A Word To The Wise
Curating mind, body, spirit, and personal development conversations to help you live a more aware, intentional, fulfilled, and purposeful life.
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A Word To The Wise
136. It’s All Connected: The Powerful Link Between Your Gut Microbiome, Mental and Physical Health Ft. Liinn Rivers
Struggling with mental health, chronic illness and/or trauma can feel like an endless battle. In today's show, we take a deep dive into the symbiotic relationship between our gut health and mental/physical well-being. Linn, an expert in holistic and functional medicine, shares her own compelling story of healing and how she now empowers others to navigate through the complexities of chronic diseases with a better understanding of their gut microbiome.
The gut-brain connection is a fascinating frontier, and in this episode, we discuss its hidden connections that radically influences our health and behavior. Linn shares the profound impact of dietary choices on our mental health, explaining how the foods we eat can either trigger or alleviate conditions ranging from autoimmune diseases to insulin resistance. Her unique perspective on the carnivore diet, carbohydrate reduction, and the controversial role of plant-based toxins challenges conventional medical treatments. It's a revealing look at how adjusting our daily nutrition might just be the key to unlocking a healthier, more balanced self.
We discuss the crucial role of the gut microbiome in emotional recovery and how certain dietary adjustments can help rewire our neurological responses. Linn shares actionable advice on incorporating probiotics, balancing meals, and listening to our bodies' intuitive needs—particularly for women during pivotal life stages.
Connect with Linn: https://www.linnrivers.com/
Chapters:
0:00
Intro/What is the Gut Microbiome?
9:40
The Gut-Brain Connection in Mental Health
24:29
The Impact of Diet on Health
29:58
Impact of Diet on Insulin Resistance
37:03
Balancing Diet for Gut Health
45:46
Gut Health and Dietary Choices
52:36
Nutrition, Health, and Intuition
1:00:00
Healing Trauma Through Physical Health
1:03:47
Healing Trauma Through Gut Health
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Email: awordtothewisepod@gmail.com
Hello everyone and welcome back to the A Word to the Wise podcast, a space where we curate conversations around mind, body, spirit and personal development. I'm your host, yumi Moses. Today on the show, I'm going to be speaking with Lynn Rivers. Lynn is a functional health and wellness expert and educator. She has an educational background in holistic and functional medicine and microbiome therapy. She teaches people all over the world have to take their health into their own hands mind, body, spirit and her experience spans over 15 years and she assists people in overcoming chronic health conditions and mental disorders. And that is exactly what we're going to get into in today's show. So I talked to Lynn on the show today about the gut microbiome, which I asked her to define and also ask her to discuss how it affects our physical and mental health. We discussed the link between the gut, mental health, neurological disorders and chronic disease. We also discussed the best diet for a healthy gut and whether or not probiotics are useful. I learned so much from Lynn in this episode and I believe you will too.
Speaker 1:This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health providers with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. And with that let's get into the show. Lynn, welcome to the show, welcome to A War to the Wise. It's so good to have you. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:I have a lot of questions regarding the gut microbiome because I've heard about it, but I will admit that I am not an expert on it at all and I don't know that much about it. And I hear people throw around the word holistic health all the time and I'm really not sure what that is either. So I'm hoping that this session can be helpful to my listeners who aren't quite sure what that is, or even if they are, this is just like additional information for them. So you have over 15 years of education in the holistic health field and you assist a lot of people in overcoming chronic health conditions and mental health disorders. So I want to first start by asking you how did you develop a passion for holistic health?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this is a great way to really introduce myself because it was my own life journey that led me to it. It was kind of just part of my journey. I had a pretty tumultuous first, really 30 plus years of my life. It was a lot of constant turmoil and I had pneumonia when I was one and two and that turned into a lot of emotional trauma due to the fear that I took on as a child from my parents thinking that I was going to die, and it turned into asthma. The majority of my childhood and teen years I was in and out of the hospital on steroids, always on antibiotics.
Speaker 2:I had gut dysbiosis very early on in life, which we will get more into, and I grew up with an alcoholic. Most of my family died before I was 15. I lost my partner, the same cancer that my mom died of. I had two near-death experiences endometriosis, hormonal disturbances of all different kinds, really really heavy depression, suicidal. Most of my teens and twenties.
Speaker 2:I really took all of that that I went through and reached a point. It was during my last near-death experience where I really thought oh my god, I came back here again. What do I need to do different? Because I don't want to keep doing the same repeat of living out the same problems and inviting the same people into my life. That was where I actually started diving into functional medicine and that's where things started changing for me. It was this moment of clarity that my body needed to be happy and healthy in order for me to thrive in this life.
Speaker 2:I'll talk so much more about this, but really that was the premises of me really coming forth and stepping into a much better version of myself. It put me on a journey of really going inwards and finding myself, finding what I wanted from this life and how I wanted to show up and what it meant to be human and how to do this human life well and not just get by. I turned all of that around and I healed myself through all of these different things and overcame all these things. Then I realized that I wanted to share this information because I'm someone who I practice what I preach and I did not enjoy putting certain information out unless I myself understood it and was able to teach it from a really grounded space. Now that's what I'm doing. I'm helping others all over the world transform their lives and to see mental health conditions from a completely different perspective that very few people are talking about at this time.
Speaker 1:Thank you, lynn, for sharing that. That was so much in there and shameless plug for my other podcast, shifting Dimensions, because I definitely want to get into your near-death experiences and it just sounds like you endured so much trauma and a lot of people who go through those types of experiences kind of buckle underneath them. But it seems like you're taking what happened to you and you turned it into your purpose in this life, which is helping people heal mentally, physically, spiritually even. We're going to focus on the physical and mental part of that in this conversation. I want to start off by asking what is holistic health?
Speaker 2:Holistic health is really finding the root cause to illness. It's healing from a natural perspective. I should say functional medicine is more the root cause of illness, but having a holistic approach is really finding out the natural way of healing. What do you need to be eating? What supplements can you take? How do you bring your body back into balance? What exercises are you doing? How are you incorporating everything natural into your life in order to be the better version of yourself? The way that I like to look at it is WHOL, the holistic healing right, like becoming a whole version of yourself through natural means.
Speaker 1:It's yeah, because everything's connected and I think over the last couple of years, especially last year, there are a lot of conversations around the cause or the root cause for mental health disorders, physical disorders, and a lot of times within the medical space they tend to kind of focus on the symptoms but not the root cause, and sometimes you have to go to the root cause and something that you're passionate about is the gut microbiome. Right, and there's so much there. So again, to level set, what is a gut microbiome? What is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm gonna let me jump into that, but really quick I want to touch in on what you just said. Yeah, when you go to a doctor and you're diagnosed with a specific condition or anything of that sort, those conditions alone there are actually symptoms. Those are the symptoms that are saying, hey, your body's out of balance, but the doctors prescribe you to try to treat those conditions of what they're calling them. But that's actually your body saying hey, something's out of alignment. Yes, and what is typically leading to those imbalances is your gut microbiome, and our gut microbiome is basically the way that I like to think of it. Is our trillions of babies that we're carrying with us, and they rely on us. They need us to take care of them, and when we take care of them, they take care of us. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Speaker 2:Your digestive tract starts from the second you put something in your mouth, even before your digestive tract actually kicks in, and it goes all the way to your rectum and your anus, and all everything that's in there is your microbiome. No, granted, we do have microbiome all over our body. However, it's like around a hundred trillion is what they're estimating is actually just in our gut alone. A hundred trillion, there's so many more microbiome organisms in our being than there are human cells, like that's something to wrap your head around, right?
