Happy Gut!

Dr. Cooper

Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance Coaching podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Bradford Cooper of the Catalyst Coaching Institute. And today we’re going to do a gut check, literally. There’s growing evidence that our gut influences everything from energy to allergies, weight, to pain tolerance and everything in between. Today’s guests specializes specifically in this area. Dr. Vincent Pedre is a board certified internist, functional medicine physician, and author of the book, Happy Gut. A book I had an opportunity to read over the last month and it is loaded with insights. You’ll definitely get a sense of that through our discussion. If you’ve been looking to pursue your certification as a health and wellness coach in time to apply for the national board exam, before the requirements increase, please reach out to us right away. We had been saying July was last opportunity, they extended the deadline on a couple of things that allowed us to add one more course in August that will allow you to hit those deadlines as well. Every one of our courses this year has filled up early, especially the last three, very early. So if that’s an interest to you, reach out to us right away Results@CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. You find all the details if you’d rather at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. For everyone else, if you enjoy videos, you might want to check out the YouTube coaching channel. It’s youtube.com/coachingchannel. We now have over 60 videos covering health, wellness, performance, and how to make the most of your coaching business and your coaching career. They’re freely available to you. Now let’s get to that gut check with Dr. Vincent Pedre on the latest episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance Coaching podcast. Dr. Pedre, great to have you on the show today.

Dr. Pedre

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Cooper

Let’s jump right in. There’s a lot to cover here. You talk about five key roles of the gut, right out of the gate, page 14 of the book, which is likely something most people probably never think about. Could you walk us through just briefly the highlights of those five? Just kind of set the stage for our conversation here.

Dr. Pedre

Yeah. Obviously everybody, when they think of the gut, they think of digestion, for example, but people don’t always think about the role of the gut in the immune system. And that is probably, you know, that is kind of a front and center discussion, especially this year with what’s been going on. To really understand where is your immune system really working from? You know, obviously it works throughout your entire body, but the foundation of the immune system is in your gut. And that is kind of really, really important for people to understand because 70% of your immune system is all along the gut lining. So your gut is not just about digesting food, you know, it’s really, it’s kind of like your border patrol. You know, it’s about controlling that interface between you and the outside world and depending on how well that interface is regulated, you can be a person who tends to get sick more often, or you can be a person who is really robust and kind of gets through colds really quickly.

Dr. Pedre

You know, so that’s probably, you know, really important key role of the gut that a lot of people don’t realize. And then of course there is symbiosis, because the gut harbors the biggest reservoir of our gut microbiome, of the microbiome that lives inside and on the body, the gut microbiome is the biggest representation of that. And it almost acts as if it’s its own internal organ, which is really remarkable. And some people believe that we couldn’t function, that the human genome does not code for all of the things that are necessary in order to sustain healthy life, that you actually need your gut microbiome to produce all sorts of metabolites. And we talk about the microbiome. We also talk about the metabolome, which is the summation of all the metabolites that your microbiome is making. And, you know, I think in this decade, what we might find is that the metabolome is more important than the microbiome. The microbiome just tells you what’s there, the metabolome tells you, what are they doing?

Dr. Cooper

Tell us a little more. So our audience is health and wellness coaches, folks that are high performers, they’re looking to make the most of their lives. Can you walk us through a little bit with some of those words that they’re listening to it and they’re going well, this sounds interesting, but I’m not sure what he means by it.

Dr. Pedre

Yeah. So, things like the microbiome, which is a summation of all the microorganisms that live in and on your body, which can include good and bad bacteria, you know, and in quotation marks, because in the true balance, we do need some of those bad guys in there, but it also includes yeast. It can include parasites. There might be some worms in there as well, you know, so there’s a lot of mystery inside the gut and that mystery has been perpetuated by the fact that there is still weaknesses in the tests that are available to us, you know, their ability to be able to pick up everything that is in the gut is not a hundred percent. So, so we have that, and then we have this whole other part that’s called the virum, which are all these viruses. They think outnumber the bacteria in our guts, the bacterial phages, and they also regulate what’s going on in the gut. So it’s quite fascinating, even just like people who are looking to perform, you know, there’s research now looking at specific strains of bacteria. There’s one called a, and I’m probably gonna butcher the name, we’d have to see it written, but it’s like biolayla. And it, what they found is that it improves athletic performance. And when they did an experiment in mice, where they, in this bacteria, it actually improved their ability to perform certain physical tasks. It actually improved their physical performance and they’ve, and the reason they started looking at this is cause they, you know, they also look at the microbiome of athletes and notice that it’s slightly different than the microbiome of a normal sedentary person.

