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Pyroluria can feel pretty exhausting

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If you’re new to pyroluria, it is a social anxiety condition, where physical and emotional symptoms are caused by deficiencies of vitamin B6 and zinc. As well as feeling anxious, shy, or fearful or experiencing inner tension since childhood (and often hiding these feelings from others), digestive symptoms are common and we cover these in my interview Low zinc, social anxiety/pyroluria and the gut on the virtual conference called Better Belly Project 2.0, hosted by Summer Bock, one of the leading gut health experts.

What you’ll learn:

  • How to figure out if you have the social anxiety called pyroluria and what key nutrients are missing in these cases
  • The zinc connection to the microbiome, digestion and social anxiety
  • Digestion symptoms we see in pyroluria
  • Is introversion a personality trait or a biochemical imbalance?
  • Can collagen and gelatin make you more depressed and anxious?

I talk about how you can feel when you have pyroluria and how I can relate to all this:

You may feel uncomfortable in group sittings, you may feel uncomfortable with interacting with large crowds of people. A lot of people will say, “I’m really good at speaking on stage, but don’t make me mingle with the people after I presented on stage because then I’ve got to interact with a lot of people.” You’ve got this inner tension where you deal with it, and you cover it up, and you push through.

I can totally relate because I have pyroluria myself. This is why I’m so passionate about sharing this topic because I grew up pushing through and dealing with it. I remember the first day of school, wanting to walk to school on my own. I didn’t want my mom to take me into school. I was always this person who kind of pushed through and forced myself to do things.

We get through life like that, but it can get pretty exhausting. With my whole anxiety that started in my late 30s, which was a result of this perfect storm, it was gluten sensitivity, and adrenal issues, and low serotonin, and low GABA. And part of my perfect storm was this pyroluria that I discovered. I find that a lot of my clients will push through, and they’ll deal with this, for many, many years.

But, as things start to shift, as they’re starting to go into perimenopause, and the hormones are getting disrupted, and they’re becoming more stressed, and they’ve got adrenal issues going on, and they discover they’ve got food sensitivities. This all conspires together to make their symptoms much worse. Then, they find they can’t socialize, or when they are socializing, they just feel so anxious, it’s just debilitating, and they can’t actually function.

There are overlaps with the pyroluria questionnaire and an introverts questionnaire I came across on the Huffington post. Based on feedback from 100s in my community I’m proposing that introversion is not a personality trait, or maybe it’s not all personality, but there’s this biochemical component.

We also have a great discussion about collagen and gelatin, which can help to heal the gut, but may also be depleting serotonin levels and increasing anxiety/depression in some susceptible individuals:

I actually did a mini-survey with the people in my Facebook community, and I said, “Anyone using collagen or gelatin, have you noticed an increase in anxiety, an increase in depression, agitation, heart palpitations, insomnia?” I got very varied response. Half of the people said yes, they felt worse, more anxious, more depressed. Another 40% said no, they feel great. Then, interestingly enough, there was a few people that said they use collagen and gelatin to actually lower their serotonin levels.

If you aren’t yet signed up you can see the event schedule and register here for Better Belly Project 2.0. It runs through December 14th and Summer is interviewing 49 experts who are leaders in the field of digestive health.

Here are some topics you may also enjoy:

  • What To Do If Your Gut Isn’t Getting Better: Jennifer Fugo (also today)
  • Leaky Gut and Your Child: Dr. Elisa Song (also today)
  • 17 Right and Wrong Ways to Eat Ferments: Summer Bock (also today)
  • Treatment Options for Chronic Yeast Issues. What is the evidence?: Dr. Jessica Drummond (coming up tomorrow)
  • Metals That Impact Gut Function: Wendy Myers (coming up in a few days)

I hope you enjoy my interview and these other expert interviews!

Do you have pyroluria and can you relate to any of this? Feel free to leave your comments and questions and comments below.

