What Travel Really Does to Your Cells (and How to Recover Faster) with Dr. Monisha Bhanote

Podcast Intro and Guest Introduction 0:00

Researchers came up with a terminology besides the chronoclock for the gut that's actually called gut jet lag. It's a pretty useful term because it's language that people already kind of can understand. rhythm, right? That synchronization and that function, that when we have that loss of that, function it's impairing that intestinal barrier reduction in the beneficial bacteria. When we reduce the beneficially bacteria, we're also reducing what they do, which is the production of our short chain fatty acids, Which are responsible for keeping inflammation down.

Well, when were not keeping Inflammation down, now we are heading in opposite direction. Welcome to the To Curious MD podcast. I'm Dr. Ali Ahmed. And I am Dr Surya Ravan. With the wisdom from holistic, alternative and these conventional medicines, we are here to challenge the status quo. We're curious about the connectivity and complexity between diverse fields of knowledge as it relates to consciousness, chronic illness, mental health, resilience and beyond. Learning more about art and science of healing, or listening to stories of extraordinary healing.

You're in the right place. Let's dive in. Welcome to another exciting episode of the Too Curious MD podcast where medicine is more than science. It's story, art, connection, and integration. So it's a lot of things. And here we are today with Dr. Manisha Banot. Thank you so much, Alia, for that introduction. I'll give Dr Manishapanot's bio here. She's an MD at CAP and American Board of Integrative Medicine certified. leading authority in longevity medicine, cellular health, and integrative lifestyle practices.

As the only quintuple board-certified physician in the United States in this field, her expertise uniquely bridges conventional diagnostics with holistic wellness. Her board certifications span anatomic and clinical pathology, cytopathology integritive medicine and culinary medicine. I love this. You spend decades diagnosing over 1 million disease cases at the microscopic level, and then you have that profound understanding of how lifestyle choices influence upstream biological signaling long before chronic disease manifests.

Driven by an insatiable curiosity about the human body, she founded the Wellkula Institute to merge modern molecular science with ancient wellness traditions. She's the bestselling author of The Anatomy of Wellbeing, a global keynote speaker, and the pioneer behind the trademark cell care philosophy. Welcome to the Too Curious to Use podcast, Dr. Vandell. We're so excited to have you. Oh, thank you so much, both of you, for having me. You know, I love the name of this podcast, right, Two Curious MDs, because I think that pretty much sums up what I am.

Travel Resilience and the Five Physiologic Pathways 2:51

I'm just like curious about life, how the human body works, How can we really spend our time on this planet living our best lives? And so I m excited about what we're going to talk about today. And thank Thank you so much for being here. I was going to say I've been traveling quite a lot, I don't know about you, and I think a lots of people have. This is the summer travel season. And I'm just so excited that we have this ability to talk to you about this very, timely topic, an interesting topic.

travel resilience and staying aligned in a disruptive world. I think that's one of the kind of ways where all this knowledge comes to bear and makes it really practical. So I'm really curious because I just flew cross country, I try to keep hydrated, and I know that lots of things are happening while we're up in the air. And I want to unpack some of those things and make this such a useful podcast, a practical one for people who are traveling this summer. And I'm also curious to know about the domestic, because we're international travelers as well, so just the Domestic Travel Resilience and International Travel resilience.

Let me give you some framework there. When I tell you that I am a travel resilience expert here, if I actually told you the type of travel I do, just to kind of put that framework into place for the people listening, right? I'm usually across multiple time zones, usually on a different continent, sometimes two continents at a time. Sometimes even three. Pretty much two out of four weeks of a month, I am away. That makes it 50% of the year. I, am not in my house. And that includes both domestic and international travel.

Like for example, just got back from two weeks in... I was in London for about a week speaking at an integrative conference, their biggest integrate of medicine conference in the UK. And then I went from the U.K. to Greece, which is another two hours. So we're going from East Coast. to the UK, which is a five-hour time difference. Then we're going another two hours to Greece, another time for a longevity festival that I was speaking at. And then coming back seven hours, to East Coast, and then going right into clinic care, patient care.

All of that. this is something I've been, you know, I'm not just this month that I do, literally it's an every month thing. So when I started observing what was going on in my body physiologically, and you, know sometimes even I remember like two years ago my father traveled with me, he's 75 years old, right, Dad, we're going and we weren't going to Europe. We went to Southeast Asia and five countries. So you can imagine you're bringing your parents along with you. And I'm like, okay, We're gonna be in this country, this I can't have you getting sick.

I need to make sure you're supported. And this is when I really started looking deep into travel medicine and what is it. Travel medicine for the most part really stops with, oh, you are traveling to this country and there might be malaria there so you need protect yourself from that. or you need to get vaccinated from this. But it doesn't tell you about the everyday stuff, whether you're traveling just basically to go from New York to Florida, which in itself has its own physiology, or if you are traveling across time zones in countries.