Dr. Cooper

Very interesting, very interesting. So with that in mind, you, you go through a whole, this laundry list of stuff, headaches, allergies, auto-immunity, weight gain, fatigue, all these different things that are, they’re such a focus point right now, but why do you think it’s taken so long? And I think it’s still being missed to point to the gut and say, Ooh, wait, hold on folks. Here’s where we need to start. What been the issue that’s caused, you’ve brought to the attention, your book is outstanding. And we’ll talk about some more details in here, but why, why is it taking so long? Why did we miss it for so many years?

Dr. Pedre

You know, and what’s crazy is that at the turn of the 20th century, the early 1900s, there were two paths in medicine. You know, there was the allopathic and there was the natural pathic and the, you know, the difference between them was the more natural route versus, um, the, the branch of medicine that was surgical interventional, you know, kind of fix the problem right away. And that got overtaken by the pharmaceutical industry, you know, and, and you would think rightly so in the beginning, like it was miraculous to discover penicillin and finally have a medication that could treat infections. Before that actually what we were doing is, and doctors actually used electrolyzed water to create their own silver solutions. So, they were using silver for its antimicrobial properties before we knew about penicillin.

Dr. Pedre

But so natural pathic medicine already knew about the gut back then. The problem is they were far ahead of the science. And the thing that has happened in the last 20 years is that the science has finally caught up with what natural pathic medicine was talking about. That, you know, we, and even I, when I was in medical school or later on heard about leaky gut syndrome, and you’re thinking, what does that mean? That sounds, you know, that sounds really out there. And you’re like, well, I don’t know that I believe that the gut can be leaky. And yet once you start understanding the physiology of the body, you know, that there are, there changes in the leakiness or the permeability of membranes in the body. For example, a patient who comes in to the hospital with a severe infection and get sepsis or septic, their blood vessels become leaky. And they get all, if you’ve ever seen somebody in the ICU, they’re all swollen, they can look like the Pillsbury Doughboy. They’re not able to retain the fluid inside their vascular system, it escapes. The reason for that is that they are septic and that causes their blood vessels to become leaky. Well, the same thing can happen in the gut. And it just wasn’t until, you know, the work of Alesso Fasano, looking at the effects of gluten on the gut and the discovery of zonulin as the signaling molecule that controls the permeability of the gut as if it were a dimmer switch and it can increase permeability, decrease permeability. And it was that revolutionary work that started bringing hard science to what naturopathic medicine was talking about for years. So at that point, Western, you know, traditional doctors, they still continue to deny. But as the science kept building, you know, you just couldn’t deny, you know, once you have research papers that have been verified peer reviewed, and they’re showing that this information is true.

Dr. Pedre

And then you have endoscopic ultrasound where you see a change in the permeability of the gut lining that’s undeniable. And then of course, the fascination with the gut microbiome, I think once we started realizing the potential, and it’s not just about, take a probiotic, it’s about like, let’s figure out what these strains do. You know, what, what actions do they have in the body? There’s very specific strains. You know, we think of E coli, but within e-coli, then there’s sub strains or subtypes, and each of them can have unique abilities. You know, one is responsible for making cheese, not E coli per se, but I’m just using that as an example. There’s a strain of bacteria that will make cheese. Another bacteria is responsible for making sauerkraut and gives it its distinctive flavors. So they all have their properties. And, I think, you know, I think that the pandoras box was finally open and we realize, wow, we were blind. And we just, weren’t looking in this area and perhaps blinded by the, you know, just the Western approach, which was pooling everything under, you know, general criteria like IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. And what is that? It’s a giant umbrella that could be caused by many different underlying causes. And then we started looking and seeing that well, is that the only thing that’s related to gut health? I mean, I think intuitively, you know, if your gut is off, you don’t feel so well, you know, if you’re having a stomach ache, you can’t think clearly, you know, it’s a bi-directional interface, but then, you know, we started seeing asthma, allergies, all these things that we thought are external and yeah, they’re partly external, but they’re being mitigated by the internal world of your gut, which is dependent on what you put in your mouth, what you eat, what you drink.

Dr. Cooper

That’s a good transition into, I’m going to hit a few of the big ones. Cause you threw in some huge elephants into this equation. Let’s talk through sugar, caffeine or coffee and alcohol. Let’s take them one at a time briefly, but just talk us through where, you know, these are huge things. Sugar is obviously, there’s somewhat of a difference. You’ve got your natural sugars and your fruits and those kinds of things. You’ve got all the junk that we throw into our bodies. Talk us through why sugar has such a negative effect on all these things that you’re talking about.

Dr. Pedre

Yeah. I mean, just starting with the, you know, looking at it from different angles. So we can look at the effects of sugar just in terms of its effect on the gut microbiome. If you eat too much sugar too frequently, you’re providing the primary preferred energy source, not just for certain bacteria in the gut, some of which are not the most favorable bacteria, but also for yeast and for candida. So you can actually precipitate a candida overgrowth in your gut by, taking in too much sugar.

Dr. Cooper

Which means what? What does that result in if people are hearing it going, candida? I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about.

