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gut health

How Three Pounds of Gut Bacteria Determines Your Skin’s Health

February 9, 2021 by Dr. Julie Greenberg Leave a Comment

Gut Health

The quest for beautiful skin is ubiquitous in Western society: we all want to have young and healthy skin. It seems reasonable that what we put on our skin would influence its appearance, but science is showing us that it may actually be what’s inside our body that has one of the largest impacts on skin health: our gut health, which is directly impacted by the health of our gut microbiome.

The Gut Microbiome

There are 3-5 pounds of bacteria that live in our gut, depending on how big we are. And those bacteria can determine a lot about how healthy we are, including our skin health. Most of those bacteria live in our colon or large intestine, and they ferment food that we have eaten but cannot digest. We depend on that bacteria to maintain our gut health and keep us healthy overall in return for feeding them. There are hundreds of species of bacteria in our gut, and some are good guys, while others are not so good.

Competition For Space

Did you know that there’s fierce competition for real estate brewing in your gut? That’s because there’s a limited amount of space, so bacteria are always trying to take over and get more room so they can grow. We want the good bacteria to win the fight, and we can help them by feeding them what they need: fiber! That’s one of the reasons why a diet high in fiber is so important. We can’t even digest fiber, but our good gut bacteria can. So to improve our gut health we need to feed the good bacteria, so they can survive and grow.

When we eat sugar, refined carbohydrates, and fat, we feed the “not so good” guys. And when we take antibiotics, we wipe out large colonies of bacteria, both good and bad, and whoever is left fights for more territory. It’s like when you arrive at the pool on a hot summer day at a resort, and there are no lounge chairs left. You lurk around, waiting for someone to get up and leave so that you can pounce and put your towel down to claim the spot. Well, our bacteria do the same thing. And once they’ve taken hold, it can be hard to get them to leave.

Benefits 0f Good Bacteria

Why do we care who wins the battle for real estate in our gut? Because our health depends on it! Yes, even our skin. The beneficial bacteria supports gut health and our overall health in many ways. For example, here are just a few of the things our gut microbes do for us:

  • Keep bad bacteria in check
  • Keep inflammation in our body at a minimum
  • Support a healthy immune system
  • Produce vitamins: vitamin B6, vitamin B12, niacin, and folic acid
  • Help digest food
  • Regulate our hormones

Leaky Gut

The term “leaky gut” gets thrown around a lot today, but it is important to really understand the concept in order to understand how gut health relates to skin health. We are a tube from our mouth to our anus, and the purpose of that tube is to extract nutrients from the food we eat. We then need to send those nutrients out to every cell in the body to provide nourishment so they can survive, which is why our bloodstream is connected to our intestinal cells.

Tight Junctions

The tiny cells in our small and large intestine have a big job: they have to let through very small molecules into the bloodstream, like vitamins and minerals while keeping out bad bacteria and large molecules that don’t belong in our blood. For this reason, our intestinal cells have “tight junctions.” Tight junctions are what they sound like: they bind one intestinal cell very closely to the one next to it so that nothing gets through.

When we eat, the tight junctions get a signal to “open up” so that we can let nutrients through, but then they close back up so that nothing else can breach the barrier. Leaky gut happens when these tight junctions get compromised, and instead of being able to close back up, the channels are always open and are too big. Then bad things like undigested food or bad bacteria can get through and “leak” into our bloodstream. This is the leaky part of leaky gut.

Leaky Gut Leads to Inflammation

Once our tight junctions are compromised, and we have leaky gut, inflammation will follow – affecting your gut health. This is because the body must respond to all of the bad stuff that is now flowing into the bloodstream. The body naturally produces inflammation to fight intruders, but ideally, the situation is only temporary. For example, when you get a paper cut, you have just introduced bacteria into your bloodstream.

Your body will note the invasion and send immune cells, such as neutrophils and macrophages, to come to create inflammation and kill the invading bacteria. Bacteria will also call the necessary cells to heal the cut in your finger. But then, once the threat has passed and your finger has healed, inflammation goes away. The problem with leaky gut is that the bad stuff keeps on coming. If the body can’t fix the tight junctions and stop all the bacteria from leaking into the blood, then it just has to keep fighting. And that leads to chronic inflammation.

Healthy Microbiome, Healthy Gut!

This is why the makeup of the bacteria in our gut is so important. The good bacteria help keep tight junctions intact and nurture healthy cells so that we don’t have leaky gut. The “not so good” guys do the opposite. So if we want a healthy gut, we must maintain a healthy gut microbiome.

There are specific keystone species that we want in particular such as Akkermansia muciniphila probiotic. Akkermansia is a good bacteria that help our gut produce a protective mucosal layer over our intestinal cells. It actually eats some of the mucous layer, but when it does this, it signals special cells in the gut, called goblet cells, to produce more mucous. So we have a symbiotic relationship with Akkermansia that actually enhances the mucosal layer in our gut.

Another star bacteria in our gut is Faecalibacterium prausnitzii. Its main job is to produce butyrate, which does several beneficial things, such as: feeds our intestinal cells, decreases inflammation, and enhances tight junctions.

Skin: The Largest Organ

Our largest organ is our skin and its connection to a robust blood supply providing a constant stream of nutrients. The skin we see on the surface is actually dead. It is the layers underneath that we cannot see that are alive and determine the health of the skin that eventually makes its way to the top. The skin is nourished by what we eat, so of course, our diet contributes to our skin health. But as we’ve already discussed, if we have a leaky gut, then whatever has leaked into our bloodstream is flowing around our whole body.

Healthy Gut, Healthy Skin

The skin really is a window into what’s happening in the gut. There are numerous studies that show many different types of skin disease are connected to the gut microbiome. These include: eczema, rosacea, psoriasis, and acne. Studies show that people with dermatological disease have higher levels of leaky gut than normal healthy controls.

Studies also show the microbiomes of people with eczema, rosacea, psoriasis, and acne tend to have too little good gut bacteria and too many bad bacteria. As we learned, this leads to inflammation, and this is a part of the root cause of dermatological disease. Inflammation is also bad if our goal is to have healthy, youthful-looking skin. It increases the breakdown of collagen and elastin in the skin, which leads to wrinkles and droopy skin.

Feed Your Friends!

So while there are some topical products that can help improve the look and feel of your skin, if you really want healthy skin from the inside out. Start giving your gut microbiome a little love and make sure you’re eating at least 35 grams of fiber a day to make sure you’re feeding your good gut bacteria!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: diet, gut health, Healthy Skin, holistic health, microbiome, skin health

The Dark Side of Garlic and Onions with Dr. Greg Nigh

July 16, 2020 by Dr. Trevor Cates Leave a Comment

On today’s episode of The Spa Dr. Podcast, we’re discussing how garlic, onions, kale and other sulfur containing foods can actually create health problems, including on your skin.

My guest is Dr. Greg Nigh who is a naturopathic physician and licensed acupuncturist practicing at Immersion Health in Portland, Oregon. He is a graduate of the National University of Natural Medicine with a dual degree as a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine and a Master of Science in Oriental Medicine.

Dr. Nigh is author of The Devil in the Garlic and has spoken around the world on topics related to sulfur metabolism and its associated problems. He has a clinical focus in naturopathic oncology but treats a wide range of other conditions including Lyme disease, mold-related illness, chronic fatigue, autoimmune diseases, and of course the wide range of symptoms and diseases associated with impaired sulfur metabolism.

In today’s interview Dr. Nigh explains how dietary sulfur is essential, but there can be issues with how its metabolized, which leads to certain health issues, including skin problems. Dr. Nigh also shares his 2 week protocol to overcome issues with sulfur metabolism.
So please enjoy this interview…

To Learn more about Dr. Greg Nigh

Website: immersionhealthpdx.com

Social Media Links: facebook.com/immersionhealthpdx.com

instagram.com/immersionhealthpdx.com

To Learn more about Dr. Greg Nigh’s new book, click here:

The Dark Side of Garlic and Onions

Dr. Trevor Cates : Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I am Dr. Trevor Cates. Today, we’re talking about how garlic onions, kale, and other sulfur containing foods can actually create issues with your health, including your skin. My guest is Dr. Greg Nigh who is a Naturopathic physician and licensed acupuncturist practicing at Immersion Health in Portland, Oregon.

He’s a graduate of the national university of natural medicine with a dual degree in Naturopathic Medicine, and a Masters of Science in Oriental medicine. Dr. Nigh is author of The Devil in the Garlic and has spoken around the world on topics related to sulfur metabolism and its associated problems.

He has a clinical focus in Naturopathic oncology, but treats a wide variety of conditions, including Lyme disease, mold related illness, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease and of course the wide range of symptoms and diseases associated with impaired sulfur metabolism.

Dr. Trevor Cates : In today’s interview Dr. Nigh explains how dietary sulfur is essential. But there can be issues with how it’s metabolized and this leads to certain health issues like in some of those cases, skin problems. This really does answer some questions that I had about why some of my patients had problems with some of these seemingly healthy foods like garlic and onions and kale. Dr. Nigh Explains why certain people have this problem and how to know if you’re one of the people that has this sulfur metabolism issue. And he also shares his two week protocol to overcome issues with sulfur metabolism. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Greg, it’s so great to have you on my podcast. Welcome.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I’m so psyched to be here. Thanks for asking me.

Dr. Trevor Cates : We went to school together. And I just haven’t seen you in so long. You have a new book that came out. I wanted to have you on the podcast to talk about sulfur because it’s something that I need to learn more about too, apparently. I’m excited to have you on and how it impacts our health and we get it in our diet all the time, but it’s not always easy for everyone.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. It’s a weird thing. Of course we have to have sulfur all the time. Sulfur is constantly needed by the body in order to make sulfate, which sulfate is doing all kinds of important things. The problem is that the pathways that sulfur moves through in order to become what it needs to be so we are not eating sulfate. Our body has to generate it from the sulfur that we eat. And those pathways can get blocked for various reasons.

Dr. Greg Nigh: When that happens, we still need to have the sulfate. And so our bodies go through some changes to work around the blockage and it’s those changes that cause the symptoms that are associated with the sulfur foods. It is not that sulfur is bad for people. It is only a matter of whether or not somebody has an issue processing sulfur. There is really not a great way to find that out other than to go through this process of reducing sulfur intake and doing some therapies to get sulfur processing right again, and then we reintroduce and find out how people do.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay, great. So let’s back up for a moment and talk about where sulfur comes from in the diet. There are a lot of different sulfur ish words that are around. So we want to make sure we are focusing on the specific one that is in our food.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Right. All the sulfur in our body has come in dietarily. There is some small amount in water, not all water, but especially people drinking well water, can sometimes have lots of sulfate actually in their water that they are drinking, but for the most part sulfur. Sulfur is just an atom. Sulfur is embedded in food. It is in protein. Anytime we’re eating protein, there is going to be some sulfur compounds in the protein. It is in various vegetables.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The title of the book is The Devil In The Garlic because there’s sulfur compounds in garlic that we just have found to be quite highly reactive for a lot of people. Onions and broccoli and all the foods. All of the foods that we typically think of as very healthy foods. We are eating the sulfur compounds and then they just have to be transformed.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Part of that happens through enzymes in our own body and part of it by the bugs that are growing in our intestine. The way that sulfur becomes a wreck for people has to do with how that transformation takes place from the dietary, just eating those nice healthy things. Then some people just have a lot of symptoms eating what they think is supposed to be a healthy meal.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. I talk a lot about onions and garlic and the benefits of that in my book and encourage people to get that. Because there are so many benefits of it. How do people know if it’s a problem for them?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. It is kind of a drag about it because there is not a great test to do. There is not a blood test that you can do. We do these antibody tests to find out if somebody is reactive to this or that food, and it’s possible to see reactivity to onions or broccoli or something, not all that common, I don’t think. What we are talking about is not that kind of reaction. We are talking about a metabolic reaction.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The only way that I have figured out to successfully identify the people that have the problem is to go through this protocol. A decent number of times, I have people that go through this two week protocol and they are nothing but just annoyed with me that I had them do that because it didn’t really change anything and that’s okay, you don’t have to solve a problem.

Dr. Greg Nigh: But I would say significantly more than half of the people who do the protocol will report anywhere from modestly feeling better to there have been those occasional people whose life is totally changed by doing it.
Dr. Greg Nigh: The treatment is the same as the test essentially, you go through the protocol and if you find that, Oh yeah, this person is definitely reactive to sulfur. You just continue with the same protocol until you get things restored and you can start to bring those sulfury foods back in.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Right. Lets use skin as an example of a reaction that some health issue that somebody might be having that could be related to a problem with metabolizing sulfur.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. Skin is actually a good one to start with because it is one of the most keynote symptoms that I associate with sulfur issues. When people have any kind of dermatitis, I mean, lots of patients that will come in with periorbital, they have eczema around their eyes or dermatitis or around their mouth or any kind of eczema rashes, or even just itchy, without any lesions.

