Deanna Minich discusses Phytomelatonin with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

1:50:  Eating the Rainbow.  It’s scientifically true that it’s good to eat fruits and vegetables. She has spent a large portion of her professional career researching plants with various companies and now with Symphony Natural Health and phytomelatonin, a plant melatonin.

2:28:  Deanna cowrote a review article on melatonin:  Is Melatonin the “Next Vitamin D”?: A Review of Emerging Science, Clinical Uses, Safety, and Dietary Supplements.  Melatonin is often thought of as a hormone, but it is actually an important nutrient and we need to have levels that are fortified throughout our lifespan to ensure better resilience and better mitochondrial function.  According to Deanna, “vitamin D and melatonin are like brother and sister. One is connected to light and one is connected to darkness, so we need them both.” 

4:15:  Many people today suffer from darkness deficiency.  We don’t let ourselves be bathed in enough darkness so that our retinas can change the signaling by the peal gland to produce melatonin.  This has a lot to do with all the exposure we get in the evening to artificial light and our phones and computer screens and tv screens.  And a lot of this artificial light is blue light, which inhibits melatonin production.  And as we get older, our bodies tend to produce less melatonin.  In the evenings we need red light, not blue light. And this is why we should consider quality melatonin concentration.

4:52:  While the melatonin produced in the pineal gland may be the most important, melatonin is produced in organs throughout the body, including in the gut mucosa.  And Melatonin is produced in the gut at 400 times the levels produced in the pineal gland, but only the melatonin produced in the pineal gland in the brain works systemically and it informs the body about the circadian rhythm.  The melatonin in the gut plays a role in gut motility as well as in digestive secretions.

8:23  Melatonin testing.  The website phytomelatonin.com has a lot of the research studies and the latest publications on melatonin and phytomelatonin. Deanna feels that testing for melatonin is not very accurate, whether you use urine, saliva, or blood.  If we were going to measure melatonin, peak melatonin levels tend to occur between 2 and 4 am.

10:56  Benefits of melatonin.  Melatonin promotes sleep and one of the ways it does this is by decreasing core body temperature and this could be especially problematic for perimenopausal women who get hot flashes at night. The primary way melatonin helps with sleep is by resetting our circadian rhythm.

17:46  Dosage.  Deanna feels that we should use the lowest dose for the shortage duration. Dr. Richard Wurtman has shown us that to take a physiological dosage for sleep, we should take .3 mg.  If we need help with sleep or we are jet-lagged and we need to reset our circadian rhythm, then 3 mg makes sense. 

19:20  We may want higher dosages of melatonin for the antioxidant effect. Melatonin is an antioxidant, it’s an anti-inflammatory, and it’s a mitochondrial regulator.  Dr. Paolo Lissoni has looked at the benefits of melatonin for cancer and to work synergistically with certain types of chemotherapy, but this should only be done under the supervision of a practitioner.

21:09  Brain benefits of melatonin.  Melatonin may aid the glymphatic process where the brain detoxifies itself.   This aids in degrading toxic amyloid beta and hyperphosp...

Dr. Ben Weitz answers questions on Gastrointestinal Disorders.

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Podcast Highlights

0:59  The first question is: “I have stomach pain and I went to a gastroenterologist who did a colonoscopy and an endoscopy, and said there was nothing wrong. But then Prilosec was prescribed because that would help with the symptoms. Does that mean that my stomach pain is all in my head?” The answer is absolutely not.  Endoscopy and colonoscopy are ways to look for structural problems like growths, obstructions, pockets, parasites, and inflammation (such as with Inflammatory Bowel Disease).  But the most common gastrointestinal conditions are considered functional rather than structural and the most common condition is Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which occurs in up to 20% of the population. But the small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) that is believed to be the most common cause of IBS cannot be seen on a typical endoscopic or colonoscopic exam.  Dr. Pimentel did develop a specialized procedure that allows accurate sampling of the bacteria throughout the small intestine, but this complicated procedure is not typically performed.  Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) can create pain, gas, bloating, and diarrhea or constipation.  When you eat fermentable fiber, the bacteria in the small intestine will produce hydrogen or methane or hydrogen sulfide gas, which results in these symptoms.   SIBO is one form of dysbiosis of which there are other forms, including Large Intestinal bacterial overgrowth, small intestinal fungal overgrowth, candida overgrowth, pathogenic bacteria, parasites such as worms and other microorganisms.  Or you can just have a low amount of healthy bacteria.  Any form of dysbioisis can create various GI symptoms.