Dr. Pedre

Yeah. Like candida, which is a yeast, it produces mycotoxins. So these are molecules that can get through the gut barrier and that can get to your brain and they do all sorts of things like typical symptoms would be mental fog, but the person can also present with joint aches, fatigue, malaise. They might present with like a fibromyalgia picture, which is a lot of body pain and lots of fatigue. They can present with migratory joint pains. Like I had one patient that had joint pains that moved from one joint to another and they would get swollen. And she had, actually, this is a really good point that I’m talking about this is she had no gut symptoms. And I asked her many different ways because sometimes people don’t answer right away. So, you know, I wanted to make sure, you know, basically I was saying, are you sure you don’t because she had so many, she had auto-immune, which are also associated with gut health issues and can be associated with things like candida overgrowth. And she had hives, she had skin rashes. She had these migrating joint pains, of course, being in the Northeast, the first thing I’m thinking is I’ve got to rule out a tick borne illness. But when I did her stool analysis, turned out, she had a parasite. One of the most common parasites worldwide is called Blastocystis hominis which in the Western medical tradition it’s been controversial, whether it’s an abnormal presence or is it commensal. In other words, it just lives in everyone. But since then I’ve seen research that shows that Blastocystis increases intestinal permeability. So having it is not a good thing because no one wants increased intestinal permeability. And then the second one that we found was, I think two different yeast organisms. So not just candida. And as soon as we treated the parasite and yeast, her systemic symptoms started disappearing along with clearing out her diet because she had leaky gut and she had developed sensitivity to dairy and gluten.

Dr. Pedre

And it’s just remarkable because on the other side of this, she was seeing doctors who were telling her, you have an autoimmune disease, we’re going to call it a non-specified rheumatological disease because she was a rheumatoid factor negative. So you know, it wasn’t rheumatoid arthritis. And the solution is we’re going to put you on prednisone. Now imagine you have a person who has a parasite and yeast overgrowth, and now you’re going to put them on a drug that increases blood sugar, basically just breeding ground for more yeast. So you get better while you’re on the drug. And as soon as you come off of the drug, you get worse again, you know, because the drug acts as an antiinflammatory and you know, for anyone listening, I’m a judicious medical doctor. I don’t believe that all drugs are bad at every moment, there’s a time and place to use medications. But I guess the way I see things is because I have such a wide perspective, I’m not going to reach for something when I, before I have looked for the underlying root cause.

Dr. Cooper

Right, let’s look at the basics first. When you hear hoof beats you don’t look for zebras.

Dr. Pedre

Yeah. I mean, or like the example I use is if you’re, if you’re treating a tree that looks diseased and the leaves are kind of drying out, they look brown, you know, you can just look at it and say, the tree is unhealthy. The Western approach is let me get some green paint and I’m going to paint the leaves green again. So they’re going to look nice and beautiful. You know, it’s a bandaid approach. The functional medicine approach, which is what I, which is basically my approach in Happy Gut is let’s look under the soil. Let’s look at the roots. What is happening there? Because what we’re seeing on the surface is a reflection of what’s internal let’s heal the root system and for the body, the root system, that is the digestive system, the gut, and then you heal the other parts, not the other way around.

Dr. Cooper

So huge number of our listeners, if they examine their diet, they are taking in immense amounts of sugar. And maybe they’re listening to this saying, you know, but I’m fine. You’re saying this can build over time. Can you kind of walk us through why they should still be aware of it, even if they’re in quotes fine.

Dr. Pedre

And this is the thing, you know, cause I imagine, the listeners probably eat a broad spectrum of foods and some of them maybe shop for healthy things or they think they’re shopping for healthy things, even like, you know, I want to mention other sugars because also sometimes people are trying to avoid sugar and then they think they’re being healthy by having alternative sugars. Like a lot of these bars now are being filled with sugar alcohols, which don’t bump your blood sugar. But what they do do is they feed a certain part of the microbiome in your gut, that for a segment of people is unhealthy and can increase insulin resistance and actually make you really gassy and uncomfortable. So you have to watch out for all the places that sugar hides, you know, high fructose corn syrup. Obviously, hopefully the listeners are not, are not drinking soda, but even just refined juices, you know, cause they are really high in fructose, which really was meant to be eaten with the fiber of the fruit together to kind of balance out the effects of the, of the fructose. But once that, you know, I talk about what’s happening in your gut, but then that glucose gets into your system and it triggers insulin response. And you know, we’re, if you look at it now, like we’re eating on average five to six meals a day. You know, back in the 1970s, they were eating three meals a day. That was kind of more normal with a fasting period in between meals. So imagine if you’re having a lot of sugar or sugar alternatives, bread, rice, pasta, crackers, things that you don’t think of as sugar, but they’re high in carbs that are simple carbs that get converted into sugar. Once they get digested by your gut, and you’re causing this influx of sugar that causes an insulin response and insulin is a hormone that tells your body to pack on fat in the middle. So it’s not a hormone that you want to be spiking all the time. And I think that’s why now we’ve got such a, you know, we talk intermittent fasting. I talk about it in terms of making the gut healthier, but it’s also for, you know, for body composition for improving insulin sensitivity.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah. We had Dr. Mark Mattson on from Mayo a couple of months ago. He did a great job talking about the IF stuff. Okay, so fortunately we’re doing this audio only and the audience is not within reach of us because we’ve just talked about sugar and the next one’s at least as big for some people, the coffee. Why be aware of, cognizant of the amount of coffee we’re drinking during the day?

