"The dose makes the poison" is a fundamental principle in toxicology, attributed to the Swiss physician and chemist Paracelsus from nearly 500 years ago. This concept emphasizes that the toxicity of a substance depends on its dose or concentration, rather than its inherent properties alone.

Two good examples of this are blue light and seed oils. Yes, the color blue coming out of your phone, tablet, HDTV, monitors, headlights, streetlights and work/home LED bulbs and vegetable oils used in everything from organic tortilla chips to restaurant french fries. There are so many parallels between the massive overuse of these two metabolic disruptors I had to write about it.

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We made it to part 4, the final article in this series on healing your gut!

In this segment I want to give you common symptoms and general rules for figuring out a gut issue. I also want to give you my favorite at-home tools for fixing them.

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Today in part 3 I’ll be exploring gut testing markers, in particular, functional digestive markers along with a review of the “keystone bacteria” that constitute a healthy microbiome.

Lastly we’ll look at re-feeding carbs for those who been low carb for a long time. If you’re just tuning in, it is helpful to read part 1 and part 2 beforehand for background.

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This week in part 2 we’re going to discuss the mechanics of digestion, absorption, fermentation and the role of fiber. These processes occur in the stomach, small intestine and colon and are co-dependent. For example, poor digestion because of high cortisol/low thyroid not only leads to malnutrition but SIBO. Fiber is a doubled-edged sword that can improve or worsen gut function so its important to know when to increase or decrease it.

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Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician and father of modern medicine, famously stated that “all disease begins in the gut.” In the last decade this statement has renewed meaning with over 40,000 publications listed in PubMed (60% of these in the last 3 years) on the microbiome demonstrating its impact on metabolic disease, cognitive decline, mental health disorders, and autoimmunity.

What has also manifested recently are the myriad of ways to restore gut health with some of them working for others but not you and vice versa. The reason for these inconsistencies lies in your unique gut status.

In this series we’ll seek to understand how the gut functions, it’s major disrupters and a few approaches to healing it.

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In bioenergetics, the foundational cause of metabolic disease is something called Reductive Stress. This occurs in the mitochondrial respiratory chain, usually in the complexes themselves, when electrons are not efficiently flowing forward to complex 4 and attaching to oxygen. This process increases oxidative stress and induces everything downstream of insulin resistance.

This article is a bit technical, but if you can grasp it, you’ll have the key to unlocking chronic disease.

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Last week I covered Prolactin’s role in calcium regulation and a bit about it anti-metabolic effects. This week we’re going to look at how Dopamine, Estrogen, Cortisol, Hypothyroidism and Serotonin affect Prolactin along with ways to measure it.

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Calcium is the most abundant mineral in the human body with over 99% residing in the bones and teeth. The regulation of calcium is not only important for maintaining these structures but also energy production and preventing a host of chronic diseases. In today’s post I’ll discuss the necessity of dietary calcium and how it's dysregulation is anti-metabolic.

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Even after the largest study ever on serotonin published in 2022 destroyed the myth that low brain serotonin causes depression, the fiction that serotonin is the ‘happy hormone’ still persists.

In today’s article I’ll demonstrate serotonin’s primary role in the body, how elevations in serotonin are more likely leading to mood disorders, and how too much serotonin is anti-metabolic.

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Everyone agrees that elevated cortisol is catabolic and shortens lifespan. Some functional medicine practitioners understand how high cortisol destroys our protective, wellness hormones progesterone, testosterone and DHEA. But very few understand its most important and fundamental role, regulating blood sugar. In today’s article I’ll unpack how cortisol is wrecking metabolic health and what you can do about it.

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