Ep 582: Bloat, Puffiness & Poor Sleep: The Hidden Histamine Link with Steven Wright

Intro and histamine wake-up call 0:00

Welcome to the Health Fix Podcast, where health junkies get their weekly fix of tips, tools, and techniques to have limitless energy, sharp minds, fit physiques, or life. Steven Wright, welcome back. Thanks for having me, Dr. Janine. I'm excited. Man, you know, we've always had great conversations. I love your products. We rep them hard up at my clinic in Wisconsin and, of course, my online version of things and in Tacoma because they work. And lately you came out with something and we were talking about it before we hit record, the whole concept of histamines and how people are waking up to that.

So when you were going through all of your gut stuff, and even now, have you noticed, you know, histamines are a theme for you too? I have actually, but I was like histamine resistant. I don't have that issue. You know, I was super resistant to it. And and yet I had these funny things, right? We're like I knew that at times I would have these sneezing fits and I'm not talking about like some sneezes. I'll talking. About like 10 to 15 minutes of sneezed where I am physically exhausted. Am done for a couple hours.

It'll ruin a date faster than anything. Let me tell you, my wife does not love it when it happens and there's a And one of those triggers is, for instance, we had this memorable date night they were going to do while we were out in Maui and we're going go to this Japanese restaurant. And I had been on vacation, so I have been drinking more than normal. Then that night, I've had a bunch of fish, which normally I can tolerate just fine. But then I also had like a Japanese beer. I just had one draft beer, And on the way home, you know, she's getting all like, we're on our way back.

That was a lovely day. And then I just start sneezing in the whole the walk home for like 20 minutes. I'm sneezed. Date night's over, and this was not the first time that something like this has happened. But it was like a final straw of just disappointment around this sneezes where I had learned I don't do beer, and I think it's because of the wheat. I had known that, but I never thought through the next step of why does that matter? Waking up to the fact that I have ADHD, looking at the connection between ADHD and histamine, intolerance being higher.

And I was like, wow, there's like a, like I'm, I don't identify as having histamine issues on the regular. Like I, don t have issues with tomatoes or avocados or leftovers or wine or anything like that, vinegar, nothing like. But if I get stressed, if i consume a little alcohol, If I am not taking my supplements, Those things will lower my capacity to clear histamine and then I will start having pretty hardcore reactions to things. And so it was, I don't know why it took me so long. It basically, a dear friend of mine, she's passed on now, Dr.

Beth O'Hara, you know, as a business coach for four years, and I was helping her write her copy and come up with her programs and stuff. And so she would be like, you know, I think maybe you should think about histamine. I'm like I don't have histamines. But it was her that really got to me that like histamin is a scale. And your ability to clear histamine changes based on your environment, the time of the season, of what's happening in the environment. The season of your life, your amount of stress, or hormones.

And more people than you think have histamines-related issues. So that was my wake-up call. Frankly, it's been a nice revelation to have some supplements to use for it. Now I don't suffer those sneezing fits if I'm going to cheat a little. Oh my gosh. You know, it's funny how you mention this because for me too, I kind of was like, no, that's just my gut. It's doing that. The bloating is one thing, the itching and rashes, That's a whole other thing. That is completely not related. And then I started going into like perimenopause stuff and moving through there and oh my Gosh, The histamines just flare so much.

And like you mentioned, hormones are such a factor. So I'm guessing that you might be getting some really good letters from folks coming in about, you've saved my world when it comes to histamines. Let's talk a little bit about your histamine product and the letters you get or the messages you got, because you were telling me about one paragraph long. Yeah.

DAO, histamine intolerance, and product development 5:00

So histamine intolerance has been around for a while, decades. People have known about it and people have know about something called diamine oxidase, which is the enzyme that is made in your gut and it clears histamines that's extracellular, so outside of cells. The other way that you clear histamin is inside your cells and that by an enzyme called HNMT. But DAO or diamine oxidase is the one that we have supplements for. It's the 1 that's more easily supplemented with like there is no known supplement for HNMT and I had known about it for years, but I just, even when I was in clinic, I couldn't get any reliable results.

And so I would ask everybody, like, what's your brand, you know? And then I'd say, how many pills do you take and what results do get from that many kills? In the survey, whenever the surveys just all over the board, tend to stay away from advocating, teaching about these products. But I also mark it down. as product development. That's where there's really something to be done for the community, for world, is to figure out why is everybody trying this thing, but no one is seeing consistent results.

I had heard about DAO, I wasn't recommending it, because I didn't have anybody to recommend it to, and I was always on the hunt. And I just told you before the show, I'm about to head off to the biggest ingredient show of the year in Vegas next week. And three years ago, finally, when I ask everybody, like I have a list of things that I am always asking, hey, do you have this? Have you heard of this, and I would always ask, Hey, Do you a DIO enzyme? And then I finally met someone who's like, yeah, we're a Spanish company, We've been working on this.

