Why a Weekend Getaway Leaves You Exhausted—and How to Fix It

Podcast Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

So just as a reminder, audience, so this is your human cell, okay? Your cell is not this big, it's super microscopic. In fact, I can tell you that because I've been looking at it under microscopes. This is just to demonstrate to you, that every day we have these 37 trillion cells in our human body. different cells for different organs, but inside each and every one of those cells, there's very similar things. The nucleus, the mitochondria. the Mitochondria make energy from the air you breathe and the food you eat, right?

So when our mitochondrial produces energy, this ATP, that energy currency of every cell in your body is running on that. So under travel stress, two things are happening. First, oxidative load, You've got altitude, higher altitude. You got that radiation that I mentioned. you have that sleep that you mentioned, right? So all of those combined are going to produce reactive oxygen speed. Have you made it past menopause or are you going through it now? I'm Dr. Pat McShane and on the Women's Health Span Voices podcast, I'll guide you through the menoppausal transition and beyond.

helping you to thrive in this powerful time of your woman. Hello and welcome. I'm Dr. Pat McShane, and this is Women's Health Span Voices. And I have a very important voice we're going to be working with today, Dr Manisha Bhanot. Dr. Bonote has multiple certifications in different kinds of medicine, primarily pathology and then integrative medicine and culinary medicine as well. Probably she'll weave a little bit of that information into our talk today. And we're going to focus on travel primarily, I think, in our interview because that's been her special interest or one of her Special Interests.

And in fact, she is an author as well, the Anatomy of Well-being and the founder of Welkula Institute and Travella Wellness,

Why Travel Exposes Cellular Stress 2:06

which is the travel piece in there, I think. So I'll let her tell us a little bit more about how she decided to get into the area of travel, because for our senior women audience, a lot of us have now a bit of more time and freedom and maybe a more money to do some travel. And so we're going to be encountering travel issues, travel medical or physical issues. So how did you get interested in that? And tell us a little bit more about your focus now. Okay. Thank you so much, Pat, for having me on your podcast.

I'm excited about having this conversation and speaking to your community about something that probably isn't top of mind as a health concern, but when they hear it, they're never going to forget it now, So for me, I've been traveling since the age of 18. Once I was out of the house at high school, actually 17, and I did not come back home. I'm basically like a nomad. Every seven years I move somewhere, live on multiple continents, always somewhere traveling. Travel brings you a bigger world perspective and you get to learn about other people's culture and everything like that.

But one of the things that I've noticed is after spending decades looking at human cells under the microscope as a formally trained pathologist, and when I say lots of cells, under-the-microscope, like literally millions of self that i've seen disease and understanding that there's a deeper mechanism behind it. And we know that lifestyle is a big contributor to these mechanisms. But one of the gaps that I was seeing in that education and that experience was that my patients who are, you know, age like 35 to 75, they were coming back from their trips and they're like, hey, Dr.

B, I got this. I've got my immunity with that. You know I, got sick. or when I was on my trip, I got stuck in the hotel room, my digestive tract was off, or I just couldn't keep up with the rest of the family. They went out and did all these excursions and I felt so tired, right? And I'm going, well, You know, there's physiologic pathways there that we aren't focused on, and they become actually more apparent when we're on the move. And this could just be a weekend away, right? This doesn't mean to be like, oh, you're flying transatlantic.

It could literally just weekend away and you come back exhausted or you go and and your not feeling it. One or two hour time difference for me. Already I'm struggling a little bit so I hear you. There you got right and so like I said I've been traveling since I am 18 you know and for a very long time quite a few decades and people are always asking me how come you're like getting somewhere and You're fine like you don't need a nap or you don't need to do this and you're not taking two days to recover and then when you come back.

So I'll get to my secrets in a minute, but really what I want you to understand is travel is already exposing the problems happening in your cell, right? They're the ones that have been quietly happening over decades and five key cellular systems that I focus on. So from digestion to immunity to energy to focus and circadian recovery, they are already under pressure as we age. Okay. And it's just the travel experience might bring them to light, right? Like you might be like noticing them, but underneath the mechanism has always been happening.

