 Hi everyone, this is Dr. Jose. I spoke with Adrian about his success story with Healthy Gut Health U. And as he'll share momentarily, he had maybe a 10 year road up until the point where he found Healthy Gut Health U. And he had worked with a few different doctors and never really seen results with his fatigue, his brain fog, and his joint pain amongst other symptoms. And he shares a few very valuable insights. One was that removing nightshades is dictated by the autoimmune paleo diet. And also reducing dietary histamine for him led to a big jump in his improvements and how he was feeling. Also importantly in there, he didn't follow either one of those diets dogmatically but rather looked at those clusters of foods as potential triggers, used that to inform his diet and personalize his diet. So not a I'm fully autoimmune paleo and fully low histamine, but rather let me take a brief excursion through this diet, see what I can learn from it, incorporate some of those concepts into my personalized diet and also not stay incredibly narrow, but rather have this personalized diet that's getting broader over time as I heal. He also mentioned that elemental heal for him used in this kind of two to four day reset application that I advocate for was very, very helpful in helping him see another big jump in his improvements and led to a fairly fast quelling of his symptoms. And one of the things that is so important that I am so happy that he highlighted is that showcases that the elemental diet does not need to be used in a two week application. There's a wiggle room where it can be used for a shorter period of time and still lead to substantial benefit. And then finally kind of at the end, he mentioned that he had used various probiotics, some of which were very expensive and had never really seen much improvement until he used these three probiotics in conjunction that I also advocate for. And while there's nothing specifically published on the three for balance protocol for which to advocate yet, there is a trend in the IBS literature where in multi species formula, so different probiotics work better than a single species or strain formula. So essentially in my recommendation, I'm just extrapolating out from that, that if multiple probiotics in one formula work better than just one probiotic, one species, then if we can combine three different formulas, so now we have 10 different probiotic species, plus a saccharomyces polarity, plus three to five soil based bacillus. This is where we can see as exemplified by Adrian's case, a noticeable improvement from probiotics, whereas historically he had tried many different formulas and not seen much in the way of benefit. So just a great example of how someone who is suffering for 10 years plus and seeing various doctors needed just the right approach of one step at a time, let's determine your diet, let's use elemental dieting as a reset, and then compound that with a well crafted and clinically efficacious probiotic protocol. And now this 10 years plus of chronic joint pain, fatigue and brain fog has been resolved. So I'm very happy to be able to share his conversation and case study with you, and I hope it will impart some wisdom and guidance along your healing journey. Hey everyone, this is Dr. Ruscio. I'm here with Adrian and he's had some great results reading Healthy Good Health U. He actually came across my work after an interview, I did a final interview with Tom Bellew on impact theory and he read the book, went to the protocol, saw some results, and I'm super grateful for you taking a moment here to share your story with us. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. It's a pleasure to be here being with you and in honor to finally meet you virtually. Well, thank you. Hopefully one day I get to meet you personally. Well, that would be great. It's always so fantastic to meet people and hear about their stories like you were describing before we started recording, many, many years where you were suffering seeing different doctors and weren't able really to regain your health, which for me as I talk about in the opening of Healthy Good Health U, I consider myself so fortunate that it was only maybe six months or a year or so, at least till I got plugged in. It was another maybe year or so until I really got over the hump. But like I say in the opening of Healthy Good Health U, if I hadn't found that, it could have been years and years and years of needless suffering, which unfortunately it sounds like that was some of your road up to finding Healthy Good Health U. So tell us a little bit about what that looked like. Absolutely, Dr. You're just now there right in the head. It took, like I mentioned earlier, took over a decade for me to actually find something that worked for me. I got to see many different doctors, you know, internal medicine, you know, natural, natural pads, and nothing was working for me. I did see a little bit of an improvement, but the minute I read your book and the minute I watched you on TV, it was just like it resonated with me 100%. And the minute that I started your protocol, oh my God, it was like 180 completely. I thought this inflammation I had going on for years, I thought it was just normal in constipation. I thought it was just, you know, everybody goes through this. So I just like kind of felt like, okay, this is part of my normal life and I have to go and deal with it. But once I, like I said, once I started the protocol, it was a completely big difference, everything, everything