[00:00:00] What is up guys? My name is Dr. Daniel Kirkbride and I'm super excited to be presenting to you guys for the future of Personalized Medicine Summit. So today I'm gonna be covering a topic that I'm super passionate about which is the gut brain connection and how we can leverage our gut health to optimize our cognitive performance.

[00:00:31] So our energy levels, our mental clarity, and our focus. And also looking at the other side of the equation, how important gut health is to the prevention of things like disease, autoimmunity, and cancer. So we're gonna look at it, the gut health through two lenses today. First lens is gonna be how can we look at gut health in terms of preventing disease in the body.

[00:00:52] And then the second lens we're gonna look through is gonna be how we can look at optimizing our performance and longevity for the future. So a little bit about me before we get stuck into it. So I'm a goal coast based practitioner. I'm a doctor of osteopathic medicine, a strength and conditioning coach, and a functional medicine practitioner.

[00:01:10] And I'm a coach, mentor, and speaker. Now we're gonna cover a few things. Today we're gonna cover what is the gut brain access. So what is the relationship between our gut and our brain? How does one of these things influence the other, and why is it so important to you? So for a lot of you watching this video you're in the corporate space.

[00:01:29] You are you're a lawyer, you're a dentist you're in that space where high performance is really important to you. You have to be sharp, you have to be dialed in. Yeah. If we're operating with low energy, with brain fog, if we're not mentally sharp, we don't have that mental clarity is really gonna start to impact our performance at our job, but also in our life.

[00:01:45] So this is gonna be a super valuable topic for you guys today. We are gonna talk about cognitive performance specifically. So how does our gut health directly impact our cognitive performance? When I say cognitive performance, I'm talking about memory focus, clarity. The second thing we're gonna talk about is disease prevention.

[00:02:02] I mentioned before, how much of a role does our gut play in the development of disease? Both disease of the brain and disease of any other organ in the body, autoimmunity, cancer, et cetera. And with all that said, how can we start to leverage our gut health to enhance our longevity?

[00:02:21] I don't think many of you here would, wanna settle for average. I'm assuming all of you guys watching this video, we're high achievers here and we wanna be performing at our peak and performing at our peak for as long as possible. So the tips and things we're gonna discuss today are not just for, a week, a month, a year.

[00:02:36] These are things we wanna focus on for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years to extend our lifespan so we can not just live a long life, but we can live a really high quality life. So a little bit about me. This is me about five years ago on the left. And this is me, about three years ago on the right.

[00:02:54] I share these photos. Because I think a picture's worth a thousand words, but I really share these photos that go through my journey. Because back in 2020 I was really struggling with chronic fatigue. And I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I was struggling to get outta bed in the morning, I couldn't go to the gym.

[00:03:10] I couldn't train. And I guess to paint the picture previously to this, I've always been someone who's a high achiever. I've been, an ath high, an athlete. I've been playing high performance sport, always being in the gym. Always been fit, always been healthy. At the age of 25 in this example to be struck down by something like this was quite significant for me.

[00:03:27] At the time I was running my own clinic, I was running my own business. I was performing at quite a high level in football at the time. I. And, a lot of these things started crumbling down around me for no apparent reason. Now, some of you might relate to this, you're not feeling too well.

[00:03:41] So the first thing you do is you go and see a doctor you go get a blood test and I'm sure a few of you could relate to this. You get a blood test 'cause you don't feel a hundred percent normal. And then unfortunately. When you go to see the doctor and you get your results, you're told that everything is normal and there's nothing we can find that's wrong with you.

[00:03:58] So unfortunately, this is the same thing that happened to me and I went to a number of practitioners, a number of doctors, a number of naturopaths, and no one could really give me an answer. I. Hence I had to rely on not knowing what I know now. I had to rely on things like caffeine and and Dexy, which are a DH ADHD medication and nootropics and, you name whatever supplement was out there.

[00:04:16] I was taking it to try and just get through my day so I could, performing my business so I could get to the gym so I could get the bare minimum done. This went on for about 18 months and unfortunately I wasn't really getting anywhere with the conventional medical system. I really had to take things into my own hands and take control of my health again.

[00:04:31] So this is where I dove into the rabbit hole of functional medicine. I sold my clinic in Melbourne. I moved up to the Gold Coast, and I really just committed to a lifestyle change for a good, six, 12 months there. I invested close to a quarter of a million dollars in my education, on coaching, on programs, on research to really understand the human body as best as I could, and, selfishly to heal myself and.

[00:04:53] Through doing that. As you can see here, on the photo on the left, this was early 2020. On the photo on the right, this was mid 2021. You can see the vitality back in my face. Look at these bags under my eyes, excess body fat, puffy, inflamed, zap of energy on the right here, full of energy, vibrant, eyes pop, nice blue eyes pop down my head, nice and lean.

[00:05:10] Like you can see the difference in vitality just from that those photos. This led me to where I am now and really wanting to help other people achieve the same thing. People who are, stuck, they've had a symptom or a condition for a long period of time. They've been to the doctors, they've been told they're normal.

[00:05:25] They've had their blood tests done. They're taking a thousand supplements, they've seen the naturopath and they're just not getting any way. This is really, where, why I started the journey I'm on. Now doing that for a number of years really led me down the path of high performance and, applying those same principles I was using with people with chronic diseases and autoimmunity, applying those principles to people that value high performance like athletes, business owners, entrepreneurs.

[00:05:49] There's a lot of similarities here in terms of the principles that we actually apply. So once we understand these principles, whether you are someone who's, in category A and you're me five years ago and you're struggling with disease. And, struggling to get outta bed and you've got, an insert condition or your person B, which is me, in today's age where I'm thriving I'm full of energy and vitality.

[00:06:09] Good physique, lots of energy can perform at a high level and maintain that high level doesn't really matter. If you're a RB, these principles are gonna apply to you. So let's get stuck into some of the science. I'm gonna keep this super simple throughout this lecture. I don't want this to be super lecturey. I want this to be super practical. So I'm gonna, follow a format where I'll explain why something's important and then gonna explain a little bit of the science. And I'm gonna give you some key takeaways at the end so you have some practical implementations. So the first one here is the gut brain access.

