“I wanted to empower people to be able to find a way to heal themselves ‘cause it’s really not so complicated”
Vincent Pedre
What does your gut say? Dr. Vincent Pedre is an Integrative and Functional Medicine Doctor whose mission is to help people understand what their gut issues are and restore them back to health by themselves. He himself battled from gut issues which went on for years until he found Functional Medicine. He wrote the book, “Happy Gut”, to help people become their own gut interpreter.
This episode talks about Dr. Pedre’s journey from becoming a Yoga Master and Acupuncturist into a Functional Medicine Doctor. He shares his take on probiotics, yeast, sugar, and others that could cause our body issues. He explains how a person’s mentality goes and how to take control of it.
Listen to episode 86 on iTunes here or subscribe on your favorite podcast app.
86: Show Notes
Dr. Veronica Anderson’s Links:
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Book:
Happy Gut: The Cleansing Program To Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, And Eliminate Pain
Time stamps:
02:21 – Transition from Yoga and Acupuncture to Gut Health
05:10 – The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
11:58 – Why people are accommodating stress
13:20 – Yoga and Acupuncture in relation to the Digestive System
15:47 – What he learned from his own gut
18:14 – The book’s purpose
19:12 – Probiotics
25:13 – Functional Medicine vs. Nutritionist
30:49 – Who’s controlling who?
Full Transcript:
Female VO: Welcome to the Wellness Revolution Podcast, the radio show all about wellness in your mind, body, spirit, personal growth, sex, and relationships. Stay tuned for weekly interviews featuring guests that have achieved physical, mental, and spiritual health in their lives.
If you’d like to have access to our entire back catalog visit drveronica.com for instant access. Here’s your host, Dr. Veronica.
Dr. Veronica: Hi. We’re coming back again. I’m Dr. Veronica. This is the wellness revolution. We’re going to talk about some gut feelings today. I have the gut experts so you know I get all the experts out there. Everybody knows today digestive issues are a big deal in your body when they occur because everything’s made in your digestive system, your hormones, your neurotransmitters and so if you have problems with your digestion besides feeling miserable because you got pain or you’re in the bathroom all the time, you maybe feel miserable emotionally because everything’s thrown off because of your digestive system. There’s so much going on in your gut in your digestive system that you got to get this straight. So, now we have people who are experts in this. So, this is not your run-of-the-mill gastroenterologist, this is a functional medicine gut specialist. Dr. Vincent Petrie – “Happy gut” is his book you want to get that whether you get the hardback or the paperback. He talks about how to make your digestive system happy and then that makes you happy and so we’re going to talk about him. He speaks all over the place all over the world. People have been approaching him supplement companies want him to be the spokesperson he has his own integrative Center in New York City so for those of you who like to travel you can look your plane ticket and come to New York get your digestive sitting system looked at and then go to Metropolitan Museum of Art and all the other the Statue of Liberty that Empire State Building that will make your head cut.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: We don’t need a hot dog.
Dr. Veronica: So, doctor I’m going to call you Dr. Vince. Can I call you Dr. Vince?
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Well done, well, dr. Petrie. Everybody knows me as dr. Petrie that’s all I’m out there.
Dr. Veronica: Wonderful but we’re going to know.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Maybe when I have my own show you’ll call me Dr. Vince. How’s that?
Dr. Veronica: Whatever once you have your show whatever you decide. But let’s talk about happy gut. So, let me just I got to ask a little bit about your background because the audience doesn’t know but I just found out you’re a yoga instructor you also are trained and acupuncture. How did you get from yoga and acupuncture into gut health?
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Well, I think it was a natural sequence of basically getting deeper and deeper into the holistic realm this whole-body approach mind body spirit into healing the body so and it started even when I was younger. I was pianist and I can lookback at old videos of me playing the piano and when I would get up on stage the first thing I would do was put my hands down and close my eyes and breathe for a moment and as a child I didn’t know anything about meditation but I realized that that’s what I was doing I was kind of centering myself trying to work against my nerves and it’s interesting that I you know grew up doing something like that because that’s what I work with people now is really helping them in so many different levels mind body spirit. A lot of it is got centered but also hormone balancing and talking a lot about stress and how that affects us. I really do think that stress is the number one biggest cause of bodily symptoms for people and they don’t know how to handle stress and I didn’t know how to handle stress. I was as you know people who made it through Medical School where type a personality. We’re go-getters, right? And I was typing in high school I wanted to be the top of my class and I was but there was a lot of stress and a lot of feeling of compression that went with that and it wasn’t until I was applying to medical school and I was afraid of needles.
