Coffee with Alice: Get Out of Your Rut, Fix Your Gut

Below is the transcript of our Stark Naked Radio podcast episode. We had some technical difficulties, and we weren't able to get the audio from Part 1 of this series. Enjoy Part 2!

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Tyler:

What's up everyone. We apologize for the delay in the Stark Naked radio programming. With everything going on with the Covid 19 pandemic, it's been a little hard to keep to our regular programming, but we wanted to make sure we continue to bring you the valuable content that you guys rely on to make decisions around your health and fitness. So with that, we are creating a podcast version of our Coffee with Alice episodes. So, for the next three or four weeks you can expect these shorter format interviews between Amir and Dr. Alice to educate you on some of the topics related to the outbreak as well as general health and fitness information.

Amir:

Welcome back to another amazing episode of coffee with Alice. This is coffee. That is Dr. Alice. You already know who I am, doctor. How are you?

Dr. Alice:

I'm excellent.

Amir:

Good. I'm great, thanks for asking. The last time we spoke, we were talking about the gut. We were talking about getting out of your rut by fixing your gut. The first episode we talked about the structures of the gut. When we last talked about the gut, you called me a glorified worm. I appreciate that. I've been called worse. We talked about some of the symptoms and tells that we'll let you know that your gut is starting to be affected. So today we're going to talk about solutions. There's a lot to get into, but we're going to keep it simple and kind of short for you, for the audience. Doc, where would someone start if they wanted to get on a gut rebuilding path?

Dr. Alice:

Well it depends, but the way that we kind of approach it here at stark is usually, we will run a food sensitivity panel right off the bat after their initial intake.

Amir:

Yeah, that's something that I had on my docket to talk to you about. Tell me a little bit more about the food sensitivity panel, cause you hear a lot of chatter about that sort of test. What does that involve?

Dr. Alice:

It is a blood draw. Now, I just want to say right off the bat, it's not the end all be all. Now if I would see more, you know, sick patients than I would perhaps be a little bit more aggressive and doing something, initially called the autoimmune paleo diet. That one is a very researched and very effective diet to try to reduce the inflammation in the gut. But since our patients aren't that pathological, most of them coming to us will not have too many gut complaints. So we would run, of course, something like a company that we've been using for a very long time, Meridian valleys, and they're looking at IGG4 and IGE. Those are two different parts of the immune system that we're testing for immune reactivity towards, you know, foods.

Dr. Alice:

So, IGE is anaphylactic. You know right off the bat from a very young age...

Amir:

Right? Like peanuts?

Dr. Alice:

Peanuts or shellfish, something like that. Where your throat closes up, like it's actually life-threatening. So patients will definitely already know that. But the other part of it is IgG, which is a sensitivity. People can interchange those things. They're two very different things. Sensitivity is much more low grade. It's not as obvious, so it can show up as gut symptoms, but it can also show up as joint pain. It can show up as a skin manifestations like eczema or hives or acne, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and other things. I think schizophrenia is kind of part of that sometines too.

Amir:

Last time you talked about your thyroid and your eyebrows starting to fall out.

Dr. Alice:

Yeah.

Amir:

That unibrow, turning into a two brow.

Dr. Alice:

Right? So, that is a little bit more specific way of finding potential food triggers that can piss off your gut. We eliminate those for about two months and then reintroduce it one at a time. Now, during this time of elimination, we're removing the triggers, so we identify what the trigger is. Now, by the way, we've run hundreds of these tests in the past three and a half years. The top three offenders are dairy, eggs, and gluten.

Amir:

So let's say for example, you test and you're sensitive to all three. You're gluten sensitive, you're dairy sensitive and you're egg sensitive. Do you pull all three triggers out?

Dr. Alice:

Yep. I pull all three out. Cause you don't know if it's from a sensitivity, an IgG reaction sensitivity or, if the person has eaten it way too much on a regular basis over a long period of time. So that is something that I've done to myself in regards to eggs. I used to eat like five eggs a day for 10 years. Now these are the most blessed eggs that can come out of a chickens butt, by the way, like pasture raised organic, you know...

