The Intelligence of Symptoms Part 3: Nausea, Diarrhea & Heartburn

Introduction to the Symptoms Series 0:00

I have no problem with a PPI short term at all because it can protect your esophagus. It can help the esopagus actually heal while you're figuring out how to get rid of your heartburn the natural way. But if you are not working towards fixing the heart burn Guess what's going to happen when you go off of this stuff for 12 weeks or 16 weeks, which is the max that it's ever been approved by for FDA. We're never supposed to be on this for six months or six years or sixteen years, or 25 years like a lot of people have been on it.

we've got to get away from it, we have a significant risk of death from all cause increase with PPIs once you've been in them for 10 years. More brittle bones, more likely to break hips, things like that, and you can Fix this problem. Welcome to Vitality Radio, the podcast that helps you make sense of natural supplements and thrive without pharma drugs. I'm Jared St. Clair. Welcome back to Vitality Radio. I'm your host, Jared St. Clair. It's good to be with you on episode three of my symptoms series.

So far in this series, we've covered the repair crew, fever, inflammation and pain, and then the elimination channels, mucus, the cough and the skin. Today we go somewhere nobody really wants to go. And I went there very recently, but honestly, it might be the clearest example of in the entire body of what this is all about. We're going to the gut, Three things I have an intimate knowledge of and I'm afraid most of us do at least on the first two at some point in our lives These are the symptoms that feel the most like your body has turned on you like you're going to die in some cases the ones that flatten you that are miserable and undignified and impossible to ignore and they are I'd argue the Most obvious protective thing that we've talked about so far.

The first one I want to talk about is nausea and vomiting. Let's start with the pair that's the most dramatic, the obviously on your side once you actually think about it.

Nausea and Vomiting as Protective Responses 2:06

And I think we all kind of get this, especially in a case like food poisoning or whatever. Nausea are miserable and I'm going to treat them as two connected things because they almost always are. Although nausea doesn't always lead to vomiting, you're pretty much always going be nauseous before you vomit, right? Let's start with the nauseam because we tend to skip right over this one in many cases and we also, in may cases, try to shut this up. Nausea is your gut's check engine light or at least one of them, heartburn would be another one, gassing, exploding, there's a lot of right.

But this is one signal that says something is wrong in here. Stop putting things in, stop moving, get ready because we may need to reverse course, quite literally. And notice it does real work even when you never actually throw up. It kills your appetite. So you stop adding fuel to whatever the problem is. it makes you go still and careful. Your body pumping the brakes and saying time to decide what we need to do right now. So nausea isn't a glitch to be switched off the second it shows up. It's information.

And a lot of the time, it's protective restraint, your body holding you back from making something worse. Now, I do want to put a little caveat in here. My poor, sweet Jen, who I adore so much, one of been blessed with, we'll say, is pretty raging motion sickness. It doesn't take much. She stares down at her phone for five seconds while I'm driving and she can start to get nauseous and the head starts to spin. I don't deal with this at all, thankfully. not just equilibrium issues and that sort of thing.

So just wanted to clarify that. There's a striking example that may have hit you directly. We treat morning sickness as pure misery to be medicated away in this country, but there's compelling line of thinking that it may actually be protective that the nausea and the food aversions to very specific foods in most cases, steer a woman away from exactly the foods most likely to carry something harmful. right during the window when the developing baby is also most vulnerable. It's not proof of anything, but it's the kind of thing that should make us pause before we assume that the body has simply malfunctioned.

Maybe there's even something to morning sickness and I wouldn't wish it on anyone because while I've never experienced it myself, I certainly have experienced that from the husband and father's point of view and it is miserable stuff and of course I have had hundreds of women in the store over the years complaining about it. So I'm not in any way trying to lighten this at all, make it seem like it's no big deal. Nausea is so uncomfortable. I get it and The morning sickness thing is really, really interesting because of this line of thinking that there is a little bit of research behind now showing that maybe it's actually protective.

