Teresa

Okay, welcome to the bio energetic view. I'm your host, Teresa Piela, joined as always by Jay Feldman and Mike Fave. Today we'll be talking about Huberman's ideas about waking up in the middle of the night, a follower success story and finishing up with a Q and A about nutrient deeds. Okay, around the internet, Huberman has become so popular. I think even from people that aren't very interested in health.

They've reached out saying that they listened to his podcast. They're learning about, know, ADHD and cold plunging and free fatty acids. And I even have listened to a few of his podcasts too, just to kind of see what information he's sharing. But just for a little bit of background for people listening,I think he used to be a Sanford neuroscientist. There's a little bit of shady information around whether he still teaches or not, but.

He's a, it says he's still a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology. And similar to a lot of his podcasts, he's researching brain development, function, neuroplasticity. He kind of covers a whole range of things. And I do want to celebrate the fact that he popularized the idea of getting light in our eyes and the importance of red light. So there's something there, but to maybe bring up some of the more problematic views. Let's jump in with this clip.

Huberman

A lot of people wake up at three or four a.m. and can't fall back asleep. Here's probably the reason. We can all push on and stay awake more easily than we can just force ourselves to sleep. If you're waking up at three or four a.m. unless you're drinking too many fluids and that's the reason why, chances are you are running out of melatonin. What it means is you stayed up too late and you probably are one of these people that should be going to bed at 830 and waking up about 3: 30 or four a.m.

People don't like that answer because they think, no, but I want to be the person that goes to bed at 11. There are ways to shift your circadian rhythm. Try and go to bed one hour earlier and chances are you will wake up feeling better at three or four AM. Now it's not exactly a solution, but if you're in an argument with your spouse or something about going to bed at one hour or the next, you know, you can leverage biology or cite this discussion.

Teresa

Okay, wow. Jay, what was your reaction to this clip? Because I know in the bio-energetic world, a lot of people are struggling with these midnight wake-ups. They have to pee, they're hungry, they've got a racing heart, they feel Hulk-like with adrenaline. Yet, Huberman's view seems to overly simplify what could be happening.

Tell us what's going on here and maybe your thoughts with his perspective.

Jay Feldman

Yeah, I mean, and it's worth noting this isn't just an issue for people within the bioenergetics sphere, but low carb spheres really common to have these kinds of sleep disturbances. And you mentioned like heart palpitations and stress that tends to really show itself when people are on low carb diets, fasting, calorie restriction because of all the stress that's induced there. I mean, it's a really common issue. think more people than not are waking up at least once during the night, if not multiple times, often having trouble falling back asleep relative to the number of people who just

are able to sleep through the night. So I think it's a really, really common issue. And with that in mind, I think there's quite a disservice here because what he's essentially saying is there's nothing you can do about this. It's kind of like, this is your body's natural clock that you're just going to wake up at three or four AM and that's when your melatonin is depleted. So you just need to go to sleep earlier because that's like your natural rhythm. And he does allude to the idea that you can shift your circadian rhythm, but his suggestions weren't really related to that. It was just basically saying, if you wake up, then go to sleep earlier so that then you get more sleep. And a, not only is this missing, I think the vast majority of what's going on in this case, but B, for most people who are dealing with these sorts of wakeups, if they go to sleep earlier, they just wake up earlier. You know, instead of three or four AM, they'll wake up at two AM and they won't actually have solved the issue. Now, one caveat I do want to mention before talking about, I think more of what's going on here is that.

For a lot of people, there is a benefit to going to sleep earlier and that does help align yourself with the rhythm of the sun and the night. And there can be lot of benefits to that for a lot of people. And so, you know, if you just blankly have the recommendation to go to sleep earlier, I think that can be helpful for a lot of people. But that's really not what I would say the main driver is of these sorts of wakeups. And so on a broad sense, what I would say is

happening in most cases is for one reason or another, and we can talk through some of these different reasons, there is an increase in stress hormones during the night that's causing someone to wake up. Oftentimes with a lot of those stress symptoms you mentioned, Theresa, sometimes people have nightmares at that point, sometimes their heart's racing, sometimes they wake up and they're just wide awake, sometimes they wake up and they can't fall back asleep. These are signs that our stress has increased and our body is basically telling us to be awake.

even though it's the middle of the night and we're supposed to be asleep. And some common things that cause that, one is basically when we're under-fueled because when we're sleeping, we're not eating, of course, and so our body and brain are utilizing the fuel that we have stored. And as we start to run out of that fuel, our stress hormones start to increase to provide more fuel since there's not enough available. And in this case, we're specifically talking about the glycogen stores in the liver.

which serve as the fuel reserve for especially the brain and the nervous system. So as that starts to run out, we have a natural response that's an increase in stress hormones, which is supposed to wake us up. And that's supposed to last eight, nine, 10 plus hours for us to be able to go through the night. And then we have this natural rise in cortisol, which is supposed to wake us up. But what happens for a lot of people is they don't have enough glycogen stored. Maybe it's because they're not eating enough throughout the day. So they're utilizing a lot of it. Maybe they're not eating enough specifically of carbohydrates, and so they're not storing enough carbohydrates as glycogen in the liver, or due to various things that can cause dysfunction at the liver, they might not be efficiently storing that glycogen. And so in all those cases, you have a scenario where you run out of glycogen too soon and you wake up in this somewhat stressed state. So that's one of the most common causes. There are some other things as well, like in the scenario that we're not efficiently using the glucose, even if we have enough stored as glycogen, if we're not using it efficiently, that can...

cause us to run through it too fast and then we can have the same spike in stress hormones. Other scenarios could be that maybe something we ate from dinner or earlier in the day is starting to reach a certain part of our intestines, maybe feeding some bacteria, maybe creating an inflammatory response that is causing some stress and that could be causing us to wake up. So there's a number of possibilities here and depending on what it is, there's different strategies we can implement to try to improve on the situation. And this would include things like

maybe having a snack before bed to make sure fuel stores are topped off. Maybe if you wake up and you are having this stress, you have a spoon of honey, have a little bit of carbohydrate, which can help to turn down that stress effect and allow us to get back to sleep. So there are some things like that aside from working on gut health, paying attention to what we're eating for dinner, you know, there's nothing that's irritating our gut as a result and working on our liver health, which these are obviously very broad areas that

There could be a lot of different things we need to do to work on them. Another one as well that I've seen in a number of cases is having a dinner that's too high in protein, especially relative to carbohydrates. That's one that can cause this kind of blood sugar effect during the night. So those are all things to consider. And then aside from that, there's a lot to consider from the more kind of strict circadian rhythm standpoint, know, getting enough light in the morning throughout the day, which helps to set our circadian rhythm. Movement can help with that. Making sure we're eating breakfast when we wake up, that we're not

starting our day with, you know, a black cup of coffee, which ends up just amplifying the stress and shifting our circadian rhythm in that way. And that can actually cause this sort of issue is if we're having this excess stress in the morning, we're skipping breakfast, we're just having coffee that can cause this circadian rhythm issue. And then also on a much broader sense, our circadian rhythm and the, aspects of our physiology that govern it, just like any organ system are affected by our capacity for energy production.

And so when we're in a metabolically compromised state, we don't respond effectively to our environment, to the light that we're exposed to, to our diet. We aren't able to properly set our circadian rhythm. And so that can cause some, some issues there as well. So those are some of the, I'd say most pertinent things to, to touch on here, you know, in this scenario that someone might be waking up particularly early, you know, someone was just waking up, you know, at 6 a.m. instead of 7 a.m., you know, and they were wanting to sleep in more.