Dr. Pedre

Yeah. Coffee is a big one and it’s a controversial one for some people. And, and there’s a lot of good research pro and against coffee. I think first of all, sourcing of coffee is really important. The coffee bean, I’ve been to Peru and I do a lot of international travel. One of the best things I did was go to a coffee plantation in Peru that was natural, organic pick the coffee beans, see how their processed, but also to understand that there are points in the, in the processing of the coffee bean, where the bean is at risk of getting contaminated with mold. And if the producer isn’t doing the right things, they, you know, you could be drinking coffee, you know, depending on what beans they buy, you know, so the higher grade, the beans that are not in as good condition might be sold to a lower grade distributors. But it’s very important to understand first, where are your coffee beans coming from? Are they organic or nonorganic? Because coffee is one of the most pesticides sprayed crops on the planet. And then secondly, they can get contaminated with mold and mold is like yeast. And once you get mold in your system that can wreak havoc, a quarter of the population is mold sensitive to the degree where it will basically turn your life upside down.

Dr. Cooper

Okay. So organic, we can easily look for, how do we understand where to look for it?

Dr. Pedre

You know, organic and really, I think researching where the company, how they’re getting their beans, you know, how they select their beans. You know, it takes a little bit of extra work, and then let’s talk about, you know, so coffee, how does it get processed? It gets processed by the liver. So liver and the gut co detox organs, the liver does a very important, process of detoxification of all sorts of things. Every medication, toxins, hormones, everything has to go through two phases of liver detoxification. The first phase is controlled by the cytochrome P 450 enzymes. The majority of them, coffee is one of them. And so when you’re drinking a cup of coffee, you’re overwhelming your livers detox systems. You can upregulate, you can also bog it down. The other interesting thing. And, you know, so my program, I cut coffee out for various reasons also for its irritant effects. And it’s very acidic and kind of irritant for the gut. Now, some people who are constipated will drink coffee to get them to go in the morning. A lot of people have coffee with a dairy product, which can also have a negative effect on your gut. The thing that I think people don’t realize is too much coffee will stimulate your pancreas to release insulin. And this could affect people in different ways, but coffee, excess coffee could also lead to weight gain, and insulin being a signal for fat deposition. So it can make you gain fat in the middle. Now, combine it with most people are drinking coffee with milk and sugar, you know, so yeah, like a frappuccino. So you’re, you’re really pushing that system.

Dr. Pedre

For me, and I’m a slow metabolizer, you can be a fast or slow metabolizer for coffee. For me, if I drink a cup of coffee, it makes me so wired. And I didn’t realize this because I was drinking the coffee with the MCT oil and the butter, I was doing this back in 2016. And I was finding that I was getting to the point where I needed another coffee in the early afternoon to get through the day. So I was on this coffee, roller coaster, you know, going, going, and crashing. And, in January of 2017, I led a group in my 20 day program and decided if I’m going to tell you to get off of coffee, and I think it’s difficult for me, I’m going to do it also. Like, I don’t just preach, I do. So I did it, and actually it was really rough. I started a wean off of the coffee cause I knew I was having too much. And towards the end of the wing, I started getting migraines. My migraines got triggered by weaning off of coffee. So one that’s kind of a big one. So if you, if you’re weaning off of coffee and you start having headaches, a lot of people are like, Oh, well, I can’t do this. Another, another thing is like, wow, that’s telling you what the coffee was doing. You know, like, so I weaned off coffee. I started with my cleanse, first couple of days were kind of rough with the headaches, but I just decided I would power through. I do allow green tea because it has, bioflavonoids, ECGC, really powerful support for liver detoxification and cleansing. So I still allow a caffeine source, just not coffee per se, which, you know, kind of bogs down the liver and actually two weeks into my 28 days, I was forgetting to drink caffeinated tea. And I felt great energy all the way to the end of the day. And it was, my aha was like, you know what? I know I’m a slow metabolizer. I know that coffee disrupts my sleep. And if you’re a slow metabolizer, you can have a cup of coffee in the afternoon and you won’t sleep well that night. And I just never went back. So that was the last time I had coffee in 2017, minus my, I will say exception when I was in Cuba and my host offered me an espresso and I felt it was going to be extremely rude of me to refuse it. So I did accept it.