It's telling the body, okay, we're not eating these certain things. We need to calm down and slow down a bit. we are protecting things right now. So just something to kind of keep in the back of your mind there. maybe this discomfort is actually a gift in disguise in some cases. Now when nausea isn't enough, when your body decides the threat actually needs to come out, then of course we get vomiting. And vomiting is not a malfunction either. It's one of the fastest, most decisive, defensive moves that your has.

When your system detects something in your stomach that should not be there, a toxin, pathogen, spoiled food, something poisonous, it makes a snap decision. This is not going any further into the body and it reverses the whole process to get it out immediately. The nausea that warned you and then the expulsion itself, that's your body ejecting a threat before it can be absorbed and do real damage. Think about how fast it works. You eat something that is off and sometimes within an hour your bodies already identified it and sent it right back out the way it came in.

That's not your failing that's your body protecting is a threat detection system operating exactly as it's designed. And let me tell you how that happened to me just, well, but last week as I'm actually recording this, I was in Denver for a conference with my sweet wife. We found this fantastic, relatively clean deli and thought, okay, think we can eat here and avoid most of the things that we don't eat. I got an incredible sandwich, which was delicious and I started feeling not so good a couple hours later back in the hotel room and things started out with my gut just being tossing and turning like crazy like I was on the ocean no nausea but just upheaval down there and then eventually I Was on The toilet over and over again and throughout the night over And over Again with pretty crippling diarrhea it was a pretty awful night and i thought you know if I Is this food poisoning?

What's going on? I'm not sure. And then lo and behold, around 4 a.m., I start getting real nauseous and You know, within about half an hour after that, it was coming out both ends and it pretty ugly. I share that with you though because I want to put something in your hands that I wished I had in my hands at night. Because this is one thing that should be in every medicine cabinet and I do have this stuff at home and should in in travel bag and did not have it when I was in Denver. And I did not have it when I was in Texas about three or four years ago when this same dang thing happened to me and I thought I learned my lesson then.

In fact, I've since brought binders and charcoal and things like that on the road, but I didn't in this particular case in Denver. And I wish I had. So let's talk about this because what's on most drugstore shelves for nausea and diarrhea works by shutting your body's response down. Activated charcoal, on the other hand, does exactly the opposite. It works with the cleanup crew itself. Here's the mechanism. And it's actually really cool how it works. activated charcoal is carbon that's been treated to become incredibly porous.

This porous surface, a single gram of it has an enormous surface area and the surface grabs onto things. When it's sitting in your gut, unwanted compounds and toxins bind right into it and charcoal itself is never absorbed into the body. It can't be. and stays in your digestive tract the entire time and rides out the other end carrying whatever's stuck to it out of you. So it's not overriding the vomiting or the diarrhea. It's helping. Your body wanted the stuff out. Charcoal grabs it so there's less of it to get absorbed in the first place and then takes it our of the body for you, it on your body's side.

And here's the key to using it. And it's, the whole reason I say keep it on hand because charcoal can only grab what's still in your gut. Once something's already crossed into the bloodstream, charcoal, can't reach it anymore. So it works best early. The sooner the better. Had I had it in Denver and started feeling the way that I did, I would have started taking it right then. I wouldn't have taken a lot of it, probably about 10 capsules. It sounds crazy, but remember this is just something you're putting in and it leaving.

You're not absorbing any of this. There's no real possibility of an overdose or anything like that. And i have used this for food poisoning before and i've used it when i started feeling like i this is gonna lead to me kneeling in front of the toilet. And it has completely alleviated it for me. What's so cool about it is that it does what vomiting would have done. It gets it out and it protects the rest of your body from it because it's grabbing it. And is a binder like we talk about with parasites and things like that.

Charcoal, a very simple, maybe the simplest of binders when it comes to food poisoning is the best thing you can possibly have on hand.

Activated Charcoal for Food Poisoning 10:15

So I highly recommend a bottle of charcoal capsules or powder whenever you travel. in every medicine cabinet in your house, maybe in you're car. It's not an expensive remedy to have on hand. Its not a cure all, it won't fix all of these things, but it works incredibly well. And when I have used it in the past, I've done 10 capsules with as little water as I can to try not to upset things any more than they are. Wait 20, 30 minutes, do another 10 capsule, wait 20-30 minutes and then do an other 10. That's how I done it.

