, we titrate you in. We see how you’re feeling. We make sure that we are supporting, maybe with a spore-based probiotic, because that will also start binding to a mold, or a Saccharomyces boulardii. Make sure the elimination’s good.

We’re able to get more food in. But if we get to a point where we’re starting to feel like the opposite, we’re starting to feel fatigue, things are going the opposite direction, I may pull back dosage or even take time off, and maybe even shift around the herbs. And then I never retest until around at least six to eight weeks off of a protocol, because even if we have gut dysbiosis, I want to make sure that if things are coming back, they’re coming back, we’re retesting, we don’t get a false test as well.

Lindsey: Even for mycotoxins, you think it takes six to eight weeks off the products?

Elizabeth Aylor: I always do that because I rerun a GI Map stool test. Because every time I have a client that has mold, they have a lot of gut dysbiosis happening at the same time.

Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, no, I wish this wasn’t the job, but unfortunately it’s turned into the job because so many people have it, and I just ran my own mycotoxin test and I had three of them.

One of them was described as “can cause increased inflammation and excess mucus.” And I’m like, “That’s my life since I was 15 years old.” I’ve literally had a runny nose since I was 15 years old, and I have no allergies. So I’m so excited to do a mycotoxin protocol on myself and finally get rid of this stuff.

Elizabeth Aylor: It is, and I really love this company. I think it’s called EC3. They have a laundry detergent that you could wash your clothes with that actually gets rid of all the mold spores on it. They have candles that you could burn in the house, too. They have cleaning sprays, too. Everything is super clean, but it gets rid of the mold spores if you are…

So I have some clients that travel a lot. They’re in Texas, they’re over here, and I’m like, “Okay, if we don’t have our air filter for a week, let’s make sure we’ve got our laundry detergent with us,” or if they work in construction, “Let’s get the clothes off and let’s wash it to make sure we’re not bringing those mold spores into the house as well.”

Lindsey: Yeah. No, I think my current house is good. But I’ve lived in some serious… I lived in Costa Rica for a year and a half, and mold actually grew on my clothing that I didn’t wear. That’s how damp and gross it was there.

Elizabeth Aylor: Oh my gosh. I’m surprised you only had three types.

Lindsey: I’ve done rounds of Biocidin, and I’ve done a lot of gut stuff, so I’m sure along the way some of it got. . . you know, and binders too, so it’s the remainder of what’s left.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah, that’s the fun thing about being in this industry, is everything that we learn, we’re able to better ourselves and then also help our clients from everything we go through.

Lindsey: Yeah. I honestly didn’t think I would come up with it, but I have to be realistic. I did live in a house where the basement flooded constantly before I moved here.

Elizabeth Aylor: So yeah. Gosh.

Lindsey: Okay. New topic. How do gut infections like H. pylori, SIBO, or parasites affect body composition?

Elizabeth Aylor: Oh, tremendously. Okay, so I want to come back a second to H. pylori. So H. pylori is a gram-negative bacteria, and this actually lowers your stomach acid. It’s very easily spread. If typically you have it, your husband could have it, ’cause it could be spread through saliva. But when we think about body composition, you hear eat your protein, hit your carbs, hit your fat. It’s one thing to eat the food, it’s another thing to be breaking down and absorbing your food.

Even things like SIBO. SIBO overgrows if we also have low HCl, low stomach acid going on. HCl, our stomach acid, kills off bad bacteria in the gut, but it also breaks down your protein into all of those little amino acids that you need for breaking down your protein to build muscle, for all your neurotransmitters in the brain. So if we have these gut infections going on, you could be eating the cleanest diet out here, but maybe you’re not fully breaking down your food.

Then that’s going to impact your body in terms of not just energy, fatigue, your hair, all of that, but absorbing your nutrients and breaking down your protein to build lean muscle. So I even have so many clients, they come to me because I’m more in that fitness industry, but I have a whole gut perspective of how I work with my clients, and they’re like, “I’ve done the macros. I worked with my clients, but I’m six months pregnant by the end of the day. I feel so bloated, and I just don’t know what to do.” And I have clients literally go from 900 calories to 1,700 calories, losing 25-plus pounds, getting all their energy back, restoring their entire gut by just getting to the root cause and restoring our HCl, our stomach acid, whatever the insufficiencies are, even things like the SIBO.

That plays a huge role. And even just throwing this out there, when we have these gut infections, parasites, SIBO, your gut/brain have such a big connection. So if you feel constantly bloated, you’re eating a clean diet, your pants hurt you ’cause you have so much distension, you don’t know what to eat, you have so much anxiety going on about this, that is going to impact your cortisol in your body.

You’re going to feel more inflamed. It’s going to throw off your hormones. It’s like another stressor going on in the body, and that could even, if we have the dysbiosis, talk about cravings, overeating. So it comes down to a bunch of different things: our ability to break down our food and utilize it, everything from stress, anxiety, and our cortisol.

You could be eating the cleanest diet, but because you have these things going on, it could really be wreaking havoc on your health and your ability to reach your goals in terms of body recomposition, building muscle, losing fat.

Lindsey: Yeah, of course, because if you have cortisol spikes, I’ve recently discovered, your blood sugar of course immediately gets shot upwards from the cortisol release which, yeah, I had a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor on for two weeks, and it was so interesting to see because I always test my blood sugar, and it always tested like 99, 102, that kind of thing. And I’m like, if I had a blood sugar problem, number one, my insulin would be high, which it’s not. It’s perfect. My A1C would be high, which it’s not.

So I’m like, why is my fasting blood sugar always high? Now I know because I’m constantly releasing cortisol. So as soon as my blood sugar drops into the 70s, my body just shoots it up, and then I wake up, my heart palpating, wondering what in the world is going on in the middle of the night that’s made me so nervous.

So this whole experiment got me really attuned to the whole cortisol thing. So one sort of related question then is how do you stabilize your blood sugar enough so you don’t end up having these cortisol releases in the middle of the night? I am eating dinner at 7:00, 7:30, 6:30, whatever. It’s a complete dinner.

It’s well-balanced, that kind of thing. But that doesn’t seem to be good enough. It’s still, my blood sugar’s dropping to sometimes even under 60 at night.

Elizabeth Aylor: Okay. I typically have my clients, if they’re waking up peeing in the middle of the night, like 30 minutes before bed I throw in another meal, even if it’s just a snack with a good amount of protein, some healthy fats and carbs in there.

That helps a lot when it comes to them, but I also make sure we’re getting the right amount of food throughout the day. But I love running a Dutch test because it shows us so much in terms of even estrogen if we’re… Like on mine, for example, when I had all the gut infections, my body was making excess cortisol, but it had very low cortisol clearance, and that’s why I really love the Dutch test ’cause it was able to show me where that missing link was.

And then even utilizing tools, if someone can’t do nightshades, they would not use an ashwagandha, but using different adaptogenic herbs to help on that side with lowering the cortisol. But that meal has been my go-to with so many clients, helping them to sleep through the night. And I even love doing magnesium foot soaks and things to help calm that nervous system right before bed.

Lindsey: What are some good examples of little meals before bed? ‘Cause a protein bar does the job, but boy, I didn’t want to eat that protein bar.

Elizabeth Aylor: Oh, yeah. You’re going to laugh. My favorite meal is literally a can of sardines with avocado on top of it, and I know that sounds crazy. My clients are like, “No, Elizabeth.” I have a client who literally, she goes, “I love having an apple with a couple tablespoons of almond butter.” That’s protein, carbs. Simple. I have some clients that will make a parfait with coconut yogurt, maybe some hemp seeds in there, some berries in there, a little bit of a beef protein powder in there so we get a little bit more protein in there if you want something on that sweeter side.

But I like to aim for at least, 20, 25 grams of protein, a good 10, 15 grams of fat, and at least maybe 15, 20 grams of carbs. It doesn’t need to be a huge meal, especially if you just ate dinner. And one other thing that I felt it truly impacted . . . because I would have horrible HRV. My HRV was like in the 40s.

It’s in the 100s now. And one thing was eating a lot earlier. So I’ll eat my bigger dinner a lot earlier, 4:35, and then throw in that small snack before bed meal, and that’s another thing we could throw in there. And that helped me immediately. Within two weeks I noticed my HRV started trending in the right direction just by shifting that.

Lindsey: Okay. Can you talk a little bit about eosinophilic esophagitis, what it is and its symptoms, and how to heal from it?

Elizabeth Aylor: Absolutely. So EOE, intense swallowing pain we think of it, and we go to the doctor, and a lot of the times, like I had a client with this, and it was so bad she had to drink alcohol every night just to get through her pain.

And what they were doing is they were actually just doing injections right into her throat. She started losing her voice, and they would also try to put her on things like acid blockers and everything. And when you have that EOE, there’s a lot of other things going on. She had gastritis, so inflammation in the gut going on, very low stomach acid.

So when we have things like that, I looked at the insufficiencies as well as the diet, so more of a GERD diet we call it, nothing that’s going to cause acid. But also since she had so much inflammation, we had to calm the inflammation while bringing her stomach acid up slowly. So I didn’t go straight into things like HCl because HCl with someone with gastritis or even a lot of EOE, even though we can have low stomach acid, it could actually flare things up more.