Speaker 2:And when your gut is dysbiotic which means that there's bacteria, there's viruses, fungi, all these different forms of species within the microbiome and when it's out of balance, it can cause a ton of different symptoms. And we're finding that over 85% of disease out there can be linked back to a dysbiotic gut. And so you're basically feeding everything that you eat, you're feeding your gut microbiome, and if there's any dysbiosis, you're feeding that and inflaming. Whatever is out of balance is a really easy way to say that, and so it really puts it into perspective of oh my god, when I'm eating, I'm not feeding my cells, I'm feeding the microbiome, which then you know, can produce certain nutrients for us or they can cause problems for us. It really depends on what, what's going on in there and what we're doing for it.
Speaker 1:You know, listening to you talk about this, I remember my first kind of curiosity into this topic of the gut microbiome was how it affected the brain.
Speaker 1:There is this whole conversation about the brain-gut connection and especially how it affects mental health right, and I want to talk a little bit about some chronic illnesses a little bit later, but I want to kind of touch on the mental health part really quickly and I remember thinking, huh, that's interesting, because there was a certain time, I'd say last year, where I just felt myself really feeling sad and I was like there's actually nothing going on in my life right now that's causing this sadness. So I thought intuitively, even before I started hearing these conversations, I'm like could it be my diet? Could I be eating foods that I don't feel good afterwards eating Because I'd eat certain things and I would just kind of feel lethargic, so on and so forth. So I actually started to incorporate what people might consider more healthy foods or just kind of eating a little bit differently and obviously moving my body as well. But I noticed a shift in my mind and my mental health. So I kind of want to talk a little bit about how does the gut microbiome affect the brain?
Speaker 2:This is my favorite topic and the reason is because that was kind of what solidified my healing right. I had so much depression and anxiety and aggressive behaviors and all of these things growing up that I needed to figure out what was going on with that. And when I started tapping into the microbiome and finding out that there are literally specific bugs in our system I call them bugs they're bacteria, viruses, fungi, the sorts, right but they can actually cause aggressive behavior. They can cause so many different things that we don't even think about. They can be the reason that we're attracted to certain people, why we're craving certain foods. Even people who are obese have different microbiomes. Like, there are certain things that can actually cause these sensations and these feelings and these desires. And when we look at the gut brain connection, our biggest nerve is the largest nerve in the body and it's a beautiful nerve and it goes to all of the main organs and there are literally millions of nerves that come from our gut to the brain. So there's no wonder that there's so much of a connection between our gut and our brain, right? And so when we look at the fact that when we eat certain foods and we have any kind of dysbiosis happening. That food is feeding that dysbiotic bacteria which, if it's already overloaded, is going to cause more symptoms. And the more we eat, the more it progresses. And we want the bacteria, all of these things, to be in a specific balance. Even the viruses are good for us, even the fungi are good for us, but it's when these things get out of balance that we really start seeing trouble.
Speaker 2:And the connection we were talking about earlier, the connection to certain diseases. Over 80% of these disease can be traced back to the gut microbiome, and we're talking Alzheimer's, dementia, all of these different neurological aspects and these psychological conditions and depression and all of these things that I experienced, the anxiety aspect and depression and all of this and our gut microbiome is directly linked to that, to the point where, when you eat something and it affects your gut microbiome, you will know within 30 minutes of eating because you will have a reaction. There is a chemical response happening. Our gut microbiome is a big piece of it and I talk about this differently than a lot of microbiologists because there's so many components that play into it and one of the things is, if you have a dysbiotic gut, chances are you also have leaky gut. A large percentage of the population has leaky gut, and what that means is that your intestinal barrier is not tight. We have tight junctions and they kind of get weak and then particles can start seeping through into your bloodstream that would not normally seep into your bloodstream. And so when that happens, that's where you start noticing a lot of different symptoms all of the neurological conditions that we talked about, and food intolerances, allergies the whole nine yards because your immune system kicks in and it's like, hey, this isn't supposed to be here, we need to get rid of this. And so that's where a lot of different problems happen.
Speaker 2:And where I really like to take this and it's a much different direction than a lot of people are talking about is the fact that certain foods that we deem healthy right, we have a tendency to go on these fads and everyone jumps on these bandwagons, so everyone started eating all these heavy vegan diets or high vegetable diets, and the reality is we would not have access to all of these groups of food without importation. So our bodies are not adapted to these specific foods that we've brought over, and that's why, when you go over to, a lot of people go to India and they end up with what they call the deli belly, and that's because they don't have the gut bacteria. For the foods that they're eating over there it's no different to the foods that we're importing, right, and so we used to eat these foods in small quantities, so our body was getting good nutrients from them, it wasn't being overloaded with all these different chemicals, because plants have chemicals that protect themselves from being eaten to that people don't realize, like salicylates, oxalates, phytates, lectins, you know all these different. They're actually neurotoxins. And so when we're eating these plants and first off they're not ripe right, we picked them right before they're ripe because we're trying to do the import, the importing of them.
Speaker 2:Our body has to process all of those toxins, and so your gut bacteria is one of the first offenders, but it's not going to be able to process all of that, and then, if you have leaky gut, then it's going to seep in, and then your liver has to take over and work on the rest of it, spelling all of those toxins along with all the other work that it's already doing. So this is one of the main reasons that we're seeing so many people with all of these digestive disorders, so many different kinds. I mean we could go down the list of them, but there's so many people who have digestive issues because they're overloading their body with all of these different plant chemicals that we would normally not have. When we used to eat, we had a protein, we had a carb and we had a vegetable. It was a simple, easy, balanced diet that our body could assimilate and our gut bacteria was kept more in check and it wasn't being overloaded with all of these compounds that it could not literally break down, and I think that's why one of the biggest shadows, if you will, of the microbiome world is it's talked about to eat more vegetables and eat more fiber. It's good for your microbiome, but the reality is the people who tend to have a dysbiotic gut tend to have leaky gut. Therefore, it's creating another cascade of symptoms, and so then it just starts worsening the symptoms, right? So you're feeding them all of these chemicals, and I want to bring up one specifically called solicylates and that was the big game changer for me and diving into research about it, because this specific chemical alone is directly linked to autism, depression, aggressive behavior.