And we know that as we age, because I know your podcast is all about women's health span, so what's going on in women health as were aging. In general, you got to know that our microbiome as we age is less diverse. So the microbiomes that we had at age 25 is not the micro biome we have in our 50s or 60s, or 70s.

Mitochondria, Energy, and Oxidative Stress 6:30

Okay? The mitochondria, the little organelles inside our cells that produce energy for each and every one of our cell is producing less energy, less ATP per cycle. The immune system is running a little hotter, right? So not as precisely as it maybe did when we were younger. Our circadian clock is less anchored. So then when you go for your weekend away or maybe I have a lot of patients that love cruising, right? And I'm like, okay, well, you're not even really changing time zones when you, I mean, based in Florida.

You're really not changing times zones you are getting on a cruise ship. And it's taking you you know, pretty much in the Caribbean, but yet they still feel it, Maybe it's eating dinner at eight o'clock and drinking three glasses of wine. So much of that. That could have something to do with it, yes. But we have to think about, on that cellular level, our body is encountering something that we haven't considered. If you're flying, even if it is a short flight, you are getting more cosmic radiation than if you were on the ground, right?

So that when you're getting that cosmic radiation, what's that gonna do? That's gonna generate free radicals and that's going to affect your antioxidant systems even more. So if don't have the ingredients to fight off these free radicles, you gonna experience some cellular fatigue, let's call it, When we're on the go, I don't know Pat, what kind of traveler you are, but one, one of the things I liked, you know, like people like to sit outside cafes and just watch people. If you ever watched people in airports.

It's like watching ants on sugar, right? Because everybody's cortisol is just through the roof, and it's this disruption from the cortisol rising. And then as you already mentioned, meal timing, so we might be eating. Maybe we've got an eight o'clock dinner time on our cruise ship, or maybe we're out doing excursions all day and now we are eating at 10 o clock at night. So now your gut bacteria, which have their own chronologic clock, microbiota chronometer, right? The clock in there, that gets disrupted.

And so basically life, modern life is putting a lot of stress on our body. This lands a little bit harder for women in midlife, all right, because the systems that were buffering us earlier, right? So our estrogen is no longer there, so now we can't support that mitochondrial biogenesis. Our gut microbiome diversity, as I mentioned, is not where it was unless we are very intentional about eating our 30 different plants a week, our immune regulation is the same protection. So all of this is basically saying that travel just reveals the gap between your cellular resilience that you had at 25, 35 and the cellular resilience you have now.

And so that's the conversation we're going to have today. So travel is not the problem. Don't get mad at travel. Okay. Travel is just the stress test that is revealing what's going on with your cells underneath and how fragile they are. I did a podcast recently about circadian rhythm, and it seems like it's a major issue whether we stay put in one place or not. Again, modern lifestyle, 24-7 lights, maybe LED lights et cetera, meal times that don't sync very well with our intrinsic natural biology, lack of activity in many instances.

So we've got circadian problems before we ever get on that plane or that ship, certainly. And aging does certainly exacerbate that. So tell us a little bit more about the physiology and about some of the tricks. I want to hear about tricks to work around it. Yeah, yeah, there's so many tricks, right? So, you know, we can take them from the pathway of the five mechanisms, so if we think about one of them mechanisms your energy, why are you feeling so exhausted either on the trip or when you get back from a trip and it's not really necessarily just tiredness.

We think, oh, I'm tired, this is like normal. Actually, it's cellular energy failure. Okay, so remember I mentioned those mitochondria, right? So those little organelles inside your cells, or I always pull this out for my patients to see. I love it when my patient can have a conversation with me and they're like, Dr. B, my mitochondrion.

Circadian Disruption and Travel Recovery Tips 11:30

We're talking now, like, this is how my teachers are now. Mitochondria show up quite often in my podcasts as well with lots of our speakers. So hopefully my audience will have at least some idea of mitochondria. So just as a reminder audience, so this is your human cell. Okay, your cell is not this big. It's super microscopic. In fact, I can tell you that because I've been looking at it under microscopes. This is just to demonstrate to you, that every day we have these 37 trillion cells in our human body, different cells for different organs.