[00:06:40] So the gut brain axis, if you've never heard of it before, is basically a two-way communication between our brain and between our gut. Okay. Now, when it comes to the gut brain access, the. We actually have 80% information coming from the gut to the brain. So this is called afferent. So we have 80% information is nerves that travel from and take information from the gut to the brain, versus 20% informa information coming from the brain to the gut. So that means there's four times more information coming from the brain. To the, sorry, coming from the guts of the brain, then there is the brain to the gut. So we just think about that for a moment that's pretty profound, and that's saying that we, there's four times more information going this direction rather than the other direction.

[00:07:25] So basically, your gut is having a significant impact on things like your mood, your thoughts, and your behavior. Similarly. Our brain is gonna have influence on our gut health and our digestion. So an example I've written there is, if you've had concussions, if you've had brain injuries, if you have, inflammation in the brain, there's something wrong or dysfunctional with the brain, vagal tone dysfunction, which we'll talk about later, this can start to impact your digestion can start to impact your bowel.

[00:07:52] But what people don't realize is the other direction is, if you have a mood disorder, anxiety, depression, poor focus, low energy, poor cognitive function, a lot of these things, are not, nothing ever happens in isolation. But if you're someone that's struggling with one of these conditions, or you've been diagnosed and you know someone who's been diagnosed with it, and you are only looking at the brain. You may be missing a big, significant part of the puzzle. And there's a lot of research coming out when it comes to the relationship with the gut and the brain when it comes to all those conditions I mentioned before. So understanding and respecting this relationship is significant.

[00:08:28] So two significant facts I've written there is that we have these things in our gut called neurotransmitters and neurotransmitters. These little tiny molecules I think of them as messengers. Okay? They're basically are messengers from our brain. That exerts certain functions in our body. Now, these are produced predominantly in your gut, so you want to think of your gut as like the warehouse. And this warehouse is producing these neurotransmitters. Now, there's four main neurotransmitters we talk about. There's serotonin. Dopamine, gaba, and acetylcholine. For today's purposes, we're gonna focus on serotonin and dopamine. Now, 95% of your serotonin is produced in your small intestine, in your gut, and over 50% of your dopamine is produced in your small intestine or your gut.

[00:09:11] So what does that mean and why do we care? Dopamine is our neuro neurotransmitter is responsible for drive and reward. Okay? So it's responsible for things like motivation and drive, reward, and pleasure. Memory and learning. So it's essential for working memory and focus helps you stay sharp in meetings, presentations, helps you with decision making.

[00:09:31] So if a lot of you're watching this, it's gonna be super important. It's also really important for movement control. Fun fact, a deficit in dopamine has been linked to conditions like Parkinson's disease, where we start to see degradation of dopaminergic neurons or in English, a reduction in production of dopamine in the brain, which starts to then cause some of the symptoms that we see in Parkinson's disease.

[00:09:50] A loss of fine movement control, tremors. And the last one there is hormone regulation. So it's actually super important to influence other hormones like prolactin, which can impact our mood, our libido, and our wellbeing. So dopamine is super important for all these things, but if you take one thing away from dopamine, it is your focus, your drive, your memory, and your learning.

[00:10:10] So if you want to enhance your cognitive function. You better start by looking at your small intestine, your gut health, because that's where majority of your dopamine is being produced. Now, if we have a deficiency in dopamine, some of the symptoms that I tend to see, lack of motivation, fatigue, low energy.

[00:10:25] Difficulty concentrating. This is a massive one. How many of you know someone, or maybe you are this person where you know you're guilty of, saying, I'm so A DHD, I have a DHD. Do you actually have a DHD? Or after knowing this fact, maybe you have a dopamine deficiency from dysfunctional, doable dysfunction in the gut, or damage to the gut, which is.

[00:10:46] Decrease in your production of dopamine, which is then causing a relative dopamine deficiency. When we see a dopamine deficiency, it can cause a number of problems, which we'll see on the next slide. The fourth one there is anhedonia. So anhedonia is another way of saying an inability to feel pleasure or enjoy activities. So we get a blunted pleasure response. And the last one there is mood swings and irritability. So if this happens for a long period of time, this is where we're looking more at the disease prevention perspective of things. Low levels of dopamine have been associated with depression, which we often, use medication to try and resolve depression.

[00:11:19] Parkinson's disease, which we've talked about, A DH Ds. So A DHD, is directly associated with low dopamine levels, which make it difficult to focus, have good intention good attention. It also is associated with poor impulse control. So you might notice that people with low dopamine are your thrill seekers.

[00:11:36] They're the people that jump out of airplanes, and they're the people that are, they have a very low risk tolerance because they're seeking dopamine elsewhere. I. So addiction and substance abuse for the same reason. You don't have sufficient levels of dopamine internally. So you re, so you'll start to use things like, gambling or porn or jumping outta airplanes like I just said.

[00:11:55] Taking drugs like cocaine, which are working on your same pathway, the dopamine pathway can get quite serious if this is left unaddressed for a long term. So that's dopamine in a nutshell. It's your motivation drive. Memory and learning. If we are low in it, we can have lack of motivation, fatigue, low energy, difficulty concentrating mood twin irritability, and a blunted pleasure response, which can lead to things like Parkinson's, depression, A DHD addiction, substance abuse, and schizophrenia.

[00:12:23] Moving on to the second one, serotonin. Dopamine was 50%, serotonin is 95%, so a significant amount of serotonin, almost all of your serotonin is produced in your small intestine. So again, we have to consider this when it comes to what is the integrity of your gut. Do you have good gut health?

[00:12:38] Do you have any damage to your gut? Things like dysbiosis, imbalances of bacteria and damage to your gut, leaky gut, we'll talk about these later. This is going to influence your production of neurotransmitters in your warehouse, IE, your gut. So serotonin, we call this the happiness and balance molecule.