I've had success with that a couple of times over the years since I started doing it. But the times that I have used it, it's been phenomenal and I recommended it lots of time and heard very, very good things. Now, charcoal is something if you are going to take it for detoxification, which I'm completely on board with as well, even occasional, just take away from your other nutrients, probably preferably on an empty stomach because it is going bind to stuff and it can bind things that you don't want to bind like nutrition.

and take it out as well. But I love charcoal for this purpose. And I told Jen, we will not be leaving town anymore without a bottle of charcoal in our luggage. We're actually prepping for a vacation here in a couple of weeks. I trim down my supplements when I leave town. I will not trim that one out. In fact, that will be one I'll be adding and I don't know, possibly even using on a daily basis. This last one was rough. All right. So what do conventional drugs actually do? Well, drugs to shut this thing down are anti-nauseal drugs, anti vomiting drugs designed to switch off the warning light and cancel the purge.

And I understand the appeal because being nauseous and throwing up is Awful, I did, you do. You feel like you're gonna die. Like it's so bad, hot and cold and sweat and just, ah, it is horrible. So yeah, calm down the frigging symptom. I get it. But if your body has decided that something needs to come out right now and you take a drug that overrides that decision, what happens to the thing is it not getting expelled. It's getting absorbed. And that can create all kinds of additional problems. In most cases, and I think we all recognize this, If you do throw up, you're better.

Usually after one or two sessions of that, it's out and you are good, right? So if you don't have the charcoal, and if your like me in Denver praying on the floor because it feels so awful, Right? And you dont have it, just let it out. Get it over with. You will feel better and your body will thank you for it by recovering quite quickly. So the true danger with the anti-nauseal things is just that you really don't want to shut that down. Now I mentioned morning sickness. That one's tough. I would say do everything you can naturally.

Things like ginger, ginger and honey, red raspberry, lots of different things that can do to kind of calm things down But if you can avoid the pharmaceuticals, I highly recommend avoiding the pharmaceuticals. This is a touchy topic because I know there are a lot of women who have reached for Zofran with morning sickness, but there is some evidence that it's possible at least that Zophran, when used that way, can potentially create issues for the fetus, including possible birth defects. None of that is locked in, But there's enough evidence of it and enough concern of It that actually GlaxoSmithKline was pled guilty to a $3 billion settlement of the Justice Department in 2012 for promoting Zofran to pregnant women because of concerns of literally growing a baby and you've got to take care of yourself to the very best of your capacity.

And my heart goes out to you with the crippling morning sickness, I've seen it in people very, very close to me. I have seen in my wife with our children, not Jen because she and I don't have children together, but you get it. So my ex-wife with her children anyway, and i've see it my daughter and daughter-in-law. Yeah, it's no fun. and all I can say is do your best to let your body do its thing and listen to your a doula depending on who you're using for that kind of thing. And if you do want something that eases the nausea without shutting your body's signals off in the brain the way that these drugs do, this is where ginger has more than earned its reputation.

I have seen time and time again and personally used it with great success. It's just a super effective herb for this for most people. Now, it's not as strong as something like Zofran, but in many cases it is at least enough to take the edge off and can be super useful. There's also a homeopathic, kind of more specific to motion sickness. It is called Coculus that my wife, Jen, has had great success with. But speaking of ginger, It has got real repeatable evidence for calming nausea, motion, morning sickness, post-surgery nauseas, the queasy stomach that comes with a bug.

And the key is that it works with your digestive system rather than overriding the nervous system. And it comes in a bunch of different formats. Ginger chewable tablets, capsules, ginger tea, Ginger chews that are little ginger candies you may have seen around. We carry them here at Vitality, but they're all over the place. All of those things have the potential to work really well. and ginger honey as a tonic has been super popular in pregnancy, especially for morning sickness. Okay, let's talk about, well, the other end of the spectrum and that is diarrhea.