I mean, that could still be related to all these issues, but at that point, sure, maybe going to sleep a little earlier might be a good suggestion as well. But yeah, I think there's a lot of other things going on physiologically that aren't being acknowledged here.

Thank you for touching on the bigger picture because I think a lot of people forget that it's kind of how you're living your life. It's not just, you you should be going to bed earlier, you know, a blood sugar drop and an adrenaline spike at eight in the morning because like you said, having black coffee and then going for a six mile run, that could be playing a bigger role than, you know, running out of melatonin like you've been mentioned. Mike, do you have anything?

Anything to add to this conversation in terms of some of the nuance here, things that could really be contributing to someone having these disrupted sleep patterns that has nothing to do with going to bed earlier or later?

Mike

I think that the general answer that Huberman gave is probably going to be unhelpful for most people. And just like from a practical standpoint, the way it was answered for me is like, I don't know if he works with clients, but when you work with people on a consistent basis and you say like, yeah, just go to bed at 8.30 instead, or like go to bed at 8 instead. And it's like, well, most people work nine to five and then they have a commute home. So now you're at six.

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And then maybe you're going to get a workout in. Maybe you have kids. Maybe you have extra work that you have to follow up on. You have to cook dinner. You have to prep for the next day. So it's like there's zero shot that for the vast majority of people that this becomes a tenable solution. and the other thing is that's great because I don't think that this is actually the fundamental solution. Now, if somebody's going to bed like one, two, three, twelve, whatever, like these times at night. Yeah, you probably want to correct that.

But to bring somebody back to like 8 p.m. I think it's like most people are like, yeah, I don't think I can do this. And even knowing like when I was working in the hospital, there's zero shot. I didn't get home till nine. So there's no way that I was going to be able to go to sleep at 830 and then leverage biology as it like just tell my manager, hey, I'm going to I got to leverage biology. So I got to be home, you know, because I don't sleep at 830. I'll be a better worker in the morning. Maybe I'll start a little earlier. So it's I think that the solution is just like

a little out of touch with what everyday people are dealing with on a regular basis and I also don't think this is a fundamental problem. Now before I talk about the problems, Jay touched on them in large, but I want to talk about what's typical for somebody as far as sleep goes. So what would I say is a normal, like what we're shooting for in terms of sleep? I would say the minimum or I guess the minimum scenario, like the minimum barometers that you waking one time per night

maybe to pee and then you can go back to sleep. That is where that's like okay, that's decent sleep and then if not, you should be able to sleep entirely through the night. If you're waking multiple times per night or if you're waking up and you can't get back to sleep or if you're waking up with like panic attacks or anxiety or anything like this, that I would say falls into the like non normal category. That is a problem with sleep that needs to be addressed not by going to sleep at 830. So with that, do think adjusting

like melatonin fluctuations across the night, you could make an argument that it could impact sleep based on melatonin's mechanisms. But when you actually work with people who do have sleep issues, they'll tell you straight up, yeah, I take 10 milligrams of melatonin every night and that doesn't do anything. I still have insomnia or I have, you know, compounded extended release melatonin and I still don't sleep through the night. So most times melatonin, at least in my experience, I haven't seen it be a massive solution.

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for most people's sleep problems, especially people who dealing with this specific problem, where they're not having an issue with sleep latency or ability to fall asleep, they're having an issue where they're waking up in the night. That's not necessarily, at least in my experience, been resolvable with melatonin supplementation, even extended release forms. Usually it goes more to the pieces that Jay touched on, and that's blood sugar regulation, that's general upregulation of stress hormones, like growth hormone, glucagon, adrenaline, cortisol, across the night.

increasing overall wakefulness and also potential gut irritation. I would say those are probably the three biggest problems to look at when somebody's dealing with a sleep issue like this. with the blood sugar dipping, I've had clients where we can see on their CGM that at night when their blood sugar drops, that's when they start to come out of their sleep. It corroborates directly with times that they are waking in the night and then shifting to either have a snack before bed

or increasing the amount of carbs and fats specifically in the last meal and decreasing protein intake or providing for like a very small sweet snack when they wake up in the night, just like a swig of juice or a small amount of honey or something like this. I would recommend rinsing out your mouth after because the sugar sitting on your teeth overnight and it doesn't feel good in the morning. But essentially that can help to stabilize the blood glucose and you can use all three strategies. You can use one of them. A lot of times you don't need to do all three. Like once you get like the mid

the before bed snack gets the job done. And usually in that circumstance, I'm incorporating something like a carb and a fat, not so much a protein. mean, you could do a little collagen, but typically it's like, know, like fruit and chocolate. If the theobromine and chocolate doesn't bother you or mac nuts or something like this, or avocado on a rice cake, just some carbs and some fat so that you're able to actually maintain your blood glucose across the night. So I think those are going to be some of the best strategies.

to help minimize that?

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And the other thing that Teresa, you touched on, I think was really helpful is the things you do that day before or even the day before adjust what's going on with your sleep. So managing your total intake across the day of total energy, but as well as protein, carbs and fat is extremely important. Even for me, even now, if I miss a meal just for work or for whatever's going on, then I will have problems sleeping and then I have to get up and I have to eat to like.

reach enough food so that I then can sleep through the night. So even missing like one meal, like it'll probably drop me by a decent amount. So like eight or 900 calories in that meal. And then I'm like, I will have problems sleeping that night. having, making sure you're hitting your targets across the day is extremely important such as sleeping at night. Another really big one here I would say is gut irritation. This is a huge driver in my experience for people. If you're eating something that your GI tract doesn't tolerate,

or this giving you bloating, gas, loose stools, whatever the deal is. A lot of times this can lead to broken sleep, tossing and turning all night long, waking up multiple times throughout the night, having to pee all the time throughout the night. These are symptoms of gut irritation or potentially upregulation and stress hormones and those directly impair sleep. So minimizing things that irritate the gut and then making sure you're eating enough across the day to keep stress low, I think can make a huge difference in people's sleep at night.

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And then also adding in the snack, these different components. The general stuff that we all know, know, adequate temperature, like 70 degrees in the room, Fahrenheit, minimizing excessive light exposure before bed, managing noise, not having like your pets in the bed with you is actually a huge one for a lot of people. Like if your dog's hopping in the bed, usually that can impact sleep. So these things all still stand. But for this specific problem, I'm thinking blood sugar.

I'm thinking stress, I'm thinking gut irritation, and I'm honing in and addressing those components and that usually gets the job done. And to what something that Jay spoke to as well, this is typically seen in people who are doing work either coming out of intermittent fasting, who are coming out of low carb carnivore diets, keto diets, who are coming out of heavy caloric restricted diets or like tons of exercise, or they have significant gut issues. This is typically where you see this.

or people with blood glucose regulation. this is, I usually see this in this group of people. Other sleep problems can go in different areas depending on what's going on. So it's important to figure out like, you know, where your specific issue is. Because for some people, I've worked with that insomnia, like part of their problem was like other stuff, like their circadian rhythm, they just work shift work, the temperature in the room, stuff like this made a difference. But for the waking up at the three to four AM, like this is a

characteristic symptom that you tend to see in these groups and I think it's usually related to the stress hormones and to blood glucose regulation and less so melatonin. Melatonin if you're a shift worker, if you're jet lagged, if you have issues with sleep latency so the ability to fall asleep maybe it'd be more helpful in those circumstances but in this circumstance I don't think it's a melatonin problem nor do I think that the shifting to 830 is the answer.

for this problem and even for myself, my circadian rhythm has shifted a little bit later. I don't really fall asleep until like 12 o'clock at night. That's very typical for me. I could not go to sleep at 8.30. There's zero shot that that would happen unless I flew to another part of the world where 8.30 was 12 p.m. Eastern time. So this is, yeah, I think this advice here, I don't know, like it seems a little bit off base, especially when you work with clients like to tell.