But inside each and every one of those cells, there's very similar things. The nucleus, the mitochondria, they make energy from the air you breathe and the food you eat, right? So when our mitochondrion produces energy, this ATP, that energy currency of every cell in your body is running on that. So under travel stress, two things are happening. First, oxidative load, right? You've got altitude, higher altitude. You got that radiation that I mentioned. you have that sleep that you mentioned, so all of those combined are going to produce reactive oxygen species.

If you haven't heard that word before, okay, imagine this. Here's your cell. Every day we are getting exposed to oxidative stress. Okay? Our cells, when they have the right ingredients, those being antioxidants such as vitamin A, C, E, alpha lipoic acid, glutathione, all these ingredients and plant-based antioxidants, it can fight these off, right? But when we don't have them, doesn't fight it off it creates those reactive oxygen species which is another terminology for it is free radicals right so you can imagine these free radicles like to go to the rest of the body and cause more cellular damage.

It's an aging process it's a natural process that's going to happen right and so when you have that The body doesn't like it, right? It's affected. So you need to support it. The other thing is when we have that sustained cortisol, this is why you to learn how to be like a non-stress traveler. You know, like I'm all about the packing before making sure I got my snacks, not, you know grabbing sugar at the airport, all that kind of stuff. That elevated cortisol will prevent your mitochondrial biogenesis, right?

So making more energy, making new healthy mitochondria and replacing the ones that have aged out. One of the things that we see in the aging process is mitochondrio dysfunction. We do not want dysfunctional mitochondria. We want our mitochondrion to work so we have energy, right? So all of this is happening. So there are some key ingredients. There's some of these ingredients that individuals might know as things like CoQ10, so what is Coq10 going to do? It's a cofactor inside the mitochondrial electron transport chain that helps produce ATP.

Another ingredient that I like is PQQ. That signals to your mitochondry to make more. I know some people know about like Ashwagandha, for example, as an adaptogen, but I like Shashandra, right? So these are a few ingredients, you got to remember the lifestyle part of it without addressing All right, I should not be eating the bad airport food. I Should be preparing my snacks when I go, right? I shouldn't be the salty food, the three glasses of wine because they're free on the airplane. Now that's going to disrupt all of that, Right?

The other thing is caffeine. And I think, you know, we're very quick. If we have an early flight, will grab a cup of coffee for there's a literally a Starbucks everywhere. Right. So what the caffeine is doing, it's telling your cells to ignore the fatigue signal. All right. Your mitochondria aren't actually getting the raw material that they need. It's basically. You can kind of consider, in a way, caffeine as a band-aid to what is actually happening under the cellular process. So we want to support cellular processes as we age.

And why I'm so focused on the cellular process is because Like I said, I've been looking at cells under the microscope. I'd been diagnosing, you know, everything from gastritis to reflux to prostate cancer to breast cancer. You name it, i've diagnosed. And at the end of the day, the simplest way for me to describe that is your cells are angry. When we get diseased cells that aren't functioning, they're angry because they don't have the ingredients to make them function. Yeah, the body is basically set up to heal essentially and maintain health and we can disrupt that process and some external things will impact it as well as you've been speaking about.

But basically if we set the stage for healing, that processes often does a very nice job all by itself. Yeah. And then one of the other pathways you had already mentioned was circadian, right? So that circidian clock that's already disrupted before we even go anywhere. It's probably one the most under appreciated regulatory systems in the human body. Right? So, and it really matters for our aging audience. It actually matters to every audience, depending on, you know, from your childhood and growth, all of that, right?

The circadian clock is itself synchronized by external cues. Right. So those cues are like cues, so one of the tricks and honestly, it's not really a trick. To me, It's just basically common sense because I do travel a lot internationally and And those going from East Coast to transatlantic is usually an overnight flight. What do people do when, you know, they might sleep on the plane and then they get to their hotel and they sleep again, right? The first thing you actually want to do, when you're getting off a plane is drop off your luggage and go for a walk.

an hour long walk, reset that circadian rhythm because that light exposure is going to tell your body's clock, hey, it's still light here. Your gut microbiome will take three days to catch up, okay? But your 24 hour circadian clock for your light wake sleep cycle, that can be done in that day. Right. If you don't want to do the walk, that's fine. Get on one of those hop on hop off open air buses, you know, and still like go around and tour around. This is really important because when that coordinated pathway falls out of sync and that cortisol is happening, it's also creating an inflammatory cascade.

