Health Podcast with Connie Sellecca: Brush Away Cancer; Eat Fermented Foods; Alarm Anxiety

In this episode we feature:

An interview with cardiologist and author Dr. William Davis.

How to fight the Post Vacation Blues.

Avoid the sleep destroying Alarm Anxiety.

The link between oral hygiene and cancer.

And more ways you can improve your health today! 

For more information, and to sign up for our private coaching, visit tesh.com

Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

Unknown: 0:07

Gib, hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm Gib Gerard. Today we have another special intelligence for your health with Connie Celica, edition of the show, and our interview is with cardiologist Dr William Davis, he is also author of the book super gut. So we have all kinds of information about how important a healthy gut is and what to do with an unhealthy gut. So without further ado, here is intelligence for your health with Connie selika, studies show a third of us experience post vacation blues once we get home, because the happiness chemicals we built up over our break are dissipating. To hold on to those happy brain chemicals longer. Have something fun to look forward to when you come back, like dinner with friends, because according to Cornell University researchers, you get as much happiness from anticipating a good time as having one. Also put a couple of pictures from your vacation where you can see them while you're working. Studies show that visualizing yourself in a place where you felt good can mentally bring you back to that feeling and immediately boost your mood. Try this test to check your balance. Act like you've been pulled over for a DUI and try walking in a straight line, putting one foot directly in front of the other with the toes of your back foot touching the heel of your front foot. Neurosurgeon Dr Nancy Tsai from Medical University of South Carolina says if you can't take more than four steps without wobbling off center, your balance needs work, so try standing in that same position, one foot directly in front of the other, and raise your arms above your head. Hold that position as long as you can, because with good balance, you're less likely to fall and injure yourself. And that's important, because 20% of elderly hip fracture patients die within a year due to complications from the trauma. You can also try Tai Chi. A study found that people who do Tai Chi once a week have much better balance than people who don't practice it at all. Coming up, we'll talk to cardiologist Dr William Davis about some of the good things we can expect to happen with our health when we add one specific probiotic to our diet, but first, if you're spending a week at the beach, is your beach towel, a bacteria bomb that needs washing every day. No microbiologists from the University of Arizona say it's okay to use the same towel for several days running if you hang it in direct sunlight and let it dry completely. The sun's UV rays will kill 90% of the germs, leaving bacteria levels too low to make you sick. But if the towel still damp the next day, toss it in the dryer, because with moisture, bacteria can multiply 100 fold after each use. So you got a sunburn and now it's peeling. Should you give in to the temptation and peel off the flakes of dead skin, or just leave it and let nature take its course? Well, according to dermatologist Dr Sonja Batra, peeling a sunburn can provide psychological satisfaction, because some people find it relaxing and even soothing like scratching an itch. But here's why you should resist the urge. First, if your skin is peeling, it's a sign that significant damage has occurred. It's your body's way of getting rid of damaged cells that could potentially turn into skin cancer, and your body heals itself by forming a new layer of skin underneath. It takes about four to seven days for a new layer of skin to fully form, and that's when the dead skin protecting the new layer begins to peel off. But at that point, your skin is really vulnerable, and peeling off dead skin prematurely can interfere with the healing process and make the new skin susceptible to infection because it gives bacteria a way to enter your system. So as tempting as it may be to peel off sunburned skin, don't do it just like you shouldn't pop a blister, because the damaged skin protects the new skin growing underneath. Okay, listen to this if you want to cut your risk of head and neck cancer by 400% brush and floss on a regular basis. Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York found that people with chronic gum disease have a 400% higher risk of developing cancers of the head or neck, but you can slash your risk by taking three minutes to brush and floss every day, the recommended length of time for brushing two minutes and flossing One Minute. Today, our special guest is Dr William Davis. He's a cardiologist who's best known for writing the New York Times best selling book, Wheat Belly. He also has a book called Super gut a four week. Plan to reprogram your microbiome, restore health and lose weight. The book explores the link between our gut health and our overall health. So I asked Dr Davis why some of us might need to consider reprogramming our gut Well, we've done a real number on our microbiome. That is this collection of trillions of microbes that live in your gastrointestinal tract, all the things we've been exposed to as modern people, multiple courses of antibiotics. Not uncommon Johnny, for a person by age 40 to have taken 30 courses of antibiotics. Then we have glyphosate, the herbicide that's also an antibiotic. We have other herbicides and pesticide residues and food and water, we've got food additives like preservatives and emulsifying