October 12, 2018

Gut Health = Healthier You with Dr. Michael Ruscio

30 minutes

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Michael Ruscio explains the importance of a gut health for a healthier you.

Dr. Ruscio gives smart, busy people suffering from symptoms like daily bloating, constant fatigue, and unexplained weight gain simple steps to start living a healthy, enjoyable life again – no matter how long you’ve been suffering for.

Specializing in autoimmune, thyroid, and digestive disorders, Dr. Ruscio has spoken at The SIBO Symposium Summit, Paleo FX, Ancestral Health Symposium, Sean Croxton’s Digestion Sessions, as well as many other international conferences and top health podcasts.

Main Questions Asked about Gut Health:

What’s the main focus of your book?

How is your book different from the other digestive health books out there?

Can you briefly talk about hydrochloric acid and gluten?

Can you explain the gut-brain connection?

What about the gut-sleep connection?

Can you explain the gut-hormone connection?

What about the gut-metabolism connection?

Key Points made by Dr. Ruscio about Gut Health:

I wanted to write a book that would be a complete manual for the user to apply the litany of different options they have toward improving their digestive health.

Our ultimate goal would be to make someone feel empowered and resilient, not fearful and reliant. And that was my chief goal.

I’m starting to use the term ‘gluten restriction’ more than I am ‘gluten elimination’ or ‘gluten free’. I think that deliberate language is important, because I’ve seen a number of patients who have been indoctrinated into eating as if they had Celiac disease when they don’t have Celiac disease, and they also never quantified they have any discernible negative reaction to gluten.

Where the dietary restriction of gluten poses a more innocuous problem that hasn’t been appreciated is the psycho-social stress that it produces.

Regarding hydrochloric acid there’s an over reliance or an overzealous tend to recommendation hydrochloric acid supplementation in natural medicine. And juxtaposed along with that, there is an over recommendation of acid suppressing medication in conventional medicine. The truth lies somewhere kind of in the middle.

When I had some digestive issues myself the most prominent symptom was brain fog, or just a feeling of the inability to think, the inability to articulate words, word searching, you’re looking for a word but you can’t find it. That sort of thing. And it was very much food reactive in my case.

When things are, for lack of a better term, not happy in the gut, you can have an over release of histamine, which can cause this inflammatory immune reaction that can lead to brain fog, fatigue, insomnia, an impaired sneeze of well-being, anxiety. And excitingly, there’s definitely this very interesting gut-brain connection.

We know that at least some preliminary but interesting evidence shows that the treatment of some digestive imbalances, most namely H. pylori, can lead to an improvement in thyroid autoimmunity.

By improving someone’s gut health, we have seen someone need up to 50 percent reduction of thyroid medication, while at the same time, they were feeling vastly better.

It’s overlooked that an inflammation in the gut can cause insomnia. In fact, in Healthy Gut, Healthy You, there’s a great diagram that shows all these different factors that are gut-related, how they can lead to impairments in sleep.

Inflammation that occurs in the gut, and that inflammation seems to impair the production of melatonin, much of which occurs in the gut. And melatonin is both needed for a healthy gut, due to its antioxidant activities, but it also helps you to sleep.

The area where I’ve seen the most promising improvements in symptoms has been with female hormone imbalances, able to be remedied by improving one’s digestive health.

The gut has both estrogen and progesterone receptors. And part of the reason why women see their digestion change as they go through their cycle, and things like pain or altered bowel function occur, is because the female hormones do affect function in the bowels.

The skin is a reflection of the gut.

The degree to which your digestion is imbalanced, there’s a chance that that digestive imbalance may be negatively contributing to your metabolism.

You can have symptoms that are non-digestive in nature, like fatigue, or brain fog, or insomnia, or joint pain, that’s being caused by a digestive problem. Even if you don’t have digestive symptoms.

Before you go exploring things like adrenal fatigue, and hypothyroid, or metal detox, or Lyme, my recommendation would be to start with the digestive tract.

Resources Mentioned for Gut Health:

Podcast Interview – Treatment for Thyroid Autoimmunity with Dr. Michael Ruscio

Podcast Interview – Gut Health and Digestive Health with Dr. Michael Ruscio

Book – Healthy Gut, Healthy You: The Personalized Plan to Transform Your Health from the Inside Out

Dr. Ruscio’s website

Book – Reclaim Your Energy and Feel Normal Again

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