9:10  Next question, “Dr. Weitz, I have a lot of gas and bloating, especially if I eat broccoli or Brussels sprouts. What do you think is the cause and what can I do about it? And should I take Gas-X?”  First we need to try to find the cause of the gas and bloating.  They might just have sensitivity to broccoli and Brussels sprouts or it might be that these foods are high in fermentable fiber and they are suffering with Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO).  The best way to diagnose SIBO is with a lactulose SIBO breath test. It is usually also beneficial to do a Functional Medicine oriented stool test like the GI Map and we might want to run an organic acids test to help us to identify Small Intestinal Fungal Overgrowth (SIFO).

13:18  The next question is “I have stomach pain, should I take probiotics, fermented foods, or digestive enzymes?”  While taking probiotics may be helpful for a number of functional GI disorders and some prominent practitioners use probiotics as their first line therapy for such conditions, for patients with SIBO, taking conventional probiotics may not be appropriate, at least in the beginning of the treatment phase.  There is a problem when citing research studies showing benefits of probiotics, since studies using different formulations of probiotics have been lumped together and this is not appropriate. This would be like lumping studies of various antibiotics together and then stating that antibiotics are effective for treating a particular condition.  Each probiotic product should be tested separately from others. We need to be cautious about using probiotics that might increase bacterial counts in the small intestine when there is already too many bacteria growing there.  This is why it makes more sense to use natural antimicrobials to reduce some of the bacteria, containing ingredients like oregano oil, berberine, allicin,

Dr. Aristo Vojdani discusses Long COVID and Immune Dysfunction at the Functional Medicine Discussion Group meeting on January 26, 2023 with moderator Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

7:14  Between 1990 and 2000 those practicing medicine were facing a new disease that was called chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia.  These patients were fatigued and had trouble getting out of bed for a period of more than six months.  A number of organs were affected, including the gastrointestinal, pulmonary, muscular, skeletal, brain, and the immune systems.  Many articles were published in scientific journals and some felt that Epstein Barr virus was responsible for chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia, while others felt that cytomegalovirus or HSV1 and 2, or HHV-6, HHV-7, HTLV-1, Spumavirus, chlamydia, or mycoplasma infection were responsible.  These were also very similar to the symptoms displayed by patients with a history of exposure to toxic chemicals, molds, mycotoxins, or silicon breast implant.  It became clear that the cause of chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia was multifactorial. In 1999 in the Journal of Internal Medicine, Dr. Vojdani published a letter that a Single aetological agent may not be feasible in chronic fatigue syndrome.  Not much has changed since 1999 with chronic fatigue/fibromylagia, except that the name was changed to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and now the SARS-CoV-2 virus may be playing a role as this condition appears to be part of long COVID. 

13:40  10-20% of individuals who had COVID may develop long COVID.  The majority of cases are those that had severe COVID, though not necessarily.  COVID may lead to the reactivation of EBV, HHV-6 and other viruses and this may contribute to the development of long COVID.  These reactivated viruses may produce super antigens in order to hide from the immune system and this may cause a disturbance in the gut microbiota.  By running the Lymphocyte Map test, clinicians can design treatment modalities.

16:12  Dr. Vojdani has published nine articles on COVID in the last few years, including two articles published in Frontiers in Immunology in 2021 and in Clinical Immunology in 2020 reporting their research that 20-25 human tissue antigens strongly reacted with monoclonal antibodies made against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is the best evidence of cross reactivity between SARS-CoV-2 and human tissue. This shows the extreme level of potential autoimmunity of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. [Reaction of Human Monoclonal Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 Proteins With Tissue Antigens: Implications for Autoimmune Diseases, A. Vojdani, E. Vojdani, D. Kharrazian.]  Therefore, autoimmunity is definitely a component of long COVID.  

20:02  What is Long COVID?  According to the CDC, Long COVID is defined as a range of new or ongoing health problems that people can experience four or more weeks following the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection:  1. Shortness of breath, 2. Memory loss, 3. Fatigue, 4. Anosmia (loss of sense of smell), 5. Gastrointestinal distress, 6. Autoimmune symptoms, 7. other symptoms.  There are five major hypotheses: 1. Viral persistence, including in the GI tract and the brain that is not detected by blood tests, 2. Reactivation of latent viruses such as EBV and HHV-6, 3. The expression of viral superantigens in order to hide from the immune system, 4. Disturbance of the gut microbiome, and 5. Multiple tissue damage, immune disorder and autoimmunity. 

23:30   Viral Persistence.