Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to the Brilliant Fertility Podcast. I'm your host, Dr Katie Rose, and this podcast exists to help illuminate the path ahead of you. With expert interviews, clinical pearls and real client success stories, my intention is to bring you hope for what's possible on this journey and to give you tools and resources to navigate the ups and downs on the road before you. If you find this podcast helpful, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And I have a big request If you have a minute, can you leave us a five-star review and let us know what did you learn? What did you come away with? Did you leave with that spark of hope? This helps more people like you find the podcast. My mission is to support as many humans as possible on their path to become parents and by you sharing and subscribing, you're part of that mission too, and I'm so grateful for you for being here.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Welcome back to the Brilliant Fertility Podcast. I'm so excited for today's guest expert. If you guys have ever had questions about your gut health, how it ties into hormones and fertility, you do not want to miss this episode. I'm here with Dr Nikki Deneza. You may know her as the gut microbiome queen.

Speaker 2: 1:27

There's all these theatrics on screen if you're not watching this on YouTube.

Speaker 1: 1:31

You're going to probably want to go to YouTube because this is going to be a really fun conversation and you'll also want to see Nikki's art and there's just a lot of fun to this one. So head over to YouTube if you want to see us in action. But, nikki, I'm so thrilled to have you here, because when I think about gut health like you're the first person that I think about that I'm like, oh, I have to ask Nikki, and you've been so gracious in always answering my questions and like really getting nitty gritty and granular in the details, which I love.

Speaker 1: 2:11

Because, we can, you know we can nerd out on it, but then we can also go woo, which is really fun too.

Speaker 2: 2:14

Yeah, I think there's a time and a place for both in the gut health world, certainly.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Absolutely so, nikki. Thank you for being here being willing to have this conversation and I love to know because I don't know that I've ever asked you how you came to be in this world of gut health and IBS and SIBO and what led you here.

Speaker 2: 2:37

That's a valid question. You know, it's funny because I have experience, having had IBSD myself and I healed my own gut and I went on that journey from the patient's perspective. I wish I could say that's what actually got me into it, though For me I don't know if I was just being a dumb dummy or what, but it took me a while to circle back to the gut health thing, even though that was my thing when I was a patient. I'll try to shorten a very long story. So I was in grad school chiropractic school and I started having tubby issues and like bloating and diarrhea. But I was also a seminar addict. I'm still in recovery, by the way. I still love seminars, but I would go to a seminar or a conference pretty much every weekend and in the beginning it was a little bit of everything. I went to classes about orthotics and chiropractic technique and functional movement training and all of the seminars I could get my little hands on, until I landed at a functional medicine seminar and this guy just blew my mind. I went into it thinking this is going to be a two-hour class on the thyroid. Big whoop-dee-doo. It's this little tiny gland. How are you going to talk about it for two hours, bro, and then Datis Karazian blew my socks off and it was like he was talking about my mom the entire time.

Speaker 2: 3:59

It was the story of a patient with Hashimoto's, and very frequently they start to feel like crap. They're told hey, you're hypothyroid, take this pill. They get put on Synthroid or Levo or whatever. Their numbers normalize their TSH looks good. The doctors go, cool, we're done, see you next year to check your TSH. But they still feel like death warmed over. But now nobody is going to pay attention to those thyroid symptoms because your thyroid is fine as far as conventional medicine is concerned. But in actuality these people have an autoimmune condition and they have inflammation and they have root causes that have yet to be addressed.

Speaker 2: 4:37

So anyway, he talks about this story, this version of the hypothyroid story, and I'm like you're telling my mom's story, holy crap. So I got into you're telling my mom's story, holy crap. So I got into functional medicine initially to help her. And you know, like called her up one day I was like mom, we're going gluten free, like come on, we're going to do this elimination diet kind of stuff and heal your gut and all of that jazz. And I think it was honestly in the process of doing the elimination diets and going gluten free. I think that's when my IBSD actually started funny enough, and I hypothesize now many years down the road and many research articles, written, read. Written is a word, right, I just made that up on the fly. It's okay, edit that out. But seriously, like I've read a lot of articles and I've come to understand the body more deeply since then and I think what happened was I was probably not getting enough dietary fiber in my diet as 95% of Americans do not do that.

Speaker 2: 5:37

And then I went gluten-free and I removed basically the one prebiotic fiber source that I had in my diet at the time and gave myself a deepened state of dysbiosis. So that's kind of what I think was going on. Then Eventually healed my gut. At the time the thing that everybody talked about was leaky gut. So I was convinced I had leaky gut. I spent all of my money from my personal training job on like L-glutamine supplements and you know, repairvite and all of that crap. I did restrictive diets. I cut out anything that could be construed as inflammatory or triggery. I joke, I did AIP before it was cool. I did AIP before it was called AIP. I basically just hacked stuff out of my diet and I did that for probably three years and it didn't really work, frankly, pardon me.

Speaker 2: 6:24

And then I sort of accidentally found things that worked as time went on and a lot of those things for me happened to be more in the flavor of like stress management stuff.

Speaker 2: 6:34

So moving out of a stressful living situation with a roommate who now in retrospect I think is bipolar and was difficult to live with, getting out of the long distance relationship I was in and then moving in with my then boyfriend, now husband, and not not having to do the long distancing anymore.

Speaker 2: 6:50

So those were the big things that really helped me. And then diversifying my diet I think overall helped me quite a lot, but anyway. So all of this mishmash helped my mom, healed my gut, got through like what I thought was a leaky gut journey, but probably was not. And then, years later, I was in clinical practice and I initially set out to help people like my mom and I thought, okay, like Hashimoto's autoimmune conditions, this is going to be my group of people. And because everything is connected to everything else, you get people who have hypothyroidism, but also they have IBS. Also, they've been told they have SIBO, also they have XYZ, and so I happened to work with a small handful of SIBO patients in the early years, like back when it was starting to come on the scene in like 2015, 2016.

Speaker 1: 7:38

I would say about 10 years ago. That's when I remember the SIBO people coming into our office and giving presentations.

Speaker 2: 7:43

Yeah, and, like the SIBO, summits were happening on the internet and the Facebook groups were starting to really pop off.

Speaker 2: 7:49

So I worked with a small handful of SIBO patients in those early years and, after some fiddling and figuring things out, I started kicking ass at that and people felt a lot better and they had been to eight different functional doctors and naturopaths and dieticians and whatever, and I was the first person who was able to help them and I was able to help them diversify their diet, not restrict their diet, and we got them off of the antimicrobials that they had been overusing for years. And so I just kind of like observed that and said you know what I think? This is actually my, my group of people, this is who I need to help. So I slowly pivoted away from the autoimmune hypothyroid stuff although I still pulled that near and dear to my heart and just started doing more of the same and helping more people with IBS and SIBO and everything in between. So bloating, constipation, diarrhea, feeling like a brick of lead that's stuck in your gullet and you're not digesting your food well, those are my peeps.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Those are your peeps and thank you for sharing that. I feel like there's such an overlap between gut health and almost every other system can have involvement. So for people who are maybe struggling with gut health or maybe just interested in learning more about gut health, like tell us what is happening in the gut, like what makes it so important as a system that it can influence all these other areas- oh gosh, that could be an hour long conversation right there. It could.

Speaker 2: 9:19

I know Probably there's two areas that are easiest for people to wrap their head around. I think, and that is a, that you need nutrients to heal your tissues and run your body Right, so like, if you want to make neurotransmitters, you need the amino acids from protein and you need the vitamins and minerals and the compounds necessary to literally, like, piece that together and make those neurotransmitters. If you want to make hormones, you need the protein and the vitamins and minerals and the building blocks and the energy to make hormones. You know, it's like if you're trying to build a house but you don't have any bricks and you don't have any wood and you don't have any nails and you have like two blades of grass and one screw and you're tasked with building a house. Good luck to you. You need the building blocks, you need the supplies and all of that is coming through your gut right, like that's where the food is and that's where we're absorbing our food and absorbing these nutrients. So if your ability to absorb or digest or otherwise assimilate these nutrients is compromised, that could affect every single cell in the body.

