The Brain-Gut Connection

Summit Introduction and Guest Welcome 0:00

Hi. Welcome to the freedom from Fibromyalgia summit. I'm doctor Roger Murphy. I'm your host. Thank you for joining us today. And I want to welcome my friend and colleague, Doctor John Dempster, who is a board certified naturopathy physician in Toronto, has a very busy clinic that uses functional medicine focused on chronic disease, autoimmune disease, GI disorders, type two diabetes, fibromyalgia, Crabtree syndrome. John's been on numerous summits with me in podcast, and we always have a, a really interesting conversation.

We usually dive pretty deep. Today we're going to focus on GI health. And the ramifications about the health of your gut dictates the health of your overall body. So John, Doctor Dempster, thanks for being a part of the summit. Hey Roger, great to see you as always. Thank you for having me on. You know, in functional medicine, it's so many, speakers here are, their philosophy is based around functional medicine, where we're trying to find the root causes of disease. And one of the primary drivers of functional medicine from the beginning.

You know, Jeffrey Bland is gut health. You know, and I think sometimes people get sick of hearing about leaky gut and the microbiome. And but it's a big cornerstone piece of everything we do in functional medicine, right? Absolutely. And you know what? Doctor Bland is our hero in functional medicine. But this even goes back to the pocket is useless. That is to say, life and death begins in about. So we've got to realize that this has been around for for a long time. This ethos and this hypothesis that we've got to keep our gut in check for optimal health and well-being.

And why is that? Can you give us some examples? Can you tell us just kind of the basics about how the digestive system and elimination system work, and then

Why Gut Health Matters in Functional Medicine 1:51

how they're communicating with the rest of the body? Well, our gut as we know it is literally from our mouth down to it. There's lots of little compartments and not so little compartments in there. And it it's comprised of a number of, trillions of microbes and cells and all sorts of activity that happens there on a microsecond level of every second of every day. And what we're learning, and this is what's really fascinating right now is, you know, you and I are both evidence based or evidence informed practitioners, and we really like to look at the science.

So right now, the science in the gut space is just hockey sticking as we call it, Canada. You know, going straight up in terms of the amount of studies and research dollars going into this. And why is that? Well, we see a huge connection to the immune system. And again, many of your listeners, this is not going to be news to them hearing this, but we're going to state this, these principles right away. Anywhere between 80 to 82% of our immune system does live in our gut. If we have any form of an immune or an autoimmune condition which is rampant right now, and nobody knows this better than you, is we've got to make sure that we are looking at is reestablishing, a proper gut ecosystem.

A significant amount of our neurotransmitters are made in our gut, and this goes into many directions, not just mental health, but it goes into the directions of fibromyalgia and pain management and everything else that we are seeing and hearing, a lot today. But I used to be the host of summits, called the Mental Wellness Summit, where we would talk and discuss the science, showing that about 90% of serotonin, up to 92% of serotonin, depending who's citing that research comes from cellular activity in our gut, largely driven by microbial activity.

And there's many other neurotransmitters. But as we know, serotonin is one of those neurotransmitters that helps with pain management and helps with mood support. And guess what? We've all been through a very rough couple of years globally right now. And you know, a lot of people, serotonin levels have taken a big hit. We are actually seeing studies and research right now that if you go through a traumatic period of time or even a short window of trauma, it can influence your gut microbiome negatively within 24 hours.

And so we are seeing surges right now of all sorts of mental health concerns. I don't know about your practice and the Roger, but in ours for sure, largely compressed with a lot of the, you know, the, the macro, systems that have gone on in the last two years, you know, globally and economically, so forth. But, what we're seeing is that if we can start to support that gut tissue, it starts to drive signals up through something called the vagus nerve. And this is a nerve. Go straight up to our what we'd like to say, our main brain or the brain that's on our between our two ears.

But arguably our main brain is can be cited in terms of gut activity or in terms of neurological activity in our gut. So there's this highway of information that goes up and down this and vagal nerve, and we can touch on that. Or if you'd like. So talking about the microbiome, I'm talking about you. You mentioned the ecosystem environment. What all makes up the environment. The GI environment I mean obviously bacteria good and bad. But there's other things as well. Right. There are. And you know, we always hear of yeast.