[00:12:54] So what is it responsible for? Sleep number one. So serotonin is actually a precursor for melatonin. That's the reason I'm wearing these sexy glasses, not 'cause they look good. Melatonin is the molecule that helps us, that tells us or signals to us that it's time to go to bed, it's time to sleep. Contrary to that, we have cortisol.

[00:13:12] Cortisol is the hormone that wakes us up first thing in the morning. It's our stress hormone. So we're not gonna go into sleep in today's lecture, but essentially you need serotonin to produce melatonin. Okay? So if you're not producing much serotonin, this is gonna influence the production of melatonin.

[00:13:27] And then melatonin is what we need to, essentially down regulate and optimize our circadian rhythm or our sleep wake cycle. So if you're someone who's struggling to get to sleep, have good quality sleep, this could be playing a role. The second thing, a major function of serotonin is digestion.

[00:13:44] Serotonin plays a crucial role in bowel motility, or essentially how things move through your bowel. So if we have low levels of serotonin, it's quite often associated with constipation, poor bowel movements, so you know, lacking bowel movements. So for reference, a healthy bowel motion is there's this thing called the Bristol stool chart.

[00:14:02] You can look it up. A good solid stool should be between a three and a four on the Bristol stool chart, and we should be having one to two bowel motions a day if you're having less than one bowel motion a day. First of all, this isn't normal, and second of all, this could be associated with low serotonin reducing your bowel mo motility.

[00:14:18] The third thing is mood and emotions. Now, a bit tongue and cheek here, but I'm sure a few of you can relate to it. If you've ever had a big night or a big weekend, you might've had a few flippers. These or other eyes known as MDMA. MDMA works on this pathway. It depletes your serotonin.

[00:14:33] Okay? So the way that MDMA works is a ple, deplete melt your serotonin levels, which is why you feel so good at the time you feel so lovey-dovey. You wanna be everyone's best friend. You wanna get everyone's Instagram, you wanna be making travel plans for everyone. And then, a few days later, you want to jump off a bridge.

[00:14:49] And the reason you wanna jump off a bridge is because your serotonin levels are so low. And that's why, you start to experience these depressive like symptoms. And this is also why, when it comes to depression, we're commonly prescribing people SSRIs or selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, which means it gives your body more serotonin essentially if we think about this and we just pull it all together, low levels of serotonin, dysregulate your mood and can cause depressive symptoms. Okay, so the first thing you'd probably want to do if you're experiencing depressive symptoms is first of all, not identify. And second of all, definitely look at what's happening in your intestine.

[00:15:20] What's happening in your gut before you reach for the, the antidepressants. Or at least if you're on the antidepressants, at least look at doing your due diligence and go, Hey, whilst I'm on these, whilst they are playing an important role, can I look at improving these other areas at the same time?

[00:15:36] And then ideally long term, try and, ramp up my own production of serotonin whilst having to reduce reliance on medications and drugs. Appetite regulation is really important too. Low serotonin can be associated with obesity and people who are overweight don't use serotonin as an excuse if you're sitting on your ass all day.

[00:15:53] But if you do have low levels of serotonin, it can increase cravings. And dampen our our fullness response, which can then lead to us overeating and over consuming. And the last one there is pain perceptions. Serotonin also modulates pain in the body, which means so low serotonin levels can increase pain sensitivity, or decrease your tolerance to pain.

[00:16:11] I used to see this all the time when I worked as an osteopath where, certain people would come in and you barely even touching 'em and they're jumping off the table. Obviously there's a few factors that play a role here, but low levels of serotonin do play a role in decreasing your pain sensitivity. And this is seen in conditions like fibromyalgia. Now we know what serotonin is. So defic common symptoms of deficiency, depression, or depressive symptoms I should say. I'm not diagnosing anyone here, but depressive symptoms anxiety symptoms irritable bowel syndrome or IBS, which is really just an umbrella term for dysfunction of the gut.

[00:16:43] Could be dysbiosis, which is imbalances and bacteria. It could be bloating, it could be IBD, which is Crohn's or Sero colitis. So IBD stands for inflammatory bowel disease. And the two main forms of that are Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Or it could just be something like leaky gut, which is like an early onset of dysfunction in the gut.

[00:17:00] Okay? So serotonin plays a sim significant role in gut motility. So if you have low serotonin and you're not moving through the bowel very well, you're not clearing out those toxic waste products and you're not absorbing nutrients very well, you're gonna start to damage your gut. And essentially, the progression's gonna be bloating. IBS, leaky gut, Crohn's disease ulcer, ulcerative colitis, bowel cancer. That's the progression of, a 5, 10, 20 year period. Fibromyalgia not really a symptom, more of a condition. And sleep disorders is a another one. So insomnia is a big one. And poor sleep quality due to disrupted circadian rhythms.

[00:17:30] So I sleep wake cycle because of that lack of melatonin that I talked about earlier. So that's the main thing. When it comes to your gut brain, axi. So if we just, go back for a second and just summarize that a lot of information, gut brain access, two-way communication between your gut and your brain. What happens in your gut influences your brain, and vice versa. However, there's four times more coming from your gut to your brain than there is your brain to your gut. So if you had any neurological or cognitive dysfunctions or diseases like anxiety, depression A DHD, autism anything like this, it might make sense to look at what's happening downstream before you just give someone a medication.

[00:18:04] Or in your case, if you know you are someone experiencing these things, it might be wise to seek a practitioner who can work through these things before you just reach for the medication or see the gp. Okay, now, two main neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin, 95% serotonin, 50% dopamine, producing your gut.

[00:18:20] Your gut is the warehouse. Okay? Dopamine, drive, reward, serotonin, happiness, balance, and the main three things, if we could. Focus on serotonin. It'll be sleep, digestion, and emotions. For dopamine, the main three things would be motivation, drive, memory, and learning and reward and pleasure. So we don't have time on this lecture to go through every single system and every single access. So we've just talked briefly on the gut brain access. 'cause in today's presentation, we're focusing more on enhancing cognitive function, preventing disease, but just to put it into your, frame of awareness, is, we do have a relationship between pretty much every single system in our body, from our gut.

