 And the reality is it's not just the physiological stuff. It is oftentimes the mental, emotional, spiritual things that are contributing to the dysregulation of their biochemistry. For years, I've been discussing the gut-brain connection as you and many others. And I think it's incredibly important for people to understand. When was your aha moment when you realized that food might have such a big impact on emotional health? Those of us that love seeing patients still and really immerse ourselves in cases, I think we're a rare breed of health nerds that probably really predates even our profession. So for me, I grew up knowing this because I was this weird teenager in Western Pennsylvania and would read all the latest books and research and things I'd find at that local health food store who want to learn about this. And this is something that, yes, you're right, it was so much more research than we had back then. But there's a reason why so much of research is really catching up with antiquity that even before the double-blind trials and the exciting research that I talk about and gut feelings, there was a lot of ancestral knowledge about this and I kind of opened up the book and talk about that somehow our ancestors knew the gut was the seed of the soul, right? And we have amazing, exciting studies to show that, but these phrases of gut instinct and gut feelings and I just feel it in my gut and butterflies in my stomach, that is part of our culture, right? And it's this sort of vast remembering now of the power that the gut wields on our mood. Yeah, you know, I'm always talking the Hippocrates 2,500 years ago said all disease begins in the gut. And interestingly, I recently have a Buddhist scholar who's become my patient and we were talking about this one day and he says, you know, I actually, you mentioned Hippocrates saying this, he says, so I went back to some of the Sanskrit texts of Buddha and Buddha actually said that enlightenment comes from the intestines and they were, yeah, and they were actually, you know, they were contemporaries and it's like, holy cow, you know, how did, how did a Western guy and an Eastern guy both know this? And it's like, whoa. Studying human experience, right? I mean, they just like probably countless of people studying and seeing connections and yeah, it's beautiful. It's actually beautiful to just see, no matter where your ancestors are from in the world, it's really a part of our heritage as human species. You know, I wrote about in the energy paradox and unlocking the keto code that there's tons of research that you and I both know that emotional stress and depression can cause disorders of the intestinal system and vice versa. So let's talk about how food and gut health can actually lead to mental issues or fix mental health issues. Yeah, so that's that bi-directional crosstalk that I really wanted to dig deep on in this book because I see a play out in patients' lives all the time and it's always the question, people after I go over the labs and go over their health history, we talk about things like chronic stress in your life currently or we look at the adverse childhood experience score and kind of look at things that childhood trauma maybe that may be unresolved. And the question often comes from patients, well, what came first? You know, what's the chicken or the egg? How did I get here? And it's these individual cases that you really have to look at what is the upstream issue? What is it? And for most people, it's gonna be a bit of both and it really doesn't matter. You have to deal with both sides of that coin, right? You have to deal with the gut and the feelings, the physiological and the psychological because the interplay between the two, oftentimes that's what gives rise to things like brain health issues like anxiety or brain fog, fatigue, depression and autoimmune patients. These are people that you and I really spend our lives really figuring out what are the pieces to their puzzle and the reality is it's not just the physiological stuff. It is oftentimes the mental, emotional, spiritual things that are contributing to the dysregulation of their biochemistry. Now, this gut brain axis and I would actually add the microbiome gut brain axis because with every passing year, the microbiome influence on everything is unbelievably big. So what are the top physiological disruptors that you write about in the book? Well, what I see the most clinically, if you're looking at the gut side of that duality, obviously assessing gut health is a major part of that as most of your listeners know about 75% of the immune systems in the gut, inflammation is a product of the immune system. So there's a lot of, I find, gut-centric components to what's causing a dysregulation of their immune system, i.e. chronic inflammation going on downstream. So when we measure things like high sensitivity C-reactive protein or other different inflammatory markers, oftentimes not everybody and it's multifactorial, it's not just one thing usually, but when you look at the gut and you see things like intestinal permeability or leaky gut syndrome, you see dysbiosis, bacterial overgrowth, maybe sometimes yeast and fungal overgrowth, so you'll see, and sometimes you'll see these cow protectin, lactoferrin, these are immune markers and the gut spiked up. And the persons, I mean, yes, they could be going through digestive problems, we see a lot of inflammatory GI issues, but as you know, I mean, that's just one end of a larger continuum. I mean, there's many people that quote unquote go to the bathroom all right is what they say, but when you look at their