Gut Health, Inflammation, and Aging 18:30

So we don' think about travel creating inflammation in this way. We know that when we eat something bad, we're creating information, right? But just the physical act of doing this also creates inflammation. So we want to make sure we are supporting that. Adaptogens is a great way to do it. Whatever adaptogen you want to take. I like holy basil. Holy basil is great. Have you ever used that, Pat? No. No, I haven't heard of it, actually. Oh, you haven' heard it? Oh boy. Okay. Yeah. Now, holy Basil is really good because it works on the HPAF.

So our access that's already stressed out our cortisol system and it kind of helps recalibrate without stimulant effects. So you can actually grow this plant. My mom grows this plan in her garden and you could throw it in a salad if you want. That's the beauty of botanicals and plants. You can eat a lot of them. One of my favorite adaptogens is holy basil. And holy Basil is a plant that you can actually grow like in the garden and you Can throw it into salads and stuff. My mom grows it in her garden.

But what's beautiful about it is an Ayurvedic plant. That works on the HPA axis. So your stress system, your cortisol system. And what it does is it supports kind of recalibrating that stress response without stimulants. Because what I see often is people are using a lot of stimulant, whether that might be the caffeine. Whether that might be sugar, whether that may be melatonin to help you sleep, right? So there's all these things that are being used that kind of aren't the best choices in the long run on this, you know, this cellular level.

One of the other ingredients that I really like for circadian rhythm is magnesium. You know, most of our bodies don't have enough magnesium to run all the cellular processes that they need. And so magnesium can help influence that sleep architecture that gets disrupted. So both holy basil and magnesium work beautifully without. Sleep aids, right? So if you know, like I said, you don't need to use these when you're traveling This is just what's happening physiologically in the body I think the other one so so like i said I have five processes that I go through digestion immunity focus energy and recovery We talk a little bit about recovery.

We talked a bit energy but gut health your digestion is one of the first things that you will experience. In fact, if my neighbor is listening to me, I'm sorry, but she messaged me and she texted me. She's like, Hey, Dr. B, what can I do? Because I was out in California and it's only a three hour time difference. And I haven't had a bowel movement in a week after traveling. Well, that certainly isn't good. Then she's, like do you have your Trevella? And, yeah, you know. But so when people are thinking of the gut, they're thinking the got just as a digestive organ, but we know that a gut is a command center for everything right from producing our neurotransmitters like serotonin.

to our influencing our immune system, to really setting the tone for hormonal metabolism inside our body, right? So it's not just processing food, it is a significant portion of your biology. And I mentioned earlier that your microbiome loses diversity as you age. So when you lose that diversity, and for those who aren't familiar with what your micro biome is, The gazillion, and I know that's not a very technical term, but there's a lot of them. There's more microbiota organisms in your body than human cells.

So what happens is that those change as we age. Okay. They're, they're not as diverse. Certain ones grow that are potentially more inflammatory and the ones that a protective are not so present anymore. When those bacteria change, your gut lining becomes more permeable. Okay. When it's more permeable, that means basically anything entering any byproducts can go into the bloodstream, cross that GI tract into a blood stream and trigger chronic low grade inflammation. So. If you think about what chronic low-grade inflammation does, it can affect every tissue in the body, from the brain, to the joints, so the cardiovascular system, the skin.

So, as a term, we kind of talk about inflammation, right? So it's that chronic inflammatory background noise that's driving aging. And everyone feels it different. Like some people will be like, oh, you know, I went for a walk and now my knees are hurting. Some people might be, like. Gosh, I'm like waking up with these weird rashes all over the body, you know, like it's gonna show up for everybody differently So I don't think we can put people in a bucket and be like, okay Here's the solution. You really need to personalize this when when it comes to your health care, but My point in sharing this is that the gut being the origin of both disease and health for every problem you're experiencing, right?