[00:18:56] So your gut is like the primary warehouse, and every other system is a byproduct of that system. So if you have poor gut health dysfunction, the gut, this can start to influence every other system in your body. To name a few, the first system here is the gut immune access. Over 70% of your immune system.

[00:19:13] Lives in your gut. We have this system as well called our lymphatic system, which is like a third circulatory system to our arteries and our veins. So arteries carry. Oxygen nutrients to our cells, and then veins will then carry deoxygenated blood back to our heart. And that sort of pumping mechanism is how we feed every cell in our body with nutrients and oxygen.

[00:19:34] Now there's a third system called the lymphatic system. Again, we don't have time today to go deep into it, so if you're interested, look it up. Lymphatic system's basically responsible for removing all the waste products from our body. We have over 700 lymph nodes in our body. A third of them live around our anterior chest, our neck area, and about half of them live in our gut or in our abdomen. So a significant portion of your lymphatic system and your immune system actually live in your gut. So again, if there's dysfunction in the gut, if there, if we have a sluggish. Lymphatic system, it's gonna lead to poor detox pathways, buildup of toxins, increased inflammation, weakened immune system. We're gonna be more prone to infections and all these things aren't gonna have a positive impact on our health.

[00:20:20] So the gut barrier serves as the first line of defense against pathogens. When we have damage to our gut, it can allow for things like toxins, bacteria, LPS, et cetera, to actually enter the bloodstream, and that's gonna increase inflammation in the body. And can contribute to immune system dysfunction.

[00:20:39] We'll go into that in a minute. So let's move on from the immune system, 'cause we can spend all day on that gut skin access. For any of you here who are dealing with things like acne, X Eczema, psoriasis Gut has a massive influence. Your skin is an external reflection of your internal environment. There's three main ways your body will detox.

[00:20:58] Essentially, liver is our main. Detox organ. That's like step number one. Okay, so I think your liver is your warehouse and it chooses how we're gonna get rid of things. Okay? So it has to metabolize toxins. Initially it's called phase one, phase two detoxification, and the final phase detoxification is actually getting rid of things from your body.

[00:21:15] So we have three main ways we can do this. First way is we can poop it out, so goes through our large intestine and we remove toxins. That's the primary way. Second way is our urine. So our kidneys will filter and remove urine. And the third way, which people don't really talk about much is through our skin.

[00:21:29] So your skin is your biggest organ in the body. So sweating is a type of detox response. If we have poor detox functions, so let's say our liver's not working too well, our gut and our kidneys aren't working too well. Or potentially they're working fine, but they're just overwhelmed.

[00:21:46] 'cause there's way too much toxins and chemicals and inflammation in the body, then your body's gonna have to rely on that third system, which is your skin because your skin's a very effective way of getting rid of things because the surface area is so big. So if you are trying to detox through your skin, that may lead to, increased susceptibility of things like acne, eczema, psoriasis, and there's, research that shows 70% of patients with psoriasis and eczema.

[00:22:11] Were shown to have irritable bowel syndrome or leaky gut. So there's a massive link between skin conditions and what I've written there, which is intestinal permeability, which is a scientific term for leaky gut. So damage to our gut and chronic inflammation. So if you're someone who's dealing with chronic skin condition, you haven't really gotten any way of conventional therapy maybe you're looking at the wrong place.

[00:22:30] Next section is the gut endocrine access. So endocrine system is the system responsible for our hormones. So again, if you have any dysfunction at hormones, and this is really important especially with just overall stress our adrenal glands, which is our main gland we can see here.

[00:22:43] That's our pancreas. So pancreas is gonna create things like. Insulin our adrenal gland, is gonna secrete things like cortisol and dheas. All these things are gonna play a role when it comes to both male and female hormones. So the male hormone being testosterone, the female hormone being a progesterone, estrogen. Females do obviously have some level of testosterone. I digress. I'm on a bit of a tangent here. Moral of the story is gut endocrine access, is a thing as well. And it's gonna have an influence on our endocrine function. So there's been a massive correlation between, dysfunction, things like leaky gut, elevated levels of LPS, which is a type of toxin that happens when we havey gut and things like type two diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease metabolic syndrome.

[00:23:24] And this thing here called GLP one. So GLP one is getting a lot of traction in the media right now, which is otherwise known as a drug called Ozempic, which works on this recept called GLP one. Now this stands for gluc glucagon like peptide, which has been shown to have a lot of, benefit essentially when it comes to fat loss in the body, which is why people are taking this, drug ozempic. Now, there's been a few fun facts. This leaky gut can reduce the secretion of this peptide GLP one, and this is a critical hormone in insulin regulation and can lead to high levels of blood sugar insulin resistance, which contributes to type two diabetes. So when the when the gut. Is compromised.

[00:24:01] We have intestinal permeability leads to chronic low grade inflammation, which negatively affects the pancreas, worsen the insulin and the resistance, and is a key factor in type two diabetes. Basically you know it's gonna increase our chance of type two diabetes. And this is a lifestyle problem. This is not something you should be medicating with. This is something that's a lifestyle problem. So for sure you can take ozempic for sure. You can take medications. My mom actually has type two diabetes, and I tell her this all the time. It's Hey, there's no point taking this medication when you know your health is still terrible.

[00:24:27] Like obviously it might serve a purpose in the short term might keep you alive in the short term if it's obviously quite severe. But we should be striving to resolve the underlying issues whilst we're taking the medication with the intention of coming off the medication and resolving the issue of the root.

[00:24:41] Now the next thing is LPS and neuroinflammation. LPS is a type of toxins called, stands for lipo polysaccharide and this type of toxin, which is, it's an endotoxin. So endo means inside toxin obviously is a toxin. So it's a toxin that gets into our blood and when it gets into our bloodstream, it can basically, it has free re and imagine that's like the entry to the highway.