Dr. Greg Nigh: They just feel like they are itchy. If someone has those issues, even if they have nothing else, I’m probably going to have them do the protocol because skin is so reliably responsive to changes in sulfur in the diet. There have just been so many people who not only have the improvement about their specific lesion, dermatitis or whatever, but who will say that their friends are commenting about how healthy their skin looks and how they have this new, you know, whatever.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Skin is definitely a primary symptom that flags me that this is going to be a sulfur issue. And then there are just a few other questions that we want to ask to make sure it all lines up.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay. What would those questions be?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Well, the most common things that show up with sulfur would be, brain fog is huge because ultimately, actually just to go back a little bit to what is happening physically, when people with the problem are eating sulfur, what ends up happening is that instead of generating sulfate, which the body needs a lot of, so4, is the chemical.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The work around is that the body generates this gas called hydrogen sulfide. In generating that, that is what causes the symptoms. It can cause irritable bowel and all kinds of inflammatory gut things. It is a gas, so it will go directly into the bloodstream. It just crosses the lining and goes into the bloodstream. And once it is in the bloodstream, hydrogen sulfide is needed for the formation of memory.

Dr. Greg Nigh: But if we have too much of it, it just causes brain fog. It can cause all kinds of inflammatory joint pain. It lowers the heart rate. People often have low heart rate or low blood pressure, because it lowers blood pressure. That is the constellation of things that I’m asking people about. Then also there’s this interesting crossover with alcohol metabolism. I am very commonly asking people how they do with alcohol.

Dr. Greg Nigh: My point is not to wonder how much they’re drinking. My point is that often when people have a sulfur issue, they are going to have an alcohol issue. Commonly you go through the sulfur questions and they have checked off most of the boxes, and then you ask them how they do with alcohol. Very commonly, they say, Oh, I can’t touch it.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I have one drink and I’ve got a headache or they have a very severe reaction. That is because there is a crossover point, the enzyme that is needed for sulfur processing and the enzyme needed for alcohol processing share a cofactor. If this cofactor is not available, it will shut down both processes. Alcohol is another question that I am always asking.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Is there genetic testing, any kind of snips or anything that can help identify this issue?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yes. I have people run genetic testing all the time and I run it through. There are various databases that we can run those things through. Generally, I think that too much emphasis is put on the role of various polymorphisms, which are what is really being looked at with, 23andme, and ancestry.com and all that.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I think that knowing what is happening with genetics can inform how I’m thinking about why somebody feels the way they feel. But it’s not uncommon at all that someone comes into me and they have essentially diagnosed themselves as having the disease like a MTHFR problem. There is no such thing. There is simply the status of a gene and that may or may not play itself out, depending on how we live and how we eat and how we think.

Dr. Greg Nigh: All kinds of factors determine how the genes express. In answer to your question, yes, there are certainly genes that are associated with sulfur pathways. I am very commonly doing a review if we see it line up, that oh yeah, this person has some polymorphisms that I would expect to lead to sulfur issues. Sometimes we see that and sometimes we don’t. I find genetics to be helpful, but certainly they don’t determine anything about how I am going to treat.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay. So that doesn’t change the protocol. I want you to explain the protocol that you recommend, but before you do that, I want to mention supplements because there are certainly supplements that a lot of people take that have sulfur components to it. They may also be taking those supplements and having problems.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is such a great point that you bring up because I have had a half dozen people who show up and they are feeling crappy for about three years. They tell me that it is because they are detoxing. Because they are taking lipoic acid and glutathione and thiamine, all these heavy sulfur compounds. Once I understood what sulfur problems look like, it was like, they are not detoxing.

Dr. Greg Nigh: They are toxifying themselves with this stuff. Essentially doing nothing more than getting them to stop all that stuff. And their health improves by 80%. So yes, there are many compounds, many of the supplements that contain sulfur for a good reason, because it is part of the way our bodies detoxify. We have to have adequate amounts of sulfur in order to run those sulfation pathways that are completely necessary for detoxification.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The problem is that sulfur is also used for other things in the body besides detoxification. When the sulfur that is used in those other areas of the body gets messed up by environmental things that we are exposed to, all kinds of chemicals will impact things in addition to dietary issues or whatever. That is when everything gets messed up.

Dr. Greg Nigh: So I kind of lost the central point that yes, there’s supplements that absolutely we have to get people to stop taking while they are going through this low sulfur protocol.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay. Just to clarify, these supplements are not a problem for everyone, but there are certain people that are having a problem with them. We want people to be able to take them, because there are a lot of benefits to it. You just have to address the metabolism issue so that they can take them.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is absolutely it. Glutathione is so important. Everyone should take it unless you have a really bad sulfur problem. In which case you have to fix that and then start taking Glutathione, because we all need it.

Dr. Trevor Cates : I am so glad we are talking about this because it answers this question. Why some people are taking these supplements and they are having a problem. It has been a little bit of a mystery to me why some people cannot tolerate them. Let’s talk about your protocol. What exactly do you recommend to help address this issue?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. Keep in mind that I work with a nutrition therapist, Maria, and she wrote the dietary protocol. There is a list of the usual suspects of foods that people are most likely to be reactive to. The list of the top 10 or 12 are in the book. They are garlic by far and away. It is crazy how many people have resolution of their symptoms through the protocol.

Dr. Greg Nigh: As soon as they reintroduce garlic, all their symptoms are back. It is clearly the most reactive sulfur source. Garlic and onion and kale. Kale is another shocker, many people will be symptomatic, reintroducing kale. Eggs, and then the cruciferous. Broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, that’s not cruciferous, but it’s another one of the sulfurs, and brussels sprouts. We also have people at least for the first week, it’s vegetarian because the biggest source of sulfur coming in is with meat products.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Now it’s odd to me that very few people become symptomatic when they reintroduce things like chicken or turkey, even though they are a very dense sulfur source. There is something unique about the sulfur as it is packaged in meat, that it doesn’t seem to be nearly as reactive as the reactions we see with the other vegetables.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Those are the main foods and they go out of the diet for two weeks. Then there are various kinds of supplements that support the process. I use crazy amounts of molybdenum. I mean I am not using a lot with each person, but I am giving everybody molybdenum, because that is this funky little trace mineral. It is the one that crosses over with alcohol.

Dr. Greg Nigh: You have to have it in order to properly generate sulfate. Molybdenum, and there is a particular form of vitamin B12, hydroxocobalamin which lowers hydrogen sulfide levels. Because many people that I’m working with have gut issues in addition to whatever else they might have. Often part of this process is that you have to get their gut working again, or else they are never going to be able to have their sulfur.

Dr. Greg Nigh: In addition to whatever it might be doing to support sulfur metabolism, there is also butyrate or glutamine or the various things that we do to get guts healed up. We have been doing all that stuff at the same time that we are working on lowering the sulfur intake because that lowers the inflammation level. And while the inflammation is low, we can get the gut rebuilt and then hopefully it can all come back together to expand the diet out.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Because, one point I do want to make for sure is that it is not a good thing to eat a restricted diet for a long time. People get stuck in an alley where they can’t get out of it because they have willed away all these foods that they have been reacting to. I just had a conversation yesterday with somebody who is eating three foods, that’s it. Nothing else.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is a nightmare for our digestive tract, because the diversity of our gut bugs goes down, down, down. Once that diversity is lost, you can’t digest the foods that you used to be able to digest because the bugs aren’t there. Punchline is, we bring the diet down by limiting those sulfur foods for a period of time. Then we have to move the diet back out. Our goal is to not have people eating that restricted diet for a long time.

Dr. Greg Nigh: In that sense, it is a very different kind of a diet. The low sulfur diet is a therapeutic diet. It’s like a prescription, you do this for this period of time, and then you are done. As opposed to something like a paleo diet or ketogenic diet, which people do for years. They do fine on that. That is not the intention with the low sulfur diet.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Right. I think what you are talking about is so important too. Because I also have seen people with these very restrictive diets, and most people can’t live like that, but there are certain people that are like me, I’m just fine with this really restrictive diet.

Dr. Trevor Cates : I try to remind them, it is not a healthy way to live because you have to get to the root cause. There is a reason why you can’t eat all these foods and we have to figure out why that is. We have to heal your gut. And now, I’m learning from you about the sulfur metabolism. It makes a lot of sense.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah, I think that is one of the most important lost messages in this. There are so many different diets out there that people are doing now. It is so common that a patient is doing like four different kinds of restrictive diets, all overlapped with each other, which is like, yeah, that doesn’t work. I mean, it doesn’t work for people, but they don’t know what else to do because they feel miserable if they don’t eat that way, which I get.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The imperative is on us, I think, as practitioners to educate people about the fact that that’s not going to be sustainable. Our job then is to do that work of helping people get their gut in a place where they can eat what they used to be able to eat. We don’t come into the world reacting to all these foods. We acquire those reactions. And so it is unraveling that.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Absolutely. Okay. With your protocol, then you are adding in some nutrients and then also taking out the sulfur foods for two weeks, you are supporting gut health. What am I missing anything? That is the protocol really.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. That is the main thing. We have to lower the intake and we have to speed up the outflow of these sulfur compounds that get generated keeping in mind that we can eat a low sulfur diet, but unless we are fasting, we are not eating any sulfur, where there is always sulfur coming in.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Besides the sulfur that we are taking in, the mucus membranes that are always flowing and getting part of the digestive process, it is all loaded with sulfur. There are bugs specifically that will harvest the sulfur out of the sulfomucin that end up in our gut. There is always going to be a supply of sulfur to the body. It will just keep recycling.

Dr. Greg Nigh: What we are trying to do is lower, sometimes there is this deluge, because people are cramming their morning smoothie full of kale and putting garlic in everything year round. These foods used to be seasonal, but now they are not seasonal, they are year round. There is one enzyme that will convert so3, sulfite, which our bodies make to so4.

Dr. Greg Nigh: There is only one. All of that sulfate comes in has to go through this tiny little enzyme, not all of it, some goes to do other things, but lots of it has to get converted to sulfate. There is only that one enzyme to do it. There are many things that we do to slow down the function of that enzyme. If we are loading our diet with all these sulfur compounds, I think it just overwhelms the system and it just backs up and up and up until it spills and spills just means symptoms start.

Dr. Greg Nigh: What we are trying to do is dramatically lower the amount coming into the bucket and also speed up the amount draining out of the bucket. That allows the overall level of those sulfur compounds to just reduce in the body in general.

Dr. Greg Nigh: We have done that with the diet, we have done it with some specific nutrients that either lower hydrogen sulfide out in the body or that speed up the function of that enzyme that is doing the conversion or other kinds of supplements that are addressing other enzymes that function within the sulfur pathways. We do those things and then for home therapies, one of the most, and just crazy when I realized how helpful it can be, is Epsom salt baths.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Who knew? There are some people whose guts improve like 80% just by doing Epsom salt baths. I mean, you have to do it in a pretty serious way, which is to say four cups of Epsom salt dissolved in a bath, hot bath, soak for 20 minutes, seven nights in a row to start with. Then after the initial seven nights, and for some people I have them do 10 nights or even two weeks. But then, periodically, you have to do maybe two or three of those at night.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The reason is because that is magnesium sulfate. That sulfate goes into the blood transdermally we know because somebody did a study on that. Epsom salt baths in that high concentration will build up the sulfate levels in the blood, which is great because it doesn’t have to go down the tube and run into the bugs that cause the problems.

Dr. Greg Nigh: You get the sulfate that way. And the thing is, if you can increase your sulfate level in that way, you don’t need the bugs anymore. The bugs are there to fulfill a purpose. We have this idea that we have, you know, the kill, the bugs thing. Like in gastroenterology in general, when you get bugs that you don’t want, you kill them somehow whether with herbs or with antibiotics or whatever. What I think is those bugs are there because they are trying to do something that we are not doing otherwise.

Dr. Greg Nigh: If we can fix the problem, which is to get sulfate into our system, with things like Epsom salt baths, we don’t need the bugs anymore. That is the only thing that makes sense to me, for why somebody would Epsom salt baths in the way that I just described and tell me that they have dramatic improvement in their digestion. And not doing anything else.

Dr. Greg Nigh: These are people that just send me emails because they heard a podcast or something like this, and they try it because they can just do it at home. And they have an improvement.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. Very amazing. Okay.

Dr. Greg Nigh: And another thing that, but I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t learn about it. I knew about it, but grounding, which is the whole idea of just putting your feet on the earth and this is a more boring kind of biology that I will go into. Part of the importance of the sulfur compounds is that they supply negative charge in the body.

Dr. Greg Nigh: One of the effects of having your body on the earth, touching the earth, is that electrons flow into you giving you this big bunch of negative charge. There are lots of studies that will show all these beneficial effects of just standing on the earth for a while every day. It is another thing, I think it’s just good for people to do grounding.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Those are two things that everyone is doing along with the rest of the protocol.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Ok. What do you notice in two weeks or do you continue it longer for people? Because you mentioned two weeks out in the diet.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. Sometimes we will go longer. The typical, let’s say we have somebody who definitely, needs to solve a problem, but we don’t know that. So we put them on the protocol. One of the first signs that we know and this really is a solver problem, is that they feel like hell for about the first three days of that protocol.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Whatever they had, they feel worse and they really don’t like us. Their skin is worse and their fatigue and headache and we are saying, yes, that is awesome. They stay with it. And usually what happens around day four or five, it is like the clouds part and the sunlight shines in and everything is awesome. They feel like their brain clears up and their skin starts clearing up. And everything transforms. That is a common pattern for things.

Dr. Greg Nigh: And then by the end of two weeks, we start the introductions and we just watch for symptoms to show up. Typically it is very rare that somebody is reactive to all the foods that they eliminated. Usually they are reactive to one or maybe two. We can identify that food and then you can bring all the rest in and hold that one out or keep it minimal.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Another pattern would be that people are on it and it is much more gradual. They don’t really go through what Maria and I called the sulfur dump, because I don’t know what else to call it. But it is something that causes that exacerbation. I think it is just mobilizing a bunch of compounds that we are not getting mobilized.