We're trying to get people to use it here in the US. This is coming from the heavens, this is amazing. And so we ended up partnering with that Spanish team of scientists who ended having all these patents around extracting the DAO and putting it in an enteric coded encapsulation that no one had done yet. The first thing I always do is send it out to everybody on my team because most of my some sort of chronic health thing that they're battling and they are willing participants to try whatever Steven's into, which is awesome and I'm grateful for that.

And so they, many of them have histamine issues and, they were all using other people's brands and then I was like, look, just trial this one seven days, same dose you're already on, let me know what happens. Universal feedback was, like holy cow, this is actually working. And so that's when I knew we had to bring the product to market. It's been an interesting journey because if you know about histamine, you now about the DIO enzyme. But you've probably tried these other products and been kind of let down or confused because sometimes they work and sometimes it don't.

So what had happened just a few, about a month ago is I was on a show of a histamines. She's very into histimine, a provider. And she's like, yeah, I don't use DAOs either because they just don t work. And I'm like I got one that works. I m telling you. She's I'll try it because you're nice, but don' t get your hoes up. Then she sent me a paragraph long response a couple days after she tried it and she's like, this is amazing. I have to go through all these hurdles of freezing my food and my diet is just not what I want it to be.

And yesterday I was eating tomatoes and I wasn't having reactions. Now I'm taking it before bed and then my sleep scores are going through the roof. That's the kind of stuff that keeps me going. Oh my gosh, absolutely, and you know you mentioned a couple things like the sleep scores and the histamines and I think a lot of people right now were recording this in the fall and we've just come off of tomato season which a lotta people don't realize how much the high histamine foods like peppers and tomatoes and even the potatoes and all that can affect them.

But one of the things you mention was that really for me is a big thing. I like looking at the nervous system and its relationship to the gut. and I think a lot of people were like we'll look at their sleep scores and they'll be like I Can't get out of the 60s. I can't out you know 70s and my mom's getting like 90s, and she sleeps six hours, And I'm in bed like 12 and you probably heard people say stuff like that Let's talk a little bit about that if you have you tracked your sleep score to see oh, yeah, I've been using sleep trackers for Close to 12 or 13 years, many companies went out of business.

I was, you know, first gen or ring I've moved on. Now I use the ultra human, but I also have an eight sleep with tracks it. And so I just did a sleep study as well. Those at home sleep studies are crazy. No, there's so much easier to do and so it's cheaper, But that's a side note. So yes, I do track my sleep. Sleep has been a challenge for my entire life since I And sleep is one of those things, it's kind of like weight gain. It's so multifactorial and people can get so dogmatic with their advice.

Like I'm an expert in weight loss or I am an an in sleep and I find that they get very excited and enthusiastic about what worked for them. But when you have these conditions where they're like so multi-factorial, there's not one blueprint for everybody. And I know because I have done it. I've done the glasses, the blackouts, I had the earplugs for my entire life. Like, you know, have a mattress that cools me down that was so expensive. The amount of gear I bought for sleep, such a high maintenance sleeper and I'm one of those people that I will often be at a 70 or 72. That's just my If i hit the eighties sometimes i actually feel worse because i think my body actually is like starting to repair itself and so i have to go through i've had to.

A series of checks and balances about what what are the potential root causes and this is actually how i approach all conditions all issues and that's where. I guess I'm saying that there's so many multifactorials because for me, it ends up being my nervous system, but there is a little histamine component to it. And so for folks who routinely wake up between one and three in the morning, There is a cycle, I can't remember exactly how the cycle works. I think it's cortisol interacting and histamine ends up spiking.

And so if you are low DAO, which can happen genetically, there's those of us like 14 ish percent of the population that literally you do not have the SNPs required to make a normal amount of DAOs. You could be Doing everything your whole life, right? Like, like try all the diets, do all of the exercise, all those supplements, chasing your tail and lo and behold, your genetics were just keeping you behind the eight ball the whole time. And as you inflame the gut, you lower your production of DAO because DAOs made by the brush border.

And so any inflammation in the small intestine is going to lower that. So that includes when you consume alcohol. That includes any sort of gut infection or food choices, inflammation there. There's all these components where you're like, I'm doing everything right for this sleep thing. and you may not even know it, but like if you're estrogen, let's say you are in perimenopause, because it's not like you get to get a memo from your ovaries like, hey, estrogen is going to drop on Thursday. And you like okay, cool, I'll plan for that.

You don't get that memo. Yeah. And one of the side effects of estrogen dropping is histamine going up.

