Protein Needs, Microbiome Terrain, and Whole Body Health

0:00And again, go back to that principle of color. Make sure that you're just getting the variety of different colors all throughout the year, actually. Great. So food sensitivities seem to have gotten, you have gone through the roof. In the last, I don't know, 30 years, everyone's, you know, so many kids are allergic to peanuts. And, you know, I think you have like the, the eight allergens now and it's just, it's gotten crazy. What are you attributed to? Are there ways of clearing out those, those sensitivities to foods once you, once they, you know, you've identified that you have one. Well, I don't think food looks the same that it looked like, you know, even back in the 1970s foods are just different now. They're grown differently. They have, like we were just talking about pesticides and secticides, things like glyphosate. So you can ask the question, what are they actually responding to and reacting to? Is it the food? Is it their gut microbiome? Is it something else in the food? Is it a microorganism on the food?

1:05You know, there are a lot of different questions. So there are different ways to work with a practitioner to rule a lot of those things out. One of the things that can be done is food allergy testing, where you can look at the actual immune response to a food. You can also do what's called an elimination diet, where you take out those nine allergens. So sesame is like the newer allergen that has been added to the FDA list. So you could take out those nine, see how you do. And sometimes I take out things that aren't allergens, but people react to like sugar, caffeine, alcohol. You know, I think that those are three big ones that you really want to get a pulse check on. In fact, this is for everybody to think about. One of my nutrition mentors, her name is Barb Schultz. She had mentioned to me, as I started to work more with people one on one, she said, and I always ask the person, what would they not want to give up? What during an elimination diet, would they never want to eliminate?

2:11Because many times, that's the thing that they are most reactive to, that it's causing this opioid-like effect in the body, and it's creating this dependency. So I'll give you a quick story about that. You know, one of the things that I have seen that people are most, I would say, dependent on, or they have a hard time giving up, would be cheese, bread, and I would say also coffee. I don't see coffee is necessarily a bad thing for all people. In fact, coffee can be quite medicinal, but coffee can also be toxic if it's not a very good brand, with good growing, good storage, and good roasting processes. Right, so then we can ask the question, is that not a good beverage for a person because of how they're metabolizing it, or is there something in the coffee bean that they're reacting to? So sometimes, you know, we kind of have to weed that out. So that's also an interesting experiment to do.

3:14So, and why are they reacting? It's just hard to say. I think that people, people living in 2025 are up against a lot more now than they were in like even the year 2000 or even in, you know, you look at 1950. I think I saw the statistics somewhere that it takes. Let's go back to oranges for a second. It just happens to be the example I have. But what you would get with one orange in, I think it was like the 1950s, you would now need eight oranges to give you the same nutritional value. So food just isn't nutrient dense to the same level that we have known it to be. We need nutrients to help us to detoxify. So if we're going to come up short on nutrients, we're going to be higher on toxin load. And that higher toxin load is implicated in our immune system functions. So back to things like food allergies, food intolerances, food sensitivities.

4:16If people get all kinds of things that happen to them when they eat foods, like if you get bloated after high protein meal, you know, maybe it's actually just don't have enough stomach acid or you need a little bit more. You know, digestive help. Maybe the reaction is because you have indigestion, male digestion. And so then you get these larger proteins that the body starts to react to. So you always have to work with a practitioner to really get into the gut, do some testing. In functional medicine, we have what's called the five R program, remove, replace, reenoculate, repair and rebalance. So there's kind of a sequence of how you do this in order to get the gut back on track. And whenever we start with our health and we start down that health journey, it's really important to start with the gut because the gut is the portal to all of the other organ systems.

5:18So how would you go about, you know, you mentioned that, you know, the gut may need some help, you know, or you mentioned stomach acid not being high enough. What do you do for those types of issues? Well, first you have to figure out if that's actually the case. So kind of trial and error. Are you not digesting protein? Are you bloating because you have an overgrowth in your gut? You've got too many micro organisms. So every time you have a grain or a starch, you start to get bloated. This is pretty common. Small intestinal bowel overgrowth. That's also called SIBO. And with SIBO, that is not really a great condition for the gut because now you start to get a lot of bad guys and less of the good guys. And those bad guys in the gut are creating gases. Right. So there's a lot of like bloating in the upper part of the gut and people start to get really distended, really uncomfortable. You know, I've seen this over and over in people like almost when women have it, it's almost like, you know, they just feel uncomfortable in their clothing. I've had one woman describe it as like she felt pregnant because it was just such a.

6:29It was, it would just get increased throughout the day. So it would start out like where, you know, less bloating for breakfast, but then it's sequentially increased throughout the day, depending on what was eaten. So I think you really need to get that straightened out like, are you bloated because of, is it low stomach? There are ways to actually decipher that and questions to ask and with the practitioner to kind of make sense of that a little bit more sometimes. You know, bringing in things like pancreatic enzymes, having enzymes with meals, like enzymes to break down things like starch, fats, proteins, you know, right now the rage is to eat more protein. We hear that pretty much everywhere return. Oh, you're menopausal, more protein. Oh, you're a growing child, more protein. Oh, you're a man. You have low testosterone. You better eat more protein. Well, in order to digest the protein, there's a lot that has to happen there. So you can be eating a lot of that expensive protein, but then not properly digesting it. So then it just kind of goes to waste.