agents like polysorbate 80 in your ice cream or salad dressing. Other prescription drugs like stomach acid blocking drugs, statin cholesterol drugs, birth control pills, on and on and on. We swim in an ocean of factors that have disrupt the human microbiome. Now, one of the effects is that we've lost very important species that did important things for the human body, and then beyond that, with loss of those helpful microbe unhealthy species, largely oddly stool species have proliferated in their place and then did something else that's really impacting modern health. They've ascended up into the small bowel, the 24 feet of ilium jejunum, duodenum and stomach, and we now have 10s of millions, I think, over 100 million Americans with 30 feet of all the proliferated stool microbes that impact your health, more intelligence for your health. From cardiologist Dr William Davis. He was just saying that many of us need to reprogram our gut because it's likely swimming with harmful bacteria linked to our exposure to pesticides, antibiotics, food additives and other dangerous toxins. He says those exposures are a top reason most North Americans are seriously deficient in a microbe called Lactobacillus Rotary. So I asked Dr Davis what we can expect to happen if we make changes to restore just that one microbe. When you restore it, wonderful things happen. We restore Rotary, it, interestingly, colonized the entire GI tract, not just the colon, but the entire length of the GI tract, where it sends a signal to the brain, to the hypothalamus, to release the hormone oxytocin. A lot of your listeners likely know what oxytocin is, because they've heard of it as the hormone of love and empathy. Well, when you restore Rotary, that's exactly what happens. You say, I love my partner better. I love my children, my family better. They're less annoying to me. I like my coworkers better. Get this one. I understand other people's points of view better. But the ladies love this restoration of Lactobacillus reuteri, because they get an explosion in dermal collagen, and they start to lose their skin wrinkles at about eight weeks of getting it. Guys love it because you get a boost in strength and a huge increase in muscle. You get a restoration of youthful muscle and strength. You get deeper sleep. It preserves bone density and ladies, very important effect, it suppresses appetite, so you're no longer having to fight temptation. And so we have marvelous effects. And this is just the effects of restoring one microbe we've lost. If you're interested in restoring that microbe, Google lactobacillus Rotary. Rotary is spelled R, E, U, T, E, R, I. There are plenty of probiotics on the market to choose from. You can also get it from foods like yogurt with live cultures, sauerkraut, real sourdough bread and kimchi. If you're exercising in hot weather, make sure you have something cold to drink, because the temperature of your drink really does make a difference. In a study from the University of Montana, scientists monitored people walking briskly on a treadmill for three hours in 90 degree heat, and the exercisers had either ice water to drink or lukewarm room temperature water. The result study subjects had to drink twice as much lukewarm water compared to ice water to maintain a healthy skin temperature and heart rate. Also, when exercisers drank ice water, they were better able to regulate their core temperature and they experienced less fatigue and muscle pain. So if you'll be out exercising in the heat or working in the heat, find an insulated bottle you can fill with ice water. Today's medical term stiff person syndrome or SPS, you may have heard it's what Celine Dion is experiencing. Well, it's an umbrella term for a group of autoimmune and neurological disorders that cause stiffness and spasm. Symptoms throughout the body. The problems typically start in the legs, which can make it difficult to walk and maintain your balance, but over time, the stiffness and spasms can spread to the torso, arms and face. And symptoms are often accompanied by heightened sensitivity to loud noises and even being touched by a loved one. Until recently, there wasn't much doctors could do to treat stiff person syndrome, but research from Johns Hopkins University says patients can get some relief from SPS with a blood plasma exchange. In other words, by replacing the old plasma in your blood with donated plasma from someone who's healthy. In a new study, more than half of people with SPS who tried this new treatment saw immediate improvement in their symptoms. If you've watched the Celine Dion documentary, she gets a plasma exchange, and that's today's medical term, stiff person syndrome, or SPS coming up. We'll hear more from cardiologist Dr William Davis. He'll explain why beans are among the best foods you can eat to stay healthy, even if they sometimes make you gassy. But first, to reduce your risk of death by heart attack, go to bed two hours after your last bite of food. The American Heart Association says we tend to eat a third of our food after 6pm which raises our risk for pre diabetes and high blood pressure by 21% one reason late night meals are typically unhealthy and processed because we're too tired to cook, plus eating within two hours of bed is linked to visceral Fat packed between our organs, which also hurts our heart. That's why researchers recommend having your last mouthful of food two hours before bed. If you've been more forgetful than usual these days, you just need more laughs. Research from Loma Linda University found laughing makes your brain process memories more effectively. For the research, one group of study subjects watched a short funny video while another group just sat calmly in the