Sleep, nervous system, and histamine connections 13:00

If you're not prepared for that, which who can be because we don't get the memo, you could be doing everything right just tasting your tail and it could DAO. It could histamines from an estrogen drop that you had not accounted for. I find it to be one those products where it's like, number one, it doesn't harm. There's no harm in taking it a placenta makes I think around 1000 X the normal level of so like in a safety environment, like the body can handle a large amount of but it might help. And so it's a cool less than $50 test to figure out.

in one month, is this an issue for me? And it could be. And so what we have is I have their blister packs to keep them protected from oxygen and pH. So I I have another one in my luggage and because I don't know when I'm going to be that idiot who orders another drink at the bar and then I wake up the next day and I am struggling or I do not know if I will wake in the middle of the night and be like, I should probably take a few of those. And so I just kind of keep myself protected and hope other people try that because it is one of these things where it's almost impossible to like, I mean, we could go through a histamine questionnaire.

I guess it's not impossible. You could get your genetics tested, you could through histamines questionnaire, if you answer yes to even a few of these, like do you get flushing, redness, do have seasonal allergies, Do you have food sensitivities? Do get tachycardia? do get car sick? You get motion sickness. All car-sick, motion- sickness, most people don't realize that is high histamin. Dramamine is an anti-histamine. Ginger is a mast cell stabilizer. That's why I say eat some ginger, take a ginger capsule.

So anyways, if you have those things and you sleep issues, I would highly encourage you to test maybe one to two little tablets of DAO, the histoharmony product before bed and just watch your scores and watch you wake ups and see if they improve. You know, it makes perfect sense. It makes sense to look at that. And I like how you're talking about the individuality here, because I think it can seem very much like this is the answer, or this the only answer. The fact that you mentioned, like, let's buy it.

Let's do an experiment. Take some notes. See what happens. How many notebooks do you think you own of data on yourself? I'm just curious. I'll share how many I have. There's probably 15 filled up behind me. I probably have about similar amount, like literally, you know, it's just data and I try to, encourage folks. Like, we don't know. You know? And I think we have this mindset of like, if I'm going to spend the money on something, It better freaking work. But at the end of the day, or what's the alternative, genetic testing for a thousand bucks.

Genetic testing, that's really good for 1,000 bucks or 50 bucks and you, know like yay or nay. I don' know I mean, I'll kind of. breaks down at the end of the day. Now that you mentioned the DAO and the dramamine component, I don't get seasick. I just started sailing. But when I get done sailing, i will constantly feel like I'm doing this. And when i get on land,i feel worse than when im on the boat. Maybe some some DAo. Okay, histoharmony guys. What you just demonstrated there is the key, which is curiosity.

If you could have curiosity about your health, you can do, I think, what you just described, which is be more courageous in testing products and be ruthless around, did they do anything? You know, I think the trap is to buy the hope and the hype and assume that that's like the only thing that is going to work for you. When the answer is no, there's a hundred other options if this doesn't work. And in fact, if it doesn´t work, the way in which it does not work is extraordinarily helpful for your next experiment.

Yes. Such wise info because yeah, that's kind of how I've learned a lot of things things that didn't work and then figured out like all right It did this though, or it did nothing. So okay, you can cross that off, right? So It's it's one of those great ways to be thinking about it. No speaking of it now my ankles itching seriously should have taken some of it before this. But it is a thing and, you know, and one of the things, of course, I focus a lot on women going through perimenoposin and menopausin, And so many symptoms could very well be histamine.

but you had mentioned one thing that I wanted to get back to is the nervous system. And the histamines nervous systems connection, You know as a biggie, but also the Nervous System gut as whole. and yes, the Histamine's are part of this, so now folks are listening like, Oh my God, how many things are a part in the gut? nervous system gut. What have you been seeing lately with folks? You know, because it does seem like the collective a lot of folks are really worried lately, there's a Let's see how we can see the bigger picture and soothe ourselves.

And I do like your B-serene topical a lot. I like to put it behind my ears. So I want to hear kind of what you're hearing from folks on the street. What's your staff hearing about nervous system, gut connection? I think people are waking up and the conversation used to be, you are stressed. and you're stressed, which it's creating your rashes, your IBS, whatever. And that conversation was, I had that given to me, not only from some regular providers, but actually people you and I respect and know who I've consulted with.

At one point he goes, Have you ever read Pema Shodran? Have ever meditated because maybe you're having some stress and I wanted to strangle him. I was like, are you kidding me? It's not stress. What are talking about, dude? So I feel like what's really cool is we've stopped using that S word and we started to talk about the nervous system. And I think that opens everybody's minds up to say, Oh yeah, I do have a nervous system. And if I don't take care of it, it is absolutely intertwined into everything I.