So whether that is cardiovascular disease, whether it is mental health, that it's autoimmunity, or whether is cancer, all of that comes back to this inflammatory pathway. That gets more emphasized.

Creating a Travel Wellness Nutraceutical 24:30

So if you're not a good traveler, if come back and you are wiped out, that's a sign that there's other stuff going on in your body. Don't ignore it and just be like, oh, I just traveled, now I need to just rest. No, That is a communication because our cells are constantly communicating that, hey, my body needs something. Let me figure out what it needs before I develop more disease. actually have founded a company and instigated a nutraceutical that can be used for some of this. So maybe tell us a little bit more about who might use that and when in the travel process you would institute that.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Pat, for asking. So after doing this for decades, looking at human cells under the microscope, diagnosing disease, doing testing on individuals to see what are the gaps in where they need more support. I didn't want to add more noise to the market. There's plenty of supplements on the markets for people to take. What I wanted to make sure is that we were formulating and creating something that did not exist in order to fill the gaps that I see that the people need support with.

And so what we formulated, what I formulated is the first physician formulated nutraceutical that combines 5,000 year old ancient wisdom science from botanical herbs with our modern longevity science ingredients that we know now can repair the body, right? So it's the first one that's kind of combining all this and it works on such a beautiful level. I'll tell you what some of the ingredients are but let me share with you how I really got into this was about five years, well maybe now it is six years ago.

During the pandemic. We all remember the Pandemic. Okay, it was good for some of us. It was bad for us Honestly, I loved it up to a point. I love it because the operating room was closed I didn't have to go in and diagnose disease after disease and just you know spit out Hundreds of thousands of cancers diagnoses, you know, so I was like, this is great. There was nothing we could really do. So I. Was just taking walks every day, like four or five miles a day listening to podcasts and audio books.

And I'm like okay, This is wonderful. I don't have to be at the hospital at seven AM for the first surgery. If I loved it. so instead I'd go for a walk, but. on one of these walk, you know, towards the end of 2020. And I take the same route every day. One of those walks, something happened. I was taking a walk and I felt something kind of hit me in my head right here. And the only thing I had on me was my, my cell phone and ear pods and a hat, right? And I didn't know what it was. And, and I felt this like, it almost felt like a airplane fell on my head.

It was actually quite. And so, you know, I take off my hat. I put my hand to the, to my brain and I'm like, Oh my God, am I feeling my rain? Like, what is this? You know? As, as a person who's held organs in their hand, You Know, like oh my god, well, What is that? Am I, feeling brain here? And, so I looked down at my head and from here down all the way, my shoulder, neck, all covered in blood. And I'm going, okay, I don't know what's happened. So I call 911. I mean, what else do you do? I called 911 and I, and, um, just standing there waiting for the ambulance to come get me.

And while I am waiting from the ambulances guy comes up to me and he goes, did I just hit you with my golf ball? And, uh, like. I don't know because where is the golf ball and I'm not on a golf course. I am in a residential neighborhood. So this guy was about 200 yards back behind a house and hit a driver shot going 150 miles an hour outside of the course and it hit me in my left temporal parietal region. Now, if anybody has ever been. fell off a bike, fell of a horse, had a car accident, whiplash, any kind of fall.

The brain has very little space to move within the skull. Okay. So what happens when the brain can't like do anything? There's a major inflammatory cascade that happens. And I got to experience that firsthand. Okay, so where you go from being 100% healthy, no health conditions to now having autoimmunity, gastric disruption, hormone disruption circadian disruption to Let's see. Memory loss, focus loss. Ear ringing. You name it. I was like, I don't know what's happening here. Basically everything.

Like it's an entire syndrome of symptoms that I So much so that I couldn't write or type or talk. I was missing words. a lot plus the chronic fatigue that comes from that. So my four or five mile walks turned into literally walking to the mailbox and back because I was so fatigued. And so when I went to all this, and here's the kicker, it hit me so hard that it also caused three cervical disc herniation. Now I have chronic pain on top of that, all from one little like, what is it? Like a three inch wall, right?