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You can tell an individual, hey, just go to bed at 830. I'm just like, what? So that'll be my taking.

Yeah, while you were talking, Mike, I was even thinking about some of the sneakier stressors that people don't even realize might be totally throwing off their physiology. from my experience, this was back in college, actually, I was on a pretty high dose of an SSRI and I would be wide awake from about 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. every single night, know, wired like a maniac.

I had no understanding that what I was prescribed that was, you know, supposedly helping my mental imbalance, my chemical imbalance was actually contributing to that mental imbalance by throwing off my sleep anymore. And it wasn't until learning more about, you know, what Prozac and SSRIs and serotonin can do to the gut and do to the brain did I start to understand, gosh, this is, you know, it's,

there's a bigger problem here. So I think a lot of people might hear a clip like this and think, great, easy peasy. Like I'll just have to, you know, shift my entire life to be in bed by eight 30 or nine without realizing it could be something much sneakier that they think they're doing in the name of health that might actually be working against them.

And maybe even worse, I mean, as Mike was saying, that's just out of the question for most people. So then this becomes like anti-advice where someone's like, well, then I just can't fix my issue. Right. If I have to go to sleep at 830 to resolve this and that's not something I can feasibly do, then this is just what I'm stuck with. yeah, I mean, I think that's a great point, Teresa. I there can be so many other factors. Like another one could be like EMF exposure. know, some people find like

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turning off the Wi-Fi at night, putting the phone on airplane mode, putting it in the other room. Those kinds of things can help with inducing less stress during the night, allowing for us to maintain more stable fuel levels, not seeing wakeups, falling asleep easier. So that's certainly something to consider. think also a lot of people have some kind of like a semi-stressful relationship with their phone or like they associate it with stimulation. can always, you people who have trouble sleeping, depending on the individual, a lot of people I've worked with

they'll go to their phone when they have trouble sleeping and it's right there. So having that out of the room can make a big difference. And if you're one of those people who uses your phone for your alarm, just get an alarm clock. It's definitely something I would say is worth it. definitely a lot lower hanging fruit than shifting your whole bedtime several hours earlier. And same with the Wi-Fi too. It can be a little bit cumbersome or difficult for some people, there's...

There's different ways you can make it work. But yeah, mean, there is something that you mentioned, Mike, which was like when you were doing your shift work, there was no situation where you could have like told your, your boss like, I'm just gonna, I'm cutting on early. gotta get to sleep by eight 30. And, know, on one hand we're saying like, this isn't feasible for some people. I do think we want to voice a little bit on the other side too, which is that something like Mike, I know when you were doing that shift work,

it was really bad for your sleep. Like you were not sleeping well during that time. You weren't feeling good during that time, not just due to sleep, but due to various other issues. And so it's also worth mentioning that sometimes there are aspects of our lifestyle or work or, you know, you mentioned like pets on the bed. There might be things that we don't want to change or that, or that are difficult to change, but are having such an impact on our sleep quality or on our health that it's worth weighing that it's worth considering that. And look, someone might have that.

might not have the choice to like stop their shift work job. Maybe it's something where we're looking at it as a temporary means to an end and we're going to look to get out of that work as soon as possible or something like that. I just did want to voice that just because there are certain things in our lifestyle that might be really difficult to change doesn't mean they can't also be having such an impact on our health that we can't make up for it just by having a snack before bed. Like Mike, I'm sure you had a lot of snacks before bed or tried to eat well and that

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situation and it wasn't enough to fix your sleep during that time. Like there's certain aspects of like of our experience that can be stressful enough. I mean, same thing with you, Teresa, having a snack before bed was not going to get you to sleep through the night, you know, from one to five a.m. And that's in that case. So we do want to have both sides there in mind where we want to work with our circumstances, bring in some gentle, easy support, some simple strategies. But also sometimes we do need to make some bigger changes.

in order to really see results here. So I just wanted to mention those things. A couple other maybe more specific strategies that someone could consider. On one hand for the gut issues, Mike, you were touching on that too. If someone's thinking maybe there's a gut issue that's keeping me up at night, but I don't know for sure if that's the case, one thing you could do is try some activated charcoal before bed, a pretty solid dose, maybe a good two grams or so. And that should help to bind with

endotoxin that gets produced or other irritating things in the intestines. And so if that helps your sleep, that would be something you could use as a diagnostic to confirm that it is something gut related that's interfering with their sleep. So that might be something to consider. On the liver glycogen storage side and the blood sugar side, this is something that I see really commonly, especially for women maybe past the age of 50, I think this gets even more common. And a lot of times goes hand in hand with estrogen issues and

I think this is partially just a correlation because normally if we're struggling with liver function, we have trouble detoxifying estrogen. And so then we're also going to have trouble with glycogen storage. And so for people in that category, something simple that I think would be worth trying is taurine, which is an amino acid that has a ton of benefits for liver health. And Mike and I talked about this in our Energy Balance podcast series on fatty liver disease, which I believe was episode 63 to 70.

And we talked about a number of other supplements, strategies that can be helpful for liver function. So would check those out. dosing taurine throughout the day is something that can really help with liver function over time and improve our capacity for glycogen storage. So that's something to consider here as well. On the circadian rhythm side, I have seen situations where the wakeups at night do seem related to the circadian rhythm. it is something, it's another factor we want to consider. Sometimes just a morning walk in the sun,

maybe before or after breakfast can make a huge difference on sleep, which sometimes we don't connect those things like something that we're doing in the morning with something that's happening at night. But I think some of the things that are worse for like the absolute worst things for sleep are waking up, having coffee and going to work out, fasted. think that's terrible on the circadian rhythm side. And then on the flip side, something that could be really helpful in getting a good breakfast, having some carbohydrates to help bring the stress hormones down when we wake up and a short walk in the sun.

in the morning, getting that sunlight can really make a big difference. So those are some things to consider. then there was a couple of other things I wanted to come back to. So one is that Andrew Huberman in this clip, I think he mentions like a real quick kind of quip saying that drinking too many fluids could be causing someone to wake up to pee. And this is obviously there's some truth to it, but I think there's also a huge misconception here, which is that if you're waking up with the need to pee, it's because you were drinking too many liquids.

And then people will say, well, I'm not going to drink anything at night for the three hours before I go to bed. And yet they still have this issue. And what that's telling us is that that's not actually what the issue is here. And what's normally happening is this is going hand in hand with the peak in stress hormones because stress hormones generally have a diuretic effect and they cause us to need to pee. So this could have nothing to do with the amount of liquid you're consuming.

and you should be able to have liquid in the three hours before you go to bed and not have to wake up multiple times in the night to go to the bathroom. So if you're noticing that, that would actually be an indication of stress hormones, more so than a purely liquid problem, like an over drinking problem. Of course, there can be some issues there if we're not getting enough sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, our main electrolytes, then that could cause a state as well where we're not actually retaining the water properly.

and hydrating ourselves properly and instead it's kind of going through us. But most of the time it's really a stress hormone issue. So that's something I wanted to throw out here as well. And then last thing I wanted to come back to was melatonin itself. And I think it's good that in this clip, Andrew Huberman wasn't like, just take a bunch of melatonin or you just need like extended release melatonin and that's going to fix the situation. But as Mike said, I've seen so many cases where

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It doesn't help at all. And also we've talked about this on a couple of different podcast episodes, but melatonin has some kind of metabolism suppressing effects and some thyroid suppressing effects. there's some concerns with melatonin and the doses people are using are way past physiological dosing, way higher, many times higher than the amount of melatonin we naturally produce. Where when they look into research, the dosing that would be appropriate if we're trying to just get normal physiological levels,

is 0.1 to 0.3 milligrams of melatonin. And people are using three milligrams, 10 milligrams, huge doses, even larger sometimes, sometimes hundreds of milligrams for, I would say, faulty premises that this is health supportive and that's a whole other topic. But yeah, I would definitely have a lot of caution when it comes to melatonin use. If someone was using it, I would be aiming for short-term, very low dose use. And I've also, I mean, the number of times where I found it to be necessary,

Maybe it's like a couple out of thousands. There are so many other things we can use instead. Most of the time, people are... When they get their general physiology, thyroid status, liver function to a better spot, melatonin ends up not being necessary at all.