So what I basically found is coming from a physician perspective, that our cells are getting exposed to the different things in these different environments. And they fall along five physiologic pathways. That's kind of what I want to unpack today. What's that physiology of really what is happening? Because I think when people start hearing this, they'll be like, oh, you're right. I've seen this happen to me. Maybe that wasn't the best choice of that decision because I didn't know that that was really happening.

So to give you some framework, so that the five pathways I like to talk about are digestion, immunity, focus, energy, and recovery. And I think those kind of like kind-of blend in because it's almost like a circle. It's not like, you know, what happens, the one happens. it is like this interconnected and you're going in and out of this like way. Yeah. Absolutely. And thank you for taking notes there, Alia. I was just writing it down because I think it's good for the audience to hear this again. Digestion, immunity, focus, energy, and recovery.

Recovery. Okay. Let's take it from there. From there it was. and I actually want to also drop in as you're talking, this is another hidden topic that's in there is how much cumulative radiation do we get from flying, right? Nobody's ever really thinking about that. Nobody is really think about what the atmosphere is around us when we're at 35,000 feet. So I'm just so curious as to hear how this physiology, because physiology as we know changes depending on whether you're you know, under the deep sea, in the air, or on land.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, why don't we start with gut? Gut's the easiest, I think, to start because this is the pathway, most travelers kind of feel right away. I mean, come back for their trip and be like, I have not had a bowel movement in a week. And I'm like wait a minute, what are you talking about, right? And this applies to both adults and children. I know you guys are both pediatricians, and the kids might not be saying anything, but it's also happening to them because it is physiology, so it doesn't really matter how disciplined you might be at home.

It matters what's going on, when you're on the road because that's really, I like to think of when your on road whether it's a road trip or flying is kind of where like the holes in the system start showing up because the body's under a little bit more stress than it would be at home and mind you we're in a lot of stress at homes but like it like those holes kind start to showing. So when I think digestion I'm thinking of All right, what's going on in your gut? And if we think of digestion not just as a, I'm digesting my food, and we thing of it as almost like it's got its own circadian clock,

Gut Jet Lag, Digestion, and Travel Hacks 9:42

there's research that actually shows that the gut microbiome has its' own independent of our sleep-wake cycle, our suprachiasmatic nucleus, that cycle which is totally fascinating because it also takes longer for that clock to reset. So when we fly there's four things that are happening in the gut simultaneously at the same time that's going to influence your digestion. I believe if I remember correctly that study was like from maybe last year, 2025, where it discussed the chronoclock of the microbiota of your microbiome.

And what it said is that there is a synchronized relationship between your circadian rhythm, your gut microbiomes, and the gut micro biome follows that 24-hour oscillation and a different microbiote will peak at different times. So when you're crossing time zones, that gets disrupted, right? So if that disruption happens, it can take up to three to five days longer to re-synchronize. And you might already be back from your trip, Right? It might be a week later and you are back and that's when your like, oh yeah, okay, I did not have that bowel movement or I do not feel as well.

So that's the first thing that is happening. The second thing, and I think some people are aware of this, but is the cabin humidity. Right? So the Cabin humidity is about 20% less. So human health, like if you even look at your, I just had the AC guys here last week and they have the panel on the wall for the ac conditioning and it's like, it should be between 40 to 60%. That's what human Health likes, right? So when you're up in the air, that humidity is dropping more than 20%, right? So it's going down to 20%. So they say that flying is like drier than a Sahara desert.

And it makes me think of like all these like influencers putting like, you know, these face masks on and the moisturizer and all that stuff. You can't do that on your gut microbiome. There's dehydration happening in your lining, right? How do the microbiota tell time if you can get to that as well? Yeah, yeah. So they have their own clock, basically. That's what's been documented in biology. They are dependent on when we provide them food, so when have a normal eating schedule, they also stay on that normal You know that when we get on a plane, as soon as we got on the plane especially if it's an overnight flight to like say Europe or something, you sit down and one hour later they're already feeding you and it might be 11 o'clock at night.

you know, or they're feeding you and it's like four o'clock in the morning, your local time. And so we're already starting that process. So I know for me, the flight attendants sometimes don't like me because I'm like, can I just have my meal later? Or can we just leave it here and then I'll like eat it later because, I am trying to really stick to that. And then the third thing is a cabin pressure, which I think people are very familiar with when you have that change in altitude. That change and altitude slows your gut motility, right?

So, and it makes gases expand differently. And the way I like to think of this is, you know, when, like, a bag of pretzels or chips on the airplane and you get the bag and that's like fully like kind of like there's gas in it, unless it's one that leaked, but there is gas. Well, that's what happens inside our gut that people don't realize and we now even don''t realize more because we stopped wearing pants that button up because now we're like in yoga pants and stretch pants, so we don' even realize this is like happening.

