This is an incredible interview that I had with my dear friend Craig Stewart!
Please feel free to subscribe to his channel and watch more of his content.
This video dives in deep into the microbiome World and the importance of Vitamin D on the immune System and Microbiome.
https://www.youtube.com/@UC8UA5z7oCyI7qNvXZQFrkYg
Vitamin D + Microbiome + Gut Health & Disease Tailored Therapy w High Dose Vitamin D3 & Herbals
We started giving them, you know, 600,000 international units of vitamin D to quickly elevate the vitamin D levels. It’s it’s a correcting dose. Okay? It’s not a toxic dose. Vitamin D is extremely safe. I would like to go ahead and say that to all your listeners. Welcome back to Inspire Conversations. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s probably uh an overdue episode. It’s well overdue. Um, if you want to get some context around a conversation that I’m about to have with a very smart individual, then um, I do encourage you to check out my personal uh, video and journey in the use of vitamin D to treat a cluster headache. It’s been uh, one heck of a road since 2015. Um, if you like this kind of content and the subject of vitamin D and the microbiome are of interest to you, then um, subscribe. There’s going to be more to follow here and I strongly encourage you to subscribe to um uh my guest podcast and I’ll announce his name in uh just a second. Suffice to say um team I’m not a medical expert uh by any means. I just have a keen interest in the subject matter. Uh and so it goes without saying this doesn’t constitute uh medical advice. Uh always talk to your doctor. uh but I hope we’re able to garner and offer some insights um into a topic that I say is incredibly dear and important to me. So um what are we going to be talking about today? Vitamin D, gut health, microbiome uh and overall health. And uh why am I interested in the topic? Uh I’m coming from the perspective of someone that has used a a range of supplements including vitamin D uh to maintain my 25 in a range of 80 to 100 nanogs per milliliter. Um and at that level my cluster headache seems to stay away. It’s been that way since uh 2015 by and large coming up 10 years uh painfree from cluster headache and trying to uh understand how this could possibly be. Uh one of the other questions that really drive my interest in this in the subject is that um roughly about 80% of the people u that suffer cluster headaches that try the vitamin D regimen um find it has a therapeutic benefit. So what about um the 20% or so that don’t see a therapeutic benefit? What’s possibly going on there? And I believe my guest today might be able to offer a a new angle and some insights um into that topic. So uh my interest in it led me to a protocol called cobbra protocol uh and found folks using even higher doses of vitamin D uh to treat autoimmune conditions like multiple scerosis. I found doctors that had published uh books on the subject Dr. Somerville a keen fan uh of his vitamin D advocacy group. And then I stumbled across a presentation. It was called VDR renewal through anti-inflammatory diet. I thought, hold on, this is um this is something I want to check out. Uh and I’m very very glad that I did. It’s a crying shame um that this presentation has been viewed less than a thousand times because it is, as far as I’m concerned, on the bleeding edge um of where this topic converges, vitamin D, microbiome, gut health. Um, and so very few of the podcasts I’ve watched over the past two weeks, and I’ve watched a few, uh, and they are heated. People talking about nutrition, these topics become incredibly heated with back and forth, uh, veganism, carnivorism, um, uh, but none of them are talking about vitamin D in relation to this topic. Uh and so I’m excited to kind of add to the human hive mind uh and and kind of the conglomerate of podcasts that are happening and converging on this this topic to offer maybe a slightly different narrative and a different view uh into it. As with all my podcasts, I’ll say it again, I’m not a medical expert. I’ve got no narrative uh to spin you. I just want to engage in a conversation, an inspired conversation. Uh and and as always, if I can help one just one cluster headache suffer, then as far as I’ve concerned, team, I’ve absolutely done my job. That’s me out of the way. Um my guest today, uh Dr. Eduardo Patrick Baltran Monisterio. He’s a distinguished researcher and practitioner in integrative and functional medicine. uh he currently serves editor and chief of target of medicine the spims uh and so that’s the St. Patrick’s Institute of Medical Science Journal of Medical Sciences. He is the creator of the LGS protocol uh which is a multidisciplinary approach for treating autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndrome uh and cancer as we will discover. Uh he has a specialty in dermatology and internal medicine. Uh he’s also a vitamin D expert and author of two books. And I tell you what, um this one I’m a little bit of a shame cuz the the the pages are well worn. his dog because I put, you know, fall asleep reading it and it goes next to my bed and then Ollie comes along. So, there’s a bit of dog here and um it’s an incredibly good book. And other than that, my guest um Dr. Beltran, he’s just one heck of a genuine, caring, and incredibly smart individual. So, um welcome on the show. I’m so glad to have you here. Well, thank you so much, Craig. It’s a pleasure to be here with you and being able to discuss a little bit of some microbiome, vitamin D, and well, we’re going to be talking about a lot of different things today and I’m really happy that you you were be able to uh actually see my book, read my book. Um I hope a lot of people down in New Zealand uh get the opportunity to be able to check it out as well, you know. Um it it sure has been a journey for me, you know, as a as a physician and also as a researcher. uh try to find answers you know and I think we all you know at some point in our life you know we have doubts and questions that sometimes we don’t seem to find answers you know talking to colleagues and and reading articles and we kind of have to do our own research you know and uh dive in into the literature and do our own you know investigation and and then it comes out to the end we start having this moment where we say eureka you know where a lot of things start to uh kind of fit in and make sense and I guess you could say that my journey started when my son was diagnosed with autism a couple of years ago and I saw all these doctors, all these uh pediatricians and neurologists and psychiatrists and they were all uh you know recommending you know medications and certain therapies and therapists and and nobody was talking about the microbiome. No, no one was actually looking into vitamin D. I mean these were things that I had to kind kind of stumble upon them uh as as it was kind of like you know as I was doing my own journey you know in research here and fortunately I’m a physician so I guess you could say I have a little bit of more of a of an advantage on to what other people I guess you know in in the sense of being able to do research and kind of understand what’s going on and then I stumbled upon the microbiome and also the queena protocol and uh and that sort of kind of was the beginning of my journey you know but initially started off with the queen protocol in Brazil. As you know, I am a physician and then I practice medicine in that country as well. And uh I guess I what I could say is that it was um it was a moment of a lot of you know revelation that was happening to me you know and I saw a lot of patients uh who had what we call single nucleotide polymorphisms uh in relationship to their vitamin D genes. And then I started doing the the research and the getting into the literature and I found that I was mind blown that practically 80% close to 80% of all patients that have an autoimmune disease they have a certain degree of genetic polymorphisms when it comes to their vitamin D genes. So then eventually I ended up you know um learning a little bit more about the microbiome and the more I started to study how it actually functioned and how it was basically like the second brain you know and there’s like an intricate intimate relationship with the with the with a with the brain and also with other organs as well you know and it literally dictates on how our our general health plays around you know plays out. So that’s how everything started off and then I kind of like specialized in this field. I did a lot of research in in regards to microbiome and how the microbiome affects uh the expression of vitamin D receptors like you like you probably uh saw on my video that I have on my YouTube channel uh where I I put out a concept known as vitamin D receptor renewal through anti-inflammatory diet and we we were able to reproduce this you know through immunofllororesence studies you know with a colleague of mine Dr. Fabiano Santos Gimaris from Brazil where we literally uh were able to show that even though if you’re a patient that’s on highdose vitamin D therapy, right, doing the Kimba protocol. Yeah. And uh you are also on kind of an anti-inflammatory diet, I guess you could say, without gluten dairy, right? But you don’t seem to show that uh let me let me say let me say it this way. one of these patients just just did not have the improvement that we were expecting, right? So eventually we said, well, you know what? Let’s see what’s going on in her microbiome. And then we were able to identify the presence of a fungus, you know, known as candida. So we decided to treat her and uh as we treated her, we started to see improvement. But let me go ahead and back up a little bit a little bit over here because this is where the interesting part is. So, we suspected that the microbiome had something to do with the uh vitamin D receptors that were being expressed on those immune cells. So, we decided to do a skin biopsy to be able to determine the amount of uh vitamin D receptors that were being expressed in the epidermis of the skin. And we found that there was a very low expression of vitamin D receptors prior to starting herbals. In this case, we used oregano oil and curcumin as well. But as the patient continued and let me let me back up a little bit that she was on 50,000 international units of vitamin D which was considerable you know and in her and as as you probably know one of the things that we do when we use the cream protocol is that we always compare our vitamin D levels with the parathyroid hormone which is the antagonist hormone right and one of the main goals is to be able to inhibit the PTH hormone and elevate our our vitamin D levels as much as we And when we see that there’s an inhibition of the PTH levels, well, that’s when we can say, you know, okay, we’ve beat we’ve we’ve beaten the the vitamin D resistance, right? So, we eventually did a a a prior biopsy, an initial biopsy, and we saw that there was through immunofllororesence, there was very little expression of vitamin D receptors. So we started you know treating her with these antibiotics antimicrobial herbs such as oregano oil um curcumin also known as turmeric in some some countries right and we started noticing a improvement you know and we know for a fact that oregano oil is a is a very potent you know antibiotic and it kills a lot of things you know not only bacteria but also can kill funguses and it’s pretty darn good for killing candida. So she got much better after about almost 3 months and then we repeated a second biopsy and through immunofllororesence you know uh we were able to see that the skin it was just like you know like the star the sky full of stars you know so many vitamin D receptors were being expressed and that just made so much sense because when we correlated you know her microbiome tests and one of the markers that we could see there was calp protectin and also zulin which are for the persons who are listening you know these are intestinal health markers that we use to be able to determine the degree of leaky gut syndrome um we could see that there was an improvement in these in these intestinal health markers. So things started to start to make sense, you know, and we say, “Whoa, wait a second. So actually treating the microbiome, you know, modulating the microbiome through diet and herbals uh actually helps in reducing the excess amount of inflammation uh that you have in the gut. And this has a potential impact on how our immune cells and let’s not forget 85% of our immune system almost around 85% of our immune system is located in the gut. So there’s a intricate relationship between the microbiome with the immune system. And when we have too much leaky gut, you know, these toxins that are coming in through the intestinal barrier, they interact with our immune cells and they downregulate these vitamin D receptors. So it’s very very important to be able to reduce the intestinal permeability as much as we can to allow our immune cells to be able to once again express our vitamin D receptors. and then hence allow the vitamin D metabolite to be able to bind to that