Speaker 2: 10:28

I think the other thing that is getting more airtime, thankfully, is this concept that most of your immune system lives in the gut, or I should say around the gut, kind of like sentinels guarding a castle, kind of hanging out by the moat, right, good old Galt, a castle kind of hanging out by the moat, right, good old Galt. Yeah, and about 70 some odd percent of your immune system hangs out around the gut smartly, because that's where a lot of pathogen exposure happens and they are poised and ready to react or stand down depending on what's going on in the gut. So if you have a healthy gut microbiome and you have a reasonably healthy diet, your immune system is going to get tolerance signals right, like chill, stand down, it's okay, and your immune system will not be activated and inflamed. If you have an unhealthy diet or an unhealthy microbiome and there's a lot more pathogens, a lot more like candida and that sort of stuff, your immune system is, rightfully so, going to launch into attack mode and try to protect you, and you know that's going to generate a lot of inflammation.

Speaker 2: 11:32

I think a lot of what we tend to label as inflammation boils down to an activated immune system and that could be an okay thing if you're trying to fight a pathogen right, like if you have the flu, you want to have a fever and you want to have some of these symptoms. You want to have an activated immune system so that you can smoke out that virus and go about your normal life again. But persistent inflammation that never ends and is there day after day after day after day, and persistent immune activation that never ends that's where we start getting into trouble and we see all of these inflammatory and like autoimmune conditions popping up, and a lot of them can stem, at least partially, from the gut.

Speaker 1: 12:14

And as far as it's concerned with hormones, what I see frequently is if we have that long standing chronic inflammation and then we have the body, you know, thinking it's being very wise trying to put out that fire by putting out more cortisol, because cortisol is initially an anti-inflammatory hormone but then we have longstanding chronic stress activation and I see a frequent pattern that occurs where once we have that inflammation and then we have the stress hormone activation, we get into a vicious cycle and people don't know how to exit that cycle. So they'll try, you know, numerous diets and supplements and programs and protocols and detoxes and run themselves into the ground doing these things that become more and more restrictive.

Speaker 2: 13:02

Which ironically makes the stress worse. Right, like it's the equivalent of complaining that you're in a hole, but also like you're digging with a new shiny shovel every couple of weeks. It makes sense how people get into that, especially because in the early stages you don't realize that you're standing in a hole. Right, because maybe the hole is only like three or four inches deep. But again, it's every typically every practitioner, every functional doc, every nutritionist, every naturopath that comes along oftentimes is handing you a new shiny shovel, a new shiny diet. Oh, you need to do a low sulfur diet. You need to do the FODMAP diet, you need to do AIP. You need to cut out these 30 different foods that popped up on a food sensitivity test. You need to do this and like kill the SIBO, inhibit, starve, and it's really taxing on the body and it's really stressful for the human being who's ultimately just trying to live their life and try to feel good.

Speaker 1: 13:58

Yeah, so in that litany, you mentioned one of the tests that I want to bring up, which is food sensitivity testing, because I think when people are trying to get answers, one of the things they reach for first is what test will give me the answers which I understand? I have been there, I have done the food sensitivity testings, I have done the microbiome testing. Part of having an autoimmune chronic pain condition is you want answers? Yeah, so with these tests and with things like the food allergen tests, the GI mapping type tests, are any of these really giving an answer that will lead us towards a curative solution or actually helping someone feel better?

Speaker 2: 14:46

Oh, this is another three-hour conversation, but I'll try to be concise for once in my life, the short answer is probably not no and honestly, like we have an entire episode of our podcast where we titled it Test, Don't Guess, and that is the rhetoric that is spilled forth. I don't know about your community like the naturopathic community so much, but definitely that slogan is very prominent in functional medicine and it's frankly, it's it's marketing at its finest Right. Like, you can't order these special, fancy, ultra cool tests. You can't interpret these fancy, super cool, fun tests. You need me, the expert, to order the GI maps and the adrenal tests and the food sensitivity tests and you need me to guide you. And it's a bunch of malarkey.

Speaker 2: 15:37

I'm at the point with my practice, honestly, that I very rarely order functional testing, and by very rarely I mean like once every two years. Maybe I will feel the itch to do something like that, and usually it's a little bit more like prompted by the patient rather than me. I think that we could get the data we need 90 plus percent of the time from boring old LabCorp Quest type stuff. Do a thyroid panel, check your iron, check your ferritin, run a CBC with differential, maybe a metabolic panel. It doesn't have to be super fancy and super sexy, and I think for a couple of reasons.

Speaker 2: 16:17

A all of the functional medicine testing companies are operating for profit. That doesn't intrinsically make them crooked, but it is something to be aware of and I think I could speak for both of our worlds because there's obviously since functional medicine is basically bastardized naturopathic medicine, I feel like there's. I could use the two semi interchangeably, but just know that. I know that they're different, but at least at my seminars you go there and the seminars are heavily funded by, or entirely sponsored by, lab companies and supplement companies. And, like when I had a brick and mortar office, I had these lab companies and these supplement companies come to my door and offer to do like little in-house seminars and they offered to bring me lunch and they offered to give me free product or a free whatever test. And it's the same problem that we rail on conventional medicine for right, Like, oh, the pharmaceutical reps are going in and buying the whole clinic lunch.

Speaker 1: 17:18

And then that doctor. How is that different from the nutraceutical reps doing the same thing?

Speaker 2: 17:22

It's not, it's just it's on a smaller scale, like the nutraceutical reps doing the same thing. It's not, it's on a smaller scale. Pure encapsulations is not going to send you to Bermuda, probably, but a lot of these companies are still doing the exact same things that we criticize conventional medicine for. It's just on a smaller scale because they have a bit of a smaller budget to work with. But there's a lot of sales and marketing involved in convincing doctors to order your test and there's a lot of marketing dollars spent on that because it's very lucrative for the companies.

Speaker 2: 17:59

But when you get into something like so specifically with something like food sensitivity testing I'm going to confess this was a big part of my journey in the beginning, like I did sensitivity testing and I felt like some of that information did help me. But now I rationalize it as well. A broken clock is right twice a day. Right, like out of the 10 or 30 or whatever foods that that test shows you. Maybe a few of them are correct, but that doesn't really speak to the quality of the test so much as it is like of course you're going to get a couple of right. So, for example, for me, my mom's side of the family is riddled with autoimmune disease, particularly autoimmune diseases that tend to co-occur with celiac disease. So we have Hashimoto's, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, that, and pertinacious anemia. That's like the five-fecta of things that clump together along with celiac disease.

Speaker 2: 18:54

So is it really rocket science to figure out that I have a problem with gluten and maybe I'm a celiac and maybe I should stay away from gluten? I don't know. Did I need to spend $300, whatever dollars, on a gluten panel from Cyrex to figure that out? Probably not. I could have just gone to my PCP or my GI doctor or whatever and I could have just gotten evaluated. But again, my point is again, I think sometimes people will defend food sensitivity tests and they'll say but it correctly diagnosed my gluten issue or my dairy issue or my whatever issue. And again I go back to a broken clock is right twice a day. If you throw darts at 30 different foods, one or two of them are probably correct and you probably could have figured that out either for cheaper or with less restriction on your diet had you pursued other means less restriction on your diet, had you pursued other means, but food sensitivity tests by and large, they're going to show you what you've been exposed to A really classic scenario.

Speaker 1: 19:53

Yes, if you've been eating the same thing every day, it's going to show you that you're sensitive to all those things you eat every day, and most people do right.

