Following Your Gut Podcast #9, Healthy Aging Amid Today's Health Challenges

In this enlightening episode of the “Following Your Gut” podcast, host Roland Pankewich engages in a dynamic discussion with Dr. Brady Wirick, DC, delving into the pressing topic of healthy aging amid today’s health challenges. As an experienced functional neurologist, Dr. Wirick shares his insights on the contemporary health landscape, characterized by the pervasive presence of inflammatory and metabolic dysregulation. With the summer months approaching, listeners are treated to an exploration of how to maintain equilibrium in light of these challenges, underscoring the importance of lifestyle modifications.

The episode zeroes in on the trajectory of healthy aging, questioning the inevitability of degenerative conditions and highlighting the avenues for prevention. Crucial themes such as the dangers of the “standard American diet,” the underappreciated role of inflammation markers like high-sensitivity CRP, and the significance of fasting insulin levels are meticulously discussed. Dr. Wirick passionately emphasizes the need for lifestyle overhauls, covering aspects from dietary reform to stress management, sleep, and even electromagnetic exposure. Listeners are encouraged to adopt a holistic approach to health, integrating mind-body balance to combat the stressors of modern living.

Key Takeaways:

•             Metabolic Dysfunction and Inflammation: A core contributory factor to chronic degenerative diseases, metabolic dysfunction often goes undetected until serious manifestations occur.

•             Lifestyle Modifications: Prioritizing sleep, managing electromagnetic exposure, and fostering emotional and mental well-being are pivotal steps in maintaining overall health.

•             Dietary Considerations: Transitioning away from the processed “standard American diet” towards whole, natural foods can significantly reduce inflammation and prevent disease.

•             Importance of Testing: Underutilized tests such as high-sensitivity CRP and fasting insulin are essential in identifying early signs of metabolic and inflammatory health issues.

•             Holistic Health Approach: True healing involves addressing the fundamental lifestyle elements rather than relying on quick fixes or overly supplement-based interventions.

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body."

Chapters

• 0:02 Healthy Aging and Stress Management in Modern Society
• 6:53 Addressing Metabolic Dysfunction and Chronic Diseases
• 19:47 The Impact of 1950s Processed Foods on Modern Health
• 22:20 Prioritizing Sleep and Electromagnetic Health for Wellbeing
• 25:11 Holistic Health: Stress, Supplements, and Digestive Wellness

Transcript

0:00:02 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the Following your Gut podcast, where health science meets clinical wisdom. And we are getting closer and closer to the start of the summer. And I’m really happy to have someone here today who’s really focused on healthy habits, because when the summertime comes around, life changes. So I’m. I’m very pleased to have with us today Dr. Brady Weirich. And Brady’s background is really interesting.

0:00:26 Roland Pankewich: He’s a functional neurologist, which I think is one of the coolest designations out there in health. And he’s spend the whole gamut from everything from lifestyle and diet to helping people with regenerative medicine. Brady, I’m going to let you take over the introduction, so I don’t do you a disservice by not encapsulating everything, but I want to thank you for being with us today. And why don’t you tell us a little bit about what it is you do and who you are.

0:00:50 Brady Wirick: Oh, gosh, where do I even go with that one? Roland? Yeah, first off, thank you. It is genuinely an honor to be here following your gut. I love that so, so much. I’ve been preaching for years that, you know, the. The eyes are the window to your soul, but the gut is the key to your health. And we’re not talking about just intuition here, obviously. We’re talking about actual, like, palpable gut health and what that means for people and how that can help.

0:01:22 Brady Wirick: As far as an introduction to me, what can I say? I was born and raised in Ogden, Utah, and I moved to Idaho as soon as I could for the fishing. And I’ve been practicing functional medicine and functional neurology since the early 2000s. So I think I saw that as my 19th year of practice. And we have covered everything from just straight up functional neurology to weight loss to regenerative medicine and stem cells, which is a whole other fascinating topic we could dive into.

0:01:59 Brady Wirick: It’s just been. It’s been an incredible journey, and it’s been a lot of fun seeing people’s lives change through them changing themselves. So I love to use the. The moniker, if you will, to. To join the health rebellion, because I just genuinely feel like we have a medical system that gets a lot of things wrong. And if you’re going to actually get results and, and get the energy and. And spunk that you want, you got to be a little bit of a rebel.