This is why you never follow anybody else’s protocol on social media, because they’re not your body and you can make things a lot worse. You need to work with somebody. But we utilize things like bitters. Those were a big one. Slowly titrating them up, and then also adding in more meat stocks and aloe and DGLs and things to calm the gastritis going on.

She was able to get off of all the throat injections. All of her pain went away within two weeks, and she has been completely pain-free for six months now. We did a whole gut restoration. But I even see a lot of people that have acid reflux, ’cause I know that’s a very common one for a lot of women too, or the intense swallowing pain and all of that, is you go to the doctor and they put you on acid blockers, which actually lower your stomach acid even more, when a lot of the times we have low stomach acid to begin with, and that’s what’s causing a lot of these issues going on.

Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I know people… I was on PPIs for 10 years. And I have pretty low kidney function. It’s in the 60s, my eGFR, and I’m pretty sure that’s because of that. So definitely not something you should be on long-term, ’cause PPIs, two weeks if that, maybe at the most but that’s it.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah.

Lindsey: Yeah. So is there a way that women should train to better support their hormones versus men?

Elizabeth Aylor: Yes. So I’m going to make this specific for my women 30 plus, because we’re different in our 30s and 40s going into perimenopause than when we are in our 20s. And the big thing that I always look for is longevity.

When we stop the strength training, we are stopping putting that demand on our bones, our ligaments. We want to be able to keep that demand so that when we’re in our 60s, 70s, and 80s, we can squat, we can lift, we don’t get osteoporosis. So I always say with our busy schedule, ’cause a lot of women are busy, focus on three days a week.

Three days a week is going to allow us a weightlifting or something of resistance that you like to do, like Pilates Reformer. Find the one thing you love and that you can be consistent with, and focus on progressive overload. I love doing full body workouts. I make them for all my clients too. Even doing them from home is a great way to support it, and they don’t need to be these big hour, two-hour long sessions.

My clients train 45 minutes maximum. When it comes to cardio, it could be a different, another stressor on the individual, since a lot of women that I see that are coming to me, and you as well, we have the hormone issues, the thyroid issues, the gut issues. We’re running around. We’re stressed out about life.

If our nervous system’s all out of whack, and then you’re over here throwing in Mr. StairMaster and intense HIIT sessions, it’s going to bump up your cortisol. You’re probably going to feel more bloated and not recovered from your workout, and it’s not going to be as effective. So, as we’re getting older, I say shifting more of that focus on, yes, keep the cardio in, but not as intense, and really shift that focus toward the strength training, the longer rest periods so that we’re able to maintain our muscle and build through perimenopause.

Since once we hit mid-40s, for around 10 to 15 years, when we’re having these hormone shifts in perimenopause, we’re losing muscle at a rate of 40 to 50% faster. So that’s why I don’t do diet extremes, because if you’re cutting your calories low, if you’re not eating enough, if you take out the strength training, you’re going to have more muscle loss during that time, and your metabolism is going to slow down, and then you’re going to end up with, I call it skinny fat.

Not the body composition that you want, but if you go to the next level extreme and you’re eating very low calories and pushing the cardio, then that’s going to impact the cortisol, that stress hormone. You’re going to feel more inflamed. You’re going to feel stuck, low energy, not recovered from your workouts, not getting that muscle pump anymore, like almost like your muscles aren’t visible.

And men are completely different with their hormones. When it comes down to it, men could do all the intermittent fasting. I laugh because my clients say, “My husband and son, they fast and they got skinnier, and it just kept me from getting fat.” She was in her 50s, and she eats more food now, and she dropped 25 pounds and she’s in her skinny pants

Lindsey: Yeah. So what do you think about intermittent fasting for women?

Elizabeth Aylor: I do not do it with my clients. If we have a lot of gut issues going on, maybe I’ll do something like 12 hours maximum. But our cortisol, that stress hormone, it’s actually highest in the morning. So by getting that meal in with protein and balanced meal first thing in the morning, it’s going to stabilize your cortisol.

And what’s going to happen is you’re not going to end up crashing midday, you’re not going to end up with cravings at the end of the night and feeling like you’re going ravenous over all the food and that you failed with your diet. When we support our hormones with having that meal first thing in the morning, you’re going to have better digestion, you’re going to have better blood sugar, you’re going to have less cravings, less brain fog, more energy, and it’s going to overall support your hormones. So I don’t do any fasting extremes with my clients.

Lindsey: Yeah. Could you outline a base routine of weightlifting for someone, like a woman in their 40s to 60s?

Elizabeth Aylor: Yes. So I say start off at home. All you need is bands, dumbbells or one of those big exercise balls, ’cause you could utilize that for everything.

And really stick to those compound movements. So if you, say for example, start off with three days of a full body split, we want to make sure we’re hitting a squat movement or a lunge movement. You could do something like a deadlift or an RDL, a shoulder press.

Lindsey: What’s an RDL?

Elizabeth Aylor: So it’s like a stiff leg deadlift, so your legs are stiff and then you’re keeping the dumbbells really close to your legs.

So I really focus on a quad dominant movement, a hamstring dominant movement, a shoulder exercise, a back exercise, and a chest exercise. And then you could throw in a core movement at the end of it, like a plank, and you could just circuit through those five exercises. An example would be, like, you can do squat.

You can do a stability ball hamstring curl. That’s another really good one. You could lay down on your stability ball and do a chest press. Then you can stand up. We could do a shoulder press or an Arnold press, and then do a bent over row. And you could circuit through all of those, and then finish off with a plank, and that’s going to hit your full body.

When you’re just sticking to isolated exercises like bicep curl, tricep extension, you’re not getting as much bang for the buck because you’re working one muscle, as opposed to when you are doing a multi-joint movement, something like a shoulder press. You’re hitting your biceps and your triceps as you’re going up and you’re coming down, and you’re hitting your shoulders, and if you’re standing, you’re getting your core engaged.

So you’re hitting so many things at once. I call it more bang for the buck. It’s more of an effective workout.

Lindsey: What did you say? There was an Arnold press, was it?

Elizabeth Aylor: An Arnold press. So it’s your hands are in front, and then you bring them up and around. So it’s hitting all three heads of your shoulders: your front, your laterals, and your rear delts just in one movement.

Lindsey: Oh, okay.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah. And you could even, if you’re new to this, you could even grab water bottles in your house. Keeping it so simple because that could be a good weight for you. And then you progress. Maybe you grab a five-pound weight. Slowing down the movement if you don’t want to buy heavier weights. When you slow down a movement, it has more time under tension, so you’re going to stimulate muscle hypertrophy by slowing down the tempo.

Lindsey: Yeah. I listen to Huberman Lab, and it seems like every other week he has on a different expert talking about how one should build muscle. And it’s laughable to me because literally one expert will be like, “Low number of reps to failure.” The next one will be like, “No, they should be longer sets …”

It seems like literally everybody has… So I’m curious, what’s your how many reps to failure, how many sets, et cetera? What do you think is the best for everybody?

Elizabeth Aylor: It’s really different based off the individual because if we have things like shoulder injuries or hip injuries or knee pain, I customize all of that to my clients.

If they can’t go heavy load, then we’re going to do isometrics and, if we have SI joint, we’re going to work on TVA to strengthen that. So I really bring that functional and more of also a PT-type approach to it when it comes to building the body. But we need something we can be consistent with too, because if you’re not going to be consistent with the program, it’s not going to be effective.

But if you’re doing a circuit, if we’re going from zero to three days a week. If we can get four or five rounds of that circuit, sticking anywhere from 10 to 12 reps with the last two to three reps being challenging with proper form, that’s a really good start point for women, but not these 30-second rest periods.

You want to give yourself, 60, 90-second rests so that you’re able to lift the same weight going into your next exercise. If you cannot do that, you’re not giving yourself enough time to recover from that exercise. That’s a big thing. I call it cardio strength training.

Lindsey: Yeah. 10 to 12 reps, how many sets?

Elizabeth Aylor: Four to five sets, but it also depends on the style of training. If someone’s training five times a week and doing single muscle groups, but I’m talking to a baseline of the women just starting out right now for doing a circuit of those exercises that I mentioned. If we can get in even four to six rounds of that, you could build up to that with a good, you know . . .

Lindsey: Oh, so are you saying she does one exercise with one muscle, then moves to the next one, and then you’re coming back around again, so you’re starting over… I see.

Elizabeth Aylor: So you can do it as a circuit. Okay. If you’re short on time, that’s a great way to do it.

Lindsey: Okay. Yeah, ’cause the practicalities when you’re in a gym, I go to a gym, you’ve got to get on your machine and then do your sets and then get off it. You can’t be switching around to another machine or you’d be spending, an hour and a half getting on the machine.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah.

Lindsey: Yeah.

Elizabeth Aylor: If you’re going more toward bodybuilding you’ve got to look at the amount of exercises and the total volume over the week. So that’s why it’s so different depending on the individual, but I normally go toward four sets, but I train women sometimes into the power with five reps up into around 12 reps for hypertrophy.

So we get strength, power, and hypertrophy, but we need the baseline first, and we need to build up. You can’t just go super heavy ’cause then you’re going to get injured.

Lindsey: Since we normally talk about gut health on this show, I’m not sure that people know what hypertrophy means. You want to define that for folks?