Speaker 2: 19:58

We typically don't eat a diverse diet and, again, fiber deprived, which is also horrible for your gut and your immune system. But also we tend to fall back on the same kind of patterns and the same recipes and the same restaurants. So, yeah, you know, if you eat eggs every single day for breakfast and then you do a food sensitivity test, it's going to show you that you're hella sensitive to eggs. You're probably not sensitive to them, it's just you have a lot of exposure because you eat them every day. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and one of my favorite ways that I heard this explained was I think it was Alex Vasquez.

Speaker 2: 20:35

He said in every other field of medicine we see antibodies as a form of exposure or protection. Right Like, if you did Epstein-Barr virus antibodies, we would say not, oh, my God, you have mono right now. We would say, oh, you had mono once, you had had an exposure at some point in your lifetime and now you have these antibodies. Cool for you. If we are talking about COVID, right Like, this was a big topic five years ago. If you have positive COVID antibodies in your blood, we would say you either had COVID or you got the vaccine and, yeah, you have some protection against that. Now, you had that exposure, your immune system remembers Hooray for you. So where does the disconnect happen when we look at antibodies against food on a different piece of paper and now we're saying, oh, those foods are horrible and inflammatory and bad for you, but like it doesn't really make a lot of sense. And then you mentioned one of my other favorites, which is the GI map, and just functional in general, I know good old as a side note.

Speaker 2: 21:41

So can we go back for a second? Do you remember when the GI map came on the scene, by the way, because I distinctly remember it and it was weird.

Speaker 1: 21:52

I don't know if I could say, if I distinctly remember it, because I think there were several companies that were sort of competing for this slot of like best functional GI tests between doctors, data and Genova and and the GI map, and so yeah, so I don't remember when those two had been like the two big tests for quite a while and and like they had been there for years and years.

Speaker 2: 22:20

And then, as I remember it, I used to hang out a lot in functional medicine like practitioner Facebook groups. I don't anymore, I've decided they're bad for my mental health to hang out there for reasons we can talk about later. But I remember it was like overnight. We went from. The GI map literally did not exist. Nobody knew what that meant to. It was the world's most popular test out of the blue. That meant to it was the world's most popular test out of the blue. And what was interesting is they had a very similar trajectory as the Dutch test, like the hormone test. Both of those companies overnight success out of the blue.

Speaker 1: 22:56

Everybody knew what it was and it was the best thing ever in the whole wide universe and I definitely remember when Dutch came on the scene, because that's very relevant for my community.

Speaker 2: 23:04

Yeah, yeah, and the thing about both of them was, out of the blue, they both had really big names endorsing them. So I think this was a very intentional marketing strategy to get. So I remember Dan Kalish and Chris Kresser were two of the big names. And Chris Kresser if you remember 10 years ago, chris Kresser was enormous. He was like Michael Jordan to us. So you get these really big names, really high profile names with websites that get a lot of traffic and names that are recognizable in the community. Both of these companies got really big endorsements right out the gate and so they got almost like a cheat code to get buy in in a very short amount of time. And then it was like they had the oh, this is new and exciting kind of energy, but also the holy shit, dan Kalish endorses this company. Whoa, it must be good kind of energy. And so that's how both of these companies apparently became overnight successes and kind of became synonymous with their variety of testing.

Speaker 2: 24:07

Right Like people oftentimes would come to me and say, not, I want my hormones tested, they would specifically ask for a Dutch test. And people oftentimes will come to me now and not say I want to do a stool test. They will say should I get a GI map or can you order a GI map? And it was just. It was fascinating to watch from like a business owner brain perspective and see like the marketing at play. But anyway, my my rambling point here a couple fold.

Speaker 2: 24:36

So, first off, I think I shared with you that some time ago when we were talking off camera. But a few years ago I actually became incredibly suspicious of the GI map and I became suspicious of patterns that I was seeing. And there was a summer, probably about three or so years ago, there was a summer where I got back to back supposed Giardia infections on like five or six different patients all back to back to back and they were all in different areas of the country, different lives, different everything, and most of these people it made not one lick of sense why they would have Giardia. So I remember the first one came back and I was like holy macaroni, you have Giardia, we'd better treat that Damn. And then the second one came back and I was like whoa, that's crazy, I just had a Giardia case come in last week. That's wild, let's treat it. And then the third one came in and I was like huh, okay, and I kind of told the patient like I'm starting to become a little suspicious of the validity of this test. But let's have you do some garlic and like try to treat it anyway, just do it, doing so gently. And then the fourth, and then the fifth, and then the sixth, all in a row, came back as supposedly being positive for Giardia.

Speaker 2: 25:51

And I was like the poop queen smells shit people. This is not. This cannot possibly be correct. And I remember one lady. She had a newborn baby and two young children and I was like kind of joking with her. I was like wow, good for you that you guys went like camping and went outside and like drank some creek water with a newborn. Like wow, that's incredible, good for you, man. And she was like I have not left my house in weeks. I'm like okay, well, the odds of you having Giardia in the pipes in your house are pretty slim to none, so I don't think you have Giardia.

Speaker 1: 26:27

So what's going on here?

Speaker 2: 26:29

Yeah, yeah, as the kids would say, it was very sus See, I'm young, I'm hip, I could say that, but anyhow. So I became more suspicious than I ever had been of that test, and so I had been of that test. And so I had two, two of my people I think one was a private patient and one was a FODMAP Freedom student. I had them volunteer to do side by side stool tests. So I had them. Each of these people collected a stool sample, stirred it to the best of their ability, you know, tried to homogenize it to the best of their ability, and then they packaged it in two separate GI map containers under different names, different return address, different date of birth, different everything, and we sent it in. So same day, same poop, same person, two different tests and we got back wildly, wildly different results. I'm talking like the. It was a man and a woman. So the woman who did the sample for me one of her samples said she had Giardia, their favorite apparently. The other sample said no Giardia whatsoever was detected. The dude one of his said that he had one of the bad E coli's from page one. I don't remember which one it was, but one of the nasty E coli's from the first page of the report and then the other one said no morsel of E coli detected whatsoever. So I made a YouTube video about this and I brought this up and I, you know, I shared the split sample reporting for both people and there were a lot of other discrepancies for the record. But I brought this case up and I said how would you treat this? Like? Do you have the woman do a parasite cleanse or do you not? Do you have this guy do antibiotics or antimicrobials to treat the E coli or do you not? And you know it brings up this issue of like you're only ever collecting one stool sample and then we, the clinicians and the patients, are assuming that that's reflective of the entirety of our gut health, and it's probably not. I think that there's an issue with stool not being the same every day, so you're going to get little pockets potentially of different critters living in that stool sample versus the next day. Your diet is fluctuating and your microbiome is going to fluctuate with your diet and what you feed them. There might be an issue with companies. You know their accuracy or their reporting and how they're turning out the test, which is part of what I suspect here Another really big problem that we could get into is we don't have a good understanding of what a normal or perfect microbiome looks like.

Speaker 2: 29:10

That's not a thing yet. We can't really tell you with definitive proof. Yes, the ideal place for your bifidobacteria to be is 2.97863% of your microbiome. If it's anything over that, you're doomed. If it's anything below that, you're doomed.

Speaker 2: 29:25

We don't have that for any of these microbes yet, and we also don't have a microbial profile for any disease yet.

Speaker 2: 29:35

I would love to do a YouTube series on this topic, but like there are researchers spending a lot of time and effort and money trying to map out the microbiome of Crohn's disease, the microbiome of IBS, the microbiome of ulcerative colitis, of colon cancer, of, et cetera, et cetera, we don't have that yet.

Speaker 2: 29:52

Even within diseases there's a lot of variability and I don't think we're ever going to get a microbial profile for a disease.