Speaker 2:And then we go into the physical symptoms, where people who have the dark rings around their eyes or the nose, polyps, running noses. This is all directly linked to solicylates, and one of the big ones that was mind blowing for me because I had it the majority of my life was tinnitus. I had tinnitus the majority of my life and you're not going to be able to Google what causes tinnitus and solicylates pop up. You have to know about solicylates and Google solicylates and tinnitus in order for it to pop up and find out that it is directly linked to tinnitus. And so when I removed these specifically from my diet and did a complete elimination and really went bare pretty much carnivore diet so I can reset my body, at one point and I took all of them out, my entire being shifted. I went from chronic depression and having all of these really out of suicidal.
Speaker 2:I think I might have already mentioned that throughout my 20s. That's just how I was, and after I stopped eating those, I remember sitting there and thinking like my God, is this how I'm supposed to feel on a regular basis? I'm supposed to be calm and happy. It wasn't my norm. It actually took me by surprise and that's what got me into really researching what's actually causing mental illness and why are people not actually getting over their traumatic experiences in life, because the reality is we have traumatic experiences and that's it. People have bad things happen all the time and we can move on Like we don't need to dwell on these things. We can move forward. It's not the trauma that's holding us back. It was our body and what we're putting in it and how it's processing things that was causing these emotional disturbances to continue popping up over and over again. I kept having outlashes and because of what we hear about in society, we automatically think, oh well, I guess I haven't healed through my trauma. Oh, I guess I still need to go back and uncover XYZ.
Speaker 2:The reality is a lot of people who are having depressive episodes and these outbursts it is absolutely. I have no doubt that it is 99% linked to what you're eating, how it's affecting your microbiome, how it's affecting your digestion in general and when you switch that. I mean. It doesn't take much for people to switch their diet and to feel a difference within a week, and so it's just really profound and the research behind it is more and more.
Speaker 2:But the reality is none of us are experts in microbiome, because we're barely touching the surface of what it actually is and we're looking at, hey, 10 years down the road we might have a probiotic where, if someone has dementia, they say here, take this probiotic, because then it's going to be correcting the imbalance that you don't have this specific species. You need to get more of this. So you give them a probiotic of that specific one and there's so much to it. But the reality is I don't think it's 80% of diseases linked to it. Like 95 to 100% of it is linked to this, because when you look at it from the simple perspective of what's the first thing you do, you put food in your mouth and that is what starts causing issues. Right, when you have a fasted person, they start getting better, they start feeling different and then they start eating again and they start having symptoms again. So I really think there's more to it than just this 80% of what we're seeing so far.
Speaker 1:I wasn't a trans, just listening to you, because it really takes the literal definition of like listen to your gut. We hear that all the time listen to your gut, listen to your gut. But it seems like our gut really has so much power over our well-being, on a physical and on a mental level as well. There's so much that you said there, right, so one I wanna clarify what does it mean to have a dysbiotic gut? Does that mean a gut that's out of rhythm and there's not a lot of healthy bacteria in there? Cause you said that dysbiotic, a dysbiotic gut is linked to a leaky gut, and I just wanna make sure that I fully understand what that means.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a dysbiotic gut means that you have an imbalance in bacteria and viruses and all of these of the sort. So, like I said, you have all of these different species and they are great together when they are working in harmony and they're in a specific balance, right. But the second you have too much of one species that can cause a slew of symptoms, and that bacteria doesn't mean that it's bad, it just means that it's good in a certain quantity, and then when it's overpopulated, they can start causing issues. And so it's kind of funny when you look at it in the world, like there are people and they can either show up in a positive way or they can show up in a negative way. Our gut bacteria does the same thing. It's when it's in balance it's great. When it's not, it's not good for us. And I think about myself. I'm like when I'm in balance I'm awesome, but when I'm not, watch out, so yeah, yeah, exactly, and you mentioned solicitates correct.
Speaker 1:Is it called solicitates? Yeah, what foods have those chemicals in them?
Speaker 2:So the majority of plants have solicitates.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There are higher offenders, like zucchini is really high, macadamia nuts are super high, coconut is high. There are. So certain foods have really high level of chemicals and those are some of the ones that are high in solicitates, and one of the best ways that you can look at this really easily is there are a lot of people who can't take aspirin. Aspirin is a high content of solicitates. That's where they get the. That's the chemical compound that aspirin is right. So if someone can't take aspirin, they definitely should not be eating foods high in solicitates. But they don't learn these things right, and so again, you think about how toxic aspirin is to the system. That is exactly what these, these same compounds, are doing to the body, just to a lesser degree.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So I have there's so much here and I'm trying to gather my thoughts because I have a hundred questions now. So what you said about the vegetables, first of all, that blows my mind because that's everything you hear. Eat more vegetables. Not to villainize vegetables per se, I don't think that's what you're trying to do. But it's interesting because I had this woman on the show who was talking about healing through her autoimmune disorders.
Speaker 1:She had a slew of them. The doctors were doing so many different tests and nothing was coming up in the data as to why she was having these autoimmune diseases. So of course, like a lot of people who find themselves in these situations, they kind of take their own health into their own hand, right, still consulting with her doctors. But she started going on this healing journey and something she found out cause she was a vegan. Actually, something she found out was that I think the chemical leptin is in tomatoes, if I'm not mistaken, and she found out that that was one of the reasons. That was something that was triggering a lot of her autoimmune disorders. So when she cut back on that, in addition to like reducing her stress, et cetera, she realized that her symptoms and her autoimmune disorders almost kind of went into remission, reversed. So here you talk about. This is so mind blowing. Because then I think to myself then every time I have an ailment and I go to the doctor, why isn't the first thing they do checking my gut?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean that is the question, right, it's so. Here's a funny thing. I literally just got off of a podcast interview with someone before you who literally brought up the leptins and tomatoes literally the same thing and so there's something to that today and it is. There are so many different compounds in plants that people can have reactions to and no one thinks of that. Because unfortunately, with the human brain, we evolve into thinking with our ego and unfortunately ego can pull us away from our ancestral roots of what is actually best for our body and start finding all of these like oh, but it's not morally right to eat meat, or is you know? We should be moving. The reality is our bodies come from earth, they were of this earth and there's so many ways that you can look at that where I understand people's like it's an emotional eating pattern to try to switch into a diet, but the reality is your body needs certain things and the number one diet right now that people are finding to cure autoimmune diseases, at least to put it in remission so they can figure out their body, is the carnivore diet. Literally, just eating meat completely removes that inflammation from your system. You're no longer having to process toxins from any of the plant sources or all of the you know, the insulin, whatever you wanna call it. It's not giving you insulin shots anymore, the boosters of what I like to call it, where you're literally just glucose loading with all of these different carbs, because we do. We have a heavy carb society. A lot of people eat so many carbs and they're not even aware of it. And when you're spiking your glucose and your insulin like this, like it causes so many different diseases, like that is probably one of the first things to look at when people have chronic health conditions. And so when you go on a carnivore diet and you allow your body to reset, that's the moment where people can understand what they're supposed to feel like. And so when people can like wrap their head around, like, okay, let me not think about my diet from this ego space or what I wish were true, let me actually give my body what it needs, that's where things start changing, because then you actually start researching and understanding these things.
Speaker 2:No one talks about plant compounds like this. No one's talking about the fact that they have their own things that are causing problems. Now, can everyone? Is this for everybody? No, not necessarily.
