Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hey everybody, what's going on? Doctor Chad Woolner here and Dr Buddy Alan, and this is episode 14 of the Health Fundamentals podcast. On today's episode, we're going to be discussing the surprising discovery regarding your anxiety. So let's get started.

Speaker 2: (00:13)
You're listening to the health fundamentals podcast. I'm Dr Chad Woolner and I'm Dr Buddy Alan. And this show is about giving you the simple but powerful cutting edge tools you need to change your health and your life. [inaudible] sit back and enjoy the show as we show you the [inaudible] down to a science

Speaker 1: (00:33)
Sohi. Everybody on today's episode, we're going to be discussing something really interesting, uh, that a recent study showed regarding anxiety. Um, let's talk about a Dr. Allen. Um, it's, it's always surprising when we find these, uh, sometimes it seem, it seems very simple and yet powerful. And when you look, what did you really, when you think about it and look at it, it's, it makes a lot of sense, right? You know, and there's a lot of people, there is a tremendous number of people now that suffer from all types of different, you know, to different severity levels of anxiety, you know, um, even panic disorders for that matter. Right. And so, um, it, it seems as though, and I don't think it's just my perception, I think the reality of it is, is we're noticing an increase of mental health problem, you bess. And it's one of those things, uh, what's really interesting is, um, when we see a lot of these health problems on the rise, the question that I think is on a lot of people's minds is, is it that the problem is increasing or is it that our methods for detecting it are improving or increasing or enhancing?

Speaker 1: (01:47)
And I think in this situation with regard to mental health issues, and we're just going to put them all together in one kind of bucket, uh, depression, anxiety, and a mixture of other issues as well. Uh, I don't think it's just because we're becoming better at detecting the mind. I think mental health issues are truly on the rise. And I think it's, uh, this is one of those subjects where, um, it's multifactoral yeah. To, to a, to a very large degree such that it's an extremely complicated subject to unpack. And this is one of the primary reasons why so many different approaches. Uh, so many singular therapy approaches have failed miserably. You look at, uh, antidepressants and this isn't some rant just for the sake of ranting against medications, um, because I'm not entirely anti-medicine, uh, but the jury is back and what they've come to find is that, uh, antidepressants and anxiety medications don't work well.

Speaker 1: (02:50)
The research just shows loud and clear that they don't work well. Now, that being said, it's not intended to stigmatize a subject that is already loaded a lot of stigma. Um, but it's just to, to really, I think, illustrate this idea that the reason why, one of the reasons why these therapies haven't been terribly effective is because it's, it's this kind of Mano Causal Approach, right? Uh, you've got this one single imbalance with this one single neurotransmitter, and so therefore we just need to rebalance that. And that's the secret. You know, that's the thing, or a, it's that you've had this, uh, you know, emotional breakdown because of this thing that happened in your past. We just need to do some counseling and that's it. Or it's just that you need more of this vitamin, so do that. That's it. You know, and, and I think the truth of it is, is that I think there are a variety of different reasons and causes behind, oh, absolutely.

Speaker 1: (03:47)
Things I can actually, uh, my wife and I went to a seminar not long ago and it was, it was directed more towards young people and social media and the dangers of it. And, and, and a lot of what came out of there as far as speaking to anxiety and to depression or, or these other mood type disorders, um, we have at our fingertips, we can see the entire world now where, whereas before, you know, people still had anxiety and issues that they dealt with, but it was in such a smaller scale. And now we can see things on this mass scale and we can see what, you know, all these false narratives from people's lives. It looks like they're so perfect. And then we compare. Unfortunately we compare ourselves to them and so we kind of start this spiral of terrible things. And so like you said, there are people who have, um, maybe chemical things going on in their body, whether it be hormonal changes, who knows?