Speaker 2: 29:59

But again, we don't even have the microbial profile of what a healthy, normal person should look like, and we don't even have the microbial profile of what a healthy, normal person should look like, and we don't have a great understanding of whether or not that healthy normal profile should change based on what type of diet they eat or where they live and like do they live in Europe or the United States? Do they live near the equator or in the far north? And like Maine, do they live? You know, do they eat a vegan diet or are they eating a carnivore diet? Like we are just in our infancy of understanding the microbiome and try to assess it. So then, to have a commercial test, again from a for profit company, to have a commercial test claim, this is the range you need to be between here and here. We know in our heart of hearts, and if it's outside that range, your doctor needs to treat you for something like it's. It's not as scientific and not as foolproof as people probably want it to feel.

Speaker 1: 30:57

Yeah, and where I was seeing issues with it, probably along the same timeline, because I remember where I was standing, like over my medical assistant's shoulder, showing her like this isn't adding up is for us it was like multiple people in a row coming back with positive H pylori who were not symptomatic for H pylori and similar to you. They came specifically asking for that test and, like you, you know you do a thorough history and questionnaire and say like, okay, there's enough going on, that like I could warrant running something outside of our standard blood work. But because it was so well marketed and it was like yeah, the thing, then we were, we were ordering quite a bit of these um gmaps and for us too, it was a lot of h pylori where it was like this isn't making sense. And then how do you treat this? Are you going to put someone on triple therapy and have them do a pretty intensive round of antibiotics and ppis? Are you going to try to do you our more natural version of treating H pylori?

Speaker 1: 32:01

And you know, unless someone was really symptomatic, I was so hesitant to throw them on anything and then thought, well, maybe let's run a hydrogen breath test through lab course and request see how that comes back first before we do anything next.

Speaker 1: 32:19

And again, this was not adding up for all of the people who were positive for the H pylori on the GI map or negative for H pylori when we ran the breath test and then it came out that you know there were a lot of false positives on the GI map for that particular microorganism. Then I started to really question should we be spending our money on this at all, or should we be focusing on these basics, like your nervous system regulation and diversifying your diet and getting more fiber, and really let's like let's zoom out and focus on the low hanging fruit of where most human beings actually need support and then, if we're still not seeing a result, let's come back to the table and see what we need to test. That would give us better answers, and that's how I feel about the Dutch test as well. It's not the first thing that I go to, but if someone's symptoms don't match what their lifestyle is reported as, then I'm going to be asking is there a test that could give us more information?

Speaker 2: 33:22

Yeah, and that's where I said I maybe run a functional test, like once every other year, because every now and then there are cases that really stump me in some way, but it's not very frequent. But the sad thing is and I say this as a human being too, so keep that in mind. But the sad thing is and I say this as a human being too, so keep that in mind None of us actually want to work on that stuff that you rattled off. So like sleep, stress management, movement, getting some sunshine on our cheeks every day, Like most of us Boring consistent things.

Speaker 2: 33:54

Most of us either don't want to do those things, right? I have a smartphone. I would absolutely love to scroll on this stupid little thing and watch K-pop music videos until 3am every night of my life. I would love that so much, but it would be terrible for me. So I don't right, but we're all addicted to our phones. We're all addicted to instant gratification and the internet and ordering things on Amazon Prime and getting it two hours later.

Speaker 2: 34:22

You know, we were in a world that doesn't intrinsically encourage consistency and healthy habits and like doing something even though it might not make you feel better in the moment, but it might help you feel better like three months from now. It's just. I think that's hard for human beings to do anyway, but the way the world is right now, it's especially hard for us. It's so much more tempting and it's so much easier and so much sexier to go and get a GI map test, Be told that you have a bad boogeyman. Nothing about your health, nothing about your situation is your fault. You have a bad guy in your gut. It is the bad guy's fault. You are innocent, dear schnookie poo, and you just need to nuke this bad guy with antimicrobials, starve it with a diet for a few weeks and then bada bing, bada boom, you get to feel amazing and lead your shitty lifestyle and eat your shitty diet.

Speaker 1: 35:17

Here's your $500 supplement kit. And yeah, it's part of that. Let's get some quick dopamine. Let's not take responsibility for what's really going on and I get it because I've been there also. I think a lot of us have really, we've really had to circle the drain a few times before we have the come to Jesus moment. But the reality of slowing down, processing emotions, dealing with trauma, yeah, see ick boo. Nobody wants to do that.

Speaker 2: 35:52

No. And again, like we're human too, right. Like I totally get it. I don't. I don't want to do any of this crap either. It's just, it's like brushing your teeth, right. Like I totally get it. I don't, I don't want to do any of this crap either. It's just, it's like brushing your teeth, right. Nobody actually likes brushing their teeth, but we all do it anyway. We suck it up because we know that if we don't, our teeth are going to fall out of our head and we're going to have dentures at the age of 40. So, you know, you just suck it up and you do the thing every day. Well, I hope we all do.

Speaker 1: 36:21

I hope everyone's brushing their teeth yes.

Speaker 2: 36:25

If you don't brush your teeth, please start, because your teeth are connected to a lot more than you realize. To be like no judgment, it's just we have to. We have to suck it up a little bit. I had a student in my program just last week. On the Q&A we were talking about digestion and connecting with your food and the importance of actually paying attention to what you're eating and maybe slowing down and taking the time to process your food, and he confessed that he's addicted to screens and he falls asleep with his phone or a tablet right here in front of his face. Every meal that he eats he's staring at a phone or a tablet or a computer. If he goes out to a restaurant with friends, he's not paying attention to the people at the table, he's on his phone the whole time.

Speaker 2: 37:10

And you know we were talking about like is it possible for him to heal his gut if he does not address the screen addiction which has been for his entire life?

Speaker 2: 37:18

He's 26 now and it's his whole life he's been staring at screens like that and I was like it might be possible, but I'm not going to place a bet on it. I think that that needs to be part of what you do here and that's going to be really hard for him and it's going to feel really uncomfortable and icky and he's going to feel the pull to go back to the screens and I just I think it's going to be huge for him both from a digestion standpoint at a sleep and a mental health standpoint. But that's a great example. He's been to so many doctors, he's had procedures, he's taken antibiotics. He was told he had SIBO and he hammered the snot out of that. He was told he had gastritis and worked on that like he's done all of the things in the conventional medical and the functional space. And this is the first time that something like screen addiction and like paying attention to your food actually came up in in the course of trying to heal his gut.

Speaker 1: 38:16

Wow, part of part of me is like ooh, there's such opportunity here for healing and you know, getting into like the subconscious, reprogramming and like wondering like, well, what is the screen giving him that he really needs on a deeper level? Yeah, my hypnosis nerd is coming out of like, oh, what's there?

Speaker 2: 38:35

Well, it makes me wonder, because I see kids like in my personal life. I see kids that are addicted to screens and again, it sounds like for him it was part of his life, before he even realized what was happening, like he was just raised on screens, and so it makes me worry that we're going to see a lot more of this as time goes on. And then, like clinically, somebody like that could go into one of our clinics or work with us in practice and we could be scratching our heads and thinking, oh, this is a really tough patient, he has a really tough case, this is a really stubborn case of SIBO, et cetera, et cetera. And if you don't ask the right questions and if you don't make the space for having real conversations with your patients, you might miss something like this. And it could be that he does not have a stubborn case of SIBO, it's that his nervous system is jacked up because he's staring at a screen literally 24 hours a day.

Speaker 1: 39:33

Yeah, I know we're getting a little off topic from where we need to go, but this is part of it, like this is part of the human existence right now, and with um I have a nine-year-old and a five-year-old and almost nine-year-old he. He is absolutely someone who I have noted in his personality that there are tendencies and when it comes to screens, we have to be really on top of it, even if it means we're the bad guy, yep, and our kid doesn't like us some days because that you know, you've had your 30 minutes and that's enough.

Speaker 2: 40:08

Yeah, yeah, we even we adopted a rule because we have a nine-year-old daughter and our rule is no screen time whatsoever during the school week. Screen time whatsoever during the school week. So Sunday night at 8pm, all the way through until she gets home on Friday night from school, no screens, no TV, no tablet, no, nothing. And then she can kind of have at it on the weekends, basically, or on on school breaks. But then even something like the tablet has a two hour timer on it. So that's the absolute maximum she could do in a single day on the tablet. And she hates it. Oh my God.