Dr. Greg Nigh:Other people, they don’t have that, but it is a more gradual process, but can definitely say that by the end of the two weeks, if they came in with gas and bloating, and what are the most common symptoms that are associated with it and very common by the end of two weeks, people don’t have that at all. Or brain fog or whatever their symptom was.

Dr. Greg Nigh: They are just describing that it is reduced by some or usually a pretty significant amount. The way that I would go longer than two weeks is, if somebody really is not doing well until maybe day 10. And then they start to notice their skin is starting to clear up at that point. Well, okay then, I will extend it a little beyond, but I don’t like to go too far beyond that.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Then obviously there are the people that it doesn’t do anything for. And then, all right, let’s go to plan B. I certainly don’t think sulfur issues explain everything, but I do think it is one of the more overlooked ways that we can investigate why somebody feels the way they feel.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Absolutely. And it seems simple enough, like what you are describing doesn’t seem that hard, especially if you give it two weeks and within that two weeks, if you don’t notice a difference, then maybe that is not the issue. We want to look at something else, but if it is, and you can start eating these foods again, which is so great.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. Even the people who don’t really notice significant change by the end of the two weeks, I still always have them reintroduce one by one. Because often people will say, Oh yeah, there is that headache that I used to have and that they don’t really even think about. There are times when somebody will still notice a reaction once introducing a food, even if they didn’t really notice a bit of it. But there are others who it just doesn’t help at all and which is fine, you know? That’s awesome. It’s not a sulfur problem.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So let’s talk about this a little bit, this is great to know that it is an option for people to find that out, to address this issue. For people who aren’t necessarily having a sulfur issue, but you mentioned something that was interesting to me that I want to bring back up, and that is that we tend to overdo it with garlic and kale and certain things.

Dr. Trevor Cates : That is so typical of our culture that we find something that is good and we are like, let’s get more of it. Let’s put everything that we can. I want you to talk more about that. What is the right amount and how often should we be eating things like garlic and kale.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I would say there is no, like, I don’t think there is a general answer to that. I do think that if we were to get back to eating seasonally, I think it would dramatically lower the amount of sulfur that we are taking in generally. There are certainly people who can obviously have lots of it and have no negative effects.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I actually do fine with sulfur, I don’t personally have a sulfur issue and I have never discovered an amount of kale or garlic or whatever that causes me any kind of symptoms, but there are other people who even, I mean, if they get a whisper of garlic in their food in any way, they will have a headache or their neck pain comes back or rash, the variability is quite dramatic. I have my ideas about why that would be, but I don’t know of any guidelines really for people other than don’t be ridiculous.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. Moderation. Of course that is key. I am kind of a little bit embarrassed that I don’t know when kale is in season, is it a fall crop? I guess I need to do some research on that because we have gotten so far away from seasonal eating and I live in Park City, Utah. We really don’t have much in the way of certain seasons. We don’t have a long growing season. So we get so much of our produce just brought in.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah, it is universal. You know what another issue is actually, even with local eating. Maria pointed this out to me, I didn’t realize that the Pacific Northwest, where I am, is an area where the soil is depleted in molybdenum, that funky little mineral that is needed to process sulfur. Even if someone is eating nice local, organic grown stuff, we are not getting necessarily adequate amounts of molybdenum in our diet that way.

Dr. Greg Nigh: There are other reasons besides toxicity, of course. I mean, I have a whole chapter in the book about Roundup, glyphosate, which was scientifically designed to mess up sulfur metabolism. It’s just crazy what it does to sulfur. I have written about that, but clearly you have to look at toxicity issues, but also just local organic foods may not be enough to keep us processing all this stuff the way we need to anymore.

Dr. Greg Nigh: But I got away from your point about seasonality, which I agree I am tragically ignorant about exactly what the seasons are for the various kinds of foods. I know that there are great resources to be doing that. I think there are whole diet programs that are just about seasonal eating things. So yeah, I think that is an excellent way to focus a diet generally.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Right, and I agree. I think we live in a time now where we are exposed to more toxins than we were really designed to be exposed to so taking supplements and doing certain naturopathic treatments, functional medicine treatments can be helpful and an important part of healthy living. Most of us cannot just depend upon food alone today. Unfortunately.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. I’m sure, you know as well, there are many people who come in and they want to just do everything with their diet and not have to take supplements. I don’t want to take supplements. I want to get it all from my food, which is awesome.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I think that is a great goal, but I think that we have created just such a wreck of a modern world within all the different ways that our health can be impacted in all the stuff that we have to detoxify. Just in the course of getting through our day, we do have to supplement along with that healthy diet. I think in order to keep all this stuff running the way it needs to.

Dr. Trevor Cates : A question that I have is, how can we grow food in a way that is free of pesticides or is organic and sustainable with nutrient rich soil? Is that possible?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. So wait a minute. What is the question?

Dr. Trevor Cates : It was more of a statement. I didn’t expect you to have the answer.

Dr. Greg Nigh: No, that is the challenge. That is the paradox of living in the modern world that we know what we are supposed to do, but it is impossible to do. Even people eating a predominantly organic meal still have glyphosate in their system. There are studies that show that even organic eaters, because it’s so prevalent in our environment. And there are just things that even if we don’t know that we are exposed to them, we are exposed to them.

Dr. Greg Nigh: We do our best. I think about naturopathic medicine as risk management and damage control. Those are the two things that we are trying to accomplish. So we manage our risks the best we can, we eat organic whenever we can and exercise and local foods and all that managing risks. Then there is going to be damage that we can’t even mitigate.

Dr. Greg Nigh: And so control the damage, take glutathione as long as it works for your system. There are various nutrients that you just do. Vitamin D, even people live in sunny places now we are not making enough vitamin D for all kinds of reasons. One of which is glyphosate because it interferes with the activation of the vitamin in our system. We have to mitigate those damages that are just part of being in this world.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. I don’t want it to sound like we are ending on a negative note here. What you are actually saying is a positive solution. There is a solution but it does require some, probably for most people anyway, taking some supplements and making sure you are taking the right ones in the right amounts. Working with a naturopathic physician or a well-trained functional medicine doctor, somebody like that can help you identify what your unique needs are.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. I agree, this is not ending on a downer because it is that kind of awareness that allows people to be proactive about their health. There are basic things that we can do to maintain a level of wellness that is much higher than we might be able to do just by what we think we should do, which is, just eat a lot of garlic and onions or the way we eat organic, exercise or whatever.

Dr. Greg Nigh: There are a lot of people doing everything that seems like it should be the right thing, but they still feel miserable. Part of that being proactive is simply to know what can be inhibitors of feeling fully vital, even in somebody who feels that they are doing all the right things.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is the whole role of working with a naturopath who kind of has a different way of assessing what it means to do things that are health supporting and getting those pathways unblocked and all that. With supplementation and other kinds of dietary things or whatever.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Awesome. Well Greg, it has been so fun having you on. Will you tell everyone where they can learn more about you and your new book?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. So the new book, you can get it on Amazon and all those places that you can get books. It is called The Devil And The Garlic. And about me, I am in Portland, Oregon, and at a clinic called Immersion Health. Which is immersionhealthpdx.com. My clinical focus is generally oncology. But I see all kinds of other stuff. I work digestive and all of that.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is my main gig and there is all kinds of stuff on the web page about exactly what I am doing and the kinds of therapies I am amusing and all that. So yeah, that’s my deal. And thanks so much for having me on and getting to talk about this stuff.

Dr. Trevor Cates : This has been fascinating. Thank you so much, Greg.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Thank you.

Dr. Trevor Cates : I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Greg Nigh. To learn more about him and where you can get his book. You can go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. While you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and information, and you can find out what messages your skin is trying to tell you about your health, at theskinquiz.com. Find out your skin personality type and how that’s connected to the root causes behind skin issues, theskinquiz.com. I also invite you to join us on social media. The Spa Dr. is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. Join us there and I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.

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Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: garlic, gut health, onions, sulfur

Elemental Wisdom During Transitions with Dr. Sarita Cox

June 18, 2020 by Dr. Trevor Cates Leave a Comment

Today, we’re discussing how living closer to the rhythms of seasons plus using Chinese Medicine elements benefits your health & wellness
My guest is Dr. Sarita Elizabeth Cox who provides diet, nutrition, and lifestyle prescriptions to break cycles of dis-ease and optimize health through traditional medicines, elemental and seasonal wellness practices. Her primary clinic is situated in a developing food forest on rehabilitated tornado land. She also serves the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and works to advance integrative health.
In this interview, Dr. Cox explains how the 5 elements of Chinese Medicine relate to the seasons. And, she shares wellness suggestions for transitional times and how living closer to the rhythms of seasons benefits your health & wellness. She even shares specific foods and teas that help during different transitions.
So please enjoy…

To Learn more about Dr. Sarita Cox

Website: drsaritaelizabeth.com

Social Media Links: https://www.facebook.com/AlbertaOrchardWellnessAl/
https://www.instagram.com/drsaritacox/
To take the 5 Elements Quiz, click here:

Elemental Wisdom During Transitions

Dr. Trevor Cates: Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I am Dr. Trevor Cates. Today we are talking about how living closer to the rhythms of seasons plus using Chinese medicine, elements, benefits your health and wellness. My guest is Dr. Sarita Elizabeth Cox, who provides diet, nutrition, and lifestyle prescriptions to break cycles of disease and optimize health through traditional medicines, elemental and seasonal wellness practices.

Her primary clinic is in a developing food forest on a rehabilitated tornado land. She also serves the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians and works to advance integrative health. In this interview, Dr. Cox explains how the five elements of Chinese medicine relate to the seasons and she shares wellness suggestions for transitional times. And how living closer to the rhythms of seasons benefits your health and wellness.

She even shares specific foods and teas that help during the transition. And she has these beautiful elemental wisdom cards that she shares. And we talk about how to use these to help integrate into your health plan. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Sarita. It is so great to have you on The Spa Dr. Podcast. Welcome.

Dr. Sarita Cox: Thank you, Trevor. Nice to be here.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I am really excited to interview you about elemental wisdom. Before we dive into some of the questions I have for you, can you give everybody a little background on how you came up with this system?

Dr. Sarita Cox: I can, I was working with a group of supportive colleagues and I had for a long time, wanted to write a book of 365 days of self care. And when I started really speaking with people that were in the industry, and also speaking to my accountant, one of the things that came out of this was breaking down the information into small daily self care tips that correlated to the seasons versus giving somebody one more piece of information, one more protocol to follow.

So it really came out quite organically just over time. I am really proud of the elemental wisdom structure because it really encompasses source and our relationship to source.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, that’s amazing. And you have such a unique background of all kinds of different wisdoms of Chinese medicine, Naturopathic medicine. Tell everybody, how did you decide to do all of this and how do you bring it together?

Dr. Sarita Cox: What happened is when I started last year actually producing the wisdom cards, I basically just started writing down what I was saying to my patients in the clinic day after day. And I noticed that it changed season by season. I also started trying to translate the ways in which I have become healthier. I have found that there was a great deal of healing that started with me when I really unplugged as much as possible and plugged into natural rhythms and cycles.

So specifically two years ago, I built a tiny house over a little Creek on my property and it’s completely solar and propane energized. And I started realizing when I would stop technology at sunset. I would go into this space where I would use books or try to play the guitar or do some creative projects. I slowly started acclimating to a much more wholesome rhythm that started healing my own burnout.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, I think oftentimes we do disconnect from the wisdom of nature that is around us and you and I, as Naturopathic physicians, we really believe in the healing powers of nature. But even with that, we sometimes lose a connection with nature until we spend time like you did, and really immerse ourselves in when the sun comes up, when it comes down the seasons and how that impacts us and our health and our happiness, our overall well being.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I love this aspect of it. Let’s talk more about the five element constitutional types that you created, because I think this is fascinating, especially with, during times of transition when we have been through a lot of stressful circumstances throughout the world recently. And I think it helps us to understand these elemental transition times.

Dr. Sarita Cox: It does, it helps us understand those. And it also leads us toward being able to understand who we are uniquely yet collectively and do self care. When we try to give of ourself, and we are not caring for ourself that becomes incredibly exhausting or not very effective for much more than a few minutes. The elemental five element actually is just traditional Chinese medicine structure. In the traditional Chinese system, basically there is source.

Then we start dividing away from the source. So we would go from the one, we can call it, God, the great spirit, Rama, whatever our relationship is to the super structure that most of us feel guides us. And from that, we basically break down until it looks like the familiar, your Tai Chi symbol, the yin and the yang, the black and the white of it. Our polarities, the left and the right of it, the he and the she of it. Beyond that in Chinese medicine, the structure through TCM is that we then look at the next separation in five elements.

In those five elements is a generative cycle, that cycle around year after year, year after year. Even beyond that, it goes into six year cycles with all the permutations of that. Generally people start with the spring season, which is represented by wood in Chinese medicine. And the lesson there for our times, I would say right now is thinking of yourself as a sapling that can sway a bamboo stalk that sways in the winds of change.

So we are able to be flexible and we are able to bend and change with the times instead of being rigid and fracturing ourselves and breaking. So after the spring, the energy is rising. The spring is a seed that is breaking through the cold earth of winter. And in the system that I relate to the most, every one of these seasons are elements, we come back to the earth element. Some people in Chinese medicine would say, we go from wood to fire, to earth, to metal, to water.

