The Gut Microbiome & Mitochondria Connection

Daniela Giangiorgi

Hi Laura. So nice to be here.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, so good to have you here. You are a mindset empowerment health coach who is also a Pilates instructor with a Muscle Activation Technique certification. And at age 41, you were diagnosed with breast cancer, interrupting the breastfeeding of your one-year-old baby boy. And if anyone understands the power of cellular healing and why I stand for restoring mitochondria function and gut health, Daniela, it’s you. So I’m super excited to have you here today.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yes. Thank you, Laura. I really do know how important this healing is through my own journey. And if you can ever save anyone and spare them from having to go through some of what you have gone through yourself, that really helps heal yourself and your mindset and create lemonade, so to speak, out of lemons. And when I met you, you helped me see that some of the experiences that I was going through, and I will tell you, Laura, I did not even know that they were gut health issues, you helped me see that they possibly were, and I had enough faith and trust in you to go for it. And through my journey with you, my healing has been just tremendous extensive. I was going through some emotional stuff and some physical stuff, and all that went away. And I recognized who I was in the mirror again after some hardships and my children got their mom back. And so I can’t even tell you how priceless this was for me. And it created such an inspiration for me to be able to give this forward to other people who might not even know, or maybe they do know that their gut health is an issue. It’s been an extensive journey for me and I am forever grateful to you for that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you so much. It was an amazing journey. And looking back in hindsight on your journey, when you were struggling with the mental pieces, you felt like you had had this switch that went on and all of a sudden you weren’t feeling yourself, you had this intense depression that came over you, that is cellular dysfunction, that is mitochondrial dysfunction. What we did was we went straight to your gut health to actually start solving that problem. That is where healing starts. And that’s what we’re really gonna be covering in this talk today, is how to heal starting there. And we’ll unpack why I always start in this spot with our clients.

Daniela Giangiorgi

I love it, I think that’s gonna be super supportive for all our viewers. Laura, I’ve known you for a while and you’ve shared a lot of your journey with me. And I know that for over 20 years, you’ve been a nurse practitioner. You’ve specialized in preventative medicine, even in the earlier part of your career, when you did work in Western and allopathic medicine model. You’ve worked so closely and have studied with so many respected, functional, natural health-oriented doctors and experts. And now you’ve built your Bio-Radiant Health brand, and it’s been helping people who are high performers just like you and me. And you’ve helped them reclaim their brain stamina, their productivity, and their energy. You’ve become I would say a really trusted resource for people who want to build back their health so that their bodies can keep up with their ambition. It’s been incredible to watch, honestly, and you’re, I would say a go-to source for gut health, for energy, and for brain health. So you kinda have taken so many paths and your story is so interesting. So tell me, how did you end up becoming this leading voice and taking a stand and shifting the conversation about health and wellness?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

There’s a journey behind all of us, right, Daniela?

Daniela Giangiorgi

Absolutely.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And I always say that if it weren’t for the 20 years that I spent in the traditional allopathic, what we call Western medicine model, I wouldn’t be set up to do what I do today. So I’m grateful for that journey. It needed to happen so that I could fully be prepared to help people on the level that I do today. I had to really truly understand what doesn’t work in order to absorb and learn and practice what truly works. It just makes it that much better when you have a deep understanding of what’s not working. So early on in my Western medicine career, I actually worked in preventive medicine. And what I realized after many years is that prevention in the Western model is very different than prevention in the functional lifestyle, naturopathic medicine realm. So in Western medicine, we call it prevention, when what we’re really doing is looking for early detection. So let me explain. Yeah. So, I mean, this is kinda what happened with you too, with your breast cancer. There was detection of it, and some people might say it was preventative, what they were doing, giving you a mammogram or however that cancer was identified. 

So we think of mammograms as preventive medicine. We think of colon cancer screenings as preventive medicine. We think of prostate cancer screenings, cervical, pap smears as preventive medicine. We think of treating high blood pressure, high cholesterol, we think of that as prevention for heart disease. And truly what we’re doing here with most of it is trying to detect disease at the early stages and then put some kind of band-aid treatment. We’re not truly preventing it from happening in the first place. And that’s a really crazy thing to wrap your mind around, that, whoa, my preventive healthcare that I’m getting might actually just be early detection care. So what if, yeah, so I say, what if healthcare actually focused on preventing the problem from occurring in the first place so that when you do these early detection screenings, they’re negative every time? What if in every person every time there was a normal pap smear, a normal mammogram, a normal prostate exam, a normal colon cancer exam, a normal blood pressure screening, a normal cholesterol level? Could you imagine life without all the chronic disease? That would be true prevention, right?

