The Functional Medicine Radio Show With Dr. Carri

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Daniel DeBaun talks about EMF radiation (electromagnetic field radiation), and its effect on health.

Daniel DeBaun is an internationally recognized expert in EMF radiation, EMF shielding, and EMF-related health issues with special focus on the effect of exposure from mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and cell phones. Daniel’s concern regarding the health impact of EMF emissions grew from over thirty years of engineering experience in the telecommunication industry, where he held a variety of executive positions at SAIC, Telcordia, AT&T, and Bell Labs. He is the co-author of Radiation Nation: The Fallout of Modern Technology.

Main Questions Asked about EMF radiation:

• What is EMF radiation?
• Where does EMF radiation come from?
• How does EMF radiation damage our bodies?
• How can we protect ourselves?

Key Points made by Daniel DeBaun on EMF radiation:

• 100 years ago, electromagnetic radiation didn’t exist in our lives. Nature doesn’t generate emissions that can potentially be dangerous to our bodies.
• One major source of EMF radiation is all the devices we use to communicate with – cell phones, Wi-Fi, Blue-tooth,
• Another is when you have an electric motor – e. g., refrigerator, hair dryer, etc. – as a byproduct it releases emissions into the air.
• As little as 6-7 years ago, I didn’t think that the low level signals from a laptop could be harmful to the body; but I looked into it and found that there was a lot of research as to how these signals were interrupting our body’s behavior.
• To be more specific, when you have a cell phone to your head or when you have a laptop in your lap, the emissions are touching the cells of the body. With the constant aggressive radio frequency signal touching the body like that, the cell becomes diminished in its capacity to defend itself.
• At the same time, there’s an immune suppression effect from these devices, which can significantly worsen an already compromised immune system.
• You can have mutated cells, you can have DNA damage, you can all kinds of potentially longer lasting health problems.
• For a bit of context, a microwave oven is around 2.3 gigahertz which is transmitted into the water in your meat, it oscillates the cells and, all of a sudden, your meat is cooked.
• It turns out that cell phone emissions are around two gigahertz. Just like the microwave it is a thermal-emitting signal. The standard for cell phones is that the cell phone is allowed to increase the temperature of the head around the cell phone by two degrees and the signal is allowed to penetrate one inch into the skull.
• Fast forward 30 years and you have children using cell phones, not the six-foot males that the standard was based on. The same signal is going completely through a six-year old child. Children are three times more vulnerable than adults.
• Over the last ten years, research says that frontal lobe cancer has increased by two percent per year, compounding every year; this being the primary cancer for cell phone exposure.
• With children, however, we’re also looking at neurological impacts – e. g., ADHD, and child behavioral problems – we’re talking about all kinds of disruption of brain patterns. We’re looking at a lifetime of exposure.
• EMF radiation symptoms are somewhat non-specific. You have a headache today, is it because you have blue light, i. e., visible light exposure to the retina? Or is it because you have a radio signal from your router that’s two foot away from you bothering your brain and the panels of the brain? There are just so many symptoms that rear their ugly head, and it’s hard to prove.
• Furthermore, blue light is a component of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum that actually is visible. And it turns out; its strength is really, really strong.
• So what you want to avoid is exposure before going to bed, as this disrupts creation of melatonin which disrupts your circadian rhythm which can lead to a whole raft of problems.
• One of the best ways to protect yourself, is to know where the EMF radiation is coming from – when a cell phone is on it’s constantly transmitting to the tower, your Wi-Fi is constantly transmitting to the router, – then, ask yourself if you need all those transmitters. Reduce the number of transmitters in a room, and you begin reducing your exposure.
• The worst case of poten...

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Navaz Habib explains the importance of the vagus nerve to our overall health.

Dr. Habib’s book “Activate Your Vagus Nerve” is a simple to follow guide to help you identify and address a major missing piece in patients dealing with chronic health concerns. By activating the Vagus nerve, we can optimize our productivity, focus and energy levels, allowing us to feel the positive effects of upgraded health.

Main Questions Asked about the Vagus Nerve:

• What is the vagus nerve and why is it so important?
• How do we know if our vagus nerve is working properly or not?
• Are there specific signs to look for? Are there tests?
• What about treatment? How do we fix this?
• Are there exercises to help rehabilitate the vagus nerve?
• What else do we need to know about the vagus nerve?

