Welcome to the age gracefully show with Dr. Michael Grossman, the well known anti aging stem cell and regenerative medicine specialist, best selling author and founder of the OC wellness clinic in Irvine, California. Each week, he shares the latest information to help you look and feel your best. So you age gracefully. And here’s your host, Dr. Michael Grossman.
Hi, I’m Dr. Michael Grossman. I’m an anti aging physician. And I specialize in keeping people healthy and youthful. And I like to do it through natural means. prescription medicines have a value. And they can help with a lot of issues. But the most important thing is to have a balanced physiology now allows you to maintain your natural youthfulness and vitality. Today we’re going to focus on the key to chronic illness is the gastrointestinal tract. Now the gastrointestinal tract is that part of your body that takes the food when you eat it goes down into the stomach, and then goes through a whole process through the small intestines of absorbing the food and then into large intestines where you concentrate, absorb some more, and then excrete the waste products. 80% of the body’s immune system surrounds the gastrointestinal tract. Guess what intestinal tract means? lymph nodes, and lymph system, the white blood cells that monitor everything that goes on in your environment, on a chemical level to decide is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is this something I should fight off and get rid of, or something I should welcome and absorb and take into my body. Now, when you have imbalances in the gastrointestinal tract, you usually have certain symptoms. You could have a lot of gas, you have bloating, you could have diarrhea, constipation, or alternating diarrhea and constipation. And we call that irritable bowel syndrome. Any of these imbalances in the gastrointestinal tract are not just annoying, but they’re really really serious problem can affect your overall long term health and vitality. When you get imbalances in a gastrointestinal tract, the body may have a number of different reactions to it. You could begin to leak things through the gastrointestinal tract that shouldn’t be leaking in. When there’s imbalances there different bacteria, different yeast, different food, irritants that caused the gastrointestinal tract to get leaky things good through it that shouldn’t be getting through it. And then what happens is the body gets overloaded with this foreign material that begins to overwhelm the rest of the physiology. Everything absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract moves right into the liver, and the liver needs to process all the things coming through. And if the liver gets overwhelmed, then you get a whole series of imbalances in your physiology that can create havoc with long term health and wellness. So it’s usually not an immediate kind of effect that you have. But over time, when the liver gets overwhelmed, tends to get into the bloodstream. You get foreign materials in the bloodstream that shouldn’t be there. And these foreign materials that get into the bloodstream when it overwhelms the physiology, the first thing it damages is the mitochondria. These are the little tiny power packs that ruin all yourselves. You will have 1000s of them and every cell that you have in your body. And these mitochondria are like little furnaces that burn up the food you’re eating and give you energy but in the process of burning up the food to give you an energy there can be damage that occurs free radicals just like you have a fireplace and get smoke. You want to fire in the heat. But you don’t want to smoke, the smoke is not very pleasant and irritates you. Same thing in these mitochondria, when they get injured by these materials coming through the body from that leaky gut, then the mitochondria are damaged. And in the process of burning the fuel that create a lot of smoke, which are these oxidative stress compounds, and these, then cause you to feel bad. So to give you a clear understanding of what this means, we can we can understand that when you have the flu, you feel really bad, you get body aches and pains and you’re tired and you get a headache, and you don’t feel good. Your brain is foggy. This kind of affects occur naturally from the flu virus because the virus in just a mitochondria of your body. The same kind of thing can happen. Through this process of leaky gut and overwhelming the physiology from a imbalanced gastrointestinal tract, you’ll feel bad. And we have what we call fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome. These are descriptions, like saying someone has a headache, it’s not like a real diagnosis. It’s a description of a physical imbalance and a pain syndrome, or a fatigue syndrome, or muscle aches syndrome can have many different causes. Headaches have many different causes, but ultimately, your head hurts. This is what happens from this gastrointestinal imbalance. So what do we do to treat this the best