Speaker 2: 40:42

She would tell anybody with a pair of ears that she hates it and we're tyrants, we're horrible, evil parents. And she would tell you with a straight face that she could moderate her consumption of screen time. And if you would just let her have some screen time during the week, she would only go on for half an hour. And she super promises, pinky promises that she would. And we've tried to explain to her. Like no, these things are addictive, they suck you in. You're not as in control as you think you are. That's why we moderate it the way we do. But who's?

Speaker 1: 41:10

moderating it for us as adults.

Speaker 2: 41:13

Oh, nobody. Yeah, that's the thing. That's on us Well and if you have a roommate or a spouse or a loved one that you live with, you can kind of be accountability buddies for each other. But both people want to have, to want to participate in that. I think screens are more of an issue for my husband and I than my husband thinks, so he's not a very good accountability buddy because he I don't think he's had that come to Jesus moment for himself yet.

Speaker 1: 41:37

He understands the importance for our daughter, but not yet for himself, yeah, so it's so interesting and I think it's a really important thing to have brought up. I don't know that we've talked about it at all on the podcast yet, so I'm glad it's coming up that this is part of what can impact other health issues, and we cannot just look at a system in a vacuum.

Speaker 2: 42:00

And you can't just run a GI map and think that you understand the totality of your gut, because for all that, I'm sure you've heard this right and actually I feel like naturopaths are partially to blame for this this idea that all disease begins in the gut, right Like that's your guys' shit, that's your jam, you have that in like textbooks and stuff, oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 42:22

And that and that's why I've got people come coming to me for fertility purposes I that are saying I think I just need to heal my gut. Or I spent $5,000 on this program for gut healing because I was told that the root of my infertility is related to what's going on in my gut and I, you know, there's a part of my brain that just wants to like scream into the void. And then there's a part of me that's a lot more diplomatic and is like hey, I get it. Like we all want answers, we want to be able to like just do a protocol and get a result.

Speaker 1: 43:02

And the gut is responsible for some of what's happening hormonally, like we already talked about nutrient absorption huge, and we have phase three estrogen metabolism happening in the gut. So if we're really backed up and we're just, you know, hanging on to a lot of our toxins and hormone metabolites, we're just going to recirculate those. But again, a lot of low hanging fruit that we can do in the lifestyle before we do really complicated, really restrictive things or really expensive testing that honestly, I don't see great results, even when you treat off of those test numbers, and so I'm really cautious about how I approach it with testing and telling someone that you know you can't put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to fertility and blaming it all on gut health, like we have to look at the whole picture. We have to look at the lifestyle and and your immune system and some of that's happening in the gut and it's important, but it's it's not everything.

Speaker 2: 44:10

It's not the only thing. It's this big promise. Right, if you just fix the gut, then everything else will be happy, schmappy and puppies and rainbows. And you know I'm not gonna poo poo the idea that the gut is important. The gut is very important and you know, even beyond the things that we talked about, something like 20% of the population has IBS. That's a pretty fair chunk of the population who has tummy symptoms, let alone maybe more subtle things that maybe aren't getting diagnosed or aren't getting paid attention to. So I do think a lot of people have gut problems again, perhaps in part because 95% of Americans do not eat enough dietary fiber. Holy crap, that's a horrifying statistic. But it's not to say that the gut is the only thing that matters. If it was, we wouldn't have other fields of medicine. We would just fire all of the oncologists, we would fire all of the endocrinologists, we would fire all of the dermatologists and we would only ever have GI doctors and functional GI naturopath people. And that's the entirety of what we would have in medicine, and that's not how it works. So we have these other specialties and that's the entirety of what we would have in medicine, and that's not how it works. So we have these other specialties. And yeah, it's, it's.

Speaker 2: 45:26

I find a lot of people get their hopes up, thinking that if they heal their gut they're going to heal all of their other stuff. And you know, sometimes that pans out and sometimes it doesn't. But I think, especially if you put all of the eggs in the basket of, not only if I heal my gut, everything else will fall into line. But if I heal my gut and make this test look perfect Like if your flavor of healing your gut is just doing expensive tests and trying to make the test look perfect and doing restrictive diets and harsh treatments and antibiotics and doing everything humanly possible to get that test to look perfect, then I think that flavor of healing your gut is really going to set you up for disaster. Oh, it's not really living either.

Speaker 1: 46:13

So you're putting all of this emphasis on just this one number and then if you don't, if you don't actually hit that perfect test result, then what? What is that? What are you making it mean about yourself? What is your life looking like to make that happen? Is it actually resulting in health?

Speaker 2: 46:29

And I'll throw this out there too. I've seen this numerous times, but one in particular stands out to me, perhaps because it was so glaring, but perhaps because it I think it was the last GI map I ever ran. But um, um, oh. And as a quick side, since I forgot to mention this earlier, unfortunately my YouTube videos about the GI map are no longer on YouTube because the company's response was to threaten to sue me. So if people are listening and thinking, ooh, I'm going to go find those videos, don't even bother. I had to scrub them.

Speaker 1: 46:58

You got to get all the tea here.

Speaker 2: 47:01

Like they suck. So bad man. I could tell you the whole story, but but I won't. But, um, so my my point.

Speaker 2: 47:08

Coming back to that, um, I remember one of the last GI maps I ran and it was a man who had he had a lot of neurological involvement in his case. And I remember telling the wife I don't know if I'm going to be the right fit, I don't think that his tummy symptoms are primarily coming from the GI area, like I think that there's a lot more neurological involvement and you might want to go more that direction. But but for whatever reason, they thought I was it and we did a GI map and he came back with the most insane number I've ever seen for Pseudomonas arginosa. It was like 10,000 times the upper limit of what the GI map says is normal. And I was already very skeptical of the test at that point. But when I saw that kind of number I was like damn okay, even if they're a little bit off on their ranges, that's probably relevant enough that we should do something about it. So we did. So I put them on some natural antimicrobials and maybe like a biofilm disruptor I forget now, but we did something with the goal of treating that, continued working together, continued checking in. We redid the GI map maybe two or three months later, after the whole protocol had finished and that bad bacteria was completely gone, went from 10,000 fold higher than what it should be to zero. His symptoms did not change even 1%. He felt exactly the same as he did the day I met him, and that was another thing that I was like okay, what is the freaking point? Is it possible that the first test was incorrect and he did not have pseudomonas? Is it possible that the second test is incorrect and we really didn't get rid of it? Or is it possible that this bacteria had nothing to do with his symptoms and we were chasing the wrong goose? Or is it some combination of three of those factors? But I'm just going to tell you that man spent what 600, some odd dollars on two GI map tests and a lot and more money on supplements, biofilm, disruptors, and we got the desired result, meaning his test looked better and he didn't feel better.

Speaker 2: 49:23

And I feel like that's something that people miss too. Is that oftentimes we are so in the pursuit of the perfect stool test or the negative SIBO test or the negative candida test we forget that the whole freaking point of this is to feel better and to be healthier. So at some point I think I gave birth to this conceptual framework. Feel free to borrow it.

Speaker 2: 49:46

But I think that a lot of what people do is that they are trying to push away from disease. Right Like, oh, I don't want SIBO anymore, I don't want candida, I'm going to shove that thing over this direction and I want to get myself away from that disease process. And after you do that, for months or years or decades, your arms are going to be tired, right Like you've been engaging these same muscles pushing away from disease and making precious little progress. So what I encourage people to do is if you could trust the process that I lay forth for just like a half a second, if you can trust the process that I lay forth for just like a half a second, if you could trust the process a little tiny bit and drop your arms and focus on a new target and start pulling yourself towards health rather than try to repel disease, I promise it will work. It does. That's so much more helpful for people and we can model that and understand if we're trying to push ourselves away from disease.