Totally blindsided. And so went to all the specialists and the specialist are like, okay, we have this option for you. We can give you ADHD meds, Alzheimer's med, Parkinson's Med, all this stuff to bring my memory like somewhere. the surgeons like, well, we can do an anterior discectomy. And of course, being that I spent so much time in an operating room, I know, you know I'm not gonna have somebody pull out three cervical discs and then have my thyroid disrupted and risk, when you too much, right?

So I'm like, well, that's not going to happen. Right. So now I mean, this process of how do I repair my body as naturally as possible because I don't tolerate medication side effects and all that. And I, and I. Want to be on chronic pain meds for the rest of my life. So I had to really pull from my integrative medicine training where, you know, we went deep into Ayurvedic medicine and botanicals and herbs and supplementation and really pulled into that and go, All right, what is it that that ancient wisdom and modern science is really saying about how do I get get rid of my chronic fatigue?

How do? I make more mitochondria because you know, you what the ER doctor said to me he goes after I actually told him how to suture me back up because I didn't want like suture material in my skull. Like I made him do it with my own hair strands and then like, you know, with a mirror and stuff. It was a real like as if you're watching Doogie Howser, like I'm like let's do this. But he told me, he goes, go sleep it off. That's what he said to me. And I was like going, wait a minute, I need to make brain drive neurotrophic factor, right?

So that happens when you move your body. I am not going to go sleeping off, but I have to figure out how to move my body, so part of that really came from you know, besides the physical therapy and stuff, but supplementation. So at one point I was on 30 different supplements to try and repair my body and get to a place that I wasn't before. And from that, I found really powerful ingredients Okay. And, and this is where the Trevella story really comes in. Those ingredients that I was taking in there, like Bacopa Manieri and Gotu Cola and the holy basil that i mentioned to you and things like PQQ and glutathione and all these things to kind of wake up my cells from this situation that found myself in but I didn't want to take those 30 bottles anymore.

And I wanted to get back to traveling the world, something that I was doing, you know, like multiple times a year and not having a problem with. I had to figure out how to back that. So a couple years back, I traveling to Southeast Asia and my father, who's 75 years old, came with me and I'm like, You can't get sick. You have to be on the same protocol as me. Okay. So because we're going far, we were going to like, you know, five, six, seven countries with a lot of plane rides. We were gone for a month and stuff.

I put him on. The same herbs that I was on, I mean, my dad was at the top of, like way up, he was walking those 20,000 steps faster than I. But he was taking the herbs and the botanicals that I was taken. And so after spending, you know, quite a bit of time researching and developing the formulation, we have developed what I call Travella Essentials. Here it is. Travella essentials in a three capsules a day formulation. So I basically went from taking 30 different supplements to now this formulation plus an Omega and a vitamin D.

Like, I mean, it's a big difference when you like are like, okay, my body's working. The cells are repairing itself. I am not fatigued. Not only do you get physical fatigue you Get mental fatigue, right? So I was experiencing all of this from just a Saturday morning walk right and ironically the audiobook I Was listening to that day is called limitless, which is a book about the brain from Jim quick and I'm like gosh talk about irony, and So with that, you know, we finally brought it to the world because when I started talking to my patients in the last few years about this and we were talking about their disruptions in their health and what they really wanted out of life and they wanted to be able to enjoy going on trips and doing this.

And mind you, I do do retreats. So I've spent a lot of time with my patience in person. We like going to international locations and I can see like all right when they're fatigued and when their not and really seeing this I'm like this is what I need to share not just to put another supplement out there but what is missing in the world that will actually help people and that's where we're at like I am just super excited about it because I hope it will really help a lot of people. So you're recommending this to women who have traditionally or historically experienced fatigue and all the symptoms that you mentioned earlier while traveling?

I basically recommend it to both men and women, okay? So anybody who is experiencing any health concern around digestion, immunity, brain fog focus, energy production, recovery, like they're just not recovering anymore.