Elizabeth Aylor: Yes. Muscle hypertrophy, think about it as the muscle growing. So if we’re wanting to build more muscle size, that’s the hypertrophy. Strength is you’re getting stronger. Hypertrophy is the muscle is growing in size.

And different ways of doing that instead of just increasing weight if you have injuries and everything is, slowing down the tempo. And that longer time that muscle is under tension stimulates the muscle growth.

Lindsey: Yeah, I do find that I start to get limited as I get to higher weights. I start to get some tennis elbow on one side or the other. And so it stops me from moving to higher weights. I kind of have to pause at a certain point on a number of different exercises, so that’s a good idea to slow it down.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah. And also making sure you’re stretching and all of that because you know when we’re gripping that heavier weight, all of the gripping is going to create more tightness all in that forearm and everything.

So if we’re not stretching all of that out, that’s going to pull on the elbow. I have a lot of clients that do pickleball, and they got the tennis elbow going on.

Lindsey: Oh, yeah, I played tennis 30 years ago, and basically cannot touch a racket for anything other than Ping Pong ’cause I will get immediate tennis elbow. But it’s been the left one. It’s been the other one more recently.

So I did notice, and I assume this is probably your experience too but just to confirm it, that when I started lifting weights it definitely helped with body composition where I wasn’t expecting it. My belly went down as a result of lifting weights even though I wasn’t doing sit-ups and stuff because I had back issues and I couldn’t mess with that area.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah. I always say cardio, we’re burning calories in the moment, but with the strength training, we’re building muscle and improving our metabolism, so you’re burning more calories overall.

So if we want to burn fat when we’re sleeping, we want to have more muscle, and as we’re getting older, like I said, muscle starts to go down as we age. So everything that we can do to prioritize our gut health, our nutrition with getting the protein in, and even prioritizing the strength training, that’s going to boost your metabolism, and that’s going to give you that body composition change that we’re looking for.

Lindsey: Yeah. I had a friend who told me, “I started lifting weights. I lost 15 pounds,” and I know it’s been many years that she has not done such a thing, so I was like, yeah, that’s proof of concept there for me ’cause, I noticed it, but there were other things happening at the same time that all this happened, so I…

But, I assumed that was what it was because of course you’re going to be burning more. With even more muscles, you’re burning more fat while you’re just sitting there.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah. I eat 3,000 calories a day and people are like, “You must do cardio all the time.” I’m like, “No.” It’s like this is… I just have a lot. I’ve been building muscle for over a decade. Yeah. More than that.

Lindsey: It’s very gratifying to go and do the… I do the InBody at the gym, and I’ve done it three times now and see the muscle percentage going up each time. It’s just a good feeling, and to feel strong to… that’s really, at the end of the day, to like . . .

I have to lift a suitcase and stick it in an overhead bin, and I’m not going to look like some frail old lady who needs the man next to her to help her.

Elizabeth Aylor: No. It’s empowering.

Lindsey: Yeah, it is. It is. I actually enjoy weightlifting. I know a lot of women don’t and they can’t be sold on it, but for me, it’s been fun.

Elizabeth Aylor: We do.

Lindsey: Yeah. So any final thoughts before we head out? And also tell people where they can find you.

Elizabeth Aylor: Absolutely. If you guys are struggling with any gut issues, I have so much free information out there. You can just type in Elizabeth Aylor Fitness on Instagram and YouTube are my two big accounts.

Go to my YouTube though, ’cause I have so much on gut health and hormones. And then I know we’re going to drop in the show notes, I have some freebies of a master class and a meal prep guide, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you ever need help. This is my passion, to heal people, just as it is your passion to heal people that are going through this time with the chronic gut issues and hormone imbalances, and we’re dismissed by doctors.

And you’re not broken, and you’re not crazy. There is a reason why you’re feeling that way, and you can heal your body, but you got to get the right person to help you, the right plan, and you’ve got to believe that you can heal too. The mindset is a huge one.

Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much.

Elizabeth Aylor: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Lindsey: It’s been my pleasure.

Lindsey: 

If you’re dealing with gut health issues of any type (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, SIBO, IMO, H2S SIBO/ISO, IBS, IBD, gastritis, GERD, H pylori, diverticulitis, candida, etc.) or have an autoimmune disease and need some help, I see individual clients to help them resolve their digestive issues or reverse autoimmune disease naturally, You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session to see if you’d like to work with me. I also have my own two products, Tributyrin-Max, which is particularly helpful for loose stool and diarrhea as it slows your motility and firms up your stool, and SBI powder, which is an all around gut pathogen binder, which is super safe and won’t harm beneficial bacteria, and is usually the first line of treatment I educate my clients about in order to avoid stronger antimicrobial herbs.

*Product and dispensary links are affiliate links for which I’ll receive a commission. Thanks for your support of the podcast by using these links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Adapted from episode 172 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability with Amy Hollenkamp, RD and Lindsey Parsons, EdD.

Lindsey: 

Welcome back to the show, Amy.

Amy Hollenkamp, RD:    

Ah, it’s been a long time. I feel like I was one of your early guests a long time ago.

Lindsey: 

You were actually my first ever guest back in 2018, and I was quite thankful you didn’t hesitate to come on, especially given I didn’t have a single listener . . .

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Well, it’s okay.

Lindsey: 

And you’ve had 1000s of listens, so it’s all good.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Awesome.

Lindsey: 

I’ve been following your blog lately, and you’ve been publishing some really interesting posts. So I’m excited to have you back on and dig into some of these ideas you’ve been sharing.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I’m happy to be back. It’s always fun hopping on pods and talking about gut health.

Lindsey: 

Yeah, so you wrote a long blog post on why you don’t use stool testing much anymore, and especially criticized the GI Map in particular. So I was wondering if you could dig into that?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I think first and foremost, people oftentimes don’t start with the foundations. So I feel like first and foremost, if someone’s struggling with gut stuff, we want to get back to the unsexy basics, basically, is how I would describe it. And I find that a lot of times people are very quick to test right out the gate. So I think in general, the philosophy behind it, I have some issues with because I think sometimes we jump straight to the diagnostics and don’t look at okay, we know that optimizing nutrition is going to help with gut health to some degree. I know working on my sleep is going to help with gut health, and so it’s going back to these basics. Because I find I’ll work with someone who’s done four or five stool tests, and I’m looking at their nutrition, and there’s all these gaps, or I’m looking at their sleep, and they’re like, “Well, I sleep six hours, but it’s fine. And I’m like, ooh, I don’t know. We might want to work on that and really focus on ways to improve sleep. And maybe they’re having issues with sleep, and it’s not totally something they’ve been able to hack, which is fine. I feel like that’s a big part of it.

I think that we get real zoomed in at like, ooh, this microbe’s off. That means I have to do all this microbiome work when we might need to zoom out and actually do some other really key foundational work. And I find a lot of times people think they’re doing, and they are doing maybe dietary restrictions and things that could help their gut health and help symptoms, but I think some of the bigger work, like optimizing nutrition as a whole, really matters. So that’s part of it.

The microbiome testing is one of those things too, where there’s this mindset of we know so much, and there’s still so much we don’t know. So there’s a lot. I think there are some things you could glean from a stool test, but we might not understand what a big chunk of your microbiome is. We haven’t even figured out ways to identify certain microbes, if that makes sense. So, there’s this whole part of your stool test that we might not even be able to identify. So, having some humility of what we don’t know about the microbiome is also important too. So again, I think that those pieces are important. So working on the key fundamental pieces, and just understanding that we’re still trying to get an understanding of what the optimal microbiome even looks like. And I feel like the stool testing companies will come and be like, oh, we are very confident that this is the right range for this microbe, and this is certainly off, and this means this. And there’s just this illusion of confidence that I don’t know if we’re necessarily there.

So it’s not like I totally don’t use stool testing, or like I don’t think that there’s value, because I think there can be value. It’s just like how much stock you’re putting into it, and how you’re using it, and what you’re implementing based on the stool testing. Because I also think the stool testing lends to a lot more of a kill and clearance based mindset. I don’t think you have to use the stool testing like that, but I think a lot of the stool test companies put that in a lot of their materials, like oh, you we have the 5R or whatever it’s called, where you remove and replace. I I forget all the R’s, but basically there’s that – we look for the bad bug, we kill the bad bug, and then we move on to other things. And I haven’t necessarily seen that need to be the case in practice. You can manipulate the microbiome and not be as kill oriented.

I think specifically about the GI Map. You know, I’ve had some providers that I’ve worked alongside who’ve done split sampling and have gotten weird results that weren’t consistent between the split samples that make me a little bit nervous. I find that sometimes the clinical markers are also a little weird, and that they aren’t consistent with when we retest from other labs, like the elastase. I’ve seen a number of cases where it’s been lower on the GI Map, but totally normal. Well, and that could oscillate a little bit, but I’ve seen enough of a trend where I’m like, hmm, that’s a little interesting.

I also think the other thing that always interests me too is my podcast co-host. She had her assistant put together a list of 100 GI Maps and look at all the data because she works with basically IBS, SIBO, dysbiosis patients mainly, and what she found was really interesting,  that there was only one with low Bifido, that was flagged as low Bifido. So we’re like, that’s really interesting because it seems like when we do other stool tests, like if we do 16S or something, it does seem like a lot of our patients are low Bifido. So something’s weird with that range, GI Map-wise. Maybe again, it’s just like the range is too broad or something. I don’t know, but basically, it does not flag Bifido being low a lot of times, which is really interesting to us in general.