Dr. Cooper

Love it, love it. All right. Let’s hit alcohol, let’s hit the third elephant and then we’ll move on to a couple of things.

Dr. Pedre

Again, going back to detoxification, really key, my program is a gut centered cleanse. So anytime you’re detoxifying, you want to, you want to reduce the load of work that the liver has to do on anything else. So it can really process out, retained toxins, especially if you’re burning fat. You’re going to release toxins that have been held in the fat and alcohol also bogs down the liver, but and it’s a double whammy too, because alcohol has sugar. You know, a lot of people don’t realize, either it’s a mixed drink or it could be wine. A lot of wines are high in sugar, and that messes with your sleep. It’s going to mess with your insulin secretion. It can mess with your mood. Alcohol is a depressant, so, you know, it’s for me, it’s very important to really, if you’re going to do this, you go gung ho you clean out your system and along the way, what happens is, look, I’m not saying don’t drink alcohol later on. Like, if you do the 28 days, like get through that, be clean, but become aware. Like if you’re going to drink afterwards, then be really aware of how it affects you. And then, if you know, you know, from that place of awareness, then you can make a choice.

Dr. Cooper

Right, but it’s conscious. It’s purposeful.

Dr. Pedre

Exactly. Like, you know, okay, I’m going to have some drinks tonight. I know I’ll feel crappy tomorrow. And then tomorrow I’m going to wake up and realize, okay, I’m not going to do this for awhile. Or maybe you’ll have a tequila on the rocks, which is a much cleaner alcohol. It’s not going to raise the blood sugar. It’s actually the lowest in sugar. And you won’t feel as bad as the next day as you might with wine or beer. Uh, so, you know, and then really what I encourage people in any gut healing journey or health journey is ultimately the important thing is to become aware of how things affect your body. And then from there you make a choice. So it’s not, you’re no longer a victim, right? You’re not, things are not just happening to you. You are actually the co-creator of what happens.

Dr. Cooper

And I love that. I mean, it’s a beautiful way to say it because you’re, you’re reminding folks, you choose this. So if you’re going to complain about this, this or this, but you’re choosing not to do something, you know you could do, well, that’s on you. So stop whining and saying, Oh, woe is me. Well, here’s your option? Here’s your opportunity.

Dr. Pedre

I mean that’s what motivated me initially to go gluten free. And I kind of, you know, back then, I still needed more evidence. I did a blood test and found that I was, I had antibodies to gluten and I had already suspected it because I have autoimmune disease that runs in my family. And there’s such a big connection between gluten, like Dr. Fasano showed, gluten causes, zonulin release, which increases intestinal permeability. And that opens up the pathway to inflammatory diseases, including autoimmune disease. And I was in my, let me think I was in my like mid thirties, early to mid thirties and thinking, you know, I want to be healthy for the rest of my life. You know, like I’m done with my 20’s when you kind of beat up your body and you start thinking like, how can I stay healthy? And this is an important message for people. You know, if you want to get into your forties and be healthy or fifties and be healthier than you were before, then you’ve got to start investing a decade, two decades before, like you can’t just arrive to your forties or fifties and then decide, okay, now I want to be healthy. Well, you’ve got to decide before. Right? And, and that’s what I did because I had been suffering from IBS for years. Since I was a child that was part of my, what inspired me to really dive into gut health. But then I have autoimmune disease in my family. And I started thinking, I wonder if I have a gluten issue. And then I did the blood test. And in that time I was already recommending gluten free diets to patients. And they would look at me like a deer caught in the headlights. Like I had just read them their rights and that I had sentenced them to like a life of misery. And then I found out that I was, and I thought, you know, I’m going to do this because I’m prescribing this. Everybody says it’s difficult. And I need to see how difficult this is. Really what I learned and what I come back to now probably 12 years later is that it’s all mindset. If you tell yourself it’s going to be difficult, then it’s going to be difficult. If you tell yourself it’s going to be easy, then you figure out how to make it easy. And you just flow with it.

Dr. Cooper

You’re exactly. I mean, you are dead on, and that’s a lot of the discussion we have here about behavior change and habits and that kind of stuff. All three of our kids are celiacs. So we’ve walked that journey in detail. And you’re exactly right, because our son just discovered recently and he was almost excited because it enhanced his running ability. It was causing some other issues that were affecting his running. So when he discovered, Oh my goodness, I’m also celiac like my sisters, boom, let’s change this and he immediately saw a performance enhancement. And it’s almost like his mindset, it’s just what you’re saying. His mindset was awesome, here’s an opportunity versus, Oh, woe is me, which is easy to happen because it is a big change.