Amir:

I don't think that's where they come out of. But, I'm not a doctor. You're the doctor. This is just coffee,

Dr. Alice:

I'm not a veterinarian, okay so anyway, those were again the cleanest eggs you could possibly get. After about 10 years, I started to actually get fatigue in the morning, and it didn't matter if I slept nine hours the night before. I'd wake up, have my five eggs, fall right back to sleep. I would have coffee, fall back to sleep. I spoke to one of my mentors in med school. And he was like, what are you eating? Like how much and for how long? I told him five eggs a day for 10 years. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that.

Amir:

10 years? That's like 50 eggs.

Dr. Alice:

Yeah, it was a lot. It's a lot.

Amir:

I am not a mathematician either.

Dr. Alice:

I took the eggs out, didn't fall asleep in the morning anymore. So I thought to myself, maybe I could eat it at night, to help me sleep. So, you know, it helped me sleep. The problem was then I started to actually develop eczema. I tried to identify all other kinds of potential triggers for eczema. Realized, oh wait, I'm still eating the eggs. Took the eggs out, eczema went away.

Amir:

Okay. So before I cut you off earlier you're saying you pulled out the trigger, that makes me think that you're gonna put something else in its place. So go on about that.

Dr. Alice:

So yes, and the next part is repopulating.

Amir:

Repopulating. And, the gut is kind of this ecosystem, right? So, what are you repopulating it with?

Dr. Alice:

It depends. So I do encourage patients to eat fermented foods as best as they can, as long as they don't have any sort of histamine intolerance. An example would be sauerkraut, kimchi, sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, any sort of fermented foods. Traditionally we humans have eaten lots of fermented foods, in many different cultures.

Amir:

What about fermented grapes?

Dr. Alice:

Yeah, that's kind of part of it as long as it's not like 10 glasses or a whole bottle of night.

Amir:

So you know, why eat those fermented foods? What are they providing?

Dr. Alice:

They're providing lots of great little bugs. So, bacteria, lactobacillus species. So, you can help repopulate like that. Oh, yogurt is the other one. Now if you're dairy sensitive, they have lots of other milk alternatives. Coconut yogurt is a great one, they have almond milk, they have oat milk, they have all sorts. I encourage having that at least every day. Now, the Western population does not like eating fermented foods for the most part. This is where we would have to introduce, of course, probiotics, but I give my patients the option now. Now what type of probiotic? This is where things get a little complicated.

Amir:

Yeah, that's a complicated thing. It's like walking into a pet store and asking for a dog. Right? There's so many different strains and breeds of probiotics. So, where would you start? Right? So do you start it based on what bugs they need? Based on blood work?

Dr. Alice:

So no, I actually don't do blood work. You don't do blood work for what strains you essentially need. You do stool testing. Now, I personally do not do too much stool testing, unless I l am looking for parasites, but that's something else. Um, for the most part you want to rotate between the different probiotics. There are of course, the spore based probiotics that are actually shelf stable. They survive the acidic environment of the gut. So MegaSpore is an amazing company, we've been using them a lot as well. But if I have a female patient who has a lot of UTIs or yeast infections and I'm going to choose a different kind of strain, uh, for that one, it's the rhamnosus and a few other things too. L reuteri as well. But it really depends on the patient.

Amir:

I can't keep MegaSpore in stock, by the way. I mean people love that. That's not the strain. That's the company...

Dr. Alice:

So that's a spore based one.

Amir:

A spore based probiotic?

Dr. Alice:

Yeah, that's a bacillus species. They're an amazing company. What's great is that again, they're shelf stable. We don't actually have to worry about refrigerating a lot of these other probiotics.

Amir:

When someone thinks gut, after a couple of word associations, they come up to fiber. So how do you determine how much fiber someone needs and what sources they should be choosing to make up that number?

Dr. Alice:

So the issue with fiber by the way, is complicated. There are some people who do not do well with it.

Amir:

When is it not complicated with you Dr. Alice?

Dr. Alice:

Listen, the human body is very complicated. Well, most Westerners do not eat enough fiber. Now, there is a debate whether or not fiber is good for you anyway.

Amir:

I'm sensing some hostility towards the West here.

Dr. Alice:

No, no, no,

Amir:

That's okay.