[00:25:00] And the highway is in infinite amounts of lanes and directions you can go. So when this toxin gets into the bloodstream, it can travel anywhere in the body, okay? And can have wreak havoc on the body, increasing what's called systemic. So systemic means system inflammation, which means it can affect any single system in the body.

[00:25:16] But importantly, for the context of today's lecture is this. LPS toxin can travel to the brain via the bloodstream, can cross something called the blood brain barrier, which is this barrier between our brain and the bloodstream, which is designed to keep, 99.9% of things out and allow the, 0.01% of things that are beneficial, like nutrients, amino acids into our brain.

[00:25:39] It's like a fishnet, imagine a fishnet that's got tiny little holes and it allows us to absorb nutrients, but it keeps out bigger particles like toxins and pathogens and things like that. So when this LPS crosses the bloodstream, 'cause it's quite a small molecule, it's gonna increase what's called neuroinflammation.

[00:25:54] So inflammation of the brain can start to kill off neurons. And these neurons are responsible for producing things like dopamine. And that's gonna have quite a negative effect on our health and particularly, our neurological health or our brain health. So this can be a key factor or has been shown to be a key factor in the development of things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's.

[00:26:12] And has been shown to accelerate cognitive decline. So things like memory loss slurred speech and cognitive function overall. Cool. So we're going on a fast pace 'cause we have a little bit to get through. So now I'm gonna go into a little bit more detail of what is that, what actually is leaky gut? I've talked about a few times, what is LPS, leaky Gut, what are all these terms have been thrown around? Why is it important? Why should you care? Now I'm gonna explain this this image and break it down. Super simple. So at the top here, we've got these cells. Okay? And these cells are cells of your small intestine wall.

[00:26:43] So this is the cell body. And these things here, these little finger looking things essentially are designed to increase the surface area of each of these cells so that we can absorb nutrients more effectively. Now you can see these cells are tightly packed together, and the reason they're tightly packed together is they form like a fishnet.

[00:27:02] Yeah. So imagine. A fishnet has tiny little holes in it, and those tiny little holes are gonna allow for absorption of tiny little molecules like amino acids, which are broken down. Proteins, glucose, which is broken down, carbohydrates free fatty acids, which are, and triglycerides, which are broken down.

[00:27:20] Fats, electrolytes, water, things that we wanna absorb are gonna be beneficial to the body. They're gonna be allowed to absorb through these small gaps and through the fingers. Now, over time, if we have chronic stress. Stress increases a hormone called cortisol. As we can see here, cortisol is what we call catabolic.

[00:27:41] Now, catabolic is the opposite of anabolic. Anabolic means like building muscle, the body's rebuilding. Repairing catabolic is the complete opposite. It's breaking down it's which is gonna cause damage. So when we increase catechism, we increase tissue damage. Now in this case, the tissues that are damaging are these cells.

[00:28:00] Or what they call, what's called enterocytes, these cells of the small intestine, and when we have damage is gonna cause inflammation. Inflammation is like a fire. Inflammation kind of gets like a chronic cycle. Damage causes fire. Fire causes more damage. We kinda get stuck in this circle eventually that happens over a longer period of time.

[00:28:19] What two things start to happen to these cells? Number one, we start to get gaps in between them so the holes in the fishnet start to get bigger and eventually we can start to actually damage and degrade the cell itself, where those finger looking things start to, get damaged and break away. And eventually, if it goes on bad enough, these cell can actually like split in half, which isn't shown in this image. The term for this, the generic term that we use, which is the non-medical term, is leaky gut. The technical term, if you wanna be fancy, is increased intestinal hyperpermeability. 'cause some people always say leaky gut doesn't exist.

[00:28:53] It does, you just, it's just the layman's terms for the scientific term. Okay? So what happens then is now we have these big gaps or big holes in our fishnet, which is gonna allow for all this stuff that's traveling through our gut, good and bad to enter. The bloodstream, which is this red thing here.

[00:29:10] So I think what is in our gut, obviously we eat food and it has good stuff in it, but when you eat food and everything you're exposed to on a daily basis, you're also exposed to things like, viruses, bacteria, fungus chemicals, toxins LPS, which is something I mentioned, which is a type of bacteria that lives in, the small intestine on certain parts of the cells. It's okay when it's in the intestine, but if it gets into the bloodstream, that's where it can start to wreak havoc. So all this stuff can get into your bloodstream when it gets into your bloodstream. A few things are gonna happen if you have pathogens in your bloodstream.

[00:29:43] It's gonna require your immune system to be activated. So your immune system's gonna have to turn on and it's gonna have to fight against all these pathogens. So now your immune system's chronically getting inactivate. When our immune system's chronically activated short term, we're gonna have increased inflammation, increased tissue damage. It's gonna make the whole problem worse. Long term, if your immune system keeps getting activated is two things, number one. We get immune suppression. Your immune system gets tired, it gets weakened. And number two is we get a dysfunctional oral what's the word I'm looking for? Or a dysregulated immune response.

[00:30:20] And a dysfunctional, dysregulated immune response has been associated as one of the early stages of developing something like an autoimmune disease. We'll talk about that more in a minute. So that's the first thing that's happening. So that's not good. The second thing is some of these toxins, as I mentioned, LPS in particular, when it gets into the bloodstream, can now travel via the bloodstream because we have that two-way street to the brain, which is depicted by this section of the photo.

[00:30:46] So these are the cells in your brain, and as you can see, they look the same as the ones up here in your gut. The only difference has we know the finger looking things. Called the micro villa. The reason we don't have the little finger looking things in our brain is 'cause when we eat food, we absorb it through our gut.

[00:30:59] We don't absorb food through our brain, so we don't need those in the brain. So in the brain it just looks like these little brick by brick walls next to each other. And what should happen is, again, same process should be nice and tight. This blood brain barrier doesn't allow for any big molecules in, it just allows for us to absorb the good stuff when LPS travels to the brain.

[00:31:21] It causes inflammation, starts to damage this blood brain barrier, and it can actually penetrate through the blood brain barrier and get to what's called a neuron, which are the messenger cells in our brain can start to damage these cells, and that's going to cause. The same sort of process is happening.