0:02:31 Roland Pankewich: There you go. I feel a Star wars reference in there in some capacity.

0:02:37 Brady Wirick: Yeah, there is a little bit.

0:02:39 Roland Pankewich: I. I just.

0:02:39 Brady Wirick: I have a rebellious spirit. If A government tells me to do something, I have a tendency to want to do the different. Do something different or the opposite.

0:02:48 Roland Pankewich: So that’s why you’re in Idaho. You’re in witness protection. I get it.

0:02:51 Brady Wirick: Yes, sir.

0:02:54 Roland Pankewich: Oh, well, thank you for that intro. You know, you said something there that is a perfect segue to something that we wanted to cover today. You know, you talked about how there’s a rebellion that you’re trying to lead about people wanting to be healthy. That’s because there’s a vast majority of our society that’s sick. And being adjusted to a sick society is by no means a healthy way to live. So the topic of healthy aging is really what I wanted to focus on with you today. And I want to. You know, the first question in that statement is, is healthy aging even possible in 2025? Or are we all destined to end up like maybe our parents did, where we watch them unfortunately go through a degree of suffering before the end of their life? Or grandparents?

0:03:38 Roland Pankewich: So how would you approach the concept of healthy aging? Where would you start with someone? And how do you think someone needs to look at health as they get older?

0:03:50 Brady Wirick: The first thing we need to do and we need to understand is that what we are being told by mainstream media and mainstream quote unquote, healthcare is dead wrong. The system for them is working perfectly because it’s creating all sorts of sick people and sick people are paying customers. So we’ve really got to get down to the core of what makes us homeo or homeo homo sapiens, what makes us humans. Right? We’re not built to break down and process all the chemicals, all the electromagnetic field stuff that we’re, that we are constantly being bombarded with. We’re not meant to deal with the constant amount of stress that we have.

0:04:41 Brady Wirick: You know, our ancestors were built with these primitive reflexes that allowed us to escape the saber tooth tiger. But now there’s no saber tooth tiger. But the saber tooth tiger is in our heads. It’s the stress of making the mortgage, feeding the kids, getting to work on time. You know, all these stressors that we’re dealing with, and we’re just plummeting at a rapid pace. So if we’re going to switch that around and go the different direction, we’ve really got to start thinking outside the box.

0:05:12 Roland Pankewich: I agree. I mean, the massive amounts of conscious and unconscious stress that all of us are under every day, just because you become accustomed to it and it’s your normal, it doesn’t mean that your body’s not negatively Tolerating, processing and responding to it. Because in my opinion, and I’d love to know what you think about this, all chronic degenerative disease is likely driven by slow, insidious processes of stressed physiology. Is that correct to say?

0:05:41 Brady Wirick: That’s 100% correct. And most people’s physiologic processes that are under stress or under the iceberg, under the surface, right. You have. Your symptoms are poking up out of the water, but everything that’s brewing down beneath are those physical, emotional, chemical stresses that are just eating us up inside. And, you know, just like every other podcast or video that I’ve been on with, with people, we always get the best material when the camera’s off, when we’re not recording.

0:06:12 Brady Wirick: You and I were talking about emotional stress before we got on here and some of the journeys that, that I’ve been down personally, you know, as. As dudes, we just want to say we’re fine, but in reality there’s these emotional stressors that are underneath the surface in our subconscious that need to be dealt with. That’s really getting like the granular, like nitty gritty of everything. You know, food is probably the easiest, most obvious portion of this. And even that’s not so obvious. Like it’s just digging in and figuring out what those stressors are.

0:06:53 Roland Pankewich: And in a clinical setting, what are you seeing most commonly to the demographics that are really the ones that are at the cusp of this? Because I would say clinically, people who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, these are the people that are kind of in this in between state. Right. They may have symptoms, you know, the iceberg, as you put it, popping up out of the water. So they know something’s going on.