Dr. Alice:

Some people do not do well with fiber. We have some coaches who ate the Peagan bar and had a very horrible time, from eating those extremely high fiber bars. But whenever I see that, I'm thinking, okay, the fiber is probably feeding some bad gut bacteria that's causing the bloating, the gas, and cramping, that discomfort. If patients have really, really, really bad, what we call a small dense LDL, that's bad cholesterol, I'm going to encourage more of that. There's many different types of fibers. We encourage patients to eat different types. You're going to find them in berries, you will find them in artichoke. Um, you will find them in chia seeds, flax seeds. So it really depends on what the patients tolerate.

Amir:

Speaking of tolerate. Is there, is there such thing as too much, too soon, too quickly where you just explode?

Dr Alice:

Yeah, you've got to slowly build up with the fiber.

Amir:

So where do you, where do you set the recommendation at or as again, I assume that matter, that depends, but where do you kind of hover in their recommendation for male or female?

Dr. Alice:

Males according to, I guess the recommendation is they're supposed to get about 37 grams of fiber a day. Females about 25 to 27 grams about.

Amir:

Okay, so about 10 grams less.

Dr. Alice:

Yes. Now just to give you an idea of how little fiber is in certain foods, one tablespoon of chia seeds will have I think four to five grams only of fiber. Broccoli, I think an entire cup is only two to three or four grams, it really depends. Avocados actually are another great source of fiber.

Amir:

Is that implying that a fiber supplementation is generally going to be needed or no?

Dr. Alice:

Yeah, I would suggest it, on top of whole foods as well.

Amir:

Now at, at Stark, we routinely put in or that the student gets their fiber and we add it to their shake.

Dr. Alice:

Yeah. Sometimes if they're really bad about taking the fiber on their own on a daily basis.

Amir:

Yeah. And, there's this, you know, there's this anabolic post-workout window that people talk about and they say you should avoid fiber because it slows down this or that. But what we know about the anabolic window is just so large and getting in the fiber in the longterm is going to be so much more important than not getting the fiber in. Just for the sake of not slowing down that post workout shake. So that's, that's another alternative is putting in a smoothie or in a shake, right?

Dr. Alice:

Yeah, it is before we even go to fiber, by the way, we should discuss, of course, the kill.

Amir:

The kill?

Dr. Alice:

Oh yes the kill. So there are some bad bugs, gut bugs, that you have to go in and potentially kill.

Amir:

With like antiobiotics?

Dr. Alice:

It can be for some people, but we tend to like to use at least here at stark, like a broad spectrum anti-microbial botanical.

Amir:

Ooh, say that again one more time. That's a really sexy...

Dr. Alice:

Broad spectrum, botanical, so plant based and time microbial.

Amir:

Anti-microbial. Give me what that, what does that actually look like?

Dr. Alice:

So the product that we use a lot is in fact Biocidin.

Amir:

Oh, I know Biocidin.

Dr. Alice:

Yeah, so that's used for most commonly here at stark is going to be used, is the throat spray.

Amir:

Speaking of another product item that I can't keep in stock. That is amazing stuff. I mean, I have an addictive personality, so I'm spraying it all day every day. My wife's like, it's not binaca, you know. But yes, biocidin and throat spray, there's also drops.

Dr. Alice:

The drops are specifically to kill really bad gut bugs. So the C diff species are something, any of the clostridium species is what we'll be looking for. And this we identify through organic acid testing. That's what I'm trained to do, to look for. Usually if you've used a lot of antibiotics in the past, then that C diff, one of the risks is in fact, is the rise of C diff, which is something thatcan potentially kill you. So, now you can have a varying, graded level of infestation. This is where stuff like a biocidin would come in.

Amir:

Now we've, we've covered removal. So removing those triggering foods, or food sources. We've talked about repopulating. I'm sure there is there more to the puzzle here?

Dr. Alice:

Replace.

Amir:

So before we get into that, we're going to stop you right there. We're going to leave you on a, on a nail biter right there. So far we're at removed. Now if someone doesn't have the blood test, uh, so they should start with the big three?

Dr. Alice:

I would start with the big three.

Amir:

And the three big three again are eggs, dairy, and gluten. We're, jiving right there. We're in sync. So, removing those three and getting on a rotation of probiotics.

Dr. Alice:

Yeah. So that would be replaced.

Amir:

That's replaced, right. So we're going to get into the other stages at a later time. That means, get out of your rut fix your gut. We'll have a part three, see you guys real soon. Thank you Dr. Alice.