Speaker 1: (04:41)
There's, there are things that can internally be causing us to feel anxious. Oh, well. And, and that's what this research is good. That place. We're going to talk to that in just a minute. Um, and we certainly don't want to downplay a chemical imbalances because that is a major driver behind. Again, what we're simply, I think trying to illustrate here are trying to drive home is, is that, um, the answer is rarely, and I don't think it's just with mental issues. Um, for most health challenges, there's rarely a magic bullet if ever. Right? It's, it's understanding. Um, you know, honestly the five funnel shortcuts either, right? No shortcuts. Exactly. New should note. No. Uh, you know, no magic bullets, no shortcuts. It really is getting back to those five fundamentals of health that we talk about. And, and pretty much every episode one way or another, those five fundamentals come back up again.

Speaker 1: (05:34)
You know? So it's this idea of understanding that it's got to come from the inside. There's nothing that we can take that's going to magically fix it. Although we can certainly do certain things from the outside to assist us for sure. You know, simplicity and consistency being being consistent with good habits of help, making sure things are functioning correctly, mechanically and chemically. You know? And, and it's interesting too because uh, addressing the mechanical can oftentimes, uh, impact the chemical. You Bet. Absolutely. You know, uh, making sure we are mentally, emotionally and spiritually in tune and then fueling ourselves properly. You know, the old adage of you are what you eat. It's true, right? Very true. So that being said, right, those are our five fundamentals of health. We talked about them before. We're going to talk about them again. No doubt. What's the study all about?

Speaker 1: (06:20)
What is, what is basically going on here from, from what this study says regarding anxiety. So researchers basically reviewed and went over, um, 21 different studies with people with anxiety issues, over 1500 people involved in these studies. And basically the, in the, um, they looked at basically the hub, the health of people's gut, the microbiome. Okay. So they, they divided these different studies into different treatment parameters. And, um, many of them use just basically supplementing probiotics. So trying to restore a healthier gut flora, a healthier gut bacteria, so you're processing food more correctly. And basically the role, the results just said that over 52% of the studies showed that the approach was effective. All right. It was beneficial for them to help heal that gut. And we've talked in prior episodes and I didn't get in, like you said, in future episodes. I'm sure this will come up again.

Speaker 1: (07:17)
Yeah. But, you know, it's, it's these simple things haven't having a good, healthy baseline as far as, uh, you know, your nutrition as far as activity and exercise. You know, it's like all of those that you have to have that to be able to build upon it. Right? Absolutely. So, you know, it's like, um, uh, a good example would be like, look, everyone, I think everyone has a desire to be healthy, right? And maybe even be a little healthier than they are now. The problem is is I, I, I can't be 100 pounds overweight and, or 200 pounds overweight and say I want to go run a marathon in a month. Right? All right. I have to get to a certain baseline before I can build upon that or I'm going to hurt myself or I'm going to do something, some other damage. Right. I would say one of the most profound things that I've learned in practice over the years, and it's taken a while to learn this, is to help patients set and myself for that matter set correct expectations when patients come in.

Speaker 1: (08:18)
Because, uh, one of the things that we often find at our clinic is we're not an emergency room and we're not even an urgent care or an urgent care clinic. And so we find oftentimes patients will fall into this kind of gap category where they're not quite to the level that they need to go to the er, their back or their neck is hurting them so bad, but they're not quite to the nine one one yet. They're close. Right. And, and then, uh, and then they're not going to go to the urgent care clinics. So they come into our clinic. And I remember the first few times that that happened to me, you know, seeing this, uh, especially as a new doctor, recent graduate, um, it's, it's scary. It's frightening. You don't know what to do and you're just like, holy cow, what do I even do here?

Speaker 1: (09:06)
And since then I've had, you know, over a decade of, you've had over a decade, nearly two decades of clinical experience. And one of the things that clinical experience has helped me to understand is that when people come in and they're severely unhealthy, whether it be a chronic problem that's been going on for a long or it's really super acute, meaning a, their back is just bad or their neck is bad or whatever. The issue may be helping them understand, uh, the, and set the right expectations. And, and that can be challenging for sure, especially when people are like, you know, I need to be fixed right now. My back is killing me. But, uh, they, they've got to understand, you know, that our first priority is not necessarily to uh, get you out the door 100% today. You know, our first priority is just to take the edge off of things at the beginning, you know, and, and just set reasonable expectations with them.