Dr. Veronica: When I saw my own blood, I thought I was going to fade when I saw my own blood. I was like “Oh, no. I want to be a doctor but I can’t look at my own blood”.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Yeah but, yeah. So, I applied to medical schools I’ve taken the MCAT and then I went in at home and told my parents” I don’t think I can become a doctor because I’m afraid of needles”. That’s how I reach finally get my blood taken or get a vaccine and they were like no you’re going to be a doctor. I had no choice.
So, it was like okay if I have to become a doctor then I need to understand what is going on with my body why does my heart start racing, why do I break out into a cold sweat and then I pass out. And I started researching and I found a book by Herbert Benson called “The relaxation response” and it explained the whole fight-or-flight response and how you know in society nowadays we’re kind of more in that fight-or-flight that would have been used in ancient times to you know run from a tiger or whatever it maybe. But we really should be in a parasympathetic state in between which we’re not. We’re in this hyper I didn’t see and I learned through that I could control my autonomic nervous system that was causing this fight-or-flight when I was going to get my blood drawn or an injection by breathing. And it was my first foray into meditation went through just learning how to breathe like sit and breathe and I started learning to control that and I decided that by the time I got to medical school I would be able to get my blood drawn and not pass out and I managed to conquer it. So, what could have been the crux what could have actually Bend one little reason that would have kept me from going into the health field actually became a really strong inspiration by which I help my patients because I realized if I can do this and I was always minded in that sense. Like my first go-to wasn’t okay give me a medication so that I don’t pass out when I have to go get a needle or give me an anti-anxiety. That wasn’t in my philosophy as a child and I grew up in a family that was very much into my dad was all date on supplements knowing what supplement to take for what and diet even though I didn’t follow any specific diet. But my first point of you know my first go-to was “What can I do naturally to unravel this internal process that is happening?” And that’s the type of doctor that I became is really looking at nutrition targeted supplementation but also understanding that mind body and let’s say gut connection you know and our soul I mean the gut is seed of the intuition so in a sense very potent powerful organ system and understanding how all of these things interrelated result in the health that we see or the lack of health that we are seeing.
So, that was the way that I kind of through a series of obstacles, let’s call them that were put in my way I looked for solution and when I went trained in yoga I was actually had finished my residency at Mount Sinai here in New York and I was looking for what to do I felt lost after finishing internal medicine and the main reason is that the question I asked myself at the end of my training was “Is this it?” Did I train you know it was just like very you know it wasn’t like a grand finale it was just kind of like “Really? I trained all these years so that I can drugs on people?” Everything is what symptom what drug do I give them what symptoms do they have what drug do I give them and I thought this isn’t what I signed up for and I once again I told my parents “I don’t know I’m not happy”. And I took a sabbatical year and I became part of a research program the clinical research arm of the World Trade Center project looking at people who have been exposed to the toxins the fumes from the World Trade Center and the great thing about that time is that I suddenly went from a hundred-hour work week and you know what I’m talking about to a 50-hour workweek. So, imagine that your work we’ve just got chopped in half. What do you do with your time? Well, for me I started exploring and one thing led to the next I went on a yoga retreat and I had such a good experience and I felt so amazing after it that when I came back to New York I said, “I’m going to train in yoga”. And the wonderful thing about that was that it brought me back to the beginning to where I had started before medical school which is I wanted to be a doctor like Andrew While like dr. Deepak Chopra that was holistic minded that married the two worlds because they are a complement to each other. It’s not that I am anti-Western medicine because Western medicine has had some amazing achievements and helped keep people alive and there are sometimes reasons to take a medication but I wanted to marry the two worlds and bridge that gap. You know, sort of like bridging east and west and finding the solutions and bringing in all of the different what I think of it and I’m sure you think of the same with functional medicine is that it’s an expanded toolkit. We have many more tools whereas you know before my toolkit was this. The procedure you know and that was it was, it was limited to that.