improved. Energy, you know, I was able to use the restroom for like any normal person. And it's just a big, big difference. So I just, I just, I can't thank you enough for writing this book. And yeah, and everything you have done. And like you, like you actually, you mentioned before, the products that we have out in the market are not 100% reliable because they have fillers. And it just, you know, I thought that maybe getting the most experience, the most expensive probiotic or the most expensive elemental heal diet will be the best, but I was wrong. Well, yeah, I mean, it's an understandable assumption for one to make that more expensive equals better. And there certainly is kind of a minimum quality bar that we need to clear. Just using some arbitrary numbers here, a $10 probiotic, they may have cut significant corners to get the price to $10, but also something that's $130, you know, you may have gotten the quality that you need. And then from there, just kind of bell and whistle type feature. But let's take a little step back. So you said fatigue was one issue. Inflammation was another, was this inflammation manifesting as joint pain or how was the, the inflammation manifest? I think, you know, to be honest with you, if I'm kind of like a numbers guy, if you would say I've been dealing with inflammation from one to 10, 10, 10 being the worst, I was at 20. It was inflammation every day, all day. And it was joint pain. It was fatigue. It was brain, brain inflammation now that I'm more educated myself. I just felt terrible. It was, it was a crane all day, you know, getting up in the morning, four or five and four or five o'clock in the morning, and then just going to bed like 10 or 11 o'clock at night, always tired. I always felt always, always tired. And I had a really good diet, you know, eating, you know, a while salmon mainly and, you know, for the most part was, was a very strict and expensive diet, but I still couldn't get any better. And just, you know, getting adrenal support, probiotics and just following your program. It's just a complete 180. Let's go through some of what you changed based upon the healthy good health view kind of self-help guide, i.e. algorithm. Let's start with step one. Was there much that you changed regarding diet? Sounds like you may have been kind of on a paleotype framework initially. And so let's go there. Was there anything dietary that you modified and that led to any benefit? I did. So I did start it. My wife was doing the paleo diet and it was working out well, but there were certain things that I just, it was just triggered. It just triggered my immune system to get inflamed. So we just started going through the list. We took some of the nightshade vegetables and we also took some of the high-histamine ones that actually I was completely unaware. And the minute I took them out of my diet and, you know, doing the elemental heal diet, it just completely improved my self-meaning. It felt like amazing. I just don't have words to actually describe how much better I felt. I told my wife, I'm like, I feel better than I was 18 and I'm 40 years old now. So it's just like, it's truly unbelievable. It is amazing how, you know, chronological age isn't the primary driver of how well someone feels, looks or performs, but you have to have the knowledge to really be able to figure out, in your case, you know, foods that are nightshades like eggplant and peppers and tomatoes aren't unhealthy foods. It's just there's many ways one can navigate the landscape of food options and having some of the frameworks of, so in the book we discussed the autoimmune paleo diet, to give you not this strict diet to just, you know, monochromatically focus, but to say, here's a cluster of foods that may be flaring your symptoms. So take some time to pull those out, observe your response, then bring them back in and see if you can identify if there was one or a handful of triggers within that cluster and then avoid those. And so it sounds like the nightshades and the histamines were just modifications you can make to your diet. And I'm assuming you have kind of a healthy balance there now where you're not just, you know, dogmatically adhering those, but rather realizing that there's some personalization that we can achieve with your diet, you know, vis-a-vis those two different clusters. Is that, you know, I don't want to lead you to the answer here, I'm leading the witness, but, you know, is that fair to say that that's how you're kind of balancing your diet now? No, absolutely, absolutely. You know, the right in the head is just that we have to try one thing or another. And it was just that, you know, I had to change my mindset as well because I felt like, well, I mean, you know, eggplants are like you mentioned, they're healthy. And I was thinking, why I'm eating all these healthy vegetables and, you know, wild meats and they're still not feeling 100% or I'm not feeling well. And I just, you know, I just had to try some out and then take some out of my diet. Yeah, and then there's one of the travesties where people pick foods based upon the feature of the food, high in this antioxidant, high in this prebiotic, which I guess isn't a bad place to necessarily start, but we really have to loop into that analysis the person's biofeedback and say, hmm, boy, if every time I eat a high-fob-map food, I get more bloated and more joint pain. Not that that's you, which is as an example. Maybe even though that food contains prebiotics, it's not the right fit