So that gas expansion is happening, your gut motility itself is slowing down when you have a higher altitude. And then the fourth would be when your disrupt your sleep. Melatonin is not just a sleep hormone. It's produced, you know, in intestinal cells and it plays a direct role in influencing that gut integrity barrier. So you are basically opening up that got lining to become a little bit more leaky when you travel if you're not intentionally supporting it. And that's just the gut, right? So when people are like, oh, I just felt bloated on the plane or I didn't have a bowel movement, there's a number of physiologic processes that are happening.

And if I think about what people were doing, they're making it worse because now you add on a salty food. Right? You add on the airport food, which is like the worst. You added on that alcohol, you know, so all these things. Now you can imagine your guts just like literally on fire. I like to travel with them. That's amazing. Yeah. Do you like to travel with less? When I travel, I try to take a little bit of my own food on the plane, because you never know when you're going to get fed, too. Absolutely.

That's what it's about, the timing, right? The time restricted eating. Is that what you are talking about? That is one of those interventions? Yeah, it's kind of like resetting based, you're reseting your biology based off of where you are headed. And if you can reset that, that will make your trip your, even if it is a weekend trip, just settle a lot better. It was interesting because my assistant last week, so I had just come back from Greece, which is a seven-hour time difference. And she had gone to California, and it was only a three- hour time different.

Obviously, West versus East, a little bit different, but she was like, at 6 p.m., she's like I can't make it through the day, I need caffeine, need to get some coffee, you know, like really struggling. Up to four or five in the morning, went to bed at a normal hour, woke up the next day, 6.30, normal hours. Because I was very like, okay, I'm gonna do... I know what I need to do because obviously I needed to function the rest of the week. I can't be like crashing in the middle of night. So I think being aware that your gut is probably one of the first things you're going to feel, but also the one that you have the most control over, right?

Like you said, Alia, like packing your food, packing a snack, not necessarily, you know, people are like, they know they have to drink more water. So we see the water bottles, that's fine. But you also have to think about food timing and what is the food that you're eating. It's pretty funny what I pack. Like I travel with tofu, like little cooked tofu packs, because I don't know when I'm going to find something that I can eat. So even if I find a salad or something, I could put the tofu on top of there.

But yeah, just kind of thinking about that. Another thing I like to travel with when it comes from a gut perspective is CCF, which is cumin, coriander, and fennel. They're just herbs that we use in our cooking, right? And you can make a CCFT. So now, yes, there you go, all right. All you have to do is ask for some water. And what's great about it is kids can even have this, so it's like, get some hot water, heat it up and kind of relieve like the digestion that way. So CCF is another quick hack.

When I had a clinic in person, I used to make little spice jar bottles for my patients. Like when they were traveling, they just take like they have a little spiced jar and they can sprinkle it on and drink that. That's another kind easy, you know, something to think about. Most people think of electrolytes. They're not thinking about, all right, maybe there's something, you know, more with the digestion stuff. Yeah. And going back to Alia, your question, I know you were asking like a more specific question and I had to look it up because I'm like, yeah, how does how I eat, manifest in what's happening to my gut microbiome and that there is a name for it called chronodisruption, right?

There's like an So basically because of the way we in one time zone are eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, in these fasting feeding cycles, everything shifts to actually get your genes to express differently. So there are clock genes that are receptor mediated on the bacteria themselves, on our gut microbiome themselves that absolutely changes what they do. So like you said, I mean, at that really beautiful fundamental level, what you eat, when you, eat how you and what kind of these little hacks or tools and tricks that you employ can really speak to the gene expression.

And therefore those genes are then going to get up to speed to that next time zone that your about to hit because your brain has already told your gut, this is what we're gonna do guys. everybody wake up, you know, instead of, let's land, Let's get to the hotel, lets order some food. And then they got microphones like, what the hell is happening right now? You are eating when you should be sleeping. We are confused and that's that mismatch, right? It's kind of funny. They actually, researchers came up with a terminology besides the chronoclock for the gut.

It is actually called gut jet lag. Right? So that they're calling it, I think it's a pretty useful term because it is a language that people already kind can understand. Basically, as you mentioned, if we kind summarize it. The loss of that microbial rhythm. Right? That synchronization, that function, when we have that loss of that functions, it's impairing that intestinal barrier, you know, with reduction in the beneficial bacteria. When we reduce the beneficially bacteria, we're also reducing what they do, which is the production of our short-chain fatty acids which are responsible for keeping inflammation down.

Well, and we are not keeping the inflammation now. Now we heading in opposite direction, right? So now we activating some other things. Some ingredients I already mentioned, cumin, coriander, fennel are great. Other things that I utilize is ginger, amla, both of them really good for digestive ease, can be beneficial. Obviously meal timing, like the lifestyle, nothing replaces a proper lifestyle. There's nothing above that. And then also thinking about, actually, I was just working on something for one of the programs we have coming up is people really forget to eat certain food groups.