However, I believe the most resonating system for me is every time we transition through seasons, we come back to our earth. So as a Naturopath it has a strong resonance because we know that so much happens in our gut health. And so during transitional times, like we are in now around the summer solstice between the wood and the coming up fire, we come back to the earth to nourish our earth.

So these are practices that we do to ground ourselves, as we were saying, to reconnect physically with the earth, by going out and walking on the trails or observing what nature looks like right now. And given this model, we have that opportunity four times a year in transitions of the earth season to come back to care for the earth and do self care there. The moment of wisdom for this time would sound something like, there is more than enough.

Everything we need is already here. We just connect inside and ground ourselves. And that wisdom is available to us. It is not buying into worry, but strengthening our faith. So that is kind of the direction that we start and we rise. And then the next season will be into summer, which is the more full blossom of things. So in Chinese medicine, it is a generative cycle.

And then the modification that some practitioners and I choose to use is, this four seasons that we are familiar with, but then revisiting our earth every season, because we can’t get enough probiotics and healing our leaky guts and connecting our gut brain access. That is really why I emphasize the transition times four times a year.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Then you created these cards and I love these cards that you create. I am a big fan of cards, like angel cards, I like wisdom cards, all these kinds of things. You created these elemental wisdom cards. I think these are so great. You sent me the earth ones because that is where we are right now. Like what you are talking about. I love this idea that you have created to help people have ideas, and understanding this. Why exactly did you create them and how do we use them?

Dr. Sarita Cox: I created them in season. Over the last few years where I am embracing dynamic change and several years ago I moved my office onto a property after a catastrophic tornado. And in response to that, I created a food forest. And that is really when I started really allowing my love of gardening to come connect with my practice of medicine. So I literally moved my private clinic into the food forest office. Out of that, I became more connected to the earth gardening as a style of stress management.

When I was starting to create the cards, I was able to do it in real time. There are a lot of suggestions out there, like write a book in 30 days, hire a coach, do this, do that. But for me, what was natural is each season taking contemplative time, particularly around the transition time and start listening to my own inner wisdom, reviewing some of the classical teachings that I have been gifted from Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine from deconstructive meditation practices like Vipassana.

I will do a strong recollecting myself. Then I create the 73 cards for each season and then send them off to the printer in Mississippi. I live in Alabama, so we are supporting our local communities here. Then once they come back in, I hand stamp the bags. In my exploration last year, I used phytolacca berries. I will return when they are back in season to stamp the bags out with an herb or a pigment from that season.

It has been a real slow authentic and organic process to me that has allowed me to capture those wisdoms and then invite people to have a daily reminder. We can use them just like you are saying, we might use an angel card deck. We might just wake up in the morning every morning and then hold the deck with intention, maybe spread it out and choose one. That is a great way to just channel our day. I have also found that sometimes I may choose a collective card.

We are in such tumultuous times right now. And we are all trying. Many of us are trying to find ways to clarify our consciousness and to see ourselves and to do that self-improvement but also how to help start healing in our community, how to have conversations, how to go beyond conversations into action, to support our brothers and sisters. Sometimes I will choose the card that sets the tone for my day. That is more in a community affiliation.

In your case, Trevor, I think a great way to use the cards would be to set a card out at your family meal. It is a conversation starter and that conversation could be read by the card. What does it mean to you or your kids? It also may be, what did you do today to self care? What are you going to do tomorrow to self care? So I love the idea of sharing these with our family. It might be you pick a card and then suddenly you think of a friend.

I invite you to text that friend, email, the friend. Trevor, our public library opened back up just two days ago. One of the ways I like to use the cards personally has just been a bookmark. If we can now bookmark a resource that we are using from the public library, then when somebody opens it, it is marked to a special passage that is meaningful for you. It helps our connectedness. We actually do have on our website, Ways to Play.

And that is a dynamic and living document. We are starting to get stories from our patients and people that are buying the cards about how they play. It is not a hard, fast rule. We jokingly say that it is ages eight to 108, and we have ways to play for one, ways to play with two and ways to play with the group.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Okay, great. I was just kind of shuffling through the deck and was feeling the cards and this one kind of popped out for me and that says, enjoy the bounty. Tell me about that card.

Dr. Sarita Cox: In Chinese medicine, the earth season is related to the harvest. We have gone through the spring where we planted our gardens, and then we go through the summer where things have blossomed and become fruits of our labor. Then in the traditional sense, in the middle of that cycle is harvesting the bounty and then sharing that with those that are beloved to us. In that particular metaphor or way of being in the world, when we have harvest season, there is so much, and the earth element constitution out of balance, it can be a bit of a hungry ghost.

It can be the center for addictions because we are not connected. Because when we take things in, they don’t satisfy us. And so that particular card really reflects the fullness of gathering and the sharing of the work we have done. And many people are now able in these transitional times to share the wisdom around health and wellness, around race and connectivity. About isolation and community that they have been working on.

Many people are planting new seeds. Some are in the growth process, but earth is really about harvesting what we have been growing and then nourishing ourselves, nourishing our beloveds and then sharing because there is so much.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. In park city, our growing season is a little late. It is a really short growing season, so we just got our garden in a few days ago. And so I think, now we can grow and enjoy the bounty of the garden. And I think a lot about summer and how it tends to be a balance of full time. Right?

Dr. Sarita Cox: Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Can you explain a little bit more about summer solstice and how this ties into earth?

Dr. Sarita Cox: Sure. So the earth in the system that I am very fond of is four times a year at each of the equinoxes and each of the solstice, we come back and we revisit these concepts. Even though it might be as we are moving from spring to summer, it is about reconnecting with the fullness of who we are. The relationship there is, we are moving from spring into summer. We would revisit again from summer going into fall, we would come back and we would refresh our faith.

We would lay down our worries again. And even though it may be a late harvest for us, it may be more of a spiritual harvest or an emotional harvest if we don’t actually have foods coming in.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Very interesting. Let’s talk about how you use this elemental wisdom in your Naturopathic practice and how people use this from a health perspective. You mentioned some about gut health and the importance of that. What other ways do you use this in your practice and encourage your patients to help them with their wellbeing?

Dr. Sarita Cox: It has really been a blessing for patients because it is a cycle that comes around every year. So it’s not a fad that we get tired of, or there is no shame in where we are starting our journey again. So that is to be congratulated. As we are coming out of spring, for example, during spring, the naturopathic philosophy always cleanses your liver. That particular deck has a lot of emphasis on liver and gallbladder health. It might remind us to do a yoga twist.

It may remind us to put on a castor oil pack. It invites us to look around us and see that greenery is coming. So eat greens, sprouts are coming from the earth. Remember to eat sprouts. Our allergies may be setting in from seasonal allergies. So we may invite people to drink nettles tea, or use raw honey or Revere the honeybee to make a relationship with where all that bounty is coming from. The spring season is a detox season in terms of how we rhythm in naturopathic medicine.

And we love detoxing as Naturopathic physicians. We do believe that there is a certain level of accumulation of toxins and stagnation that gets accumulated. Naturopaths also love to do a fall cleanse. In the metal season, we emphasize brushing the skin because that relates to the largest organ the lung and large intestine. We really remind people, year after year, let’s get your skin brushing going. Let’s get your skin healthy.

Get that glow from the inside. Let go of things through the large intestine things have accumulated. So we might do a colon cleanse and we might do dry brushing and focus on that aspect of that, which is naturopathic in our training. We just invite people to remember it year after year. It is a great way of picking up your healthcare anywhere you want to during the year. We are our own worst critics. If we fall off a program, it is hard to pick it back up.

I try to remind people that every year we are on this path and we are learning more. We may forget for a moment, but then when we get that tiny reminder, suddenly every cell in the body remembers how useful nettles tea is. Oh, yes, that helped me so much last year. Then we find year after year people’s seasonal allergies, once they start realizing that maybe it was the corn they were eating, maybe it was a food sensitivity that we might explore during gut health.

But year after year, when we improve our health, a lot of the symptoms that have nagged us, start minimizing, and then they may have a flare of those, but then they can just remember in season and start again.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. I think that is so important. I think it is important to remember that there are certain foods that are better to eat at certain times and teas to drink at different times. And like you talked about with doing a spring cleanse versus a fall cleanse and the difference in those. I think a lot of times we forget that and I think a lot of functional medicine, and Naturopathic physicians, have started to get away from that.

I think it is a great reminder to people that there might be a better time, depending upon where you are in your life and also where we are in the seasons, as far as starting something, new, eating certain things. I think it is so important for us to get back to this so that we can set ourselves up for success.

Dr. Sarita Cox: Absolutely.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. I want to talk about teas for a moment because I think that is so fascinating. I love herbal teas. I love drinking tea, but there are certain teas to drink at certain times. Can you explain a little bit more about that?

Dr. Sarita Cox: When I found Chinese medicines, categorization of foods and herbs, it opened up a package of wonder for me. An easy example with teas is peppermint tea. This is one they taught us in naturopathic school actually, peppermint tea versus cinnamon tea. So if we think about drinking chai tea, that has things like black pepper and ginger, cinnamon, these types of herbs in it versus something like mint tea.

When we actually sip that tea, if we are paying attention, one is warming us and one is cooling us, and I will go into greater detail within even the mint family. We know that peppermint is actually more cooling than spearmint. Even within that family, there are going to be derivations of the temperatures that we are imbibing. When people are having a lot of hot flashes, for example, in menopause, it’s going to aggravate them to do a lot of hot spicy foods, or it’s going to aggravate them to drink their chai tea.

You can go the opposite sometimes like Indian culture drinks, spicy teas all the time, so that their perspiration is functioning well, which is our inherent air conditioning. But beyond that, there are the constitutions of temperature. There are qualities like certain teas make us more moist and certain teas dry us out more, certain teas go more to the upper body, some to the lower body, all the teas, all the herbs have affinities with one or of our organ systems.

So we can really dial in, exquisite individuation, which I will remind us all is dynamic. I only give a prescription for my patients for three months, for one season. Now it may be, they need that prescription again. But so many times I have seen people overuse a prescription that was given to them, and then it actually starts causing symptoms because they have taken too much of it. They rectified their constitution and then they took it the other direction.

That kind of reevaluation, and then now I will mix patients formulations based, not just on the season, but also their constitution. I am mostly working on their constitution, but I know if they have seasonal flares of this related to the heat, I will put more cooling herbs into their formulations. So it is a really exquisite way of noticing who we are. What is our relationship with the external world and how do we capture the dynamic nature of both us and the changing world to optimize?

Dr. Trevor Cates: Absolutely. Okay. A lot of my listeners have skin concerns because of my focus on skin. If you look at certain skin conditions, one that I just thought about was rosacea. For people who have taken my skin quiz, it is probably the heat skin type. When you think about something like rosacea, there tends to be like you what you were talking about with that internal heat, right there probably is more of an issue like that. Can you talk some about what that would mean as far as foods to eat, herbs and things like that.

Dr. Sarita Cox: What I see with rosacea in my practice is very often, it is an intricate process where people often have taken a lot of antibiotics. Antibiotics, actually, all medicines have an energy. And what happens in that particular manifestation of rosacea, the antibiotics have actually made the earth too cold. And then what we get is a deficiency flaring. It is almost in the same category in Chinese medicine that we would use the herbs for auto-immune flaring.

So when we see heat, heat on the skin, it is coming from either excess or deficiency. The first thing we have to do is tease that apart. I am working with somebody that needs to be nourished and they to be warmed, although it sounds anti intuitive. Sometimes the damage is so deep that even though we would think that herbs like cinnamon or food saw would actually overheat them, they don’t because their constitution or their modified life has dampened them so much They are super cold.

The other end of the spectrum is their constitution is just full on. They have so much energy. It is like people with high blood pressure, they have this red in their face because there is too much pressure in the system. There is too much heat in the system. Those are truly excess syndromes. Most of my patients that I have seen with rosacea, when we start healing the gut and we actually start nourishing them, usually with some B vitamins and some probiotics, I see them start to change.

Now we may not get a hundred percent with that. I have always been taught that we can create about 50% from external regimes and about 50% from internal regimes. I think when we combine those pure ways of caring for ourselves, that we will have pretty dramatic results. What do you see as the cause?

Dr. Trevor Cates: Right. No, I agree. A lot of skin problems go back to the gut. I think this is really interesting to look at it from a Chinese medicine perspective and an elemental wisdom perspective, it adds another layer of it. And it does make sense that it really is dependent upon what else is going on for the person.

It is not just what is showing up on their skin, but what other symptoms do they have? What other things are they experiencing that certainly helps to individualize it rather than just taking a look at someone’s skin and just giving them one thing. It is important to know a lot of different things about what is going on with that person.

Dr. Sarita Cox: One of the things I noticed over time that completely fascinates me about skin in the context of the Meridian systems, in our body, we have these 12 highways of energy. And Trevor, it is uncanny, time after time, somebody will just get a breakout and it might be in an unusual place. When we track it back, it is very often that Meridian system. It will come out exactly on a point, it will come out on a small intestine point on the face or a stomach channel on the face.