gut, you'll see the upstream root components that their second brain, their gut, is actually causing some downstream impacting up, let's say their mood or the inflammation level. So yeah, it's profound. So looking at gut health is important. And then we deal a lot with a mold toxicity or mycotoxins because our patients tend to be, as I'm sure you see too, people that have different methylation gene variants or HLA gene variants, they tend to be more biotoxin sensitive and then that paired with an unhealthy gut and then they get exposed to some other biotoxin like mold or sometimes we'll obviously see chronic Lyme disease for people that are struggling with that. And it's typically a combination of biotoxins, i.e. bacteria, viral and mold issues. And for many people, an environmental toxin component too, is that they sort of pick these things up along the way of living in our very polluted world and it's contributing to the inflammatory response in the body that can be impacting their mood, but also their energy levels and of course their immune system. Now one of the things you mentioned in the book, tell me about the polyvagal theory and why that would matter to you, me and our listeners. This is a way to describe and understand the way that stress and trauma, unresolved trauma can be stored in the body and how it exists on a continuum like most things that we're talking about within health. Let me just define it first. The vagus nerve is the largest cranial nerve in the body and it's responsible for our parasympathetic nervous system, the resting, the digesting, the more hormone balance, circadian rhythm throughout the day, the anti-inflammatory mechanisms in many ways too. And both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic are both important. There's nothing wrong with the sympathetic but it's about regulation between the two and the problem is most people find themselves in an over-activation of that sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight stressed state and a weak parasympathetic response. So what the researchers will call a poor vagal tone or low vagal tone is basically a weak vagus nerve. That parasympathetic, that resting, digesting, chilled out state is hypoactive. It's not working the way that we would like it to be. So polyvagal shows all the way from ventral vagal function to dorsal vagal function. It's showing the body being in this sympathetic hyper-activation. So it is not a new theory actually at all but I think the growing research around trauma and its impact on physical health, I think some of the older research of the polyvagal theory is really coming into its zeitgeist of people's awareness of it. All right, so how in the heck would I or my listeners know if I have a dysregulated autonomic nervous system? And number two, what can you do about it? Look, I mean, the statistics speak for themselves and you look at the rate of autoimmune conditions, the rate of mental health issues. It's fair to say that you really can't have those problems without some sort of nervous system dysregulation. So I would say first of all, whether you're diagnosed or not is I keep saying, repeating myself, these things exist on a spectrum and depending on the study that you look at, it's about four to 10 years prior to someone being diagnosed when things were somewhere on that inflammation spectrum. So you don't necessarily have to be diagnosed. I mean, many people, you know, they're just, they're feeling that wired and tired, they're anxious and exhausted, they have sluggish GI motility, they are like constipated, they maybe have some IBS issues, they have weight loss resistance, metabolic issues. Throughout there, that's a lot of people. That's the vast majority of the human race to varying degrees. So you can assume that a component to why you feel the way that you do is a dysregulated nervous system. And supporting it and regulating it is in my experience with our telehealth patients, a massive component for many people to their healing. So yeah, that's the state of affairs right now. Let me make a comment in the same light, and I'm sure you see this in most of the patients that end up seeing me. Many people have been to four or five, 10 different well-meaning physicians, other practitioners, institutions, and they often vague complaints. And most of them are told every one of your lab tests is absolutely normal, there's nothing wrong with you. Some people joke, you need a checkup from the neck up. And that's certainly been my experience. What say you? My gosh, I'm so glad you brought this up. I mean, my heart breaks for this epidemic of medical gaslighting that we're seeing in the world today. Really, I think in many ways, this archaic system coming to grips with an informed populace. The gatekeepers are going by the wayside and I think the democratization of information, the decentralization of information, you have empowered consumers that know more than honestly most conventionally trained doctors do about health. And that's threatening to a system that never really had to answer questions. And we're vastly as a conventional model behind the times when it comes to helping people with complex health issues. And it's something that I really go hard in got feelings because it's something that I see on an hourly basis with new patients telling me these horror stories of medical gaslighting. They're told they're just depressed, take these antidepressant. Well, who wouldn't be a little bit depressed when you feel horrible and everybody just tells you, it makes you feel like you're crazy. They say, you know, you're just getting older or you're