My gut, my gut functionality, histamine, allergies, hormones, weight gain, all the things. So I that's been the really, the best shift is this language shift around your nervous. caring for it and protecting it, and how interwoven it is into many of the outcomes we want in health. And so I think that just that idea that like emitting, you too have a nervous system. It is affected by the world at large and what you consume. mentally, emotionally, it is affected by your environment, like literally where you sleep, how you see the pollen that's in the air, what's not in air the mold, whatever it The reason why people like myself have been saying for 15 years to chew your food slowly and to say a prayer or say gratitude before a meal is to shift the state of your nervous system from sympathetic to parasympathetic.

And the reason why that matters is because rest and digest is parasympathetic that's where you get all the blood flow to your digestive organs that where u get the right hormone mixture to feel full and to make the amount of enzymes and stomach acid like there's a concoction of things that happen that is outside of the food you choose and so i think what's wonderful. Is I'm trying to get rid of this conversation around food is medicine because it's not food, is important, but it just food. We have to digest that food we have assimilate that.

And that's food enters a contextual relationship with your body that is very much dependent on your nervous system. And so what you believe and what do you feel matter. If you are afraid of that food, are you afraid to that reaction of food? You increase the likelihood of the reaction by minimum 30 percent, which would be the nocebo effect or the placebo effect, however you want to square it. And so I think that's really powerful to think about that. Like, for instance, if you buy a supplement and you're afraid of a reaction or you just distrust, just trustful, you like this dang industry and this working on my health thing sucks and nothing ever works for me.

There's a 30% less chance it's going to work for you. Just because of that mental framework that you're using. And so I think the nervous system is this wonderful new word that we can all use and adopt to start to talk about topics that We've been talking about for decades, but maybe we could use a new openness in all of our world to do it with a little bit more care and also make it kind of cool or like in vogue to you know to take care of yourself essentially it's like like we're basically saying we should take of ourselves better and we what is happening unconsciously and consciously.

And if we do that, I see measurable shifts in people's health, measurable shift immediately.

Curiosity, self-testing, and nervous system regulation 23:00

There are people out there who can tolerate almost no food, like five foods. They can barely tolerate curcumin or fish oil or DAO. they are very sick, they're very challenged. Honestly, the fastest way for them to make progress is to wake up every day and literally hug themselves multiple times a day, tell themselves it is okay. Go outside, put their feet in the grass, ground a little, maybe do some other exercises. There's like so many schools of thought on different exercises you could do. Just choose any of them.

One of the them, do it a few times day. And it sounds so Simple but it's actually very hard to do because it you have to change your life you to changer patterns and many of us are addicted to the old way of feeling like the the mental frameworks of the. You know the dopamine rush you get from from being afraid of everything that's like there's payoffs to that way of of being and so I think the beautiful thing about the nervous system is it gives us a new way to talk about these things and we are getting online feedback every day from a number of sources about how Much better they're feeling how much more food they can tolerate how better their stools are their energy levels are if Yes, we make supplements that help with it, but also just doing the basics of like, it's okay.

Like it is like yes, the world is crazier than any of us have ever seen in any Frankly you and I I don't know about you, but I really have any power to do anything about it. I Don't I literally don' The best thing I do is talk to you about this and have some you know live therapy in front of everybody about You know, that's really all I got I can't affect it and so I Can get worked up by the dopamine the fact that I have ADHD and low dopamine I'm attracted to things that will make me have dopamine so that feel better and one of those things is fear and challenge and outrage and all these things.

And so one of the biggest things I've done is put an app on my phone called Be Present. It's absurdly priced for like $100 a year to basically lock me out of my iPhone. But it's very helpful for my nervous system. Yeah, well, there's so much involved in that. And yeah, I mean, a lot of people are feeling, you know, we can't control any of this, but what we control is our vibe. That's why I tell everybody you can control your vibe, if we're all working on feeling good, that's gonna be way more powerful than all the negative in the world.

But at the end of the day, and I've been there with my gut, with other autoimmune things, when I'm been really sick. It's really hard when you are in throes of that to really be like, all I need to do is meditate, you know, that kind of stuff's coming up. Like you're like, I don't know. No, no, i need a solution and I needed now. And I'm sure you probably get a lot of folks do probably, just like you explained you were in that a little bit when you had someone talk to you about that. So, it's kind looking at like all right, The nervous system has such an impact.

We know we have to baby step it in, but at the same time, we and and we started putting on different acupuncture points definitely behind the ears but we Started to do some of the the likes. This is the window to the sky points. There's there's chest points So those you guys are watching I'm like poking different spots on my body windows skypoints on your neck and then there is spirit gate points on Your chest and Steven probably knows and has heard about all these points too, but but he started doing that he says no No, I haven't oh well I started doing this and I starting pairing it with red light on on the points with Kenyan's red like because it's like tiny it like this big and i can stick it on things so I don't know I I just wanted to throw that out because its one of the the ways in which I've been looking at tapping in to the nervous system using something you have And also being able to stack a couple things like we're going back in that department.