Speaker 2:There are certain people out there who have the best microbiome and they can digest anything they put in their body, but is it still going to cause issues down the road by them, like putting that in an impactful way, like eating all of these things in heavy loads? Right, we're not supposed to be eating tons of blueberries one or two. And I always like to think of things as the smaller the food, the less quantity we're supposed to eat of it. Because even almonds when you think about almonds, for example, they're small, but think about how much water it takes to grow one almond a gallon of water per almond those are not meant to be eaten as like a main meal. But people do. We shovel this food because we think like, oh, these are good for us, but we forget about the lectins, we forget about the phytates, all of these chemical compounds that our body is literally not digesting. And so, coming back to the point of why don't we get this information when we go to the doctors?
Speaker 2:First off, the Western medical system is not geared towards helping people. They treat symptoms, and just because they're wearing a white coat does not make them smart. They are trained. Anyone can get trained to prescribe medicine. Anyone can get prescribed to hear a thing and diagnose a symptom. That's not smart, right? That is just like hey, I'm going to school and I'm learning how to diagnose people. That's not helping you get better and so you're not going to get these things from your regular Western medical system.
Speaker 2:That is set up for acute conditions. They are perfect for acute medical conditions. If you're bleeding and you need to be sewn up or you have a rupture of appendix, definitely go see them. But when you have chronic health conditions, they're not going to help you. It's going to make you worse and you don't need to be filling your body with more medication. And so they're not. Of course, they're not going to be like oh, let's check your gut. They don't even believe in that because that's not in their training capacity. They're not trained for this, so they're never going to bring this to your attention.
Speaker 1:This is such an illuminating conversation. For me, it's interesting that you mentioned you know the whole medical industry and you're probably triggering a lot of egos with that statement, right, if they're listening to this. And it's interesting because I was talking to someone who's a pharmacist and they told me that sometimes it's really hard for them to do their job because they see people coming in constantly for, like, high blood pressure medication and these types of medications over and over again. And they said to me candidly that I tell my patients sometimes like, listen, this is not a life sentence, you don't have to have, for example, high blood pressure forever, because it's kind of told to you that once you have high blood pressure, you have high blood pressure forever, right? So people feel disempowered to really seek other methods of healing.
Speaker 1:And the gut microbiome, with what we've been discussing, seems like it's linked to so many different things. But even with the whole diet situation that we were just talking about, for example, it's interesting because I was going to ask you, is that for everyone? Because I know people who have had pretty bad reactions in terms of their mental health, in terms of their physical health, who've cut out meat, for example, and it's like night and day for them. They're just vegan or vegetarian, right, and focusing on those foods and not eating any sort of meats, and they seem to be doing better mentally and physically, right, and some people have reversed certain chronic pain or illnesses that they were facing once they got off meat.
Speaker 1:So I just want to dig deeper into that a little bit. Like is everyone's gut? Is it a case by case basis? Do people need to go get a gut test to kind of figure out okay, these foods work for me, these foods don't work for me? Because, like you kind of alluded to, I'm assuming that this is not a blanket in terms of diet and nutrition. It can't be the same for everyone.
Speaker 2:Right? Of course not okay. And so that's going to be one of the big topics. Because, first off, yes, if people are upset about hearing this about the Western medical system, the reality is you can't ignore it at this point and I'm really proud of those pharmacists being able to reach that point and I think we're going to start seeing that more and more, where people are going to realize like, oh my God, you don't have to be on medication, you can actually heal yourself, right, and I think, as our generation starts kicking in, we're going to see more of that. But the older generations, who are still locked in to the old mainstream mentality, you're not going to see that in the Western medical system.
Speaker 2:Now, as far as the diet's concerned, the reason these people are seeing bigger, like they're seeing results by going vegan, is because they're removing two major components. So meat is high in sulfur and so when you're combining all of these high sulfur vegetables and these high sulfur foods, those combinations are what wreak havoc. So, yes, you're going to start feeling better when you go on a vegan diet or a just a carnivore diet. That's because you're removing these major compounds where your liver is trying to process all of these. A lot of people are going to have methylation issues, which is what kicks into processing all of these compounds like brotherhood sulfur or salicylates or anything of that sort. Now, when you do that, you might feel better for a while. I have known a lot of people who are in their 50s 60s and they went vegan in their 20s, but they started feeling the difference there. The reason is you can feel so good at going on a vegan diet at first because again, you're separating and not compounding these sulfur compounds and causing a lot of other issues for your liver to digest stuff like that. But then when you start consuming all of these, unfortunately the vegan diet is a high carb diet. There's barely any way to get by a vegan diet by reducing your carbon take. It's almost impossible, because then you start eating more rice, you start eating more grains, you start eating more beans. You're eating high carb foods. Yes, some of them might be like a slower glucose spike, but they're still going to be high glucose. That will eventually lead to insulin resistance.
Speaker 2:Over 90 percent of the population is insulin resistant and barely any of them know it until they are prediabetic. Where that comes from? The majority of that insulin resistance is from our carb intake. We eat way more carbs than we're intended to and we should not be having those insulin spikes as regularly as we do. That ends up adding up over time and people start feeling it later in life. This is why we tend to find people starting to be diagnosed prediabetic when they're in their 40s, because their system is just catching up and that insulin resistance is moving into prediabetes and then that prediabetes into diabetes.
Speaker 2:I myself was prediabetic and I did not realize I was insulin resistant and that was what was causing the majority of my problems. Do I think I'll be able to eat more plants at a certain point in my life? Yes, will I ever eat a ton of them at once? No, because we're not meant to eat one main source as a whole. We're supposed to have a balanced diet, but the insulin resistance creates so many different symptoms in the body and it doesn't affect just one organ. It literally affects your entire being. I mean your legs, your arms, your liver, your stomach, everything it's affecting and your brain, which they used to think it didn't affect, but it does. If people understood this one simple thing insulin resistance that's going to be the key for them actually getting through life with more of an easy, and they're just going to have an easier time moving through life without having so many chronic conditions.
Speaker 1:The quality of the car matter and the reason I'm asking that is because I watched this documentary on Netflix and where this guy was visiting different blue zones around the world, which, in these zones, are zones where people live to 90 plus Some people are like 103, 120. And part of his research was looking at what kept these people alive. So, outside of daily activity, outside of having friends and family and community, they. He also looked at their diet, right, and a lot of these people were still eating breads. Granted, they were making these breads from scratch, right. For example, like in Italy I think he went to I'm forgetting the city but they were making a lot of carb dense foods, right. And then, I think, in Japan, they were really big on eating these purple sweet potatoes, right, so their diets were very carb heavy. But these people were extremely healthy, right, because they're living to 90 plus 100 and something.
Speaker 1:So does the quality of the carb matter? Because I know, for example, in America, they put chemicals in everything and I'll eat certain breads. I really enjoy bread, for example, but I'm getting to the age where, like, I can taste the sugar Like I'm. Like, is bread supposed to have this much sugar in it? So does the quality of the carb matter, and also does it matter how much sugar is being put into something.