Gut Hormone Connection with Dr. Jolene Brighten: Better Belly Project 2.0

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Dr. Jolene Brighten is one of my favorite women’s health experts and her Gut Hormone Connection interview with Summer Bock on the Better Belly Project 2.0: is fascinating. Here are a few snippets for you to enjoy about the connection between your thyroid, digestion and SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) specifically:

In the case with hypothyroidism, this is something that’s a really interesting phenomenon. Your thyroid can be functioning perfectly well, but you can still be hypothyroid because it’s not about just the thyroid function but the conversion of T4 to T3. T3 helps your mood, it’s what helps your menstrual cycle, it’s your metabolism. It does so many wonderful things. Every single cell needs that active T3.

Well, your gut and your liver are major sites of activating that T3. If they are unhealthy they’re not going to convert your T4 to T3. Then, you get into a loop because if you don’t have enough T3, now, you don’t stimulate hydrochloric acid. If you don’t stimulate hydrochloric acid production, then, none of the other gastrointestinal organs are going to work as well. Your gallbladder is not going to contract. You’re not going to have pancreatic enzymes, which sets up a perfect environment for SIBO.

She goes on to share how T3 also affects motility, which is a major factor when it comes to SIBO.

Adrenal issues and high cortisol issues are common with the clients I work and Jolene shares more on this topic too, and how this can play a role in anxiety (and insomnia):

If the gut is inflamed, so if you’ve got gut infections going on, then, those adrenal glands are going to kick into hyperdrive. We can see they’ll try to secrete cortisol so that we can drop that inflammation. In addition to that, they’ll start spiking epinephrine and norepinephrine over time, which when those hit the brain, we’re going to feel anxious and panicked.

She also covers orgasms, and so much about birth control pill concerns like the impacts on the microbiome and an increased risk of Crohn’s disease. It’s an interview that is not to be missed!

Summer Bock, one of the leading gut health experts, is interviewing 49 experts who are leaders in the field of digestion, nutrition, and health in this huge, week-long virtual conference called Better Belly Project 2.0: Crushing the Critters, Plugging the Leaks, & Balancing the Biome for Your Best Body Ever

Summer’s goal is to create a great resource with a few different tracks to make it easier for you to navigate the information:

  1. Gut Health Basics
  2. Gut-Brain Axis (my interview “Low zinc, social anxiety/pyroluria and the gut” is in this track)
  3. Wellness Professional
  4. Fermentation
  5. Microbiome & Probiotics

This online event will provide exceptional value, knowledge, and truly life-changing insights from authors, professors, scientists, fermented foods experts, and wellness practitioners who have an understanding on how you can improve your digestive health amidst all the processed foods, antibiotics, stress and lack of probiotic-rich foods in the diet.

The dates are December 8-14th and there’s no charge to attend when you register in time for the live event. You can see the event schedule and register here for Better Belly Project 2.0

I hope you enjoy it and get as much out of it as I plan too! I learn new information at all these online events too!

Do you have thyroid issues and digestive symptoms? Feel free to leave your questions and comments below.

Gut healing bone broth and SIBO on the Better Belly Project

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A quick reminder that The Better Belly Project: Crushing the Critters, Plugging the Leaks, and Balancing the Biome for Your Best Body Ever, hosted by fermentationist, Summer Bock started on December 9th!

Here are some snippets from some of the many excellent interviews.

Kellyann Petrucci, M.S., N.D., is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Dr. Kellyann’s Bone Broth Diet and she shares this about the gut healing bone broth:

I call this my liquid gold, and this is my gold standard, this is my go-to, this is the love of my life, I have to say, is bone broth. Here’s why I love bone broth so much. We talked about your intestines, the long tubing. Well we talked about it being red and inflamed. Think about it like this. If you’ve got a sunburn, it’s inflamed, it’s red, you want to heal it, you want to get it to feel better, so the two things you’re looking for is you want to get out of pain, you want it to feel better, and you want it to heal. You put some aloe vera on there, it calms it, it soothes it, it heals it. But guess what? That’s what bone broth actually does to your gut. That’s what it does to your intestines. It goes in there and it heals it. It seals it. It provides nutrition.