But guess what? Not all yeast are bad. We have to have some beneficial yeast. We have to have some other, not just, you know, we often think of bacteria as being bad, but we have trillions upon trillions of beneficial flora, beneficial bacteria. There's also parasites. There's viral activity. There's other, you know, possible molds and things that we are exposed to that if we are giving them to a certain environment, they can thrive, which we have to keep in check. And in terms of yeast and fungus rather.

And so there's lots of activity going on in our gut that we have to be, as mindful as we can in terms of supporting it, because what we eat and this is no surprise, how we think, where we live, what we how we interact with our community. Believe it or not, that actually has a role.

Microbiome Balance and Gut Ecosystem 5:47

These are all factors, among many others that can start to change and adjust the ecosystem of our gut. Yeah, it's so there's potential pathogens that are just sitting there. They're they're opportunistic and normally they don't bother us. They just cohabitate with the good bacteria. Normally they're kept in check. But then when we get out of balance and that can come, as you've already mentioned, from different ways, that can be from stress, which is really the catalyst for just about every chronic condition.

But stress and inflammation and, these autoimmune diseases can it can really sabotage the, the guy's ability to do partly what it's designed to do, which is to communicate with the rest of the body. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's, that's you know, I like to kind of put these in different groupings. We've got our pathogenic organisms. These are the ones that are often our disease causing. These are the ones that most people know something's wrong when they have them. And, you know, these are things like charity and salmonella and so forth.

And then we have this group of opportunistic bacteria, and these are the ones that are kind of a creature like, you know, if you remember ever going to a house party, there's always that group of people that show up and maybe you've had one or too many drinks and, you know, they're normally good people, but when they get out of hand, they can break things and create a mess. So we don't want to give them the opportunity. This opportunistic bacteria, to do that, they can create all sorts of, disarray in our gut lining.

They could create some disruption to the actual cell function, and they can leave debris that our detox pathways have to work, which are often working already hard enough, have to work overtime to deal with. And, and then we have the other group, which are the beneficial, flora and the commensal flora. So it's a tight balance. It's a tight rope. And, you know, we do have we are resilient beings. So I'll let you jump in here. But, you know, we often can sway a little bit of sway too far. That's when we have a problem. Right.

And you mentioned diet. I mean, I, you know, I talk a lot about, all the time, whether it's here on this summit or podcast that I'm doing or presentations I'm doing for fibromyalgia, for other folks. You know, the only way to to overcome fibromyalgia and fibromyalgia is very much treatable. I hope you've learned that on the summit, most, all of the speakers have. We're in agreement on that. I think we all are in agreement on that. But you can't get there without getting healthy. And I know that sounds.

I know, simplistic, but it's really the truth. And you can't get healthy with an unhealthy diet. I mean, there's just no way around it. Eventually you're going to have to to fix that. Now. But part of the diet is having reactions to foods that you take in that normally would not give you any trouble, but may be causing allergic reactions, or maybe causing autoimmune reactions. So our diet plays a huge role in the health of our of our gut, which then which then can dictate the health of the rest of our body.

Food is essential. It is is literally information that is sending, you know, so many directions, every, every moment of our being. So we've got to always make sure that we are eating the best for us. No, I know we're all looking for that one magic diet, for that one magic supplement or a medication that's going to cure whether fibromyalgia or whatever other condition. But there has to be some tailoring to that to to each person's unique genotype and, and so forth. So, you know, luckily, again, we're we're exposed to different, laboratory tests and tools and diagnostics in the functional medicine sphere that can start to shed some light into making some more customized and I would say more suitable, discussion points in terms of what to eat, there are always the staples.

I think we can all agree on some of those right now. And, you know, we hear a lot of about gluten for very good reason. We hear a lot about dairy, about nightshades, and obviously a lot of the other pro-inflammatory foods that are found in processed foods, processed or ingredients found in processed foods such as sugars and, artificial flavoring and so forth. And those are always essential. But we've got to do our best to try and nuance this. You know, I was so many patients originally when they come to see me, they're on a lot of supplements, but they haven't quite nailed their diet down.

Diet, Food Reactions, and Elimination Strategies 9:46

And we can't supplement a bad diet or a diet that's not right for for that person. So oftentimes, you know, it's important to to look at supplementation. But we've got to make sure that we distill that down to the absolute essentials and make sure you nail down what you're eating. Yeah. So I think there's two groups out there that are, you know, as far as diet. And one group is they're just militant about what they eat. So they are no gluten. There may be a vegan, they may be whatever. They're just really locked into super clean diet.