just stressed. All these, like you said, well-intentioned sometimes. Sometimes there's what I would call medsplaining. It's like, you know, mansplaining only with people's health. And there's a lot of, you know, there's God complex and hubris, I think, with these complex health issues where they don't fit into a box and the training is typically to diagnose and match it with the medication. And if you don't fit into that box, they're told, hey, it looks like autoimmune conditions or, you know, it is, you know, you're just depressed or you are referred to somebody else and there's just this growing list of labs where there's really nothing to show for it. I'm not sure how we break this cycle, but I know you and I are both trying to do that. And I think the important thing is that people need to find someone who will actually take their complaints seriously and have the ability to investigate this. I mean, you know, if you had asked me 20 years ago now what I thought of Leaky Gut, I would have told you it was pseudoscience. Now, of course, thanks to Dr. Vizano and others, we know that Leaky Gut number one exists, we know how to test for it. So it's not pseudoscience, apocrity was right. Just a diverge for a second, back in the late 1800s, there was a theory that caught wildfire called, which you probably know about autointoxication. And that was bacterial toxins coming out of our intestines was actually the cause of most of our illnesses. And it got so extreme, as you probably know and I do, that people had their entire colons taken out. People had all of their teeth removed and it actually was the start of colonic therapy because of this. That's where colonic therapy started from. And believe it or not, it was correct, but not in the way that anybody thought. We're beginning to actually come around 100 years later, more than 100 years later and say, you know, there was something to this and now we can test for it. Yeah, and you don't have to remove your colon or your teeth. No, that's the good news. That's the good news. But you need to take care of your colon and you need to take care of your teeth. Yeah, we could talk about the oral microbiome. Hey, look, that's something that's important there too. You're right. But hey, how far we've come, I'm glad, in returning a corner. Yeah. All right, speaking of turning a corner, you have a term in the book which I find fascinating. Shameflimation. And you say, and I want you to defend this, probably has to do with a lot of chronic health conditions. So what the heck is shameflimation? It's my made up word, right? So much of our job, so much of our job is education. So I think like a teacher in that way of like a how to the lay person and we deal with savvy aficionados, the area that people when it comes to health, but still they don't do this for a living, I do. So it's just this phenomenon that I see clinically for the past 13 plus years of the people's mind, body connection, their mental health, their emotions, their thoughts about themselves and other people in the world and how it impacts their physiology. So shame is something that I see to varying degrees in different instances. One, something that I talk about in the book is this unresolved trauma component for many people's health puzzle pieces. And there's a lot of shame. This is like pretty straightforward, right? You could assume there's a lot of shame when it comes to unresolved trauma and things that people maybe are a little bit defensive when I bring it up on that initial telehealth consult when I see their high A score and we talk about things like sexual abuse, growing up and physical abuse, growing up. Was there alcohol, drug abuse in the home, growing up? Was there just a general neglect or a latchkey kid growing up? And that, depending on that person's biochemistry and their own bio-individuality and sort of resilience capacity, it really can influence their biochemistry today. And we know that's a contributing factor. The higher the A score research shows, you're more likely to have, it's a potential ingredient to trigger autoimmune problems, trigger brain health issues, trigger hormonal and metabolic issues later on in life. But I also see shame play out in a more nebulous way because it's a little bit not as obvious, but it's with people that are dealing with chronic stress in their current life. So the people that I talked to in this category and obviously you can have both past trauma and current stress, but let's just say their A score is lower, their childhood experience is lower, but it's the current stress of a job, high pressure job or, and at that point they're on the go all the time. They're kind of irritable because they're not really managing their stress very well. They're snapping at their partner, they're snapping at their kids, they're not really present with their family when they are home because they're checking their emails and they typically will do the grab and go convenience packaged foods that don't really love them back and they're doing a lot of stress eating. So there's shame around that too. So there's a lot of shame with chronic stress due to various reasons. And that life stuff, that feeling stuff of gut feelings, we will see spike inflammatory proteins impacting the gut brain axis and really throwing off anything from SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, just driving food reactions, food sensitivities to of course this epidemic of diagnosable autoimmune issues and brain health issues. So that's my way of kind of educating people about this phenomenon of shame formation. Well, I gotta say, when I was a big fat