receptor. So this is something that we were able to prove that contributes to also what we know as vitamin D resistance that’s being generated by our gut dispiosis. Um man, just just in that explanation, there’s a there’s a heck of a lot to kind of unpack. um particularly for the person kind of moving into the space with not necessarily a grasp on on some of those concepts. I wonder um if it would be an appropriate time um to share a slide uh with our audience and um it’s perhaps the slide is a really good place to kind of start to say um yeah sure. So, or or maybe if we just back up once one step and say, well, the gastrointestinal um tract uh starting from the mouth and ending at the anus, really our conversation is centered around um the the large intestine, the colon, the gut. Yeah, exactly. So, in that slide that you’re showing right there, uh we can see the the gastrointestinal lining. We have those uh cells known as the interasytes where which have the green coloration that you can see right there. And they’re bound together with what we call tight junctions, right? Uh which are those purple boxes. And and and tight junctions are basically proteins that help bind these cells together to uh make sure that the gut isn’t too permeable. I mean, we have to remember that the the intestines, you know, they have to be semi-permeable because they allow nutrients, you know, vitamins, uh you know, things that are going to are going to be nutritious for our body, right? So, it needs to be able to allow nutrients to get in, right? But now, uh, let’s not forget that, uh, in our in our in our gut microbiome, we have a whole bunch of these bacterias, funguses, viruses, parasites that live there, and they’re living in symbiosis, which basically means that they live in harmony with us, right? And whenever you um for instance consume certain foods uh such as gluten, I guess you could say, you know, uh that’s a big one right there that a lot of people that have issues with gluten, you know. Uh so gluten uh once it gets in contact with these interases, these green cells that you see right there, they they have a a a a lectin by the name of glyodin. Okay? So glyodin once it gets uptaken by these interasytes they upregulate another protein by the name of zulin. All right and zulin goes all the way to these tight junctions that are represented by the oclidins and the claudins and they break that bond. Okay. And when they break that bond as you can see in the figure right beside now the intestine that was initially you know semi-permeable becomes now excessive you know there’s excessive permeability which allows now for more bact bacteras to be able to you know sink in you know sneak in I guess you could say and also um toxins let’s not let us not forget that bacterias have on their surface what we call lipopolysaccharides these are the famous endotoxins And these guys do a lot of damage, you know, if we have a lot of exposure to them. As a matter of fact, you know, that’s one of the things that can even cause a fever, you know, because these are toxins that interact with your immune system and they cause, you know, the production of certain cytoines, right? So, in other words, what’s going on here is that you have this increased permeability which can be initially caused by exposure to certain types of foods. In this case, for instance, gluten, right? Which upregulates zulin and zulin is going to act upon the tight junctions increasing the entrance of these uh bacterias, antigens, endotoxins, lipopolysaccharides and sometimes you can even have a fungus in there and then you can even have the enters of micotoxins. Right? So what we kind of have to remember is is that um your immune system since it’s mainly concentrated in the gut lining right around 80 to 85% of our immune system is there the first line of the of defense of our immune system is always going to be the innate immune system right and here we can talk about for instance of our macrofasages dendritic cells right uh neutrfils and the these are what we call antigen presenting cells. So whenever a a a toxin gets in contact with one of these cells, these cells are going to try to rapidly, you know, try to eliminate this bacteria, the bad bacteria that’s gotten in, they’re going to do a process known as fagocytosis. I mean, these macrofasages do that, right? And then they chunk they break it in little small chunks and they present those pieces that have been digested by these cells like the macrofasages and they present it to your uh acquired immune system which would be represented by the tlymphosytes and belymphosytes right so it’s kind of like saying okay you know what I found this bacteria he was sneaking in I killed him and now I’m going to go ahead and present him to you so you can be able to recognize what type of a pathogen this is and try to make an antibbody later on down the road. Right? So we make antibodies and and the cell that’s responsible for making these antibodies are called our B cells belymphosytes and uh when they mature uh they become what we call uh plasmatic cells right so these plasma cells are the ones that are responsible for making antibodies and let’s say for instance you were consuming gluten right and a little bit of gluten got in And now it’s interacting with your immune system. So now these plas plasmatic cells are making antibodies which are going to bind to the gluten molecule glyodin in this case and they’re going to form what we call a immune complex. It’s kind of like they’re going to get together. They’re going to surround that molecule and they’re going to try to eliminate it by make forming these immune complexes, right? And once these immune complexes are formed, they take them all the way to the liver. And as we know the liver is the laboratory of the human body where we detox everything right and get rid of these bad things right out of circulation. Now the thing is is that our immune system has what we call as immunologic tolerance right and what that means is that we can tolerate a certain amount of leaky gut and certain amount of intestinal permeability but to a certain extent and I and and for the listener who’s watching this take try try to imagine yourself that you’re in a library and you’re trying to read a book in silence right trying to focus trying to understand what’s what’s written in those pages and in the background you have like two little kids that just know, playing around, screaming and making a lot of noise and then it starts to get a little bit annoying. So, your tolerance, your tolerance in being able to, you know, uh, focus is is is slowly getting way, you know, worn down and it gets to a point where you get a little bit upset and then you might get, you know, tell the kids, hey, get out of here, you know. So your immune system has what we call the imunologic tolerance. And when when your immune system gets so overwhelmed with all of these toxins, these endotoxins, exotoxins, lipopolyaccharides, micotoxins, there’s going to be a moment where it’s going to break. And when that breaks, you know, hell gets gets loose, you know, and and what happens is that sometimes our immune system starts making these antibodies and they go haywire. And gluten uh interestingly has a a sequence, an amino acid sequence that sometimes resembles a lot of endogenous proteins, proteins that are found in different tissues in our body. And uh whenever you have this protein that gets in and you produce an antibbody to try to be able to neutralize it, something can happen known as molecular mimicry. And unfortunately, this can happen to a lot of patients who have autoimmune disease. This is the mechanism by which the pathogenesis by how autoimmune diseases take place is you eventually end up making these antibodies where you recognize this gluten and then unfortunately that that gluten has a protein structure that’s similar to a protein that’s also for instance found in the thyroid right so this same antibbody now when it’s circulating around the body and it reaches all the way to the to the thyroid says wait a second you kind of look like gluten you know I think since since you’re kind of similar to him are going to start attacking you and then all of a sudden you start developing what we know as you know Hashimoto’s disease which is a hypothyroidism right or you can have the contrary which is hyperthyroidism Graves disease or if it goes all the way to the skin you can probably cause psoriasis or it can cause you know if it affects the melanocytes which are the cells that give pigmentation to the skin can cause vitiligo you know you start targeting those cells there right and if it goes to the central nervous system well then you can have brain fog you can have Parkinson um you can have Alzheimer’s. You can have a whole bunch of neurodeenerative diseases that can start manifesting and including also uh cluster headaches. You see, so it had there’s an intricate relationship between our gut microbiome with the rest of the body. Everything’s related to the gut microbiome. I always have a saying that the the microbiome is the epicenter of human health, right? And if you want to improve your general health, you got to start with your gut. That’s the that’s the first starting point. Love it. Um a and so um I could just take the advice of Jordan Peterson then uh Dr. Belr I’m interested to understand what some of those bacteria living in my colon might think of that decision and and that’s an element I guess that that is seldom discussed um when these proponents are kind of arguing back and forth. It seems to me um many of the bacteria that live in the colon like to ferment stuff. Um and and what do they like to ferment? When you read the literature um they want to ferment fiber, plant fiber. Um and so I just want to understand what are the benefits of allowing and feeding the bugs um what they’re looking for in terms of that um reciprocal I guess arrangement. Like you could even talk about some of the and I’ve heard you talk about echammansia monsiler. I mean, you know, you you kind of look at what that um critter does. He’s actually eating away um this blue blue stuff that’s separating out the um the interasites from the actual microbiome. So, um man, it sounds like you would want to get rid of him really quick or is that part of just that that beautiful symbiosis uh in terms of a relationship? Yeah, sure. That’s a great question. That’s what actually one of my specialties right there. I’m going to I’m going to try to break it down as nicely possible, make it understandable so people can relate to it. So when we talk about the microbiome, well the first thing the microbiome in general, the word microbiome refers to a very big large group of microorganisms. And here we can we’re talking about bacteria, we’re talking about funguses, we’re talking about parasites, we’re talking about archas, which are very ancient primitive forms of bacteria. And we’re also talking about viruses. So we have all of these things that live in us, right? And if we look at the literature, it says that the human body has approximately around 32 trillion cells, but our microbiome is represented by approximately close to 100 trillion. So we basically have we’re more microbes than human cells in general. You know, that’s kind of mind-blowing. And if you were to put all of these guys on a, you know, on a balance to be able to weight them out, it it would be close to about 2 kilos. So, it’s pretty considerable, you know, and we have to we have to remember that these guys, they’re there for a reason and that we live in in symbiosis like you said, you know, I mean, we we have to uh coexist and we give them the food because when we eat, we’re actually feeding them as well. And as you had mentioned, you know, fiber is one of those things that we give these guys, right? Um, but they also make a lot of important things for us. You know, they help break down certain foods. They absorb new certain nutrients. They help make certain vitamins such as vitamin B12, folate, vitamin K, you know, I mean just to give you an idea, uh lactobacillus for instance, bifidum bacterium, aerobic, these guys make vitamin B9, B9, right? There’s another b another bacteria as for instance that makes propri bacterium for instance and lactobacillus can make vitamin B12 which is known as you know um cobbalamin and then we have bacteroidis fragulus which makes uh vitamin K so I mean these bacteria are actually making vitamins for us which are very important and as we know our body doesn’t make vitamin K we we rely on these guys so um it’s important for us to make sure that these guys are are in check, you know, because sometimes we will find ourselves in in a certain state of deficiency. And if you’re not making, for instance, enough amounts of vitamin K, we know that vitamin K is important for coagulation, for instance, right? And if you don’t have enough vitamin K being made by your gut, well, you’ll have issues with bleeding. And it it goes down that rabbit hole, I guess you could say, if you want to keep on going in there, you know, but but in general, we are living in symbiosis, just