And yet they're a little bit discouraged because they've been eating this way for a number of years and they don't notice a lot of difference. So I think that, you know, diet, clean diet is the long game. You have to clean your diet up really to be able to make the progress. But supplementation and finding some of these other root causes is a little bit of a shorter game. If you can, release some of the lynchpins, whether that's a problem with your thyroid or mobile toxins or something that you discover in testing and fix that, then now you start to see the diet, eventually really make a progress.

And then the other the other side of the coin is the folks that just, you know, try to do these different guys and they're just like, you know, like most people, I mean, there's so many different choices out there, and we don't have time to go in depth about the different, diets. But what in your practice, it seems to be what what seems to be the, the best diet for your for your patients across now? Everybody's different. I know my practice. It's specific for that person. But is there diet that you kind of like more than others.

Yeah. We definitely have a a foundation from that. And you know, some of that is what I decided. It's more of an anti-inflammatory protocol is very, very minimal on grain. So we take it, you know, we as we've done have been very, very fortunate to be part of some research done at Harvard where they've shown that a lot of the activity, even with some of the gluten free grains, we have to be very careful. And a friend and colleague of ours, and as we both know, Doctor Peter Osborn's and written a great book called No Grand Pain and, you know, I would I would say that there's still some merit to that.

Now, I do find that eventually I can get leeway in there, and we can often find that Keebler and Buckwheat brown rice can be introduced. Yeah, but at the beginning, when we're trying to overcome this giant hill, at first, as you say, the diet is a long game. We're not looking for a quick overnight fix. In fact, some reactions, many people are like, oh yeah, I tried that gluten free thing, or I tried that grain tree thing. You know, it didn't work in a week. And like, well, let's talk about this.

So, you know, this is we have to make sure that we are sitting reasonable expectations. And you nailed it. Like, this is also not something that people are going to feel for for many months in some situations. And it is the shell game. But the more insights that we can look at and in terms of understanding inflammation in the body and how that interacts with the gut lining, which comes back to what I do with my clients. We actually we will measure our patients foods. So I've always got this, this sort of approach where we say, look, here's my based anti-inflammatory diet.

We cut out gluten, we cut of nightshades, we cut out dairy, we cut out. So I, I know it sounds like we cut out every, every bit of fun out there and I'm sure. But there are so many. And we have a nutritionist that we have our patients work with that helps to create foods that they can. We want this to be a can do not a can't do. Yeah. So we approach we want to empower them with we'll say hey I've just never tried these other types of groups. But then we often will test foods. Now again food testing is right with inconsistencies.

But you can find, labs that are going to be helpful. I can give you some further insights that we can bring in and nuance that treatment plan because as as we discussed earlier, you know, a food reaction isn't always an allergy. That's a quick overnight thing. It can sometimes be days, weeks later for them to actually feel an impact from that. And it can be widespread. It's not just about pain. It can be mood, skin digestion, could even be joint pain and so forth. And, and so we do want to make sure that we're providing our patients with as much tools to distill and customize their, their eating plan.

Now, in your practice, do you do food allergy testing. Do you do Eliza test or out cat or elimination diet? What are some of the some of the things you turn to to help to to to find you promise me all those. Yeah. Oh yeah. We don't do all the about for everybody but all the above or at our disposal. We often do, you know, different types of antibody tests. And there are more than just a typical allergy IgG antibodies. There's Ige, AGM, IgG. And we will leverage in some situations and instances what what those antibody immune reactions are doing in, in each person to the system.

Yeah. You know, I see a lot of patients that as they're going through this, this journey, this chronic ill health journey, they're trying to figure things out. But, they find that the their diet becomes smaller, you know, more and more more limited, more limited, you know, and they get to where they're down to just a few foods. And that just shows you that, that, that, you know, these toxins as they build up in your body, become more and more sensitive to things, whether that's a food allergy or food or bright lights, noises, you know, things that you never really thought about, smells you never had a problem.

And now you're starting having these issues. It's because the body's just not working like it's supposed to. It's really stressed out and has become overloaded with toxins. And I, I do food allergy on every patient, and I didn't used to do that years ago, but, but, I had a patient that I did elimination. It's always the elimination diet. And I highly recommend that. But she she was doing fantastic. I had her doing really well. I had an elimination diet and, that three months into a program, she, started adding back foods and she had all these fibro flares.