It might come out on the chest in our lung points. That is always fascinating to me is to look where on the skin is the blemish showing up on the body of the Meridian systems. And that often guides me like, are you dealing with some grief that is unexpressed? That might be coming out physically on their lung channel right here on their chest. I love seeing how the skin is such an offering to us about how to look deeper and what levels to look deeper, that it is not a coincidence that the blemish comes up in this particular spot.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, absolutely. That is so fascinating. I love looking at these different perspectives and how we can bring all of these together. Sarita it has been so great having you on and learning more about elemental wisdom and your cards. Can you tell everyone where they can find out more about you and also get these beautiful cards?

Dr. Sarita Cox: They can learn more about me on my website, where of course everything is in transition right now. We are at drsaritaelizabeth.com. I do have a blog that is interesting for getting a little bit deeper in the cards, also on the social media sites, Pinterest, Facebook. We are all exploring new mediums as well, but you can follow us there. And a couple of times a week, we will give a tip on our card. This one, There is more than enough.

I know at times where transitions are happening, a lot of us may feel like there is not enough, but this is a real important time to count the blessings that we do have and take stock of. I have had so many people that come in and say, I realized I don’t even need to do that thing anymore. I don’t need this. So I think these times are opportunities.

We do try to consistently give positive health tips related to whatever is going on in our current season and what is happening around our property. Social media is drsaritaelizabeth.com. We actually have a quiz on there that you can find out more about your constitutional type versus what season we are in.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Okay, great. We will have those links below your interview on The Spa Dr. Website.

Dr. Sarita Cox: Thank you Trevor.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again for coming on Sarita.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Cox. To learn more about Dr. Sarita Elizabeth Cox, you can go to TheSpaDr.com, go to the podcast page with her interview, and you will find all the information links there, including how to get these amazing cards. I really do love these. This is the earth set that I have. And she has all of the different seasons, the different elements that you can get depending upon the time of year. If you are listening to this podcast during the earth season that we talked about, then this is a perfect time to get these cards.

Dr. Trevor Cates: If you are catching this podcast later on, you might want to consider a different season or get all of them, because I think they are fantastic. Again, you can go to TheSpaDr.com, Go to the podcast page with her interview to find the information on that. And while you are there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community, so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and information. Don’t forget that your skin is an outer reflection of overall health. You can go to theskinquiz.com to find out what is your skin personality type and get messages and information on what your skin is trying to tell you and what you could do about it at theskinquiz.com. Also, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. On social media. We are on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. So join the conversation there, and I will see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.

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Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: chinese medicine, gut health, health and wellness, herbs, teas

Skin Microbiome and Eczema with Skyler Stein of Gladskin

June 11, 2020 by Dr. Trevor Cates Leave a Comment

At least 32 million Americans are estimated to have eczema. I had eczema as a child and know well how much this skin condition can impact your life – the itching, the embarrassing rashes kept me up at night. This is what led me on my path to help others with natural solutions for skin. So, whenever I hear about a natural option for people suffering with eczema, I’m curious to learn more. So that’s why I asked today’s guest to come on The Spa Dr. podcast.

My guest today is Skyler Stein who holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.A. from Duke University and leads Gladskin USA, a biotechnology-driven skincare brand. He has an interesting story that led him into the microbiome space (which he shares during the interview).
In this interview, we discuss the gut-skin connection and Skyler shares some research in the skin microbiome space that has led to topical skin care to support people with eczema.
So, please enjoy this interview.

To learn more about Skyler Stein

Website: us.gladskin.com

Social Media: Instagram: @gladskin.us

Special Offer:
20% 2+ bottles & Free Shipping
Code SPA20 @ us.gladskin.com

Skin Microbiome and Eczema

Dr. Trevor Cates : Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I am Dr. Trevor Cates. Today we are talking about the skin microbiome and eczema. At least 32 million Americans are estimated to have eczema. I personally had eczema as a child and know how much this skin condition can impact your life. The itching, the embarrassing rashes kept me up all night. This is what led me on my path to help others with natural solutions for skin.

Whenever I hear about a natural option for people suffering with eczema, especially when it has some science and research behind it, I’m curious to learn more. So that’s why I asked today’s guests to come on The Spa Dr. Podcast. My guest today is Skyler Stein who holds an MBA from Harvard business school and a BA from Duke university and leads Gladskin USA. A biotech driven skincare brand. He has a really interesting story personally, that led him into the microbiome space, which he does share during the interview.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Also in the interview, we discuss the gut skin connection, all about the skin microbiome and Skylar shares some research in the skin microbiome space that has led to topical skin care to support people with eczema. Now we know that the inside out approach is important as well as what we put on our skin. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Skylar, welcome to the spa doctor podcast. It’s great to have you on.

Skyler Stein: Thank you for having me, Dr. Cates.

Dr. Trevor Cates : You have an interesting story. I would love for you to share what got you interested in one of my very favorite topics to talk about, which is the skin microbiome. You started with an MBA from Harvard and things took a turn and led you down the path to the microbiome space. So why don’t you tell everybody about your journey?

Skyler Stein: The story actually begins in my undergrad. When I was at Duke university, I started studying genomic sciences. I was really interested in science and how the implications for society of the new emerging genomic sciences ultimately shifted that focus to energy and the environment while I was at Duke because I saw so much of the systems were so unsustainable and they had to change and there was going to be so much opportunity to go along with that change.

I brought that major and focus in energy and the environment to my career after graduating, where I worked in finance, and investment banking and venture capital and private equity, really identifying new renewable energy and alternative technologies and commercializing them and bringing them to life. Then I decided to go back to Harvard to get my MBA. And about three weeks in, I started feeling really lousy.

I was fatigued. I couldn’t concentrate or focus. I was having trouble remembering words. I had been completely healthy my entire life. And I just knew I wasn’t feeling like myself. So I went to a number of different doctors, and after seeing about six doctors, someone tested me for Lyme disease and that came back positive. I took a medical leave from Harvard, moved back to San Diego where I’m from and started treatment. Treatment for Lyme disease involves lots of antibiotics. So I was essentially taking four to five antibiotics for four to five months straight, really not understanding the consequences or the collateral damage that that would cause.

I started researching more and more about the impacts that antibiotics have on the body and discovered the microbiome. This was back in 2014 and it was really when the microbiome space was really starting to take off. There were some really exciting studies that were coming out in mice and in humans showing that the microbiome affects everything from not just healthy digestion, but everything. There are links to many chronic conditions, neurodegenerative, obesity, mental health, really you name it. There is a new study coming out everyday showing the connection between the microbiome and those health conditions.

And I was completely fascinated by this. Luckily San Diego is a hub of microbiome research. There is the Craig Venter Institute. He is the guy who first sequence the human genome, and UCSD, which has developed a microbiome Institute with some of the leading researchers in the world there. I actually decided to do an end of one study on myself, tracking my microbiome weekly for a year. The results just fascinated me.

For those listening, I have this chart that shows weekly how the different types of bacteria changed through different medicines I was taking through different supplements I was taking through different diets and alternative treatments. I could over time correlate the health of my microbiome with how I was actually feeling. And it was such a light bulb for me.

I had read these studies and I thought this was fascinating, but when I really saw the data correlate to my own health, I decided this is really a space that I want to dedicate the next chapter of my career and my life to. I healed fully from the Lyme disease. I went back to Harvard and then I went to finish my MBA at Harvard and went to join Obvious Ventures, which is a venture capital fund started by some of the founders of Twitter.

That focuses on world positive investing. And I went there to focus on something similar to what I was doing in the energy space, but finding microbiome technologies and the opportunity to commercialize them. So while I was at Obvious Ventures, I spent all my time talking to as many researchers, academics, startups that were focused on microbiome sciences to improve human health.

As part of that process, I really focused on the skin microbiome space. There is a lot of work done in the gut microbiome. But there was less attention at the time on the skin microbiome. The science was clear that it is as important to our skin health as our gut microbiome is to the rest of our health. Through that process, I met the team at Gladskin, they are based in the Netherlands, near Amsterdam. I saw what they were doing.

They showed me their research. They showed me their results and they were leaps and bounds ahead of any other player who I had talked to in the States and decided to join them full time to bring that technology to the United States.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Fantastic. Thank you for sharing this. And thank you for sharing this slide. Before you close out of this, for those people that are watching the video, can you explain what exactly we are looking at here? What are the different colors and then it looks like you were taking antibiotics, then you took antifungals and then maybe did some travel. Is that what we’re seeing here?

Skyler Stein: Yes. I start at the beginning of this chart, you can see the first three bars. This is when I was on heavy antibiotics, essentially 80 to 90% of my entire microbiome was made up of one type of antibiotic resistant bacteria. When you are taking antibiotics over a long period of time you are naturally breeding more and more, and all that survives are the antibiotic resistant bacteria and they continue to thrive.

The type of bacteria is called Enterobacter which can cause lots of problems. And I was feeling it with my symptoms then. Through taking all the antibiotics, and by killing all the bacteria, it allowed the fungus that naturally lives in your gut in a healthy balance, it caused that to allow it to overgrow because the bacteria was not there to keep the fungus in check.

So you can see in the next chapter where it says antifungals, once we reduce the amount of the fungals, we could increase the amount of healthy bacteria back into my gut so it looks like a more naturally healthy balance over the next six months or so with the blue charts. That is essentially a healthy bacteria, different types of healthy bacteria that are starting to repopulate in my gut, to make me more healthy.

Fortunately around Thanksgiving. I took a family trip to Mexico, to Cabo, and drank the water. What was interesting is, it caused complete eradication of all the progress I had made over the prior six months and that same antibiotic resistant bacteria that had grown when I was taking all the antibiotics,it allowed that to really come back and thrive, which was fascinating.

My microbiome looked different actually going forward from the impact that Mexico had. I then saw an ayurvedic practitioner who prescribed me a three day cleanse of Kanji water. And I can tell more about what that is, but it’s essentially different ayurvedic spices with over cooked rice. I just drank the water from that for three days, and you can really see over those three days, this healthy bacteria coming back and repopulating.

It was essentially a way to selectively feed the healthy bacteria in your gut. And for me, this was such a turning point and the light bulb for me, that the microbiome really is the missing link between some alternative Eastern therapies in Western science. Now that we have the technologies to really measure what these alternative treatments and the effects they really have. It is a way to really quantify the impacts there.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah, fantastic. The pink that we see in the graph there looks like it was present a little bit after the antifungals, and then it became much more prolific. What is that?

Skyler Stein: Yes. Those are called Bacteroides. It is generally healthy bacteria found in many people’s microbiomes, generally people who are healthy have a large portion of their microbiome, with Bacteroides type of bacteria. After that Kanji ayurvedic cleanse that I did, it became a permanent part of my microbiome going forward from that date. So even though I still wasn’t on it created an environment that made it healthy for that type of healthy bacteria to continue to grow.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay. Very cool. And then what kind of test was this that you did?

Skyler Stein: This is essentially a test where they sequence all of the bacteria that are in your microbiome. So it is called a 16s test. It allows you to look at the 16s gene on each of the bacteria, which gives you a good idea of the taxonomy of that gene.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Right. Okay. This is the gut microbiome, not the skin microbiome. I just want to clarify, and this also doesn’t include fungi. This is just the bacteria, not fungi. It would have been interesting to see what happened after the antifungals to the balance of those.

Skyler Stein: Absolutely this is just focused on the bacteria, but you can see the impact of the antifungals, which don’t directly have impact on bacteria, but you can see indirectly what happened to the bacteria by taking them. It would have been fascinating to see the antifungal data as well. But I think this also paints a pretty clear picture of what was happening there.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Let’s talk more about the skin microbiome, because you were just talking a bit about the gut microbiome. Now I have talked to my audience some, they know that in my book, Clean Skin From Within, I talk about the skin microbiome and the gut microbiome, how it connects to it. Tell us a little bit about your understanding of the skin microbiome and what fascinates you so much about it.

Skyler Stein: Yes. It is widely known now that a healthy balance of bacteria in your gut is required to be healthy. I think most people in the U.S. understand probiotics and understand healthy balance in the gut, but there has been way less focus on the skin microbiome. When you tell people that your skin works the exact same way as your gut, and it also needs a healthy balance of bacteria in order to be healthy, it’s a light bulb that goes off, they are just so intuitive for so many people to really understand.

We have completely disregarded the skin microbiome. We have been taught that we are dirty and we need to scrub it clean and to essentially disinfect it every single day. And by doing that, we create an environment that is unhealthy. It is essentially like taking antibiotics for your gut every day. It doesn’t create an environment for those healthy bacteria to be able to thrive.

We also know that different parts of the body are colonized with different types of bacteria, depending on the environment that they are in. And actually, different people’s forehead to forehead is more common than my own forehead to the back of my knee. In terms of what the skin microbiome looks like there. More research is showing that there has been a connection between the skin microbiome, the types of bacteria that live on the skin and different types of skin, inflammatory skin conditions for a long time.

It was taught in medical school that the microbiome is really a reflection of what is happening of the disease on the skin. It is a symptom of what the cause is of the actual disease. There is more and more evidence coming out now that the skin microbiome is actually the cart pulling the horse where it is the imbalance in the skin microbiome. That is really the driving force that’s causing these different types of inflammatory skin conditions.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah, absolutely. What you said about hygiene, I really want to emphasize that because I do think that for so long and still for many people, when someone has a skin problem like acne or eczema, psoriasis, dermatitis, a lot of these things people will think, Oh, that means my skin is dirty and I just need to clean it more. I need to use more cleansers and soaps and, and that’s actually further disturbing, disrupting, damaging the skin microbiome instead of moving in the right direction.