7:35So literally. So you really do want to ensure that you have healthy digestion, having one to two bowel movements per day, no symptoms after a meal like bloating or distension or burping acid reflux. I mean, just listen to your body because if you've got some of these symptoms, that would tell you already that there's an imbalance somewhere. How much protein do we need? Do we, you know, all these prescriptions for additional protein? Is that really necessary in most cases? I think it depends. I do think that those groups I just mentioned do actually have more protein requirement needs, but it depends on the person. And again, it's just so hard to give like, you know, the standard 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. I do think as we get older, when we're experiencing more breakdown of things like muscle, I think it is important to be looking at how much we are getting in our daily diet.

8:39I do think that that is important. I do think it's important for men as well. To keep maintaining things like testosterone levels, because men go through a hormonal shift, known as antropause, where things like testosterone come down, different antigens come down. So that impacts their mood, their ability to focus, their sense of drive. So yeah, but you know, I think like anything else, you can't go overboard either. Like if you have too high a protein, then something else is going to go out of balance. Maybe you have too little fiber then. So everything has to kind of be in its proper balance, but for certain groups, I do think that protein can be increased because of need. So you talked about gut health. How has the rise of the microbiome over the last, well, at least in the public consciousness in the last 10 years, affected your work and how you how you deal with people's, I mean, to use the word gut health, I think we wouldn't even be using that without the discussion of the microbiome.

9:47So how has that informed your profession and what you do? Well, it's part, I mean, the gut microbiome comprises, I would say more, it's a greater population than cells of our own bodies, right? So it has the ability to change things like our mood, our behaviors, our appetite, you know, a lot is signaled from the gut. So that's why ensuring that we're taking in foods that build a good healthy gut microbiome is really important. I feel like the gut microbiome has been talked about now for some time and we have a pretty good handle on it. You can go to a functional medicine doctor, give us tool sample and kind of get a sense of the, the genetic material of the different microorganisms that you've got in your stool. So that can be helpful. I don't think it's the be all end all what I think is more important potentially is making sure that we're taking in foods that create naturally a good healthy gut microbiome.

10:51So there's been I would say when we first started to learn about the gut microbiome, we became strongly focused on probiotics. Oh, let's make sure that we're giving these probiotics because we want this gut microbiome population. But now we know that those gut microorganisms don't stick around unless the environment is is built properly. This is why we talk about tend to your terrain. The terrain is the environment in the gut and if it is not a healthy environment, then you're not going to have good healthy microorganisms sticking around because ideally what you want is those microorganisms to adhere and to start to metabolize and to give you things like short chain fatty acids like butarate, which can be important for the gut health as well as immune health as well as brain health. We build a better gut lining through things like prebiotics like we've been talking about.

11:55So the future I think is looking at not just the gut microbiome, but looking at the skin microbiome, looking at the nasal microbiome, the oral microbiome, the vaginal microbiome, the ocular microbiome, the scalp microbiome. If you look at the work of Dr. Rob Knight, who is an expert in this area, he even looks at the face, you know, that we have different microbiota throughout. So that could be informing us in a variety of different ways. So he talks about microbiome of all different kinds like not, you know, not just the gut microbiome, but all over the body, the various colonies of bacteria that we have. Yeah, yeah, because it can all be very diverse. So let's just think about skin care. Wouldn't it be nice to be looking at sampling the skin to see how the microorganisms there are again producing certain metabolites that are changing things like skin acidity, the, the hydration, changing the hydration status.

13:06I do think that and even when women go through menopause, their microbiome changes and it starts to look more like a man's microbiome. And that can impact us from the level of even things like detoxification. So one of the first line defenses against the toxins that we ingest through food is a gut microbiome. The gut microbiome is there to take those things and metabolize them and get rid of them. So if we again, we need to got microbiome that's truly working for us. I think that that's really important. And what's the role of breastfeeding for establishing a healthy microbiome? That's really important. You know, if we think about even children who are delivered vaginally versus C section, there's a difference in their their gut microbiome, right, because they don't have the exposure of the vaginal microbiome.

14:07And then further, the transference of the microorganisms of the mother and colostrum in a lot of different proteins and even melatonin from the milk of the mother, which then all of which can inform the gut microbiome even the melatonin that the mother produces if she's feeding her infant at night when her melatonin is high because melatonin is it's lipid soluble, it comes out in fat. So yes, breast milk can play a role in establishing a healthy microbiome in an infant, but the the degree to which that can happen depends on the health of the mother and what she's actually transferring. Right, thanks. So given all the sensitivities that that people have and they they restrict this and they restrict that, how do you then achieve a wide range of nutrients in accordance with your the concept that you talk about with regard to the rainbow diet?