Have you used red light at all with the gut for folks? I bet you have. Yes, I want to come back to that. I wanted to leverage what you just said there. So I think what you said is super important, right? Because I just went on this rant about how easy it is to help your nervous system just hug yourself and go ground. And there's probably someone listening right now that's like, f you, dude. F you. If I could choke you out, I would. That's great. I appreciate that. But what you just said is really important, which is getting leverage in situations where it doesn't feel like you have any leverage.

And I think that's where properly dosed supplements can really help. There's actually a concept, I don't know if it comes from psychiatry or psychiaty or psychology, but it's this zone of tolerance. Essentially, it is like we have a window, high and low, of which we are Let's say capable of being an adult. And you desire to have a very big window plus or minus. Let say zero is neutral and plus is a lot of happiness and negative is maybe the opposite of that disappointment, anger, all those emotions.

You want a large window so that you can function throughout your life and experience things and be an adults. But as we get sicker and sickier, our windows get smaller and smaller. Maybe something happened as a child. Maybe it happened just recently. But if you get something physically or trauma-based, it can shrink that window down and kind of lock you into a very narrow zone of tolerance. And so what's really frustrating is if your outside of that zone tolerance, you could be almost impossible to achieve anything.

Mentally, your not clearly thinking. You're not sure if thinking clearly. Your might be manic, might depressed, not really sure. because you're not in that zone. And so having tools that can pull you back in the zone or increase the Zone that are not thinking mental energy based, I think is extraordinarily helpful to have in The House. That's where B-serene IR is one of those tools, in my opinion, that I don't think you need to use it on a regular basis. In fact, they don t necessarily say you should unless you re in one those chronic conditions or whatever.

But it is extraordinarily powerful and fast acting if you're outside your zone of tolerance and you need to get some leverage on yourself. I had never thought about coupling it with light therapy, but that's an awesome, awesome innovation on it. Yeah, I actually like to stack things every so often and see, you know, it's back to my experimenting and my plethora of notes on random randomness. But it is fun, and definitely B-series was one of the things that I just happened to come across when you sent it over to me to test it out and I was like, this really works along with some of other essential oils and different things for folks too.

One of the things that I was going to run by you as a way that i've been playing with holozymes lately is because of different enzymes in there I've started to use them more as systemic enzymes than digestive enzymes and I know that you've mentioned using them that way in previous talks but I have been kind of playing quite a bit with folks that have puffiness, swelling, bloat that things just aren't getting, nothing's happening and we put them on a little bit of a water fast and throw in the holozimes.

Give us a little scoop on how you guys have been using holozymes outside of the box. And what have you heard people, you know, doing? And of course, we probably should explain to folks what holos are and since you're the master of it, I'm gonna let you explain so that Post can hear this and I'll tie it back into how I think it relates to the nervous system here too, because sometimes we get some nasty. Yeah, well, I would say world holosomes are the world's most advanced digestive enzyme, but I labeled it digestive enzymes so people could put it in a box.

It's also a systemic enzyme, and so I think that's what we're about to dive into here. But enzymes have been around for, I don't know, hundreds of years probably, but at least the last couple of decades they've been very well used and people know about them. Unfortunately, they're like part of this class of supplements where people try them, And the prior versions of them were inconsistent, not properly powered. And so the responses are weak to nothing. People are like, did I just spend $50 again to get no effect?

And they stop using it. Providers stop telling people about them. They move on to things they think are sexier, like probiotics or something. But the reality was we just didn't have a properly built product, frankly. And so Holozyme is my solution to that, because I have the exact same problem. I used to take multiple brands of enzymes at every meal, and they still didn't really get the result that I wanted. But they were just better than taking one brand. In clinic, I would just rotate through every 30 clients.

So I'd try a different one, thinking I had found a difference result, but it never worked. The results were always the same, inconsistent at best. Um, and so holozyme has been a passion project for me personally, cause I need them, um, uh, for a daily, on daily life, but also just cause that kind of problem just, you're just grinding my ears. I'm just like, why can't we figure this out? This makes so much sense. And so, we leveraged a patent and then we worked with, a Japan US based manufacturer of enzymes to kind of keep souping it up.

Holozyme as a digestive and systemic enzyme 33:00

And so I think we're on like version eight now with full FODMAP support, which is really cool. Um, and so the fascinating thing is that the original version, version zero, um, was run through six different pilot studies and pilot, meaning one of the study had three people, another, the biggest study, had 30, There was some blinding, but not double blind. It was like proof of concept style trials. But they did get really cool data. And the interesting thing was the original patent, the scientist behind that felt strongly in the use of systemic enzymes.