for you as an individual. So yeah, this is fantastic because hopefully it's helping our audience with the framework of the mindset, as you said, for how we navigate diet. So that was a good first step for you. Did you then layer on top of that protocol of avoiding nightshades and lowering your histamine? Did you then go right into the probiotic protocol or how did that look? So what I did, I transitioned, I had to repeat some of the steps. So I had to go back to the elemental heel diet for a couple of days. So I did that for two days and then probiotics. And I felt that once I went back, I took three steps. I was three steps ahead. I took one step backwards, but I was able to go back two steps again. So I felt a little better again. And for the audience and some of the patients, I'm sure, sometimes you're going to have to go through step three twice or three times, because that's what I had to experience. I'm going through my second round, but I do feel better and I can see it the big difference. And I was just a little impatient myself, because I think some of us actually feel like, okay, I'm going to take this and I'm going to feel so much better within a month or two, because you see other people maybe feel much better. But it might be not the case for everyone else, like myself. I mean, I can't over emphasize how important of a point that is. Understandably so. When you're improving and then regressing, it's easy to kind of freak out. But what I would offer people in terms of how to approach this would be trying to zoom out. And if the trend is improving, even if there's a little hiccup, if there's still that trend, and this is analogies all the time, kind of a stock market ticker, there will be ups and downs, but if the general trend is upward, it means that we're on the right path. You don't necessarily need to go see a doctor to help you with that. I mean, certainly there's a time and a place and I don't want to dissuade anyone from seeing a clinician, especially if it appears, warrant it. But the point I'm trying to make is don't freak out or jump ship too prematurely if there's a hiccup. Because this is something that Mike Nelson said regarding progress with exercise, but I think it parallels to health and healing, linear progress is really linear. There's usually kind of this up and down bumpy road that we navigate. So it's a phenomenal point that you make. Thank you so much for making that point, because I feel like people just need to be continually reminded of this. Because if you're feeling well right now, this is easy to not agree with it. But if you're in a down swing, it's so easy to go on the internet, start Googling things, looking off various tests. So just for everyone listening or reading this, be a little bit patient. Look at the zoomed out trend line. If that trend is still improving, even if you are down swinging, if you're worse down swing now, better than your baseline from before, you're still on the right track. So keep that trajectory piece in mind. And let's touch on the elemental heal. So it sounds like you were using that kind of in the reset application that I discussed a few days exclusively or semi exclusively. Is that how you're using it? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I had to go exclusively on an elemental heal diet. I did it for about three to four days. And I and I told this because this was actually recommended by another doctor to go in just on a water fast for two days. And I was like, there's no way I can do that. There's just no absolutely no way because I can go out without eating every two or three hours. And the minute I start doing it, and I just had to change my mindset as well. And I think you mentioned this during on your book or in previous podcast, where your mindset has to change. And that start to thinking about, oh, my God, what's going to happen? Everything's going to go bad. I'm going to get inflammation. I'm going to start feeling worse. I changed my mindset. And I started, okay, I'm going to get better. I had to come myself. I had to go through this journey. And I had to I have to go through the process. And I did it for two or three days. And felt incredibly better, incredibly better. And I wasn't feeling and I'm sorry. And I wasn't. And I think this was my biggest thing that I will feel hungry and irritated and tired. And no, it was it was completely the opposite. I had more energy. I was I was like, sharp. I was like, my focus was was so much better. It is amazing. That's exactly what I was thinking before I did my first the longest I've done on the elemental diet is four days. And I was blown away at I thought I was going to be hungry and irritable and tired. But I actually had incredibly sharp focus and a clear mind. And it just goes back to in my opinion, how your gut when inflamed will cause things like fatigue and brain fog. And I'm also really happy that you shared the bit about doing it for about four days. Because one of the things I discuss and how to get help you and discuss in the podcast. In the research, the elemental diet has been used in kind of a two week application. And some providers unfortunately feel that elemental diets can only be used two weeks, or nothing at all. And while I appreciate wanting to be evidence based, there's also a theory I floated out there, which is we want to be evidence based, but not evidence limited. Meaning there's been that one study in SIBO for two weeks. So if we're just looking at that, we're not kind of thinking critically, we