Speaker 2:Well. So there's a lot that goes into this, because insulin resistance is not only about carbs. I mean, even the air that we breathe can cause insulin resistance. Right, there's so many different triggers that can cause insulin resistance, but when it comes to carbs, you also have to think about the fact, like I always like.
Speaker 2:Going back to Japan and their basis. They ate rice, but they ate minimal, right, they didn't overeat things. They actually had a small portion of rice with fish and every. You know their portion sizes were just ideal for their body and they have. I don't remember the same, but they have that method, if you will, where when they feel half full, they stop eating. Right, and that alone is key.
Speaker 2:Here in America are you kidding? People shovel food like they're never going to eat again and they're eating more. A lot of other countries, they naturally intermittent. Best they eat, you know, in the morning and then they eat again for dinner and it's early. The time you eat can also play a huge impact on it, because your digestion is best in the morning. Hours Around 11, 10, 11 am is when you have the best digestion, and then you get past four o'clock and it starts declining. A lot of people tend to eat six o'clock, seven o'clock, and then they go to bed by 10. Their food's not digested yet.
Speaker 2:So it really all just depends on when you're eating these carbs and how many you're eating, because in other countries, like you're talking about with bread, bread is just a part of their diet along with all of these other things that they're eating. It's not bread on top of bread. You know, like here I couldn't tell you what their carb count is, but a single like a bun for a hamburger has over 40 grams of carbs. I eat 20 grams of carbs a day. You know, like I'm not a no carb person, but the mentality of overeating and eating so many different carbs, like French fries along with the hamburger, along with other things on their plate that are heavy carbs, like that's over easily 100 grams of carbs in one meal that someone's consuming, and when you think about how much 100 carbs is good. Let me try to put it this way when you check your blood glucose, your level spike by four points for every gram of carbs you intake. Ok, so when you eat 100 grams of carbs, you're multiplying that by four. That is a high blood glucose. Like people don't pay attention to the fact that they are spiking really high. And then your body has to try to come up with the insulin to take care of all of this, and it doesn't, and that's why we end up getting insulin resistant and we don't process all of this stuff.
Speaker 2:And other countries just tend to have a better mentality around the way that they eat food. And I mean, let me put it to you this way Over 50 percent of Americans at this point are either pre diabetic or have diabetes. So that should say to you right there that we are eating way too many carbs, because carbs are sugar. It's not like a lot of people like to think, like oh well, I cut out sugar, so I'm good. No, carbs are sugar, like that's another form of sugar. And so when you can bring that back, it doesn't mean stop eating carbs. It just means bring it back. Like don't make that the entirety of your meal. Really balance it off. Like we lost the idea of balancing our food long ago.
Speaker 2:And I just I think about my grandpa and how he used to eat, and he used to eat the same thing every single day A piece of toast, eggs and bacon, and that was his breakfast, and then for dinner he'd have steak, you know, whatever, and it was just like a easy, balanced meal. He never ate vegetables he couldn't. His body actually was similar to mine, and he died at 90. He was the only one in my family who died to live to old age, but he was actually still healthy. He was still working on his roof at the age of 40. He just happened to have an accident at the age of 90 when he died, and so there's a lot to think about it. Though they had a balanced plan. They, they, just they didn't overeat. My grandpa's generation didn't overeat. They worked on the farms. They had everything that they needed just from the farm, and now we have food everywhere. Everywhere you go, there's food in reach, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's food everywhere and it's so much chemically enhanced food as well, so much high fructose corn syrup. So even when you're eating something that, yes, it's a carb, it's obviously not as detrimental as eating. Eating a piece of bread again, maybe in Europe is not going to be the same thing as eating a piece of bread in America, because there are regulations of what can go into the food versus what can go into the food here in America are two different things. So I do like that. Again, it's not a sense of cutting everything out, because I think when people hear that, they freak out because you know the keto diet was such a big thing for a long time and personally for me.
Speaker 1:I think I tried that for three days and literally felt like I was going crazy because I'm like I'm just, I need a slice of bread or something right. So I'm more for the holistic approach, but like not overeating, if that makes any sense, like to your point, but at the same time still acknowledging the impacts of those food. And because I can tell when my glucose has spiked right. If I eat food and I immediately feel super tired after especially if I have like a breakfast sandwich in the morning I can tell when my glucose has spiked. I don't have a glucose monitor. I know that that's a thing now that people sell, you could kind of wear it like a watch or something. But I can tell when I eat certain foods and I still feel like light on my feet and I'm still pretty good to go, versus when I eat something else and I'm like, oh, I feel so tired, I have theitis, and I think a lot of people can identify with that. How can people tell if their gut is completely out of whack?
Speaker 2:Well, first let me touch in on that, because I used to be. I was against the keto diet for a long time because I just thought it was another fad diet. And then I started doing the research into it and I was like, oh my God, there's actually something to this. So I jumped on the keto diet and that is where my body started shifting.
Speaker 2:And the reality is, the reason most people don't make it past the first week on keto is because their body is striving to try to get those carbs to keep that high blood glucose going, because there's a system that's running where it's like, oh, insulin spiking, I need more glucose. Their body is just trying to preserve itself. It's idea, even though we're not supposed to be running on that kind of glucose on a regular basis. So your body's literally trying to be like, oh, but I need my kick, I need my kick. It's almost like an addiction is what happens, and so it's like it takes moving past that rough point to really start seeing benefits.
Speaker 2:People find massive benefits by dropping 20 plus pounds within the first week of being on keto, once they reach that point where their body is starting to utilize that fat for fuel. So there's a lot to the keto diet, and one that it took me a while to get into, but once I did I was just like wow, that's really profound. But now I understand why people are using it. But back to your other question. So will you ask one more time please?
Speaker 1:Yes, of course, and I just want to respond to what you're saying because, as you're talking and I try to talk for the audience, right, because we think about living life, for example. So I'm Nigerian and in my culture it's very carb heavy right, so a lot of beans, a lot of rice, a lot of plantains, all really good stuff. So I'm trying to picture myself at a family gathering and having to overthink Again. You're not saying don't have carbs, right? But I guess what I'm trying to ask is is there a healthy medium, right? For some people? Maybe they're able to do the whole keto thing. Is there a world where people can still manage their diet and their health of their gut microbiome by, like you said, maybe not necessarily cutting foods out, but eating them in moderation, not overdoing it? Or is it one of those things where you're not really going to see any sort of health benefits unless you completely or you're 80% more into keto than any other diet?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so actually this is a great way to lead into the question that you asked again about the gut microbiome and how to know right, and the reality is, if someone is dealing, this is actually going to answer your question anyway. When someone is dealing with immense gut dysbiosis, they're going to know, because everything they eat makes them feel bad. They're always tired, they're always angry or irritable or they are always depressed or anything that you give them food reactions. If you have skin conditions, that is 100% an indicator that you have gut dysbiosis. Skin conditions do not come from the outside unless you are wearing makeup or something of that nature that's going to affect your skin. That way, everything else stems from inside your body, and so when you have acne or you have rosacea or psoriasis or any of these eczema all these conditions that is because your gut is dysbiotic. Those are ways to really tell like something's not right. That is your gut. There's no more denying this. We're proving it time and time again through microbiome, the microbiome therapy and research and all of these different avenues. And so, with that being said, if someone has these conditions and they're to the extent that I was where I literally almost had a heart attack from throwing a frisbee.