So he made the protocol two per meal and two before bed. Because he felt so strongly, so the original trials on the, which is new form is significantly different only in the up way. So I do believe the regional trial still apply, but. That was two with meals and two before bed. And it showed really cool stuff. Like we're talking about drops in blood sugar spikes after meals at around 18% in another trial. There was like a 17% reduction in total cholesterol. They did two different studies on gout and uric acid and found a 47% percent reduction gouts like uic acid.

numbers and then gout pain. And now I can't say that this treats it. It's not for that. But what I think it speaks to is the power of the systemic use as well as the continual digestion of whatever food you are eating. I personally myself had mildly high uric acid, like always right below the cutoff, 7.8,7.9, 8.0,8.1. I don't think I ever got a score higher than that, but I started having big toe pain early in my 30s. And I'd already been gluten free and paleo for five or six years. And it put me on this journey where i was losing my sports i wasn't using my hobbies it was so much pain that i think about going on all of your knowledge is a.

A way to block your gas it basically but it hasn't some nasty side effects and. In the middle of formulating holes i'm i always talking to the research and he mentioned all the studies and i like. thrown tart cherry juice at this. I've thrown like all kinds of crazy stuff at. Who knows? So I use six per night and within 10 days the pain in my toe is gone and I had tried a whole lot of things. And I was like, holy cow, this is pretty cool. And so since then, if people are dealing with inflammation, let's say they had like a sprain or a strain, like they're a performance athlete or just a regular weekend Joe, I always tell them to up dose systemically.

And normally they'll report back that they're feeling more mobility, maybe less pain. It can work in conjunction with other products like curcumin or whatever you're using for inflammation. But it works on different pathways, specifically either around improving blood flow potentially to that that injury site or there's some really interesting novel data around circulating immune complexes and breaking down extra kind of crud in your blood basically. And so I think like everybody should be doing it.

I'm super biased but We have had people who are waiting for back surgery They are escalating on all the pain meds and they everybody's very aware now of the opioid Addiction levels and like so we've had People write in like look I love this for for my gut but like I haven't so much pain right now and I like cool try six before bed and see how that works. And if it helps a little, then take six more between meals. We had one guy who was waiting for back surgery and he refused to continue escalating his pain dosages.

And so he used 18 per day in between meals and was able to wait for his insurance to get him in for like four months and still be capable of work and family life and things like that, which is really cool. I hope that maybe one day we'll be able study this further because You know, there's no money to be made from the pharma companies in systemic enzyme therapy, but the research out of Europe on this stuff is so cool. I would agree with you. I mean, I've definitely dosed high on this. Actually, have been using it kind of like prednisone.

So I'll taper up, ramp up and then ramp back down too with folks on it. And so I'm making folks take about 10 between meals and 10 again at night at the peak and we ramped up from 6 up to 10 and them back. Down. Think I heard you on someone else's podcast talk that good dosing sounds like, all right, follow that. Then I decided to go a little higher. because why not? And I saw it worked too, you know, and I have a disc injury that I tend to kind of manage this way too so I played, everything's always with myself first and if it works with me then of course I'm going to share it with my people too.

And, I do think yeah, Kirk Human definitely has some play in there. Sometimes CBD can be really nice if its a full spectrum, no THC on my end but the CBD for sure, but I like that. Now, One of the fun things that I love about you is that in your emails you're just so candid and I saw your little emoji guy behind you, the little poop guy. So for those of you guys who are watching, you can see he's got the Little Poop Emoji stuff. Looks like a stuffed animal character there. But I just love reading your e-mails because they're so funny and real.

And and a lot of like, Yep, I've experienced that. Yep. I can relate to that are you I'm guessing you're still writing your emails. For the for the most part. Yeah, yeah, we have I mean, We have a team a marketing team. So so I have final say and I change everything to be even more in my voice. But yeah I do have some have A lot to help these days on them. Oh, man. You're lucky. What's next with you guys? Because you're going to this place that's Vegas, and you are going see all the people with all their products and all of the different things.

What do you got in your head? What are you thinking about? Where are your guys expanding to? If I had millions in funding or millions at the bank, I would have a lot more SKUs at HealthyGut. That's not necessarily the case right now. So we're still very bootstrap family business. Um, so I gotta be very careful with what is Steven's fascination versus what's best for the business, you know, that kind of thing. I would say there's a few products that I hope will come out within 2026. One of them I will be for folks with a heartburn and B-coastal membrane issues because, um, I think low stomach acid is just growing every month because the amount of fear and the number of nervous system dysregulation continues to make low-stomach acid even worse.