0:07:16 Roland Pankewich: Maybe they’ve got some functional testing done or a complex blood panel done, and they see some things that are imbalanced or uneven or uneasy, and they’re not necessarily fully sick, but they’re on the way there. Is that what you say? What? Sorry? Is that what you would say that you see most often in a clinical setting?

0:07:34 Brady Wirick: Absolutely. When I start thinking about my own clinic, the two driving forces in my, in my clinic is going to be weight loss, and the other one is going to be regenerative medicine or stem cell injections. So on one hand, we have people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s that are still clinging on to the way to lose weight is to reduce your calories. And then we have another group of people that have arthritic joints that are breaking down, but no one wants to talk about that space in the middle where the arthritic joints are being caused by the metabolic dysfunction that’s causing the weight gain.

0:08:14 Brady Wirick: And you have to address both of them. But in the meantime, your brain health sucks. You know, you’re in your 40s and you’re walking into. Walking into a room and forgetting why you’re there. That’s not normal. But we laugh about it and say, oh, ha, ha, ha, that’s funny. No, there’s something seriously going on. And if we’re going to prevent, you know, degenerative diseases later, Alzheimer’s, dementia, et cetera, we’ve got to address those particular issues first.

0:08:43 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, it’s funny. People say, oh, it’s just getting older, but getting old and aging are not necessarily the same thing. And I always think about the old Clint Eastwood joke, never let the old man in. Right? That’s the difference between being elderly and in good health versus being someone who’s decrepit, in need of being taken care of by a personal care worker or a retirement facility. So what you just said there, I would love to expand upon that. You made a brilliant statement.

0:09:10 Roland Pankewich: Whether someone’s having a hard time losing weight or they’re chronically inflamed and they’re experiencing pain, the center of that is metabolic dysfunction. And I think we can agree that metabolic dysfunction likely drives all chronic degenerative diseases. And where someone experiences the ultimate manifestation of the illness that they eventually get diagnosed with, that was just their area of susceptibility.

0:09:33 Roland Pankewich: But in that metabolic dysfunction, A, what are you guys seeing as symptoms and maybe some. Some feedback from testing? And B, what are some of the strategies that you’re finding to be very successful for people beyond the stem cells, beyond the manipulation of calories and food?

0:09:51 Brady Wirick: Hey, so on. On question A, and I’m, I’m writing notes right here so I can keep myself together on question A, what are we seeing on testing? And then B, what are some of the strategies?

0:10:05 Roland Pankewich: Correct.

0:10:06 Brady Wirick: Okay, so testing the most underutilized test. There’s two tests out there that are just highly, highly underutilized, as in, we never order them. As you’re part of your, like, doctor’s normal blood work panel, the first one is going to be high sensity, high sensitivity crp, which is an inflammation marker. Well, are you inflamed or are you not? And if you’re listening to your gut and deep down you feel like crap, guess what? You’re inflamed.

0:10:38 Brady Wirick: But using high sensitivity CRP, which is like a 12 test, by the way, using that test, it actually puts a number to that inflammation. So we know what direction we need to head. The other one is going to be fasting insulin. What really blows my mind about fasting insulin, which is another very inexpensive test. But insurance, insurance policies won’t pay for that, you know, $15 test or whatever it costs. It’s very cheap.

0:11:09 Brady Wirick: They won’t pay for it unless you have full blown diabetes. But it can tell us if there’s a blood sugar dysregulation problem 15 years before it shows up as abnormal glucose. That’s high enough to be called diabetes. 15 years. So we can pull that test and say, okay, let’s match Sally’s symptomatology of joint pain, brain fog, weight gain to. Okay, look at this. Her CRP is at a 7, which is still at a normal range with, with lab ranges, by the way.

0:11:46 Brady Wirick: But it tells us that she’s inflamed. And oh yes, by the way, her fasting insulin is creeping up. So we know there’s a, a disregulation with her with her insulin. And if we can nail those two things down and get her on a low glycemic diet and get her doing things like intermittent fasting and even like 24 to 48 hour fasting on occasion. Oh man. Then you, and then you have her on an anti inflammatory diet, you see those numbers drop, you see her start to move again, you just literal miracles.

0:12:25 Brady Wirick: Because we’re fueling the system the way it should be fueled. We’re dealing with these high, high priority issues like inflammation and insulin.