[00:31:38] We get an immune response in our brain. So there's these cells in our brain called microglia, which we get, so we get microglia activation, or the activation of glial cells, which causes inflammation, elevates something called free radicals, which are a type of cell, which increase inflammation in the body.

[00:31:54] So free radicals, not good antioxidants. Destroy free radicals balance between the two is very important. So if you've heard the term three radicals before, it's basically reactive oxygen species that can cause damage to the cells in the area. Oops. And we can also increase the, a neurotransmitter called glutamate.

[00:32:13] So earlier I talked about something called gaba. GABA is a type of neurotransmitter that calms the brain down, makes you feel relaxed, makes you feel zen. Glutamate is' like it's crazy brother. It's crazy twin brother. And. We don't have time to go to super deep today, but if we when we have the presence of LPS and we have chronic inflammation, rather than the body producing gaba, it can convert into glutamate and glutamate to more excitatory neurotransmitter.

[00:32:35] And it has been associated with things neurological, diseases, but in particular, elevated levels of glutamate will make you feel very fidgety, make you feel very edgy, make you feel very what's the word I look for? Makes you feel a little bit crazy. Okay. So if you have high levels of glutamate, can make it hard to calm down, can make it hard to be balanced, so if you have high levels of glutamate, you might feel a little bit anxious, you might feel a bit fidgety. You might be someone who struggles to calm down, who struggles to to slow down. Okay? More importantly though, if we start to damage. The cells of the brain, then that's gonna be the first stage of developing, neurodegenerative conditions.

[00:33:09] So neuro, Romanian, brain degenerative degeneration of the brain. And that can start to cause, early stages, cognitive decline, poor memory, slurred speech poor mental clarity long term, if that's left for 10, 15, 20 years, can start to develop into things like Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, depending on the specific pathway, specific chemical that's been damaged.

[00:33:28] Okay so not good. LPS, so we just talked about all that stuff at a, I guess a macro level. LPS we already talked about this, a toxin from the gut back. These are toxins from the gut. Bacteria leak into the bloodstream can travel to the brain when there is damage to the gut lining. When these molecules enter the bloodstream that travels to the brain and break down the blood brain barrier and promote neuroinflammation cytokines these are basically a. Pro-inflammatory protein which elevated when there's damage to anything in the body, any type of cell damage. We see an increase in cytokines, but in particular, if there's damage to the small intestine, we see an increase in cytokines.

[00:34:05] So things like interleukin six e Es, RCRP, these are things you can see on a blood test and would indicate elevated cytokines and inflammation. Now when it comes to inflammation, not, that's a whole nother lecture again, but I guess a short term view here is I don't want you guys to leave this lecture and think inflamma, all inflammation is bad. Chronic inflammation. Chronic systemic inflammation. So global widespread inflammation on a chronic basis is the root of all disease. However, acute inflammation serves a purpose. If you go to the gym and you train your biceps, you're gonna do some damage to your biceps. We're causing inflammation, we're causing muscle damage.

[00:34:37] Over the next 24 to four, eight hours. When you eat good food, you sleep and you recover. Ideally, your body goes through a process called resolution, and we can see it here, acute inflammation. You damage your bicep, you give it 48 hours, you feed your body the right stuff, you sleep you do the right things.

[00:34:51] We have resolution, which means we get back to a level of homeostasis and ideally we come back bigger, stronger. We've adapted. Now if that process is insufficient, so stress is greater than our capacity to recover or there's something in our body that's. Disrupting that balance or disrupting that process or the information, the magnitude of inflammation is too big.

[00:35:09] The frequency of inflammation is too often. And we're unable to resolve that inflammation. Then we go down a different pathway, and the pathway is this pathway here of chronic inflammation, tissue damage, autoimmunity, cancer. What ideally what we want to do is we have acute inflammation. We've controlled the dosage, we've controlled the frequency. Our recovery is bang on. We're eating good food. Our body is functioning optimally internally, and we get to, the level of resolution. But unfortunately for a lot of people with chronic diseases or early stage chronic disease, where it's in that like phase one where you're not even aware you have it, you've just got symptoms like bloating, brain fog, low energy, these kind of things.

[00:35:43] It's not quite obvious yet, but we can still definitely do something about. Pathogens. So pathogens again, pathogens are all bad. Your body is more virus than it is human. We need viruses, we need parasites, we need bacteria. We need fungi within our microbiome to, have harmony essentially. But if there's an overgrowth or of any of those particular, categories or all those categories together, some of these can start to cause issues in the body, and particularly it's just about where they are. So there's a term called translocation. Translocation means that when bacteria normally lives, in your gut, but now it enters your bloodstream because we have damage to the gut.

[00:36:18] Now it's causing damage. Some of those bacteria in your small intestine, large intestine actually serve a purpose. There's a large amount of candida in your large intestine. There's a lot of, bacteria and viruses in your small intestine. They're not causing any damage when they're there. But when they start to translocate or basically transport from the gut, which is one section of the body into the bloodstream that's when they can start to wreak havoc and cause a lot of issues inflammation on the body. Okay. So it's understanding that. And identifying, do you have things where they shouldn't be?

[00:36:47] And we can do this, we can look at this through blood testing, stool testing, et cetera. We'll touch on this briefly. Antigens. The reason I mentioned antigens. Antigens are a foreign basically whenever you get infected by something, if you catch a virus or you catch a you get sick for the first time. Whenever you get sick for the first time, you usually wrecks, you know you're sick for five to seven days. It catches you off guard and. What happens is your body develops something called antibodies and antibodies like memory cells that your immune system creates. So the next time you get sick from that same virus, it doesn't catch you off guard and you can deal with it pretty fast.

[00:37:15] 'cause you've got like an army of soldiers ready to go who, know what the enemy looks like. So the first time you got attacked, you got attacked by a guy that you didn't even know he was your enemy. You call, he caught you off guard. He snuck into your house. He shot a few people, but next time you're like, Hey, I know who that guy looks like and next time we see him, we're gonna destroy him before he even gets anywhere near my house. That's what your immune system's doing with antibodies. So this is usually a good thing. But if we have chronic immune activation. And again, imbalance between what's called our innate immune system and our adaptive immune system to two different parts of our immune system. We get something called immune dysregulation.