And so being able to take a product like HCL Guard or some other stomach support formula that's well done, I again, it's just such a no-brainer curiosity for you to test that no matter what you're dealing with, that it could improve your health so dramatically if you fix that. with perimenopause and menopaus, estrogen is super, it's like moisture, right? Like in one way, you could look at it like that. And mucosal membranes are, I think are getting more ravaged than ever. I don't know if it is just a confluence of things.

It's probably just the conflance of all of it, awareness, the state of the world, all these things, plus menopsis, peri-menoposis, these types of thing. I'm fascinated by DGL again. I am fascinated with the old school stuff. But again, old-school stuff that kind of works, but you have to take like 3,000 milligrams for it to work. And a lot of the products out there are just chalky. It tastes terrible and they're full of mannitol and sugar alcohols that just make people like myself super gassy. And so I'm working on that and I am hunting ingredients at the show that are novel for mucosal healing.

But I m very interested in that because that I think is a Kind of one of those no brainers, like if you having heartburn, acid reflux, or you're just feeling drier, there's likely something going on mucosally. There's a lot of people, even my wife included, who have a chronic cough. And they don't know that it's acid reflux, and it could be silent acid reflex. That's the thing for my wife, for Shea. For a while, I was like, look, this might be reflow. Even Western medical doctors will say this is most likely reflox.

They'll try to put you on a PPI for eight to 12 weeks, because that's typically what it is. but this idea that you have reflux but you don't feel anything is like, that's like gonna make your head explode if you're not in this industry.

Future products, fiber, and GLP-1 support 43:00

And sure enough with her, we've tried a lot of different things, but higher dose DGL is one of the only things that kind of keeps her cough gone. And so I'm hunting that. I am actively trying to figure that out. And I've also been very interested in fibers. So I got into some spats with my email list a couple years ago because I had some opinions on them. Some people get very defensive of the things that work for them, and they don't like it when you challenge those things. And I also don t want to take something away from somebody or cause confusion if it is working for them.

So I kind of pulled back and I've been waiting, but I think fiber is going to become a really big topic we'll all be talking about for the next few years because it, in my opinion, is more important than probiotics. You can't have a fire without like wood or whatever, like you got to burn something to make a fire. And in this case, I feel like the wood, or the fuel is the prebiotics or fiber, however you want to talk about it. gotten more aware of nutrition and food. In general, I would say most people have cut down even further their amount of prebiotic and fiber, and they are causing nutritional dysbiosis themselves.

And I think that is a significant problem that we have to fix if we're going to get people to a resilient way of living and being. And so they don't have diseases of aging, because gut dysbiosis is linked to literally whatever you want to pick. Heart disease, neurodegeneration of all types, you name it. You know, that that's a problem. And so I am actively playing with different prebiotics and fibers, trying to understand which ones are like bloat me, which one to taste like bunhole, you know. A lot of them taste terrible.

Oh, a lot. Of the products that you mentioned right now, like the powders out there for gut lining repair tastes like crap. I mean, it's you can't even. fathom it. And yeah, like what you said, I would love to see something that lubes the tubes and gives the fiber where it doesn't make the tube sticky and then people dry out worse because you'll hear that in the menopause space a lot where people are like, yeah I can't do fiber because it's gonna bulk me and dry me out more and nothing's going to move and I'm like if we can just get something the lubed the tips and puts the fibers in there Yeah, it would be magical.

I know a lot of people listening right now. So if you're open to baggies of unlabeled powder being mailed to you to test, you know, You can always reach out to us. We're down. We are down, especially my folks at the Center for Human Restoration. They've been through a lot of different trials that we've got. Um, we have been running over the time and yeah, it's definitely something that I'm curious about. And of course, I know we're getting short on time here and I just wanted to go through one thing because it is a question that i get from folks because the fiber conversation, the enzymes conversation you know, that the lubing the tubes kind of conversation comes into play when folks are taking GLP-1s.

And since it seems like it is few and far between to find some folks that aren't doing a tersepitide or somaglutide these days, what have you seen be a protocol? I know we weren't going to ask about protocols, but I decided I'm going do it for just this last one. And then- No, no, it's good. Everybody loves a protocols including myself. Yeah. I mean, I think number one, just so everybody's aware of where I am at, Anti g l p ones i think they're an awesome tool to have in your toolbox i thank the micro dosing of g.

l. p. ones like at lower than study dosages so for instance with like semi glutide the dosage is that were studied i thing the starter doses three milligrams. And the low dose is seven and the high dose 14. So we're talking less than the starter dosages is a micro dose. They do some really cool stuff for mass activation and histamine. I think there are some inflammation pathways and pain pathways. It's when you get to the active dosage that are being studied for fat loss or glucose control. That's where essentially I mean, I don't think it's a shocker to you and I, but like, it sometimes it a little bit of a new idea for most people.