Now all my toolkit is I can sit there and have a conversation with the patient about how even though they don’t think that stress is an issue for them because a lot of people are so used to the level of stress that they live with that it has become their normal. You know in the nervous system it’s called accommodation you know if somebody touches you somebody’s putting pressure on you if you keep feeling it to the same intensity that would be a big bother but the nervous system accommodates so after a while it starts to lessen. You feel it but you don’t feel it as intensely. So, where was I going with that I just got? Yoga, yoga, brought me back to looking at the person as this whole. Looking at them from the outside does my internal medicine training had separated people into systems so you came in with a pneumonia you were a lung, you came in with a heart attack you were a heart you came in with ulcerative colitis you were your GI system. But it was all felt like compartmentalized and one patient in the hospital can have like five different specialists on their case and each one was putting in what they thought was best for their organ system but no one was putting it all together. And the great thing about doing yoga is that it got me to look at the body from the outside and starts to look at how people sit their posture, how your breathing since your greeting says a lot about the type of stress that you’re holding inside and I was talking about that you know people think that you know people get accommodated that’s where I was to their stress. So, stress becomes your new normal and you don’t recognize it but guess what your body registers stress. So, even though for you here at your mental level your stress is here maybe because you’re so used to it that you’re just desensitized to it but guess what? Your body doesn’t do your body’s feeling this stress here your body’s feeling it here. I call it biological stress. So, a person you know and you can be in biological stress just by living a hectic schedule. Rushing to work in the morning eating your meals fast getting to home late, eating late not getting enough sleep. All of these things even if you think it’s part of your normal life it’s a biological stressor for your system then you’re living with this high cortisol which is not good for your body not good for your mind and not good for your gut.
Dr. Veronica: So, we’re talking and we’re talking now about cortisol and yoga and so what led you after you became a yoga master and so you’re so you’re fifty-hour work weeks. How did that translate to talking about the digestive system so much?
Dr. Vincent Petrie: So, yoga led me to think well I would like I wanted to bring something into my practice that was like yoga Eastern minded that I could apply with my patients. And I did a lot of research and everything kept leading me back to acupuncture and I decided okay, well, I’m going to train in acupuncture. And the great thing about it was that acupuncture opened my mind up to systems biology. Functional medicine is actually it’s rude is Eastern medicine. So, it’s basically taking systems biology and applying it to the Western model. So, instead of looking at the body as a compartmentalized system, you look at the system the whole as a whole and how everything interacts and affects each other. But then it was it was acupuncture that finally made functional medicine sense to me was before that I had heard of functional medicine but I was still too much in my western-trained mind. So, it didn’t quite make sense to me I was like well that’s interesting but how is that possible? You know even though even though I knew that that was the route I wanted to take and I had been mentored by Dr. Lipman who was the first person to tell me about functional medicine. And I took a detour and I went to acupuncture first the anchor puncture opened my mind to systems biology and after that I’ve been always so thirsty for knowledge. I thought when the acupuncture was done and it’s like maybe I’m looking for punishment since like okay I didn’t get enough schooling now I’m going to go home trained in functional medicine but it really didn’t start out that way it just started out with me deciding I’m going to go to one of their annual conferences and see what it’s like. And when I arrived there I feltlike I found my long-lost family in medicine. And I have felt like Nemo or Dorie slit you know swinging by myself you know among some sharks at times. You know people who did not believe in what I was doing who poo pooed that acupuncture who weren’t into supplementation or looking at things from a natural point of view. So, I feltlike for a long time I was swimming against the currents and when I arrived at the first conference II Institute for functional medicine I felt that I found my tribe, finally. And I felt so comfortable there that I did I wasn’t planning on training and functional medicine but one thing led to another. And underneath it all I had grown up with what I thought was my normal. I had IBS I had a sensitive stomach. I had been on so many antibiotics as a teenager and you would be horrified I was treated with cipro at least once maybe twice a year and now we know from a study that came out and just about. What’s that?