Speaker 2: 50:49

There's this piece of that energy. That means we have to fully understand the disease, right? And that's where the testing comes in. Oh, if you don't know what you're dealing with, you're never going to lick it. If you don't know what pathogen to target and kill, you're never going to kill it. You have to know the specific marker that's elevated on your oat, where you're never going to address this thing. You need to know all of the things versus. And we don't like, we don't know all of that. Research is not done, science is not done. Our understanding of the gut, especially as in its infancy, we don't know all of the things yet. And that's OK. That's just where we are in human evolution.

Speaker 2: 51:34

Something like 80% of the GI microbiome cannot be cultured, so it's very difficult to study about 80% of the microbes in our gut. And then something like that's kind of a big deal. And then something like 50% of the microbes in our gut, and then something like kind of a big deal. And then something like 50% of the microbes in our gut don't even have names yet Names, names like so there's no research papers on them, right? We're not going to have a research paper on bacteria 9021056983xyz. We're going to have papers about Bifidobacterium infantis. We're going to have papers on Lactobacillus acidophilus. We write papers and we study in depth the things that have a name first. So that means 50% of the microbes in your gut we basically have no research on because we haven't even bothered to name them yet.

Speaker 2: 52:17

And so we, in this lifetime, anybody who is alive and listening right now, today it is not possible in our lifetime to know enough to accurately push yourself away from all of the GI diseases and all of the GI bugs, because we simply will not know all of them in our lifetime, and that's terrifying and depressing until you realize there's another option, right? You don't have to push away from Pseudomonas arginosa. You don't have to push away from Klebsiella pneumoniae. You don't have to push away from insert name of favorite bacteria or yeast. You can pivot and you can pull yourself towards health, and that's something that we know a lot about.

Speaker 2: 52:59

We know a lot about what nutrition, what nutrients, human beings need to be healthy. We know a lot about the fact that humans need sleep. We know that stress and mental health struggles are damaging to our body health and our mental health and that we need to do more to manage our mental load and our stress load our mental load and our stress load. We know that human beings are not made to live in a deep, dark cave. We do well getting a little bit of sunshine on our cheeks every day. We know that movement is good for the human body. You don't have to get lost in the weeds of what kind of movement, and should I do weightlifting or yoga, but there are certain tenets of human health that we know very, very well. So it's much easier to target those things and pull yourself towards those health promoting things, as opposed to trying to repel yourself from the next Hollywood microbe.

Speaker 1: 53:47

Yeah, and I actually love it because I don't have to borrow it, because I have my own version of that. Yeah, can.

Speaker 2: 53:54

I hear your version.

Speaker 1: 53:54

It's evolved from my work with hypnosis and the subconscious and is that when we are so entirely fixated on what is going wrong, what we need to fix it is putting so much of our mental, emotional and therefore physical energy, because where our attention goes, the energy flows right. And so when we can shift into, well, what want? I want to feel better, I want to wake up and feel free and easy in my body so that I can go about my day and do the things that I enjoy. I want to just be able to have a five minute in and out the door poop, be done with that for the day and carry on like.

Speaker 1: 54:40

There are so many elements that I think we get lost in the weeds of the suffering and the fixing and the what's wrong, that we forget that we can actually pivot that focus on. What do I want? What would my attention go towards if I decided that I am worthy of feeling good, that I deserve to be healthy, that I am a good enough person to have human connection, because I think human connection is lacking in so many of these disease states. And so, yes, when we can shift that like, what am I looking forward to? What am I looking towards and put intention there every day. It doesn't have to be your entire day, it can be 30 seconds as you're waking up. What is my intention? What can I move toward that really allows for change to happen?

Speaker 1: 55:35

Yeah Well that's part of our brain to see that like what's possible instead of what is this hell that I've been living in.

Speaker 2: 55:41

Yeah, well, and you said at the beginning of the episode that we could get a little woo. It's kind of manifestation, right. Like if you spend your day thinking about diarrhea, then maybe you're going to manifest more diarrhea, like if that's too woo for some people, okay, but you know it, it makes sense. Like the example I've heard before is, if I tell you right now, do not think of pink elephants, what immediately pops into your brain is a fricking pink elephant.

Speaker 2: 56:13

And I don't know why, but every time I've heard that publicly, like they always go for an elephant, and now my brain is stuck in that version of the story.

Speaker 2: 56:20

But anyway, I think similarly, if you spend your days reading about and researching and obsessing over and trying to treat and live your life around SIBO or candida or infertility or leaky gut or whatever, I think that there is there's like a neurological component to this and an energetic component of you're going to bring more of that into your life, whether you want to or not.

Speaker 2: 56:46

Versus, if you could picture what your health would or what your, your life would look like when you're healthy, like, what would I do? Would I play a game of tennis? Would I go with my friend to that concert that she invited me to? Would I go to the potluck when my neighbors get together? Would I go with my friend to that concert that she invited me to? Would I go to the potluck when my neighbors get together? Would I go visit my mom more? Would I take my kids out for ice cream? Like whatever that looks like for you? But trying to get out of this headspace of obsessing over the disease or the symptom and getting into a headspace of acting like a healthy human being could be a really hard pivot for people, because for some people that's all they've ever known.

Speaker 1: 57:26

Maybe they've been sick for the majority of their life and they can't even visualize the other side of it, and this is why you don't have to do it alone. That's maybe where we come in as helpers and facilitators, and not fixers, but saying, hey, you don't have to do this alone. You can have a person who's in your corner, who can give you ideas and help facilitate this and hold your hand a little bit as you walk this path.

Speaker 2: 57:57

Just connection too, like just talking about it with somebody, can help, even if that person doesn't help you at all. Just talking and connecting over it can do wonders. And that's going to strengthen your gut brain connection, for that matter, because in my research on the vagus nerve that nerve that connects the gut and the brain one of the best things for the vagus nerve is connection. So if we can facilitate as part of our efforts to become a healthy person, I think that's actually going to have a direct kind of treatment effect on the gut too.

Speaker 1: 58:33

Yes, oh gosh. I was like are we going to talk about the vagus? Because that's like a whole nother episode.

Speaker 2: 58:38

I mean, I would be happy to come back for a part two if need be.

Speaker 1: 58:41

Part two on the Vegas, because that's oh it's my favorite nerve to talk about and I think if maybe we could just leave listeners with a little bit of goodness about the Vegas, I can do that pretty easily, may I?

Speaker 2: 59:00

Yes, please. It's actually like it's not that complicated of a nerve at the end of the day. So here's what you do Everybody, get out your, your notepad and your pen Ready. So here's how you do the vagus nerve stuff and you're going to have perfect gut health, perfect poops, perfect hormones. Everything's going to be great.

Speaker 2: 59:17

First, you gargle vigorously for 10 minutes a day. You have to gargle vigorously enough that your eyes tear up. If you don't cry, you ain't doing it right. Then you go on Google and you Google search Vegas nerve stimulator device. You pick the fanciest looking gadget you can find, ideally the one that has like the electrodes, and you zap yourself in the neck every day 500 bucks. You buy not one, but two of those Can't be too safe. Then you go online and you find every vagus nerve supplement and every vagus nerve essential oil and you start wafting that every day. And now, congratulations, your vagus nerve is totally healed and you can live your normal life as planned. No modification necessary. Bada bing, bada, boom, bagel. T tone is yours for the taking, would you say? That was a good executive summary, katie.

Speaker 1: 1:00:05

It was pretty good. Yeah, I think people are going to have a lot of questions.

Speaker 2: 1:00:08

Oh, coffee enemas. That's the added bonus. If you really want to go above and beyond, you got to do your coffee enemas. Okay, now can I come back from being a jackass. Now can I come back from being a jackass? I was serious for a moment.