like you said. and they’re making stuff for us and we benefit from those things. And one of those things that these bacteras make when they receive for instance uh uh fiber, they ferment fiber and they convert it into what we call small chain fatty acids, right? And these fatty acids the most the one the ones that have been most studied at least in the literature are propionate, you know, acetate, but is like the big one, you know. Um but these bacteras are making all of these you know small chain fatty acids which are very very important for the body. For instance you know propionate is very important for a process known as gluconneogenesis means the making of new sugar right it also protect us protects us against you know insulin resistance. It also regulates appetite you know GLP1 the famous ozen peak that we got over there you know and we can also talk about that with acromancia. It also has certain anti-inflammatory effects. It inhibits the baking of certain cholesterol. So, and it’s it’s also important for instance for gut motility and that’s just propionate. Acetate you know is a very important energy source for bacteras. And there’s a thing a phenomenon by the what by by which we call cross-feeding which means some bacteria receive the fiber and they make acetate. Right? In this case this we’re talking about a bacteria by the name of bifidum bacterium. A lot of people have probably taken bifidum bacteria as a probiotic. You know, it’s a very very common probiotic. So, so, so bifidum bacteria consumes acetate and it feed it consumes fiber, excuse me, and it converts it into acetate, right? And then acetate is going to feed other bacterias to be able to make butyrate. So, this is what we call cross-feeding, right? And interestingly, if you are one of those individuals who likes to, you know, drink a little bit of vinegar, you know, vinegar is, you know, acetic acid. Once it hits the stomach, the hydrochloric acid of the stomach converts that into acetate. And acetate, you know, is one of those things that’s going to be able to feed your good bacteria. So, that’s kind of interesting, you know, and that’s why there’s certain benefits when you consume a little bit of vinegar, you know, in your in the morning. Let’s say if you wake up early in the morning, have like a little spoon of vinegar. Uh I know not everybody’s going to do that. I don’t do that on daily basis. My wife does that. Yeah. But it’s uh it’s one of those things that keeps you in check. You know, it keeps your microbiome in check. And these bacterias, they’re always intercommunicating with themselves. So they make certain metabolites, certain small chain fatty acids which are going to be able to feed other bacteria. And here’s where butyrate comes in, you know, which is like the one one of the most important, you know, small chain fatty acids. Butyrate supports the colonoscytes, which are the bacteria that live, excuse me, the cells that live in our large intestine, right? The interocytes are the cells that are found, for instance, in our small intestine. And the colonosytes are the cells that are found in our large intestine, right? And so whenever there’s a cell that might be a little bit, you know, damaged, what butyrate goes over, it tells the cell, hey, die. You know, we want you to die and we want a new cell to come out, you know, to be able to rep to replace the dead one, right? So it’s always helping the gut lining, the intestinal lining to be able to replenish those cells that are wounded, perhaps cells that perhaps might kind of be mutating, you know, becoming like a cancer cell. So butyrate is very important for being able to protect us you know from a process uh known as cancer you know developing cancer also butyrate downregulates a pro-inflammatory uh pathway by the way by the name of NFCappa B you know and that’s a p it’s a shared common pathway with uh lipopolysaccharides which are endotoxins that are found in in in from bacteria right and also it’s a very potent immune immune regulator, a immune modulator, you know, it helps regulate the production of T-reg cells, you know, T- regulatory cells, interlucan 10, which are anti-inflammatory. So, believe it or not, your small chain fatty acids that are made by your gut bacteria, they’re helping to, you know, train your immune system to certain extent. Kind of like, you know, telling these guys, hey, you know what? you’re supposed to be able to know when to recognize a bad bacteria and when you’re not supposed to overreact, right? And it also allows your immune system to kind of like stay in this anti-inflammatory state. And then uh like I said, it also has a neuroprotective um uh benefit as well. But what what I what I like people to understand is that in order for these good bacterias and don’t get me wrong, we also have a lot of bad bacterias in our intestines. Okay? And and they’re and they’re there, you know, they they live coexist as well and but in harmony, right? And the thing is is that you you always have to try to make sure that everything is in balance and you don’t have an overgrowth of one thing and or a lacking of another thing, right? And and when that and un unfortunately, you know, the type of diet that we have, I mean, we consume a lot of sugars, refined carbohydrates. I mean, I mean, I could go on talking about, you know, the western diet. I mean, there’s nothing good to talk about it actually, you know, but unless if you’re going to talk a little bit about, you know, in a Mediterranean diet where you actually start seeing that there it’s the one of the best diets that you have out there, right? Or, you know, a lectin-free diet with no gluten, no dairy. Well, I mean that’s that’s another topic to talk about. But what’s important to understand that is that diet has a humongous impact on how these good bacteras u start to replicate and start making all of these small chain fatty acids such as propionate such as acetate and such as butyrate. And whenever we take an antibiotic for instance, right? And let’s say we went to the doctor, we had like strep throat and or we have acne, you know, there’s a lot of teenagers that go to the doctor because they have acne on their face. And one of the things that a dermatologist would do is prescribe an antibiotic such as, you know, minycline or tetracycline. And we know that you have to take this for a long extended period of time to be able to control the the acne, right? Um, but the problem is is that you can be taking these antibiotics and they can actually improve the acne that you have in your skin, but they’re killing off the good bacteria. And when you take out these good guys, now all of a sudden the bad bacteria start to overgrow, right? And and believe me, all teenagers, at least if I know, they eat everything. You know, they love to consume carbohydrates. They’re going to McDonald’s. They’re going to Wendy’s. They’re going to be eating, okay, pizza and and all these things and Coke and Coca-Cola, Sprite, whatever. So, they’re putting masses of massive loads of sugar into their diet. And what these bacteria love is sugar. I mean, they thrive on sugar, right? And and they can be and they can be in the form of sugar. They can be in the form of carbohydrates, processed carbohydrates, and they start growing. So all of a sudden now the antibiotic that was used to be able to treat the acne killed off the good bacteria and now allows for the bad bacteria to start overgrowing. And then you can actually develop what we call disbiosis which basically means you know the imbalance you know of our gut microbiome where there’s a more prevalence a higher prevalence or overgrowth of bad bacteria over good bacteria. And this ends up causing a lot of localized inflammation in the gut. And eventually, you know, there’s going to get to a point where you’re going to start increasing the permeability of the gut lining. And there’s going to be more interaction of your immune system with the microbiome and perhaps even certain proteins, bad digestive particles that coming from your diet which shouldn’t be interacting with your immune system in the first place. And there’s going to be a moment where your immune tolerance is going to get overwhelmed and eventually once that immune tolerance is overwhelmed you might develop you know molecular mimicry and end up developing a autoimmune disease. Right? Going back to what we would mentioned before right so there’s a lot of things that happen in our microbiome and and what we have to understand is that 90% of our microbiome is found in our large intestine. 10% is found in the small intestine but 90% is found in the large intestine and if we look at the large intestine where that 90% is found 90% of that 90% is represented by two bacterial filas. So when we look at at bacteras they’re classified according to their their fila then eventually there’s you the the kingdom the fila until we reach to the species right. So there’s a classification uh of families and the biggest main filer that we have here is one of them that you just mentioned which is firmicutes and the other one which is bacteria. So these guys represent 90% of the 100% okay of the microbiome. But then we have other groups as well that are very important you know and these guys also have you know a very important role you know in in in our microbiome. And here we can mention for instance the actinoacteria where we can mention bifidobacteria we can also mention proteobacteria and where we have all the bad guys you know that’s like going if you if try to imagine that you have the microbiome and you have different neighborhoods you have the very nice elite you know the good guys are in very nice places to go visit but then you have you know the the the the neighborhoods where nobody wants to go around because the high violence the bad guys are there you know So, those are the protoacteria, you know, we won’t be messing around with them very much, you know, but you’ll always but you’ll it sounds to me like you’ll always have um those bad neighborhoods in a city, for example. Of course. Of course. The same with the microbiome. So, so am I right in understanding then like a a microbiome or a gut that’s in um and I think the term is ubiiosis. So, um there’s balance to it uh as a as a gut where and you could talk a little bit more about the mucosal guardian or that mucin because there’s a relationship there between short- chain fatty acids and mucin and kind of I mean it looks to me like you need to swim through the mucin before you can have a wrestle match with this with the colonocite to be able to get through anyway. So, um that’s right. So, yeah. So we have Exactly. Yes. Yes, Craig, you’re 100% correct. We have this mucous layer known as the mucin layer that separates our microbiome from interacting directly with our immune cells, right? And this mucin layer is made thanks to the production of these small chain fatty acids and of course you know certain vitamins and minerals. And one of the vitamins obviously is vitamin D. Vitamin D promotes also the the production of uh mucin. And you got you kind kind of have to think about it this way. You know, this is how I always explain it to my patients is that I want you let me go ahead and show you. For instance, I’m showing here my this is the charger that I have for my iPhone, right? And I can actually touch it, you know, and it’s connected to the to the wall. I’m not getting electrocuted or anything. It’s because it’s got a a protection outside of it. It has a specific barrier that isolates me for not being electrocuted. Right? So the mucus membrane that we have out there in our gut lining known as the mucin layer separates and protects us, you know, for not having that direct interaction between the microbiome with your immune system. And what feeds off, you know, these cells that make the mucin layer, they’re called the goblet cells. These cells are also found in our gut. And these goblet cells they make mucin right and it’s thanks to the presence of these small chain fatty acids right now when you start losing these good bacteria then what happens is that if you don’t make enough small chain fatty acids right and if you have certain vitamin deficiencies and certain minerals deficiencies such as zinc vitamin D you name it then you start losing this mucous membrane this mucin layer and it starts to thin out and what we really wanted when We really want to have a nice thick mucin layer because the the thicker it is, the less interaction you’re going to be having between your microbiome with the immune system. But what happens is that our diet changes. You know, we might be exposed to antibiotics. We might be exposed to many different things that might affect our microbiome diversity. So, we start producing less small chain fatty acids and then we start getting this thinning out of this mucin layer, right? And then when there’s very little mucin and here’s where we’re going to talk about acromancia because acromancia has a very important role in the recycling of the mucin layer. Okay, this is a bacteria that that’s there to be able to recycle and clean up that mucin. Okay, you