0:12:36 Roland Pankewich: And in your practice, do you have reference ranges for those numbers that you like to see before you can feel comfortable that someone’s healthy by the numbers?

0:12:46 Brady Wirick: I do. I don’t have them in front of me, so I can’t just pop them off the top of my head. But I talk about them all the time on like social media. So like my tick tock for example, I go through a lot of those.

0:12:57 Roland Pankewich: Because you, you said the normal range for CRP can be up to 7, but that’s an illness range.

0:13:04 Brady Wirick: Right?

0:13:04 Roland Pankewich: Like that’s not.

0:13:05 Brady Wirick: Yeah.

0:13:05 Roland Pankewich: Optimal range. That’s.

0:13:07 Brady Wirick: Yeah, I should have said more like.

0:13:08 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, a lab standard can be. But this is the thing, right? You, you delineated between what the medical system says and what optimal are, are not the same thing. So I think people listening should be very astute to realize that just because a number is in the normal range on a lab reference range, it doesn’t mean that that number is optimal or it’s optimal for you as a person who may be suffering, which I actually.

0:13:34 Brady Wirick: Have a cheat sheet, Roland, that I can send you.

0:13:37 Roland Pankewich: That’d be wonderful.

0:13:38 Brady Wirick: You can link in the notes to the. It’ll just take people right to the cheat sheet.

0:13:41 Roland Pankewich: Oh, perfect. Thank you.

0:13:42 Brady Wirick: They can see what the ranges are. I’m not smart enough to have all those memorized. I. I just use my resources.

0:13:50 Roland Pankewich: Well, everything’s digital nowadays, which is wonderful. You can always punch it in and then the algorithms get taken care of for you.

0:13:56 Brady Wirick: Right.

0:13:57 Roland Pankewich: But so in that regard, when it comes to seeing these markers. So you’re saying highly sensitive C reactive protein and fasting insulin. What are the commonalities that you see in people, symptom wise, who have both of these elevated? Is it just they’re abusing carbohydrates? Is it they’re eating a pro inflammatory diet or. There are other lifestyle factors like sleep, lack of exercise, being sedentary, being on medications. Like what are the things that cause these variables of inflammation to go up?

0:14:28 Brady Wirick: So 50% of that. And this is, this is me. Okay. I don’t have anything to back this up. This is just what I see in people.

0:14:34 Roland Pankewich: That’s what I’m interested in.

0:14:35 Brady Wirick: I. 50% of the issue is going to come from. You said two things that are the same. A high car, a high carbohydrate diet, and a high, a pro inflammatory diet. Both fall under the umbrella of what you and I like to call the standard American diet, which is abbreviated. Sad. Sad. Right. There’s been a meme going around that I absolutely love that is obviously created by Chat GPT. It’s a cartoon of a mother and a daughter. They’re sitting in a car, they’re both holding a Starbucks cup in one hand and a bagel in the other.

0:15:13 Brady Wirick: And the mom is saying to the daughter that she just needs to take her antidepressants because depression is. Her depression is. Is genetic. And the point is. No, not genetic. It’s the fact that she’s eating what her mother ate and they’re stopping and getting. Putting things in their body that are highly inflammatory. High drivers of insulin, high drivers of. Of carbohydrate metabolism issues. And those are the issues they’re gonna, they’re gonna turn into, you know, Alzheimer’s, dementia, early death.

0:15:53 Roland Pankewich: Got it. And are you seeing, are you seeing those kinds of people in your clinic? People are dealing with advanced degenerative things or have you been over the last few years?

0:16:02 Brady Wirick: In my clinic and in my own family.

0:16:05 Roland Pankewich: Right. So there’s A personal aspect to this?

0:16:07 Brady Wirick: Yeah, it’s. It’s a big time personal thing because my mom, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about six months ago, and I love her to death. Right. She’s my mom, man. She is stubborn. And. And unfortunately, she’s kind of past that point of no return. Because when I try to talk to her about her diet and you go to her house and you open up cupboards and it’s nothing but prepackaged junk, and the second you say something about it, she gets on the defensive about how healthy she eats.