Yeah, I've got an anecdote there. I was put on 250 milligrams of melatonin during, you know, kind of the perfect storm of my sleep crisis and it did nothing. If anything, it caused such a severe stress reaction that the next day I could barely stand up. know, it just was just so harmful. So wouldn't recommend that to anyone. And Jay, as you were talking, you also reminded me to...

more about supplements that could be hurting someone's sleep or harming it. I know some people find that even though there are so many benefits to glycine and we see it as like an inhibitory neurotransmitter that might help some people sleep, I've seen a few people that actually get kind of revved up from magnesium glycinate, but when they switch to the magnesium taurate, that's when they notice their...

sleep really shifts for the better. So just paying attention to things that you might be kind of taking, thinking, I'm doing this to help my sleep. You might be someone that isn't really benefiting and there's, you know, there's room to step back and look at maybe all the supplements that you have stacked throughout the day and starting to maybe simplify to understand what's actually helping, what's throwing you off and, and, and not necessarily needing so many supplements that could be complicating the picture.

Yeah, and just a real quick comment on that because then I'm sure you'll want to hop in Mike, but I've known people where a B vitamin complex that they were taking in the morning with breakfast was actually interfering with their sleep. People who are really sensitive to that stimulation, who tend toward insomnia. Yeah, even things that we wouldn't normally think of as stimulating vitamin K, vitamin E, moderate dose B vitamins, pregnenolone, progesterone.

I mean, things like this that even again, when you're dosing them in the morning or early in the day, could be setting yourself up for stress later in the day, could be causing that imbalance early in the day and then kind of leading you to blood trigger instability throughout the day. So yeah, when we get into those less simple cases where a snack before bed and just generally a good kind of bio-energetic approach in terms of diet and lifestyle isn't getting them there, then that's when we might need to look at some of those deeper layers.

Yeah, definitely. I'm glad you brought that up, Teresa, because I've seen that happen for sure.

Teresa

I've heard the same with oregano oil. Mike hop on in, have you seen similar patterns?

Mike 

I wanted to touch on the SSRI piece that you mentioned, Theresa, because I had quite a few clients who've been on antipsychotic medications or SSRIs. And one thing I want to mention there is a lot of times when you're using those medications, a lot of things in the supplement realm and hormone realm actually give you paradoxical reactions. I'm not exactly sure why, but I do think that some of the shift in brain chemistry that occurs with use of those drugs, like I've had people where they take theanine or glycine and it wires them instead of calming them down. it's the typical pattern that I see is they're using some of these medications. And it could be it could be SNRIs, SSRIs, antipsychotics, sometimes benzos. Some of these medications by interacting with brain chemistry give people really paradoxical reactions. I've even seen people take progesterone and get like anxiety from it while they were using some of these medications.

So that's one thing to keep in mind. I think it is important to understand the combination effects of different things. And sometimes you may be having a weird response because of something else that you're using. And this class of medications is one that's like really big that I've seen people have weird responses to all types of stuff when they're on it. Something I wanted to touch on that Jay talked about when you're talking about the shift work stuff. For me, what I try to do is I think you want to set an exit strategy for some of these things if you can.

But if not, then I try to work into like work a system into that that's personalized. So as an example, with my own shift work stuff, the lot of the nurses that I worked with when I was when I was working night shift, they thought it was weird that I worked every other day instead of like grouping days together because you only work three days a week. So it's like, OK, I'll work Saturday, Sunday and then one day during the week or I'll work three straight and take four off and then I'll like switch back and forth. But I never what I did to like combat the

like fatigue and problems with sleep is I stayed on night shift the whole time. And then what I did was I work every other day so that I would, I would never have a circumstance where I was going or I tried to never have a circumstance where I was going to work and I was like, like had no sleep. Like it was terrible. So I would always be, and when I finished work, I knew I could sleep as long as I needed to that next day. And then I would entrain my circadian rhythm opposite. And what I would do is I would do like as soon as I woke up, which would be like five o'clock in the afternoon, I would expose myself to really bright light from halogen lamps for like 20 minutes, just so I had that light exposure. And if the sun was still up, like during the summer, I would go out immediately and get into the sun. So I was stimulating morning at that point. And I would eat my meals at the same exact time. And I would not rotate back and forth because alternating, like the alternating schedule was worse. We were like, you know, three days on nights and four days on days.

That was terrible. I never could adjust that. So I just stayed on night. So a lot of times I'll try to make adjustments with this and kind of find like what's the best you can do in that circumstance because sometimes sometimes like for me when I was doing the shift work, there is no like for that period of time, like there is no shot I could I could exit it and the night shift. I had to just like at least in that point in time, I had to do that. So that was something that I think, you know, I set an exit strategy. So I had an end goal.

But in the meantime, it's like, well, what can I do to get this under control and minimize the damage from this and like still like maintain some normalcy? But yeah, definitely wasn't good. And it messed up my circadian rhythm for a while after, which that brings me to the circadian entrainment stuff. So coming off shift work for two years, one and a half, two years, it, had like one year where one to two years almost where my sleep, my circadian was terrible. Basically, I would go to sleep at like two or three AM.

because I would hit like 11 or 12 and it'd be like, oh, the night's young because I used to like stay awake until 10, 11 o'clock in the morning. The way that I actually got that back to shift that circadian rhythm was I forced myself to wake up at my normal time previously, which was like eight or nine a.m., even if I didn't get enough sleep. And I also did use for a period of time, very low dose of 250 micrograms.

of melatonin before I went to like at the time I was supposed to go to sleep and then had the light exposure in the morning. So it can be helpful in the shifted circadian rhythm setup because it can help to entrain things like getting all the zeitgeibers. So like your food intake, your light exposure, all this type of stuff under control. And so that was that was super helpful for me. The other one I wanted to talk about with the EMF one, which we we talked about on previous episodes, that was a huge problem for me.

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And it's not just wifi. That was the problem. Cause we have wifi in all the houses that we've had. Um, and I have most multiple clients that have this sensitivity as well, but the wifi at night, if it's in the other room, it doesn't matter. Cause I'm far enough away that I don't have an effect from it. But the big driver for me was like dirty electricity coming off the lines in the house. So the, the, the house was emitting or the, the, there's a smart meter on the house, inverting the current. And then basically when I had checked the, the, the amount of dirty EMF coming off the lines in.

The rooms is insane. was like, I think it was over a thousand millivolts. And that was basically, I just couldn't sleep at night. Like I wouldn't fall asleep until three, four AM. And I, when I woke up in the morning, I would like, wouldn't sleep that long. And then I would be in a circumstance where I was just like chronically fatigued and I was also getting like tons of muscle tightness. And I think this is related to the, the EMF opening up voltage gated calcium channels and then creating excitation in the nervous system and also contraction of the muscles.