treatments for imbalances in the gastrointestinal tract on that. So we start with trying to prevent the leaky gut the irritation that occurs in the gastrointestinal tract that sets off this whole process of overwhelming the physiology and injuring the mitochondria. So to repair the leaky gut, we have a variety of natural approaches. So one very basic approach is to give the body probiotics, the right balance of good and bad bacteria very important. Bacteria are what digests the fiber in your body, the end the food to eat, and it creates nutrients from that, that actually feed the gastrointestinal tract. And the main nutrients that are produced from these healthy bacteria is called l glutamine. So the amino acid, the only cells of the body that get their food and nutrients from the bacteria breaking down the fiber or the lining of the gastrointestinal tract, all the other cells in the body get their food from the bloodstream that already have everything broken down for them. But the lining of the gastrointestinal tract needs l glutamine to heal and to maintain its health. So big doses of L glutamine to people who have this leaky gut intestinal imbalance problem. And that helps to repair the lining of the intestinal tract. The good bacteria there are many kinds of good bacteria you can use. I like ones that have at least 20 billion good bacteria. And there are many kinds of good bacteria. We want the ones like bifidobacterium and lactobacillus that can balance out the guests with tests on track. And these are very hardy bacteria. There are some other bacteria that can be used that don’t work nearly as well. And you want bacteria that live bacteria. So you want companies that the ones that I use are companies that I know, have very vibrant bacteria that really are alive. If they’re on the shelf. Very often they’re not healthy, living bacteria. So that’s one big area that we look at. Another big area of how to heal the intestinal tract would be to eliminate things that are irritating it, which commonly are foods so people can develop food allergies at any time of their life. Food allergies can cause problems with right. headaches and stomach aches, can cause diarrhea, gas constipation. Food allergies may not cause any of those specific issues. But they just make you feel tired. And usually food allergies are things that you’re craving. So when you’re craving wheat products or dairy products, you’ve got to eat them every day. And if you don’t eat him for a day you really miss them. That’s a sign that you may be having a food addiction allergy syndrome. And these are very common things. And it could be any food. But the way we find out which foods were allergic and addicted to the easiest way that we can run different tests and blood tests and other tests that are helpful, but the the easiest, and the most accurate way is just going on elimination diet, you’re eating very simple foods, rice, chicken and vegetables, and you rotate them through your diet for 10 days or so. And at the end of the 10 days, you’ll find you feel so much better. And then we play detective and see which of those hundreds and hundreds of foods are eliminated are the cause of your allergic reactions. And we’ll take you through a process of how to do that. So that’s area eliminating foods from your diet and finding out which ones you’re allergic to and irritating your GI tract from. So other things that can cause that can be imbalanced bacteria that may need to be treated with specific herbs and or even prescription medicine. Same thing with yeast. yeast is an irritant. People don’t die from yeast in their GI tract, but it can be a big irritant for some people. And treating it with herbs and or prescription medicine can be very, very helpful. When you change your diet and you eliminate the irritation, the GI tract, your symptoms will get very better very slowly. It can take a week or two to start feeling somewhat better, a month or two to feel dramatically better. It takes time to repair and heal the mitochondria. When your mitochondria are injured, we often will give you specific nutrients to heal the mitochondria, high doses of certain antioxidants, co q 10. Light pohick acid, vitamin C, a variety of other antioxidants can be very helpful to repair the mitochondria that have been injured. So that is generally a big picture of what chronic disease. I do a lot of work in this arena for patients who have been to many other doctors who don’t have this perspective of of how to deal with chronic disease. So you can reach me through my office 949-222-0232 you can reach me through my website, OC wellness calm and get a big picture of all these different things that we do in the office. It’s a pleasure talking with you today. And look forward to speak to you again. Thanks so much.
Thank you for watching the age gracefully show with Dr. Michael Grossman. Join us next week for another informative discussion. To help you age gracefully. Be sure to visit us at oc wellness.com