[00:37:49] Our immune system comes pretty trigger happy and it loses its ability to identify between self and between foreign. And this is where your body can start to produce antibodies, memory cells, against your own organs, against your own tissue. And this is the definition of autoimmune disease where your immune system mistakenly. Identifies you as foreign and attacks you, and when it starts to attack you, you can start to damage organs. This is a prime example of something like Hashimoto's Disease, where your body produces antibodies against your own thyroid and will attack your own thyroid and then leads to the destruction of your thyroid.

[00:38:24] So this is important when it comes to everything we just talked about. Quick image on the two different types of immune systems. This is the immune system we're born with. Gut barrier is a big part of that, our immune cells, which are a big part of that natural killer cells, T cells, and lymphocytes, which are produced in our small intestine.

[00:38:38] This is all the stuff we wanna rely on. When this system starts to get weak, because it's being constantly bombarded by unnecessary things that are preventable, we start to then switch into what's called our adaptive immune system. A way you can think about this if without us having to go deep into immunity is think about your nervous system. You've got your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your calm, your rest, and digest. It's what we wanna spend most of our time. This is like this part of the immune system or the innate immune system we wanna spend most of our time there. It's where homeostasis exists, where balance exists. The second part of our immune system is the adaptive immune system.

[00:39:11] This is like the sympathetic nervous system it should turn on at a time of stress and help us. In a, for a small period of time. But then we want that thing to turn off. We wanna spend 99% of our day living in a sympathetic state. We all know that wouldn't be good for our health, but it's the same thing with our immune system.

[00:39:25] If you spend most of your time in your adaptive immune system, 'cause you've got chronic infections, steal infections, damage to your gut lining, all these things, then you know we're gonna, we're gonna have poor health outcomes. If we zoom in on the adaptive immune system, there's this particular pathway called TH 17, which you start to see is commonly driven when we start to have autoimmune conditions.

[00:39:44] And this is a, a long-term problem I guess a long-term development of having the cascade we just talked about of, damage to the gut. This image here where, we have increased cortisol, increased cat catabolism, tissue damage, inflammation, infections, decreased immunity.

[00:40:00] So what is the problem? What actually causes this and how can we resolve it? Okay. So leaky gut causes, there's quite a few things, and the question everyone asks me is what causes leaky gut? And it's never just one thing, it's a combination of things. These are all things that are gonna gradually chip away at your gut health.

[00:40:12] So it's not something that happens overnight. When I see people that have these problems they usually come to me when they're 30, they're 35. And these problems started developing when they were 15, 20. But it's one of those things where it's 1% compounded interest, but it's. A negative 1% compound.

[00:40:26] Yeah. We all know how compounding interest works. This is like having a credit card debt. Yeah. We all know how credit card debt worth, that's a negative compounding interest. Okay. Obviously for the bank it's positive. For you it's negative. Yeah. So circadian disruption. Disruption to our circadian rhythm.

[00:40:42] Okay, so this is our sleep and wake cycle. Chronic stress or low vagal tone. So vagus, the vagal tone is our vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the nerve that supplies most of our viscera is the portal to our autonomic nervous system and helps to keep us in a parasympathetic state where our body can be anabolic, healing and repairing versus when we're chronically stressed.

[00:41:02] That's more of a sympathetic catabolic state. So sympathetic dominance is gonna lead to catabolism. Processed diet, we can go through that in a whole nother lecture in terms of nutrition, but processed diet, I'm sure you guys know what good and bad food is dysbiosis, imbalance of good and bad bacteria in the small intestine or translocation of bacteria from the intestine into the bloodstream.

[00:41:22] Infections. We call 'em stealth infections 'cause they're usually low grade. You don't actually know that they exist. It's not like when you get sick and hit for six and you know that you're sick. A lot of people, 95% of people that I work with, when they come to see me. You know what? They don't know they have it until they get the blood test or they get the stool test, but it's something that's constantly chipping away at 5%, 10%, 20% of their energy and their potential. And if we, again, compound that over years and years that's gonna have a significant impact. So it's not about wait until you are, until you're fucked, or wait until you know it's obvious.

[00:41:50] We wanna pick up on these things early and look at it how we can, how can we enhance your performance rather than just how can we just wait till you have disease and then fix something? So disease prevention, performance enhancement is the exact same thing. Medications and antibiotics, specifically antibiotics, one round of antibiotics can just, cause damage that can take up to six to 12 months to resolve for your gut without intervention.

[00:42:11] Environmental toxins and pollutants. So we're talking pesticides, herbicides, glyphosates, chemicals in your household products, your cleaning products, your skincare products. Looking really at how we can be more low tox with what we're doing. Over training, under recovering. For some, a small percentage of people this is a problem. Doing two sessions a day, smashing CrossFit 10, 10 sessions a week, not recovering very well. Very David Goggin's mindset. Now, obviously there's, this is a hard to teach in 30 seconds, but for certain people, they're doing too much. Training can be a problem.

[00:42:42] Okay. Training is quite catabolic. What I'll leave you with is training is a sympathetic. Activity. It's a catabolic activity. Recovering is an anabolic activity, so we need to get the balance right. If you're doing too much stress, too much training, too many ice baths, too many saunas, too much Wim Hof style breath work, and not enough sleeping, not enough food, not enough recovery and restoration, then your body's gonna be biased towards being in a catabolic state.

[00:43:07] You are gonna heal slower, repair faster. I'd be more prone to soft tissue injuries, more prone to gut issues. And if you already have those things and you're trying to heal 'em, it's gonna be very slow. On the flip side, if you have the balance right where you still stress your body, you still expose it to training and useful stresses, but you have sufficient recovery, then that's where our body's gonna be more anabolic.