So for me that was a huge one. I think it's important people think about EMF. You have Wi-Fi, that's one. Like you definitely don't want to be close to a router when you're sleeping. But you have dirty EMF which can come off the lines in the house. And the other one is the electrical devices can actually produce EMF themselves. So that would be in volts per meter. And that's where you have like your smart TVs, your laptops, your computers. Even like it depending on what type of alarm clock or cordless phones are also terrible as well.

these types of things, like if they're sitting next to your bed, that could be a problem on top of the wifi. So I would keep these things in mind and for me to test some of this stuff to figure out like how I was responding and what the trigger was, I had purchased the Tri-Field EMF meter and I was using a dirty electricity meter from GreenWave. I'm not affiliated with them, but those are the ones that I had used in case people aren't interested. And for me, figuring out the EMF was a huge thing.

Cause I was living in Florida, like, you know, 20 minutes from the beach and really nice spot. At that point I had stopped working in the hospital because I started working on some of the projects online and I had the worst health and it was because of the EMF, like, cause I couldn't sleep. I was like chronically sleep deprived. And then I went and did a travel contract in the middle of like in Amarillo, Texas in the middle of the winter. And like, like definitely not an oasis compared to where I was before.

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and was working like 50 hour weeks in the hospital and my health was better there because I could sleep at night and I wasn't having problems with EMF. So that for some people who are sensitive to that, I think that that could be a serious concern with the sleep component. And then the last ones that I wanted to mention for, I've seen the same thing with the blood glucose regulation for postmenopausal women. they will, you'll tend to see like broken sleep and then a high fasting blood glucose.

value in the morning. Now not super high, but like in the low 100s. And then their blood sugar is wacky all night long. And I think it's related to usually what you'll see on these hormonal panels is you will see the shift towards estrogen in the progesterone estrodial ratio. And then you also see the the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis kind of shot like the DHES to cortisol ratio is not good. It's less than 10. And then

Then you see like the A1C is a little borderline 5.7, 5.8, stuff like this. So correcting the hormonal component there, as well as liver health, all this type of stuff, is important to actually get those things under control. It's actually super important and then stabilizing blood glucose overnight. Because I've had some people where during the day their blood glucose is fine. It's overnight. It's just sitting high the whole night. It's just sitting in the low 100s the whole night or dipping back and forth and having rebounding effects from those adaptive hormones.

And correcting that, I've been able to see clients, postmenopausal women, bring their A1C and fasting glucose down by changing what they ate the day before or that night and stabilizing blood sugar as well as addressing hormones. So progesterone, obviously everybody knows for women, for guys as well, but mainly women can be extremely helpful for sleep, especially when it's dialed in appropriately. So those are things I wanted to add. And then the only other thing is just for people to be careful with taurine and glycine. I think they are really helpful.

I use them all the time, but sometimes because they can induce a bile flow because they are what's used to conjugate bile acids, some people can get digestive issues from them. So for me, the first night as an example of taurine and glycine, I sleep like a baby. And then the second night I have problems because of increased bile flow that creates irritation in the colon. So these are just specific things that I think people can look out for with using these, but they can be extremely helpful.

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And I guess the last one was supplements. would say anybody doing something like having a bunch of supplements on board. A lot of times I'm taking supplements back and then having people test supplements one at a time because you don't even there's so many times you could be taking a supplement and you're thinking, hey, this is like theoretically I saw it on this podcast. It's supposed to be the best thing ever. So and so talking head said use these supplements and then they take it. And then there's like, well, you know, when did you start having this problem?

a couple months ago, when did you start this supplement? Oh, a couple months ago. All right, let's just pull this supplement out and see if that's triggering your new symptom. And you're like, oh, it went away. Okay, add it back in for a couple days and see if the symptom comes back to retest that hypothesis. And then people will often find that some of the supplements they're taking are actually the problem. And I think that's a huge, huge thing. Same with dietary changes. Some of the dietary changes that people make, they will create some benefit and then it'll create some problem. And because you if you don't

like kind of go about it in semi systematic fashion and you can't you don't figure it out and then you kind of get I don't know where to go next. I don't know what to do. So I'd say making one change at a time with supplements and then with some of the dietary stuff was super helpful to see how it specifically affects you and long term it actually saves you time because it puts you in a circumstance where you aren't backtracking.

and creating new problems that you're not sure about. You actually have clarity on how this specific thing affects you and you have a bank of reference experiences so that you don't have to rely on like some other external person telling you what how something affects you. You have direct experience with it and you're just using these other people to see, well, this is interesting. Should I try this or should I try that or is this helpful? You're kind of using it as a way to get introduced to new information and your filter is your experience with it. I think that's for me, that's the best way to go. That was the most helpful for me.

And that's something that I do with clients on regular basis. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a supplement mess somebody's sleep up or their digestion up or something like this.

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And I understand so many people are just so desperate and excited. Like you said, Mike, they hear something on a podcast and they think, okay, if I get this L-theanine and this special magnesium blend and this melatonin and this lemon balm tea, and then, you know, these special blue blocking glasses that will fix everything. And then before, before they know it, they have no idea what variable might be working against them. So really good point there that.

The slower you go, you're actually saving yourself time and understanding what's leading to what. It doesn't have to be such a chaotic experiment.

Yeah, and not to say that those supplements can't be helpful. L-thionine, magnesium, glycine can all be really great supplements that can help with sleep, but we've all discussed different situations where they could be making it worse and even more so than that what both of you guys are touching on, which is just doing it carefully because if we are one of the people who has an adverse reaction, one of the few or less common, we want to be able to identify that and not have it be something that sets us back in the long term and then we're backtracking later.

Yep. A hundred percent. Yeah. hundred percent. And it's, think a lot of people, I think they're always surprised to see like, cause I have, even I spoke with a, I spoke with a gentleman yesterday. He's like, I just like, went low carb and I went carnivore and I just like basically ate meat for a couple months. And like, then I started getting panic attacks and I couldn't sleep at night. And then it's like, she's like, well, I added in some carbs and like, well, now I can sleep, but I still have some panic attacks. Like just, just doing the carb thing.

Like and getting carbs that you tolerate, right? Because that's the that's the mind fueled carbs. You add them in and it's like, I'm going to eat mango and watermelon and this and that. And then you get digestive issues. And it's like, well, maybe I don't tolerate carbs. Like just finding the right ones that work for your system and having them in adequate amounts. It's like such a simple thing. But people do it like, wow, like my intractable insomnia that I took five thousand supplements for and took all these medications for like it's actually resolving now. So I think that is something that is

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It's just so foundational, the having the carbohydrates on board and like even doing the snack. And I think people under underestimate the value of doing that with your sleep or even when you wake up in the middle of the night, just having a swig of juice or coconut water or something like this can make a huge difference beyond like all the crazy supman stacks and things that we have available to us now. Like that I think can be the most central thing that, and I would try that first before getting to all the subs. That's like the first quote.

Some of the hey Mike, I'm having sleep issues. Are you eating enough during the day? Do you have any digestive problems? Okay, I'm well not really eating enough my digestion is fine. Okay. Have you like where's your carbon take? Okay, I'm a little low on carbs. Did you try a snack before bed? Do you try something when you wake up? It's like that's the general question flow. go through first before we start getting into do you have circadian disruption? Where's your cortisol? The DHS ratio? What's your glucocorticoid curve like that stuff is way later because if you most times you do this and then

Things are under control.

I would say mine's the exact same, the first thing I say is, you try going to sleep at 7 PM? And they haven't tried that. always make sure they try that first.

And then did you cite that site ads or human as your source for this?

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Right, always send them this clip and I say make sure you try going to sleep super, super early, four, five, six p.m.