Skyler Stein: Oh, absolutely. If there is an invasive weed in the rainforest, instead of carefully weeding out the one problem, essentially what we are doing is we are burning the whole rainforest down and hoping that it comes back completely healthy and diverse. Because there is less flora and fauna and all those symbiotic relationships there, when you burn everything down, it really creates an environment for the bad pathogenic invasive species to take a hold without the protective species to keep them in check.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Right. Absolutely. Antibiotic resistance and all of that as well comes into play when we are using topical antibiotics or even oral antibiotics.

Skyler Stein: Yes, absolutely. Specifically within eczema or atopic dermatitis, which is a condition that affects about 30 million Americans up to 20% of children. There was an article put forth by Heidi Kong at the NIH that shows right before an eczema flare up happens, there is the signature microbiome imbalance that precedes it for the vast majority of people. And that it wasn’t until the microbiome healed, that then allowed the flair to resolve, which is a really fascinating piece of research that has caused many more skin microbiome researchers to dive deeper into really what’s happening here.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. I started going to some of the skin microbiome conferences a few years ago. We have been talking about the gut microbiome at Naturopathic medical school. I started learning about it there but the skin microbiome has been a little bit newer and certainly I became very interested in it. When I was going to the conferences, I realized there was so much we still don’t know, and that we are still learning about the skin microbiome and it is super complex.

I think a lot of times people are quick to jump to this assumption that the gut microbiome is going to be similar to the skin microbiome, at least the general public. So whatever is good for the gut microbiome must be good for the skin microbiome to put on topically. People are using products or bacteria that are in the gut on the skin, but that is not going to really help.

Skyler Stein: Right. I think there are a lot of companies that, for example, will put lactobacillus yogurt extracts, which lactobacillus is really healthy bacteria for the gut, but doesn’t naturally exist or live on our skin. Not all probiotics are created equally. It is really important what exactly you are applying to your skin, especially depending on the problem that you are experiencing. It is definitely not a one size fit all. It is so complex and the more we are researching, the more we are learning, how much we don’t know about it.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. The challenges with the skin microbiome and using a topical on the skin, because I was so excited about initially, I thought, okay, well, I am going to do some research and start adding probiotics to my skincare products. It is not that simple because first of all, the bacteria are so different and they vary, like you said, from one person to the next, from one part of your body to the next, it varies so widely.

And then even if you identify an organism, how are you going to make sure that it stays alive in the topical in a way that is going to actually provide benefit rather than just being on the label. Then you also have to deal with the FDA regulations, of no live bacteria are supposed to be living in a skincare product. I realized, okay, this is way complicated. Maybe I need to take a step back here. It sounds like Gladskin is one of the few companies. There are a few emerging that are getting to the real science on this and figuring out some solutions for people. And especially, it looks like that is his focus on eczema on atopic dermatitis, right?

Skyler Stein: Absolutely. That is where we are starting. We see tremendous results with our Gladskin product for people with eczema. It is really about our view. It is about two things, keeping the bad pathogenic bacteria levels down as low as possible and keeping the healthy ones up. Sometimes just applying a probiotic will help with the healthy bacteria. But if there is a problem bacteria on your skin, that is really causing inflammation, that is really irritating things.

If you don’t get rid of that, you are not going to solve the problem. Gladskin uses what is called Endolysins technology and science. This has been available in Europe for about five years now. Gladskin has been sold there. We have helped hundreds of thousands of people in Europe with that technology. We just launched Gladskin into the U.S. in January. We are just getting started and really focusing on educating about why Endolysins are different and how it is really a different category and approach overall of treating it compared to anything else that is really available in the U.S.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. Amazing. Can you explain what is different about people with eczema, atopic dermatitis than everyone else?

Skyler Stein: Yes. So with people with atopic dermatitis, there is this particular species of bacteria called staph aureus, which is commonly known as staph. There is a difference between people who are colonized with it, meaning you have it on very low levels versus a full blown staph infection. Traditionally, it has been thought that as long as it doesn’t look like a classical infection, there is nothing you should really do about it.

Antibiotics should really be spared for the times that it’s a full blown infection. But what the research is showing now is that the vast majority over 80% of people with eczema are colonized with this bacteria. Even if it’s not at clinical levels where it is called an infection, but it can be causing inflammation all along the way. Previously doctors were only told to treat it if it was classified as an infection. Gladskin really focuses on balancing that skin microbiome at the core before things get out of control, even if it is not showing up as an infection.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay. Can you explain a little bit more about how this really helps, going a little bit deeper into how exactly this helps people with eczema?

Skyler Stein: Yes. The Heidi Kong article that I mentioned showed that the microbiome balance proceeds an eczema flare, and then the microbiome balance needs to heal before the flare can heal. Gladskin takes the approach of constantly monitoring and keeping that microbiome balanced. To reduce the likelihood of flares from happening and to help them to resolve quicker by really focusing on the microbiome first.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay, great. What are some of the other things that you guys have found with the skin microbiome in ways that help people with eczema?

Skyler Stein: Yeah. We found that the vast majority of skincare products in the U.S. are packed with preservatives. We think about preservatives as something to keep our product fresh so that it can stay on the shelf longer, so we can have a longer life, but preservatives are really broad spectrum antibiotics that kill bacteria. Every day that we are applying skincare products with preservatives, we are putting those broad spectrum antibiotics on our skin.

The preservatives are really important for the way most skincare products are produced because it helps keep the product safe. It helps keep consumers safe to make sure that there aren’t unhealthy problems causing bacteria inside the bottle, especially products that you kind of dip your fingers into every day. It is a way of keeping the product clean without infecting it every day.

Those preservatives can be really irritating for people. It is a similar line of thinking right now with COVID and everybody is constantly washing their hands, constantly disinfecting their hands and more and more people are seeing their skins are getting more sensitive. There are more eczema type flare ups from the overuse of those products. All those products are doing is killing the skin microbiome, which otherwise keeps your hands healthy.

It is really the awareness of it and the importance of the skin microbiome is becoming more and more obvious to people. So long story long answer to your question, but it’s about using products that both can preserve the healthy bacteria that naturally are growing on your skin and minimizing the pathogenic bad problem causing bacteria.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Great. What is some of the research you have done? You can make claims on the product. So obviously you have done some research on this.

Skyler Stein: Yes, we have done a lot of research. Mike Rios, the biotech company that developed this is a hundred person, biotech company in Europe. We have done a tremendous amount of research. There was a double blinded placebo controlled trial in Europe with Gladskin and it showed that there was roughly 80% reduction in reported flare ups compared to the product that did not have the Gladskin technology inside of it.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Wow. It is great to see that. I had eczema as a child and my daughter started developing it too when she was younger and once it starts and you get that flare up, it just gets harder to manage. And it’s nice to know that there are things to help with calming it down. I know with my daughter, for a while, she was starting to get it on her hands. What we realized is that at school, the soaps that they use in the dispensers was really irritating her skin.

The more she would use it, the worse her eczema would get. It started to get better over the weekend when she was home, then she would go back to school and it would come back. I actually had my pharmacy compound a natural hand-wash for her. She started using that instead and took it to school with her and used it and that helped. Of course she also has a gluten sensitivity, and so if she eats any gluten at all, she gets a flare up of eczema.

That was another thing that we had to work on from the inside out and helping her gut microbiome. I definitely know it is challenging if people are looking for options besides topical steroids and the conventional treatment, which can calm the flare up initially, but it is not a long term solution. And it’s certainly not the best solution either. If you can find other things to help soothe the skin, support the skin microbiome, it’s certainly a healthier approach. And it is certainly more of a Naturopathic approach from my perspective of helping support the body to heal itself. The body is very wise when just given the right tools, it can recreate balance and good health.

Skyler Stein: Absolutely. Eczema is a chronic skin condition. And so we need tools and medicines that align with the chronic nature of the condition. Steroids are fantastic over a two week period, but it is really a bandaid for the two week period without getting to the root of what’s really driving the disease.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Skyler it has been so interesting having you on, and I love your personal story. Thank you for sharing your personal story at the beginning, and what led you to Gladskin and all of the research and things that they are doing there. Tell everyone where they can find you learn more about the solutions that you all have.

Skyler Stein: Yes. You can come check us out at gladskin.com. You can purchase the product directly from there. If it doesn’t work for any reason, we offer a no questions asked guarantee to make sure that everybody is happy. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for coming on.

Dr. Trevor Cates : I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Skyler Stein. And if you’d like to have more information about Gladskin, you can go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with their interview and you’ll find the information there. They have generously offered a discount for people who would like to try out the products and I don’t make any commissions. I don’t make any money from the sale of this product. I have no association with this product. I just heard about it, thought it was very interesting. I love hearing things that people are doing innovatively, especially in the skin microbiome space, because it’s so near and dear to my passions. So while you are at thespadr.com, I encourage you to join the spa doctor family. So you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and information. You can also take the skin quiz to find out what messages your skin might be trying to tell you about your health, including the skin microbiome, and how much that might be playing a role in the health of your skin. You can go to theskinquiz.com to take that online quiz. Also, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. on social media. We are on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest. And I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.

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Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: eczema, gut health, microbiome, skin rash

The Microbiome Solution with Naveen Jain

August 2, 2018 by Dr. Trevor Cates Leave a Comment

On today’s podcast, we’re talking about how understanding the microbiome may be able to change the world’s healthcare as we know it and make illness “optional.”

My guest is Naveen Jain who is an entrepreneur driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several successful companies including Moon Express, Viome, Bluedot, TalentWise, Intelius and InfoSpace. Viome is focused on disrupting healthcare with the goal of “making illness elective” by identifying microbial biomarkers that are predictive of chronic diseases and to adjust the microbial imbalance through personalized nutrition.

Naveen Jain is also a trustee of the board at the X PRIZE Foundation where he is focused on using incentive prizes to find solutions to many of the societal challenges.  And He recently launched a million-dollar Women Safety XPRIZE to empower the women around the world. And, he is on the board of Singularity University where he is focused on educating and inspiring leaders to address humanity’s grand challenges through innovative technologies.

Naveen Jain has been awarded many honors for his entrepreneurial successes including “Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year”, “Albert Einstein Technology Medal” for pioneers in technology, Recipient of “Ellis Island Medal of Honor”, Most creative person” by Fast Company,  “Top 50 philanthropists of 2018” by Town & Country magazine, “Humanitarian Innovation Award” at the United Nations, “Distinguished Global Thinker Award” by IILM, “Most admired Serial Entrepreneur” by Silicon India,  “Top 20 Entrepreneurs” and “Lifetime Achievement Award” for the leadership by Red Herring.

On today’s podcast, Naveen shares how we can come together to solve the world’s problems, including healthcare. He shares about the exciting research on the microbiome and the potential it has for preventing and reversing many chronic diseases. And what his company is working on to continue to address the healthcare crisis. 

So, please enjoy this interview…

Learn more about Naveen and his ventures with Viome: Website

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TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor:             Hi there. I’m Dr Trevor cates. Welcome to the spa doctor podcast. Today we’re talking about how understanding the microbiome can change the world’s healthcare. My guest is Naveen Jain, who is an entrepreneur driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is a founder of several successful companies including moon express, biome Blu dot, talent wise, intelius infospace. Biome is focused on disrupting health care with the goal of making illness elective by identifying microbial biomarkers that are predictive of chronic disease and to just a microbial imbalance through personalized nutrition. Nevine is also trustee of the board of the x prize foundation, and he recently launched a million dollar women safety x prize to empower women around the world. On today’s podcast, Nevine shares how we can come together to solve the world’s problems, including healthcare. He shares about the exciting research on the microbiome and the potential it has for preventing and reversing many chronic diseases, and he talks about what his company is working on to continue to address the healthcare crisis. Nevine is such an inspirational speaker, so I think you’ll enjoy this interview. Your vein is so great to have you on my podcast.

Naveen:           It’s an honor and a pleasure. I’ve been looking forward to it.

Trevor:             Yeah. Great. So I know that you have this mission to get people together to solve the world’s problems. Right? And the way we actually connected was because of your microbiome test, but then I’ve learned that you’re doing so much more. Uh, so what got you inspired to do this?

Naveen:           Well, first of all, and this is the first time in the human history that individuals in a small group of people can do things that could only be done by nation states and it used to require that humanity to essentially pooling our resources and give it to this entity called government and hoping and praying that someone there might do something about it and we all have learned, especially in our current administration, they’re not generally the things happen the way we want them to happen, but such is life. Right? But that’s what the democratic system in the bulge. But that doesn’t matter because we as entrepreneurs, you know, the presidents come and go in the niche, the niche and his phd. But if you look at the innovation, innovation never stops, you know, innovation is not in that state or a blue state. It’s really isn’t national global things.

Naveen:           It would continue to walk and as you mentioned that now the technology is at a point where everyone has access to the same set of technology seem separate research papers that you could be sitting in an African, have access to some information that you have sitting at Stanford and that is really what’s changing everything that means now you and I and a small group of passionate people are able to do things that were unheard of. So for example, if you look at the space exploration, it used to be not signed the superpowers in the government. And if you look at today, it is done by Elon and Richard and Jeff and you know, people who are going out and saying this is something we can do. And innovation is accelerating. In the last 50, 60 years since we had the first man landing on the moon, no one ever thought we could build a reusable rocket.