Similarly, I think Lactobacillus might have been like seven out of the 100. It was another one that didn’t really register as low super often, but we’ve found in other tests that it is low. So basically, again, that was one piece of it. And then I think she did some of the split samples where one would have true pathogens on one split sample but not on the other, and so it would change the clinical decisions. Which again, I think it’s hard. I feel like basically, I think these tests are imperfect in a way, and I just think we want to understand that if we’re going to use them.

I’ve generally moved a bit more away from stool testing and have been really focused on again, the factors that would shift the microbiome. I think the stool testing can be a little distracting, in particular when people are doing a bunch of them, when they keep repeating it, and they’re like, oh man, like I have this marker, like it causes that. Oh man, I have basically this infection-based mindset, which you know isn’t necessarily true either. I feel like we can manipulate levels of certain microbes in gentle ways. It doesn’t have to be this aggressive – I’ve got this boogeyman. I feel like I don’t know if I’m being dramatic, but this is how I feel like some of the discussions go with my patients. It’s that oh my gosh, I have this bad microbe and I have to clear it. It kind of creates this worrying mindset. I just feel like sometimes the stool testing does that in a way, when it might not need to be that intense or aggressive.

Lindsey: 

Well, I know that Lucy Mailing did the split sample on the calprotectin and the calprotectin marker was off. And I have a mentee right now, and I’ve been looking at a lot of the GI Maps that she gets because the company she works with-that’s their default test-and Calprotectin is elevated a lot of the time. I mean, maybe in that sort of yellow range, but elevated on a lot of people that didn’t come in with gut health issues. These are like Hashimoto’s people and such, and so I’m like, I don’t think all these people have IBD.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, no, that’s another one that gets weird. I remember specifically having a patient who, I think it was like 900 and I was like, oh, we might want to circle back to that. Go to your GI for another test, and I think it was a little elevated, but it was 100. It was like, okay, this is not something I’d be extra alarmed about, but 900 would be something that I think you would need to take care of right away.

Lindsey: 

Right, right.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

So yeah, I’ve definitely seen that trend to sometimes more extreme examples like that. And again, I kind of wonder: is it are they biting off more because there’s so much in that test. It’s like there’s the clinical markers and the microbiome markers. Like, is it just too much in one test? Does that make it harder to make it accurate? I’m not a scientist on stool testing, so it’s hard for me to say. But yeah, I feel like it.

The other thing that’s a little weird about that test, and I didn’t realize it as early as I maybe I should have, but my husband and I did a GI Map. This was a long time ago, maybe like four or five years ago, like right when we got married. I remember he did the test, and there’s the line to fill it up, right? Like there’s usually a line fill to this point. I filled it exactly to that point. He filled it up to the brim, and I’m like, how does this affect the test. I don’t know because the solution’s supposed to basically, I think, neutralize and kill or hold it in place. Again, I don’t know the whole science behind it, but if the solution to stool ratio is a little weird, could that make the test wonky? It just kind of put an idea in my head because he got the results back, and he had sky high levels of every microbe, and I have kind of lower levels of every microbe, and I’m like, could that just be a coincidence across between our tests? Maybe I don’t have the true answer to that, but it did create a question in my head of even the amount of stool to the solution that’s supposed to be stabilizing the stool. If that gets weird and isn’t tightly regulated . . .

Lindsey: 

I mean, you’d imagine they must measure, right, like put a certain weight of stool or whatever when they’re . . .

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Right.

Lindsey: 

Well, I mean, to me, the reference range is like they should always be as a percentage of the total microbiome. That’s what I want because like you do a Tiny Health Pro, and you’re like, oh, okay, so 20% of your entire microbiome is this one bug.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Tight?

Lindsey: 

And you do a GI Map. If that one bug’s not on the list of bugs, it’s not showing up.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Right. That’s what I put in the Substack article I wrote too. Like it doesn’t put anything into perspective if you’re doing absolute values, which the GI Map does. It’s like okay, so I have this 10⁷, oh my gosh, when it doesn’t put anything into perspective. Like that microbe in the context of your whole microbiome might be fine, but I think it creates this boogeyman mentality of oh no, you have that pseudomonas or whatever. And it’s like okay maybe that’s an issue, but I don’t think we should just direct the whole entire protocol because that is a little elevated on the test.

When maybe you had no other really other major markers, it’s like there could be ways for us to gently move that in the right direction if we’re trusting the test. I think the other thing that’s interesting about microbiome tests is I’ve had some people with fairly decent microbiome tests who have crazy symptoms, and you’re like, okay, well, there’s other stuff at play here. Like people just assume that the microbiome has to be this big player, and maybe it’s not 100% there, but it’s not doing anything crazy in terms of how the stool testing is coming out. Maybe there’s something that we don’t understand, like we haven’t identified a microbe that’s there, but nothing obvious is coming up. I think that that can be at play too. So yeah, it’s a strange world to maneuver through. But I think you’re right. The absolute value versus the percent of the microbiome. Like looking at it in the context of all the microbes makes way more sense to me than the absolute values.

Lindsey: 

Yeah. So yeah, I use the Gut Zoomer a lot because, well, for one thing, I was using it a lot, especially when they had the deals for three tests for 700. But I hate their reference ranges, and I’ve told them this. I’ve said 10 to 20, or above 20, or under 10. I’m like, this is completely out of context. Like for this particular microbe, it might represent .01% of the microbiome, and this other one, it might normally represent five or 10% and they’re all on the same reference ranges. So if it’s a little out, I don’t know if we’re talking about something that’s completely taken over most of the microbiome, or it’s just a tiny little amount more than its tiny normal amount.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Exactly, and I do think the other thing too sometimes about microbiome testing is usually I’m seeing people that have done a bunch of these tests, and I don’t think it’s just related to this test not being the right fit or whatever, but basically it’s like if this test was so useful, you would think that treating based on the test would yield results, if that makes sense. And again, I think sometimes you’re so in the weeds with this stuff because I’ll have people that’ll come work with me and they’ll be like, “Do I need to do another GI Map?” And it’d be like the fifth GI Map. It’s like, well, you’ve done four, and nothing really has led to the right solution, or it hasn’t been that great from a clinical standpoint.

And there could be a lot of reasons for that, but you know, I think it just goes to show that the test isn’t the end all be all. I think all stool testing isn’t the end all be all. We want a strategy that’s going to push the needle and create a healthier microbiome. And there’s a lot of other issues in the space that prevent people’s microbiomes from getting better and from improving. But you know, I do think there’s probably an over reliance on stool testing to direct clinical decision making, in my opinion, at this point. And again, I think I still run stool testing here or there. It’s not something I do on everybody, but you know, there’s still value. I think at certain points, but usually I would focus on the fundamentals pretty heavily before I would do any stool testing, which I think sometimes people do in the reverse. Everybody has their own way to do it.

Lindsey: 

So when you mentioned you’re seeing gaps in nutrition, is there a common pattern? I mean, I know that obviously, like the kind of people I’m seeing, there’s certainly nothing I need to tell most of them to take out of their diet. It’s usually what they need to put back into their diet.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, well, I think that that’s 100% what I’m seeing as well. Most of the time, I try to work through a hierarchy. A lot of my patients have dealt with weight loss, and this is a Substack I’m working on today, so it’s top of mind. But they’re under fueling altogether, and I think people need to understand too that if you’re not eating enough food, your body goes into this budgeted state, and one of the systems that gets hit really hard is the GI tract because the body views it as oh this is less important than breathing, like your respiratory system or your cardiovascular system. Same thing with hormones. Sometimes women lose their periods if they’re under fueling. Not always. I’ve definitely seen people that are under fueling by a lot and still have their cycle. But you know, I think that’s one thing you can see typically is someone might lose their cycle or their cycle gets a little weird. So that takes a hit.

But then your body goes into budget mode. It’s like okay, we don’t have tons of fuel coming in, so we need to really start downregulating things like thyroid hormones. A lot of times, cortisol gets a little weird. One of its main jobs is to maintain blood sugar, so you’re under fueling, and you don’t have enough stored carbs. Cortisol comes in to bring glucose into the bloodstream, and that does weird stuff GI wise. So all these hormonal patterns from under eating are pretty awful for your gut, or just could make you feel awful.

How I present it to patients is that your body is trying to help you. It’s trying to say like, oh, she’s not eating enough fuel. We’re going to not burn all that fuel. We’re going to try to save some of that or store some of it, and not burn it as quickly as maybe we’d like to. Same thing if you lose your job or something, and you have a certain amount of savings. You’re not going to go blow it like you have extra money. You might want to be a little more cautious with how you’re spending. That’s what the body does. And so I think that’s one of the biggest things I look for right out the gate is like, are you getting enough to eat or not? Because if you’re not, it’s going to impact so much. And I would say, probably like 80% of my patients are not getting enough to eat, and they’ve worked on this. They’ve worked on diet, I think, with a lot of providers, but just never looked at is the plate adequate. It’s more like, oh, what’s on the plate?