Speaker 2: 1:00:26

I really don't think the vagus nerve is a very complicated nerve. At the end of the day, however, the stupidity that you hear on the internet, sometimes from well-intentioned dummy practitioners, is this idea of, like we're going to trick the vagus nerve into doing our bidding. We're going to force the vagus nerve to activate because I want to digest my food God damn it. And therefore that's my goal, is all that matters, and I'm going to force this nerve to do what I want. And so we have this whole growing industry around stimulating bagel tone, right. So there are I shit you not.

Speaker 2: 1:01:05

There are numerous multiple hundred dollar vagus nerve stimulator devices. There is one where you do the zappy zappy on your neck. There are some that clip on the ears. There are some that it's like a wristwatch that you wear. There's all sorts of different gadgets, but there are many gadgets that claim to stimulate your vagus nerve. A lot of functional neurologists will tell you with a straight face the whole like gargle, until your eyes tear up thing and the neurological pathways are sound. That does engage the vagus nerve to some degree. So, like I understand the rationale behind that and there are. You know there is a vagus nerve essential oil. This is not, this is just cardamom. But you know there are essential oils that supposedly stimulate the vagus nerve. I'm sure they smell wonderful and I'm sure that some of the supplements were well formulated, but at the end of the day, the vagus nerve is just, and the rest of your nervous system for that matter. Your nervous system is assessing your safety and assessing your connection with the world around you, and if your nervous system decides that you are safe enough to rest and safe enough to digest your food, it will allow you to do that and it will allow the vagus nerve to do its job.

Speaker 2: 1:02:24

If, however, you live in fight or flight mode, you're constantly on the go, you're scarfing a granola bar, hurtling down the highway at 80 miles an hour on your way to the first meeting of the day, if you're getting reamed out by your boss in the middle of your lunch break, if you have a fight with your spouse at dinner, if you are in an abusive relationship, if you're not safe at home, if your nervous system deems that you are not safe and you're not connected and you don't have that community to rely on and those connections to rely on, you don't get the vagal tone thing that we all want.

Speaker 2: 1:02:57

You get in fight or flight mode, which is totally different physiology.

Speaker 2: 1:03:01

They oppose each other, and so we get people whose guts are not getting activated and not getting enough blood flow and we have tense muscles and rapid heart rate and high blood pressure and basically, like all of the modern diseases are at least somewhat linked with higher sympathetic tone. And so it's this, the seesaw right. This teeter-totter of you get one or the other and your nervous system is constantly deciding are you safe, are you connected? Yes or no? And depending on the answer to that, you will or you will not get bagel tone. And like I don't think we can trick this nerve into doing what we want, I don't think that we can have a nervous system that fully understands that you are not safe, you are not happy, you are not connected and that also allows us to digest our food and have amazing poops Like it. I know that this saying is incorrectly used a lot, but you can't have your cake and eat it too right, and I feel like that's what people are asking of the vagus nerve.

Speaker 1: 1:04:08

Thank you so much for saying that. So this is funny and you'll understand this reference. Maybe part of the audience will. But my domino belief is that when we create safety in the mind and body, conception can occur more easily, and so I will frequently see people who simultaneously have digestive issues while they are going through a fertility journey. And when we find the pathways for that unique individual to feel safe, guess what Digestion improves too. Menstrual cycles improve. Menstrual cycles improve. Maybe all those five rounds of IVF that they went through back to back to back to back that didn't work out, were part of what was creating that picture and ultimately rewinding to find out what does this person need to feel safe? That's going to look a little bit different for everyone, but I would say there's foundations that everyone can benefit from would say there's foundations that everyone can benefit from.

Speaker 2: 1:05:16

Again, safety and connection.

Speaker 2: 1:05:17

I think those are the two really, and, like the things that make you feel safe might vary a little bit.

Speaker 2: 1:05:22

Like I'm picturing if somebody grew up in a household where physical safety was an issue and they're you know they had an abusive parent or they saw their mom be in an abusive relationship.

Speaker 2: 1:05:37

Maybe the number one thing that makes them feel safe is like physical safety kind of stuff and like having a partner or a roommate who they feel safe around physically.

Speaker 2: 1:05:49

You know, if somebody grew up in a household where money was a big issue and they were constantly going hungry and they never had money for anything and they were teased for being the poor kid and you know they saw their mom going without dinner a lot because she was feeding the kids instead of herself, security is going to be a bigger piece of that safety puzzle for them because of what they grew up with and the trauma that they were exposed to. But I think that there's still tenets of what safety looks like for everybody that are going to be similar. It's just a matter of like how big some of these puzzle pieces are for you. And again, like physical safety, like food security, financial security, like just having a safe place to go to if you feel overwhelmed or scared, having a safe person to confide in if you are going through something difficult. I think these are important for everybody, but maybe like plus or minus a couple points, depending on your trauma.

Speaker 1: 1:06:47

Absolutely, and how I give people a little bit of you know space to explore this safely is, instead of waking up and asking every day what the hell's wrong with me, being able to ask what do I need? To feel safe today Because our unconscious doesn't know how to respond to the question of what the hell's wrong with me. It's like, well, I don't know all of it, everything the world, yes, whereas if we can ask something that is more specific and in that direction of moving towards, we're going to get a better answer.

Speaker 2: 1:07:24

Yeah, so I like that. I think you know. Similarly with the bagel tone conversation. Again, I think safety is a big thing. Connection is a big one. Again, like hat there's. There's a feeling of safety in connection.

Speaker 2: 1:07:41

Now, people who tend to be more introverted or people who this is really foreign for them might disagree with me initially. Right, like the guy that I mentioned in my program right now who's addicted to screens and he's, oh no, spilling essential oil all over her desk. It's OK, only one drop got out. So you know, for him it might be a bit more daunting really engaging with people and connecting with people in the beginning. But I think that there is this very real sense of safety with community and like, as an example, you know we have a great community here on our little dead end street that we live on.

Speaker 2: 1:08:20

The neighbors texted us yesterday they had to bring their daughter into the hospital because she fainted and they were there all day like getting some testing run. So we were kind of on call. If their son, who was home alone, like if their son needed anything, he knew he could come over to our house. I offered you know, I was like you've been at the hospital all day. Can I bring you anything.

Speaker 2: 1:08:40

And they did the same for me when my husband was in the hospital last year and like, we look out for each other but we also get together and have little potlucks and get togethers and like they you know the same neighbors they asked to borrow a couple cups of powdered sugar last night, so I went over there and hung out and let them use, you know, the powdered sugar and it's the little things like that. But it's constantly telling your NERP system hey, we have a community, we have people that care about us, we have people who would help us if we needed help, we have people that can support us if we need support, and I think that's another piece of the safety thing. But also it just improves your quality of life If you can connect with the world around you and connect with the people around you. I think that it's also like a self care make you feel good in the moment kind of thing that you can do too is to connect.

Speaker 1: 1:09:39

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I think maybe I don't know about you, but that's what ultimately drew me to running group programs instead of solely relying on a one-to-one relationship. Well, I think a very good quality therapeutic one to one relationship is worth its weight in gold. I think a community is worth even more gold. Yeah, the healing possibility is magnified in that setting.

Speaker 2: 1:10:06

And I've seen that in my program too, I think a because we just get these little snippets of connection for the fun of it. So, like when we did the meet and greet for my current group of students, we had a couple of little pockets that were so funny to watch. So, like two people and I got talking about anime and it was like this whole conversation we were all being dorks and we were all like recommending different anime to each other and talking about what anime we grew up watching. And have you been to any conventions, yes or no? And like, oh, I cosplayed as this character once and it was just really fun to connect over that, even though it had nothing to do with our health in and of itself. And then the next cluster. We had some musicians and one guy had a guitar on the wall behind him, on the camera, and I I was like, oh, do you play guitar? And we got talking about that. And then the next guy who logged on had a guitar behind him and we got to and he, he does music for a living and he's he's a professional musician and we were, we got talking about music for a long time. And another two one of our students right now lives in Hungary and one of our other students. She lives in the United States but she grew up in Hungary, so we got talking about that and like cauliflower soup recipes from their Hungarian families and so, even when it doesn't pertain to health, I think it's great to connect and have that like facilitate bagel tone for us and it makes the process a lot more enjoyable.