Here's what's actually happening when your intestines detox or detect something They've decided they need to detox that it's harmful a bad bug a toxin contaminated food or water Your body does two things at the same time. It floods the intestines with fluid And it dramatically speeds up the movement through your system. Why? To flush that threat out and down and gone before it can be absorbed through the intestinal wall and into the rest of you. Exactly the same idea as the nausea and vomiting. That's what diarrhea is.

It's actually a flush. it's your gut hitting the emergency evacuation button to get the dangerous thing out of your body as fast as physically possible, which is why sometimes it is very urgent as well. So it's not in that moment, the disease itself, it is the response to the bug. It's the body choosing speed, get it out now, over comfort.

Diarrhea, Dehydration, and Gut Support 16:48

And I get that it miserable because again, I just spent an entire night with this stuff, but it something that your body is doing for you. So now look at what standard anti-diarrheal medicines do. The common one is called loperamide and it's also known as Imodium. That's what most people know it as. And the way it works is it goes into the gut and slows everything down. It puts the brakes on that emergency evacuation system and really just the evacuation system period. So the fluid your body was using to flush the threat out gets pulled back.

The movement grinds to a halt and everything your was frantically trying to expel is now held in your intestine. Kept in contact with the wall it was trying across for the extra hours or days that the drug keeps it parked there. That exit actually stops. and the absorption into the body and exposure continues. And there's a pretty sharp warning on this from the FDA. In 2016, they put out a formal warning that high doses of loperamide can cause serious heart problems, dangerous sometimes even fatal heart rhythm disturbances.

The FDA had tallied dozens of cases of serious cardiac events tied to loparamid or imodium. including death. Now, most of the worst cases involve people taking bigger than normal doses because they were already fighting opioid addiction and opioid addictions tends to constipate people and create all kinds of gut. It's like both directions, generally constepation, but then people can also have almost crippling diarrhea and so people using high levels of imodium. In that case, along with opioids, it's just a mess.

And interestingly enough, Imodium is in like so many people's travel bag. It's just a thing that they take on vacation because, well, who wants to have diarrhea on a vacation? Well, nobody does, but let's be cautious again. What do I take? On vacation, I think back on track, back. On track is my favorite travel companion. Probiotics, Elruderi and the key spore probiotics, its digestive enzymes, it's peppermint, is ginger, It's fennel. It is fantastic for calming the gut down when it is under duress and guess what else I didn't have in Denver because well, if you've been trying to get back on track, you know, we've be very, very low on it.

So I've not been buying it for myself, saving the bottles that we have for you. But as of this recording, it's back in stock and it is new and improved. It's got a new label and everything, but that's not what the show is about. I'm telling you, back on track for travel, along with charcoal, these are two things that I vow to never leave home without when I travel again. Now, there's something you need to know about diarrhea, just like vomiting, and I don't want to soft pedal this because it is important.

There's a real danger of dehydration, not the diarrhea itself. but the dehydration caused by it. And around the world, that's what makes this one genuinely dangerous, particularly in small children. Diarrhea that is severe, has blood in it that comes with high fever or that drags on. That needs real attention, but your average case of the runs, generally speaking, It's not comfortable, but it isn't really not meant to be stopped. Supported, sure, with probiotics, enzymes, things like that, But generally not stopped now.

I also will tell people that If it's just this, you know, like what I had where it was a one day of, oh my gosh, this isn't good. You do what you can to just support your system. But if it is chronic and if you're experiencing diarrhea for day after day, after a day because some sort of a bug maybe got you or whatever else is going on, then still back on track. Absolutely love it. It's got a great human strain in there. Its got the probiotic strains from the spores as well, but you may want to seriously consider also a colon specific probiotics for about 30 days.

I have had great success with the very specific formula from Sol Array. It's a refrigerated probiotic, but we can ship it to you. And that while you're taking the spores. So the Spores are rebuilding the gut for the long haul and the colon support formula is generally slowing things down a lot, putting the brakes on like Imodium does, just supporting the gut, supporting it so that everything is more balanced, so the body doesn't feel the urge to get everything out. Now, diarrhea can also, if you think it's food poisoning, charcoal, still exactly like what I said for vomiting, same thing.