kind of have to figure you have to imagine like this is the guy that’s always cleaning up the mess. All right, by eating up the mucin, right? So if you have, you know, this mucus that’s there and it’s not being replenished and it’s not being I mean recycled, you start building up a lot of a lot of, you know, garbage on it, right? And then these things, you know, they start to build up and I guess like the environment doesn’t get very healthy at all. So acromancia has the the main role of being able to eat up and recycle that mucus, right? making new mucus as well because it also promotes the ma the the production of certain uh small chain fatty acids to be able to replenish that mucous layer. So it has these two functions right one is it participates in the cleaning and the other is in the remaking right now it’s interesting to say something here because as we age one of the things that I generally see when I do a lot of microbiome testing is that a lot of individuals don’t have acromancy in their gut okay and that might be to many different factors but that tells me that your mucin layer is compromised okay or you might actually have an overgrowth of acrobsia and that has also been described in medical literature and that’s a sign of inflammation. Why? Because the gut also tries to make mucin on its own whenever there’s inflammation. I I kind of imagine this whenever you get a cold, right? Let’s say you got a viral infection, a respiratory tract infection. Why is it that we make mucus? Why is it that we start making all this mucus? Why is it that we start, you know, all we have I mean our our our noses get all full of snot and stuff, you know, it’s because we’re making all this mucus to be able to eradicate eliminate, you know, the infection, right? So whenever you make too much mucus, right, then you’re overfeeding acromancia and acromancia starts to build up. So that’s another reason why acromancia can overload, can overgrow in the microbiome. So that’s kind of interesting, right? So our microbiome, as you can see, you know, it’s very very uh it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a universe, you know, when you start looking at it, you know, it’s a very complex ecosystem. um while you’re while you’re talking um uh someone had messaged me within the cluster community and and they um had taken a GI map and they were following a real strict carnivore diet. So no sugar, dairy, gluten, lectins, none of that. In fact um nothing apart from minced beef or you know um just yeah animal protein um and they had seen significant improvement in a number of conditions in their health. Um however the GI map the GI map did show that they had a overgrowth of of C diff um as well as a a heightened uh marker for for intestinal permeability zulin. Um so uh I I guess um just with that in mind um why do people see some improvement on the carnivore diet? Because now I’m perplexed to say um how could it even work when um these bugs that we’ve just talked about want the fiber to be able to ferment it, produce the short- chain fatty acids that then encourage the production of the mucin that provides the barrier that prevents kind of that first line of defense um before there’s an interaction with the microbiome, the the food waste, the toxins, the endotoxins, microto all of that stuff. um that’s going to lead to the degradation of the tight junction. Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. There’s a very good explanation to that. There’s a great explanation why people go carnivore, you know, and you Yes, definitely. You see significant improvement, you know, and people start saying, “Wow, you know, my psoriasis went away, you know, my vitiligo improved, you know, my multiple sclerosis got got better.” And there’s multiple reasons for that. You know, it’s not so simple, but I’m going to go ahead and break it down. Okay. So, what happens is this. Whenever you consume certain plant-based diets, right? You’re consuming a lot of things that have been exposed to herbicides, insecticides, you know, I mean, glyphosate, for instance, you know, is oh my god, you know, it’s an antibiotic to begin with. It has a patent of an antibiotic. Back in 1996, her Monsanto when it launched, you know, glyphosate, it had a patent of an antibiotic, you know. So imagine you’re actually putting a herbicide on all of these crops and we know that it’s also ankcoenic so it can actually promote cancer, right? And it also destroys your tight junctions by the way. So and it’s also an antibiotic that’s going to kill your good bacteria. So there’s a lot of damage that’s being done just by the fact that you’re consuming food that’s been, you know, irrigated, you know, with glyphosate. Okay. And I don’t know how it is in your country, but I mean in South America and the United States, I mean, glyphosate is all over. I know that certain eur some certain European countries, it’s prohibited. They don’t allow glyphosate, right? And that’s that’s good, you know. I think it should be that way, you know. Um, but so so so there so just the fact that you’re consuming foods that have herbicides is a no good. Okay. It’s it’s terrible. Right now, now let’s go into the lectins. Let’s talk about the lectins. Thing is is that a lot of these plants, you know, I mean, they’ve been around long for a long long time, you know, even before humans actually ever existed. When God created the world, he made the trees and the vegetables and all these things first before we were actually walking around, you know, it’s in the it’s in Genesis, you know, just look it up. So, these guys have been long before us, okay? And they’ve developed, you know, many different lectins to be able to protect themselves, to defend themselves, right? So if an animal, they can’t run away, right? A plant. Exactly. They can’t run away. So they need to be able to defend themselves somehow, right? And that’s why they develop toxins, you know, and these toxins are are the know the famous lectins, right? And we consume these lectins on a daily basis, you know, and then there’s going to get to a point where you start having dispiosis like claustrdium defacil or H pylori or sodomonas or morganella and you start getting all these bad bugs because you were exposed to all these things prior in your life and perhaps even antibiotics. So you need to ask those questions to your to the patient. Hey, have you taken antibiotics? When was the last time you took them? Oh yes, I did had I had loads of issues with you know my tonsils all the time. I had to have my tonsils taken out because they were always getting infected and I always had to take you know you know penicellin to be able to to treat my tonsils my my strep throat and then you say okay and what about vitamin D you know how are your levels of vitamin D how was your immune system that whenever I hear a person that’s always having recurrent you know respiratory tract infections sinocitis you know uh amigdalitis or tonsillitis you know uh upper respiratory tract infections you know pneumonia I immediately start relating that to immune system a weak immune system right and perhaps maybe something related with vitamin D but don’t forget we are always exposed right to antibiotics at one point in life right and unfortunately these antibiotics can have a very large toll on our microbiome and as I was saying a little bit earlier for this the example that I gave you about you know acne you can you can get the acne you know cured and then 10 years down the road you develop Crohn’s disease and then you’re wondering why you see it’s because 10 years ago you took so many antibiotics that you allowed for claustrdium dysfilishi right to be able to overgrow and now it starts causing all this inflammation in your intestines and you you under the presence of a vitamin D a low vitamin D state right and you have a certain epigenetic risk to certain dise diseases, you set the stage for the disease to show and manifest. Now, when you go on a carnivore diet, what are you doing? You’re eliminating these lectins. You’re taking a while. You’re taking out the glyphosate. You’re taking out the herbicides. You’re taking out anything that can potentially cause food sensitivity or increase permeability, right? And then you’re just left with fat and protein. Now these bacteria that we have in our gut, they know what to do with carbohydrates. They love carbohydrates. They specialize in carbohydrates, right? They ferment carbohydrates. They they use it as a fuel source. So whenever you put in sugar or a carb, they’re they’re, you know, they’re dancing and they’re partying. They’re doing everything they want. But the moment you put in, you know, fat, they look at it. It’s like, what the heck is this? I don’t know what this is. You know, what are we going to do with this? Everybody’s like looking at each other. what’s this? And they don’t do anything with fat. I I’m talking about healthy fats, obviously, right? And then when they look at protein, they kind of look at it, well, I guess I know what I can do with it, but they’re not very efficient with protein and breaking down protein. They can use protein, but not as well as carbohydrates. So this is why when you go on a carnivore diet, you start improving your gut health to a point where symptoms get better. But if you do a GI map and then you discover, oh wait a second, you actually have claustrdium deficil. You actually have this other you’re actually revealing what was there in the first place. And then that’s when you go in with the herbals to be able to eradicate those infections. M and then that’s when you improve everything. See, and people are not aware of these things. Yes. It kind of segus us into I guess our um the next segment to say it seems to me it was 2,000 years ago or so that Hypocrates had said it all begins in the gut. But now we’re kind of coming full circle with the slide with with the kind of the slide in front of us to say okay um dispiosis results in a anu im a mucin layer that’s degraded. Um there’s interaction with the contents of the gut with the lining um and a degradation of the tight junctions allowing those endotoxins, micotoxins, exotoxins um to then start entering and have a tiffy if you will with the immune system. and probably why um you say 85% of the immune systems on the other side of that wall ready to go bang hello. Um that’s right. So talk to me about how the brain gets involved in all of this uh in terms of you know I’ve heard terms like the gut brain immune access. Oh yeah. Well the brain you know and the gut they have this huge connections. I mean, oh my goodness, if you were to to look look at how the immune system participates directly with no, excuse me, your gut your gut microbiome participates directly with your with the central nervous system and the entic nervous system. It’s it’s incredible because the human brain has approximately 86 billion neurons, right? That’s how many neurons we have. And the gut has approximately I mean the the the the the interic nervous system has approximately 50 million neurons. So it’s a very high concentration of neurons there and we also have the vagus nerve. So we have two two lines of uh interconnection between the gut and the brain. Okay. And 90% of all those apherent uh pathways go from the gut to the brain. So there’s 95% of all those uh connections are coming from the gut to the brain and 10% are coming from the brain to the gut. So that’s kind of impressive you know so this means the gut is telling our brain a lot and the brain says okay you know I’ll send I’ll send in you know an impulse to be able to produce more hydrochloric acid. I’ll send an impulse to increase motility. I’ll I mean they’re con constantly interacting, right? And we’ve kind of forget that that that the gastrointestinal tract is extremely innervated, you know, and the vagus nerve is is a so here’s the thing we have to kind of understand back up a little bit because when we look at the central when we look at the at the nervous system, right, we have what we call the central nervous system and we also have the peripheral nervous system, right? The central nervous system is represented by the cranial nerves. Okay, these are nerves that are coming out of the brain and they’re going to the eye bulb, to the lung, to the to the stomach, to the I mean to different parts of the of the of our of our b of our body, right? Okay. But then we have the peripheral nervous system, okay, which are coming out from the spinal cord and these are going to our muscles. We have motor nerves. We have sensory nerves. And part of that is also going to our gut, our intestines, our kidneys, our our liver, you know, our bladder. I mean these nerves form part of the peripheral nervous system and the entic nervous system is part of that. Okay. So we have two nervous systems that are communicating with the brain. One is the vagus nerve which is the 10th cranial nerve and the entic nervous system. Okay. And when we look at the pathways, the amount of neurons that are being shared, 90% of those neurons are ascending neurons, which means they go from the gut to the brain, and 10% are