And that's typical in the fibromyalgia patients. You know, they get under stress, they can initiate a flare. But I couldn't figure out what was going on because there really wasn't that she'd really eliminated a lot of stress in her life. And what we narrowed it down to is every time she ate eggs, she had a flare. And that was enough for me. I mean, it took a month. I hate to admit it took a month to figure that out, but every time she ate a eggs, she had this intense, diffuse, achy all over pain and brain fog.

And ever since, I just that's just to me, that's low hanging fruit. If you can do it. And they're not 100%, as you know. But if you can do a test that will give you some clues about what they should not be feeling in their body, that can be incredibly helpful. Eggs come back a lot in the testing we do and we see. And again, you know, there are there I was explaining to my patients there's not a perfect true test yet. They have to still interpret it. We have to understand there's still false negative false positives.

And fortunately there's nothing really false positive with dairy, gluten, eggs, etc. but you know, we have to make sure we are interpreting that data and making sense of that to each patient. It's so important that we don't just say, oh, that's the only thing that I have to avoid or the only foods that I can eat. We do have to bring it all together. You know, with autoimmune, patients and fibromyalgia may not, you know, debatable whether fibromyalgia is an autoimmune disease or not. Some of us think there's certainly, enough smoke that we think maybe we can find the fire one day.

But with autoimmune disease, the first thing I always think about is why is the body attacking itself? So if you look at a lupus, you know, or rheumatoid arthritis, either true autoimmune disease Hashimoto's, you know, why is the body attacking these tissues? Why would they want to do that? And if we look at the research, oftentimes

Testing, IBS, and Digestive Support 17:28

we see one of the common denominators is this thing called leaky gut. So here we are talking about leaky gut again. And and on every functional medicine oriented type of summit or podcast, leaky gut is going to come up and people kind of, you know, and I'm guilty of it to kind of rolling my eyes sometimes about it. But really it's it really is the foundation if you've got it. That's not right. Every time you're eating something, you run the risk. You're generating these inflammatory chemicals and you're sabotaging, as you said, the body's ability to to generate these neurotransmitters, to communicate with the brain.

Oh, I would agree. Yeah. And, you know, we have heard about this for a long time, but it's, you know, it's for the right reasons that, you know, if we don't fix that, that's the foundation of your healing. It's like trying to be able to have some quicksand. It's just not going to be sustainable if we're just trying to put the fires out without trying to address where the flames coming from. And so we do want to make sure that we are assessing that. Thankfully, there are tools that are available to give us some insights into intestinal permeability, known as leaky gut, and give us an idea, okay, how much focus and attention do I need to give to that area right now?

If we continue to allow things to seep into our bloodstream, such as undigested food particles or different microbial material and other toxicity, compounds, toxic compounds, we've got to realize that that is only going to fan the flames of any form of chronic pain syndrome or chronic autoimmune condition. These conditions are not usually caused by one thing. They're caused by a perfect storm. And like a hurricane coming from all your, all these storms coming together into one big storm. So we have to start to isolate each little micro storm.

And if we if we do that effectively, often, we'll see proven and in this community, fibromyalgia, we know about 70% of those with fibromyalgia have irritable bowel syndrome, which is another syndrome really means nothing other than you have stomach pain and bloating and gas, and you may have diarrhea or constipation or go back and forth. Otherwise, it's just a name, right? Like kind of like fibromyalgia, but but there's definitely a connection. Right. And you've already pointed out the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is crucial for these folks because when it's depleted and when it's low, we know they have a lower pain threshold.

They can't block this thing called substance P, which generates, increased, neurological activity that makes makes any kind of stimuli more, more pronounced. Do you, do you find with your patients there's a few things that you can do, really to kind of shore up any kind of symptoms. I mean, is your go to I'm sure you and with your programs and stuff, I know there are, but just just so we can have that conversation. What are some things you recommend to help individuals with irritable bowel kind of get that situation under control?

And it's interesting you mentioned this. This is why I created a program literally called yeah, we got Institute. And it's literally to help people with IBS type symptoms. And anybody got issues. So some of the common themes really like we have a seven module portion of this that breaks it all down. But we really want to get in there. We want to reseed or re colonize the beneficial flora. We want to get rid of the inflammatory foods. We want to remove any form of invaders such as yeast, bacteria, parasites.