And one those food group is fermented food. So making sure wherever you go, you're incorporating some kind of fermentable food kind to rebuild. Right? So that's the best part of traveling to other countries is most countries have something that is It was a great segue to your next topic though, immunity, the other, yeah. Yeah, so with immunity, okay, immunity works a little bit different, right? So when we think of immunity most people are like, oh, I always get sick when I travel. And they're thinking their immune system is a problem.

It's fascinating because it's like people actually get stick when they get back home and then they'll be like oh I picked up a bug. something happened along the way. Oh, that person like two seats over from me was coughing or I was like at Disneyland and everybody was sick or something like that. But when we think of the immune system and what's actually happening is it's our stress response. We have not mastered our stressed response like a TV. I think the best reality TV is just sitting in an airport watching people and how stressed out they are.

Like you don't even have to do anything. It's like its own show because They haven't figured out like, okay, there's going to be a line. There's gonna be, you know, You're gonna have to walk. You gonna to have do this and that. And there is going be noise, but they haven' figured it out. All right, ther's quiet spaces that you can go find. Like, I've located quiet space like in different airports. I plan ahead to make sure. That you know some of the best airports do have lounges that you can use and they have Quiet areas in those louenges or they even have like some yoga spaces of meditation spaces Worst case scenario go find a chapel, you Know like just to kind of quiet the nervous system because when as you guys obviously know

Immunity, Stress, and In-Flight Exposure 22:58

when you are under stress What happens? cortisol is released, when excess cortisol released and sustained, it's also creating that the immune system can't work. And this is tied tightly in with the gut because you've already kind of opened that window with a gut not being optimal and with significant portion of our immune systems living within the guts. Now we're just kind pushing it a little bit further, right? So, and I think if we think about it, It's like the immune system also follows its own circadian rhythm.

I always say that the first thing to do when you land anywhere is if it's daylight and you're landing, go take a walk outside first to get the sunlight to reset the circadian rhythm, but secondly, if you can walk to like a park or a forest or something like that, you can actually support your immune system to create natural killer cells due to the phytocedins in the trees, right? So go hug a tree, like walk outside, just go. Is you land or is this like the next day? How would you know? Absolutely not.

Don't wait the Do not wait the next day. I pretty much drop off my luggage and I'll go for a one or two hour walk. If you're that tired, you don't want to walk, get on one of those hop on hop off buses. Just take a tour and sit at the top and reset. But definitely don't go and try and sleep because you're not going to be resetting then. You're definitely not gonna be reseting. I think like when it comes to immunity, people are concerned about the wrong things. Like they're like, oh, like the air on airplanes is not clean or I'm gonna get sick from that.

Surprisingly, the air on airplanes, and the strength of those HEPA filters that have been tested, is more clean than most homes, okay? So I would not be worried about that. The area I would be worried about is the area of that, you know that jetway where you're walking on to get on that plane? There, that like 10, 15 feet. That's where I'd be worrying about because there's nothing there from a protection standpoint and then that's getting a lot of exposures. You say about the small little bathrooms.

The small, little, bathrooms, those are, you know, obviously you want to carry wipes and stuff like that around with you, but the actual airplane itself, that filtration air system is really, really good. Yeah. I definitely agree. And then sometimes when they have you all pile on into the jetway and everybody's just standing there for 10, 15 minutes. That's your side. Yeah. No, no, that is absolutely the worst part. And then also I think about it from the perspective of maybe, you know, I see this more in the US than other countries is when we get off the airplane, There's always like 10 to 12 wheelchairs lined up waiting to take passengers off the plane.

And I'm like, okay, that's not like if these people are truly compromised in their health, this is not the healthiest way for them to get off of the airplane where there's like literally 12 lined. I think there's also, you know, the myth around radiation, cosmic radiation. So when we're thinking about where to sit on our airplane, if you sit closer to the window with the windows open, and mind you, I am a window seat person, you are gonna get more cosmic radiation. So now in the newer planes, the good thing is you actually see like there's little buttons to like lower the light, right?

So you're not getting as much, which is pretty cool. Thinking about it from the perspective of, okay, there are going to be some exposures. How can you optimize it? Optimizing also your stress response is probably going to be one of the keys to that, right? Because if you're more stressed, your immune system is just going be releasing more inflammatory cytokines and kind of opening up that inflammation pathway. There's no doubt that everything we do in life is stressful. It's a matter of how are you managing it.

Yeah. And I think some people manage it with alcohol. To me, I'm like, okay, that's not solving the problem there. I Think if we think about supporting it, with botanicals, herbs, some of the ones that are well-known that we even saw during the pandemic with things like astragalus for immunity showed some great benefit when it come to viral exposures. So I think we just need to start thinking about how we're moving our body through the world in a more intentional way, like a deeper way. I always say self-care is self care, right?