0:16:41 Brady Wirick: And there’s just nothing reflective, there’s nothing healthy about what she’s eating. And it just. Anyway, I didn’t mean to go on that tangent. So I see my own family. I mean, even just today, I had a guy call me from, from South Dakota, and he’s got a wife that’s in her 60s, that’s in her, you know, in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, and they want to know what they can do for help. And. And you know Kevin Connors, right?

0:17:09 Roland Pankewich: I do.

0:17:10 Brady Wirick: So they’re following Kevin Connors protocols, which is awesome. They’re very similar to mine. So they’re. They’re on the right path there, but they just want that next step. And the next step is obviously when we get into regenerative medicine and stem cells and stem cell exosomes, because there’s so many cool things we can do now to help brain pathways start to rebuild, but you gotta be giving it the right fuel.

0:17:35 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, that’s. It’s unfortunate because the occurrences of chronic degenerative neurological diseases have dramatically increased in the last few years. But, you know, the one thing that I can say from clinical experience that I think that you would echo, no matter what the disease state is, the disease has to be recognized for the fact that it is a diagnosis based upon a collective set of symptoms and variables. Right.

0:18:01 Roland Pankewich: Like type 2 diabetes isn’t a packaged thing that the body is given. It’s a set of circumstances based upon how a medical professional who sees these variables in very specific ranges can finally diagnose someone with a condition. But the one commonality of all chronic degenerative conditions is they are driven by inflammatory insult. In that inflammatory insult, I believe that there is a pathway of mitochondrial dysfunction.

0:18:27 Roland Pankewich: There is an inability for cells to properly intake and intake nutrition and exude waste materials. And the one thing that I think is very apparent with not only cardiovascular illness, but especially neuroscience neurological issues is gut health problems. I remember reading an article, it’s maybe almost 10 years old, that in Parkinson’s, for example, they found a protein present in the gut that was present multiple decades before a Parkinson’s diagnosis can even be properly made by a medical professional.

0:19:02 Roland Pankewich: So I think the long and short of what you’re saying here is it’s absolutely essential for people to have a sense of where their inflammatory load is, understand how dysregulated their metabolism may be. And what you’re saying is there’s still hope for people if they catch it at the right time. You know, unfortunately, you said your mom is kind of past the point of recovery and at some point the body can’t come back from such an extreme insult.

0:19:27 Roland Pankewich: But what would you say that are some optimal strategies that someone who may be in their 40s, 50s, or listening to this, and they’re like, yeah, I have pain in my joints. Yeah, I have brain fog. Yeah, I can’t lose weight. I feel like crap. I’ve been told I have an autoimmune condition. Where do those people start besides food?

0:19:47 Brady Wirick: Well, they start with food.

0:19:49 Roland Pankewich: Oh, we talked about food. So, like, where would you go now?

0:19:52 Brady Wirick: So we, I said that 50 about food and then 50 is going to fall on our lifestyle.

0:19:56 Roland Pankewich: Okay, let’s dig into that a little bit.

0:19:58 Brady Wirick: So before we do that, I want to, I just want to point out one thing that you said and share with you something that was very eye opening to me. There’s a great show on Apple TV called Lessons in Chemistry. Did you catch it?

0:20:17 Roland Pankewich: No, I didn’t even know it exists.

0:20:19 Brady Wirick: So you need to watch this with your wife.

0:20:21 Roland Pankewich: Okay.

0:20:22 Brady Wirick: It’s. It’s a lovey dovey. It’ll make you cry.

0:20:25 Roland Pankewich: Lessons in Chemistry. So it’s not a guy with a Bunsen burner and a beaker and a lab coat?

0:20:29 Brady Wirick: No, it is. Okay, but it’s a girl in a lab coat with a Bunsen beaker.

0:20:33 Roland Pankewich: Okay. Far more interesting already.

0:20:35 Brady Wirick: So. And it’s. I can’t think of the actress’s name. She does a fabulous job, but she’s trying to become a chemist in the 50s, so she’s got the whole sexual prejudice against her. And she ends up doing a cooking show where. The cooking show, she’s bringing in what she knows about chemistry and teaching people how to. How to cook, which is, it’s, it’s fun. But corporate sponsors come in to sponsor her show.