guy, I had no shame in eating a pound of peanut M&Ms, none. Obviously I had a big problem, but that was not shameful for me, but I get what you're saying. You're right, I have a large number of patients that they know the foods they're eating are killing them or affecting their mental health or the way they feel, and yet they do it and they say, I can't help myself. And I think that's what we're both getting into. How do we break that cycle? You mentioned one thing. Convenience foods, because quote unquote, we live busy lives and we're under stress, it's so much easier to stop on the way home and pick something up than to go home and make something or even find fresh ingredients and make something, even if it was gonna be very quick. How do we break this? So I put together a protocol and got feelings that I adapted from protocols that I have for patients and everybody has their own entry point. I'm just putting my clinical hat on for a second. Like for some people, the feeling stuff is very overwhelming for them, right? It's like the idea of dealing with past trauma, I think of a patient I had a few weeks ago, they had a very high A score and they had never really done therapy, they never really did much there, maybe some CBT, like general therapy, but not really dealing with the past stuff so much. And they didn't wanna go there. And they said, you know what, no, I know I went through it. They didn't wanna talk about the connection between how it could be playing out with their inflammatory problem and anxiety and depression and fatigue. So you just have to plant that seed sometimes. And for them, they were expecting the functional medicine doctor to be prescriptive, to run some labs, look at their gut health, give them a food protocol, give them a natural medicine, supplement protocol, maybe some bio hacks in there, and we did all that, but you just have to get rolling, meet them where they're at and that's the science and art of what we both do. But this is a surprising one. Only three weeks on the protocol, she was feeling more grounded, less inflamed, blood sugar was more stable. That's physiologically for a fertile foundation, for someone to make more proactive and less reactive decisions. And for her, she said to me, hey, you know that trauma thing you were talking to me when we first met online? I'm ready to talk about that now. And now we have her doing somatic practices, breath work, doing some EMDR with a therapist. The gut side of gut feelings was her entry point to create some resilience, increase some bandwidth, so she could cross that bridge of dealing with the past stuff. For other people, it's the opposite, right? It's the opposite, like the physical stuff's overwhelming, and like we were just kind of saying, they're in this throes of shamefulmation and sabotaging behavior, they really can't get past like a few weeks before like just doing things in a very self-sabotaging way. When it comes to food or alcohol or lifestyle stuff. So for them, regulating the nervous system with therapy, EMDR, somatic practices, breath work, some of the tools that I talk about within the protocol of the book, that's gonna create more resilience for them than they can go make better food choices. For most people, they're at least open to some degree that they need to deal with both the gut and the feeling stuff at the same time, because both are important. One will influence the other. I think we're beginning to realize how much a great entry way into mental health the gut is, fascinating work. You can take bowel movements from depressed individuals and feed them to mice or rats, and just so everybody knows, mice and rats love to eat poop, they think it's fantastic, and you will get a depressed rat. And we can measure depression in rats, it's actually pretty easy to do, just by changing their gut microbiome. And the signals that are sent from the microbial population has an amazing impact on anxiety and depression. So you're right, so just in three weeks with your patient, you've manipulated that component and now all these postbiotic signaling compounds that are coming up to the brain, and the leaky brain, that's now repaired or in the process of being repaired, and now you're right. Now they go, oh yeah, there is some stuff I really need to work on here, but that's what tipped it over. Yeah, absolutely. And I want the reader of the book to, depending on where they're at, just find something that they can stay consistent with. Because when you start saying consistent, even with the small stuff leaning into it, if you can get your head above that proverbial water, even just a little bit, people start to make more proactive decisions. They have a little bit more of self-respect, I think, for themselves. I think there's a going back to that shameflame concept. People that are in the throes of dysregulation on all levels tend to feel miserable, and when people feel miserable, they tend to make miserable decisions. So not to say that anybody's ever perfect, that's not the case, but you tend to have a little bit more of an awareness and a mindfulness around decisions that we make in our life when we can create physiological stability and resilience as well as mental-emotional resilience as well. All right, so why is it that when we're stressed or sad that we reach for junk food, or we reach for alcohol, you see it, I see it, what is that connection? Why do we do that? Well, I think it's multifaceted, right? I think of the thinking of some foods that are highly palatable and the research around descent memory for some people. There's this nostalgic component, I think, for some