How can you protect your cells? And for somebody who has diagnosed so many diseases under the microscope, I'm always like, okay, pull out my little cell model. I talk to my patients. See these guys? We've got trillions of these, right? And let's do it in the right way. I love this. And thank you for bringing up kind of like your passion for pathology and that level at which we can actually detect disease. That's been a science as well. Then you also bracket it with like the culinary science. So I'm kind also really interested in pathway that you took to where you are today.

Yeah, like what got you started here? Yeah. So it's been a long journey. Let me give you the pathway that it took me to get here in the short amount of time we have. I started out as, all right, I'm going to be a doctor when I grow up because that was kind of the path as a first generation immigrant. You get to Pre-med, pre-law, did not do engineering because my father was an engineer and law was way too much reading and no pretty pictures. So I'm like, all right, I'll go down the medical route and see what happens there.

And so I went into medicine originally as a internist doing internal medicine residency. And very, very quickly realized that I was not solving a problem. And was like, okay, this is really dissatisfying to me and to my patients. This is back in the day when our H&Ps were literally handwritten, like there was no EMR. Every couple of weeks or months. Yeah. Yeah, right. Every couple of weeks or months, I'd see like the same patient come back in either emergency room or in the clinic or something. And I'll be like, oh, i wrote this HMP.

Like, you know, nothing's changed. What's going on? So at that time I'm like, okay, I can't continue on this path. Let me think about what would I enjoy doing where I could actually help somebody. And I had done a lot of rotations in radiology and I was like.

From Pathology to Integrative Medicine 30:38

Okay, I guess I could do interventional, but I really don't want to sit in the dark for the rest of my life. And I know that's not what radiology is, continuously learn and never get bored with because there's so much to learn. Well, that's where pathology comes in, right? So pathologists, as you guys know, it's like being a doctor's doctor. You know like everything about everything, like how the body works on that cellular level, literally looking at all kinds of cells. So I did. I went down in the route of doing a pathologist residency.

And then I even further subspecialized with a couple of fellowships, one in cytopathology, which is literally I could look at a single cell and diagnose disease, you know, whether that's like a thyroid FNA or, body fluid or something like that. And then I added on another layer of, this is me being curious here, right, of breast cancer, bone and soft tissue cancer. And really going, all right we have these organs, why am I diagnosing so many diseases? And not just like inflammation, I mean cancer after cancer and when your youngest patient is 18 years old and you're like, Wait a minute, her genetics are normal.

What is going on in the world, right? And honestly, it would have been easy for me to just sit in my office, because we also have our Dictaphone, but we sit with light. And we have a microscope, and we're looking at these beautiful colors, you know, pink and purple, through the microscope and stuff. I could just there and look and screen my thyroid FNAs all day long, or my breast cases. But something in me was kind of going, you know something that a lot of people have never seen in the world and never will, and actually most doctors have ever seen and ever will.

So yes, so you can have a very, very nice comfortable life, an easy life just sitting here and doing this, or you could take what you now and figure out a way to really help people like being that doctor that you were supposed to be 25 years, 20 years ago when it came out. And this path didn't exist back then, right? So integrative medicine, it was not so well known, there was no conversation around it as an option to do like, you know, residency or fellowship in it. So I did. So, I pursued an integrative medicine fellowship at the Andrew Wiel Center.

I had pursued culinary medicine. And so I was basically bridging my two ends, like the diagnostics. How do you create disease? what's actually happening and then how do I take it from, okay, I know what is happening at the cellular level, but then I also know people's lifestyles and what they're doing and how that's impacting it. So how to I bridge those two? And that is kind of what brings me to what I'm doing today. I do have my own telehealth clinic and educational kind platform that I walk my patients through.

beautiful international destinations and do our more in-person stress management techniques, meditation. The travel resilience as you do those retreats can... Yes, absolutely. But then that's where I was like, okay, there's still a problem I have to solve for. And that's where in the last few years, I've been making this observation about a lot of my patients love to travel, but then not even my patience, like my colleagues also, they're all traveling and then they all are like texting each other.

Oh, do you have this in your room? Or can you help me with this? For my patient, we text like this happened. And I'm like, why are you guys not good travelers? And, have I just got this whole system down or something? And so then I started really looking at it and I'm like, because people aren't thinking of their body like these little cells, like the way I, the like I am literally trained to do and like my body. So a couple of years ago when I was taking my father with me on this trip to Southeast Asia, We didn't just go on the trip.

I went with an apothecary of herbs and I'm like, okay, we're going to take this and we are going take that because we need to protect our digestion. We need protect immunity. And I need be able to focus because, well, I am going be speaking, you know, or I will be in meetings, so I'll be doing this. So we have energy because if we go this far we will walk 20,000 steps a day. So part of that apothecary is now my next business, which is Trevella Wellness, the first physician formulated travel wellness and longevity supplement.

that brings together basically botanical intelligence using the botannicals of Ayurveda, the Botanicles of Traditional Chinese Medicine that are well established for the last 5,000 years to help with those five physiologic pathways and bringing together the longevity science ingredients that I know are beneficial for people's cells because we're getting all these exposures. We're not living from 50 years ago or 100 years Life is different. Okay, so that the birth of, you know, after my book, The Anatomy of Well-Being, the new birth, of my baby is basically Trevella, which is what we've been formulating for the last couple of years and is finally like available for people.