0:21:07 Brady Wirick: And the corporate sponsors bring in a, like a Crisco, like a cooking oil that’s made with seed oils. And her stance then becomes, that’s not fit for human Consumption. That’s not going on my show. The whole point of that is, is she makes comments in the show like that’s, this is where it all starts. Like in the 50s when we started getting all these like margarine and processed foods that had a healthy label thrown on them. Well, now we’re going to start seeing that generation of people that grew up on those particular foods that were pitched as health foods, when in reality they’re like one chemical away from being plastic.

0:21:55 Brady Wirick: It’s no wonder we’re facing these neurodegenerative disorders. So anyway, watch the show and when you see these little moments in there, I’m sure you’re gonna text me like, holy crap, you weren’t kidding. But it’s just, it’s when you’re nerds like you and I, it’s, it’s awesome. Like, it’s just fun.

0:22:11 Roland Pankewich: I love that. Thank you.

0:22:12 Brady Wirick: So, lifestyle, we can break this down into several areas. Right.

0:22:20 Roland Pankewich: Let’s do a high level overview. Not too deep.

0:22:22 Brady Wirick: Okay. I would start with sleep. Prioritize it. And there’s tons of stuff out there. Blue. I love the blue blockers, by the way.

0:22:34 Roland Pankewich: I, I, yeah, I have three, I have a problem. I have three different pairs.

0:22:41 Brady Wirick: There. They’ve been shown to help asleep, you know, cooling your room down to comfortable temperatures. Black lights, you know, any light whatsoever drives melatonin pathways are going to disrupt sleep. People just aren’t sleeping enough. We need to prioritize.

0:22:59 Roland Pankewich: I think there, there’s, I remember doing some research into this years ago. We’ve lost about an average of an hour and a half of sleep per night. And people don’t realize that when you’re sleeping next to a phone that is emitting a signal that can be disruptive to the body when you’re checking your phone in the evening, like you just said, you’re disrupting melatonin pathways. And it’s no wonder why people wake up feeling exhausted and they wonder why they don’t have the resilience to becoming ill. Because sleep is when the body repairs itself. That’s the regenerative process of what our body needs every night.

0:23:33 Brady Wirick: Yeah, and, and it’s, I’m, I’m glad you mentioned your phone right next to you. I would go so far as even putting, getting a Faraday pouch and putting it in there so it’s not emitting or receiving anything. Because I think the next one after sleep is going to be electromagnetic health, you know, and, and big rural or big populated areas. There’s swarms and swarms and swarms of electromagnetic radiation that we have never ever as a human species been subject to. Like we are now.

0:24:06 Brady Wirick: You know, 5G Wi Fi, all this stuff that’s considered safe because it’s non radiating, we know it’s not safe. So things like turning your phone off, turn your WI fi off at night. I have just stupid simple. If I wasn’t on my computer right now, I’d pull it and show it to you like the Home Depot. Turn the dial or click the little buttons in and it shuts off at certain times. Yeah, my routers are hooked to those. They turn off 10 o’ clock at night.

0:24:31 Roland Pankewich: Smart.

0:24:33 Brady Wirick: There are some great EMF blockers that you can wear that you can put on your phones. Electromagnetic health is a big deal. There’s an awesome resource about it. It’s Mercola. He wrote one that’s called emf. Fabulous read. You know plenty. You know, a third of the book is references or research articles. Great stuff. Okay, so that’s electromagnetic then. Stress management, stress management, mental health. Falling under the same, you know, under the same category. You and I were talking about emotional release techniques.

0:25:11 Brady Wirick: This is something I’ve experienced for the first time. You know, as dudes, we have a serious problem of saying we’re fine when we’re not. But seeing professionals about figuring out what your emotional triggers are and what those unhealed traumas are from the past, that’s huge. Breathing techniques, you know, like box breathing, meditation, prayer, all those things are going to play a role in calming down your immune system. So your nervous system, so it’s not.

0:25:39 Roland Pankewich: Your immune system too. You’re not wrong. Both.

0:25:42 Brady Wirick: Yeah, you’re calming down your nervous system so you have a better immune system. How’s that?