study room with no video to watch afterward, all the participants were given memory tests and had their stress levels measured. The result, those who watched the funny video, scored far better on the memory test and had less stress during the test. The researchers confirmed what other studies have proved, that the less stress you have, the better your memory will function. So here's the way it works. When we laugh or just even smile, those actions reduce stress hormones, lower our blood pressure and send more feel good dopamine to our brain. That's a chain reaction that alters our brain waves and increases gamma wave activity, and the scientists conclude that those brain waves improve our memory and recall. So the bottom line is pretty straightforward, we now have a terrific reason to watch stand up comedy shows or hang out with our funniest friends, because it's a fact that laughing makes the brain work a whole lot better. Okay, listen to this. Are mosquitos keeping you from enjoying your backyard? Try attracting hummingbirds, because they eat mosquitoes. Hummingbirds love tubular flowers like petunias or day lilies. They'll also come to drink homemade nectar left in your yard. Just mix one part table sugar with four parts warm water and fill a hummingbird feeder, or just use a red solo cup and cut little holes right above the water line for the birds to dip their beaks in, and the influx of hummingbirds can help keep mosquitoes from eating you alive. Back with more health intelligence from cardiologist Dr William Davis, and in his book super gut, he shares lots of research on a gut condition called SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It refers to having excess, unhealthy or bad bacteria in the upper gut. And it's estimated that as many as one in three North Americans have some form of SIBO. So I asked Dr Davis to share some of the health conditions now being linked to having this overgrowth or harmful bacteria. When you have this situation, these microbes don't live for decades, right? They live for minutes to hours. So there's very rapid, constant turnover, trillions of microbes when they die. There's a very important, recently discovered process where the breakdown projects these microbes enter the bloodstream, that's called endotoxemia, finally validated once and for all, 2000 steps relatively recently, but that process, SIBO, endotoxemia in the bloodstream now tells us with confidence, how microbes in the GI tract can be experienced as rosacea or psoriasis or eczema in the skin. So. Or as depression or Alzheimer's dementia or Parkinson's disease in the brain or the muscle and joint aches of fibromyalgia or restless leg syndrome or rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, I believe virtually all common chronic conditions need to be re, examined, reconsidered in light of its connection with the human microbiome. Today we're talking to cardiologist, Dr William Davis, and he was just talking about a condition called SIBO, which refers to having an unhealthy overgrowth of harmful bacteria in the small intestine. Dr Davis says there's a fairly easy way to start treating SIBO, just start adding more legumes to your diet. So legumes, like white beans, black beans, chickpeas, hummus, all these things we're familiar with are very important sources of so called prebiotic fibers, specifically the galacto oligosaccharide form of fiber, probably among the most important prebiotic fibers that you can get because they come to they very healthy species in your GI tract. So if you say, Oh, I can't eat beans or peas or chickpeas or whatever, because it gives me excessive gas and bloating, the problem is not the food. The problem is your microbiome. And so that's your signal. Something's gone haywire. Maybe it was antibiotics, maybe it was your statin cholesterol drug. Maybe it was the anti inflammatory drug you took for your menstrual cycles or for your knee pain. So if you had those kinds of experiences, legumes, think about disruptive microbiome all but specifically, consider SIBO. If you have something you're dreading to do, do do it after you've taken your daily walk, and that will make it easier. That advice comes from Iowa State University. They found that people who rode a bike or took a walk for 30 minutes experienced a mood boost that lasted more than an hour afterward, and that helped them finish a difficult task during that time back with more health intelligence from cardiologist Dr William Davis in his book super gut, he breaks down some of the ways we can reprogram our gut and replace many of the harmful bacteria that cause health problems with more beneficial gut bugs. He says the most common method of reprogramming is with dietary changes combined with taking probiotics. But Dr Davis says another proven way to start adding more good bacteria to our gut is to simply eat more fermented foods, far more important than a probiotic, very costly probiotic, is to get fermented foods do what your great grandmother did and ferment sauerkraut, ferment vegetables on your countertop, get kimchi and kombucha and kefir and yogurt. And the basics of how to ferment food is ever you can get this many books, including my book. It's very easy and it's a it's event. It's effectively cost free. Should be very inexpensive outside the cost of your vegetables, but this is how you re implant very important microbes, crazy names like leuconostoc, mesenterides, pediacos, pentaceous. Now these microbes play kind of a traffic cop function on the other microbes, they bring order back, and they allow the restoration of the microbes you may have lost or are lacking. It's not quite clear how that happens. Are they latent? Are you more receptive from your environment? But