Dr. Pedre

It’s a big change. And for a lot of people, it can be, it can be a big shock, but you know, so, so awesome to hear that about your son, but also just think about like, you know, it’s like martial arts, the, the, you know, a lot of them, what they teach is flow with your opponent and it reduces the impact of the punch. If you try to meet the impact with impact and resistance, it’s going to hit really hard.

Dr. Cooper

That’s a great analogy.

Dr. Pedre

If you flow with things and you just, you know, talk about a time. Like this to me, 2020 last year, I was really, really interested in flow. And I was reading a book by a physicist on flow states, which I think are really important in all aspects of life, including health, but talk about flowing with life. Like 2020 has really been a year where you’ve had to, you either resist it, which you can. It’s just going to overrun you, everything that’s happening. Or you can just flow with it and pivot and figure out how do I operate in this new world reality that we have? And the same thing comes with health. When you are told that you have a gluten issue, then I have just given you a new reality and a responsibility because now you have a solution, but now it’s upon you to decide, how am I going to do this? Some people they need little step wise approaches like let’s conquer bread first. You know, some patients, I just tell them, look, you’re overwhelmed. Let’s just do bread. Like take the bread out. Then we’ll little by little, we’ll start kind of weeding out all the different places that gluten gets into the diet. And then other people are just all or none. I mean, I was all or none. And what I noticed within a month is for me, it was my mental clarity at the end of the 12 hour a day was just as sharp as I was at the beginning of the day. And I could not say that when I was eating gluten.

Dr. Cooper

Well, let’s run down that path on a broader sense. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is on page 89, you go into the cleanse and the beginning of the 28 day process, and I’m, I’m guessing that many people, unless they’re in there with you on a daily basis, feel completely overwhelmed. So we’re saying not just gluten, we’re saying a number of different things in addition to that, and coffee and sugar and alcohol. Is there a starter set for the person who isn’t an all in person, are there two or three things that you’d say, okay, I get that. Yeah, that’s a piece you don’t have to go all in. You could start with A, B and C as your starting point and then add D E and F or something like that?

Dr. Pedre

Look, yeah. The top two and across the board in what I’ve seen just from, from, um, you know, my 20 years now being with, taking care of patients, are dairy and gluten. And, you know, if you can start with those top two, that’s, that’s really big. For me, I had done, and for other patients sometimes, you know, more personalized might do some food sensitivity testing and find that there are other foods that might be problematic. And the thing is sometimes people need to get their feet wet. The problem with that, the problem is that if you’re, you know, and I’ll use an analogy, if you’re sitting on five thumbtacks and I take two of them away, did I take your pain away?

Dr. Cooper

Good question. That’s well said, yeah.

Dr. Pedre

You’re still sitting on three tacks that are pinching you.

Dr. Cooper

And maybe even more so because you haven’t distributed the weight across five anymore.

Dr. Pedre

The thing is, if you, if you do a self experiment and for some people, it works great. You know, sometimes it’s like, Oh, I took gluten out and my issues resolved. And it’s amazing, you know, so wonderful, but not for everyone. And what I say is, you know, sometimes you have to take out that threshold level of things that are instigators or triggers or mediators of the disease process. And once you take away enough of that burden, which could be the five thumbtacks, then you take away the pain that you carry from that. And if all you did was take away two and then four weeks later say, well, I tried, it didn’t work. But you didn’t do the whole thing. So you didn’t really do everything that you could have done to make it work. And that is a really tough thing for some people, especially in like, even outside of the happy gut diet, like the autoimmune paleo diet, you know, these are very restrictive, difficult diets for people.

Dr. Pedre

The thing is what I’ve found over the years is that when you do get a person over that border where you can get them to do all the things, and maybe they have to be done in a phased approach, maybe it’s slower. Maybe once every week you take one thing out or every two weeks until you finally get to the combination of everything that has to be out of the diet, then you can really see deep healing happening. You know, there’s a lot of variety in this, but for example, like a celiac patient, it’s incredible what happens when you just take gluten out. You make sure that there’s clearly no inadvertent cross-contamination, but I see patients that have multiple food sensitivities might have intolerances and food sensitivities, you know, and there’s so much available to eat nowadays, even what is quote unquote healthy. You know, when you walk into some of those healthy supermarkets, but it’s a landmine of things that could actually be bad for you.

Dr. Cooper

Clearly. All right. What if someone, they’re not noticing any specific issue, they’re not coming to this interview, they’re not listening to you saying, Oh, I hope he helps me with X, but they read your book. They’re listening to what you’re talking about. They get the connection between optimal health, not just fixing what’s wrong with you, but optimal health, and they want to make some improvements. Do they need to go through the same steps? Or do you have some other suggestions for someone in that kind of a situation?