Speaker 1: (10:01)
And, uh, and when we do that, uh, I think it, it helps set the stage for, um, a longterm gray, a longer term greater outcome. Oh, absolutely. Well, and you know, just again, ratcheting back a little bit, it comes, we're taking them back to more simplistic way of looking at things and, uh, coming back to what we're, you know, our topic here is, man, if we can help our guts be healthier, yeah. That will affect every aspect of our lives. Because a healthy, to have a healthy gut means you have to continue to eat a healthy diet. Right. Our, our culture is surrounded by terrible food choices. Yeah, right. There's fast food and there's processed food and there's garbage food that are high caloric intake, but virtually devoid of any kind of nutritional value of eating a diet that what we call the sad diet.

Speaker 1: (10:53)
The Standard American diet is a constant assault on your gut. And so it's no wonder that so many people have so many, not only gut issues, but oftentimes not necessarily a correlated a mental health issue that, that, that, that, uh, that's either a, the primary driver behind or a huge factor of it. Right. And, um, and so getting a healthy gut is one very simple but very powerful step in the right direction to helping people with, uh, things like anxiety and, or other common health issues. So, uh, we talk about probiotics. Okay. Um, maybe let's dive in a little bit deeper. In terms of probiotics and maybe foods that already naturally have probiotics in them, what would you recommend? Um, honestly if you're going to attack it with a diet, there are some fantastic, uh, any kind of fermented food is going to be wonderful. So things like there's pickles that are fermented Sauerkraut, there are Kefir, um, type of yogurt drinks that are delicious.

Speaker 1: (11:59)
And I mean, honestly, they're wonderful. D some yogurts are better than others. Obviously we don't want them to be late and the sugar sugar. Yeah. But, um, yeah, some good healthy yogurts. Um, oh gosh. Uh, and, and I know there's loads more, but anything, anything that's fermented is going to have loads of good bacteria and therefore you, yeah. And again, it's also good to understand there's, there's tons of different strains of bacteria. Some are bad, some are good, but generally if you're, you know, some of those options are sharing are going to be wonderful for you. Just kind of keep your gut healthy. And, and my, you know, I'm not going to recommend a specific brand of probiotic per se. Uh, but what I would simply say is you don't want to go getting a probiotic at Walmart or target and think that you're going to get a really potent, powerful, um, the, the thing that I would say is, um, talk to your healthcare practitioner, uh, get their recommendation.

Speaker 1: (12:55)
If they don't recommend probiotics, I wouldn't take that advice right? If they tell you that probiotics are no good or anything like that, I wouldn't, uh, I wouldn't trust that type of advice. There's a few things to really, um, keep in mind if you have had any kind of recent infections where you have had, you've been given antibiotics, all right? Those whenever, or if ever you have prescriptions or courses of antibiotics that you have to go through, um, or even terrible gut flus, things like that, where your system has really thrown off those and you don't need to take these indefinitely. All right? Yeah. Obviously if you eat them regularly in your diet, great, but to do a course of probiotics for a month, two months is generally going to be pretty good. Well, and the thing, I think that's a great point that you bring up Dr Ellen and let's kind of talk about that for just a second.

Speaker 1: (13:45)
As is a lot of people have either got issues and or mental issues that stem from originally some sort of a bad bug that they got where they used some sort of a really a potent antibiotic. And the problem with antibiotics is that they're oftentimes very indiscriminant. Meaning they just go in and they killed the good and the bad alike. They just go through when they wipe it out. And so the problem is that number one, uh, that can create, um, you know, it can create inflammation and all sorts of problems on the system. But, but one of the other big problems is that it can lead to opportunistic infection and forward is that the healthy gut flora, your healthy gut bacteria is designed to kind of help keep the gut in check, right? It's kind of this a natural, um, you know, competition that happens there in terms of making sure that the, the bad stuff, uh, stays at bay because the good stuff is out competing it more or less, again, over simplistic way of looking at it.