Lindsey: 

Is it because they’re trying to lose weight, or is it because they’re restricting their diet so much because of the gut symptoms, or why is it that they’re under fueling?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

I think it’s a blend of a couple things. I think one of the big things is restrictive diets. So maybe they took out pieces that were really huge in their diet and haven’t totally found ways to replace them, so sometimes that could be like gluten . . .

Lindsey: 

or carbs . . .

Amy Hollenkamp:    

. . . yeah carbs, exactly carbs is a big one, right? Bread, that kind of stuff, and it’s like oh, they’re eating whole foods now, which is great, but also maybe they’re pretty active, and it’s like oh, this is interesting because maybe they’re just not totally fueling for their activity level. I think the other thing is sometimes I’m seeing people skipping meals for – maybe they’re fasting, like doing fasting windows, which I don’t think necessarily is a bad thing. But you have to make sure that you’re able to make sure calories are sufficient if you’re doing a fasted window. I think some people just skip meals because their symptoms are so high. So like some people are just having trouble eating enough, and that becomes a weird cycle that people get stuck in, where they’re kind of under fueling a little bit, and then their digestive capacity and their motility goes down a little bit more, and then they’re like, “Ooh, that doesn’t feel great.” So they continue under fueling, and it’s just the cycle that continues until they can find ways to get calories up, and then their system kind of reboots a little bit more.

Lindsey: 

So constipation is how it’s manifesting?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I would say constipation is a big one. I still see people with diarrhea who are under fueling, but yeah, I think I think a lot of things basically go wrong if you’re under fueling metabolically, hormonally, nervous system wise, it’s just very stressful for the body. The other thing I would say is people that are under fueling, some people don’t lose weight, that can be a little bit of a trickier one.

Lindsey: 

Oh yeah.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Where they’re like, “Well, I didn’t lose weight”, and I’m like, “Well, I think it’s just because your metabolism met you where you were. Whereas other people will lose a lot of weight and sometimes significant amount of weight, and I have found in people that have lost weight, sometimes it takes restoring some of the weight for their metabolism to kick back on. They’ve lost like 40 pounds. Maybe they’re eating enough right now. Until they gain maybe like 10 or 15 pounds back, they might not necessarily feel fully metabolically healthy. So I have seen that too. Sometimes it takes certain individuals to be able to increase their weight again a bit for their body to feel safe to metabolically run at an efficient rate. So I think that’s interesting.

I think in terms of macros. I know you were mentioning carbs. I see sometimes carbs being a little bit low; that can do funky stuff to the hormones as well. Similar to what I was describing, like thyroid hormones can get a little bit distorted, like low T3 when there’s too low carb. I think cortisol can get weird for the blood sugar reasons I mentioned before. If carbs are a little bit on the low side, so usually that’s one area. I very rarely would say – I think a lot of my patients do okay with protein. There could be some people that might be a little bit more on the vegetarian side of things or vegan side of things, where they’re low in protein, so that becomes a much bigger issue.

So I look at the broader areas first, of like, okay, are we getting enough, and is everything fairly well balanced? And then from that point, I will look at micros. I would not look at micros before then, though, because if you’re under fueling overall calories, your micros are likely going to be a little low. As you increase more of the calories, the micros usually will increase. Unless someone has a nutrient-related test that shows them that they’re low in a nutrient, which has value too.

I’ll talk a little bit about that, but I like to assess what someone’s eating micronutrient-wise. What are their pain points? Are they really struggling to get certain nutrients in? And so that’s usually something I’ll get into a little bit later if we can get the first bigger pieces in place, and we can get a much better baseline of the micro nutrients. So I’ll look at that, and I will run more thorough nutrient related labs in terms of things that I do with patients at this point. I don’t run as much stool testing, but I do run way more micronutrient testing than I maybe have historically done in the last couple years.

Lindsey: 

Do you do full panels, or are you doing like individual tests through their insurance?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

So it depends. I don’t really care. I don’t care how they do it, but usually I will recommend certain nutrients based on what I’m seeing. So, a lot of times, I’ll do a little bit of review of what makes sense for them. So I’m doing custom panels, basically. So usually, I’ll just order them. You can order them now through Fullscript, but you could run them through Ulta Labs*. There’s a lot of options now to do it yourself. But if someone felt like their insurance could do it for cheaper, I’m all for that. I just have found that’s a whole nother animal in and of itself.

I don’t understand the cost of labs. I was telling someone the other day I ran B12, an iron panel with ferritin and vitamin D through a provider, and I was like, oh, just run it through my insurance or whatever. I think I could order all those for like 50 bucks or something fairly cheap, and they billed my insurance $800 and then I paid $200. And I’m like, what kind of racket is happening with blood tests? I just don’t understand how ordering direct can sometimes be cheaper. It’s very strange to me, but I guess it’s the nature of the racket that I don’t understand, it’s too over my head. But yeah, I’ll order a number of nutrients, and there are patterns that I’ve seen with patients in terms of nutrients that can be fairly low.

Lindsey: 

What do you see?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

I see vitamin A being fairly low. I find that . . .

Lindsey: 

Do you test that a lot? Do you do beta carotene or retinol or both?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Retinol mostly. So I’ll look at retinol, and I would say most of the time it’s either low or at the very bottom of the range.

Lindsey: 

Okay.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

And granted, things like diarrhea can lower vitamin A. I think getting the vitamin A up really helps with the immune function and inflammation in the gut, and can help prevent infections. Like I do wonder a lot about some individuals with post-infectious IBS. Like I’d love to do research on some of these areas, just because there are some studies with vitamin A where they’ve looked at like, oh, you people recover better from GI bugs if they have enough vitamin A in their system, and it’s just a really interesting question as to why some people get post-infectious IBS and then other people don’t. It’s like whoa, I think there’s multi factors in there. So I’m not saying it’s just vitamin A, but it is an interesting variable I think, your nutrient status.

Lindsey: 

Yeah. Well, we’re going to dig more into that later. But tell me about other nutrients that you’ve that you’ve noticed that tend to be low.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I think zinc can be one that trends pretty low. You know, I’ve seen levels in the 40s before. I think sometimes people were kind of right at the cusp. Sometimes in the 60s, so that one I think can also be really important for immune function, that kind of thing. Copper is actually one I see pretty low. I always run zinc and copper together because I have to figure out how I’m going to address the zinc. If someone has low zinc, but they also have low copper, and I’m loading them up on zinc, it’s going to affect their copper, but copper I see low really regularly.

Some of the B’s I look at, I’ve had a few patients with low folate, which is interesting, especially if they’re maybe not eating some of the fortified grains. They remove stuff out of their diet and aren’t supplementing with anything, that would maybe increase the risk a little bit. I’m not saying you have to be eating the fortified grains or anything like that, but I’ve had a few patients who have pretty restrictive diets and then they have some of these low B vitamins, folate being one. I look at B12 sometimes. Iron, iron’s another one that I think can be pretty much low in most people.

Lindsey: 

Definitely menstruating women. But I tell you, I find a lot of people who are high as well.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

A lot of people exactly.

Lindsey: 

And that’s my genetics for hemochromatosis. And I found that myself, but I have that.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

And yeah, that is very true. I feel like you get both ends of the extreme, especially people that are obviously people that are more inflamed can have ferritin in the three hundreds. I think that that can be a really interesting nutrient, especially if it’s on the high side, you want to obviously do different things to help get the inflammation in the body down. But I find that low, low iron can be one that’s going to impact your energy level. So people that just feel like even if they don’t have anemia yet, but their ferritin’s low, I do see even just getting their energy back up a little bit being a super important part of them making progress GI wise.

You know, I’ve even had patients who’ve restored their iron, and we think it was a bigger part in why their gut feels better. And there are studies specifically on how the gut’s functioning, basically like a gut that has, or when iron levels are higher, there’s more permeability. If iron levels are lower, there’s actually more inflammation and permeability. So we need a lot of these minerals, and that’s with most minerals. If you look at magnesium, that’s also a mineral that when they’ve studied actual permeability and how the gut’s functioning, if it’s too high, it causes more permeability. If it’s too low, it causes more permeability. So a lot of the minerals are very interesting when you look at, it’s like a Goldilocks effect.

But I think you could take pretty much any nutrient and link it to it affecting the gut brain in some way. So that’s why I like to focus a lot on these micronutrients and not get too in the weeds with some of these other things, because sometimes if you can just get your nutrition up, inflammation at the barrier’s regulated so much better, and a lot of these IBS like symptoms start to gradually decrease. It’s not an overnight shift. That’s the problem I think with nutrient diet related stuff is it takes time, and there can be things you could do in the meantime that might help symptomatically.

But in terms of building up the resiliency in the gut, I think it really takes optimizing nutritional status. I feel like it’s a really hard uphill battle if your nutritional status is subpar, and so many people, I’m sure that you work with, if you’re dealing with restrictive eaters, there’s going to be gaps somewhere. I mean, I don’t think I can think of one patient where we didn’t do something nutritionally to help them build resiliency and help with their gut brain in some way.