Food, Microbiome Support, and Resilience 36:30

it's meant to work on pathways. It's not meant. Work on a disease. Okay. Like it. Working on those five physiologic pathways that I know ourselves get disrupted because we're living on, on different planet nowadays. We're not living from like a hundred years ago, we have more exposure to ourselves than ever. So for me, this formulation is, all right, how can I support myself in that gap between just living? Right? That existence of just like, it's an everyday daily wellness supplement. So it not just when you travel.

Depending on how many time zones you go, we do have different protocols for that, but it is, It's filling the gap of something that I think, you know, I talked to my patients. I'm like. Nobody wants to go in the garden, except my mom, my guests to grow different herbs and plants and put them in their salads and stuff. We're so busy. we need something. That's going to fill that gap. And that's what I created. And earlier, we mentioned symptom chasing, and this is kind of the opposite of symptom-chasing.

So you're trying to support the cells rather than go after, you know, fatigue or diarrhea or whatever it is that a person might be experiencing. And that's where my expertise is. I've been looking at people's cells forever and seeing how angry they are. Your cells need support and let's start supporting them. And I tried to make it as easy as possible. Well, good. That sounds like a great thing. What other advice or messages that you would like to give our menopausal audience about travel or just maintaining your energy level and your health in general?

We've covered a lot of territory, but maybe I skipped over something. Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, because in my experience, what I have found that a lot of healing happens through the gut. I. Think that looking at that broader sense of. the gut not just as a digestive organ but the guts to be the key to heal any of your chronic issues and both prevent them as well right is key and you know how you approach that like personally how I approach with my patients is I do in-depth diagnostic testing Really looking at the status of their microbiome because no, not everybody needs to be on a probiotic.

Not everybody need the digestive enzyme. Always start with the foundation of food as medicine. And, you know, I'm trained in culinary medicine, right? So how do we take our food, eat the rainbow, the 30 different plants a week? How do take that microbiomes that has been deteriorating since the age of 25 and replenish it in a way that's going to support us? Yes, yes, and avoidance of ultra-processed foods, avoidant of preservatives. We're starting to get little bits and pieces of this information from some of the bigger studies.

And that's a lot of, I don't know, microplastics maybe are in there too. as a risk and the fact that so many of our current foods, even if we are buying food that's not processed, the nutrient level has deteriorated because our soils and our agriculture methods and shipping and so on have put a price on the vitamins and minerals in our foods. What I tend to do is I try and make it as easy as possible. I do cooking classes with my patients and stuff and I'll teach them how to do recipes where it's like, I love a good mason jar where you've got 30 different plant ingredients in one jar.

So now you're like I don't need to worry about it the whole week. Or we'll do like a chia pudding that has like 10 ingredients in it and it's not about the quantity of the food necessarily. It's getting that biodiversity that Biodiversity is what's going to set your microbiome up for repair and I will say in my older population I and when we do this testing and i'm like guys you're starving yourself like like you need to eat some real food like your cells are literally starving. And that's why you're feeling these symptoms.

That's Why we're creating disease, it doesn't have the nutrients. They're absolutely shocked when they see like testing and they're like, Oh my god, I thought like I was fixing everything and I have no idea. Yep. Yep, well that's good, good advice. And the other things, the others organs that have kind of come into their prime or are coming into the prime that are doing more than we ever thought that they were doing are our bone and our muscle. So maybe we, sometime we can come back and talk about all the wonderful things that muscle does for us besides move us through space.

Absolutely. And interestingly enough, I did do another podcast episode on bone health and these specific ingredients, and it's pretty fascinating what they do to bone. So yeah, absolutely. I think the key message here is how do we make ourselves more resilient? Right. It's not about becoming invincible. Right? It is about how you have enough reserve capacity when stress hits or your symptoms, you know, your systems, how do you respond to that and recover without losing days? Yeah, an infection or an injury as you just described or a stressful life circumstance that you don't that, that have to deal with that.

You can't just avoid put family issues and so on. So resilience. Yes, That's what we're seeking here. This has been just wonderful, wonderful information and a fun interview. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us today. And to our audience, if this is the kind of information that you value, please like this and share it and tell your friends so we can have a bigger audience getting this important information. If this episode spoke to you, please share it with a friend ready to take charge of her health.

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