Now, the last part of this episode is something that I know a whole lot about and I am going to tell you that there's an episode 341 of the Vitality Radio podcast, Digestive Health User's Guide that goes all through this and my personal story of reflux and what it does and why you do not want to shut down reflux by shutting down acid. We shutdown acid through PPIs, proton pump inhibitors, things like Nexium, Prilosec, Prevacid, those types of drugs and Meprazole is the generic name for the biggest one.

And what happens when you do that? Well, stomach acid is not a design flaw. It is there for multiple reasons. We want stomach It's essential to have stomach acid because without it, we don't break down protein. You need it to absorb minerals like calcium and magnesium and iron. That's critical for, of course, bone health and blood health, and energy, all of these types of things. It is critical to the absorption of B12. And you need as a frontline defense against the stuff we just talked about. which is food poisoning because stomach acid is also known as the acid barrier.

It is by design there to keep things that you swallow from getting anywhere where they will cause damage. The acid itself can kill many things such as E. coli and that kind of stuff. But if we calm that acid down, shutting it down with a PPI, which the most common thing that doctors will prescribe for heartburn,

Heartburn, PPIs, and Reflux Recovery 22:48

Disaster and one of the most ridiculous things has been done in medicine in my view in the history of world i have no problem with a short term at all because it can protect your esophagus. It can help the esophagus actually heal while you're figuring out how to get rid of your heartburn the natural way. But if you are not working towards fixing the heart burn, guess what's gonna happen when you go off of this stuff for 12 weeks or 16 weeks, which is the max that it's ever been approved by for FDA.

We're never supposed to be on this for six months or six years or sixteen years, or 25 years like a lot of people have been on it. We've got to get away from it. We have a significant risk of death from all cause increase with PPIs once you've been on them for 10 years. More brittle bones, more likely to break hips, things like that. And you can fix this problem. In fact, I talked about back on track on the last segment. But back on track is a formula I developed almost 20 years ago based on my experience with heartburn when I was a 26, 27 year old.

I have not had acid reflux. 800 of these scopes that he was doing every single year and had been doing these Scopes for 20 years in practice at that point. So he said I was terrible, especially at the young age that I Was at 26 years old when I had that scope and yet 27 years 28 years now later. I don't have reflux and have not had it since it is reversible through taking care of your gut taking Care of Your digestive system Benefits obviously from also taking notice of what you're putting in your mouth, but even if you don't change your diet, believe it or not, you can resolve acid reflux without drugs.

You absolutely can. I've seen it over and over again. dozens of people, maybe hundreds at this point with this problem, getting away from things like imeprazole and that kind of thing. Well, I'm not your doctor and I don't, i'm, not the guy that recommends you get off of a drug. You look at the consequences of being on that drug long-term and if you decide you want to get out of it, you won't help supporting your body while you do so. I'm happy to help out and I've done it for lots and lots of people and i've got a incredible track record of helping people with that.

Episode 341 is the number to listen to if you are wondering about acid reflux. Okay, so those are the three in episode three. I got one more episode coming. Uh, we talked about now, uh, you know, inflammation and pain. We've talked. Skin interruptions and itching, and we've talk about diarrhea and diarrhea, vomiting and reflux. All of these symptoms that we have drugs designed to shut them down. I'm trying to help you understand why we don't want to do that if you didn't already figure that out already.

So next time, we're going to talk about some quieter symptoms, but important ones, fatigue, appetite loss, and water retention. That's on episode four of the Symptom Shows. I hope you've enjoyed these episodes. If you like these episode, give me some feedback. I'd love to hear it from you. I get it. But I mean, they say I have a face for podcasting, but regardless, if you want to support this show, it would very much help. If you check us out on YouTube, not necessarily permanently, hit a few shows, make a view comments, share them, like them subscribe that kind of stuff.

I would greatly appreciate it I also do a bunch of shorts and things on youtube.

Closing Remarks and Next Episode Preview 26:48

that we don't do on the podcast app. So you may actually like that subscription for that reason, too. That's all I'm going to ask of you today. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Jared St. Clair and this has been Vitality Radio. Hello, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Vitality Radio. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast has not been evaluated by the FDA. Thank you.