descending, which comes from the brain to the gut. So, a lot of messaging comes from the gut and goes to the brain. That’s what I’m trying to say. You see, and we’re talking about around 15 500 million neurons here, right? That’s a lot. But but as I was saying you know a little bit earlier you know the the the gut itself whenever you have this disbiosis whenever you are consuming certain foods that are causing a lot of inflammation right and you start producing you stop you stop producing you know small chain fatty acids in adequate amounts and then all of a sudden you start making a lot of these uh you know uh inflammatory markers a lot of these endotoxins start leaking in and they start interacting ing with what we call uh your immune system, right? And one of the things that we notice is that these endotoxins specifically, you know, I like to talk about the lipo the lipopolysaccharides because these guys, oh boy, they do a lot of damage in our body. Okay? Once they get leaking in, once they start getting in and interacting with your immune system, they like I said, they interact initially with your antigen presenting cell as you can see in the slide right there, right? and they bind to what we call toll-like receptors right and also CD-15 receptors and also they inhibit the vitamin D receptor expression so in other words they upregulate production of certain interlucans and cytoines you know and these interlucans that we make one of them is interlucan one interlucan 6 these two interlucans by the way when we make massive amounts of loads of them they cause fever all right so interlucan one interlucan 6 when it gets to the hypothalamus it causes shivers you know it causes fever increases your heart rate increases blood flow and the reason why is is because we want to quickly you know make those neutrfils make their way where the sight of the infection is and I want to put little things in perspective here I want you to imagine the patient who has Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis also which enters within the realm of IBS you know irritable bowel syndrome right so let’s say we have a patient patient that has clustrdium deficil, right? And he has an overgrowth of clustrum deficil. And if you’re a patient who has Crohn’s disease, you start developing these ulcers in your large intestine. And it get it can actually get to a point where these ulcers are so massive they they start to bleed. And if you do a GI map or if you look at the feces, you’ll actually see the presence of blood. it gets and and in some instances you actually end up going to the emergency room and they have to do a a hemicollectomy take a chunk out of your intestines because it’s so way I mean it’s gone so far in you know that they can’t they can’t you know uh recuperate that tissue so they have to kind of like cut it out and join it back together you know it’s that bad you know and I’ve had patients who had Crohn’s disease where they had they lost like 2 meters of their intestines you know because they were you know with the excessive amounts of of dispiosis and they were just have making so many so many inflammatory markers that it made their immune system go haywire and the first line of defense are the neutrfils. So when neutrfils get to the gut lining, right, one of the things that these guys do is which is something very interesting is that they they they produce a protein known as calprotectin. Okay? And calprotectin is a protein that sequesters manganese, right? And also um zinc. So when it sequesters these two minerals, it doesn’t allow for these bacteria to continue to proliferate to be continue to grow. It kind of is like, you know, you’re taking away the food resource that they require in order for them to be able to continue to grow. So it kind of your body’s trying to keep, you know, the infection, you know, uh uh to a certain degree where it doesn’t continue to to progress. But but like I said, we all have a certain point where we’re going to end if it’s like muscle. You’re you’re you’re arm wrestling, you know, with these guys. And then there’s going to point you get tired and then all of a sudden you lose. And but but like I said, you know, in the gut we also have what we call the tight junctions. And these tight junctions once they get compromised now these lipopolyaccharides make their way into the immune system. They make their way into the blood circulatory system and they get all the way to the brain. And in the brain we have what we call the bloodb brain barrier, right? Which also has tight junctions just like in the gut. And now if these lipopolyaccharides are arriving to the gut or excuse me are arriving to the brain they start affecting those tight junctions that you have you know within the blood vessels right which are known as endothelial cells and these tight junctions break up and now you start having this entrance of these lipopolyaccharides into the central nervous system into the brain and obviously you know there was a study that was done in the past where they were trying to look at the brain of autistic children for instance you know And I mentioned this in my book where they were doing this study trying to see what was going on in the brain of these autistic children. The pathologist was doing this and he was able to determine that there were the presence of certain immune cells that shouldn’t be there and they were making these immune clusters of of of immune cells of neutrfils inflammatory uh antigen presenting cells that were found in the brain of autistic children. And what does this mean? It means that autism in essence is a neuroinflammatory condition caused by leaky brain and if you have leaky brain syndrome you also have leaky gut syndrome. Right. So you you then come back to the slide and say exactly the the originator. Um uh and so this is a second version of that same slide we were kind of just looking at um to save. So that’s that’s another beautiful slide right there, you know, because I mean these lipopolysaccharides, they do a lot of things, right? One of the things that they do is that your body is always trying to, you know, maintain everything, you know, under control, okay? And your liver is working in favor. It’s trying to do the job it’s supposed to be doing, which is, you know, eliminate these toxins, right? Okay. So whenever you have an increase of lipopolyaccharides, your liver starts making what we call lipoproteins. Okay. And here we can mention highdensity lipids, low density lipids, very low density lipids, LDL, HDL, right? VLDLDL. And these guys go and they bind to these endotoxins, these lipopolysaccharides. And we also make another protein known as the lipoprotein lipopolyaccharide binding protein also known as LPB right and it binds and they make this complex to be able to eliminate that toxin via the apatic route. So let’s say if we have leaky gut and these toxins are making their way in. Your liver is going to say, “Oh, wait a second. We have a lot of toxins. We need to do a lot of cleansing here. We need to be able to clean out these endotoxmia. You know, we need to reduce the excess amount of lipopolyaccharides.” So it starts making more of these lipoproteins, HDL, LDL, VLDL. But it gets to a point for instance this is something that I used to see in my so my my patients that I that I saw in the intensive care unit because before I got into dermatology I was I was an internist. I also have a sub specialty in in internal in intensive care unit uh treatment of patients and I saw a lot of septic patients you know and one of the things that I would always see is that their lipid profile would always be very altered you know and that that got me going you know that I well why is it that these lipids are getting elevated you know why do these patients have a altered lipid profile and the reason why is because your your liver is you know trying to save you by trying to eliminate the excess amount of lipopolyaccharides that are circulating in the body. And don’t forget these lipopolyaccharides, they cause vasoddilation. They cause, you know, in a decrease in the blood pressure. This is one of the characteristics of the patient that’s in the intensive care unit. They have low blood pressure. And we need to be giving them, you know, vasopressors, you know, to be able to increase their blood pressure because when you have sepsis, you have so many of these bacteras in the blood that are loading the system with lipopolyaccharides, increasing the vasoddilation, increasing permeability, and now you start having this extraization of fluid into the tissues and you start getting edema right in the lower extremities. And this can eventually lead to you know multi-cystemm organ failure and that’s one of the you know things that we see in patients that are in the intensive care unit. So there’s a whole pathophysiology, you know, if you if you don’t take care of yourself, you know, you don’t have the infection under control, all of these things start to play out and the liver plays part of that process there, you know. So your immune system is trying to defend you, your liver is trying to detox you, you know, and if you don’t have vitamin D levels in adequate amounts, well, you’re going to be in trouble because um your immune system is going to go haywire. It’s not going to be able to defend you correctly. how it’s supposed to right so that’s what the slide there is trying to show you if I can I can kind of re recap real quick so here we can see the lipopolyaccharide it’s binding to the antigen presenting cell it produces all of these interlucans like interlucan one interlucan 6 tumor necrotic factor alpha right causes hypo it goes to the hypothalamus causes fever increases your heart rate as teicardia has a compensatory effect increases blood flow taking these neutrfils to the sight of the infection, but at the same time you also cause vasoddilation, right? Because you’re producing a lot of nitric oxide. And then this increases the permeability of the blood vessels. And when you have an increase of the permeability of the blood vessels, now you don’t only just have hypotension, but you have leaking of of plasma into the interstitial fluid. that can cause too uh you know renal failure, lung failure, it can cause you know edema and eventually you end up having which is the multi-systemm organ failure and this is known as septasemia septic shock right so lipopsaccharides can be very damaging if you don’t have them under control right but I think I don’t know what if you want to show the next slide perhaps maybe that’s a little bit what we were talking about at the beginning we’re talking about how lipopolysaccharides you know they have this ain for binding to specific receptors such as the tolike receptors and when they bind to this receptor um they upregulate a pathway where they make a lot of NFCappa B and this pro-inflammatory molecule NFCappa B increases interlucan one beta and tumor necrotic factor alpha which in other words decreases transcription inhibits transcription inhibits translation and there is no expression expression of the vitamin D receptor, right? So, if you don’t have expression now of these vitamin D receptors and those immune cells, so what’s going to happen with vitamin D? It’s not going to be able to bind to it. It’s not going to be able to act at that vitamin D receptor to form what we know as the vitamin D receptor complex, right? And we know but when we form these vitamin D receptor complex we upregulate transcription. We upregulate translation. We make enzymes. We make proteins. We do what the body was meant to do. Right? Normal physiology. But now these bacteria, these endotoxins or micotoxins can do the same thing. You know, they’re putting your immune system to a halt where they’re taking over. You see? And that that’s not a good thing because besides this, you know, there’s also another thing that wasn’t that’s going to be described in my my my fifth edition, my next book that that’s coming out which has been a little bit it’s been revised that that also lipopolysaccharides, they inhibit the expression of certain genes that are part of the conversion of vitamin D. For instance, we know that vitamin D when we expose ourselves to the sun, right? uh we make cholealiferol you know ultraviolet B- rays touch our skin and then there’s a cholesterol known as 7D hydro cholesterol that transforms that into choliferol right which is the vitamin D that you buy at the supermarket or at the pharmacy where you you’re able to buy it right and then this vitamin D is transported all the way to the liver and in our liver we have an enzyme that’s upregulated by a gene known as CYP2R1 and this enzyme is known as 25 hydro hydroxilase which converts choleic calciferol into calcifidile or also known as 25 hydro hydroxy vitamin D right which is basically our reservoir of vitamin D in our body and has a halflife of approximately two to three weeks right it’s kind of like our storage okay it’s our reserve of vitamin D then this vitamin D metabolite calcifile goes down to the kidneys and I’m bear in mind that I’m only explaining just the endocrine