0:25:46 Roland Pankewich: That’s perfectly so.

0:25:48 Brady Wirick: But practicing those is huge. At my house, we, we have a sauna here in, in our house. And before you think we’re all fancy schmancy, you know, we bought this thing at Costco, an infrared sonic. Costco. Yeah, it was a couple thousand dollars, but man, it was money well spent.

0:26:07 Roland Pankewich: Well, you pay for it now, you pay for it later. If you don’t do it right. That’s kind of how the healthcare system works.

0:26:14 Brady Wirick: It’s been life changing. Connecting with your loved ones is another huge one. Just fostering those connections, putting your phones away, you know, bringing the people that are close to you closer is. Has a huge impact on chronic stress. And all of these factors, when they’re out of whack, guess what? They disrupt gut function. Hey, and you and I both Know that when you disrupt gun gut function, you’re throwing brain, your brain health is not good.

0:26:51 Roland Pankewich: Well, it’s a, it’s a pathway that requires communication effectively for the relationship to be harmonious. Right. That, that, that nature of keeping a relationship healthy is dependent upon communication between two people or within the body itself. You know, you could almost say that someone who develops an illness is someone who loses the ability for its body to communicate optimally with itself and with them.

0:27:14 Roland Pankewich: So you know those, those factors that you hit. And this is a very true statement. A lot of people, especially practitioners, are looking for the edgy new thing to do that’s going to replace all the old school, low and slow stuff. But the reality is what you said best. We’re all human beings. There are certain fundamentals that all humans do need. And until you get those things dialed in and right, I don’t know that it makes sense to try to chase the boogeyman or the ghost with the fancy new thing. It’s like, you know, if you haven’t addressed all the variables, I would assume that you’re not going to be giving someone stem cells the first day they come in your office. You’re going to get them dialed in first, then talk about regenerative medicine when everything else they’re doing is cohesively working together.

0:27:57 Roland Pankewich: I did want to ask you about supplements because this is a, this is an interesting area in functional medicine because there’s never been more products out there. There’s never been more for people as non health professionals to be influenced by. On social media. I can’t tell you how many people send me photos. Is this good, is this bad? And whatever.

0:28:17 Brady Wirick: We can get those two.

0:28:19 Roland Pankewich: I get those two. Yeah, like we can go down the rabbit hole of how people’s influence is very much being driven by crafty marketing. But how do you relate to the use of supplements and do you have any go tos that you find to be really effective for the people who you deal with?

0:28:37 Brady Wirick: So here’s my whole thing on, on supplements. And please understand when I say this that a significant amount of my living is made with supplements. Less is more. You can.

0:28:55 Roland Pankewich: More was more. No, I’m joking.

0:28:58 Brady Wirick: You can overdo it very easily.

0:29:01 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, good insight.

0:29:05 Brady Wirick: For me personally. Here’s one example. I would rather see somebody take a digestive enzyme than a multivitamin.

0:29:15 Roland Pankewich: That makes sense to me. But I’d like to hear your rationale behind that.

0:29:18 Brady Wirick: So we could get into the whole like soil depleted and the, you know, red pepper doesn’t have the same. Right. It’s the same flavonoids as it used to and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. But the reality is if your body’s not. If your body lacks the enzyme it needs to break the food down into its component parts, then you’re not going to digest them. So rather than taking a multivitamin that has a whole bunch of potentially fake vitamins like folic acid versus folate, why not eat a whole natural diet and take digestive enzymes so you can get the nutrients you need out of your food?

0:30:08 Roland Pankewich: Well, it’s. It’s funny that very few people stop and think about the word play of the name supplement. Right. So a supplement is meant to be something added to the base thing that we’re needing. So you can’t subse. You know, you. You can’t sustain yourself off of a bunch of pills. Maybe you can, but it probably wouldn’t be ideal long term because food in and of itself has its own vibration that the body resonates with.

0:30:31 Roland Pankewich: But I understand that you can’t out supplement a bad diet, but I do think that the best diet, not properly digested is actually worse for you than the worst food, fully properly broken down and assimilated. So I like that idea. It’s not always about food. It’s about digestion.

0:30:50 Brady Wirick: You know, a really. A really wise man once told me that my stomach doesn’t have teeth.