Dr. Veronica: I said wow.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Yeah. And we know from a study that came out like two or three years ago several wipes out your digestive system your microbiome for 12 months up to 12 months. And I was on cipro at least every12 months, it’s not every six months throughout my teenage years. So, I had no microbiome. So, I developed the leaky gut I developed food sensitivities, dairy. I would get sick all the time. The doctors thought that I was just too thin, I couldn’t gain weight lo and behold because I couldn’t absorb my nutrients. I had a leaky gut. And it was a long journey but it was through medical school and what not I had changed my diet. I had learned to live with it but I still lived with what I thought was my normal you know and I just thought well this is just the way my body is and when I went to functional medicine one of my first modules was the gut module the GI module and through it I figured out exactly what was going on with my gut and I finally took lutein out of the diet and I fixed another couple of things I started using probiotics eating the right foods changed the way that we were eating at home and long and behold my gut healed itself. And I started working with patients because I just loved the gut and it had always been a frustration of mine when people came in with stomach issues as I hated the options we had as Western doctors. Because we were treating symptoms weren’t treating the underlying cause. You have to look under the hood as I like to call it. And so, I just started working with patients because I thought it was fun and you make someone better and they come back in a month and they’re already feeling different and you work with them for two or three months and they’re much better. And I just started getting referrals after referrals after referrals until one day I wake up and I realized “Well, I’m a functional medicine gut expert.” I didn’t even plan on this in my practice this is what I do I thought if I have so many people coming in they have no clue absolutely no clue on what to do. I thought well I need to write a book because if I have this many people and it never ends that more and more people wanting to come in because of gut issues then there is so many more. We know there are 70 million Americans who suffer from some sort of gut distress and about 20 percent who have acid reflux at least once a week. So, everybody you know so many people suffering from going to shoes I give her to even higher statistics. So, I wanted to write a book to help these people because I realize that there’s only you know, one of the mean that it’s impossible for me to see all these patients but I wanted to empower people to be able to find a way to heal themselves because it’s really not so complicated and though people think it is.
Dr. Veronica: So, I’m going to ask some of the common questions. So, first. Why can’t you just take a probiotic? People say oh just go take a probiotic that all. It seems like now probiotics are the cure-all everybody knows what they are they run to the store.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: There’s so much variety.
Dr. Veronica: And I say well, hold on a second it’s not quite as simple as just taking a probiotic.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Well, there’s so much variety in probiotics. And they can have so many different strains and variety meaning the strength of the probiotic. So, you have to look at the CF use kalim colony forming units and it could be 1 billion or it could be a hundred billion. So, the strength can be really different and that’s going to affect you differently and then the strains and we’re still learning I really think we’re at the tip of the iceberg and understanding you know, what each strain does and what it can heal. And then there’s all different types of probiotics because they’re not just the regular ones that we think of like the lactobacillus which is used to make yogurt and fermented foods. There’s little bacterium which is the most important probiotic in the development of the infant gut it’s called difficult back bacterium competitive. And then you have the spore based probiotics there’s not a lot of them out there in the market but there’s a lot of amazing research showing that they reduce things like c-reactive protein which is an inflammatory marker. And there’s one human study showing that these spores based probiotics are the reverse leaky gut. And I don’t think we have a study like that with other probiotics. Then there’s the non-bacterial probiotics, so, then we have a yeast based probiotic like Saccharomyces boulardii I which has been shown to protect the gut like when you’re in the middle of an antibiotic course. Also, really good for travelers’ diarrhea. And then you have soil based probiotics because maybe at some point we weren’t supposed to be so clean and we were supposed to eat a little bit of the dirt on our vegetables you know back in the day. Now I’m not saying go out there and eat dirt but there is something to that you know if you know where your produce is coming from like when I when I had my organic vegetable garden and I grew my own lettuce up in a country house that we had. If the lettuce had some dirt in it you know I would clean it I didn’t want to have obvious dirt but I would leave some of that dirt in there because I know that it’s good for us. So, we need all these different because the issue is when you have a probiotic it’s only representing a really narrow scope of the bacteria that are in the gut. And to put it into perspective they think that there’s a hundred trillion bacteria inside the microbiome that makes up the gut and I’m not talking about the microbiomes and other parts of the body but within those 100 trillion you can have anywhere between 400 and 600 species in one person. And just thinks that a probiotic only has maybe 8,10 different species you have 400-600 species so you can’t possibly recreate that in a probiotic because diversity is the key to health. So, there’s another thing there’s prebiotics. So, prebiotic foods. So, the way that you’re eating is going to build your gut flora but it’s also you know, going back to the idea of taking a probiotic to treat something it’s reductionist, you know. It’s against applying a Western Way of thinking of things a single drug for single condition, you know. The Magic Bullet. And it’s not like that you know you can’t take the probiotic and then go out and have your burger french fries and ice cream and all cookies and all these other things and things but I’m taking a probiotic so it’s going to protect me. No, it doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to look at your body as a system and it’s an integrated whole and if you know are sometimes I like to tell people it’s like a piece of a pie and each piece you know, some slices are bigger so, somehow something has a bigger influence on how you feel and some are smaller. But in order for you to have excellent health, you have to address every single portion of that pie. Sorry to use the analogy of the pie thing because it’s maybe not the best I don’t want you going out and eating pies. But you got the picture it’s all these things together you have to that’s what makes the whole.