Now, yes, we can measure these. And we do that with our patients that come in for that one on one care. But oftentimes we will find that people will benefit in general when we, you know, remove and reintroduce and re inoculate our microbiome and balance it out. So there's so many other variables there that are helpful. But those are just big easy quick quick wins for anybody listening. Right. Well there's many different strains of probiotics or companies and with different strains of probiotics that are available out there.

There's many different antimicrobials, you know, always try to to work with somebody. But if you can't, you know, really try to, to get the best quality products you can that can, that can make all the difference. Because not all providers are created equal, and many of them are raw with ineffective delivery systems and so forth, or ineffective dosing strains. So we do want to make sure that we're investing into quality products. Oftentimes you can know that you're doing that just by the cost. And you can go to any health food store.

We can see there's a wide array of costs, but there's usually a reason for that. So, you know, if you're not working with somebody one on one, you're making these decisions by yourself. Really do make sure that you're investing in higher quality, products. And there's a lot of good suppliers out there. I mean, there's a lot of wonderful probiotics out there now. I tend to lean a lot of times more towards spore probiotics because of the factory. Indestructible don't matter if the individual is taking a probiotic, they take it in an empty stomach.

They can take it. It really doesn't matter. And they seem to really work really well. What about you? Is that is that one of the probiotics you kind of lean to? We often do both. We still lean on responsibility. Yeah. So I find that I still and support probiotics are very helpful. They tend to be a little bit of the cutting edge right now in terms of research purposes. Yeah. And I still find that I want to get into the hundreds of billions of counts in some situations, and we can't quite hit that just with a sport or sport probiotic all by itself.

Yeah. So I have to alternate and mix, different probiotics at different times. But I mean, depending on the patient, of course. So I think the probiotic, routine regimen is very, very important. But I also really think for IBS just starting with a good digestive enzyme. So many people, I think after the age of about 30, if you've eaten a lot of processed food and foods that really aren't real foods. So these are foods that you manmade foods that don't have any enzymes in them, like fruits and vegetables.

Eventually your pancreas becomes compromised or you lose your stomach acid. You don't have enough stomach acid so that food just sits there. So I really think for me, starting with a digestive enzymes is crucial. And then I find that my patients who are constipated so have I. BSc most of the time it's just there to deficient in magnesium, which is a natural muscle relaxer, but also relaxes the colon. Definitely. And it's the number one deficient nutrient in humans. And it certainly is up there in terms of, you know, relief for constipation.

So, you know, we often in your listeners probably get the sense that we do a lot of testing with our patients. We do, you know, back to the pancreatic conversation when I'm doing this comprehensive stool analysis with each patient, I virtually do it with each patient. We often see a deficiency, what's called a last stage one and last stage one is is indicator pancreatic function. And if we have an insufficiency in the pancreas, we have to make sure that we're supporting that with enzymes. So it's a very good assumption that almost everybody could could benefit from some digestive enzymes with pancreatic support.

Specifically do you do you normally start folks on the chain hydrochloric acid, or do you just go right to more of a pancreatic type of enzyme? You know, I, I will start with it in question. Yeah, I will start with an enzyme only because not everybody tolerates the betaine. HCR well, yeah. Same same. And I do think it is an important step. But sometimes when you have a new patient you want to make sure that we don't make them feel worse because they've they've come into the clinic feeling pretty crummy.

And so eventually we'll will challenge the hydrochloric acid levels with betaine HCO. But for anyone who's listening who's tried this before and you've taken too much, you know what I mean? You feel like you get this heartburn and you feel it's not a pleasant sensation. It's not dangerous if you reduce that right away. But it can be very unpleasant. We don't want to rush that initially. We'll push that up later. Now, people are often told when they have reflux or heartburn this, that they have too much stomach acid.

But you and I know that that may not be the truth. It may be the other way around. They're actually having symptoms of heartburn or reflux because they don't have enough stomach acid. Yeah, yeah. So you talk all right. Because you start with the HCA, which is a very common way to improve stomach acid. If you move that acid too quickly and it gets into the areas that are irritated and they haven't healed properly yet, you can still notice some irritation. But it is certainly I would say I fully agree with that comment.

Roger, is that we've got to make sure that we don't have a hypochondriac, situation, which is very common. And we can often see that when we see multiple nutrient, deficiencies upon our testing and multiple, different types of, just biotic, which is a term that describes an imbalance in our, beneficial bacteria. If we see, some deficiencies in nutrient levels that are excessive and we see excessive amounts of this biotic behavior in our stool testing, it's almost certain that we've got a hypochondriac picture.