somehow, very good studies from a husband wife team at Stanford, the Sonnenberg is showing that vigorous and enthusiastic consumption of fermented foods something we forgot about ever since 1927 when frigid air came out with affordable home refrigeration because of the discovery of Freon as a refrigerant. Ever since then, Americans forgot that fermented foods are not only tasty, they're essential for health. If a friend develops poison ivy or poison oak, can you catch it from them? No, that's according to the Mayo Clinic, the rash isn't infectious and cannot be transmitted by touching blisters on someone else's skin. It's an allergic reaction caused only by an oil on the plant's leaves called urushiol, which can trigger a painful rash up to 48 hours after contact. The only time you could get it from someone else is if you touch the clothes or shoes they were wearing when they were contaminated, which still have the oil on them, generally speaking, to protect yourself, remember the saying, leaves of three, let it be and if you suddenly realize you've touched poison oak or Ivy, you may be able to avoid the rash if You wash the area thoroughly with water and dish soap. Within 10 minutes, the dish soap will cut through the plant oils and rinse them away. Here's an email I received at Connie at intelligence for your health.com. It comes from CAMI Mosher, who writes, I've heard that we can do better at something when we visualize ourselves. Doing it. How does that work? Well, Cami mental practice or visualization can have great results. It's something athletes have been doing forever. They use mental imagery to enhance their physical performance, and it works. Research shows that going through the motions in your head, like sinking a free throw or even nailing an important speech, can improve our performance as much as actually physically practicing, and sometimes the results are even better. In a study from Texas A and M medical students learning to draw blood received 30 minutes of instruction that was followed by either 30 minutes of additional hands on training or 30 minutes of guided mental practice, the result the groups performed equally well, meaning the mental practice was just as effective as the hands on practice. So if you want to perform better practice, but also visualize the results you want, and you're more likely to get them. Thank you for your email. Cami, I hope this helps. Okay, listen to this. For a stronger immune system, be more compassionate. Research from UC Riverside found people who spent five minutes a day feeling grateful for a loved one, saw a spike in immunoglobulin, a an antibody that fights up viruses. Even better write a letter of appreciation, the research shows it will boost your happiness, even if you never send the letter, because just putting your thoughts on paper makes you feel more connected to the person, more humble and more likely to do good deeds for others. Do you have alarm anxiety? See if this scenario sounds familiar, you set your alarm before bed, set a backup alarm just in case, and even wake up in the middle of the night to check the time that is alarm anxiety, the fear of an alarm not going off or not getting enough sleep before it goes off. Alina winel is a master sleep coach, and she says alarm anxiety becomes a vicious cycle. We can't sleep because we're anxious about the alarm, which stresses us out so much we can't sleep. And when else? Says alarms are aptly named because hearing it puts you into an alarmed state, shocking you awake with a rush of stress hormones. So how can we eliminate alarm anxiety? When else says the first step is to face your alarm clock or phone away from you, or put your phone far enough away from the bed that you can't check it. It will go off whether you can see it or not, but looking at the time kick starts your stress hormones and choose a more gentle alarm sound that's not so shocking, instead of something that sounds like an air raid siren. More intelligence for your health from cardiologist Dr William Davis, if you'd like to know more about him or his book, super gut, check out Dr Davis, infinite health.com and earlier, he talked about some of the health benefits associated with restoring the microbe, lactobacillus rotary in our gut. They include giving us a happier mood, deeper sleep and less of an urge to overeat. But Dr Davis says there's another benefit we can expect with more healthy microbes in our gut, they'll help us look and feel much younger. So think about it, if you restore this lost microbe, lost by most of us because of antibiotics, etc, we restore it, and you get a restoration of youthful muscle and strength. Most of us lose about a third or more of our muscle and strength as we get older, starting at about age 30, so it comes back, preserved bone density, increased libido. Many med experience an increase of testosterone, back to youthful levels, levels you had at age 18 or 20, better sleep, by the way, smoother skin, thicker hair, reduction of appetite, increased libido. These are all signs, I think, of greater youthfulness. And you can see this, people share their before after photos, and you can see that many people you'd say, Oh yeah, this person looks 10 or 20 years younger. That's it for our show today, our special intelligence for your health with Connie Selig. Edition of the podcast, I'm Gib Gerard. Don't forget to rate comment and subscribe on Apple podcast. Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. It helps us out a lot, and also you can reach out to us on social media. All of our links are listed down in the show notes. We try to respond to every DM, every mention of the show, because ultimately, we do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You.