Lindsey: 

So in that same post that I mentioned earlier, you identified some common patterns of dysbiosis that people with gut issues tend to have, such that you almost don’t need to test because you kind of already know what it’s going to look like. And I agreed wholeheartedly with what you said, but can you can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah. Well, I think I even think in general. I just released a post this week too. I think there can definitely be interesting patterns GI wise. I actually think a lot of the research tends to lean towards, especially with SIBO, IBS patients, maybe having more proteobacterial growth and that sort of stuff, leading to a little more inflammation and having low levels of good microbes. Again, that’s why the GI Map is so weird, where it’s like okay, Bifido and Lacto and all these good microbes seem fine. . .

Lindsey: 

. . . and they don’t list proteobacteria amongst the phyla. You just get those two, and you’re like, um, well, they’re both low, so probably you have high proteobacteria, but I don’t know.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I think what’s interesting about that is the actual profiles that you see with dysbiosis in IBS patients is a proteobacteria doesn’t really love fiber, you know what I mean? that’s always interesting to me is this idea of oh let’s starve out the microbes and then starve out the imbalance. Like really Proteo is definitely going to be more into sugar, into fat, and it’s not that sugar and fat are inherently bad or evil, anything like that at all. But it’s like this idea of demonizing fiber or fermentable fibers. I don’t think really fits the hypothesis that okay, we can take this proteobacteria or this imbalance and starve it out. I just don’t think that really – there’s not tons of evidence to support that, which I find interesting because people have taken that and run with it.

And I do think some dietary restrictions help symptomatically for sure. So I’m not trying to say that they don’t, but I feel like looking at the actual microbes that can be imbalanced in IBS, the recommendations dietarily, I think, promote more of that in some way. So if the diet’s restrictive and you’re limiting certain fibers, I think you’re going to start getting overgrowths of certain microbes and that sort of thing. And it almost takes flipping that on its head. I think you could do restrictive diets to help lower symptoms, but that’s pretty much the main thing that it does. Is it lower symptoms? It doesn’t correct an imbalance, and I feel like there’s that idea floating around of like, oh, I can starve out these bugs, and it’s like we can’t really starve out anything without something else popping up. It’s like whack a mole almost.

There’s just no evidence that we can really manipulate the diet in that way and cause shifts to happen where we’re starving out only the bad bugs but the good bugs we’re feeding in some way. I just feel like it’s gotten a little bit misinterpreted and misused. Low FODMAP, I think, has a lot of evidence for lowering symptoms and it has a time and place. But the more that you can maybe get symptoms under control, and then flip the script almost of like, oh no, now I need to add diversity in to feed all my different microbes that can do all different types of jobs for me, is the main way to go when you’re looking at these microbial patterns.

So I think in the end you could get real locked in on what microbes are growing and that sort of thing, and there’s some relevance. And if you’re targeting certain things, if a microbe is really overgrown or something, there might be value in that. But I think in general, we really want to focus on strategies that help diversify the gut, which kind of gets lost, I feel, or is an afterthought in some way, of like, okay, eventually we need to do that, but right now we need to kill, kill, kill that microbe, that pseudomonas or something. I think some of the targeting of certain microbes gets really skewed, and some of the actual interventions that are popular don’t really fit that model either.

Lindsey: 

So, what do you think about breath testing? Do you use it at all?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, so breath testing. Oh, this is another can of worms. Breath testing. Breath testing is a really interesting one, just because I feel there’s almost two camps in my head. I feel like the researchers are not super hip at breath testing at all. The actual scientists doing a lot of the GI research, but I also think some of the MDs and some of the conventional big MDs are very big into the breath test. So it’s this weird dichotomy in a way. If you look at some of the research papers, they’re like, “Oh, this test isn’t great”, basically, but then you hear certain proponents of the breath test being like, “This is the best test ever.”

So it’s a weird one to wade through, seeing both sides, and I think it does stink because in terms of a truly good test for SIBO, I don’t think we have. I don’t. I think the breath test isn’t great. I think there’s a couple real big problems with it. Probably the biggest being there’s no real way to figure out if the increase in gas is coming from the small intestines or the large intestines. Basically, if you’re not familiar with the breath test, you take the solution and you breathe into these bags, and they collect gas. And the theory is that if you have SIBO, the gas happens before the 90 minute mark or whatever, the 60 minute mark, wherever the cutoff is for that particular provider’s test.

Then you have SIBO because the gas that’s being produced is supposedly in the small intestines because it happened before this cutoff. But I think in the studies the cutoff, people’s orocecal transit time, so the time it takes for them to get that solution from their mouth to the to the start of the large intestines, varied from like 10 minutes to like 220 minutes or something like that. So, if you’re someone with really fast oral transit, maybe that 10-minute mark, that solution’s hitting the large intestines at 10 minutes. Well, you’re going to have tons of gas, and it’s not related to SIBO. It’s gas from your large intestines.

There’s probably some issues going on there if your transit’s that fast too. Like maybe you do have some issues with transit being too fast. But then on the same token, if your transit’s really slow, like maybe it’s the 220-minute mark, like about that 90-minute point. The solution has not reached the large intestines, and so maybe you’ve had some gas increases, but maybe the solution’s moving so slow down the small intestines that it’s not going to show spikes. So it’s really weird test.

I feel like to try to interpret when you don’t have that data, and most of the researchers at this point who have reviewed a lot of the breath testing will try to say you should do basically a transit study alongside. I mean, this is not being done in practice at all, but watch where the solution actually is, and then do the test so that you know, like, okay, that lactulose solution is in the small intestine. We see it, and you’re getting a spike that looks like it could be SIBO.

Basically, that’s what they’d want to do because what they found, especially if you use that 90 minute cutoff, the 90 minute cutoff seems too long. I think they said it should be maybe like 70-seven minutes is the cutoff. If we’re getting really into logistics, that’s what some of the research papers show. It should be a little bit, especially for lactulose, should be a little bit sooner. But I’ve seen people use 90 minutes. I’ve seen people use 120 minutes. You know, I’m seeing people use a broad array of different endpoints there, and it can really, really skew the interpretation of the data. So, I think even when you use the 90 minutes, I think they were, it was maybe like 88% of the tests. I don’t think it was a large study, but when they looked at people doing the breath test, and they actually monitored where the solution was in the system, that 88% of them were blowing basically false positives. I believe it was around 88% Don’t quote me on that, but it’s around there. It’s around the 90% mark are false positives, basically, which is alarming because people who get diagnosed with SIBO get really locked into that diagnosis, and then they’re like, “Oh man, like I have to clear everything out,” which I totally get.

I had SIBO, I was in that same state of like, I have this overgrowth, I got to clear it out. I think it’s okay to maybe use a breath test and be like, “Okay, this is kind of interesting. Let me see if it’s consistent with symptoms. Like, I still think you need to work with a provider if someone did do a breath test and try to figure out if it makes sense to pursue treatment for SIBO. I think if you can put the breath test in the right frame of mind, like I typically would not spend money on it at this point. But if a provider really wanted to use it, or if they were wanting to explore that and that’s their process of running that test, I think the way I would think about it is like I’d also want to match it with my symptoms and make sure things seemed like it could be SIBO.

And I think there-it’s okay to maybe try treating it if you’ve done other things and nothing’s worked and see what happens with treatment. If you try to treat it and it nothing happens, like maybe you could try one other option, either antibiotic or herbal or however you want to treat it. But I find people will go down that SIBO road over and over and do tons of herbals, and maybe the first round was helpful, but none of the other rounds were helpful, and that’s really hard psychologically too. Like if you took Rifaximin or something one time and it felt amazing, and you’re like, “Wow, this is awesome, but then you do it the second time and it’s not helpful, and then you’re like, “Oh, maybe it’ll be the third or fourth time’s the charm.” And I think it’s just usually some of these clearance-based options have their season of helping, but then, and if it doesn’t help, don’t continue. Because I find some people will get into that boat. Some people it never helped, and they’re on their sixth round of something, and it’s like, okay, this never helped before. We probably shouldn’t keep doing it. Like more is not better.

And there’s a whole range of people that have been diagnosed with SIBO, who try treatment and it does not help, and they feel like, oh my god, I have this insane SIBO case, that’s just untreatable. Like the Rifaximin’s not touching it, and I really wonder if those people don’t actually have SIBO, or that the typical SIBO protocols are not going to help. We should probably think of some other reason why your gut brain’s breaking down beyond just SIBO. Let’s kind of zoom out again and see what other variables are at play. You might not be someone that’s going to respond to SIBO because maybe you don’t have SIBO.

Maybe you just have dysbiosis, which also tends to be more linked to what the research says too. So I feel like SIBO is definitely real. I feel like sometimes people are like, “Oh, are you a SIBO denier? Which I’m not at all. I think SIBO is definitely real. It’s just like it’s over diagnosed with the breath test, and I think that you have to have fairly high levels for it to be the main issue, I think what most people have who are put in the SIBO camp is dysbiosis of the small intestines which seems most problematic. There was that really cool 2019 study from Nature where they looked at that, where they looked at whether SIBO was linked to functional GI symptoms, basically. There’s a bunch of different diagnoses that fall under functional GI, but IBS is the big one. Think GERD, that kind of stuff.

And what they found was that SIBO was not linked to the symptoms; that dysbiosis was linked to the symptoms. So the actual balance of the bacteria likely matters way more than the abundance. I think what the caveat to that is how abundant is the bacteria. So I think if the bacteria starts to get pretty high, old school SIBO, how they used to test for it, like in the early 2000s like late 90s, that’s when you’re going to have a lot of symptoms that look like SIBO, and where you get people starting to have nutrient deficiencies and some of the cluster of symptoms that we hear SIBO causes.