So it's technically a daily wellness supplement that doesn't exist and fills the gap for something that I saw in the market that is absolutely necessary for people from a cellular health benefit standpoint. And it was something me and my father were taking. I mean, my Father was climbing Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur, like up the whatever hundred steps, before I was getting up there. He's 75, right? So we didn't get sick on this month-long trip. It was fabulous. The beautiful thing is we're now going to take Trevella into trial at the University of Florida.

So super excited about that. And yeah, but part of that was also my own personal backstory of why I even got into the supplement space in the first place, which is its own story, if you want me to share that I love how you're bringing that, you know, the digestion community, how focus becomes kind of where's our focus and how we're going to prepare for a change in that focus as we do different things and energetically how do we transition from one circadian rhythm to another, what's going happen to that energy system.

and at that cellular level because the mitochondria is everything towards energy and how we, you know, and then tell us more about recovery. What does that look like as we're again transitioning back or, in terms of travel? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, focus definitely in itself gets impacted because, well, first of all, we have hypoxia.

TBI Recovery and the Birth of Trevella 38:08

I already mentioned the change in oxygen, right? We're going to have a hypoxia, and I've already mention the cortisol problem. So that's also going influence how well your brain is going work. And then we had the dehydration. That all gets impact, that all get compounded. Then with the energy production, because our body experiences more oxidative stress, Right? Our cells, our mitochondria, are actually going to be influenced on how they are functioning. So when people think of travel fatigue, oh, I'm just tired because I took a trip, they're not realizing that no, the cosmic radiation created more reactive oxygen species than if you were on the ground, right?

So you need to more intentionally protect that. So the recovery is the whole part of what are you doing with your digestion, immunity, focus, energy. And if you'd allow me to share the story of the focus and cognition, I think this will kind of tie it all in together during the pandemic. How was the Pandemic for you guys? Did you enjoy it or was it like not good? We were both, I think, in hospital, medicine at the time. It was awful. I'm still recovering from it. You're still recovery. Life-changing.

We can all agree it was life-changing. Personally, i love the pandemic, up to a point. And so I love The hospitals were closed, so no operations going on. If there's no operation going, well, I'm not going in to go make a diagnosis, right? Because there is no pathology work. So I would use that time to basically take like four or five mile long walks and listen to podcasts and audio books and just, you know, start like taking care of myself. It's time we never have as physicians, to actually do anything for ourselves.

On one of those Saturday morning walks, I'm taking a walk and it's around like 9, 9.30 in the morning and out of nowhere I feel something hit me like at the top of my head and I am like, okay, what's going on here? I was wearing a baseball cap, had my headphones in, basically had cell phone on me, nothing else and walking through. residential neighborhood. I'm like looking up and I don't see anything in the sky and i'm, like, okay, I Don't know what hit me. So I take my hat off and then I put my Hand to my head and look down at my hand and it's like all covered in blood all the way up here And then, you know, i put, my, hand back to, me head, and, oh my God, am I feeling brain here?

And as somebody who's, literally, held organs in their hand, You can imagine what's going through my mind. There's something going on here. So all I did was call 911 because I didn't know what else to do. And so while I'm waiting for the ambulance to come, this guy comes up to me and he goes, did I just hit you in the head with my golf ball? And I'm like, I am sorry, where's the golf ball, right? So this golfball was going 150 miles an hour, hit me in my left temporal parietal region, and bounced another 50 yards.

And I was on the street. I wasn't on a golf course or anything like that. And so long story short, basically, you know, I rushed to the emergency room, got stitched up, sent home to be followed up with neurology and physical therapy and all this stuff. suffered three cervical disc herniations because the force was so much. But what was interesting is you go from having zero health problems to literally having everything in a textbook when it comes to a traumatic brain injury. So I suffered a traumatic brain injury, which meant memory loss, focus issues, ear ringing, pressure, chronic pain, sleep issues.

autoimmunity, digestive issues, PTSD issues. Basically you name it, it was like textbook, like craziness. And I'm like, okay, I don't know what to do here because like literally I was in the best shape of my life. Then one second later, experiencing this cascade and going to all the specialists and they're all like okay well we can give you ADHD meds for your focus, we could give Alzheimer's med for memory loss, you know, Parkinson's because I had balance issues. We can give you anxiety meds, depression med, we can you injections for the pain.