But only if they did their cold plunge that morning. And then, yeah, bedtime by seven.

cold flung with some black coffee in a sauna after contrast therapy.

Okay, so this was a comment from Vanessa C. 1965 and she said, Hey, I'm back to say yes, these guys know what they're talking about. After four years of rising TSH into subclinical hypothyroidism and creeping weight gain, my thyroid panel is finally looking excellent with no glandulars. I was vegan and hurt my gut with grains, legumes and nuts, then went high protein, low carb to try to recover.

just letting myself eat carbs with every meal and not trying to cram in so much protein, balance something out. Heck yeah, Vanessa. The weight went down without caloric deficit or exercise. I stopped fasting too, no more stressing myself. Thanks guys. I think that comment was for you too, but I will celebrate in the gratitude.

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You guys might include you.

I don't know when she left that comment, but it's just amazing how simple it can be. You both were just touching on sometimes it's just eating carbohydrates with every meal like we want to, like feels intuitive and lo and behold, things really do shift.

So for our Q &A today, Guy was asking, he said he has a question regarding nutrients. I try to build a diet that meets the recommended daily intake of all minerals and vitamins. Should I consider that not all of them are absorbed or is it enough to just hit the recommended values? It seems impossible to know exactly how much of each nutrient gets absorbed from every food. Thank you. Okay.

Mike, what would be your thoughts there? think he's got some good points. There's, you know, a lot of mystery that goes on once we put something in our body. How should one go about thinking about this?

I think when like the frame that guy's thinking about it from of like, well, how do all these nutrients interact? How is each one absorbed? Am I getting all of them? Am I getting all of them in the right amounts? Like that is like actually gets a little bit like it can actually get complex because there's a lot of nutrients and there's a lot of different components. So for example, the thing is like which foods are you using to hit those nutrients?

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So are you using for your iron, are you using beef or you using chocolate? And then like obviously the iron from beef, the heme iron is going to be more absorbable than chocolate. So for me, I don't even try to necessarily approach it that way first. I actually approach it with the solution in mind because it just makes it easier because the theory and the abstract perspective.

Like you can just start spinning your wheels and looking at the absorption curves for all these different foods for different nutrients and the anti nutrients in them that can impact this and impact that. And then you like that's where you get into like this like, well, I'm just going to eat carnivore because like meat is the supreme food and it's most bioavailable and there's no anti nutrients. But so when I think about this from the solution perspective, the first thing I do or the first thing I would do here is I would structure your diet to hit all the micronutrients.

and also macronutrient targets that you have set for your goals in your context. So just try your best with your regular everyday diet. You don't have to go crazy and like, I eat, you know, 15 grams of oysters and 1.7 grams of mussels so I can perfectly hit this manganese target and this zinc target and this type of stuff. Just set up your general diet and chronometer and try to see using the foods that you eat on a typical basis.

If you like where you're at with your micronutrients all your vitamins and your minerals so and your macronutrients as well because the the protein carbs and fats are important and as we just talk again as you just talked about even with sleep getting enough carbs and total energy is extremely important. So you're going to I guess another thing I'll put in here is you're going to have some foods that you use for micros and you're going to have some foods that you use for energy for your macros right like olive oil butter mac nuts some of these things. They're not massively micronutrient dense, but they're macronutrient dense.

So they allow you to, I know you guys are laughing because I said Mac that's.

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Every time

love that every episode gets a little mac nut shout out. It's great. They're delicious. They deserve it.

Well, it's essentially you have some these foods allow you to hit your targets as far as energy and macronutrients go, which I think is extremely important because a lot of times if you just go the micronutrient route, you get stuck in a circumstance where you're you're honing in on organ meats and all this type of stuff and then you're hitting those targets and you're like, well, you know, how do I get enough carbs? Because I have to only use sweet potatoes of this particular variety or whatever the thing is. So you think about it that way of, you know, kind of two different types of food, you're going to hit those targets. Now,

From there, once you see where you're at, you just look at it in general. Then the next step is to say, okay, where are my gaps? What am I short on? So as a personal example, I don't tolerate dairy. So my calcium is always short. So the question is, how am I going to get my calcium? Do I try to do it through certain foods or do I try to do it through supplementation? And the caveat there is like, what's going to be easiest for me? Am I going to sit there and try to like boil greens or something to get my calcium intake?

to the optimal target, I'm just gonna take a little bit of calcium like eggshell calcium, coral calcium, something like this. And then I'm adding in coral calcium because it's it's significantly easier for me. I could just put it in the shakes that I make every day and then I'm easy to go. So I go from there. So that's step number two is correct your micronutrients with foods and or supplements to hit the targets after you have your baseline diet set. And you can use certain foods. You can use liver, you can use oysters, egg yolks.

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molasses can be helpful for certain things if you like and intolerate it so you can set things up from there. Now, the one question that doesn't get answered with this so far is what nutrients are you specifically deficient in and which ones you have excess in? Now, you can oftentimes gauge by going through your diet history. If you're a carnivore, you're probably not short on iron. You probably don't have too much iron. Your parathyroid hormone level, so your calcium balance depending on how you ran the diet,

may not be so great. You may have had a high phosphorus, low calcium intake. Your iron, your copper status, depending on what you ate, if you didn't really do the organ meats, you know, organ meats now is what were the problem with carnivore, like too much vitamin A, all the stuff that you see in that sphere now. But if you weren't doing much organ meats when you did it, then copper status and some of these other micros, molybdenum, vitamin A intake could have been quite low. And so there could be issues there. Or if you're vegan on the flip side,

Maybe there's certain minerals and maybe there's certain B vitamins that you're going to be short in. So and certain fat solubles. So these are things to keep in mind. But what I typically do at this point, I'll usually gauge where a person's diet is from there. So even somebody listening, you could just think like what diets have I done before this? And then you can get a rough idea of which vitamins and minerals may be a little bit short. But you can also just go test one time and just see where your stuff is at. And a lot of times this makes a huge difference because there's like I had a client

Recently, his TSH was like in the high twos and his body temp was low. But and I was like, he's like, do I have to go on salt mentation? And I was like, no, I don't think so. Let's see where your micros are, because maybe you have some minor deficiencies that are impeding your ability to produce thyroid hormone adequately, respond to it effectively, convert it into the active forms, effectively, effectively, because all the micronutrients are important for this.

So we looked at his labs and it's like his zinc was low, his copper was low and his iron was borderline, right? So the zinc copper level, I'm typically, at least for plasma zinc, serum copper, I'm typically looking for about 100 micrograms per deciliter. And in iron, there's a full panel to go through, but his ferritin was like 48. These values aren't really, like these are on the low end. So we corrected that and then his temps came up by a degree.

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And his thyroid hormone values, his TSH dropped back down and the last one was just in the very low to like 2.0 something. So much better shift and the T4 and T3 values improved as well. So we saw a change in the semiprofile, a change in his micronutrients. This gentleman had digestive issues for years. So that's why I think he was actually deficient because he wasn't absorbing stuff. A lot of times if you have things like IBSD, you run into the bathroom, you're losing those micros.

So just the testing was helpful and then we're like, okay, let's replete these things for a period of time and then follow up. So when I'm looking at testing the labs that I typically like to see to look at full micronutrient status or at least minerals is vitamin D3 and parathyroid hormone gives you an idea of your calcium status. You have an RBC magnesium to get an idea of your magnesium status. For copper, you can do serum copper, RBC copper and ceruloplasmin. You could just get away without the RBC copper and ceruloplasmin a lot of times.