It's like the higher the dose, the, higher, or the chance of the side effect, because it higher effect. All effect so like like higher dose the more effect there is, including side effects. And so I would say. Number one, if you're using them, you have to advocate for yourself. Your GP or whoever put you on this is unlikely to be advising you how to best use these at this time. They are likely to do what they've always done, which is escalate the dose. If you're not seeing whatever changes they're hoping you'd see and if you do that you are more likely to have side effects and so in my opinion we should try to use these things at the lowest dose possible so we have the least amount of side-effects and maybe it takes a little longer to lose the fat or whatever the goal is.

And then also we should be just very cognizant of the systemic effects that they have. So in the case of most of these drugs, it's delaying stomach emptying and really kind of just totally messing up the pathways of a gut. One thing that's been working for people lately is a new analogy like the gut as a conveyor belt. Think of it just like a conveyer belt whether you're pitching building a car or you picture moving carrots down a production line or whatever you are picturing, it's a conveyor belt and it starts with you putting food in your mouth and ends in the toilet.

And that conveyer belt needs to run on time. If it doesn't run in time, If it runs too fast, then you get loose stools. If a runs to slow, you could constipation and there's a number of stops along the conveyor belt. One of the stops is the stomach. You know, one of those stops to the small intestine, large intestine. All these different stops where things happen. People take on, take parts out. They put parts in. Um, it's very much, very, much a conveyer belt and so the beginning of that conveying belt is your mouth, but like the very first big step is stomach and the GLPs really impact that.

And I think if. You take the confluence of what they're doing, I would suggest that they are going to lower total nutrient absorption from all food choices. Whether you're able to eat protein or not, whether you are able eat healthy or no, whatever food you choose, you'll lose more of it to the toilet while you on these drugs. I don't think we know yet what that percentage is. Is it 10%, is it 50%, but my guess is that it's directly proportional to dose. Um, Why is that happening? Because your digestive process is no longer functioning correctly or as it was intended.

And so I think taking things like HCL guard or other things to boost your stomach acid to make sure you are fully breaking down as much of that food as possible while it's in the stomach, as well as encouraging proper stomach dumping and proper systemic functioning so it doesn't, quote unquote, freeze up like it has happened to some people. I think that's really smart and almost a no-brainer. And if you have to couple it with DGL or some sort of mucosal defense product, I thinks you should. On top of that, digestive enzymes are non-negotiable, even more so than the HCL support.

Because, again, we do not know yet how under-assimilating you are going to be with the food you choose. But the other thing is I've played with them. And it becomes harder and harder to eat protein it because harder harder eat well because one of the other things is doing is blocking dopamine. It's affecting it anyway stop blocking it's effecting it and. If you like me and your emotional eater. uh, what happens? We choose carbs. They're, they're easier to digest. Let's just give us credit for that.

It feels better to eat them both physically because it's easier, but also mentally because there's more of a boost in neurochemicals. And so the diet slowly drifts on these drugs towards higher carb, lower protein, and lower fat. that coincides with the muscle loss and some of the other unwanted side effects of these drugs. And so I think if you can just plan for this stuff, like I have to take an amino acid support product, I to have take my holozymes and I might need to four or six of them to really properly break this food down because your gut is not going to be doing its job.

It's kind of I don't know the best analogy, but it's almost like you're wrapping it in a weighted blanket and you are making it fight to do its job and it can't. You're just handcuffing it every single day. And that's fine. I'm not saying you shouldn't do this, I am just saying give your gut some support and give you whole body some supporting awareness that you can just hop on and hop off these things and not expect there to be you know, calcium loss, magnesium loss iron loss B vitamin loss let alone macronutrients like protein.

Yeah, no, I agree. I agreed. It's definitely something we got to watch out for. But at the end of the day, they're hot. And people, women in particular, are desperate to lose weight. So it's one of those things where we gotta think about what to do. Take a broad spectrum amino acid powder every single day. Maybe twice a day take a multivitamin when you're on these things. and try not to escalate the dose. Go to a new one, go to trisaparitide or retichutrides on its way out. So go a GLP2 or GLp3.

They're much better because they don't just restrict or they just don' boost GL p1, they do other things and I think multi modalities is safer. Yeah, absolutely. Oh my goodness. I'm looking forward to hearing what happens after this next weekend and what kind of things you come up with and the next stuff. So we'll make sure that when you figure out what you're going to formulate next, we get to hear about it and bring you back on so we can chat about. Thank you as always for bringing up all kinds of good stuff for us to think about and chew on.

Totally pun intended on this one. Thanks for coming on again, Stephen. Appreciate it. Hey fellow health junkie, thanks for listening to the health effects podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please help support me to get the word out about the podcast, subscribe, rate and review and just get that word. Thanks again for