people that kind of plays on certain pleasure centers of the brain, but I do feel like a lot of it is some sort of quick dopamine hit, some sort of numbing and distracting from issues that need to deal with. And that's on all levels of culture. Even with social media, I see that, right? It's like, it may not even be food for them. It may be, I want some distraction, some numbing from this dysregulation in my body, which further perpetuates that same inflammation for many people. Yeah, I think that's it. What do you think? What are your thoughts there? I think dopamine receptors are a big piece of this and certainly the gaming industry knows this extensively and we know it from rat research. You'll press that button to get that hit. The problem is once that hit wears off and it wears off quite quickly, you seek another hit, whether it's from that food that did it or from TikTok or whatever. And you'll just keep pressing the button. I know, and it is the foods for sure, but again, a lot of what I talked about in the book is this technology and this FOMO culture, the fear of missing out. And I talk about the Jomo, it's like kind of transmute FOMO into Jomo, the joy of missing out, because a lot of this ancestral stuff, I talk about Huga and sort of the Danish concepts of kind of simplifying your life, unplugging maybe a little bit, reading a book by a fire or whatever that you can to unplug, to regulate your nervous system and ground yourself. And the research around forest bathing is so fascinating that I write about. I mean, there's just this regulation on so many levels, whether it is foods that don't love you back that kind of contribute to that distracting and numbing dopamine hit or social media. I just read a study recently, it wasn't new, but I was in preparation for the book and really looking at different, all the research that's done on social media, multiple studies looked at this one, it was 2012, I think, looked at over 7,000 New York Times articles and they looked at what determined the viral, the virality of an article. And they found that emotions like rage and anger outperformed other emotions by a lot. And that, I mean, that we all kind of know that intuitively and there's other studies that show that Facebook at one point at least, maybe still, prioritized posts that use the angry emoji. So, and then they're feeding, they're feeding the angry articles to the people that are most likely to engage in that rage. And that further perpetuates that cheap dopamine hit that's really junk food for our physiology just as much because that's just regulating people's nervous systems just as much as that food that doesn't love them back. We kind of talked about bad foods. Are there any good foods that can help turn the tide? Yeah, for sure. So the protocol in the book, I really talk about the gaps protocol, you know, the gut and psychology syndrome or gut and physiology syndrome, something that I've used clinically for the past 13 years for people who needed it. So whether it's an autoimmune inflammation issue, metabolic issue or a brain health issue, this is a protocol that really is, I think of it as a proverbial cast for a very dysregulated gut brain axis. So it kind of, as you know, like a lot of foods that the world would epitomize as super healthy that are relatively healthy, but maybe lots of raw vegetables, lots of raw foods, which are not inherently bad. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying someone that has a very reactive system on all levels, emotionally and physiologically. That can be a lot to digest and work on. So focusing on soups and stews, grounding, easy to digest, bioavailable, nutrient-dense things, it's a great way to ground them, not just physiologically, i.e., calming, stress hormones, calming, inflammation levels, but also you'll see the ripple effect of their emotions being more grounded as well. So it could be bone broth based soups and stews, you could do organic chicken broth or grass-fed beef broth, or you could do fish broth, which isn't as common in the United States, but in other cultures it's pretty common. We have recipes for all of these in the book. Two, and you could obviously do some plant-based galangal broth, ginger broth, seaweed broth, if you want to do as well, and lots of protein and vegetables in there, but the vegetables you're gonna get are going to be more digestible and usable to the body and less irritating to an irritated system. So that's one thing that as a tool that over time, therapeutically, I've seen amazing results with doing sort of a gut reset, if you will. That's a really good point. And particularly in California, if you don't have a salad three times a day, there's something wrong with you. Absolutely, people who have a really dysregulated gut, their microbiome is shot, they've got a leaky gut. These people, they really react to raw vegetables. And I'll give you a personal example, which I've talked about before, but it's worth repeating. Years ago, my wife got a Nutribullet, a Magic Bullet, and decided to make a kale smoothie. And she took four cups of raw kale and made a smoothie and handed it to me as I was walking out the door. And I can eat kale, I occasionally have kale. So I'm walking out the door and I chug my kale smoothie and I eat a lot of salads, obviously. And within an hour, I'm having massive intestinal cramps and the next thing I know, I'm in the bathroom and out comes the kale smoothie. And I'm going, what the heck? And then I went, well, duh, you idiot. There's actually a lot of really protective plant compounds like lectins that the plant doesn't want you to eat them. And