Vagus Nerve, Stress, and Nervous System Regulation 26:18

Yeah, yeah. You mentioned the vagus nerve, which is really important for these folks because their sympathetic nervous system is over. It's over generating a response all the time. They walk around wired and tired because their parasympathetic nervous system is pretty much dormant for these folks. Unfortunately, because of the central, since the central central sensitization pain syndrome, that's such a, I always get a tongue tied on that, but we see that that imbalance can really create some problems and one of the ways that you can start to to fix that, to balance it out, is tapping into the vagus nerve 100%.

You know, we've got, as you said, you know, we've got the parasympathetic and then we've got the sympathetic, which is the fight or flight versus the rest and digest and I was explain to my patients, you can't have one foot in both. You're in one side or the other, and most of us are trapped in that fight or flight response, whether we're, you know, dealing with a busy household or work stress, life, stress, disease, stress, illness. And it's very often times we we have to find a way to get them back into that parasympathetic and get them out of that trapped state that they're in, so that their body now receives signals to heal.

Because especially when we're coming at this from a gut foundational healing perspective, we're not going to heal that got running. If we are constantly in that sympathetic fight or flight dominant state, and it's okay to have bursts of that, we are we are programed to have burst. But with the recovery period, and if we don't have that recovery period, we're constantly bursting over here and then we are going to eventually it's going to catch up to us and it's going to give us. So some of the, speakers that are on here, I've talked about some of the things you can do, the exercises to help stimulate the person to, system and, and the vagus nerve.

What really seems to work for me is breathing exercises for my patients. That seems to work. It's easy, something to do. But I also really encourage the patients I'm working with. One, I want to do an hour of power every day, and it could be half an hour, whatever that is. But just making that quiet time to where you can really kind of get in touch with your body and what it's trying to tell you, get in touch with your spirit. Just that alone can be a dramatic improvement in balancing out this Overreactive, nervous system, I love that.

Yeah, we can't all, unfortunately, retire at this age, right? We have we have responsibilities that we have to own up to and continue to, you know, trigger our stressful responses. But at the same time, we can manage these better. And, you know, we can do that with daily practice and mindfulness and so forth. And it doesn't have to eat up your whole day. You know, you touched on one that I, I actually tell every new patient, no matter who they are. And I haven't even seen the lab danger. Every new patient that walks in my door, I cite a study done based again through some Harvard research that shows that if you do ten consecutive deep breaths and you do that once an hour throughout your waking day, you will buffer the impact of stress by up to 40%.

Wow. Wow. That's impressive. It's so easy. It's so simple. And it doesn't take any time out of your day. So very quickly we can lose, you know, any of the the usual kneejerk excuses or I don't have time or cost too much. Doesn't cost very. You can take it with you anywhere. And my busiest people that I work with are really, enjoying just that simple exercise. Yes. However, if we if we could do that, we would be way healthier. But that's something that we work towards because often times there's, you know, there's a lot of well, I can't because of this.

I can't because of that. So we try to get some quick wins under the belt, get some momentum going, and then we work on to the next step, which is mindfulness. And, you know, the more meditative states, exercises. Yeah. Are there any, supplements that you like that you might want to throw out some names of, some things that you normally recommend to kind of, a way to, to nurture your gut, to keep it healthy. Not so much as, focus on a treatment. You know, we don't have time to go into those, but, there's some things out there that just really are just good things to take, maybe in periodically just to really help that gut, to be healthy.

Well, you can't get away from probiotics. I'm going to say that right off the bat. Yeah. You know, I also like to try and vary them over time to so different products, different strains, different of. So probiotic is number one by far. Keeping an eye on your fiber content is key. And you know we hear a lot about fiber. It's not just about psyllium and Metamucil anymore. It's about looking at all the insoluble and soluble fibers together. These are often the the fertilizer for those probiotics to flourish.

These are the prebiotics. And so making sure that we're getting enough fiber, whether it's through our diet which willfully most North Americans are very, very low. And we need to get that out. So oftentimes we'll supplement with that. I do love al glutamine. I think al glutamine is a wonderful nutrient to really heal and seal those tight junctions that have often become leaky, as we've inferred too earlier. And it really allows us to create a much, more integral gut lining there so we can do some of that testing the ability.