pathway because there are many other pathways. Okay, so this guy goes all the way to kidneys and if your kidneys are working just fine, right? They they have an enzyme over there known as 125 hydroxilates which converts calcifidile into the actual hormone known as calcitri. Now calcitriel has a halflife of only 2 to four hours and that’s it. So it’s a very short halflife. Qualiferol, the one that’s made in our skin, has a half life of 24 hours. Calcifidil has a halflife of three weeks, two to three weeks. And calcitrol has a halflife of 2 to four hours, depending on the literature that you’re looking at. So, in order for us to be able to make vitamin D, we need to be exposing oursel on a daily basis to the sun or taking vitamin D on a daily basis. Why is because if we don’t do that and I know people that take like high load dos of vitamin D once a month, you know, that’s not pretty good actually. There have been studies that that that link that with, you know, osteoporosis. You know, this is why you need to be taking it constantly and you need certain co-actors to keep it nice and at good levels. But what I’m trying to get at is this. The enzymes that participate in the conversion of vitamin D from one metabolite to the other are affected when you have excess amount of lipopolyaccharides circulating in the body because they can go to these genes and they tell them hey turn off you know or it makes the gene not work effectively and that compromises your conversion of vitamin D. So in other words, it can lead to vitamin D deficiency. And the way how this is done is through the NFCappa B pathway that I just discussed right over here. So that’s mindblowing right there, you know, all these infections, chronic infections, right? Because I look at it as that, you know, and we we have to always remember whenever I see a patient that has an autoimmune disease, I’m thinking infection in at the back of my mind, you know, there’s a bug out there that’s causing this. There’s disbiosis in the intestine and there’s inflammation in the intestine and this patient has his immune system compromised. that’s so so not enough to put them in the intensive care unit um but but enough that there is a low grade constant um state of inflammation and I guess I I mean if we start talking about migraine and cluster headache um there was a paper and there’s not a lot of research in the space that I was able to find looking at some of those markers like LPS uh in relation to um migraine it seems has kind of got the spotlight because it’s more prevalent to say Um there’s a paper saying lipopolyaccharide levels are elevated in the systemic circulation in chronic migraine patients with overuse headache evidence of leaky gut and inflammation. And so um my question um to you then is um if we are talking about dispiosis the leakage of endotoxins exotoxin micotoxins into circulation then interacting with the immune system and upregulating the NFCAB transcription factor which results in the production expression of pro-inflammatory cytoines um that are not limited to the gut but travel in systemic circulation um may be setting the stage then for hypothalamic dysfunction because if you look at imaging imaging studies with cluster headache patients the hypothalamus is all lit up and something leads to that kind of sensitization to the point where um the sufferer is more prone to cluster headache and and then my kind of follow-up question to that to say um in terms of and you mentioned a bolus and a loading dose so the cluster headaches sufferer that is suffering today that stumbles across vitamin D regimen.com and says, “Okay, I’m going to try um this approach is recommended is recommended to take a bowl dose of 600,000 international units.” That’s a lot of vitamin D at one time. Uh and then to drop down to 10,000 international units um to maintain serum uh in that kind of 80 to 100 nanog per milliliter range. And so um what are we kind of I mean my suspicion particularly on the back of my experience of I said I have been painfree by and large 10 years but it wasn’t until 2022 where um I came into cluster headache cycle and bang I’ve got a tax and I tell you uh Dr. Belro and I called um uh Pete Bachelor, the retired uh neuron 80year-old fighter pilot that came up with the vitamin D regimen for cluster. And I said, Pete, Pete, my vitamin D level was 99.3 nanogs per milliliter. Uh and I’ve just had a cluster headache attack. They’re back. What do I do? The phone goes the phone goes quiet and he says to me, “Take 600,000 international units of vitamin D.” I I said Pete um your hearing must be going in your old age my my level is already 100 NOGS per milliliter and the attacks and even more calm he says take 1 million international units of vitamin D3 and at that point I decided to and I started loading at 100,000 international units per day and on day number four the cluster headache went back into remission and so um that’s right in terms of vitamin D resistance and the reasons for vitamin D resistance. What I’m taking away from this is that um LPS may have and and the pathway that it induces may have quite the bearing on the situation. Would that kind of be fair? Well, it’s a very complex answer that I’m going to give you right now, but I’m going to give you the full full answer, okay? Because I think your viewers deserve that. Okay? And it’s it’s this is really interesting because I mean we kind of have to remember where the high loading dose came from. The history of where that came from, you know, because this goes all the way back, you know, to when we had children that had ricketetts, right? So we had children, you know, back in the 1800s, late 1800s, they were diagnosed with ricketetts and we started giving them, you know, 600,000 international units of vitamin D to quickly elevate the vitamin D levels. It’s it’s a correcting dose, okay? It’s not a toxic dose. Vitamin D is extremely safe. I would like to go ahead and say that to all your listeners. It’s very very rare to cause toxicity with vitamin D, even at very high doses, because I’ve seen over 3,500 patients so far, and I’ve had no cases of toxicity. And if I did see a little bit of an elevation to vitamin D, the only excuse me to calcium levels because that’s what defines toxicity is having hypercalcemia, it’s just a matter of just reducing the dose and then monitoring the patient and it should be fixed in in about a matter of three days. But going back to what I was saying, so this whole high loading dose that we give to our patients, the intention is to be able to increase vitamin D to a certain level very quickly in a matter of about 2 to three days. Right now, the thing is is that the reasons why we have vitamin D resistance, it can be attributed to many different things. It can be obesity. You know, we know that people that are obese, they have higher requirements of vitamin D. It might be caused by medications. If you’re taking an immune, for instance, a cortical steroid, right? Like cortic like predinazone, right? Or hydrocortisone or you’ve been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and your rheatologist is prescribing a steroid for you. We know that steroids upregulate an enzyme known as 24 hydroxilase, which eventually ends up degrading calcitrol. So this decreases your calcetrol levels in the blood. Right? Then we have medications. People who have epilepsy, if they’re taking carbomasene, carbomasopene inhibits CYP2R1. So in other words, you’re not going to be converting vitamin D and it’s going to cause vitamin D deficiency. I mean, I could go on with far with drugs that that that alter and inhibit and cause decrease in vitamin D deficiency. But then we have another component with this which is a genetic component, right? which are the famous single nucleotide polymorphisms right and and these single nucleotide polymorphisms are very common in individuals who have autoimmunity okay I would say close to 80% of these individuals have you know vitamin D genes that might have some single nucleotide polymorphisms some might have more some might have less okay and when I refer to the vitamin D genes I’m referring to a group of genes, okay? And and genes that that transport vitamin D, genes that convert one metabolite to the other, right? Genes that are regarding to the vitamin D receptor exclusively. You see, so we can have genetic polymorphisms that affect the transportation, right? The conversion or the actual receptor itself. Okay? And these things must be taken into account when you look at any patient who has a possible vitamin D resistance that is attributed to a genetic problem, right? And there are ways to be able to diagnose this. You can do genetic testing and look for these genes, right? and and and not only vitamin D but you can also it’s important to look at other genes for instance like that are responsible with the methylation cycle such as MTHFR or genes that are responsible with you know liver detox such as GST GX GST or GXT right these are very very important for glutathione pathway and let’s not forget that glutathione is extremely important for our liver to be able to eliminate toxins and every time you take Tylenol for instance, which I know a lot of people who have cluster headaches are taking a lot of it, you know, at one time in their lives because they have a headache, right? So, they might be taking, you know, Tylenol because it’s the only thing that’s available for them. But every time you take Tylenol, you deplete your glutathione, you see. So, there these drugs can be harmful and make things worse even down the road. But going back to the vitamin D resistance and the vitamin D genetic polymorphisms, so there’s a genetic component to it, right? their medications, obesity, genetics. And now what I’m bringing to the table and that what me and what some of my colleagues are bringing to the table is there is a microbiome component to it. There’s a leaky gut syndrome component to it. And this leaky gut syndrome if it’s not in check you know it’s going to contribute to the down reggulation of the vitamin D receptors and inclusively to a certain extent not very much but to a certain extent it can actually compromise the conversion of one metabolite to the other. You see, so when we talk about, you know, cluster headaches or any any any type of disease, right? And yes, you know, vitamin D, one of the reasons why vitamin D is so important, this is what I wanted to hit on. When you increase your vitamin D inre increases amounts of high amounts, it does a lot of good for you at the level of your immune system. It acts on your macrofasages, your antigen presenting cells. And these cells make what we call beta defensins and catalysins. And these guys go and they’re going to go kill all these bad bacteria that are in your gut. So now you’re actually equipping your immune system with the correct amount of vitamin D that they really need to be able to fight off the infection. And not only that, but calcitrol, the actual hormone of vitamin D, inhibits the production of zulin. So if you are inhibiting zulin now you’re preserving the tight junctions this means that vitamin D reduces leaky gut. Yeah that’s why it’s so good. Um there’s a really good paper um that I was reading uh anyone can search. I’ll put it in the description, but it was um gliden versus vitamin D3, a battle to the last tight junction. Uh whereby That’s right. Yeah, it’s a great paper by the way and it’s a beautiful, beautiful paper. So, um just humor me. Um let’s just sidestep and go. Um I’m sitting at the um table, the last supper, and I’m past a loaf of bread. Uh, you know, we’ve been eating bread. We we’ve been eating bread and gluten for a long long time. Um, how can it really be bad for us? Exactly. Well, it’s because the if you go to Europe, right, and you and you buy a loaf of bread over there in Italy, right, and you put a little bit of garlic and a little bit of butter, it’s delicious, you know. And I don’t see people complaining that they’re having issues with that type unless you have celiac disease obviously, right? Or you’re gluten sensitive. But there are people that are eating bread and they have gluten. But the type of of wheat that they have in those countries is an ancestral form of wheat. It’s not the type of wheat that you have in the United States or in Latin America and perhaps some other countries as well where it’s been genetically modified and it has been so much modified where you have 14 400 times more presence of glyadin and glutin in the molecule of gluten. So this means that you’re getting a massive load of gl of glyadin into your gut because it’s been genetically modified. And then when you eat bread, let’s say in the United States, then you say, “Oh, wait a second. This is this is not good, you know.” But if you eat bread like let’s say in some European country, and don’t forget this, this is very important. They don’t have herbicides. They don’t have glyphosate in Italy. It’s it’s banned, right? So you’re you’re actually eating a healthier food over there. Okay? And so that kind of explains why some people react less to wheat from Europe and