Speaker 1: (14:44)
But that's really, uh, what happens in terms of making sure we have a normal, uh, healthy, um, healthy, diverse gut biome or, or environment for the, the um, the healthy gut bacteria. Uh, what's the difference for people that are listening here between prebiotics and probiotics because they're not the same thing. No. Prebiotics are kind of like the fuel for probiotics. They kind of help set the stage so the bacteria can thrive. Yeah. Eating foods that have, uh, that are naturally high in fiber are almost always going to be a great, um, prebiotic four probiotics. So think about it this way. Certain foods, and I think, again, this should come across as fairly intuitive, but maybe it isn't. So let's talk about it for just a second. Uh, certain foods sitting in the gut for a prolonged period of, well, I don't want to say a prolonged period, we'll say a period of a time can be very beneficial for them.

Speaker 1: (15:46)
Being in that environment. Other foods sitting in the gut for a long period of time can just create problems. Inflammation, right? So let's, let's talk to a hamburger sitting in the gut. Meat sitting in the gut for a long, for a period of time, let's say, is going to create inflammation. We just know that it's going to right? Versus Broccoli, let's say, you know, there's a cruciferous vegetables, you know, there's, they're, they're fibrous, right? Getting that into your gut. It's going to be your, your body is not going to fully digest all of that. And so there's going to be elements of that that is going to sit in your gut. And again, that's going to act like a prebiotic to where it's going to fuel or provide, uh, you know, food if you will, for the, for the, for the probiotic species to, to thrive, to thrive, right?

Speaker 1: (16:34)
So that's the difference between a prebiotic and a probiotic. Um, so getting kind of back on point here, um, people who are struggling with anxiety, what's the take home here for them that you would say, um, take home honestly is start taking a little closer look at what you're eating because, and again, if you've had, if you know, like, oh, I have had bouts where I've been on antibiotics and really if it's been a long time and you know, it's one of those things that it's not going to hurt you to do it. You might, even if you haven't had one of those things, do, do a spell for a month. Yeah. All right. See how that changes or maybe two months, you know, give it enough time for your body to kind of, to change to build those, um, that biome up in your gut.

Speaker 1: (17:17)
But ultimately it's, you know, let's get your gut healthier because what if, what if you didn't need to take any other nasty or, or more potent medications and you could just, with, uh, you know, improving your diet a little bit, or what if just improving your diet made a significant impact you by reducing your anxiety. Right? Absolutely. A simple thing to do. Uh, the thing that I would also add as well is that you may not necessarily have any gut symptoms. It may just purely be, you know, uh, it's been shocking to me and somewhat surprising how many patients, uh, we found have had gut infections where their only symptom was either depression or anxiety. That was the only symptom, no gut issues at all. Or so they thought, right, and yet your test and you come to find, no, you've, you've actually got a bacterial infection or you've got a parasitic infection or you've got some type of, uh, you know, um, bad bug in your system.

Speaker 1: (18:15)
And so, um, so yeah, that's a, that's a really, really important, um, concept important truth that, uh, that patients need to understand. It's gut health. Can impact so many areas and especially, uh, from these studies here, if you're dealing with anxiety, um, there's a very, very high probability, um, in fact, the thing we can stay from this study 52% more often than not that God is going to be involved. Oh, sure. So restoring that normal healthy gut flora is going to be critical as part of the overall management strategy. So, uh, if you're somebody who's struggling with anxiety, if you know somebody who struggles with anxiety, one simple thing that you can start doing immediately is cleaning up your gut health, uh, watching what you eat, reducing the amount of inflammatory foods, eat, increasing the amount of probiotic foods, rich foods you get, um, prebiotic food, um, that you, that you put in your diet.

Speaker 1: (19:12)
Anything else that you'd add into that? Nope. And just give yourself time. You know, if you're doing the right things, make remember, always given it enough time to actually make the difference. Uh, don't, don't just try it for a few days and be like, oh, it didn't work. Or even a anchor to, yeah, yeah. You know, give it time. Give your body time, but you, you'll be surprised. Um, just about, eh, in fact, I would probably say just about all of any kind of condition you might have would improve by improving your diet. Absolutely. All right, so just keep that in mind, give it time and uh, you know, always it's always best to go the more natural route and just is. Yeah. Awesome. Well I hope this has been valuable for you guys and uh, we will talk to you guys on the next episode. Have a good way.

Speaker 2: (20:00)
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