Yeah. So those are those are very quick, easy wins right out of the gates. And I do love certain key nutrients. I do have something like five Http which is a serotonin, supporter. And we have so many serotonin receptors in our gut lining that oftentimes that is is a very key. Step as well to initiate some healing. But we will find when we do our labs, they're deficient in minerals, B vitamins, 80 oxidants. And it's so many of those do have rules. And they get that, you know, you'll never go wrong by putting in a high powered, or plant based multivitamin or some form of a formula that contains that in a powder, as well.

I do love those things. Just to kind of cover a little of a lot. Until we get some very specific treatments in place. So five Http five is actually tryptophan when combined with synergistic vitamins B, vitamins, magnesium, vitamin C that turns into serotonin. That's where serotonin is. Brain chemical anger, hormone comes from.

Supplements, Healing Progress, and Resources 32:28

And in the literature it says that if you take five HTP, it may increase loose armaments. Now I have never seen that I see that, yeah, okay, I get it. Whenever I've got somebody with you about a which they go back and forth when losing constipation or you're about d was loose. What I find if I can get that serotonin level up and with the five FTP that oftentimes that stops those loose elements. So it's a little bit kinder. A little bit of a contradiction to what you see sometimes in some of the literature out there.

But that just solidifies what the real world is like. You know, if you got somebody like, like Doctor Dempster or myself, that's in the trenches everyday working with patients, I don't care what the literature says, if it's working and it's in a safe, we're using it. And that's what I learned early on about five HTP. I use it for, you know, across the board, my fibro patients. But I see it can be really helpful because serotonin controls how fast or slow food moves through your intestinal tract.

It controls the motility and FTP if it's low, you'll see that food just kind of sits there and become conscious. You know, you become constipated. I'm sorry. But then when you get under flare, you start to have these loose bowel movements. So TV can be very, very, very helpful. Yeah. And also it just makes you feel better. Right. And if we again have that balance between the vagus nerve and everything that's happening up top of this brain, it happens down this brain and vice versa. So it's a need for loop.

And it really helps create momentum for a lot of people. Because most people when they're sick, they're not feeling their best mood. They're not feeling their best energy. You do not feel their best, you know, right away. And we want to make sure that we're we're supporting every aspect to keep that progress going. Because as I always sign off on all of these talks, I say, look, it's not about perfection. It's about progress. We always want to make sure that, like, don't panic if it's not going perfectly at the beginning and you've eaten a bit of glutamine, you know, you've got you got in a fight with your, your spouse or your coworker or whatever it might be.

Don't worry about perfection. Take that off the table. That's going to be the antithesis of healing. But focus on doing one thing better each day and moving forward, and that's going to have a compounded interest effect in months in, you know, possibly a year later, you're just going to see those small changes truly stacked up. John, I wish we could go into more detail. I wish we could, you know, we we had more time, but I want to make sure they can learn more about the Dempster Clinic, learn more about you.

We've talked a bit about the, good gut program that you've got to improve the name, but I've had I've had access to it. It's a really well thought out. Well done. Where would they go to learn more about you and, and some of these things we've talked about. Sure. Well, they can first of all, you can jump on my webpage, which is the Dempster clinic.com, and I'm sure you'll have a link there for easy access. And if you want to learn more about our Healthy Gut Institute, that's my online program. That just again, is a foundational step off point for anybody dealing with chronic illness, especially in the autoimmune IT gut space.

There will be a drop down in that, on my website there for the Healthy Gut Institute. Or you can just Google it. But, there's take advantage of all our free resources, videos, articles and so forth. You know, we really just want to make sure that people are getting the tools to initiate their healing and get things rolling, and so that they can work with the practitioner like you and, and, find somebody in their area that's helpful, to really start nuance and create that individualized, component to it.

Yeah. So, hopefully to your doctor Dempster and I, we really gave you some things to think about. And, and this is, you know, this is just kind of the, the beginning of the journey for some of you with some GI problems and also just for fibromyalgia. So there are a lot more out there to be to be had. I understand that, but but if this resonates with you, then I want to encourage you to continue learning more about how your GI system affects your overall health. It really is fascinating and, Doctor Dempster does telemedicine as I do, and he's got a lot of, free resources on his site, as do I.

They can help you navigate some of these GI things. John, thank you so much, Roger. It's always a pleasure. And thank you for doing what you do. And this is a great event. For.