So yeah, I think that a lot of people get sucked into the SIBO framework of like, oh, I have SIBO, I got to do all the SIBO related things. And I think you, if you are in that place now, how have you done with that type of work? I think some people do great with certain rounds of herbals, and that’s still good. That’s great. I’m glad that those things help, but I think there’s this whole cluster of people that haven’t been helped, and then they feel like, oh my god, I’m just this lost cause SIBO case, and SIBO is so hard to treat, and they just go down that mental rabbit hole.

And in reality, I think maybe they’re just looking at their situation wrong. That maybe SIBO is something that they can keep in their orbit a little bit, but release a little bit and say, okay, that path didn’t help. Maybe I just really focus on some other things and zooming out again and seeing where my gut brain is at as a whole. That sort of mentality, and going back to the drawing board, versus thinking that they’re broken in some way. I just think the protocol might have been broken for them, not that they’re some really difficult case.

Lindsey: 

Well, I think it also helps to maybe distinguish between SIMO and IMO because IMO I have seen can be very recalcitrant, sometimes very hard to dislodge those methanogens. And I’m almost to the point where somebody comes and they’ve said, “I’ve already failed either antibiotics or herbals, that just takes them straight to the elemental diet, like that seems to be a pretty successful treatment for IMO. And it’s just that it’s expensive off the bat, and of course you’re not going to be eating, so people don’t think so much about like well, there’s no grocery bill, but . . .

Amy Hollenkamp:    

It is one of the more successful yeah. I agree I think with IMO too sometimes I find things can be stacked on top of each other as well. I’ve generally found too I really liked PHGG. Doesn’t work for every single person, but PHGG* I think can help with IMO. I like to pair it with the Biogaia (Biogaia Gastrus*) and PHGG. I like that for IMO as well.

Lindsey: 

Okay.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yes, just it might not do the heavy lifting if someone needs more heavy lifting, but in terms of if they’ve done some clearance and they’re still kind of struggling a little bit, it can be helpful.

Lindsey: 

Post-infectious IBS. Let’s talk about this because that’s what I have had for all these years, and I’ve had positive antibodies. I’ve subsequently had negative antibodies, but honestly, I can’t say that anything has really changed symptom-wise. Like I still feel like I’m on that sort of treadmill where you know things start to get a little overgrown, got to knock things back a little bit, and then I mean, overall though, I’m not bloated. I’m fine. Like I’m generally good most of the time.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

So right, yeah. Well sometimes I think it’s helpful too when you’ve had post-infectious IBS, I find sometimes people will try to compare their gut to pre-infection of I have to get back there and it’s like well let’s turn the page a little bit. The circumstances have changed a little bit. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have you be mostly symptom free most of the time but the fact is maybe your symptoms have changed and I would not necessarily think that you’re not a success if you can’t get back to this point of pre-extreme.  And I had a patient too who had three GI infections at one time; it was kind of wild. And he’s had a pretty gnarly case of post-infectious and I feel like again. That is he had C diff. I think he had rotavirus and then Giardia all at the same time.

Lindsey: 

Oh my gosh!

Amy Hollenkamp:    

And so it was nasty, and he had longstanding issues from it. And I’m like, well, we really can’t compare. Like we can’t necessarily say the goal is to get back to this point of pre. And that could happen. I think sometimes with post-infectious issues, it just does take some time for things to slowly get more calibrated, and maybe you get back to that point. But I think there can also be like, okay, maybe I have a little chink in the armor, but I can mostly still function normally, and maybe still have pretty normal days. But the goalpost shifts a little bit. I think having a mindset like that can be helpful.

And I think about that too like even with, I had some postpartum OCD anxiety stuff, and I remember a therapist saying like, the goal isn’t for you to have the mental health state of no pregnancy. Like that’s just not necessarily a realistic goal. Like you’re probably going to be someone that has more anxiety, OCD, postpartum, and that’s fine. We can move through that and strategize how to deal with that. But it’s almost a page is turned, which I think is helpful to compartmentalize in that way.

But I think with post-infectious IBS, the immune system takes on a threatened state, and it’s like, well, we had this invader come in and shake stuff up, and we’re not going to let that happen again. It’s like what the gut, the stature that the gut goes into post infection. You know, I think there can be different things to consider, and it’s something that I think there’s so many variables. It’s hard to totally understand again why someone could have an infection and immediately be fine and someone else can have an infection and be thrown off. It could be the timing of that, maybe it’s mixed in with some other stressors and it just hit the immune system in a weird way. There could be genetic pieces, but I think again, it’s one where I think you still have to zoom out and look at the full picture. The gut might still be a little more sensitive to stressors in the gut brain, but you can still look at different ways to support the gut brain. Same would go for people with SIBO that don’t have post-infectious issues, or that just have dysbiosis. I think we still want to zoom out and look at the full picture, gut-brain standpoint-wise.

Lindsey: 

So, what are you talking about when you’re talking about support for the gut brain?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, nutrition optimization. What I talked about before, lifestyle factors, movement, sleep, and I when I say these things, I don’t think they need to be like A plus plus. Like I don’t think you need to be the best sleeper or the best mover or something like that. But you need to be covering that base, like doing B work. You need to be doing B sleep. You need to be doing that type of work. So I think those things would still help someone with post-infectious IBS. It might not be the only thing.

I think that the thing I would consider more so if someone had post-infectious IBS would be motility support would probably be more important. I think it’s something you still have to play around with, with the individual and figuring out what option would be best. I think there are certainly people that take low-dosed pharma meds if they feel like they need to do that and that it’s beneficial. I think a lot of people that I work with do well with different herbs. I don’t necessarily think that has to be a supplement either. Some people with more mild cases of post-infectious IBS can do okay with ginger tea a few times a day and chamomile. I like those three together. I think can be interesting if you consistently do it. Some people can manage just with that.

Lindsey: 

What was the third?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Chamomile? So two ginger teas during the day and a chamomile. So kind of like taking those . . .

Lindsey: 

. . . before bed.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yes. So I like those blends as a mild way. Or if someone gets to a point where they feel like they don’t need the prokinetic supplements anymore, maybe they can do a maintenance of one ginger, one chamomile.

Lindsey: 

Yeah, I mean in terms of herbal supplements, do you feel like there’s any that are more successful as prokinetics? Because I mean I’ve tried every last one of them, and I can’t say any of them made a huge difference of SIBO not coming back for me.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I mean I think there’s some I don’t love. One that I don’t love is Motil Pro. That one just generally causes a lot of symptoms. It can cause ginger burn. It on paper it looks great. It has chamomile. It has 5- HTP. It has all these things in it. I just think that ginger can be a little rough in that one. One’s Motility Activator.* I would say I see people responding well to and liking one that again it wasn’t on my radar that my podcast co-host uses. It’s not really marketed as a prokinetic, but I’ve had some patients really like it. It’s Acetyl-CH™ Active*. It’s an acetylcholine booster, so it’s a little bit different. It’s interesting to me because I think a lot of the Motility Activator tends to be more of a bile supportive supplement, which bile increasing can help increase motility. But Acetyl CH Active’s more of an acetylcholine booster. It’s more of a neurotransmitter shifter. So some of these have slightly different mechanisms of how they’re increasing motility. So that can be interesting. I use that one a lot.

Lindsey: 

Is that one that’s good for constipation or diarrhea or either?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

I’ve used it for both. I think that one too. I’ve used it a lot for people that can’t tolerate ginger because that’s something too. Motility Activator is usually pretty gentle. It’s much more gentle than Motil Pro.

Lindsey: 

If you swallow it with enough water, yeah. All of these. That’s the secret. Don’t try and just one sip it.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, yeah. They’ll get lodged in your throat with a burning sensation.

Lindsey: 

Number of times I’ve had that stuck in kind of feeling.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

What the heck is happening in there? Yeah, it’s the worst feeling. I hate that feeling. I know exactly what you’re talking about. But yeah, the Acetyl CH Active is one again that wasn’t on my radar that I’ve used a lot and have liked, and good for people that have GERD or reflux or who just don’t tolerate ginger.

Another one I’ve used again more regularly lately, not as much early on in working with people, would be chamomile as a tincture* or a stronger dose of chamomile. You can play around with the dose of chamomile too, taking fairly high doses is safe with chamomile. The only thing I would be careful of is if you’re on an SSRI or any sort of antidepressant, just because it can cause serotonin syndrome. That would be my only caveat for chamomile. But you know, I do like chamomile a lot.

That one wasn’t really on my radar. I mean, this was a long time ago, and we talked to this guy. We talked to an herbalist on our podcast. He was basically making an argument that peppermint gets so much attention for IBS. IB Guard is even – conventional docs I’ve seen give IB Guard. But he was saying, you know, chamomile is way better for gut-related things, IBS-related stuff, and I was like, oh, that’s really interesting. Then I started digging into it a little bit more, and there is some interesting data on chamomile and gut stuff, and it has prokinetic properties. I find that it helps with hypersensitivity as well. So people that have a little more hypersensitivity, I think, do well with chamomile, but that one can be an interesting one too.