Naveen:           We obviously had the shuttle but never eddie usable rocket. And the point is now that innovation is accelerating the pace and the same thing is starting to happen in the healthcare. Our healthcare system is not that it’s broken, it is just become obsolete. It was designed for the purpose of taking care of people who are dying from infection at an acute needs. And our system does that extremely well. But today in our healthcare system, most people are suffering from chronic diseases. And as we all know, the chronic diseases don’t happen overnight. They happen over time. I mean it’s not like we go home and say, honey, last night I was out with boys and I think it might’ve caught obesity.

Naveen:           It’s not whether you look at the depression or anxiety or you look at the Alzheimer, Parkinson’s and you look at auto immune diseases. It’s not something you wake up one day and you catch. This happens because you have a chronic low grade inflammation. And this is really where the fundamental shift is coming from. In the last 10 years. It has become completely clear that almost all of the chronic diseases, and I think you know as your audience will appreciate whether it is a skin disease, whether it’s an acne, Eczema or dry skin or any type of skin diseases they look like they show up on the skin, but they really are inflammation that’s internal and so when you know my mother who is a beauty from inside out, she really meant it and if in fact if you go back and start to think about the things that have been in our vocabulary and someone will say, Hey, do a gut check.

Naveen:           Listen to your gut. What is it in that gut test they’re asking you to do? And you know, if you go back even 2,400 years ago, hippocrates said, all disease begins in the gut. What did he know? And then he said something very profound. You know, one man’s food is another man’s poison. That means there is no such thing as you know, or some healthy food that needs a food that’s good for trevor. Maybe bad for Nevine and the food is good for me. May Not be good for me in three to four months because as your microbiome inside the gut, I’m going to come back and describe what that is, but that is the key is that our body is an ecosystem and I’m going to come back in a second. Describe but just taking oral concept that you know, bs is skin decisions.

Naveen:           Whether it is aging. I mean there’s no way that it’s written that you know, humans must age and when they age they must get wrinkles. They must get all these chronic diseases that are somehow people are appearing. That what happens is over time we continue to neglect and continue to build up on these toxins in our cells are constantly being essentially bombarded with the free radicals. And so it’s really happened because as we’re aging, we are eating poorly. We’re in a rush during the time when we need to be healthy. We’re all trying to pursue our Korea and running and trying to grab a hot dog wall between the meetings and eventually your gut micro biome starts to get that dysbiosis and you start to see the thing that you never thought you would ever have you. You start to get brain fog, you just start to get tired.

Naveen:           You start to not get good sleep, and these are all symptoms of exactly the same thing, which is a low grade chronic inflammation. So that’s a long answer to your short question about you know, what we can do as humanity and what drives me. What drives me is what if it is possible to create a world where chronic illness is absolutely a matter of choice. What if illness was purely optional and what if that was possible today because now we have technology at our disposal to be able to look at a molecular level, what is going on and to be able to apply the artificial intelligence to be able to make sense of all the data that human brain can have a process and that technology is not going, not just going to revolutionize healthcare. I think is going to completely implode and disrupt our current healthcare system and if I may say so, and if you don’t mind my indulging in the second year is that I find there is no other industry traveler as you are a prime.

Naveen:           I think an example of it you took on this large companies, whether you call them cosmetic companies or pharmaceutical companies, they want to keep you sick. The pharmaceutical companies have become parasite on humanity. To them, a chronic disease is actually a subscription business. The only. They never care about what’s causing them to simply want to suppress the symptom so you have to take their drugs for the rest of your life. Now imagine the only person who doesn’t want to stay sick is the person who is sick, right? And you know even the best drugs that suppress a symptom have efficacy rate of 20 to 25 percent. Now imagine what that really means in layman’s terms. That means 75 percent to 80 percent of the people are not only going to be not help, they’re going to be harmed. There’s no industry where you and I can sell a product telling our customer they did.

Naveen:           You do, percent of you who are going to be harmed by it, but you should buy it. Anybody could do that. I mean that is the only industry you get with it are the only me and are taking advantage of humanity that humanity has to come together to kill this parasite. We have to say, enough is enough. We’re not going to allow us to be with demise anymore. We’re going to empower ourselves with information and we want to go out and solve the problem and that’s why I personally admire you. Travel for what you’re doing. You took on a project that is not easy. These are the billion dollar companies who would rather have you feel because they have. They don’t want you to succeed and that’s the reason what drives you and what drives me is to say, you know what? We’re going to side on the side of our customer, our people, our friends and our family and our loved ones who are suffering from it and we’re not going to let them suffer anymore. And that’s what drives me. And that’s what drives your truck.

Trevor:             Absolutely. It’s so true. And it is a very empowering idea that we have that control, that we can make those decisions ourself and that we have control. And I don’t mean just you and I mean we collectively have control over our destiny of our health and that we don’t have to rely upon some doctor in a white coat that’s been sitting there all day. They’re willing to spend seven minutes talking to you that we can actually do take, take charge of our health. And, and so I’m kinda curious what, why the microbiome, what you see when you created, um, volume, what led you to find the microbiome and feel like this is the future?

Naveen:           Okay. So I’m going to step back for a second that I’m going to come on back here. So as you know, my other company is Moon Express, which is the only company in the universe that has permission to leave earth orbit and land on the moon. And that is actually, it’s going to have a first mission to the moon next year. And the only reason I mentioned that is as we were getting, as we were getting closer to launching this mission, I started thinking about the ones you’ve done that Moonshot, what do you do for an encore, you do another moon shot, and this time it was going to be a symbolic moonshot. And I start thinking about that. There are two big problems that you know we as humanity must, must solve. One is education and the second one is healthcare. And I started looking at both the problems and it turns out the booth were very similar problems and in a sense that in both cases the people believe the system is not working for them.

Naveen:           It is broken and it dumps out the neither one of them is actually broken. Our education system was designed to teach US skills and the industrial era. That was all we needed. We needed 10 million accountants and we needed 5 million late machine operators and meaning $20,000. These people and our education system, wonderful job of teaching them the skills and they could use those skills for the rest of their lives in the world. Live today, which is the word of exponential technologies that miss in that world. Any skill that you learn becomes obsolete by the time you graduate. So think about it for a second. By the time our children graduate, what they learn is no longer valid because the world has moved on in that world. You have to rethink about what education is. It needs to be learning to learn. It’s about learning to solve problems.

Naveen:           You can no longer be unit disciplinary. It has to be multidisciplinary because problems don’t tend to be unidimensional that it’d be multidimensional. Right? So my point is that is where the education system needed to be fixed. And then I looked at the, looked at the healthcare, exactly the same thing. It was designed for the times when people need it to be taken care of infectious diseases. And here we are sitting with chronic diseases. It healthcare system that was designed for episodic sickness is dealing with a chronic sickness and no wonder the things are not working. Now, as I started looking at the things and I, you know, I’m just a information junkie. I went probably must have read 10,000 research papers that came out in the last 10 years and it became very clear to me whether you read nature and the cell and any of the peer reviewed journals that every single chronic disease.

Naveen:           I read Parkinson’s, it starts in the gut 15 years before you see the first symptom and people are not doing the fecal transplants for autism and it turns out the anxiety and depression tends to start with the gut as a low grade inflammation and you start to think about obesity and diabetes and autoimmune diseases and even the heart disease or cancer in the last six months alone, there are papers published by the Mayo Clinic about the breast cancer being caused by the microbiome. They took I think 1600 women with breast cancer tissue and they found was I, you know, similar microbiome that was causing that breast cancer. They did the same thing for pancreatic cancer. The same thing on the liver cancer and what they’re learning is not only our microbiome is responsible for many of these chronic diseases. What’s even more interesting is the weather. The cure for these things work or does not work also depends on your microbiome, so they were research publishing there, whether chemotherapy works or it will actually kill you, depends on your gut microbiome and similarly immunotherapy, whether it works or does not work because at the end of the day, despite how proud we are of who we are as humans, we are basically, there are more more microbial cells in our human body that are more foreign cells in our body than human cells and that everyone knows, but what they don’t know is what makes us, is really our gene expression.

Naveen:           Our DNA does not make us who we are. Our genes are not our destiny. And I’ll give you an example of why I believe that. So first of all, we all share almost 99 percent same DNA. Uni look very different, but 99 percent of our DNA is identical. In fact, I and a three, she had almost 80 percent the same DNA. Not that is not interesting. What’s interesting is if you look at us as humans, every part of our body is identical. The same DNA, same Dni is. That’s not here is also not taught our skin, our lungs, everything, so how is it the same genes can make here and took and why is it we don’t get the tooth growing up on our head and heel growing in our mouth is because it controls the genetic expression of what genes are expressed and what genes are not expressed, and that’s why the same DNA can produce every part of her body.

Naveen:           Now, what’s very interesting is that human DNA only produces about 20,000 genes and the microbiome, these organisms, we have a collection of these organisms, whether they are bacteria, viruses, fungus, yeast, mold, or even the bacteriophages, which are the viruses that attack bacteria. All these combined is what we call microbiome. They produce somewhere between 2 million to 20 million genes to think for a second. That means we are less than one percent human when it comes to our gene expression. So why are they important? So if you think about it, that everything that’s happening in our body is controlled by the gene expression. And that gene expression is primarily microbial. And there is a, you know, some, most people still have this abstract concept of these critters in their gut and they just like, Hey, I don’t want them, I want to kill them. All right? And the point is nature has created us as a symbiotic relationship because we already complex all the nutrients that our body needs.

Naveen:           Our Body cannot digest the food we eat. It has to be digested by our microbiome and they produced the nutrients that our body needs. So if we feed them the wrong thing, they produced the wrong thing, and many of these wrong things can either be inflammatory. So if you’re reading this stuff like eating lots of protein and you’re feeding these things called protein for mentors, you suddenly start to see a lot of ammonia and sulfides being released and that may show up as the Zima and dry skin or acne in your gut, or you may be actually eating stuff that’s producing lipopolysaccharides Lps, which causes inflammation. Again, that shows up as diabetes or skin procedures to all these things are simply the symptom inflammation thing of inflammation really is pulling a string and wherever the weakest link is, it breaks there and some people that weakest link is the heart of our other parts of the body and some people assist skin and all these things start to happen over time. Now, very interesting is as I tried to explain this counter microbiome traveler, most people just still have a very hard time. So I came up with this tongue and cheek his story, uh, what, how humans were created. And if you, me, and I’m going to tell you this story because once you hear it, you can never hear it again.

Naveen:           So here’s how it all happened. So as we all know, trevor, that we were all, you know, on this planet, planet, spacecraft that we call planet earth, the micro organisms have been around for three and half, 4 billion years. The humans only evolved in the last couple of million years. We’re very new species, the human species. So how did we come to be? So here’s how I think happened. One day, all the bacteria in wireless, in the east and the fungus and mold, they all got together and said, we’re sick and tired of living in the smallest place we want to take over the world. And they all looked at each other. One of them raised their hand and say, I have an idea. What’s your idea? What if we can clear this bipedal thing and what the brilliance of us could live inside it? All we have to do is keep this thing healthy and keep feeding it what we want.

Naveen:           Keep feeding it so that it stays healthy. We can make it clear if anything we want and it’s going to go everywhere looking for the food all over the world is going to poop everywhere and it’s going to spread this around and we’re going to take over the world. And they created humans. Now, interesting thing happened. Once a human’s got cleared it, they start to wonder, just like today, you and I wonder about, hey, artificial intelligence, what if some day it became smarter than humans? What will happen to us? Humans? And these organisms are not dumb. They stop, they reassemble and says, master, master, we have a problem. What’s the problem? Some monster. We created this monster be called humans. Aren’t you worried? Someday they may become smarter than us. What are they going to do about that? Master said, don’t worry. We got a whole plan in place.

Naveen:           What is that master? While I’m going to tell you the secret. Then inside the human cell, this thing they called Mitochondria, what they don’t realize is this is one of our older brother is right there inside there, so that provides them all the energy and we talked to it all the time and anytime that humans go out of control, he shut the energy pipe and they’re done. Master. That’s brilliant. But you’re not thinking right now. They started to develop this thing called brain. What are we going to do about that? Master says, that was the first thing we thought about it. Remember, we live in the gut. We put a direct connection to the brain. They call that a vegas nerve. And imagine that Vegas nerve, they can’t. They’re going to name it after Las Vegas thinking, what happens in the gut is going to stay in the gut. They were. What happened was, now I’m going to tell you another secret here. Remember what makes them feel good to serotonin thing. We don’t let them produce much of that. Ninety percent of that we produce ourselves. In fact, we control their emotions, their behavior, their decision making. We have a direct control over the Amygdala, the prefrontal Cortex, like a good leader. We make them think they are the ones who are making the decision. We sit here simply pulling all the strings and they are popping. Sit back a little bit.

Trevor:             Yeah, so that’s who we love that. That’s really funny. Yeah, so we are controlled by these microorganisms. Yeah.

Naveen:           Now, interesting thing is it’s not just a control is that symbiotic relationship that we were created for. That means if we can provide, if we know what organisms are, they are this new ecosystem, these no such thing as one good ecosystem that we all need. So think of our gut and like a Amazonian forest, forest forest. Every step you did is it completely different ecosystem, yet every ecosystem is lush and green, so you and I can have completely different gut and both of us could be very healthy. That means there is no one right gut that we try to make. It is really about diversity and all different organisms working together and it’s not the good bacteria or the bad bacteria. It is all of them coming together, living together in harmony. That means when we eat food, there’s no such thing that he, all of us should be eating healthy and that means eating spinach and avocado and old and avoiding the carbs, and that had been the general myth and that general mit is why we are in a situation we are every few years.