Daniela Giangiorgi

Absolutely. Absolutely. You really shine a good light on clarifying that because I think we do. We hear this word prevention and we’re enrolled in it too easily.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, and so I would say in the Western world what I was giving as preventive advice was actually not really preventive. So let me give you an example. So people would come into my clinic. They’d be struggling with weight and high blood sugar and whatever is going on. And so we give this advice to eat a lot of whole grains, to use artificial sweeteners instead of sugar, to count your 10,000 steps. So if you’re doing that, you’re asking them to wear an EMF emitting wearable device all day long, and people do. People are wearing watches made by the most popular cell phone company in the world and it’s emitting EMFs on their body all day long. And it’s counting everything from your steps to your vitals, to your sleep, to your exercise. But I say having this device may actually be more counterproductive to you. Eating artificial sweeteners to keep your blood sugar down may be more harmful to you, and eating a lot of whole grains might actually set you up for inflammation and a lot of problems down the road. So we gave a lot of health advice like counting calories, exercising more without much really behind it. We never taught people how to get better. We never taught people how to be accountable, how to actually eat healthy. I would tell people as they were walking out the door, eat your vegetables.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s true.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Exercise more. but I wasn’t telling him what kind of exercise to do. I wasn’t definitely not talking about the importance of stress reduction and mindfulness and sleep and trauma release and drinking purified water and eating organic food and breathing clean air and changing your body products to non-toxic ones. And getting on some kind of a preventive detox protocol, because we’re always have this onslaught of toxins coming into our body at all times because we live in a fast paced first world culture.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Absolutely.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So these are not the things I was talking about in preventive medicine at all. And I will say one disclaimer about devices because people are probably saying, “What? What do you mean don’t count my step? So there are a few devices like the Oura Ring, for example, that you can wear it and you can actually shut off the EMF emitting portion of it and it collects data. And then you can hook it up to your, you know-

Daniela Giangiorgi

Oh, good.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It could hook it up to download the information later. But so yeah, if you can get a device where it’s not emitting and constantly conversating with a server, sending data nonstop and have it send data later, that’s fine. So I just wanna say a disclaimer there before people think, “What are you talking about? I have an Oura Ring.” Yeah, Oura Rings are good.

Daniela Giangiorgi

And Laura, just piggybacking on what you’re saying, I have an experience that completely highlights everything you just shared. When I was cleared from having cancer and that diagnosis, I was ready to go, I was cancer-free. And I said to my doctor, said, so what can I do? What can I do to prevent this from coming back? She said, “Just do what you were doing. Just eat a healthy diet and exercise.” And I thought that’s not sustainable. I feel incredibly insecure because I was doing all those things. And what does that mean? What are the details? Let’s unpack that. But there is nothing. Post-cancer, there is no protocol that’s set out. And so for me, you give me, you know, having had the experience of working with you creates this amazing space of security, a path, a protocol, something empowered to guarantee that I will be here tomorrow. And not just that I will be here tomorrow, but that I will be thriving and happy and energized. And so this is sort of my second home in my care post-cancer. And I’m sure when if there are people, viewers that have had cancer, they’re probably nodding their head like, “Yes, that happened to me too”.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you for sharing that, Daniela. I know when you came to me, there was a lot more that we got to do to clear toxins outta your body, to clear smoldering gut infections, to really bring you up to the peak performance that you can, that your body can achieve. And this is really important for you because you have two small children.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s .

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, and you’re driven and motivated and you’re up to big things and you wanna build a legacy in the world and so do our viewers. The thing I hear most from people is, “I wanna keep up with my family, I wanna keep up with my kids. I wanna spend weekends being active and I just can’t because my energy’s too low.” Or, “I have all these crazy digestive issues that I gotta stay near my bathroom.” Or, “I can’t even go out to eat and because I’m just a big old pain because I have so many restrictions that it’s not fun anymore and everybody looks at me like I’m high maintenance.” And so life doesn’t have to be that way is what I say.