Speaker 2:Those are where you want to stop and actually get extreme. Go on an extreme diet for even just a week, so you know what you're looking for, so you know what feeling you're supposed to come back to. And then from there, because it is an elimination diet, you start adding things back in one at a time so you can find out what's triggering this, what's causing me to have these symptoms. And I always want to remind people don't make excuses Like, yes, a lot of people want to live a happy life and eat food, but we're not supposed to eat food for this like enjoyment of life. We're supposed to eat food for our survival. Like food was not meant for this. Like party and eat all these things all the time and look at this new food. Food was meant for survival. We're supposed to eat to survive and thrive. And so really be honest with yourself. If you are feeling bad enough and there is something that's just digging you up time and time again and you're just like man, like I don't really want to feel this way anymore, allow yourself to get strict for just a week. Even so you can figure things out If you're not in that bad a condition and you eat things and every once in a while you feel kind of off.
Speaker 2:A lot of people have depressive episodes after eating heavy carbs because when you fluctuate your blood glucose levels you're going that messes with your emotions, like it is directly connected to your emotional well-being and you'll know. Like if you're having carb intolerances of any kind, you're going to know, and I like to always, I like to remind people of that. Yes, go extreme if you need to. If you don't have to learn to cut back, just watch yourself and think about when you go out, what are you eating and how can you do it in a balanced way where you're still getting things that you love to eat. But you don't have to go so extreme. If you don't have to, then don't. But also remember to pay attention that there is a way of eating that's going to take you through life in a much easier way, versus if you keep eating the way that you are, five years from now you may not be. You know where you're at right now.
Speaker 1:It might be worse, yeah but as you're talking, I'm also something else popped into my mind, because a lot of people say fiber is extremely important and a lot of people on the keto diet talk about how they suffer from constipation because there's not much fiber in their diet anymore, since they're mostly eating meats. Is that accurate and how do you? And what's the role of fiber in getting enough fiber for your gut microbiome? Does that actually affect it?
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of different scientific studies out there that show opposites of each other. There's some studies that show you don't eat fiber at all. That fiber is actually kind of a lie. If you will, really, yeah. But then there's others that show that fiber does feed your gut microbiome but at the same time, if you have dysbiosis, you're not going to want to feed the gut microbiome because you're not just feeding the good ones, you're feeding all of them, right. So that's where it comes down to a lot of functional medicine practitioners. They will say if you have a certain gut dysbiosis, don't eat fiber. You need to cut down on the fiber because you're going to be feeding these bacterias and while you're going through treatment whether you choose to go through a regular antibiotic approach or you use natural antibiotics like herbal remedies, those while you're doing that, you don't want to be feeding these bacteria, as you want to be able to wipe them out and get the ones that need to be, you know, swept away If they're overpopulated. You don't want to be feeding them while you're trying to clear them out. So a lot of practitioners will say don't eat fiber while you're clearing out your gut from a dysbiosis. Now, on the other side of it, I think there are certain.
Speaker 2:On a keto diet, I eat plenty of fiber. I eat more than 50 grams of fiber a day and I'm on keto. Keto does not mean no carbs or it doesn't mean no vegetables. A lot of people still eat their certain vegetables. I mean, like even zucchini. I can't do zucchini, but one zucchini is only three grams of carbs right, and you want to stick between 20 to 50 grams of carbs on a ketogenic diet? That is so easy. Like.
Speaker 2:I have keto bread that is delicious and it's only four grams per slice. Most bread is 30 grams per slice 30 grams of carbs. You're eating with just one piece of toast, right, and so with the keto toast that I have, it's four grams. And then you add in, like zucchini and another vegetable and that's like okay. So you're added up and you eat a whole zucchini and then you add in, like zucchini and you're only at like, seven grams of carbs, right, and so it's not hard to still eat a wide variety of food while being on the ketogenic diet. It's just you're cutting out the high glucose-biking foods which we're not supposed to be eating in large quantities. We just happen to at this point in life because we have access to it and everyone thinks like, oh, I have access to this, so it should be okay. Not, it's just a rewiring, it's a reframing of what we're actually supposed to be doing versus what we think that we can do just because we have access to it.
Speaker 1:Right. Have you ever worked with pregnant women who, for example, I know this woman who she was vegan and then when she got pregnant, she started craving meat, or vice versa, for example. But even women who are about to start their cycle, their period, for example I know that my appetite changes and I start to crave a little bit more sugar, et cetera. Have you worked with anyone going through that? And then, what are your thoughts on those cravings at critical points in the body and how it's changing?
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm just. This is like favorite topics here. Every single pregnant woman that I've worked with started eating meat when they got pregnant. They literally could not. Their body was just like give me meat. Like they went from vegan to I want a hamburger right now and there's nothing they could do to stop those cravings. Right, and I'm really thankful for those women listening to their body, because that is your natural, intuitive body seeing this is what I need. You're making a baby and I need these nutrients.
Speaker 2:If we go back to the beginning of time, we know that what built our brain was meat. That was what we survived on. Meat was what actually literally built our brain, right, and so our bodies know like, hey, we're building this fetus, we know what we need, eat this, and our body naturally tells us what to eat. Okay, and like now, when these women aren't pregnant, they can go back to their own views and what they think that they need and not eat it because their body's not. They're like well, whatever, like this isn't you, but if you're going to build a baby, we need to. We need these. You know these nutrients.
Speaker 2:And so working with them. That is what I typically found Right. They all went through that and you asked me another another. There's a second part to that question.
Speaker 1:I was also asking in terms of our women or people who get periods.
Speaker 2:So the big point to that is women. Women specifically need 18 milligrams of iron a day, 18. This is going to be a kick, a shocking study for you. So I did a study on all of my clients for a couple of years. Every single woman, every single woman who is still menstruating, had a low iron and the sense of their iron was low, but low ferritin. And so many of them were actually so low that had they gone to the hospital and had their iron levels checked, they would have had a blood transfusion. Their iron levels were so low.
Speaker 2:And the reality is that even when you are eating meat, most women still are not getting enough iron, because we lose that every single month. So we have to maintain that Right. And so meat you can get about like three milligrams of iron out of each serving. So when women eat that and they start craving it, it's because they need iron. Their bodies were made to. You know they're bleeding, so they have to replenish that and that's why we need women tend to actually need more meat than men, and that's another big shocking thing because usually it's men who eat more meat, but they only need a small percentage of iron and they get that easily through the meat content, so they end up overdoing their irons more often than not.