Speaker 2: 1:11:33

But also sometimes people share information with each other that I never would have thought of.

Speaker 2: 1:11:39

You know, like I don't have any personal history or personal experience with reflux, for example, and I have my go to things that I would use, but I'm not necessarily a reflux person. I'm more of like the IBS SIBO Lower down, yeah, yeah, so like the pyloric sphincter down is more of my turn right. And we've had some great exchanges with people in the Q&As where people with GERD or LPR will exchange ideas with each other. And you know, oh, this is the brand of chewing gum that I get. That's really been helpful for me. And one lady shared I never would have thought of this she said that she has alkaline water in a little spritzer bottle and when she feels like the LPR kind of burning her throat, she'll spritz alkaline water and sort of try to inhale just a little bit of that mist and that really helps with some of the symptoms of the LPR. I was like I never would have thought of that in a million years, and she was able to share that with some of our other students in the Q&As. So no.

Speaker 1: 1:12:39

Community is amazing. And similarly, like, I had my own fertility journey but I never went through IVF. So I didn't have to do some of the injections, like I've done other injections for other things, like you know be 12 shots and stuff but I never had to do progesterone and oil, which is a historically reported to be just literal pain in the butt shot, and people giving each other advice about like oh, here's how I warmed it up and here's the little like tool that I use to help me like place it correctly and that's that is. That is community. That's helping with that. Okay, I'm safe. People, other people understand what I'm going through. I'm no longer isolated in this. I no longer feel like I'm some kind of community leper because I might be the only person in my small friend group locally going through this. So there's just such an immense value in having that community. Who gets it?

Speaker 2: 1:13:37

Yeah and, if I may say, because I imagine it's similar in your world with your program, for example. But I think the biggest hurdle that people have in working with me because I work with people in a group coaching climate as well I think that the biggest hurdle is that a lot of people have come to believe that their case is far too severe or far too special and there's no way they could possibly heal their gut in a group coaching format. And people have been duped into thinking that they need the specific testing, the GI map, the protocol that's crafted to perfectly match your GI map, your species of candida, your species of whatever. Like this whole idea that you have to test everything under the sun and you're not going to be able to tackle it unless you identify it first. And we have to test, don't guess, and like all of that's malarkey.

Speaker 2: 1:14:38

Anyway, even when I work with people privately, I really don't do that much testing and when I do, I send them to LabCorp and we check, like their iron and their ferritin and their TSH. It's not rocket science. You can do that through your PCP as part of what I'm teaching you in the group coaching format, but that's a hurdle that I face with promoting my program is that people think that they are more severe or more special than what can be tackled in a program. And I'll tell you, 99% of the time they are incorrect and we can help them anyway. And I imagine, similarly, like your people especially have probably spent thousands upon thousands of dollars right, like how much is IVF? Like 18 grand or something insane like that that's in a cheap clinic.

Speaker 1: 1:15:27

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:15:28

Yeah, and it's a tough pill to potentially swallow, to think, oh, I maybe could have done it in this other way, for cheaper and less invasively, and like that's kind of an ick factor for them to overcome, to be open minded to working in a program like yours, and, again, like there's some piece of their ego that wants to believe that their case is special and unique and that's why they had to do the special, unique, expensive stuff. And of course that wasn't a waste of money, of course that was the right thing to do, because you are special and you know it's. I don't know. Like I said, I think it's this difference between pushing away from a disease that we're able to label versus just pivoting and pulling yourself towards health we're able to label, versus just pivoting and pulling yourself towards health.

Speaker 1: 1:16:20

Yeah, I do see that a lot and I kind of similarly to how I approach the screaming into the void versus being very compassionate and diplomatic. It's like everyone is special as a human being, as the unique unicorn person with the unique gifts that you are, and whatever condition is that you are struggling with, that's not that special. You're not alone in it. You likely haven't had the most severe situation of it that I've ever seen and there's a lot of good foundational framework that can be laid for improvement.

Speaker 2: 1:16:51

Very simply, yeah, no, I don't know in your world if this applies to, I will say, to play devil's advocate in my own space, there are some conditions where I have had to deny people joining my program because I thought it was more of a safety issue rather than an efficacy issue. So, for example, if somebody has colon cancer and they want to forego the treatment of colon cancer and they just want to do my program to heal their gut instead, like I would have to say no to that Because that like, first of all, I'm not trained, I'm not an oncologist, I'm not a prescriber even I'm a freaking chiropractor, right. Like I'm not a prescriber even I'm a freaking chiropractor, right Like I'm not trained to supervise or treat this condition. And that's a huge liability for both of us to take that on. And also, heaven forbid if I recommend an intervention that would be useful for IBS but then it for some reason does something bad in colorectal cancer and I'm just not aware because it's not my niche, right.

Speaker 2: 1:17:53

So, and I sometimes say the same thing for, like, really aggravated, hot, acute, pissed off ulcerative colitis. Like I have worked with people with UC many times and I have had success working with them, but sometimes I tell them get your shit literally get your shit under control a little bit with medication and work with your GI doctor first, and when you're more stable then we can approach this conversation of like the real root cause healing issue more than anything else, with those two conditions where I just have to be careful and lay the expectations correctly so people don't make an unsafe choice in their treatment. I don't know if there's an equivalent in the fertility world, if there's something that would be so blatantly unsafe that you would have to deny somebody your program.

Speaker 1: 1:18:47

As far as the group program goes, the only situations where I've said you know, this isn't going to be a good fit is when people have actively been in menopause and even if it occurred at a young age and they've been told by other providers like maybe there's a chance here. It's like if you have actively been in menopause, if you don't have some semblance of a menstrual cycle, then this program is probably not going to be a good fit.

Speaker 1: 1:19:19

I just can't ethically say that that's a good idea and a good time and money spent Otherwise. You know the conditions that most often come up, like endometriosis, pcos, unexplained infertility, irregular cycles that you know. No one's really gotten to the bottom of why that's occurring. All of that I feel very comfortable with, but it's most often the unexplained infertility crowd who there is. There's some explanation in there. It's just people aren't asking the right questions. There's some explanation in there.

Speaker 2: 1:19:53

It's just people aren't asking the right questions. Yeah yeah, and that goes back to screen guy right Like and I'm just really lucky that that came up. He brought that forth all on his own, based on what he was watching in the videos for that week for the program. But I could easily see him working with people and spending a lot of money and doing all of the tests, all of the supplements, all of the protocols and getting nowhere, because there was this huge elephant in the room that no practitioner was aware of and he didn't know if it was relevant or he wasn't ready to have that conversation yet. Yeah yeah, it's tricky.

Speaker 1: 1:20:28

It is, it is, and, and yet none of none of these human conditions are completely so complicated that we can't support in some way by either referring out or saying hey, here's some simple things that we can do. So thank you so much, nikki, for being here, thank you for having me. I have a feeling people are going to have questions. So, if so, and if people want to find you how can they?

Speaker 2: 1:20:57

do so gutmicrobiomequeen, and then my YouTube channel is just Dr Deneza Gut, microbiome Queen, and then I have my own podcast, the IBS Freedom Podcast, which I do with a dietician friend of mine who's also in like the IBS SIBO space, and then I have various goodies and some downloadable goodies and stuff on my website, fodmapfreedomcom. Those are probably the best ways to find me, though, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:21:37

Wonderful, and we will link those in the show notes too, so you guys who are listening don't have to go digging too far for that, and feel free to reach out to us as well on Instagram, facebook if you have questions, as always. If you want to take a moment to pause, leave a review, for the podcast helps us get in front of more people who need this sort of conversation, and thank you all so much for listening, and, nikki, thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker 2: 1:22:07

Thanks for having me.