[00:43:26] We're gonna grow, we're gonna repair, we're gonna have better health overall disconnect from nature. So spend more time in nature. Grounding forest bathing getting out in the sun. Chronic inflammation, which we've talked about. So what are some solutions to leave you with today? I'm a little bit over time but we'll go through these, so things to focus on and things to avoid.

[00:43:45] This is specifically for improving digestion and improving gut health. Obviously we can talk about all the other categories and other time. But today's purpose, we're just gonna go through one of the, the key things, like 10 things you can do to improve your gut health and digestion. And then similarly were some things to, avoid or minimize.

[00:44:00] So number one is chew your food thoroughly. Number two, eat in a calm, relaxed state. So you could do something like box breathing or a physiological sigh before you start to eat. That's gonna be something that can help put you into a para the next state. Also making sure you're not eating when you are distracted.

[00:44:17] So sitting down, making sure you're not on a computer, not on a phone, not talking to a coworker. Just sit, be present and be relaxed. Okay. Bitter foods, this supports something called bile. Bile helps our body to s stimulate sorry. Spit of foods help produce bile. Bile helps to break down and emulsify fats.

[00:44:34] It also acts as an antimicrobial, so a type of substance in our small intestine, which pre protects us from bacteria. IT support. We need to support stomach acid production, so things like apple cider vinegar, digestive enzymes. HCL either in supplement form or in outside vinegar, can help produce stomach acid.

[00:44:52] Stomach acid, as the name suggest, is acid in our stomach that helps to break down protein and also has an antimicrobial effect. So protects us against overgrows of bacteria in our stomach like heop, pylori, wanna eat a variety of seasonal fruits and vegetables. Eaten in season means it's gonna be less likely to be genetically modified, obviously, if it's frozen, different story.

[00:45:10] But if we're eating fresh fruit and vegetables, we wanna try and be as seasonal as possible. Easy way to follow. Easy way to be healthy is follow the seasons and try and be as much of nature as possible. Increase our dietary fiber. This is obviously a bit of a seesaw. Too much fiber can be a problem too.

[00:45:24] Little fiber can be a problem. So the sweet spot for most people tends to be around, half a gram per kilo, stay hydrated or half a gram per kilo if you're a little bit less, if you're a bit lower, if you are a smaller person. Otherwise, I would, I'd probably say most people would max out around 40 grams a day, 30 to 40 grams a day.

[00:45:41] Okay, stay hydrated. 35 to 45 mil per kilo body weight per day. Make sure you're having proper filtered water. Revers, osmosis, filtration, mineralized and ionized is the best quality water you're gonna get fast in between meals. Stop snacking. Eat three to four good quality meals and then allow at least two hours in between each meal so your stomach has time to digest and clear out any waste products.

[00:46:05] Adding minerals to our water. So Celtic salt, lemon, lime are a good quality supplement can be useful. And taking a post meal walk, walking post meal can help to regulate our blood sugar levels and help with digesting our food. Things to avoid eating in a rush while you're distracted. Like I said, make sure you're present.

[00:46:22] Consistent snacking, like I said, three to four solid meals. Leave at least a two hours in between meals so you've got a bit of time to digest. Eating on the go as above. Not chewing your food, which generally comes down to rushing eating on the go. Most of your food should be broken down in your mouth by an enzyme called amylase.

[00:46:39] So if you're not breaking down majority of your food in your mouth, the less effort your mouth does, the more effort your digestive tract has to do. So if you want to decrease the amount of work your digestive tract has to do, start by chewing your damn food, drinking excess liquid with meals. So try and stay clear of excess liquid or things like caffeine with meals.

[00:46:58] High intake of processed foods. So anything that's prepackaged, anything that has ingredients listed more than three to five ingredients, seed oils, refined sugars gluten processed foods. Try and minimize any of those things. Obviously have live your life a little bit. Have 'em every now and then, but don't make them a big party of your diet.

[00:47:14] Large meals late at night. Aim to consume me dinner two, three hours before bed, eating under stress, over consumption of caffeine, alcohol put gluten in there as well. And overriding in one sitting, a good rule that the Japanese follow is, eat until they're 80% full and then stopping. That's something we could all take from them as westerners. So these are some basic recommendations to start with, to optimize your gut health, and as a byproduct of improving your gut health, you're gonna notice improved. Energy, cognitive function, skin health, pretty much every system in your body will work better if you want to be a bit more specific.

[00:47:46] Beyond doing those things, potentially you're already doing those things or you're just someone that's Hey, I want to just get specific and know exactly how my body's working, exactly what I wanna do. What I would recommend is one of, or a combination of the following tests. So I. Blood tests, a stool test, DNA test.

[00:48:02] I won't have enough time to go through the specifics of each of these. If you do have questions, welcome to reach out to me on to via email or Instagram. I'm happy to dive into the specifics of what they are, the benefits, and which one's right for you. But these tests are gonna allow you just to be specific with your intervention.

[00:48:15] So rather than just going on the internet and following random nutrition advice, taking random supplements and doing random programs, understand exactly what your body needs, what your deficiencies are and what you should be doing for your body to get the best results. In the short term, but also long term if your goal is longevity.

[00:48:30] If you're not sure where to start, you can scan this code. Essentially, if you purchase a blood test and you want us to take a look at it, you can purchase the blood test, email us your results. All the details are on this QR code. Once you scan it and we can give you some feedback on where things are at, it's completely free.

[00:48:45] Nothing to buy, basically just an opportunity for you to get your test done and have it looked over by someone who understands the optimal reference ranges. Who can then give you advice on where things are at. And I'll give you a thumbs up and say everything's great. Or if there's things to work on, I can let you know which areas to work on which which tests might be the most relevant for you.

[00:49:02] So thank you for having me, guys. Hope you have enjoyed this presentation. I'm sure you'll be I'm sure my details will be somewhere if you wanted to contact me if via email or Instagram. If you have any questions about the presentation, also love any feedback. If you guys have any feedback about what you loved what you took away from it, I'd love to hear it.

[00:49:17] So thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your evening.