Speaker 1:Interesting because I've heard it flip the other way around. I had a doctor come on the show and he basically was saying that sugar is the link to almost all diseases and all health issues and he was making a case for that. And he said that when I had asked him about nutrition and stuff, he said that women could probably eat more, benefit more from a vegetarian diet than men actually. So it's so interesting because then it's like what study, like who's right? You know what I mean, because everyone's kind of saying there's a point where everyone's saying the same thing, but I tend to hear different rules of thought when it comes to the nutrition piece.
Speaker 2:Well it really comes into when you think about the certain nutrients that women need more than men. And when we look at that, it's when you overdo iron. You can have the same symptoms as when you have iron deficiency anemia, which a lot of women do. And the reality is we can't do without iron Iron. When your iron levels are low, your progesterone levels drop and when your progesterone drops it actually lowers your iron. It's like this hand-in-hand cycle and it throws our hormones out of whack big time if we have low iron, which is why a lot of women tend to have really bad periods or really bad symptoms. And it comes down to the fact that the one thing that's highest in iron is meat. You cannot get a high source of vegetables that is high in iron. The next closest thing are insects. Like I think it's like three grams of crickets or something I can't really remember how much, but it has 18 milligrams of iron. And when you really think about things, it's like yeah, you know what Cultures? There's a lot of cultures who do eat insects and there's a lot of cultures who, they do eat nothing but meat. And we have to look at those things as a whole and not just like the pieces of what's happening in America. No one likes to take into account what are our nutrient deficiencies and what do we have more of, and a lot of people are taking multivitamins when they don't need to be taking multivitamins. And the course that I'm creating goes through all of this, because people should be able to know what their nutrient panels are on a daily basis and what they actually need more of versus what they're eating too much of. Because when you take a multivitamin and you're not balancing your iron with your calcium or your magnesium and all these things, it throws your body out of whack. And yes, it's sugar, one of the biggest causes to disease. Yes, because of insulin resistance, and everything can come back to insulin resistance. So that's not wrong.
Speaker 2:But we also have to look at the body as a whole and what the body needs. And women when they're iron deficient, anemic, and they're trying to have a baby, the complications are enormous, and so that and again it comes back to that thing of okay, women crave meat when they're pregnant or when they're going on their period, it's because their body is telling them hey, I need this nutrient. Our body is a tool and it is constantly talking to us, like if we could learn to listen to our body, we would know exactly what we need versus what we're just like shoving into it and trying to fit to make it work. And so it's really an intuitive thing, and in my near death experiences I was shown a lot of this stuff which I'm not going to talk about right now. But there's like this ease to really understanding the human body and everyone's just skipping over it. Everyone just sees it as like this separate entity from them, instead of realizing, hey, this is your vehicle and if you listen to it, you'll know how to take care of yourself.
Speaker 1:Have you heard of the work from Dr Gepa Marte? He talks about how trauma and unresolved trauma can affect people's health, right. So, for example, I think there was a study I hope I'm not misquoting this or saying this incorrectly but essentially, if people have certain ways of coping with their trauma that they have not resolved and they keep it in their body, sometimes it could manifest as autoimmune disease, it could manifest as cancer, and I know that you look at the whole person, you have a holistic approach and I just want to hear your thoughts on. I know everything feeds into each other. I know that the gut affects the brain, it affects mental health, but how much and I don't think you'd have the numbers for this but how much of trauma and all of the hardships of life also affect someone's health?
Speaker 2:So this is where maybe I mentioned it in the beginning, but this has been the biggest topic in podcast lately for me, and the reality is, yes, your trauma is going to affect your physical body because it's going to affect your vagus nerve and the way you process information. However, it's actually the opposite that people need to start looking at, and they do not have a healthy body that is grounded and working properly. Therefore, turning your vagus nerve off and saying like, hey, you don't have to be in fight or flight and your gut is fine and you're not leaking and all of these things that are happening in your body. That causes those traumatic events to continue to replay and the neurological wiring of those traumas are going to continue because you're not going to be in a body that's able to process new neurons, you're just going to. Your body is out of balance, so these traumas keep coming in and you just keep reliving that same moment over and over. The traumas are the way that I like to look at. The traumatic aspects are somatic, like we can feel them in our body, but the beautiful thing about that is you can move through that with somatic therapy and moving your body, doing yoga, really moving your body and working through that from a somatic perspective, while you are getting your body in check too, and then be able to, like, actually navigate your trauma from a completely different perspective, because we're going back to the gut microbiome again.
Speaker 2:When your gut microbiome is dysbiotic and it's causing all of these symptoms to arise mentally and you're being set off, you're getting aggressive, you're sad, depressed, whatever it is, whatever's coming up from this is going to make you think that things are connected to your past, that this is about your trauma, and then you're just going to continue reliving those being like, oh man, this must be because of what happened when I was two years old, and it just is stuck in my body and it's replaying.
Speaker 2:So then your mind is going to continue rewiring those programs of like, oh okay, like we're just going to continue re looping this over and over again. But when you actually fix your body and you're coming from a healing, grounded space and your body is able to do the work that it needs to in order to heal those neurons, in order to refire and reprogram your subconscious mind right, then you can actually look at these traumatic experiences from a completely different perspective. So, yes, they play, it's a hand in hand. One of does affect the other, but the reality is you cannot work through that trauma if you're in an unhealthy body. It's just going to keep coming up the same way over and over again until you're able to sit there in a calm space and look at it from a completely outsider's perspective.
Speaker 1:I think what you're saying is true and the reason I'm saying that is because I realized the biggest shifts in consciousness that I've ever had, or the biggest shifts in healing from my quote, unquote past, or healing from issues that I guess people would call shadow work, has come from me prioritizing my physical health.
Speaker 1:The biggest leaps and bounds or progress that I've made in that space have come simultaneously when I was focused on my physical health, so moving and trying to eat better. So I think there's so much to what you're saying there and it's interesting because a lot of these conversations are had separately. You're talking about the gut, microbiome, the gut brain connection, but I don't really hear a lot of conversations that talk about what's feeding into each other. Is the trauma from the past feeding into the gut or is the gut feeding into the trauma? And it sounds like what you're saying is the stuff in the past happened and those traumatic events happened. But if you're trying to shift into a new paradigm, if you're trying to release and heal, you can't heal without having a body that's able to kind of rewire itself.
Speaker 2:Exactly Because it's a body that's creating.
Speaker 2:This is the easiest way for me to say this. It is your body that is creating the emotional responses, not the traumatic experience. The experience is outside of you. Your body is what's causing the emotional outburst, the aggressive tendencies, a PTSD episode. That is a physical response. That is not a trauma, just being like, oh hey, I'm an external thing and I'm going to come like, slap you in the face. Your body is having the trigger release and so when you can stop your body from having those releases, you can look at that and you're like, oh, that happened to me in the past, but I'm not there anymore. That's then my body is what's holding that in there. So it is literally a physical response. And if we can remember that it is a physical response, that's happening, meaning you can feel it and you can see it, then that is why we need to work on the physical aspect of it, because I can't even tell you how much work I did on the traumatic events from my childhood.