they react more to wheat that’s coming from let’s say the United States or any other country like South America like Brazil for instance, you know. So that’s one of the biggest issues right there. But then again, we have to step back and remember this. It’s not just the gluten that’s causing it. You might have certain dispiosis that’s promoting it. And if you have vitamin D deficiency as well, well, guess what? Your tight junctions are might be just compromised and then you’re going to start getting the issues. So, it’s all about maintaining gut balance. It’s all about having adequate levels of vitamin D and vitamin B12 and vitamin B9 and all these things, right? And making sure that we have a healthy lifestyle, good sleep, you know, um that’s a big problem. you know, we nowadays everybody’s stuck on their phones before they go to bed, you know, they’re like zombies, you know, and then we just get, you know, overwhelmed and we just watch a movie and we stay overnight. We’re really late late at night sometimes. We have difficulty falling asleep or might be preoccupied with problems that we have in our work or problems that we have in our family or things that might be going on in our lives, you know, and it just might be enough stress that just produces too much cortisol. And if you have too much cortisol, now what happens with your circadian rhythm? It’s altered. And now you know that when we wake up, we start making cortisol, right? But as the day goes by and then the sun goes down, now melatonin starts to go up and cortisol starts to go down. That’s the normal circadian rhythm right there. But if you’re under stress 247, you’re not going to get good night’s sleep because your cortisol is always skyrocketing. You can’t sleep. And if you go to sleep, it’s got to be probably three, four hours sometimes. And then you get all this you need to be drinking coffee to be awake at when you’re working and you you need to be on some medication to keep you, you know, going because you’re so tired and then you get this adrenal fatigue. I mean, it starts building up, you know, and I discuss this in my book. I mentioned these things about how important sleep is and making sure that you have all of your filters of your body, you know, in check, right? So, as you can see in that slide right over there, it says causes of vitamin D resistance. Well, obviously chronic infections, we talked about that. Obesity, medications, liver problems, kidney problems. Yeah, these are sites of conversion. And if we have, you know, fatty liver, right, or renal insufficiency, I mean, we’re not going to be able to, you know, convert the metabolite adequately, right? And then we have the genetic component when we’re talking about the single nucleotide polymorphisms. And then we could add on there the microbiome which is also contributing to the problem. It’s a it’s it’s a big contributor and that it’s been under the radar of a lot of people. You know, people haven’t been looking at the microbiome as a contributor to vitamin D resistance and that’s been on my radar for a couple of years for me now. You know, and this is why I wrote a paper I wrote my book. I have articles talking about this, you know, um where I I explain how these uh lipopolysaccharides, these endotoxins, these microtoxins play a role in contributing to the whole vitamin D resistance thing, you know, and it’s something that’s really interesting because it’s been under the radar for many years and a lot of people haven’t even heard of this before, you know. Um uh yeah, it’s it’s super interesting. Um should we break the audience out and tell them what a biofilm is? Yeah, sure. So biofilms exist you know in our body all over. We have them on our skin sometimes they can build we can they can start growing in our teeth and people who know BOF films very well are our dentists. I mean, every time you’re going to your dentist and you’re going to get your teeth cleaned out and they’re taking that plaque out, well, guess what? That plaque is a bofilm. You see, it’s a bunch of bacteria that, you know, get together and they start making this bofilm, which is basically a extracellular matrix, right, of a substance that creates kind of like a shield that protects them from uh antibiotics. Okay. So, interestingly, you know, one of the things that I like to mention is that our microbiome is very diverse, right? And our gut, I’m talking about the gut microbiome. And whenever you have certain bugs that live in your mouth like streptococcus, right? There’s a bacteria in our mouth by the name of strep strepto streptococcus mutants that causes cavities when we consume a lot of sugars and we don’t have the habit of brushing our teeth on a regular basis and using tooth floss and that’s how you end up developing you know cavities but these bacterias we also have other bacteras such as you know foods and bacterium nucleiatum which also is part of the of the of the oral microbiome we have the oral microbiome the nasal microbiome the skin microb microbiome, the gut microbiome, the bladder microbiome. I mean, we have different microbiomes in different organs, you see. And this diversity changes on a constant basis. It’s always changing, you know, if it’s spec specifically if it’s the if it’s the gut. But what happens is let’s say you take a specific antibiotic, right? like amoxicelin and all of a sudden all of these bugs they say oh wait a second this is no good this is something that’s not good for us we’re going to die out so what they do they start communicating with each other and that’s that’s known by the name of quorum sensing and they start you know gathering around you can have here claustrdium esarishia cololi salmonella or any other bug clubsella and they start talking to each other and they say, “Hey, you know what? We better we better get together here and know we better try to team up together, try to work together to be able to create this bofilm.” It’s kind of like a slime, I guess you could say, right? That creates a shield. And this shield, I’m trying to put it in layman’s term for your audience here, by the way. So, this shield protects them from antibiotics or anything that could probably potentially destroy them, you know. So then what happens is that over time these microbes let’s say if you have an a specific infection right um uh and you have an autoimmunity that’s ongoing then and you start using conventional antibiotics these antibiotics are not going to even touch the surface because they have this such a potent resistant shield that protects them from all these antibiotics. So you need to start thinking well how can I actually eliminate these bofilms when they can actually be promoting leaky gut and causing this endotoxmia causing these lipopolyaccharides to get in and and induce a autoimmune disease right and here you can even mention candida that is interacting and communicating with bacteria so you have a fungus which is a totally different type of species that’s communicating with bacteria right and these molecules that are being interchanged you and and there’s a there’s a there’s a conversation that’s taking place here between these guys and this conversation ends up with the making of this bofilm and it’s kind of weird because you you kind of have to think about it this it can sometimes the the disease that you have might have been started by candida okay so if you have a patient that says oh you know what Dr. Beltran I have this issue of always having candida vaginal infections you know or a person says you know what I’ve had these funguses on my nails for such a long time you know Dr. Belgrin or I might be having you know recurrent you know teniaurus which is the presence of candida on the skin by the ingodal region you know where you get this rash that just very itchy and it’s around this you know the scrotum of the vulva of the woman and and they have this fungal infection caused by candida that’s a sign of of a compromised immune system but also an overgrowth of a fungus and sometimes times when you treat these patients with antifungals, traditional antifungals, it kind of goes away, but you don’t eradicate the infection completely. And the fungus and we know that bacterias and funguses have the capability of of building up resistance to antibiotics, especially conventional antibiotics, and they intercommunicate with each other and they start saying, “Hey, you know what? this antimicrobial, this antibiotic and this antifungal that you that we just got hit massively with, we need to build up together and make this bofilm to be able to protect us. So that ends up happening and then now the conventional medication that you took initially doesn’t work anymore because you have a biofilm. So then this is what is the next next thing I always tell patients. In order for you to be able to break these bofilms, you need to use what we call biofilm disruptors, right? And biofilm disruptors that I am very familiar with are a combination of certain herbals such as oregano oil, bourberine, you know, uh licorice, uh you know, curcumin, uh uh uh it’s called garlic oil. These things they have certain compounds in them that are very potent antibiotics but I also add in sometimes you know certain supplements like alphal lipoic acid or neck and acetylcyine because they start making pores on these bofilms and the more you start making more pores it’s like you’re trying to drill in through this bofilm drill in drill in drill in and I use these herbals associated with these supplements like alpha lipoic acid in a series of cycles because you want to attack, attack, attack, attack, and then you want to give it a pause, you know, and then attack again, attack again, attack again. You got to give it a pause and then attack again until you disrupt that bof, and then you’re able to get those microbes. And the beauty about these herbals is that they’ve been around for thousands of years. We have so much information on these herbals, but we don’t learn these things in medical school. They don’t teach us these things because it’s not conventional medicine. They what what what medical schools are going to be teaching doctors are just everything that’s related to pharmaceuticals. They’re not going to be telling hey you got whenever you see this you could be using you know oregano oil right whenever you have candida or this or this or that right as a herbal. So doctors who work in the field of integrative functional medicine unless you’re a naturopathic doctor well then you will be receiving you know education on herbals obviously because that’s the naturopathic route right um you kind of have to go back and restudy all of these things and learn that’s what I had to do I had to restudy all of these herbals and then that’s when I found that when you combine these herbals associated with alphaloboic acid and neck as well you actually develop what we call bofilm disruptors and then you break down the bofilm initially and then you start targeting those herbs excuse me those bacteria and that can be appreciated in the GI map because when you do the GI map you can actually say oh look here we have three bad bugs that don’t that have been identified for instance you can find esarishia coli you can find clustrdium and maybe even morganella or sidedonus four for instance, right? And then you treat you treat you treat the infection and after then about a month or so you or two months or so you you repeat the the GI map and then you see that there’s been a decrease in the numbers of these microorganisms but a new one just popped up that wasn’t there in the first place and then you say but how come this guy just popped up you know that’s because he was way in the bottom of the bofilm so there were like layers and layers and So you see what I mean? So you actually were treating the surface and the more you went down eventually you got to the point where now this guy becomes evident and you start seeing and detecting him on the on the GI map. And that’s incredible because you start knowing now that you’re actually getting in where you’re supposed to. And that’s how I treat my patients and I use those three pillars of the of the LGS protocol is which is first is modulation of the microbiome. And this is where the herbals go in right two modulation of the immune system and that’s where vitamin D comes in at high doses according to the genetic profile of the patient as well. And three, you have to compensate the epigenetics of every patient because some people might have problems with the methylation cycle. And you need to compensate that methylation cycle. Some people have issues with detox. So you have to compensate the genes that are responsible with detox. Some patients who have autism have issues with neurotransmission. They have genes that require compensating in order to be able to produce more dopamine or reduce the excess amount of dopamine. And that’s when we get to ADHD, autism and all these things like that which are described in my book by the way you know. So the three major pillars of the LGS protocol and now also treating cancer as well is that you always have to remember that every