Key Points made by Dr. Habib about the Vagus Nerve:

• The vagus nerve is one of the most important nerves in our body. This nerve is the only one that leaves from the cranium, which is where our brain is located, and goes to the other organs.
• It goes to many different organs in our body; essentially, you name the organ and the vagus nerve goes to and innervates that organ.
• The vagus nerve not only sends information to the organs from the brain, but also from the organs back to the brain.
• Most of us have heard of the brain gut connection and the physical connection is the vagus nerve. It is the fastest and clearest direct path between the brain and the gut.
• An easy way to check if the gut brain connection is working, and that the vagus nerve can transfer the information between the gut and the brain, is to see if our gut is working the way it should be.
• Digestive dysfunction is one of the most important, most common signs of vagus nerve dysfunction that we see.
• There is one test that I feel is a great way for anyone to just check to see how well their gut is functioning. It’s called the sesame seed bowel transit time test. Pick up a small bag of white sesame seeds, put a spoonful of these in a glass of water and drink it down, without chewing the seeds. Our body cannot digest the covering so they will show up in the stool. What we are looking for is the time it takes to see the first seeds in our stool and then when we see the last seeds to come out in our stool.
• Anywhere between 12 and 24 hours is good. Anything more or less than that is a sign that our vagus nerve isn’t working properly.
• There are other signs, as well. The vagus nerve has four different functions. One being a parasympathetic function, which is our rest and digest function – so one thing I look for is how well people handle stress. Inability to handle stress and/or recover from a stressful event means that their bodies are not very well adapted.
• 15% of the information passing through the autonomic nervous system (which is the system that controls all the things we don’t think about, g., digestion, heartbeat and breathing) is parasympathetic. If these things don’t function well and don’t allow for recovery, it means the vagus is not working well.
• This is where a lot of issues with inflammation occur. If we’re not able to control our levels of inflammation, it’s because our vagus is not able to do its job.
• We have a system called the blood brain barrier, which is supposed to keep inflammatory products, viruses, , out of the brain; but the vagus is a direct bypass.
• If we start to have leakiness in the gut because our function is compromised, it’s easy for the inflammation to get through the gut blood barrier into the vagus nerve and bypass the blood brain barrier leading to the brain fogginess incidents where you are dealing with memory loss, walking into a room and forgetting why, and forgetting where you parked the car, for example.
• This is a direct sign of inflammatory processes in the brain, especially when one had a good memory before.
• Thus treating the gut issues are not always enough to resolve issues.
• Travel is one of one of those things where our body is put under a lot of stress and that stress can be because we’re crossing time zones, for example, and our body is don’t know what time it is, and so we throw off our melatonin responses and our hormones get thrown off. And in doing so, when we change our schedules, our bodies don’t know whether they’re in a state of being awa...

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Jordan explains endometriosis – causes and natural treatments.

Dr. Jordan Robertson is a naturopathic doctor and women’s health author. Through her experience in medical literature review, critical appraisal and research, Dr. Robertson has published over 12 literature reviews on women’s health, and has worked closely with McMaster University, writing and facilitating courses on integrative medicine for the last 10 years, speaking for their medical school and working off-site for the Endometriosis Clinic at McMaster Hospital. Dr. Robertson has most recently lectured for the Ontario Association of Naturopathic Doctors convention on PCOS, PMS, PMDD and Endometriosis, and has published a book for women, Carrying to Term, on reducing miscarriage risk. In her clinical practice she focuses on women’s health issues including PMS, PCOS, infertility, menopause and breast cancer recovery.

Main Questions Asked about Endometriosis:

• What is endometriosis?
• What causes it?
• How would you assess and treat the various aspects of endometriosis in patients?
• How long should it take to see improvements?

Key Points made by Dr. Jordan about Endometriosis:

• Endometriosis is a gynecological concern, where women have abnormal growth of endometrial tissue outside of their uterus.
• Unlike the normal menstrual experience, where the endometrial lining is shed every month, these satellite lesions create chronic inflammation, chronic pain, and a chronic immune response, given that they are growing and bleeding, but with nowhere to go.
• 2002-2003 was sort of the first glimpse we had at endometriosis being an immune-triggered condition, we were starting to realize that the immune system in those women was not behaving normally, and almost more like an autoimmune-like tendency, where the immune system, rather than helping these women, was actually perpetuating inflammation, and that their T cells, and the cells related to what would typically be related to a sort of cleaning up cells that are where they don’t belong in these women weren’t behaving properly.
• There’s some evidence that these women may metabolize hormones differently, that they may metabolize environmental estrogens and hormones differently than other women, and so, they have, say, a more difficult time of clearing environmental estrogens from their body than women without endometriosis. The one that they’ve spent the most time on in the research are the dioxin family of toxins; and we also know that those women differ in their progesterone reception.
• I think we underestimate how many women suffer with endometriosis, because the gold standard for diagnosis is laparoscopic surgery.
• Some of the advances in research and assessment is identifying that there is a blood test that can rule in endometriosis for women. It’s called CA 125, which was typically a cancer marker for ovarian cancer. It actually does run positive in many women with endometriosis, and so, just as a starting point, women can have that blood test, and rule in endometriosis.
• We know that vitamin D is really concentrated in the decidua, which is the uterine lining, and really influences the immune system. Best example of this is the impact that vitamin D has on miscarriage reduction, the same thing happens with endometriosis, and we know that the lower their vitamin D status, the greater their pain, the greater their use of analgesic drugs. So that from an assessment perspective, I think that’s sort of the best sort of surrogate marker for immune function.
• The hormonal stuff is interesting, because we generally, conventionally treat endometriosis just by suppressing all hormonal function, which from a fertility perspective, is not really an option for women to have their cycles suppressed like that, ongoing. At some point, they need to come off the drug therapy. But those women actually do benefit from additional progesterone supplementation, especially around cycles where they’re attempting to get pregnant, because their progesterone receptors are lowered in their endometrial lining, and they’re not as sensitive or responsive to their own progesterone.
• When it comes to environmental toxins, I would say I just usually treat it empirically. We have collected data on thousands and thousands of women, we know that they eat more saturated fat, they eat more high fat dairy, they eat less polyunsaturated fats in their diet, they eat more refined carbohydrates, they eat less antioxidants, and they drink more alcohol. Their diets naturally, even if we just watch women with endometriosis, are higher exposure to dioxin compounds, or estrogen-like compounds th...

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Nirala Jacobi explains the bi-phasic SIBO diet and its relevance to difficult cases of SIBO.

Dr. Nirala Jacobi is a naturopathic doctor and is considered one of Australia’s leading experts in the treatment of small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), a common cause of IBS. She lectures nationally and internationally about the assessment and treatment of SIBO and is the host of the popular podcast The SIBO Doctor podcast for practitioners. She is the medical director and senior naturopathic physician at The Biome Clinic, center for functional digestive disorders in New South Wales.

Main Questions Asked about the bi-phasic SIBO diet:

• What is the bi-phasic SIBO diet?
• What makes you suspicious that a patient might be in the group with histamine issues?
• How is the histamine bi-phasic SIBO diet different from the original bi-phasic diet?
• What about hydrogen sulfide SIBO?
• What are some of the things you can do to restore the microbiome?

Key Points made by Dr. Nirala Jacobi about the bi-phasic SIBO diet:

• I put the bi-phasic SIBO diet together for practitioners to really organize their treatment approach for their SIBO cases. So, it’s a diet that’s based on the low fermentable carbohydrate diet know as FODMAP diet. I wanted to offer something to patients and practitioners that made it a bit more streamlined.
• We get very good feedback with it. Of course, there’s always exceptions and difficult cases as you mentioned, where we may have to make further adjustments to it. But out of that really came also my experience that I mean, the kind of patients that I see now, is not your simple SIBO case anymore.
• I see pretty advanced and difficult, and failed cases. And so I saw more and more histamine intolerance, which can actually occur with long standing SIBO and for lots of other reasons as well. And so, we I formulated the histamine bi-phasic SIBO diet.
• Some people just associate histamine with allergies, and you just take an anti-histamine for that. But you actually have about five different receptors for histamine in your body, in every imaginable compartment. In your brain, and in your digestive tract. And in your immune system. So, you have lots of different areas where histamine is actually really important. And serves a special function.
• When we start to see histamine be a problem, we don’t just see allergies. We see also headaches, we can see gas and bloating. We can see constipation or diarrhea. We see abdominal cramping. We see menstrual cramping. We see insomnia, so you can see how this can be quite confusing.
• The difference between the original and the histamine SIBO diets is that we the original one has phase one and phase two still within the context of FODMAPs. Or these fermentable carbohydrates. And it’s phase one is basically very restrictive. And then phase two is a bit more generous. The histamine one really focuses on foods that are high in histamine. So, and as well as fermentable carbohydrates. So, it combines the histamine foods as well as the histamine what are known as histamine liberating foods.
• So, phase one of the histamine bi-phasic SIBO diet eliminates both histamine and histamine liberators. As well as FODMAPs. And then phase two, you’re adding in histamine liberators again. And then when you’re done with that, and you’ve identified, or calmed that whole histamine response, you can transition onto the phase two of the regular bi-phasic SIBO diet.
• Now, it’s important to mention that you cannot eradicate SIBO with diet alone, we know that. You can manage symptoms with the diet, but you can’t eradicate them. The eradication really comes with antimicrobials. And that’s done usually in phase two.
• And these SIBO diets are really not meant for longterm treatment, because we know that longterm reduction in fermentable fibers is really starving your micro biome.
• I think as human beings, our ideal diet is likely to be an 80% plant based diet. And within that 80% plant based, to have a lot of variety there. Not just the same eight to ten vegetables.
• I actually think the goal of the practitioner is not just to identify SIBO. What I usually tell practitioners is to find the cause of SIBO. What actually happened here. Because we have normal defenses that protect us from bacterial overgrowth. Otherwise all of us would have SIBO, all the time.
• It’s really up to the practitioner to identify if this patient has SIBO due to some motility defect. The other area of SIBO causes, or underlying causes, is poor digestion. And then lastly, the last category is impaired outflow. Because SIBO is a...