Dr. Veronica: So, what you’re saying is it’s not simply good enough to if you have a digestive problem just go take a probiotic and it will fix it. So, I would you got to cross that point. But when we talk about things being reductionist that’s the way we think. It’s sort of like you said well you can’t take a probiotic and eat the burger and fries and the pie it’s really the same with Western medicine we just don’t admit that and so if you’re a diabetic and you’re taking metformin or insulin it doesn’t mean that you should be eating the burger and fries and everything that’s why people are having problems. They think that that pill is going to allow them to do the things nothing. So, same Western medicine that doesn’t work.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: The same thing with a satin you know. I had a patient come in saying well I’m on a statin so I can go out and eat steaks right. But that’s not the case. But that’s one problem with Western medicine is that it hasn’t given nutrition the importance that it really should be given you know. What should be written on this prescription pad is a nutrition prescription you know how to eat is that that’s the greatest source of harm that a person can do to themselves is what they put at the end of their fork. What they put into their mouths.
Dr. Veronica: Well, people say I went to the nutritionist and didn’t help me. What’s different in functional medicine versus I went to the nutritionist and didn’t help me?
Dr. Vincent Petrie: I think, I think sometimes what I what I know is that maybe you got a nutritionist but you only do one thing and you do them really slowly and it goes back to sometimes if you really want to see true results guess what? You’ve got to do everything together. So, if you want to reduce inflammation in your body you have to take out all of the inflammatory foods. Now, it doesn’t mean that some people you know aren’t ready for that all-or-none approach. So, I believe in a stacked approach so say I want to take you off of gluten dairy soy and corn but it’s a lot to conquer all at once. So, we can do week one take gluten now. By the end of the week you’ve conquered you understand how to eat when you go out like how to avoid gluten. Week two. Now add dairy to the list and then you figure out how to get dairy out of your diet you’re thinking about all the places where dairy is. Week three corn and week three soy. You know, whatever order works for a person but ultimately in order to get the results that you need to get you have to do everything together and sometimes there’s a lot of discounting that happens on the part of patients. I don’t want to say it’s dishonesty but maybe you don’t want to disappoint the person so, maybe you don’t tell them all the truth of what you’ve been eating, you know. So, they want to sound good to the nutritionist or the doctor. I just had a patient who did my 28-day cleanse and she’s had a high cholesterol. She’s a young woman I had a high cholesterol for a long time and I’ve been trying to get across to her the connection with sugar and what not. But it wasn’t until she did it in an organized fashion where she had to cut out sugar because that was part of my program and really be mindful of what she was eating. Her cholesterol dropped by 17 point something percent in her LDL dropped by 20% which was 40 points. That is remarkable and we had done and I had sent her to nutritionist and she hadn’t been able to accomplish this. So, what was different? And I asked her what do you think was different? And she’s like “Well, I think I was stricter with sugar and you know, I excluded all the other inflammatory foods”. Sometimes it’s a matter of feeling like you’re on a program so it makes you more dedicated to doing something and I think then if I can hand to the patient a paper showing these amazing results. This is you before doing things as you thought we were doing healthy but letting a lot of like what you thought was insignificant sugar here little sugar there maybe a cookie here maybe you think it’s the you know what did they say the devil is in the details. It’s always, it’s not like it’s not some grand thing, it’s small little details in your diet that could be making you sick. You could be, just and it doesn’t have to be a big thing that can cause an amazing shift for a person but sometimes you can’t really you know you need to do this whole integrated approach and a lot of what I do is not just diet but also mindfulness and tuning into gratitude. Because I think in order to heal you’ve got to get into this parasympathetic state. And even digestion speaking of the healing the gut the digestion is a relaxed activity. It’s not, it’s not a fight-or-flight activity. If you’re in fight-or-flight the last thing your body wants to do is deal with food down here it wants you to run, you know. It’s going to send blood to your muscles and away from your gut. They just think of all the people that are stressed and that’s affecting their digestive system. So, you know. So, it’s a little bit of a battle you know because it’s a lot of pieces of the puzzle fitting them together and getting people to overcome their own internal resistance to making these changes.