15:13Well, let's just back up into the elimination diet again. This is one of the first places to go when people feel like they may have some issues with their gut or they have immune issues or maybe they have auto immunity and they really want to get a handle on their immune system and their gut because most of your immune system is actually in your gut, right. So it's not that you are refraining from all foods for an extended time, but for 21 to 28 days, reeling back on certain foods, especially things like corn, soy, dairy, certain meats, like I mentioned caffeine, alcohol, sugar and just taking out a lot of those things from the diet, typically that you would find in an ultra processed food diet. And then after that three to four weeks, adding back in foods, one at a time and seeing how the body responds. So looking at things like, okay, do you feel joint pain after you eat that? Are your joints sore? Do you get a headache? Are your ears red? Do you have flushing? Do you have hives after you eat certain foods because all of that could be triggering you into thinking that, wow, I might be having a response here.

16:25So after you do that and you add back foods, right, then you start to get a new palette of foods that you can eat and then you diversify. And in fact, I want to mention this, there are studies that show that infants that are fed a more diverse diet earlier in life, have less chance for certain immune conditions as adults. So diversity is really important. And some of the reason I think that people have an issue with reactivity to food is because they have the same food over and over again and large amounts of it. So if you just had small amounts of many foods, chances are you're not going to react to the same degree as if you had again like a two slices of bread sandwich with cheese and hamburger, you know, like many different things in large proportion over and over again. So changing it up so dietary, dietary diversity helps to protect against things like food sensitivities and even potentially food allergies because it's helping the gut microbiome to be diverse, right, nature's principle, one of nature's principles is diversity.

17:42We know even from brain health studies, people that are more neuronally plastic or have more synapses communicating in their brain, they're doing diverse things, right, they are maybe reading different books are doing crossword puzzles are taking a different way to work in the morning. So diversity of food diversity of life experiences and even diversity of physical activity can be a good thing. And talking about people eating the same thing when you when you go, you know, on plant based and you know what are the experiences that you have is like what do you eat, you know, twigs and berries. And they think it's very limited where I tend to eat a tremendous amount of variety. How many meals does the average how many different types of meals is the average person eat. Well, it's hard to say there are different numbers that have been tossed out there, but you know, typically people, you know, if you look at the American gut project, people that have less than 10 foods kinds of foods per week versus those that have more than 30.

18:52The people that have less fear less well, they have less robust like immune systems got health and those sorts of things. So in most people circulate among like five to seven different recipes in a week, you kind of have your go to's right it's like oh I'm going to. Wednesday spaghetti day or Thursdays are taco day and so you kind of go with the same things over and over again. But you could do like a taco day, but then you can have different types of things in there. One of the ways that you can diversify very easily is through two things herbs and spices. So when I when I talk about herbs, I'm talking also about herbal teas and different kinds of teas, which bring in a lot of different phytochemicals. And especially if they have a combination of different types of plants in them. And then when we think about spices, you know, variety is the spice of life and spices help food to taste better.

19:54And it also helps with giving us more phytochemicals. It's very protective. In fact, if you there there was a study in which they had hamburgers, so they had the hamburger meat. And then when you put in spices before cooking, you can prevent the formation of certain carcinogens. So the spices are very protective. So they don't only make things taste better. They help to protect against toxins and other things that might form with the cooking process. And that's also something to think about is what's called advanced glycation and products or ages. And these are, you know, like food that has a crispy texture to it, like you put bread into a toaster and it becomes more brown. Or you cook a pizza and the crust is brown or cookies that have like that ridge that is more brown around the perimeter.

20:54That is actually inflammatory. There is so much that has been studied on advanced glycation and products. These brown products that form through grilling, baking, frying and roasting and broiling are all up regulating inflammation in our bodies. So we may not be able to avoid those foods, but one of the things that we can do is bring in spices because spices can help to offset some of those advanced glycation and products. It was a really neat study. It was done long many years ago now with Dave Hebrew at UCLA. And it was a hamburger study where they had people eat a burger. Then they measured how their inflammation went off after the burger. And then they had them come back to the lab and have the burger, but with half of an avocado. And they found that the inflammation flatlined just right after eating it. So you can actually eat smarter by having effective combinations of certain foods.

21:59So bringing in a plant can be very protective, especially that avocado, right. But then the spices could be great for just even putting, I mean, you can create those advanced glycation and products, even in grilled vegetables. That's why, you know, when you put them on the grill and you get the kind of the the singe of the black brown color that tells you it's been damaged that tells you that you now lost nutrients from the food, right. So it's important to protect that food with spices and cook your food slow and low, not in dry hot heat methods like I described, but more like steaming. Just gentle sauteing. You know, if you need to boil something a bit, but not overextending that period, because then you start to lose some of the nutrient quality. So in that example, you talk about the burger having, you know, various properties to it that were detrimental.

23:27Thank you.