Daniela Giangiorgi

No. Not at all.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Beautiful. So talking about mitochondria and whatnot, can you please share with our viewers, why is gut health so important to the function of mitochondria?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes, so at the most basic level, your gut processes food and food is fuel. So our digestive system breaks down the food into its smaller parts. So think about vitamins, minerals, macronutrients, you may have heard of macronutrients like fat, carbs, and protein. Your digestive system breaks all the food you eat into those smaller pieces. And all cells, including the mitochondria inside the cells, need those nutrients to survive. So at the most basic level, if your gut is dysfunctional, you cannot possibly get the nutrients to the cells to actually do their job or to heal. So that’s really super basic. Now, when we have gut dysfunction and when we have leaky gut or that gut permeability, we’re more likely to have deficiencies. So let me explain. If, like I just explained that woman or man who goes to the restaurant and they feel like, “I’m high maintenance. I can’t eat anything anymore,” when everything’s going sideways like this, we develop these food intolerances to healthy foods and then we avoid foods entirely. Or we avoid entire food groups because they’re making us feel bloated, achy, brain foggy, and tired, and those might be healthy foods, healthy foods that are full of nutrients that we need. 

So when that gut is not working and you start avoiding healthy foods, that’s a problem. And then when the gut is inflamed, you have reduced absorptions of the nutrients. You have a higher need for certain nutrients because you’re constantly needing to repair the intestinal wall. So I always talk about leaky gut like a bunch of teenagers came into your house and threw a party. So there’s good bacteria that when they get outta control, they become problematic. So there’s a lot of bacteria in there that if they just stayed mellow, they wouldn’t cause a problem. And it’s kinda like when you have two teenagers hanging out at your house together, they’re fine. But if they invite each 20 of their friends to come hang out at your house, yeah, they start having a party. So they eat all your food, your floor gets dirty, they knock stuff off your shelves, they knock the screen door off its hinges, they might accidentally punch a hole in the wall. You’ve got a mess to clean up after they’re done, and that’s kinda what happens when bacteria start to overgrow and go crazy in your gut, they throw this big party just like teenagers would and stuff gets broken. 

And the barrier between your gut and your bloodstream becomes compromised. And then particles of undigested food can leak through toxins from your food that if you’ve got pesticides and herbicides in your food, or even toxins coming into the body that eventually make their way to the gut, it leaks out into the bloodstream and causes a problem. So that’s why gut dysfunction is so critical. Now, what I wanna explain next is how there’s a domino effect that happens here. So when you get this increased permeability, dysbiosis, teenagers having a party in the gut, and the party might include some bad kids too. Somebody might get wind that the party’s happening, and so you might get some gang bangers come by. You might get, yeah. I mean, some stuff that you really don’t want there. So think of that like the parasites and the fungus and the actual bad bacteria. 

So when they come in, what happens is, first off you have these minor changes where your immune system over activates and inflammation goes up and you get this increased absorption of toxins like I just explained. And then the minor changes, lead to big major changes. So now the words out that a party’s happening in your gut and the whole neighborhood’s showing up. And now what happens is you’ve got toxin overload, you’ve got leaky brain, so that. And you’ll hear people on this summit talking about the gut-brain connection and leafy brain. So listen to Peter Khan’s discussion, for example. This blood brain barrier that we have becomes disrupted. You get hormone dysfunction, brain neurotransmitter imbalance, and mitochondria dysfunction and shut down. And then you feel the symptoms. So as the cascade goes, now you feel fatigue, brain fog, poor brain stamina, moodiness, anxiety, depression, irritability, difficulty sleeping soundly. And then that sets you up for chronic disease down the road. So we have a name for mitochondrial dysfunction, we have several names for mitochondrial dysfunction and those names are cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s. You catch what I’m saying here.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yeah, absolutely.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

At the cellular level, this is mitochondria dysfunction and we label it all of these big names. And then the Western medicine model comes in and they slap bandaids on it. They don’t actually prevent it from happening in the first place.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Such a good analogy. I always appreciate your analogies. They’re so tangible. They’re so easy to access. They make so much sense. And I’m hearing you say this and I’m thinking, oh, I had that mitochondrial dysfunction and then I had the disease from that mitochondrial dysfunction. But it all kind of further up the river, so to speak, that source is the same source, you know?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. I wanna explain real quick. I wanna explain one more thing to you.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yeah. Great.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Your gut is made up of three main things. So the community of bacteria that live inside of us, so those are the healthy commensal bacteria. And then you have your immune system. And most viewers here I’m sure have heard that 70 to 80% of your immune system is in your gut microbiome. That’s that whole thing where Hippocrates said, “All healing begins in the gut,” because immune system is in your gut. And then the third thing is, you have this neurological brain system, which I just alluded to. And that regulates everything and helps your microbiome communicate with your body. So here’s the thing. Those three pieces are so vital and important to mitochondria because our mitochondria are stimulators of the same immune and neurological systems that interact with your gut. So I’ll give you an example. So when we get food poisoning, it’s the communication back and forth between the mitochondria and the microbiota, the gut, that regulates the body’s immune system response. 