could mistakenly confine ourselves to only allowing patients to use in that application. However, one, if we think critically, we can say, well, does everyone need two weeks? Maybe not. Let's experiment with the short duration also happens that in the inflammatory bowel disease literature, this has been used as a partial meal replacement or in shorter courses in a litany of various studies. And so what I'm trying to tie that back to is, if you felt this was two weeks or nothing, you may never have done the therapy because that's a much harder goal to reach for. So I really appreciate you kind of sharing that shorter two to four day reset application of the elemental hill because it makes it much easier for people. And like you said, you can experience significant improvement just from that shorter application. Is there, is there anything that you want to, anything else you want to share regarding your use of the elemental diet? No, I just, I guess my experience for listeners and patients out there, just, just if don't be afraid. I think is a lot of people are afraid of the lack of nutrients or perhaps I'm going to go hungry and I'm going to feel tired and I'm going to, I'm going to feel just bad. Don't, don't, don't, don't be afraid because the nutrients, the formula, it's an amazing, it's amazing that'll make you feel completely much, much better 100% or 150% better. So don't, don't be afraid. Yeah. I mean, it's a great point. You know, unfortunately there, there's still some of that residual opinion on the internet from not only from when the recommendations were two weeks exclusively, but also from the early formula as five and X plus that really tasted poorly. And it's sad when, when patients could have done this years ago, you know, not the diet that is, but they've avoided it because they thought, you know, what they read on the internet, the rumors about it tasting terrible are true. They were true five years ago, but now, you know, the landscape has shifted quite a bit. Thank you for saying that actually vanilla, oh my God, it's just an amazing flavor, chocolate as well, but our favorite, my wife and I love vanilla. It's just so refreshing that it's just like, we crave it every day. We're going to have at least one a day. Yeah. Well, then I mean, thank you for saying that again, because this can help allay some of the concerns of people who may be able to benefit from this, but have been withholding because they thought it was this, oh my God, it's going to taste terrible. And understand me. So if you were under the impression it would taste so terrible, I wouldn't blame someone for kind of dragging their feet with starting this. But really, you know, it's not just me kind of trying to talk up our formula. And it's not only our formula. There are some other contemporary formulas that have just been reformulated and taste much better. So again, important to keep that in mind for patients. Absolutely. No, no, thank you. Thank you, Dr. Yeah. No, like, and once you had those ice cubes, like you mentioned, or you talked about, oh my God, it just changed. It's just completely or so much better. Right. So already, this has been a super rich conversation. I'm tempted to kind of pick your brain here for a long time. But you know, in the interest of time, is there anything else that you want to kind of leave people with in clothes, any insights, any thoughts? My final, just I have to wrap this up. Once again, don't be afraid. And there's going to be lots of information once you go online. Obviously, everybody goes online, buys books, don't listen to everything or don't read everything, because it's not 100%. And my perspective, again, let me rephrase that. In my perspective, it's not 100% accurate. Don't be afraid of the elemental heal diet. Probiotics, in my experience, and I'm not bragging, but I have spent lots of money and supplements, my wife and I. And the minute we try you probiotics, it was completely blue, everything out of the water. It's just the formula that you have in the probiotics is so much better that we're proof. Don't be afraid. And don't go for the biggest price tag, because that doesn't mean that's going to be the best. So just to keep that in mind. And I mean, doctor, I can't thank you enough. Like I mentioned during the podcast, I wish I can. I'm sure one day I get to meet you in person to give you a big hug. I'll give you a big hug via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. But yeah, all I can say is just thank you and keep doing the work that you're doing. All of your podcasts. Thank you again. I listen to them every time you post them. Great information. And I just, yeah, all I've got to say is just thank you once again for all the hard work you do. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And it's really stories like yours that, again, make it worth the three years it took writing Healthy Good, Healthy You, and all of the hard work that goes into these things behind the scenes. Because there are moments when it feels like you're slugging an uphill battle. Especially when there's so much to contend with out there that feels like it's misinformation. But then hearing stories like this put so much wind in my sails. Because then it makes me feel like we're kind of changing the tide and helping people in armament with some of these simple things that can make a big difference in their health. So thank you again so, so much for sharing your story. Thank you, doctor. Thank you so much once again. And it's a pleasure.