Naveen:           You and I both know there’s a new fad diet. Remember Atkins died. Most people who are listening good probably don’t even remember the Atkins Diet. It used to be no carb diet, a lot of fat, and it turned out the poor atkins died of heart disease. That did not go very well for the brand. Then they came the Paleo Diet and the Ketogenic Diet and the, you know, all these fad diets come and what really happens is you died that’s good for one person is not for other. And secondly even a Di does good for you actually becomes bad for you every three or four months and that’s why the things that work for you short term and then suddenly they stop working and you start going the reverse. So think of it like a seesaw. When you get imbalanced, you start to eat certain foods, you get to balance and you don’t stop and now the imbalance the other way.

Naveen:           So you have to constantly balance in tune and that is really what you need to understand. The only way you can do that is to really do a microbiome test and not just any microbiome desk. Because what really happened is the reason you know this, she had been around for 10 years, so you will say, we just said, if people know about microbiome, I’m heard about microbiome. Many people probably were listening to it. I’ve done the microbiome does, is it completely useless? And the answer is they probably died because 99 percent of all the company that do microbiome test, they absolutely scamming the customers. And what they do is they use very ancient technology that’s really, really cheap. So whether you look at the companies that people may have spent their money on ubiome or buy a home or you know, the American gut project, they are basically do nothing.

Naveen:           What they do is 16 as sequencing that can never see any bacteria, virus, east fungus, mold, and even the bacteria they seed at a genus level. That means there are some of the only seven or eight style you have a high for me. Cues versus backdoor oddities. That doesn’t tell you anything. What really need you need to know is what are they actually producing? Because we need to know are they producing short chain fatty acid that our body needs, like butyrate, how much they’re producing, which are anti inflammatory, how much of aesthetic as the lactic acid they’re producing, how much of the LPS, which is toxic is they’re producing, and then you start to look at it and saying how he just finished going to be consumed by our gut microbiome, so for example, for me is financial toxic and here’s why is punished as we all know, or Kale has lot of these thing called oxalates, oxalic acid, and if you don’t have the gut microbiomes called oxygen factor, then you eat.

Naveen:           The spinach is going to actually not be that digested anymore. It’s going to call it inflammation. Same type of thing. People believe this polyphenol foods like the pomegranate juice and the blueberries, they got to be good for everyone and the answer is no because they really don’t have antioxidative in their own. What they have, like pomegranate juice has something called ellagic acid. Allergic acid in itself is not antioxidative. When it goes to your gut, the Gut microbiome converts that allergic asset into something called utility in a Ula, and once you get the utilization aid, that is what’s absorbed in the body and that become antioxidative. So my point is it is not something you can say on eating healthy. You have to know what’s healthy for you. And so travel. I’m not a scientist or a doctor. I went to Los Alamos national lab and we found this technology.

Naveen:           This was designed for the biodefense work. So imagine the problem they were trying to solve was the same thing. If a bad actor or to get hold of something chemical or biological, how would we. How would they know what’s making people sick? So the develop this technology that’s able to look at your blood and urine are your pool and able to find out exactly what is going on inside your body and what’s making it sick and what’s causing inflammation. And if I say, look, if we know what’s causing them, why can’t we just reverse it and make people nonsick reverse the chronic diseases? And so we got the exclusive license and I started this company and basically put together a team travel that has never been put together. Right? So head of the IBM Watson is an ai person. Dr Massey aid, um, you may know her.

Naveen:           She’s a phd. She’s mad, she teaches functional medicine. She was working for human longevity for Anti Agent Company, for Craig venter. I took her, I stole her from there and brought him, brought her whole team, Allie and needles, needles, clipboard. They all came in to solve this problem. The team that was working at Los Alamos to solve this problem. I took the whole team and hire them to solve this problem for us, to have the humanity move forward with a simple moonshot. What if you and I can create a world together? We’re interested option. And the only way we can do that traveler is if millions of us can come together. We now have tens of thousands of customers and we see unbelievable feedback. As an engineer, I never thought I would wake up in the morning and read the email from someone saying thank you for changing my life or an email from her husband and saying, you gave me my wife back.

Naveen:           She was so sick and I lost her and she’s back now. Right, so people are calling us and said they were depressed or anxious. People who had acne and Eczema. It just disappearing. Interesting thing is we don’t focus on any of those things. We simply focus on balancing your gut and reducing the inflammation. Two of the women went on Dr Oz show one last 71 past one last 49 pounds. We don’t focus on weight loss, that we’re just a byproduct of reducing the inflammation and fixing the leaky gut and balancing the gut, the gut microbiome and all these things that are, we call different diseases that are just the symptoms. People are telling us their psoriasis is, you know, much better the autoimmune disease. They’re not taking biologics anymore or they’re taking much less of them than they used to take. The joint pains are not happening and we still learning what is happening there and the good thing is if we can get a couple of million of people to come together, we will have all the data that we need to solve this problem, but you know, you and I can do it alone.

Naveen:           I mean it’s every one of us have to come together and say this problem is worth solving. And my absolute belief, trevor, is that our generation, if we do it right, will be the generation that will be known for solving chronic diseases. And if we cannot come together and continue to fragment, then we’re going to simply passed this problem onto our children and grandchildren and one on one and we’re going to watch them suffer. And none of us want to see our children and grandchildren suffer. So all we, all I can ask is let’s all come together and solve this problem. I’m only other thing I can tell you to is that I came from very, very humble background. We, I grew up in India. I had no food to eat. I had no place to stay. I came to United States with $5 about 35 years ago.

Naveen:           God has been very kind to this. Any which way you can look at measure success. God has given us everything and the only way I can give back to the society is to dedicate my life to solving the problems that matter. So I am here and I’m going to dedicate my life to solving, but I can do it. It only can be done when we all come together, so I’m in it for the long haul. I’m not trying to make money. We have all the money that we could ever want in our life. All we want to do is that solved this problem and dexterities and that when we started this company to do something in technology like this, to adjust to do a sequencing of your rna, which is what we do would cost $5,000 and in fact today the companies will do this cost $5,000.

Naveen:           We are able to provide it for couple of hundred dollars. Travel is because we’re trying to sell them at cost. We just don’t need to make money. We need to get enough people to come together and hoping that in the next one year the cost will come down to so cheap that are philanthropic dollars can just introduce, subsidize it for everyone. And one day when the everyone we have solved this problem and no one has chronic disease, the best thing of my life will be that we shut this company down because it’s no longer needed. And that will be the happiest day of my life.

Trevor:             I love it. I love your entrepreneurial spirit and um, and your passion for this. And it’s so great to hear this. It’s something they. The idea of individualizing medicine and diet and also that a lot of disease comes from the gut is something that nature pathic physicians have been talking about for so many years. And, and so, so it’s great to see more of the technology and the science supporting that and, and the work that you’re doing to help us really understand more about the gut microbiome and what is their, what is normal, what is healthy. And uh, so, and I know that this is, this is something that’s developing, that’s continuing. And so what do you think as far as where, what would the information that we have available now versus what we have coming? How far do we have to go?

Naveen:           Well, you know, again, we feel really, really good because you know, think about we’re looking at for the first time, all the genes that are expressed by these know, not billions to trillions of these organisms, every single thing they’re doing in your gut. We starting to understand that we now understanding that when they released these enzymes and peptides and molecules, they are absorbed in our blood in there changing or gene expression. So in fact, some really, you know, if anyone who interested, I’m more than happy to recommend some of the books that I find really fascinating is that as these peptides are released to change our immune system and the immune system, because when this year pathogen, they want the immune, they work with the immune system to kill the pathogen. And but in sometimes the bacteria, our gut is not balanced and they actually does not control.

Naveen:           That means the creed, the inflammation. But the switch to turn it off is not there, and then that means we now get the chronic inflammation rather than the anti inflammatory things such as butyric acid being produced that actually shuts the system down to say, okay, all good now. Right? And so when you start to get this dysbiosis, which is just gut imbalanced, you start to see the immune system is either hyperactive and when it’s hyperactive, you can get autoimmune diseases. You get inflammation, causes acne and Eczema. We all know that. I mean that’s really weird. You know, heart disease caused by the hardening of the arteries and the inflammation. We all know that inflammation, chronic inflammation is the root cause. So now the next thing we are launching our travel is on the host side and you know it’s hard to call ourselves a host, but we really have your host for this, millions of these organisms.

Naveen:           On the host side, we are going to be adding a, the blood transcriptomics, which is really a couple of drops of blood. And we sequence it to see every genes that are being expressed on the host side, that ms dot mitochondrial gene expression that no one has ever looked at. The number of Mitochondria. We talked about another bacteria inside our human cell, so we look at that bacteria and seeing what is doing because that’s really the energy factory. So as we age, we lose energy. So what’s happening in the mitochondria that’s causing it, because that’s really what causes the wrinkles and what causes the cells not to work as well. Because when the energy factory is not working well to cells to stop dividing and when cells to start dividing, our skin is no longer smooth because that means our stem sort of constantly producing new a new skin cells.

Naveen:           When they stop producing, our skin cells are not being produced, so they all get wrinkles. So all these things are because our system is just not working out. So the blood transcriptomics allowed us to look at the mitochondrial gene expression, all the blood cell gene expression, including all the Cytokines, which are the inflammation. So Aisles Iowan, which is anti inflammatory iron, six iron glove. Eileen, 17, 18, all the Interleukins, crp, tnf Alpha, and then we see all other genes being expressed and then we’re going to be adding as we are going to be adding the skin microbiome, but just to be clear of all the micro organism that are inside our body and on our body. 90 eight percent greater than 98 percent of them live in our gut and about point one percent live on our skin. Point. One percent live in our saliva. One percent are actually in the oral microbiome inside our gum and then they are in other places in our blood, but most of them are in our gut.

Naveen:           But then we’re going to obviously add the skin microbiome. We are going to start looking at the urine to see what, how are what type of minerals, what type of organic acids and amino acids being produced in our gut. And we take all this data and then we say artificial intelligence. Tell us what is going on. This person had joined paying. This person didn’t have joined pinch and he and our 100,000 people that all have acne and here are the people who don’t. What do you see here? What is common? What are they producing when they have this and how do you reverse it? So if, if lipopolysaccharide is really the culprit, how do we reduce it? What foods cause that lipopolysaccharide to go up and then we start to look at what all the chemicals and every food and we see how does our gut microbiome takes this chemical and what is it producing out of it?

Naveen:           So we look at input and we look at the output and say, Aha, this output is no good and this being produced by this input. Let’s stop this food and give this food instead. And that’s basically where we are right now is. And my hope is that, you know, in the next four or five, 10 years this problem will get solved. But only if we can get millions of us to come together. And you know, no one. And the reason is if you are a doctor, you can see 10,000 people that just not an update and if every doctor has thousand people and they become so smart, remember it, Dr. who is the thousand people? They have lots of knowledge. Not Imagine your ai doctor that has 100,000 people, a million people, 10 million people. That doctor has all the information that you need. So imagine when you go to a doctor because they are an expert and that what makes them an expert. 100 people, a thousand people. But here’s the worst part. Their knowledge is still what they learn in the medical college. You talk about continuing education every single day. Travel. You and I both know it. We are information junkie. The more research is being released every day than human mind can lead. Forget about working anywhere, just simply reading the research, a full time job, but because a really good at that, you feed them all the research. They take all the knowledge.

Trevor:             That’s great.

Naveen:           I just want you to know that I am a big admirer of yours because you are one of the few people who actually are doing it for the right reasons because you care and you care a lot about people. I’ve seen you at work. You’re not doing it because is another way of making money. You’re doing it because you want people to get better and that’s why your products are so good because you. You deliver value. You’re not simply saying what will make it easy. You’re not trying to sell them something. You’re delivering what works for people. So I just said thank you for doing what you do because people like you are the people who this world needs. The more of us is what’s going to make this world a better place for all of us in a firefight children’s.

Trevor:             That’s very kind of you and of course all the work that you’re doing is so exciting and important and I can’t wait to see what unfolds in the next four to five years as as we discover it. All right?

Naveen:           Very interesting. Is that, you know, I started company called wild. I don’t know if I’m going to keep a secret. The Indians cannot pronounce the word. We have a company that I started that I cannot pronounce that’s always have to spell it for people to go, but I say why on this it even with w with beat, what is we? Victor said he can put a link down or at least people can find it.

Trevor:             Your website is [inaudible] dot com, right. Is that okay and we’ll have the link up to it. The main. Thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your information. I really appreciate it.

Naveen:           Thanks. Really looking forward to seeing the episode on. Let’s continue working together. Yeah, absolutely.

Trevor:             I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Nubain chain. To learn more about Nevine and what they’re working at at volume. You can go to the SPA Dr. Com. Go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information and links there, and while you’re there I invite you to join the spa doctor community. You can also subscribe to the podcast on Itunes so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend you get your customized skin profile@theskinquiz.com. It’s free. Takes just a few moments and you’ll get your own personalized skin inflammation. What do you know, what your skin’s trying to tell you about your health and what you can do about it? The skin quiz.com. Also, I invite you to join me on social media, on facebook, pinterest, twitter, instagram, Youtube, and join the conversation there and I’ll see you next time on the spa dr. podcasts.

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Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: changing the world, dr. trevor cates, gut health, innovation, microbiome, modern healthcare, the spa dr.

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