Dr. Pedre

I always say like, you just never know what that percent is that perhaps is between you and that optimal version of you. You know, some people, yeah, they could be closer to it, but even making these changes might elucidate something that, that person wasn’t aware of that was causing a problem. A lot of times you don’t realize until you go through the process of eliminating and then reintroducing. So it’s not just the elimination, it’s the reintroduction of what was eliminated in foods. For example, like eggs. I had a patient who came in and she had been suffering with nausea for like four years. And she also had sores in her mouth that were believed to be like implantitis or an autoimmune condition. She had been to GI’s. And before she came to see me, she had been following different paleo diets, but they all allowed eggs. And then she decided, well, let me try the happy gut diet before she came to see me. And she had taken eggs out and finally the nausea she had lived with for years disappeared, it was the eggs and that’s not, and you know, it’s just, you never know. And, that’s an unusual thing, but I mean, I’ve had patients where cinnamon was the trigger for migraines, and they were putting cinnamon in their oatmeal every day and take the cinnamon out and now their migraine frequency dropped by 50% just by doing that.

Dr. Cooper

Interesting. Wow.

Dr. Pedre

So there’s a lot of things that we do on a daily basis that we think might not be harming us, but maybe we’re not, maybe we’re not living optimally, you know, call it biohacking like, you know, as I get older now in my forties, you know, I think you become more, I’ve always been interested in health, but as you get older, you become very interested in, you know, how do I not just maintain health, but like maintain optimal wellness. And even for me, it’s times of years where I do some more restrictive eating, cutting out certain things, you know, cause the diet always drifts, you know, we’re human, it’s always going to drift in different directions. It’s been, actually a gift to be in this, I know it’s going to sound kind of, contrarian, but, I think the quarantine in many ways has been a gift to be able to cook at home, all of my meals. To institute intermittent fasting after dinner, like not having any late night snacks, a lot of things that, and the other thing that I think is really important to mention here, which is another elephant in the room. So a lot of times people don’t don’t talk about, or they don’t want to talk about is the effect of stress on their bodies and also on the gut. Because stress is also another path that increases intestinal permeability, which is the pathway to increasing inflammation in the body and risk for all sorts of diseases. And what I think a lot of people realize is during quarantine is that there was a lot of stress in their lives that they just didn’t know was there because they just were operating with it as part of the normal and you take it away and suddenly you feel this inner peace that you did not have before.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah. Well said.

Dr. Pedre

The commute, everything. So I think we underestimate the effect of stress on the body and the importance of mindfulness as part of a whole body approach. And that’s why, you know, in my book, I put, I just threw the kitchen sink in there, I feel that way.

Dr. Cooper

We’ve got a chapter on yoga. We got the whole thing going here. Absolutely.

Dr. Pedre

But I, what I’ve learned in my years of being a doctor is that that is a key component of healing. You could do everything right with your diet, but still be living a type a lifestyle. And you’re not going to heal fully until you incorporate mindfulness breathing practices. You know, it doesn’t have to be yoga. It could be going out in nature. It could be being out in the ocean. It could be hiking in the mountains. You know, it’s different solutions for different people, but they all have the same thing in common, which is they lower your cortisol and they boost your oxytocin levels. So they help balance your sympathetic nervous systems. And I’m convinced after so many years, and maybe not so many years, 20 years, of being a doctor, 21, that you cannot heal if you’re in the sympathetic fight or flight response, even if you’re doing everything right, you’ve got to get into that parasympathetic state.

Dr. Cooper

I almost want to stop there cause that’s so powerful. Let do one last kind of wrap up question, just if there’s anything else, any final words of wisdom for those that are either trying to help their coaching clients, their own life, or maybe family and friends that we haven’t talked about that you want to get out there and make sure people are digesting.

Dr. Pedre

Yeah. We talked about mindset, you know, I think before you start any program, you need to first shift the mindset of the person. And I find it to be really powerful to incorporate gratitude on a daily basis. That’s another thing that I’ve actually started doing a couple of weeks ago, a little bit late into COVID, but, you know, I had a practice of waking up and expressing gratitude for something, you know, gratitude and setting an intention for the day. And I’ll give you an example, what I did recently, I started writing down my gratitudes a couple of weeks ago, instead of just saying them, it’s pretty incredible, like to put it on paper and see it. And, this past Saturday was July 4th. I was up in the country at my country home in Pennsylvania, and I woke up and I said, my intention today is to connect, connect with people. And my plan was, I was going to a beekeeping workshop at an organic farm. And then I went to the farmer’s market and then I went into a little town called Narrowsburg and it was crazy. I put that intention out and my gratitude that day was just for being out in the country, you know, being in this beautiful surrounding. All of these people at the farmer’s market wanted to speak with me. Like I put that intention out and I connected with the guy who was growing the microgreens. I met an acupuncturist, herbalist who had produced an immune boosting bone broth and someone who owns her own catering kitchen and makes gluten-free stuff. And like everybody wanted to connect with me. And all I did was start my day with the intention like today, I want to connect. So I, you know, if there’s anything to leave with is do not underestimate the power of having your clients set an intention, you know, and the rule is, my rule for intention is it needs to be something that’s so easy to do that at the end of the day, you can check it off and you were successful.