Dr. Veronica: So, one thing I’ve noticed in people is that when they’re out of balance with their hormones their neurotransmitters in their brain but also their digestive tract because they are overgrown with the wrong type of bacteria or health harming bacteria or yeast, it makes it incredibly hard for them to stick to a plan because they’re having cravings. So, their body is craving because there’s an imbalance and that’s how that once we start down the path that I say okay we’re going to do this we’re going to do this we’re going to do this they are able to follow a plan that they thought they would never be able to do because as their body starts to come in balance all of a sudden, those health harming bacteria those yeasts are under control and so the cravings go away. We get the one in eating schedule so that their hormones come into balance. So, yeah, a little bit about that because it isn’t as simple as I’m eating healthy with is cheating and/or it’s just it’s a little bit more nuanced than that. You have to understand there’s a few more things going on. So, talk a bit about that.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Well, and it’s that who’s controlling who. It’s this brain connection and when you have yeast overgrowth in the gut or candida what we find is that the candida secretes all different sorts of toxins and it can control the brain the way your brain is thinking and make you crave sugar. So, a part of you it’s almost like you know if you have somebody come in and they say I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I just can’t stop, you know. That it’s because your brain is not in control these little careers in here are in control but the crazy thing is that I put people on a seven-day detox and by the end of the detox their sugar cravings are gone.
Dr. Veronica: Yes, probably it takes about 72 hours.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: And the amazing thing is that the person that you do that to they go and kicking and screaming and thinking that you know, I can’t live without sugar like no, no, like you know like it’s a little kid you just took their favorite toy away. But, one thing I did recently because I had what I call dietary drift you know and it’s when you’re leading a good diet and then you slowly drift into the bad zone. So, over the holidays I had started allowing more sweets to come in and I had started craving that evening sweet you know when your cortisol drops late at night and suddenly you’re thinking I want something sweet after dinner. And so, I write a letter group and i cleanse and I decided you know what I’m going to join them I’m going to do this thing. I haven’t done my cleansing in like over a year when my book first launched. I’m just going to I’m going to do the cleanse with my group I walk the talk I’m going to be there with them. I go off of coffee sugar alcohol. And fascinating thing was the first night I was craving the sugar and I thought to myself and this helped me and I don’t know if it would help other people I’ve got you know, as you may imagine becoming a doctor there’s a great deal of discipline in my personality. But, you know, that first night I was craving sugar and I thought to myself what if you don’t have the sugar or you know gluten free cookie or whatever it is you know, are you going to be alive tomorrow? Is this life or death? And the answer was no. No, I’ll be fine, you know. It’s not, I don’t need this in order to sustain me because I had a really good dinner and I ate really healthy throughout the day and I had my omega threes and my hope you know my healthy fats. And so, I got through the first night and the second night I felt it again not so strong and what I like to tell people is that one way your brain when it’s telling you that you want sugar it doesn’t know what type of sugar it really wants. It just wants a sensation of sweet. So, if you give your brain a healthy sugar substitute. Let’s say, some blueberries and wait a couple of minutes, your brain is going to be satisfied. It’s not, it’s not the same as getting a sugar hit which is kind of like cocaine. It lights up the same areas of the brain as cocaine does so, it’s kind of like works as a drug in the brain. But if you just allow those couple of minutes, it’s going to pass. And another key tool that I found was having an herbal tea like something soothing tee to get through that period. But what does sugar do to you? It causes mood swings, right? And I honestly think that it contributes to depression because of the way it’s affecting your hormones, your internal hormones your insulin secretion, your cortisol. So, even though I’m not a depressed person I do tend to feel you know, more down in the winter months. And this was January when we did the cleanse. And I found by the end of week one off of sugar I was feeling I had up the ante on my feeling of positivity of how I felt internally and I thought “Wow”. Like even the small amount so it was just going back to wasn’t like I eat a lot but even that small amount looks at what it was doing to me internally. So, pretty, pretty amazing. But it causes anxiety also. People don’t realize that connection between sugar and anxiety but just think of you know sugar feeling feeding all the bad bugs in the gut that produce neurotransmitters like glutamate which is an excitatory neurotransmitter. It makes you a – on fire makes you anxious. So, when you take that away you know by the end of the week people feel even keel and people will come back and say and I know you see this in your practice “I don’t have those mood swings anymore”, you know, or I’m not that monster that I used to be. Granted, you know, a woman right before her cycle you know, tends to start craving sugar, right?