So your gut says, “Hey, we got a problem over here.” The mitochondria are then messengers. They send signals to your immune system to get working. And so what’s happening here is two different sets of organisms, bacteria that live inside of us and with us and mitochondria, which are actually technically derived from bacteria and there’s thousands of them in some of our cells. Some of our cells have thousands of mitochondria per cell and you’re gonna hear all about this on the summit, so I’m not gonna get into the deep nitty-gritty about that. But these bacteria and mitochondria are communicating back and forth to keep everything going smoothly and healthy. So what goes wrong is what I just explained when we first started talking, is that gut imbalance, the dysbiosis. The party gets thrown in your gut, the teenagers go crazy, the bad guys show up and everything goes haywire.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Absolutely. My goodness. So does this touch on this connection between the gut, the brain and the mitochondria? We’ve been talking about it a little bit, but I just wanna make sure that our viewers really understand the connection between those three.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It’s absolutely connected. So your brain-gut connection and your gut-immune connection are all wired together. Everything is absolutely connected. And here’s the thing. If you want to solve your health problems, you have to start ground level. You have to start basic and foundational. And a gut healing protocol, a gut healing plan, some kind of evaluation of gut health, should be included first and foundationally in every process that you’re doing from a functional medicine standpoint. If your practitioner is not looking at gut health when you’re thinking about brain health, if they’re not looking at gut health when you’re thinking about immune health, then a piece can be missing. When you’re not thinking about gut health, when you’re trying to solve an energy problem, then you have a big piece missing.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That makes a lot of sense. So for you, when people start working with you, what’s the first thing you do to support their health journey?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well, gut health, right? So before-

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s what I figured.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, so before we can do, and that’s a great question because people get caught up on, well, I should do this first, or I should do that first. So this is a very relevant question. So before we do any kind of detoxification, people will do a toxin test and they’ll find out, “Oh, I have a high level of environmental toxins in my body. I might have pesticides herbicides, or I might have heavy metals, or I might have micro toxins, mold toxins.” So we do this kind of testing in our clinic and we find this in people all the time, but first we have to set people up for success to remove those toxins. So before we can do any kind of rebalancing, resetting, and detoxification, the first thing we do is take you through a gut restoring journey. And so, like I said, it’s like getting your house in order before you can remodel the kitchen. So you want to have the cupboards and the countertops that are full of clutter , fixed, and handled before you can simultaneously install new cupboards and countertops, right? If you don’t clean that up first, there’s no way that you can successfully create a new space, a new journey in your health reset. You can’t do that if you haven’t cleaned up at the ground level first. So you have to clean that up before your contractor can do the job, right?

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yeah.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So your healing journey is the same. You can’t fully restore your mitochondria energy production, your brain stamina. You can’t get rid of irritating chronic symptoms like pain and eczema and bloat and headaches until you repair your gut health, which also restores your immune function and allows your mitochondria to do their job. It’s the foundation, the beginning of all healing.

Daniela Giangiorgi

I’m so glad you do it that way, really. I see people that are interested in working with us and they say, “Oh, I wanna get a food sensitivity test.” And I say, I hear you. And let’s back it up, because in everything that you’ve shared with us just now and just the experiences that have had with our own clients and their success, it really is that foundational source of that gut healing. And I always think of it and express it as like, it’s grand central station. If grand central station broke down, think of everything down the chain that would collapse. But if that’s fixed, think of how we could support all these avenues, your brain, your mitochondria, your toxicity, how imperative that is.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I wanna say something about food testing. I’m glad you brought this up because a lot of times people wanna go straight to food sensitivity testing. And I will tell you, I could make a lot of money selling food sensitivity testing right out the gates and then creating programs based on that. But that doesn’t actually serve you best because when you haven’t done the gut work, I guarantee you’re gonna have a lot of food sensitivity. So it makes sense to do the gut work first, and then maybe three, four, five months down the road, then do a food sensitivity test and see what’s left. How much more work do we need to do? Because if you start with that, you’re gonna be so disempowered and sad because you’re just gonna see all these things that you can’t eat.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And then you’re not gonna know what to eat. So let’s do some work on fixing that house that had a party in it. Everything got damaged. Let’s clean some of that up and see if some of those food sensitivities resolve and then do food sensitivity testing to see what else is left over. And then that can be… So if you do it in that order, when you have food sensitivities, they zap our energy, right? So if you do that gut healing first and then look for the food sensitivities and then remove those things out, then you can heal inflammation and you can heal even further and you can boost energy up even higher. There is a right way to do things and this is really important for people to understand. If you are searching out on the internet and trying to piecemeal this all together by yourself, and I acknowledge you and commend you for being here on this summit because you are learning. And the thing is, you want to work with a practitioner who can actually have you do these in the right order so that it takes less time, costs you less money, less effort and less heartache and less frustration. ‘Cause there’s nothing worse than trying to piecemeal it together and then coming up, hitting a wall, hitting a wall. “I tried this and then I hit a wall, and I tried this and then I hit a wall. And I felt better for a little while, but then I went backwards.” So it doesn’t have to be that way.