0:30:56 Roland Pankewich: Who would say such a weird thing?

0:30:59 Brady Wirick: That was you, Roland.

0:31:01 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, well, someone said that to me, so I was, I was paying it forwards.

0:31:06 Brady Wirick: No, but I mean the whole digestive process that starts with even just the thought of food. If I say lemon, you start to salivate. Yeah, that’s all just digestive enzymes that break it down into its. Into its parts so you can absorb it. That’s it. If you don’t have them, you don’t have them.

0:31:27 Roland Pankewich: And would you say that’s a feature of what you see in the aging populations, generative crew you’re dealing with? They all have digestive issues.

0:31:35 Brady Wirick: They all do, Every one of them. And they all have inherent low enzymatic processes because they’ve had so much chronic stress in their life that they just can’t produce it anymore.

0:31:51 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, it’s an energy problem. At the end of the day, illness is an energy problem. And there’s a gentleman I love. His name’s Dr. Zach Bush, and he has this statement that I’ve never forgotten when I heard it. When your rate of injury exceeds your rate of repair, you get sick. And I think it’s really important for people. Get lost in the details of an illness rather than understand that the illness is the manifestation in the area of the body that is most compromised.

0:32:18 Roland Pankewich: But the fundamentals of all illness have a lot of overlap in them in the fact that your body is just breaking down faster than it’s able to repair. And I think from some of the things that you’ve elucidated today, in terms of the strategies, all those things are addressable. Whether you’re, you know, in early stages of something or even if you’re unfortunately at an end stage, you always have the ability to improve your quality of life. If you take responsibility for your health and implement strategies to help your body regain the energy that it’s lost, that, unfortunately has led to the manifestation of the illness that you’re dealing with.

0:32:53 Brady Wirick: Amen.

0:32:54 Roland Pankewich: I love it. Brady, are there any parting words that you have for us in terms of a message that you think people who are listening to this, who might be in the situation that I just described, need to hear? And the second part is, you know, we’d love to know more about what you’re doing, where people can find you if they want to connect with you. So, you know, please take us out with some words of wisdom of your own.

0:33:17 Brady Wirick: I think the greatest, and I. I don’t mean to bring religion into this, but my favorite saying of all time comes from my friend, Dr. Andy Barlo, and he says, God, food heals man, food kills. So food the way God intended it. You know, the beast in the forest, the plants growing up out of the ground, that food will heal you versus man, taking it and processing it to the point that he can make a profit on it.

0:33:48 Brady Wirick: That’s the food that will kill you.

0:33:50 Roland Pankewich: I think that is just a statement of fact and not too religious at all. So thank you for that.

0:33:55 Brady Wirick: Yes, you’re welcome. As far as where you can find me, tick tock, Instagram, Facebook, here, everywhere. I’m almost not a big.

0:34:07 Roland Pankewich: You’re not on a bus bench ad, are you?

0:34:09 Brady Wirick: No.

0:34:09 Roland Pankewich: Okay. You have good hair for that, though. I could see you at a bus bench ad with your thumbs up saying, do you want to be healthy?

0:34:18 Brady Wirick: I love it. That’s funny, especially coming from your. You, because, you know, we’ve talked about your hair in the past.

0:34:24 Roland Pankewich: Well, the good thing is this is not on video, so no one has any idea what we’re talking about.

0:34:32 Brady Wirick: Yeah, it’s. You can find me on Those and then YouTube. I have a lot of stuff on YouTube. Any of these topics interest you? Look into there because that’s where the videos usually end up.

0:34:44 Roland Pankewich: So awesome. And Brady does some amazing videos for master supplements in US Enzymes, taking people into quick, deep dives into understanding products better and how you can use them. So Brady, thank you for donating your time. I know you’re super busy guy in the clinic, so thank you for carving out some time for us, for me, for all the listeners. I’m sure at some point we’ll cross paths and have another great conversation. And I want to thank all the loyal listeners for tuning into another episode. And we’ll be back sooner than later.

0:35:12 Roland Pankewich: Continue following your gut through this process because I’m enjoying it. I hope you are too. Thank you very much. See you soon.