How to Fix Your Gut, part 1
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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Reductive Stress Creates Oxidative Stress
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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Prolactin Tells You Dopamine Status
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 Status Affects Metabolic Health
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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Serotonin is NOT the Happy Hormone
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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Low Carb and Fasting are Stressing You Out!
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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Seed Oil-Free Company Sold for $1.2B
What’s the rage behind seed oils? Why are some doctors saying seed oils are “heart-healthy” and others are saying they’re the biggest threat to health. Today I’ll explain why this issue developed and how the core of it is about PUFA aka polyunsaturated fats.
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Estrogen is the Problem
Elevated estrogen in men and women is associated with obesity and metabolic syndrome. The pro-metabolic hormones like progesterone for women and testosterone for men are both lowered by estrogen dominance. And unlike those pro-metabolic hormones, estrogens continue to be produced by men and postmenopausal until end of life.
Today we’re going to investigate how estrogen blocks T3 conversion in the liver as do the other major inhibitors like CORTISOL, PUFA and PLASTIC.
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The Most Prescribed Drug on the Planet
Levothyroxine (T4) aka Synthroid has been a mainstay in the pharmaceutical industry for decades due to the high prevalence of hypothyroidism and until this year (overthrown by Lipitor, a statin) was the most prescribed drug on the planet.
What is hypothyroidism? Why has Lipitor now taken the gold medal? And are the conditions of hypothyroidism and elevated cholesterol related?
Let’s have a look…
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If you want Ozempic, what you actually need is...
If you’re considering a GLP-1 agonist (like Ozempic) its crucial to understand how it works, evaluate the risks, and most importantly what the underlying cause is in the first place.
Let’s dig in…
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The Meridians, the Primo Vascular System and the Brain
In classical acupuncture there are 12 major meridians and 2 midline meridians. The 12 major meridians are further divided into 6 yang (downward flowing) and 6 yin (upward flowing) meridians that are paired based on whether the associated organs are considered 'hollow' or 'solid'. This pairing creates a looping, longitudinal circuit that is continuously flowing Chi up and down the body. These meridians have superficial aspects that allow them to be needled (acupoints)
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Mindfulness and the Brain
….an anecdotal study performed by Australian journalist, Graham Phillips, and Graham’s personal investigation into Mindfulness meditation’s effects on his brain. You can view the 30-minute tv report here.
Graham hooked up with a research team at Monash University to obtain baseline values for standard behavioral and neurological tests including MRI. After 2 months, one of the most significant changes was Graham’s increased performance in cognition - decreased distractibility, increased reaction time and increased working memory. At the same time, he had a simultaneous decrease in neural activity. So, what does this mean?
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