The surgeon wanted to do an anterior discectomy, which for somebody, I spend a lot of time in operating rooms. I'm like, there's no way you're opening up my neck and taking three discs out and then like putting, no, So it was like a host of like everything. And this went on for years, but part of that was if I didn't have the integrative training that I have to go, all right, there's got to be another way to work through this than to just go. All right. This is the only option. So, yes, I did the physical therapy and lots of physical, but it was really the lifestyle approaches through like, you know, remember the ER physicians like go sleep it off.

And I'm like. Wait a minute. I need to go make brain drive neurotropic factor. The only way to do that is to move my body. Why are you telling me to sleep at all? And so. Really taking that lifestyle approach and going, all right, how can I optimize the stuff that was now taken away? Like I couldn't see, so I had vision problems. And now, you know, obviously I'm not looking through a microscope properly. I could not read or type or talk like I was dropping words or like slurring from, fatigue. It was basically like, How do you rebuild a human body?

And so doing that, a big part of my regimen was supplements. Okay, so all the botanicals and herbs anything that I could do without side effects of like my body just does not like it like the only medication I took was 1.5 Xanax pills and one was a practice pill because I needed to get an MRI done and I was like I'm scared of this MRI machine because of the sound because i was so sensitive to sound, because sound sensitivity. So on a Friday night at seven o'clock, I took the pill to see like what the effect would be.

It totally knocked me out. Then when I had to go for my MRI, i took half of the lowest dose and had somebody drive me because it just knocks. That's how sensitive I am to medications. But the supplements is really what happened to rebuild like my body. And going from some like somebody who used to walk four or five miles a day to now I can only go like to my mailbox and back or to the end of the street and because I'm so tired and then I have to take a three hour nap. That was really taking down that neuro inflammation taking out all the inflammation that's like happening in the body and going all right how can I rebuild my mitochondria.

How can I rebuild neurons? How could I do all this? And so that's actually all the ingredients that ended up in Trevella is everything I took to rebuild body. So yeah, it's called Trevela and it works amazing on like when you're traveling, but this is actually meant for every day in a sense that There are a number of things that people are going through that they need support in their body. Whether that's, you know, their stress response, whether that is their focus, most people aren't focusing.

And when you go from as bad as I was to like now my brain is like, I wouldn't say it's back to where it was, but it is a lot better than where was after the injury. As you're even talking, I'm thinking of the people that are on shift work, right? The circadian rhythm is off, like there are so many applications for this. And then the other aspect of it that comes up is climate change, you know, and how what we are in right now across this country and across the world is just, we're having to be resilient, not just to increase temperatures and dehydration, but also just this extreme heat.

And then we have the air quality, right? The toxic kind of environmental exposures that all of us are going through. How do you recover from that? And so I love this idea that we can recover, from let's say a traumatic brain injury, if you can look at it as a systemic kind cellular process. Yeah, process that's happening that includes all this. Your inflammatory system, your nervous system. It all comes down to the cells, right? It's like, how do you repair the cell? And I really want to highlight what you've just shared, as well as what Gurbhan is speaking to and kind of really bring it all together.

You have shared the story of a thousand patients and more. I mean, the stories that we hear just from one instant really demonstrates how that impacts so many things. And we started with travel, right? So we start with the circadian rhythm, rhythm of the body and how it's so connected to the environment. and how the environment has an impact on us and on our cells, and to look at it from the vantage of a cell. I love that cell that I'm going to get one myself too, because the cell itself is so beautiful.

It's just so magical. If I was a bio teacher teaching high school kids, I would share to that joy of this what the cell does. The cell has a lipid bilayer. It has communication signals. Its got intercellular systems, some organelles that don't even have a membrane and some do. And how all of these systems so beautifully, just beautifully doing things. I'm in awe of what this cell can do and then what it can together with all the other cells. The cell is basically constantly communicating, right?

And so most people are living through life with disrupted communication, as I did in myself, you know, my own story. And I think at the end of the day, when I talk to many of my patients, they're like, I just want to feel good enough to go see my grandkids at be able to go to Disney with them or go on like, you know, a lot of people are doing family travel right now, not get stuck in a hotel room because their body is not functioning. So really when I was building, my next iteration of, okay, I've been testing patients and looking at their cells for years and years, but how can I really simplify this and make it helpful for them?

Because yeah, we can't have a perfect lifestyle every day. What I know about cells is what was put into Trevella. So, yeah. And how the cell is so magically regenerative that we don't have to, as a pathologist, it's always about taking away the negative, by taking the cancer, removing it, extracting it. You know, chemo-radiating it but when no one talks about supporting the actual health of the cells, like keep it viable and so that then naturally that good thing will kind of beat out the bad. It's health cell care.

Self care is self care. Self Care is Self-care. You've got it. And I love it! Selfcare was so 2000s, like this is all about self- care, okay guys? Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Very 21st century. Yeah. Absolutely. I've loved this conversation. We want to bring it together. The curious question. And then? Yeah! I just want kind of bring together and thank for sharing your story. That's just so powerful because I think we find time and time again when we do our own hearing. It really helps us to understand at the, in a very fundamental level, what works.