Again, they all maybe have a little bit of a different slant on how they’re affecting motility and the pathways that they’re acting on. And sometimes that’s the case. I think with prokinetics, sometimes it does take playing around with different ones. Sometimes too,  maybe that’s not the fit. Maybe prokinetics aren’t going to be the answer to help with motility stuff. I think the other thing I would mention about prokinetics, I feel like one of the biggest symptoms that gets helped with prokinetics would be bloating. So I think a lot of times people think like, oh, the motility piece is going to be the biggest thing, but I would look out for how it’s affecting bloating more than anything else. So again, I just feel like some of these motility aids, it’s “oh they’re going to for sure correct my constipation” or something like that, and maybe they help with constipation. But I would say the biggest symptom to look out for is how’s it affecting your bloating.

Lindsey: 

Yeah. So I got on Motegrity, but a quarter pill, ¼ of one milligram is about as much as I can handle. But I feel like it’s made a big difference compared to herbal stuff. I don’t know if you found the same with your patients.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I agree. I think that that you should be open to the pharma prokinetic. And again, I think dosing can vary, but I find that a lot of people do well with like half a milligram or a lower dose of prucalipride. So yeah, I’ve liked prucalipride. I would say I haven’t loved many of the other pharma prokinetics.

Lindsey: 

I’ve never tried any of them.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

So I mean, I think things like LDN or something could be helpful for other things.

Lindsey: 

Yeah, I’m on that, but that didn’t make a lick of difference,

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Right? Exactly. I think it’s okay, that can be helpful for immune system stuff, but sometimes people are like, “Well, I’m on a prokinetic and it’s LDN, and I’m like . . .

Lindsey: 

Yeah, that’s not really a prokinetic.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

So yeah, I feel like it’s with all this stuff. I think approaching it from the mindset of like, okay, I’m going to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. I think picking the options that I would tell people, the options I see being the most effective herbal wise, would be Motility Activator, Acetyl-CH Active, and chamomile. And I really like those three. So if you were going to do an experiment, you could try each of those out for like two to three weeks and see am I noticing shifts? Maybe you don’t get all the benefits in that period of time, but I think you should notice some shifts happening. So yeah, I think that’s the hard part about some of the stuff is it does take some twiddling around. It’s hard to know exactly who’s going to benefit from one thing, you know. “Motility Activator is the perfect one for you, and not for you.” It’s just hard to know.

Lindsey: 

So, yeah, no, I just generally steer away from anything with 5-HTP for people with loose stool. That’s my general rule. But yeah, for me people have liked Motil Pro if they were on the constipated side. I’ve seen that.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I mean, again, I still think Motil Pro could be someone’s favorite, so I’m not totally against it. I would just say it it’s not the one I would start with typically, just because it can be a little bit more of the ones that I would say cause symptoms. So yeah, I think it still takes some degree of experimentation, no matter what. Like on paper, this might look like the best option for you. It’s like okay, I wouldn’t get too locked in.

Lindsey: 

Yeah. What about Iberogast*? Have you seen much success with that?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, you know, I feel like Iberogast was a really weird one because it disappeared for a while.

Lindsey: 

Yeah, and then the new formulation and . . .

Amy Hollenkamp:    

and then that was so funny. Last year, it was on TV. I don’t know if you’ve seen there’s actual commercials. I was watching. I’m just like wow, right? I was watching and . . .

Lindsey: 

You can buy it at Walgreens.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

I know. I was watching an NFL game and it was a commercial and all of a sudden it was Iberogast and I was like what? I almost fell out of my chair. It was just so random. So I would say Iberogast was a weird one because it was just not there for a while. Sometimes for international patients, it was a little more available. It was just a weird one. But generally, I have seen some people like it. I think with every prokinetic, it can be one of those ones that for some people, it might fit the bill. One thing about Iberogast that’s interesting, and I haven’t explored this at scale with lots of people, something that Jason Harelak told us. He was on our podcast, and he was saying that he uses Iberogast a lot for hypersensitivity. But you have to take it fairly regularly for like six weeks or something before you see more hypersensitivity changes, which I found was pretty interesting. Again, I have not done tons of work with Iberogast in that way. It’s not one that I use really regularly. It’s kind of one where someone’s like, “Oh, I tried it and I like it. I’m like, “well, stick with it”. You know what I mean? That’s usually how I’ve seen Iberogast. But yeah, I think it’s an interesting one. I just haven’t recommended it a ton, but I have seen so many people on it, and some people do like it.

Lindsey: 

Yeah, I’m kind of surprised to hear about it for hypersensitivity because I think of the hypersensitivity usually coming in conjunction with hydrogen sulfide SIBO, and then I would never do anything bile promoting in that scenario.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, I think again it could be just some of the mixtures of the herbs because he talked a little bit about peppermint and caraway, and I believe peppermint’s in it. I don’t know if caraway is in Iberogast, so I’d have to check.

Lindsey: 

At one point though when it was out of stock, I went and I bought all of the bottles of all of the things that went into it and tried to recreate it. There was one good batch but one batch I made, it was like there was this one overwhelming herb that was so terrible, and I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to throw this out and start over.” But I had to add a little stevia to make the whole thing even palatable.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah. Oh my gosh, you’re braver than me. I that that’s impressive that you tried to recreate it.

Lindsey: 

I have all those bottles now. Yeah, I might have a bottle of chamomile. I should check that out. Yeah. So, have you found anything in your experience that lowers the vinculin antibodies?

Amy Hollenkamp:    

I’ve had some people run it before. It’s not a test I run super regularly to where I can say like, okay, here’s their anti-vinculin before, and then here’s it now. I feel like I don’t really have that data. So yeah, I would say generally speaking, I think focusing a lot on immune system stuff I think also helps. Which to me, I always go back to the nutrients. So like A to D to zinc, but I think most of the nutrients play a role in how inflammation is regulated in the gut. So, I do a lot of work there, and I think you know slowly working on diversifying the gut I think is important for post-infectious stuff. It’s just hard again.

It gets a little squirrely if motility is being disturbed and that’s leading to more stagnation and that kind of stuff. So I still think such a big part of it could be trying to find some sort of prokinetic that helps, and then sort of working on a lot of the fundamental pieces of building the system back up. But I do think the immune system piece matters a lot too, and could be interwoven with some of the stuff necessary for post-infectious stuff, some of the very anti-inflammatory stuff. DIYs can help, especially if it’s pretty close to when the infection happened.

Lindsey: 

Oh yeah, yeah. Often I usually get this has been happening for 10,15, 20. Yeah, I know my story. Well, I, for what it’s worth, I did two rounds of the Prolon Fasting Mimicking Diet, and my antibodies normalized.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

So cool.

Lindsey: 

Yeah, I don’t know if it’s . . . I kind of don’t trust it because I did the Candida + IBS Profile with Vibrant. So now I’m doing the ibssmart to make sure those results are real, but I also I had elevated CdtB ironically when I had normalized vinculin.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, you’re like, wait, what? One goes up, one goes down.

Lindsey: 

Right, right. Whereas it’s been the opposite previously.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

So right, and so ironic I feel like when stuff like that happens.

Lindsey: 

Yeah, we’ve gone over time. You’ve been very generous with your time, so I will wrap it up. Let people know the name of your podcast and where they can find you and all that.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah. So the podcast is the IBS Freedom Podcast. I don’t know if we’re kind of off schedule right now, but we should be back up and running soon. But we’ve done over 200 episodes of that, so we’ve got lots of topics there. Mainly, I would say I’m writing in the Sub. My Substack is the main area that I post on. I am on Instagram, but I don’t know that Instagram’s a whole nother animal. I feel like I don’t know if you’ve ever run into this or dabbled in Instagram, but the algorithm is just rough in terms of my skills.

Lindsey: 

Don’t even bother. I mean, I post, but that’s it.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Right. Well, my skill set is usually long conversations or just writing articles that are more long form content than you have to do something engaging within the first two seconds, or the post doesn’t matter. It’s basically Instagram’s model. So I do post on there a little bit, but I feel like it’s all about who’s watching, but it’s like okay, it feels like I’m posting into the ether on Instagram. Yeah. So, but you can find me at Amy Hollingamp, RD, and I think it’s a similar Substack.

Lindsey: 

Well, I was reading them, so I appreciate it.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Awesome. I’m glad. Yes, I’ve liked Substack a lot more. I feel like there people actually see your stuff and comment on things, so it’s good.

Lindsey: 

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time, and I appreciate you coming on.

Amy Hollenkamp:    

Yeah, no problem. It’s been really fun.

If you’re dealing with gut health issues of any type (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, SIBO, IMO, H2S SIBO/ISO, IBS, IBD, gastritis, GERD, H pylori, diverticulitis, candida, etc.) or have an autoimmune disease and need some help, I see individual clients to help them resolve their digestive issues or reverse autoimmune disease naturally, You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session to see if you’d like to work with me. I also have my own two products, Tributyrin-Max, which is particularly helpful for loose stool and diarrhea as it slows your motility and firms up your stool, and SBI powder, which is an all around gut pathogen binder, which is super safe and won’t harm beneficial bacteria, and is usually the first line of treatment I educate my clients about in order to avoid stronger antimicrobial herbs.

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