Speaker 2:I did yoga, somatic therapy, talk therapy, all of these different rakeys and all of these healing modalities to work through that stuff, and sure did it help me understand it? Yes, but did I stop having emotional outbursts from it. No, when did that stop? When I started understanding what was happening in my body on a physiological level and that it was causing these upheavals because it was setting off my biggest nerve and continuing to refire these programs in my brain.
Speaker 2:And then, when I stopped doing that, I no longer had those triggers and then I stopped reacting to external situations. And then I was like, oh my God, I've already healed through that traumatic stuff. My body just wasn't healed. My body wasn't given that chance to reset right. Because we're in our society we tend to go to one extreme, to the other and we get hyper-focused on like, oh, all this traumatic stuff you got to go into the spiritual. People forget it's mind, body and spirit. Your body is responsible for the physical reactions that you're having because of those traumatic events and it needs to be brought back to center too.
Speaker 1:Wow, this is really good. I think I can talk to you forever. I have two last questions before we close out the show. I have to have you back to have a part two on this. So the question I want to ask is how does this relate to addictions? Because a lot of people are suffering from grief, right, they've lost the loved one, some have lost their jobs, some have gone through really traumatic events in life which you can relate to, and they are addicted to a lot of substances. They're addicted to food, alcohol, drugs, however you want to call it, because the pain is so much there's some pain people go through in life that it just really brings you to your knees, especially when you lose a loved one. I guess what I'm trying to ask is can you the focus on the gut microbiome helps someone, for example, recover from addiction a little bit faster?
Speaker 2:Yes, I will tell you why, and that is because there are actually bacteria that cause addiction. When we're talking like that, there are literally bacteria in your gut that can cause anything you're experiencing. It's real. We find that there are certain bacteria species that are directly linked to alcoholism versus heroin. If someone one person can take heroin and they'll never touch it again, that's because they don't have the gut microbiome that's saying, hey, I want this, while other people can. That might sound so simplistic, but that's the reality. We literally have these things that are sending what if they're overpopulated and there's a lot of them they're going to respond with like I hate more of this, more of this. This is again why it comes back to. We're talking about even people who are obese. There's literally bacteria that cause obesity because they say give me more of these, give me more of this food. They're actually causing the person to crave those specific foods. It's with any addiction across the board that our gut is having a response to.
Speaker 1:Good. My next question and my final question before we close out the show is how do we get better bacteria in our gut? I know obviously that could be through food, but there are a lot of supplements out there and you can see this can in my hand. I'm drinking this soda called Super B. It's supposed to be a probiotic soda. A lot of those are on the market. I just want to hear your thoughts on probiotic supplements. Do you think those are helpful? Are they gimmicks? You don't have to endorse any specific probiotic company on the show if you don't want to, but I just want to hear your thoughts on how people can improve their gut and do supplements help and do sodas probiotic sodas help as well.
Speaker 2:My first question would be what's the sugar content on that?
Speaker 1:I got the one that has zero grams of sugar. I stay away from the ones that have sugar in it and I can actually read the ingredients. It's filtered water, organic cane sugar, organic raspberry powder, organic pomegranate powder, and it says that the sugar is eliminated during fermentation. Those are all of the ingredients, and it has zero grams of sugar. We have to take the word for it.
Speaker 2:The probiotics is a big piece and there's a lot to probiotics. I could definitely not dive into that, but I am actually creating a course that has all the information that someone would get if they came into a $3,000 consultation and they're getting it for $50 during the pre-launch sale right now. In this I talk about probiotics. I highly recommend a probiotic every single meal. That is because those are going to help you process the food that you're eating that you might not have the gut microbiome for. One of the simplest steps that people can take is to incorporate a probiotic into their daily eating. I recommend going on to intermittent fast for everybody. That's across the board. Now you're going to want to figure out which one works best for you, because there's different levels to intermittent fasting. When you can intermittent fast and only eat twice a day and take a probiotic with each meal, that alone is going to really shift your gut. It's going to help you so much. The reason I mentioned the course is because there's so much to probiotics. You're not going to just go out and go to Walmart or go to Target and buy one off the shelf. Chances are you're not going to get anything from those. You really need to understand what kind of probiotics you're taking, which ones cause histamine reactions. There are certain strains that cause more histamine in the gut. A lot of people can already have histamine producing bacteria which they don't need more of.
Speaker 2:Probiotics are a big topic but, yes, probiotics are extremely beneficial, even when they are considered dead. A lot of times they'll do research and they find out that the bacteria has died once it reaches the intestines. But they still find that even though they are dead, they are still creating a response in the gut. Like I said before, no one's technically an expert on these little guys yet, because there's barely touching the surface, but we do know that they're still actually benefiting people drastically. I cannot go a meal without taking a probiotic. I noticed the difference immediately and so it is. It's a game changer. Don't just expect to find one that has all these different probiotics and then think it's good. That's unfortunately not the way they work. There's a lot that goes into it.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that. I'm going to make sure I go to the store this weekend and get a probiotic, even though you said that there's a lot that goes into it, so I probably need to take your course as well, just to make sure that I'm taking the right one. Lynn, thank you so much for this conversation. I learned so much, and I'm sure the listeners learned so much as well. We just basically scratched the surface on this conversation, so I appreciate you for explaining as much as possible. I always like to ask all my guests for final words of wisdom to the listeners. I know you've been dropping a lot of gems throughout the show, but gems that you have that you keep in your back pocket as you go through life, or it could be related to what we've been talking about.
Speaker 2:Well, I think, first off, to take what resonates and labor doesn't, and to open your mind to different ways of doing things. I think we get so stuck on this one-way track that this is the only way to heal or this is the only way to do things. But to really pay attention to there are people out there who we were doing so much research, and the information that we're putting out there is for you to take and try. Try different things and find what works for you. That's in every aspect of your life. Really just open up and think like, okay, life is an experience. Let's try all these different things and find what works best for me. See how I feel better and really invest in yourself.
Speaker 2:Really take the time and energy to know who you are on all levels and what's going to get you to the life that you want. If you want to be a better person in all areas of your life, take the steps to get there. Don't make excuses. It's so easy to make excuses, which is actually why I made the course $50, because I want people to take advantage of this to learn about their body and their mind and what they're creating. Just really allow yourself to grow. I always think about it, as this might sound extreme, but why be here if you're not going to grow and get better as a being, if you're going to stagnate? Is that really what you want to do for the rest of your life?
Speaker 1:Thank you. Where can people find you if they want to connect with you, to learn more about your work or even take your course?
Speaker 2:Everything's on my website, wwwlynne riverscom, and that's L-I-N-N riverscom. You can find everything that you need on there.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Lynn, for stopping by the show today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you guys so much for tuning into today's episode and a big shout out to Lynn for stopping by the show. If you're interested in learning more about Lynn, please check out the show notes, where you can find a link to her website, wwwlynne riverscom. You can follow A Word to the Wise on Instagram and TikTok at A Word to the Wise podcast. We're also on YouTube at A Word to the Wise podcast. Please be sure to subscribe If you are enjoying the show. Please rate, leave a review, share and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, peace and love, always, always, always.