If you don't think you have like a genetic disorder with copper metabolism, I tend to look at plasma zinc. I tend to look at RBC zinc, plasma selenium. I'm looking at an iron panel ferritin. I often look at B12 folate homocysteine in a complete blood count and then plasma selenium and whole blood manganese or RBC manganese. Those are ones that I don't do them that often. It's only if I really think that somebody may have an issue with those that I start to look like say Hashimoto's for the selenium.

or depending on what they're doing with their diet, I'll look at the manganese. So you can look at these labs and you can get a sense of, am I on the low side or on the high side of those and then target that specifically. When you follow up, you don't have to do the whole thing again. You just do like, say you're low in copper, zinc and iron. You just follow up on those values. So you already know where everything else is. That's fine. So it's like helps you to figure out your specific problems or your specific deficiencies or excesses. A lot of people I've worked with.

Baritons in the 400s the first time we look and it's like that's not good. That's that's actual huge problem So you want to bring that down usually with blood donation? That's the main way to do it So these are ways to to this is like the three-part process set up your diet dial in your micros your vitamins minerals between supplements and dietary components as well and if you still really want to look under the hood depending on your symptoms do some micronutrient testing to see where things are at and then correct and then follow up just in the values that need to be corrected

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I think that's the easiest way to go because if you try to do it the other way, you're going to just spend like all this time thinking about all the relationships and connections and then it makes you feel overwhelmed and then this way. right, well overwhelmed, but this is all you really have to do to get a lot of this under control and then go from there. The one caveat I want to say here is a lot of the B vitamins and some of the water soluble vitamins are way harder to test for because they're like the serum values that you get don't really corroborate fully.

your actual status for these things and there are other in depth markers you can test for them, but it starts to get really expensive and it starts to become a lot of markers really fast. So that's why you don't see like vitamin C or some of the B complex vitamins and components here because they're very they're much more difficult to test for and they start to become very expensive. Whereas this panel is not super expensive and you get a full breakdown of a lot of the minerals and you cover some of the important bees and then and then you can go from there.

And usually you can cover a lot of the other B's and vitamin C for most people without having to actually test it because at a reasonable dosage you can replete your status and there's not really a high risk of toxicity from them. So it's like just cover yourself with those B's and the vitamin C and then go from there and you can assume that you're relatively repleted. And if you still have problems then you can do more advanced testing down the line if needed. But a lot of times like there's very few times I've even had to go that route. Most times the

doing the diet and covering between what you see in chronometer and your supplementation gets the job done. The micronutrient testing, like that's even a little bit more rare, because a lot of people feel better just correcting those things alone.

really glad you mentioned the B vitamins too, because I think something that I've seen help a lot of people is dialing in thiamine because just a deficiency in thiamine can, I think it's just called thiamine induced malnutrition because it dictates how the microvilli are absorbing every other mineral and vitamin. So if we can think upstream or

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downstream, whichever way you want to look at it, what's going to be the limiting factor that's maybe preventing someone from absorbing their nutrient dense, regenerative, you know, whole foods based diet. might not be, they might not have to be so, you know, maniacal about trying to dial in all these little teeny micronutrients. could just be, okay, let's start with the basics and then see how they start feeling, how their energy is, how their digestion is. Jay, what would you add to this?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good question and probably one that lot of people are wondering about because as you look into all of the things that can affect nutrient absorption and nutrient-nutrient interactions and things like that, there's a ton. you know, if someone's looking at like their magnesium and they're looking at how well it's absorbed and it's like 25 % absorption and then they're thinking like, okay, do I need to quadruple my magnesium dosing because only a quarter is getting absorbed?

And that same thing can happen when you're looking at, know, I have coffee alongside my meat or my vegetables or my fruit. So is that inhibiting the absorption of different micronutrients there? So it can get really complicated. And I think it's a really important one to kind of calm the concern a little bit because all of this is generally accounted for when it comes to looking at nutrients in food and nutrient status and recommended amounts.

So, hypothetically, ideally, when these things are studied, they're looking at vitamin A intake or thiamine intake in the context of a whole food diet and in a normal human. you're getting an idea of, all these factors at play, including this individual's bio-individuality, their ability to absorb this nutrient, the other nutrients they're consuming along with it, the polyphenols, whatever else, this is the amount that we need to prevent deficiency. Unfortunately,

That isn't the case with all the nutrients. A lot of the research that has been used to determine minimum needs or recommended daily allowances is really old research and a lot of it isn't done that well. So it's actually not the best body of research to rely on anyway. But the kind of broad picture that I say here is that, you know, if we're suggesting getting, you know, 400 milligrams or 500 milligrams of magnesium a day,

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it's assumed that that is accounting for absorption and all of the things that affect absorption. And there's a lot because you can look at calcium interfering with zinc absorption or vitamin C increasing iron absorption or calcium decreasing iron absorption. And so there's so many factors here and most of the time I really wouldn't worry about them unless you're in a scenario where you do have an iron deficiency. And that's a case where you might want to be careful about having

dairy alongside your red meat when you're really trying to bump up your iron status or at least next to the liver that you're eating or whatever it is. So there are situations where that comes into play, but in general, on average, I wouldn't worry about that. I wouldn't worry about your high polyphenol fruits or vegetables or high tannin coffee interfering with the absorption of zinc or magnesium or copper. Yes, it happens to a small extent, but A, it's not enough to really move the needle in the vast majority of cases.

and B, that's already kind of accounted for when we're talking about the amount of these nutrients we need. There are maybe a couple of exceptions here. So one, for example, would be anti-nutrients. We've talked about these in a number of situations, but phytic acid, oxalic acid, or phytates, oxalates, those can more strongly interfere with nutrient absorption. And so there are scenarios where we might want to think about those things. And when we look at spinach, for example, yes, there's a good amount of calcium in there, but because of the amount of oxalates, it could very much

be a net negative when it comes to calcium status. So there are some exceptions here where you do want to be aware of some factors. All of this is kind of accounted for though, when you take like the kind of bio-energetic approach where we're eating well-digested foods, we're avoiding high anti-nutrient foods. If we're eating things like grains or legumes, ideally we're preparing them well, we're fermenting them, we're sprouting them, things to help lower the anti-nutrient content. So a lot of these things are kind of baked in and for the most part, it isn't something that

I would concern myself with too much unless there was something that was indicating a deficiency. And at that point, we might want to look at things. Well, even then, I mean, the first thing I would say is make sure we're getting enough of that nutrient. And then if we're not seeing the results we would expect or we're seeing an iron deficiency, even though we're getting a good amount of iron, then maybe I would think about how much calcium we're getting and how much dairy we're consuming. And there could be a scenario where, yes, our iron intake is okay, but we're having so much calcium-detaining food that it's interfering with the absorption.

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Again, I would say that's relatively uncommon, but that's something I wouldn't worry about on average, only in maybe a very specific case. So yeah, that would be kind of the broad thoughts. Some other things that I do think are worth noting though, would be the different forms of the few different nutrients. So Mike, you touched on it with iron, or we have heme iron and non-heme iron, and the heme iron is the form that's in the animal-based iron containing foods. There is like a two to three times difference in absorption.

between heme iron and non-heme. So that is something you might want to account for if you're not eating a lot of animal protein sources and you're working on your iron status and you're seeing that on chronometer you're hitting your target for iron, but a lot of it is non-heme iron. That's not going to help so much. So that's something to bear in mind. When it comes to vitamin A, that's another one where you're just looking at chronometer, you could be getting tons of vitamin A so to speak, but a lot of it could be beta carotene.