Daniela Giangiorgi

I’m so glad you’re saying this because how are people supposed to know otherwise? I mean, really, truly, I would think they would be thinking they’re doing themselves well by creating this investment on starting with the food sensitivity. So this is critical information for people to know and that’s why I loved working with you personally and that’s why I love sharing this information with people because it doesn’t have to be that hard, it doesn’t have to be that grueling. It gets to be easy. And when you have an expert such as yourself with this guidance or any other expert who knows this, they can help make every effort, all your investment, whether it’s financial time, energy, I even call this investment of hope. It can make it efficient and it can make it worthwhile and less grueling. It just doesn’t have to be so hard.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It doesn’t.

Daniela Giangiorgi

I love that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It’s too easy.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Easy, right? Get to press the easy button, Laura.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That’s what we do. We do easy around here.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yes. So tell me, you have a live 28-day journey coming up, and this is a summit to help our viewers become the most energetic, the most focused person that they wanna be. Can you share a little bit more with us about this gem that you’ve got going on and how to access it?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, this is really special for our summit viewers. This was actually born out of creating this summit and knew that, whoa, once we do this, we have to have a place where people can really get support and help. So yes, this is a guided journey and it includes two live group coaching calls per week with me over 28 days. And that means you have six touch points with me. So as you implement the strategies that I teach during the course, you’re fully supported along the way. And so this is kinda what you can expect during our three weeks together. I’ll coach you on what steps you can take to wake up each morning feeling purposeful and energetic. I know that is number one on my priority list, that I wake up each day clear and ready to tackle my vision. And so I kinda created this program for what would be most important for me in a program and I wanna wake up feeling like that. And for me, sustained focus when I’m working on important tasks is really important. So we’re gonna focus on that, like, how do you keep that brain stamina going? You wanna be able to keep up with your family mentally and physically. So we’ll focus on that. You’ll know what foods to eat and which to avoid in order to maintain those maximum energy levels. You’ll know what products to keep in your home and those products that might contribute to your long term success and those that might actually cause a problem and hurt you. 

There’s some things lurking around in your home that are actually causing energy and cellular decline. You’ll understand the role that sleep plays in their cell recovery process and we’ll help you build a personalized plan to get the amount of sleep you need. And you’ll have a clear understanding of supplements. So, supplements are huge. So many people I’m sure viewing this summit right now take supplements. So we’re gonna help you understand supplements and which will support your energy and how long you should take them. So if you happen to live in the United States, the program will also include an optional curated supplement protocol to speed up the process for you so that you’re feeling that purpose and energy and you get fast results, and it’ll set you up foundationally to have permanent results. That’s really important when I’m working with people that they get permanent results, not just a temporary fix. It’ll set the foundation basically for long term healing of your inflammation, your leaky gut, your chronic symptoms, and everything I do is with the purpose of permanency, not temporary hacks. We want you to have long term success here. So you can actually go to easy energyreset.com to learn more and get access, and we’ll be launching that after the summit wraps up.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Great, so easyenergyreset.com.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s wonderful, Laura. Well, thank you. This is such a wealth of information. I really believe it’s gonna be hugely supportive to our viewers and it’s just such an honor to work with you, to support these clients, to educate, to empower people, and to help them feel their best for the long term like you just said.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you so much Daniela. And for all of our viewers, I wanna thank you for being here, for being a part of this summit, for spreading the word. Make sure that you’re sharing this summit with your friends, your family members, your colleagues, your co-workers, there’s a wealth of information here. And I would suggest to you as you go through these talks really find your path. Find the people on here who resonate with you. Find the people who you know that you can trust and that you wanna work with. And that is the goal of this, is that you’re empowered and you find your path after watching this summit.

Daniela Giangiorgi

So beautiful.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, so take good care everyone. Bye now.