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Terry Wahls explains her updated version of the Wahls Protocol for MS, autoimmune disease, and a number of other health issues.

Dr. Wahls is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa where she conducts clinical trials. In 2018 she was awarded the Institute for Functional Medicine’s Linus Pauling Award for her contributions in research, clinical care and patient advocacy. She is also a patient with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, which confined her to a tilt-recline wheelchair for four years. Dr. Wahls restored her health using a diet and lifestyle program she designed specifically for her brain and now pedals her bike to work each day.

She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine, The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles, and the cookbook The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life: The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions.

Main Questions Asked about the Wahls Protocol:

• Can you tell us your story of beating MS?
• So, can you give us the basic principles of your plan for your brain health and mitochondrial health (the Wahls Protocol)?
• You still use these principles in your clinics to help patients?
• So, it’s not just for MS and autoimmune disease?
• And, it’s not expensive?
• I would think within your group classes, there’s a certain amount of support from everybody?
• Thinking about the different parts of the Wahls Protocol, what are the three things listeners could do right now to start helping themselves?
• Are you still doing research?

Key Points made by Dr. Wahls about the Wahls Protocol:

• I’m a conventional internal medicine doctor who was diagnosed, in 2000, with multiple sclerosis. Of course, I wanted to treat my disease aggressively but, despite the best people and newest drugs, I went relentlessly downhill. In 2002, I was introduced to the Paleo Diet, but I continued to go downhill.
• But I’d been reading the basic science, ancestral health principles, functional medicine, and integrating all that I was reading. I designed a diet and lifestyle protocol for my mitochondria, for my brain cells, to slow my decline. And to my amazement, my brain fog went away, my pain was stopped, and then I began getting stronger.
• The first thing I’d been adding were supplements targeting my mitochondria, then I though of using the nutrients in my supplements as a guide for how I should design my nutrition plan. So, I created a very structured Paleo diet. Once I redesigned my diet, the speed of change was breathtaking.
• So much so that I started focusing on diet in my clinics, the primary care clinic, the traumatic brain injury clinic, and I had remarkable results. Remarkable success at getting people to make these big changes.
• I began seeing people from the pain clinic, people from primary care and psychiatry clinics with complicated medical problems; and we’re helping them.
• We’re turning off brain fog, we’re stabilizing their mood, we’re dramatically improving their blood sugars; people with severe obesity are beginning to lose weight.
• It was remarkable the variety of people that would come. We had so many people coming that we had to figure out how to do all this in group classes.
• I ended up having to give quarterly reports to the chief of staff and director of the hospital with our progress – the number of people we saw, how we changed their overall blood pressure, their blood sugars, their lipid values, their use of pain meds, their use of blood sugar meds, the use of meds overall because we were so successful.
• I also want people to understand that many of the people we were serving at my clinic had severe financial restraints, so I’m teaching people how to make these changes while living on a fixed income. I did all this doing basic primary care lab work and using basic supplements.
• I’m now teaching at the Institute for Functional Medicine and the A...