Dr. Veronica: Yes.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Yeah, so, I mean, I don’t and you can probably speak more to it this than the nine – then I can. But I think using a substitute you know, like a dark chocolate high sugar again going towards natural sugars like blueberries or apples or oranges. Things that are going to be healthy for your body and like anything, anything that’s a craving in other words it’s not required for the sustenance of your life it’s going to pass. It will pass within 20 minutes and if you satisfy it with something healthy and then just tell yourself “Wait, let that sink in”. You know, part of slowing down and our rush society is that you know we tend to overeat, overindulge, because we don’t know how to slow down and enjoy the little parts of the process, little pieces.
Dr. Veronica: Yes, yes. We did. We’re not talking we’re talking about the gut but we’re also talking about the emotion surrounding the food and what it how what are the emotion comes from because that emotion a lot of times comes from directly the digestive system with the hormones and the neurotransmitters that you’re talking about the glutamate and how the sugar feeds the glutamate and makes you feel excited.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: And just think of everything that is tied to the gut, you know. Your grandmother loved you by cooking for you or by baking for you. So, we show love to each other by cooking, you know. And it’s such an and it’s also part of community, you know, we get together for holidays and what do we do? We share a meal. That’s the biggest thing. So, but, like you were saying gut feelings or even gut intuition that mind connection and a lot of what I talk about is kind of you know, learning how to tune into your body, you know. Teaching people that I think of myself and I’m sure you think of yourself the same I’m a body interpreter for people, you know. I’m just helping them understand the signals that their body is giving them. But ultimately what I want to do is teach people to listen to their own bodies so they can be their own body interpreters, you know. And that’s such an important, you know, thinking the key and the center the root of the body is the gut and going back to yoga the biggest three chakras the root chakra. The root chakra, the second chakra and the third chakra are all located in that center. Everything that grounds us into being in this world in this body is so important. So, so important. And our power and will, you know, that’s the third chakra, you know. So, when that challenged so people will have a lot of upper GI symptoms epigastric pain, reflux. I see that a lot with people who are under duress but behind it there’s some sort of power struggle whether it’s with a family member or maybe it’s with a boss, it’s a dynamic at work. So, it’s really fascinating when you get to thinking about all the interconnections and the even the energetic connections with what causes distress or gut imbalance in people and makes you not feel so great. You know, we’re more, this is the funny thing is we’re more foreign material than we are human, you know. So, our bacterial cells outnumber our own cells and to one.
Dr. Veronica: So, we’re going to have to finish up. Your site “Happy gut life”, is that where we go to get more information? Happy gut life? And then we can all begun. Go ahead.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Yes. So, it’s happygutlife.com and I have a free gift for listeners if they go to life’s calm and foreign /gift then they’ll get my free Quick Start guide to a happy gut. So, if you’re thinking about you know you have gut issues or maybe you have things that maybe related to the gut like you have fatigue, you have asthma, allergies even autoimmune disease is rooted and connected to the gut. My guide is a way to get started, you know. So, it’s kind of like a beginning blueprint of how you should rework things to start to feel better.
Dr. Veronica: So, everybody knows that in the show notes, bellow the show notes, we will have where they can click so they can get that gift because we all love free gifts and then they can start to figure out how to get their gut happy but if they can’t get it happy from the free gift, begging fly in the New York City.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Or read my book “Happy gut”.
Dr. Veronica: Read the book, we’re flying in. So, thank you so much for being on this show. I thank you for your work it’s great everybody needs to know how to make their happy gut so they have good gut feelings.
Dr. Vincent Petrie: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Female VO: Thank you for listening to the Wellness Revolution Podcast. If you want to hear more on how to bring wellness into your life visit drveronica.com. See you all next week, take care.
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Dr. Veronica Anderson is an MD, Functional Medicine Practitioner, Homeopath. and Medical Intuitive. As a national speaker and designer of the Functional Fix and Rejuvenation Journey programs, she helps people who feel like their doctors have failed them. She advocates science-based natural, holistic, and complementary treatments to address the root cause of disease. Dr. Veronica is a highly-sought guest on national television and syndicated radio and hosts her own radio show, Wellness for the REAL World, on FOX Sports 920 AM “the Jersey” on Mondays at 7:00 pm ET.
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