The Environment and Your Health with Jon Mitchell

02/08/20 • 31 min

The Functional Medicine Radio Show With Dr. Carri

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Jon Mitchell talks about the relationship between the environment and your health.

Jon Mitchell is a certified Physician Assistant turned Functional Medicine Health Consultant who shows driven professionals how to get abundant and sustained energy, mental clarity, and resolve their chronic health issues.

Main Questions Asked about the Environment and Your Health:

How does the external environment impact our health?
When it comes to the environment and your health, is there one area that you typically get the most bang for your buck?
Can you talk about the use of light boxes?
What about blue light?
What about water and the minerals? How do you test water?
What about air quality?
What about noise pollution?

Key Points made by Jon about the Environment and Your Health:

The framework that I work people through begins with working on their environment, and then we start moving onto those other things like the gut, hormones, etc.
Things like your air, water, light, sound, EMFs and food are all going to influence a lot of the different functions within your body and at very basic level.
A lot of times once you correct those things, everything else downstream works itself out.
When it comes to the environment and your health, everybody is a little bit different in what is affecting them most and what they need to work on. One thing I like to work on is light.
In our technology-driven life, we’re constantly being bathed in artificial light and it’s not normal, it’s just common. It has biological effects that we don’t realize.
Our cellphones, laptops, TVs, even LED lights all produce blue light. Blue light is stimulatory, it suppresses melatonin. Melatonin helps us get to sleep and helps set our circadian rhythms. It is also an important anabolic hormone and a very powerful antioxidant. I try to get my clients to think about their exposure to light and try to mitigate that exposure, put on some glasses that block the blue light.
We do want to get out in the sun (just don’t burn). The first thing when you wake up, get outside in the sun, show as much skin as possible; then throughout the day you want to get some sun.
It’s tough in the winter, especially up in Canada, because you’re typically not going to get the UVB light that will help with vitamin D production. However, getting outside or getting sunlight through the window is going to help entrain the circadian rhythm, which is going to be helpful in a lot of ways, e. g., serotonin is converted via UVA light, so light from the sun is actually going to make us happier.
Light boxes can be very useful, especially people dealing with depression and seasonal affective disorder.
It’s important to understand that there is no wavelength of light that is inherently bad, it depends on how much you’re getting and the full spectrum of light. Light boxes can be very useful for that type of thing.
Using glasses at night will change the way everything looks; everything will look red and orange which is what you want to emphasize at nighttime.
I usually want clients to avoid the blue light for two to three hours, minimum. It takes that long for your body to calibrate.
Sleep is also triggered by a drop in temperature, so another tip for improving sleep is to drop the temperature in your home a little bit before getting ready for bed.
There are apps that you can use to change the background light, I like them, but I think we tend to forget about all the other types of light that we’re getting. I think using the glasses makes the most sense because it’s very easy to do and you can still go about the evening without worrying too much about it.
The reason I focus on all these different environmental factors, the air, the water, the light, is because these are things we’re exposed to day in and day out.
On average, we should be drinking about three litres of water a day, but the question is, “What’s in your water?”
In general, people don’t realize that there are a lot of contaminants in the water. We trust our municipalities, but when I actually test the water supply of my clients, it gives a whole different picture of what’s going on.
It’s important to understand that just because you don’t notice something in your environment; it doesn’t mean that it’s not wearing you down.
Just because you think your government is regulating these things, they usually aren’t doing a very good job.
If we’re talking about filtering water, I like reverse osmosis, but it’s important that you ...

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Jon Mitchell talks about the relationship between the environment and your health.

Main Questions Asked about the Environment and Your Health:

How does the external environment impact our health?
When it comes to the environment and your health, is there one area that you typically get the most bang for your buck?
Can you talk about the use of light boxes?
What about blue light?
What about water and the minerals? How do you test water?
What about air quality?
What about noise pollution?

Key Points made by Jon about the Environment and Your Health:

The framework that I work people through begins with working on their environment, and then we start moving onto those other things like the gut, hormones, etc.
Things like your air, water, light, sound, EMFs and food are all going to influence a lot of the different functions within your body and at very basic level.
A lot of times once you correct those things, everything else downstream works itself out.
When it comes to the environment and your health, everybody is a little bit different in what is affecting them most and what they need to work on. One thing I like to work on is light.
In our technology-driven life, we’re constantly being bathed in artificial light and it’s not normal, it’s just common. It has biological effects that we don’t realize.
Our cellphones, laptops, TVs, even LED lights all produce blue light. Blue light is stimulatory, it suppresses melatonin. Melatonin helps us get to sleep and helps set our circadian rhythms. It is also an important anabolic hormone and a very powerful antioxidant. I try to get my clients to think about their exposure to light and try to mitigate that exposure, put on some glasses that block the blue light.
We do want to get out in the sun (just don’t burn). The first thing when you wake up, get outside in the sun, show as much skin as possible; then throughout the day you want to get some sun.
It’s tough in the winter, especially up in Canada, because you’re typically not going to get the UVB light that will help with vitamin D production. However, getting outside or getting sunlight through the window is going to help entrain the circadian rhythm, which is going to be helpful in a lot of ways, e. g., serotonin is converted via UVA light, so light from the sun is actually going to make us happier.
Light boxes can be very useful, especially people dealing with depression and seasonal affective disorder.
It’s important to understand that there is no wavelength of light that is inherently bad, it depends on how much you’re getting and the full spectrum of light. Light boxes can be very useful for that type of thing.
Using glasses at night will change the way everything looks; everything will look red and orange which is what you want to emphasize at nighttime.
I usually want clients to avoid the blue light for two to three hours, minimum. It takes that long for your body to calibrate.
Sleep is also triggered by a drop in temperature, so another tip for improving sleep is to drop the temperature in your home a little bit before getting ready for bed.
There are apps that you can use to change the background light, I like them, but I think we tend to forget about all the other types of light that we’re getting. I think using the glasses makes the most sense because it’s very easy to do and you can still go about the evening without worrying too much about it.
The reason I focus on all these different environmental factors, the air, the water, the light, is because these are things we’re exposed to day in and day out.
On average, we should be drinking about three litres of water a day, but the question is, “What’s in your water?”
In general, people don’t realize that there are a lot of contaminants in the water. We trust our municipalities, but when I actually test the water supply of my clients, it gives a whole different picture of what’s going on.
It’s important to understand that just because you don’t notice something in your environment; it doesn’t mean that it’s not wearing you down.
Just because you think your government is regulating these things, they usually aren’t doing a very good job.
If we’re talking about filtering water, I like reverse osmosis, but it’s important that you ...

Previous Episode

Mental Illness – A Different Approach – with Dr. Kelly Brogan

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Kelly Brogan talks about a different approach to treating mental illness.

Kelly Brogan, M.D., is a holistic women’s health psychiatrist, author of the New York Times bestselling book, A Mind of Your Own, and the children’s book, A Time for Rain, and co-editor of the landmark textbook, Integrative Therapies for Depression. Her latest book is Own Your Self. She completed her psychiatric training and fellowship at NYU Medical Center after graduating from Cornell University Medical College and has a B.S. from M.I.T. in Systems Neuroscience. She is board-certified in psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, and integrative holistic medicine and is specialized in a root-cause resolution approach to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms.

Main Questions Asked about Mental Illness:

Why is that you see mental illness as a symptom not a diagnosis?
What are the five reversible drivers of mental illness that you speak of in your book?
What recommendations do you make to patients presenting with symptoms of mental illness?
Can you tell us more about the adverse effects of medication?
Why don’t’ more doctors prescribe thyroid medications for patients with mood disorders?
What else is important for us to understand?

Key Points made by Dr Brogan about Mental Illness:

Many people are walking around with an idea that we’ve worked out the taxonomy, so to speak, of psychiatry and mental health, and that we have all these discrete disease entities that are largely permanent but can be managed through lifetime prescription compliance.
It’s simply not true.
Remember, we don’t have any form of objective testing in psychiatry.
For several decades there’s been research that largely comes under the umbrella of psychoneuroimmunology (mind-brain-immune system), sometimes it’s called psychoneuroendocrinology (mind-brain-hormonal system).
Essentially, it’s a field of research that puts mental illness in the same category as other lifestyle conditions, e.g., heart disease, diabetes or autoimmune conditions.
All of them, chronic illnesses, representative of a kind of mismatch between our native biology, our genomes’ expectations and the exposures we have daily.
So, this is the concept that your symptoms are essentially messengers that allow you to learn the language of your own biology and begin to take control or the process of healing.
Think of the parable of eight blind men feeling an elephant. It’s this idea that if you are focused in a cordoned off, segmented area of exploration without an awareness of its connectedness to the whole you could get a really wrong impression; like thinking that you’re just feeling a rope when you feel the elephant’s tail.
So, it’s the same concept with psychoneuroimmunology, for a number of years they been studying the role of inflammation as a messenger system in the emergent phenomenon of psychiatric symptoms, whether that’s hearing voices or seeing things, whether it’s insomnia, poor concentrations, agitation or irritability.
The list of mood, behavioural and cognitive symptoms that can attend an imbalance is very long.
I found five drivers that are the most common reversible causes of what we’re calling psychiatric symptoms.
I call them psychiatric pretenders.
The first is blood sugar imbalance. Most, if not all of us to some extent, because of our stress exposures, the nature of processed food and the way we use food for our convenience rather than developing a more conscious relationship to the act of eating, are on a blood sugar roller coaster.
The relationship of blood sugar dips to fight or flight chemistry is such that you can end up having something as severe as a panic attack. I had one patient who was on three psychiatric medications, on her way to electroconvulsive therapy and was totally symptom-free within four weeks of basic dietary change.
Another one is thyroid imbalance. When you look at the symptoms of hypothyroidism and those of a major depressive disorder, they line up so c...

Next Episode

The Wahls Protocol for Autoimmune Disorders with Dr. Terry Wahls

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...