patient who has a specific disease autoimmune disease metabolic syndrome or cancer has three major problems going for them. They have problems with their microbiome. they have problems with their immune system and their epigenetics are probably hair hair wire have not been compensated. So these are three major pillars of the protocol. If I um could while we just stick around with the bofilm um you talk about pulsing. What is the idea around um using the herbal antimicrobials in a kind of a pulse sort of a fashion? Oh yeah. Well, the pulsing is really important because don’t forget these are also antibiotics, right? And if we use antibiotics for prolonged periods of times, you can eventually develop resistance to these antibiotics. So, the pulsing is like you’re treating the infection, treating the infection, you’re doing the harm, doing some harm, and then you let it rest. And when you let it rest, you kind of allow the bacteria to kind of like recover a little bit, you know, but then you start attacking them again, but get them by surprise. So this needs to be done in cycles, right? One, because you want to eliminate the infection progressively. You don’t want to be doing it too harsh on the system as well. Second of all, there’s a phenomenon known as die off. Okay? And a lot of patients who do herbals when they’re treating their p I mean when you’re treating patients with herbals and you start eliminating these bofilms or other bad bugs these bugs don’t forget inside of them they have their toxins and when they explode and they die where does that go? It’s going to go into your leaky gut that you have there in the first place. So we have to be cautious and not overwhelming the patient making them you know sicker right because these toxins are going to eventually interact with the immune system. So this is why we do a twoe cycle and then we give them a break so they can recover as well. So it you have to be a little bit conscious you know so this is one of the reasons one of the many reasons why we do cycles. We treat the patients for two weeks and then we give them one week of a break. they kind of recover. And I’ve had patients call me, you know, uh, Craig, where they say, you know, Dr. Belchin, my psoriasis has gotten like full-blown. Oh my god, I’m it’s terrible. This is this is terrible. I don’t want to be taking these herbs. And I say, okay, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to start taking activated charcoal because activated charcoal, what it does, it binds to the gut epithelia, right? and it creates a layer, a thick layer that makes your intestines very impermeable. So in other words, you’re physically using a mech a physical mechanism by reducing the permeability of the gut. Okay? And that way you kind of reduce the excess amount of entrance of of these lipopolysaccharides that going to be interacting with your immune system. So there are many different reasons why we use you know the cycles and that’s one of the few right so cycles usually if you go to a naturopathic doctor and you’re being prescribed a herbal the usual route is that you’re going to be prescribed it for about 2 weeks or so 10 to 10 days probably 15 days and then you’re going to have a one week break so you can recover and then you start attacking again and then you get these bad bugs you know by surprise and you start killing them even more until they’re gone. I’m I’m laughing here because it’s the story of my life that I fly in the face of my do my my doctor’s advice and then um wing my own treatment. It’s a perfect opportunity to talk to you about um hydroonitis supraativa which yeah yeah so so let me just give the background to the viewer um I would have gone through was I went to ask my doctor for the sixth round of antibiotics because um they just gone they got better then just kept kept on coming back kept on coming back and it was that doctor’s appointment where the doctor had said to me um I can’t we can’t we’re at the end of the road with antibiotic. Craig, um, look, I want to talk to you about a med a biologic um, and talk to him about this medication. I was like, well, who, oh my goodness. Um, and that’s when I, um, followed u much of the advice that I had garnered from the VDR renewal presentation to introduce um, quite a massive diet change for myself at the time. Um as well as uh I threw pretty much the kitchen kitchen sink at it in terms of herbal antimicrobials and um I did it for a month actually not two weeks. So um disregarded the pulse therapy but within 10 days within 10 days. How um how is that even how is that even possible? I mean, I know it’s possible and um I would say at the very beginning when I first saw my doctor about the condition she had said to me, it’s a metabolic issue, Craig, you probably need to do something about your diet um and the condition will clear up. And I didn’t want to listen at that stage, but um so just talk to us a little bit little bit about HS. Oh yeah, of course. Of course. Well, you know, I think what the problem is is that we when we go to our conventional doctor, our conventional alopathic doctor, you know, and that’s the the usually the medical schools around the world, the majority are alopathic, you know, unless you go to a naturopathic doctor who’s going to be talking about herbals at one point in life. Well, the thing is is that they have not received training in microbiome interpretation. Okay? And some of them are not very familiar with the microbiome. And and that’s not that’s not their fault. It’s because the system is set up to such a way where they’re just going to be prescribing meds, medications and antibiotics and and if that doesn’t work, then they’re going to be considering, you know, biologics, etc., etc., right? Like you said, and I’m going to be very honest with you, Craig. You know, at one time, I’m I’m an alopathic doctor. Okay. At what time in my life I also was one of those doctors as well you see and I did prescribe antibiotics and I did prescribe uh uh biologics as well and immunosuppressive drugs you know but then you know like I said like in the beginning of this uh uh podcast I I had things that happened to one of my family members one of my children and I had to start immersing myself in this whole new world you know which was very eyeopening for me it was very re revealing you know and and that’s how I ended up you know discovering that the microbiome is the epicenter for human health and that our epigenetics also has a very important role in how our biochemistry plays out and how our physiology plays out and yes you know the microbiome influences in how certain conditions like you know hydrogenitis you know can cause, you know, abscesses in your armpits or psoriasis can cause flare-ups or vitiligo can show up or hypothyroidism and hypothyroidism also can be caused even through a root canal as well. Just to give you an idea, you know, so there’s so many things that we as physicians are not aware of and that we have to go back kind of to school, go back to school and study these things on our own. All right. Okay. or do like this integrative. Now now there there are many courses in integrative medicine there but these are courses that you have to pay out of your pocket money you know to be able to learn these things from a specialist who people who actually learn these things you know and are teaching them there it’s it’s like everybody’s doing these things nowadays you know but but there there’s that other side of medicine and I know colleagues that are very you know uh narrow-minded and they’re very you know critiques of you and they say ah that’s just all you know charlatanism that that’s that that’s not that’s just rubbish you know I don’t believe what these guys are saying you know I I well you know I I feel very sad for that for that because unfortunately you know at one time in my life I was kind of like them too you know and then when you start getting this re revelation you know and you start seeing how things are are really and you do the science and you do the research and you look into it you know and then you start saying well wait a this actually makes sense. This actually explains a lot of things, you know, and the microbiome is definitely a point of the site where a lot of these things are happening. And yeah, you know, the the microbiota, the the bad bacteria when they start overgrowing and they start causing all this inflammation, well, guess what? These are going to allow for, you know, inflammation to take place in different sites of our body. And when you all of a sudden start fixing the microbiome there, I’ll give you I’ll give you this really interesting thing. You know, for instance, our liver makes this enzyme by the name of beta beta glucaronadase, beta glucaronadase. So this enzyme is very important because it causes glucaronidation and it binds to toxins and certain hormones like estrogen for instance and it takes it out via the gut pathway. It puts it out into the gut. But if you have certain bacterias that make the exact same enzyme, which is the betalucaronidase that I just said, now they’re going to get that toxin that’s in the gut or that hormone that’s in the gut and they’re going to reintroduce it back into the hippatic system. So now you have this recycling or better off saying reintroduction this vicious cycle of toxmia where the bad bugs are reintroducing the toxin into your body and causing this metabolic disturbance like you just said. So it’s important for us to be able to get our microbiome tested and look at our intestinal health markers, right? And these intestinal health markers we’re talking about statocrit you know secrettory IGA you know betagluceronidase antiglyin a zulin calprotectin the presence of ault blood that can be suggestive you know of ulcers ulcer of colitis crohn’s disease even cancer you know so these intestinal health markers are very important for us and we have to know what they mean to be able to understand what’s going on in our patient and when we find what the bug is that’s doing all these things. Then we can target them and perhaps even, you know, treat them with herbals and diet because diet is very important here, right? To be able to bring back illiosis, the normal homeostasis. And when that happens, well, things start to play out the normal way, the way it’s supposed to, right? We heal, right? So it’s very complex you know Craig and it’s fascinating because the microbiome indeed I always say is the epicenter of human health. Anything that happens there it’s going to manifest in some other part of the body. It can be the skin. It can be the central nervous system. It can be in your bowels. I mean you name it. It’s going to show up somewhere. So before we um before we talk about then specifically your approach to kind of round off the conversation, I would just say um uh oh just as a segue to move into the LGS protocol to touch on the cobra protocol and to understand a little bit of the difference between the two. Um suffice to say in terms of psoriasis um one of the papers I had found I don’t know if you know of Dr. Renu Matani, she’s a cobber train protocol um doctor uh had a case report. It was a series of six or seven cases using um the cobra approach um and the before and after photos of psoriasis patients were quite breathtaking. I will um link that particular paper in the study. Um so when you approach cobra protocol versus LGS protocol what are the some of the core differences between the two because to my understanding both of them are essentially the vitamin D regimen that I follow um but taken to the next level and done under the care and guidance of a physician which leads me to the point um that I was trying to make and and wanting to kind of just posit the question to say that for the cluster headache sufferer that has either tried the regimen and uh and found that they’re one of the few that it doesn’t work for. If they then went and kind of consulted someone like yourself and increased their vitamin D dosage to the point where they suppress their parathyroid hormone right down um into the lowest point for normal as well as adopting um some of the I think you know where I’m going with it. I’ll pass over you. Of course. Of course. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, uh there are some there are some similarities and there are some major differences between the Kohima protocol and the LGS protocol. The Kohima protocol as we know focuses in elevating vitamin D to certain levels where we are able to inhibit the parathyroid hormone without causing obviously toxicity and this is why we measure uh you know serum calcium or ion ionized calcium making sure that uh the patient’s not getting toxic now and I think the dosage that they they say is 1,00 milligrams per kilogram that’s what they recommend my dose do is halfway and the reason why is because of this. These are my findings. Whenever I treat a patient who has an autoimmune condition and I do use high doses of vitamin D but not to the extent of cobbra is because I have found in my patients that when you modulate very well the microbiome, let me put it this way.