if you eat them whole, you go through a very slow process of breaking these things down. But what my wife had done, of course, is homogenized it and every plant defensive protein was now fully activated and my body went, holy cow, I gotta get rid of this thing. And this is exactly what you're talking about. So when I have people who are really, you know, not well in their gut, one of the smartest things to do is you basically cook these foods down to, you know, nothing and that's where you start. And then you gradually reintroduce this stuff. Yeah, that's great advice. Yeah. And look, some people we even have to do, I'm glad you brought up, like there's a transition period, you know, necessarily always staying there. Like if we're repairing these things, let's segue out of that, to use that proverbial caste analogy. There's a time for a sling and there's a time to take off that sling entirely. But when there's resilience regained, but some people have to start with even pureed vegetables, like it's like that broken down. Oh yeah, absolutely. And so you kind of have to meet your gut where it's at and don't try to rush things that it's not ready to digest. Yeah, I mean, I literally will have people, you know, cook their salads and then puree them and that's, you know, that's where we have to start or not where we're gonna go today probably, but I will use a variation of a carnivore diet temporarily to get these plant compounds away from people and we'll do that. I just had a friend who's a patient. We've done this and he was a vegan and had all these gut issues and we kind of tried every trick to keep him as a vegan. And I finally said, look, this isn't working. You've got wide open leaky gut. We've tried everything. Do me a favor, you know, let's try a carnivore diet primarily based on fish. He was good with that. Within a month, he said, oh my gosh, you know, that was it, that was it. I said, okay, you know, good. Now let's branch out, but yeah. Lean out of it for sure. And I mean, the fruit side of things, those people tend to, I find to almost do better with fruits than a lot of the higher reactive, let's just say higher FODMAP or higher oxalate vegetables. We'll have them bake it down, simmer it down, fruits, like berries into sort of a compost, like kind of inside of a pie without the pie part and maybe some honey, something like that, it's a treat for them, but it's more digestible. I mean, the concept is you're kind of predigesting it in a way by cooking these down and there's nothing wrong with raw foods. We're not saying that, but kind of for the people that need it for a time therapeutically, use it therapeutically and then lean out of it based on your body's own pace of recovery. Yeah, I'll actually even have people ferment their fruits. That's a great tip, yeah. Really actually add some postbiotics and to start breaking them down. And let's remind ourselves that plants actually want us to eat their fruits. This was the enticement to distribute their babies, their seeds that we couldn't digest as opposed to plants actually didn't want us to eat their leaves because that's their energy, sir. What is a sugar audit and why do you recommend doing one? So, I mean, you know this, but like people, even that, I mean, the people that I meet, people that you meet are very savvy people, as I mentioned earlier. They are eating better than most people are. They know more than most doctors do, but I am still, I surprised many of them to when I really point out the hidden sugars that's even in these things that are very much marketed to as healthy things. And look, they are better for you options. There's nothing wrong in that, right? And they're better sourced ingredients, et cetera. But you still have to look for grams of added sugar, especially if you're just not mindful of how you're fueling your body. And we know, especially for people that have dysregulated guts and dysregulated nervous systems, the more added sugar, the more you're going to contribute to that stress cycle and that's a chain-flanation cycle when it comes to how they feel mood-wise and their blood sugar is all over the place. So, sugar audits, one of the days within the gut feelings protocol is just for people to take an inventory of their breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack and just be mindful, almost using it as a mindfulness experiment of saying, wow, I didn't realize that dressing had some X amount of grams of sugar or I didn't realize that I'm having this big thing of juice thinking that I'm doing the great thing but it's really lacking fiber and it's biking my blood sugar that just because something's quote unquote healthy or it's marketed very well, really don't ever, like I would still want to empower the person to read the grams of added sugar in the back of that label. Yeah, kombucha is one of the big mischief makers at least in the sort of people I deal with. Oh, I have kombucha every day and yet their triglycerides are high and they're insulin resistant and I go, you know, every look at the back of the label and there's 20 grams of added sugar, I get news for you that wasn't all fermented away and alcohol that. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I mean, a lot of these kombucha companies, the mass market doesn't necessarily love the tanginess, the tartness. So they do it from a sales perspective, I'm assuming, but yeah, look better for you maybe, but yeah, you want your kombucha to be as tart and vinegary as possible and then read the grams of added sugar for sure. What was maybe the most surprising thing you learned while working on this book? It would be, it's hard to say because I think the breath work research is really fascinating. I talk about holotropic breath work and it's origins with psychedelic research. I found that fascinating. I knew about it intellectually. We integrated in patients' protocols, but I just, the deep dive of that space was fascinating in writing and researching for this book. The other one that comes to mind is the science around intergenerational trauma, transgenerational trauma of how it sounds so almost woo-woo and science fiction. The fact that we are helped today not only has to do with the foods we eat in our stress levels or our past childhood trauma but it has to do potentially with our great grandparents and what they experienced. But the research is really looking at that. Is that there's multiple examples within the journals. One is the Holodomor, it was this man-made famine, this Ukrainian genocide in the early 20th century. Another set of research looking at the Holocaust in Germany and Poland and the Rwandan genocide in the 90s and looking at the trauma that they went through impacting not just the people they went through but these methylation variants would be passed on from kid to grand kid to great grand kids having increased risks of autoimmune issues and metabolic issues, type two diabetes and mental health issues. So it is profound and I think that we're just beginning to scratch the surface of in a way we are living out things that we need to deal with in our own life that's like our opportunity, like our life today in many ways is an opportunity to fix and break cycles that have been going on for generations. And as trauma can be inherited, so can healing. And I see people all the time with my patients raking the cycle of dysfunction and disorder and dysregulation and disease and they're not just their body but it changes the culture of their family and it heals their kids, their health, their spouse. And I think of the legacy that is of just healing generations they'll never get to see. So that to me was probably the most enriching, it was the most I think in awe of the power that we wield that it's not just about us, it's really about really leaving a legacy of wellness on all levels. So how do you counter the argument that, well, my great grandfather was traumatized in the Prussian war and so I can't help it that I wanna have a pound of M&Ms and drink like a fish. I can't help it. Well, I think that's the difference between being reactive and proactive and being a victim and being more than a conqueror. I think that's the difference is that people can use that as a way to distract and numb themselves, absolutely. That's victimhood in all levels, right? But I think that all other people can say, wow, I think the person that's proactive and that's working on healing has that paradigm shift to say, wow, if anything that gives me some grace and some lightness that this isn't all just about me but we all were dealt different hands, right? But it's our responsibility to say what do we do with it in this life? I see people up against seemingly insurmountable things with very high A scores with very much heaviness in their life, in their family's life for generations, overcome, overcome. So I think that that's just the difference between an excuse maker and people that don't make excuses to people that their why is bigger than their excuses. If you had one recommendation for anyone trying to heal their gut brain connection, what do you got? Where do I start? I mean, I get back and look at some of the recipes in the book and really look at the gaps protocol that I have in gut feelings because I do feel like that's a good first step. If you're like, man, I'm struggling with some brain fog and fatigue, maybe some background anxiety, maybe an autoimmune issue, look at that side of it, the soups, the stews, the cooked fruits, we have recipes for all of that to make it more digestible and therapeutic that proverbial cast for your gastrointestinal system and therefore your microbiome too. On the feeling side, I mean, there's so many practicumatic practices that I've talked about in the book but I would say breath work is one, don't underestimate the power of breath and how it can regulate your nervous system strengthening that vagus nerve. But if you're talking about like me personally, I love a good old fashioned forest bath. I love the research coming out of Japan and South Korea, looking at using nature as a meditation and medicine and these things are completely free or low costs for people. So that is a great excuse to go out in nature which humans would have done for eons and we didn't need the randomized controlled trials to look at the mechanisms. We just knew intuitively that nature was healing but now we have some cool science to show the mechanisms. So if you need another excuse, there are many that I talk about in the book as far as the research is concerned but just taking in nature sensorially with all your senses and that the plant compounds have been shown to modulate the immune system in a positive way improving mood. There's one study that I talk about with the microbiome of kids that went through this forest bathing class it actually changed their microbiome, the microbes impacting serotonin and neurotransmitter crosstalk between the gut and the brain. So there's so many really fun things in a way to support and regulate your nervous system on the feeling side. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're gonna love this next one. Sorghum is one of the two main grains that have no lectins and sorghum has been shown to be great for your gut buddies.