Dr. Pedre

So you don’t wake up and say, my intention is to reorganize my entire closet, answer my a hundred emails and write the first chapter, whatever. No, no, no, no. The intention is like, I’m going to smile at the person at the, where I go get my matcha tea or the coffee shop and wish them a good day. You know, that’s my intention for today. You know, whatever it is, it’s something that is so simple that at the end of the day, you check off and you did it. It’s a, it’s a win. It has to be a win for the day. And then gratitude because gratitude for, even anyone who lives in the negative, you cannot be in a negative mind space when you’re expressing gratitude. You know, and for those that can’t find a gratitude. I changed the question and I say, well, what is still good in your life? I had a patient yesterday who was upset that he couldn’t go on vacation, you know, travel restrictions and his wife and him they they travel every year in the summer for three weeks. And he was kind of having an adult tantrum as I like to call it. And I just looked at him and I said, you know, tell me what is still good in your life. Yeah, I know all these things are inconveniences, but what is still good? Let’s change the focus. And it’s funny cause adults are in many ways, no different than kids, you would probably do the same thing to your child and try to get them to focus on well, what are you still happy about? You know what’s still, what is still good? I think, you know, I’m not talking about food. We talked about gluten, dairy, all that, but I really think that this is as important as the rest, because when you’re in a space of gratitude, when you’re in a mindset of positivity, then you’re going to look at that fast food place. And you’re going to realize this doesn’t align with the vibration that I’m carrying. And I don’t want to eat this. Like it’s not even, it doesn’t even come from a sense of deprivation.

Dr. Cooper

Right, right. It’s not avoidance anymore. It’s just, it’s Oh my gosh, that’s not me.

Dr. Pedre

It’s choice. It’s like, that does not resonate with me. And thus it does not exist in my world anymore and I’m not deprived of it because I don’t even need it.

Dr. Cooper

Love it. Great, great way to wrap up. How do people find you? We’ll mention your book again, Happy Gut. Great read. Really a lot in here folks. And he does a good job of giving you the step by step. So you’re not, I don’t think you’ll feel that overwhelmed as you work through it, if you address those chapters. But if folks are wanting to follow you, do you have a Twitter or an email what’s the best from your end?

Dr. Pedre

Absolutely. First of all, my website, happygutlife.com. They can learn all about all the different programs that we have. We have a 20 day program, which is, we call it the happy gut reboot. And, but we also have a seven day detox that we just kind of redesigned our 14 day mini cleanse into a seven day thinking of people who want a quick detox, but don’t want to commit to those 20 days. You were asking me, you know, is there something quicker that people could do? So it’s a much easier program. And we worked with a chef to design it with a zero wait shopping list. So we tell you exactly what to buy. And you’re replacing two meals a day with a smoothie and the recipes are delicious and it’s all liver and gut supportive detoxification. So it’s kind of like a quick reset. So we call it the happy gut reset so they can find all of that on happygutlife.com. And then of course I’m on Facebook, Dr. Vincent Pedre, Instagram, I’m very active there as @Dr.Pedre. So you can find me easily on social media.

Dr. Cooper

Perfect. Perfect. Well, thank you again, speaking of gratitude, we really are grateful for your time. Great insights and we’ll definitely stay in touch on this stuff.

Dr. Pedre

Yeah. Thanks for having me. And yeah. Thanks for sharing your story about your kids. That’s so powerful. It’s such a good, such a great example for people.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah. That personal thing is, it’s a big deal. Yeah. Thank you for tuning into the number one podcast for health and wellness coaching and a special thank you to those of you who’ve been kind enough to share with others. We’ve been growing rapidly the last six months, and that’s a thanks to you. The name of Dr. Pedre’s Book is Happy Gut for those who would like to dig in a little bit further. And next week we welcome Dr. Martin Jones from the UK to the show. He specialized in the psychology behind optimal performance. And we’ll dig into the practical elements of that throughout our discussion. On the video front, I mentioned earlier, you’ve got access now to the YouTube coaching channel. It’s youtube.com/coaching channel. And what we’ve done is we created playlists over there. Now that our library has grown to over 60 videos, we’ve created playlists one for high performers, one for coaches looking for tools to share with their clients as a resource, one for coaches that are looking to grow their business, those types of things. So look for that. We try to make it really easy by creating those playlists out of those 60 so you could find what you wanted right away. Now it’s our chance to move forward, to move toward better than yesterday with a fresh batch of ideas and application. But as you know, it’s up to us to now put it into practice starting right now. This Dr. Bradford Cooper, with the Catalyst Coaching Institute, signing off, make it a great rest of your week. And I’ll speak with you soon on the next episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance Coaching podcast, or maybe over on the new YouTube coaching channel.