And generally the equivalence between beta-carotene and retinol, retinol is the actual vitamin A we use, is considered to be about a 12 times difference. you would hypothetically, assuming that you efficiently converted or convert it well enough, you would need 12 times as much beta-carotene to make up for your retinol needs. Most of the time, if you're in a hypothyroid state or a hypometabolic state, you could run into issues there and actually get a buildup of beta-carotene. So that's one that the difference

is important and we want to make sure we're getting enough of the retinol, not the beta carotene. And we did a couple of episodes talking about vitamin A and whether you need to be concerned about it the context around all of that on the Energy Balance podcast. So I would point people in that direction if they have concerns. And then the last one I wanted to mention is vitamin K, where the vitamin K in like leafy greens, for example, that's vitamin K1. And really the K2, vitamin K2 is the form that we utilize. And the difference there is generally about a 10 times difference.

due to absorption and conversion concerns. So that's another one where if we want to make sure we're getting enough vitamin K, we would want to focus a lot more on the vitamin K2 as opposed to K1. So those are some kind of considerations to have in mind, but aside from those maybe unique circumstances and being concerned about some of the major players in terms of anti-nutrients, as long as you're getting enough of the nutrients, all of the factors affecting absorption is kind of...

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included there, it's kind of considered when we talked about getting enough. And last thing I wanted to touch on as well, both of you guys mentioned scenarios where someone might have gut issues and they're not absorbing nutrients well. And at that point, typically we would know, like there are some clear gut symptoms here and that's a scenario where we want to focus on fixing the situation in the gut as opposed to trying to account for it by tripling all of our micronutrient needs. That's all I'm going to get us so far. So yeah, that would be kind of my broad thoughts here.

For the vast majority of times, just to reiterate, don't sweat it. You don't have to, you know, as Mike, you were saying like, yes, the micronutrient test can be great, but the vast majority of time, you don't need to worry about that. sufficiency from the diet is, is plenty. It is worth tracking a bit on chronometer and taking a look at where you're at with your micronutrients on your typical diet. But outside of that, I generally wouldn't sweat it if you're eating a well-digested low antinutrient bioenergetics diet.

Mm-hmm. want to I want to add something here too that I think is important because we see these different camps popping up low vitamin a low vitamin D all this type of stuff and I think or even like the morally like like copper iron stuff these perspectives I would say on average when you have this perspective where there's one micronutrient is just a pure toxin and

We need to get it as low as possible or you need to get something like another example in contrast to vitamin D would be like Coimbra protocol where you get your vitamin D as high like really high like very high levels. I think in both circumstances the Coimbra protocol is a little bit different because that's like for a specific that's like basically pharmacologic dosing of vitamin D for a particular effect. But some of these other camps where you have these extreme perspectives on the micronutrients a lot of time I think the perspective is at least in my my

my opinion is extremely unbalanced and it misses the nuance where there's a Goldilocks zone for these micros. There's an optimal amount. too much iron be a problem? Yes, 100%. Is too little iron a problem? Yes, 100%. Can too much vitamin A, particularly in the form of retinol, cause problems? Yes, 100%. Can too little cause problems? Same deal. So what we really want to do is we want to find

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Or we want to get like a rough idea of what the appropriate amount of some of those things are instead of swinging all to one side and saying like, it's just toxic or it's just or we just we just need it. or, you know, we need as much of it as possible. We want to find what like get specific. Like what is the appropriate amount? I've had people come out of some of these groups where like as an example, one lady I worked with in recent times was anemic from blood donations because iron is toxic.

And it's like, that is a huge problem. Like we don't want to be donating enough blood to the point of like depleting ferritin levels, pushing to anemia and then causing issues. Like we want to have appropriate ferritin levels. So yeah, I wanted to put that in there because I see this stuff all the time in it. And it is a little bit frustrating because there's like, and then when you look in there, like they're talking about some of the research, like, this research is bunk and then you go through the research like, some of this is actually pretty good.

Even though it's standard mainstream research, some of it is actually pretty helpful to give us an idea when you go through some of those papers.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the most common one I've seen too, is people who are fearful of iron overload, which is a legitimate concern and one that's way under recognized in the mainstream, tragically under recognized when it comes, especially to like heart disease and cancer and things like that. And to see people, I've seen people with those issues and their ferritins in the three hundreds and their doctor never said anything about it. And it's like,

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So, so tragic, so terrible that that's not something that's acknowledged. But at the same time, you have this reflex where it's like, iron is toxic. And just because you can have excess iron and iron overload and that can be problematic, doesn't mean that iron is toxic. It's, it's a really important nutrient in terms of the most fundamental functions of energy production. And the complex is that the electron transport chain and being able to utilize oxygen. mean, it's, it's, it's such a fundamental nutrient. So,

to have people who are then only concerned about excess and trying to bring it as low as possible. I agree, Mike, I've seen that, where people are basically putting themselves into an anemic state and they're not even looking at that as a possible problem. And then they're so fearful about bringing iron containing foods back in or trying to increase their iron status because of the kind of imbalanced takes on iron that are out there.

Fear is just burning through their magnesium and their potassium and their sodium throwing them off even more But yeah, I would say some people if we drop the fear and get curious and even notice Maybe what their body is craving they might understand maybe that is because the body is wisely trying to replenish something so it might not necessarily be a test that they need it could just be you know, their body starts having wild cravings for chocolate and mac nuts and

then they start to notice they feel more alive and something is replenished and it can be a little bit more simple.

That brings a good point to Teresa. A lot of the stress hormones actually waste critical nutrients. And that's something like, for example, parathyroid hormone is going to pull the calcium out of your bones when you don't have enough. Or aldosterone is going to make you waste your potassium. Or hypothyroidism is going to make you incapable of holding on to magnesium effectively. part of the goal with the... Like I think this goes with Ray's hypothesis that energy and structure are interdependent at every level.

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But when you get into a good state, you actually are able to hold more structure. You're able to build more structure. And part of driving energy metabolism is making sure you have these critical nutrients in the optimal amounts and or getting them in the right, basically in the right amount. So I think this question is great overall. I think people should be trying to dial in their micronutrients because you have the if it fits your macros crowd like you get that and the calories in calories out stuff. And then there's like not so much talk about micros in some of those areas.

But I do think the micros can be super important. I've seen people make huge differences dialing in their micros. But for most people, that's put your diet in chronometer, see where your gaps are, cover your gaps between diet and supplements, and that gets the job done. I'd like 80 % of the people fall in that camp. And there's going to be 20%. Like they have very specific problems going on that they need to get like look under the hood a little bit more and get that addressed. It's not always micros could be hormones, could be other components, blood sugar regulation, et cetera, but

For most people you do that and like, wow, I feel a lot better. I'm sleeping through the night now, my energy's better, the weight's coming off finally, my exercise, my workout routines are going better overall. So I think you do that. That for me is usually first step. I, somebody presents me with labs and it's like, okay, there's definitely a problem with this prolactin value or this blood glucose regulation, this A1C, this insulin values, there's a real issue here. Most times, like, look, we have to get the foundation right.

Well, thank you for bringing some reason to this conversation and let's wrap up here for today. Jay, where can people find you?

My website is jfeldmanwellness.com. Head over there for tons of free resources. And then my YouTube channel is J Feldman Wellness, where you can find this podcast as well as the energy balance podcast, which I do with Mike.

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And Mike, where can people find you?

They can find me at my YouTube channel, MikeFave, my website, MikeFave.com, and as always on the Energy Balance Podcast and here on Bioenergetics Review with both of you guys.

about you, Theresa?

Yeah, you can find me at livingrootswellness.com or on Instagram and then my tapping app, Tapping with Tea or the website tappingwithtea.com. All right. Thank you everyone for tuning in today and we will see you for the next episode.