And when you kind of feel it in your own self, you can't wait to tell other people and you cannot wait share that. I feel that energy from you is, how can I be most effective? How can bring this to more and more people? And so it's really lovely to connect with you in this way and really understand the passion and the intelligence and curiosity and just the drive to get to that next answer, to uncover more. Because as we're finding out, the more we know, we can do. And so just never to let that quest for knowledge and for that next horizon stop you.

And I'm going to dare to ask you the curious question because you are an endlessly curious person, but I am going do it anyway because we do for everybody. What are you curious about Monisha? What gets you excited to do something or get out there?

Curiosity, Cell Health, and Closing Reflections 51:38

Here you're doing lots of different things. I'm sure the retreats and the speaking gigs and all of that are kind of all coming together. But what gets your curious? What are you curious about? Yeah, I think I am really curious from a planetary perspective, like kind a big worldview, how we can in a way, kind of not just save humanity, like save the humans, but save, the animals, save. The planet, to me, that's like a really big kind, of overlying, all right, what is it that we need to do and what transitions, and even if it's at a person level, at state level and a country level.

The world is a lot bigger than the microcosm that each of us lives in. And I think because I've traveled to, you know, over 50, I don't even know. I stopped counting how many countries. But, and I see the way people live and what brings them joy. I return back and I'm like, wow, people are really living in their small like world and unhappy for reasons that yeah, it makes sense. But at the same time, we have this short life, right? So what drives me and gives me curiosity is how can we make it so.

And it's maybe naive of me, but I would just love to be able to, you know, go into the bank and the person's having a great day. Like my banker's like having great a day or drive down the road and you're like, nobody has road rage, right? Like I still believe that's possible. And I think that that is possible when people's cells are working the way they should. Right now, their cells, as I describe it, are angry. Everybody's got super, super angry cells. figure out, you know, in my way, and I'm trying, how can we make happier cells?

Because if we can make healthier cells, we could also make a happier human. And happier humans can then make an happier planet, right? So it's, I know our ambition is... Now close with our rapid fire questions. Okay. I love the ambition. What's the number one habit that supports healthy cells. The number one habit that supports healthy cells, I would say, is sleep. Okay. Is inflammation always bad for cells? Is information always for bad cells. Inflammation. Oh, inflammation. No, information is not bad to cells because inflammation can also be protective when it needs something to like die off, right?

So no, it's not. Okay, so what nutrient do most people overlook for cell health? The nutrient most overlooked for cell health, you know what? There is not one nutrient. I think this is where, for me, utilizing botanical intelligence and going, all right, our body needs this diversity in order for it to function and in the order of the microbiome to functioning. So I if it's not a nutrient, it is a category. And I those categories are botanicals. And last question, how do we make ourselves younger?

Ooh, How do We Make Ourselves Younger? Self plug, take some Trevella. No, but I think making ourselves Youngers is multifactorial, right? It's really looking at all your lifestyle factors, like how you sleep, what you put in your body, What you Put on your Body, you know, all of those, right? Toxins, environmental exposures, All of that is critical for making ourselves younger. I like to use like the Christmas tree analogy, so like when we go and we're going shopping for a Christmas Tree, we are looking for like, even if you don't celebrate Christmas, people can kind of visually see this.

We're looking the biggest, fluffiest, the one that smells the nicest, right? Because when we bring it home, then our decorations can kind of hang on it and look beautiful, and then it looks great in pictures. Think of the human body in that way, that's the lifestyle. That's all those fundamentals that are absolutely critical. Then layering it on to how can you stay young is, yeah, okay, you can do some new technology things that we have. Do some wearables to track something, do some infrared, add the supplements, all these different things.

But none of that's gonna work without that foundation, right? It could only make it better. So I always say stick with the foundation first and then build from there. And when it comes to disease being that 90 to 95% of our diseases are lifestyle related and not genetics, I think that puts a lot more power and control in our hands that people have kind of given up to this idea that, oh, it's in my family or, Oh, this is just going to happen. No, we have a more control than we think. Thank you. Wow.

That's a great note to end on. We have more more than control we than think and thank you so much for demonstrating all these beautiful ways that we can take advantage of that. Absolutely. Yeah, and really you brought into our concepts of medicine is more than science. It's story, art and connection and your story really resonates with all aspects of that. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on the Two Curious Andy podcast. We hope today's episode inspired you to ask new questions and explore fresh perspectives.

We challenge you to ask us those unasked questions that you're curious about in your medical practice, condition, health and wellness. If you enjoyed the podcast, don't forget to subscribe, share it with somebody just as curious and leave us a review. It helps us keep the curiosity alive. Post or comment with a question or curious inquiry that have and seek to explore or learn with us. Stay curious, and we'll see you next time.