To me it’s one of the most premier and best foods that you can possibly put in your body, and there’s nothing trendy about it. There’s nothing trendy about bone broth. It’s simply putting some healthy bones in a pot with some water. Celery, onions, and carrots for some flavoring, if you want. Throw them in there. Any spices that you want. You want to take that and simmer it for anywhere from 18 to 24 to 48 hours depending on what your goal is and what you’re doing. Just simmer it for a long period of time.

You want to get it gelatinous, because one of the big hitches, one of the beautiful things about bone broth is it really helps your body mainline it’s own collagen. We know that collagen, that’s the glue that holds us together, it’s super important. We lose that as we get older. Cooked collagen is gelatin. Gelatin is a big, big word, because that word means so much to gut health and gut healing. Gelatin, it heals everything so beautifully, particularly the gut. That’s why for me, that’s what I’ve used with patients, with readers, with celebrities, with everybody I work with, my go-to is bone broth. I love it because, again, I’m into the trifecta effect. I want something that I give my patients to work on so many levels so they get a lot done with a little bit of effort, and that’s why I love bone broth.

Dr. Vincent M. Pedre is author of Happy Gut and he shares about Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO)

I’m excited to talk about SIBO because I feel that it is one of the most misunderstood diagnoses. In Western medicine, so regular MD’s, they don’t know how to treat it. They don’t understand the length that it has to be treated in order to resolve the SIBO. SIBO doesn’t resolve overnight. It didn’t happen overnight. It’s not going to resolve overnight.

What happens in SIBO is that you get too many of the good guys in the small intestine, so an imbalance occurs.

If you have methane-predominant SIBO, often these people have constipation because the methane causes the migrating motor complex that controls peristalsis. It causes it to malfunction. These people will develop constipation.

He covers the SIBO breath test and how it measures hydrogen and methane, and the effects of fermented foods:

What we’re looking for and measuring in those samples is hydrogen and methane. Now, this is key because we’ve been talking about bacteria up to now. The methane producers are a genus of bacteria or species that is more archaic. It’s called archaea. They’re not even sure that they’re actually bacteria. They’re very fastidious. They’re a little bit harder to treat.

If it is a methane-predominant and it is probably more Archaea, they will, more likely, do well with fermented foods. It’s not going to worsen their symptoms. It actually will help them get better. We need the lactobacillus to out-compete the archaean to keep it in control.

He covers pros and cons of antibiotics and other medications, herbal approaches and probiotics, pro-kinetics, can you treat it through diet, with fermented foods and changing the diet into a low-FODMAP diet, avoiding the foods with the short-chain carbohydrate, plus tips to improve digestion like reducing stress, having fun, tips for stimulating the vagus nerve and much more. It’s a wonderful interview!

My anxiety-gut interview airs on December 14th and I address the following in my interview:

  • IBS and anxiety
  • psychobiotics
  • serotonin and the second brain
  • GABA and GABA-eating bacteria
  • the vagus nerve and the gut-brain connection
  • how to use tryptophan and GABA to ease anxiety (and cravings)
  • melatonin for gut motility and sleep
  • glutamine for gut healing, calming and intense sugar cravings
  • prebiotics to lower high cortisol
  • and probiotic-rich foods too of course!

Why attend?

  • From the bacteria and flora, to your digestion and your elimination, the way your belly is operating has a lot to do with how you are operating.
  • You’ll be able to customize your experience so that whether you’re a full-fledged nutrition geek, or simply interested in maximizing your belly’s efforts you’ll find the knowledge and information that is perfect for you.
  • With all the toxins we’re exposed to, with processed foods and the stress in our lives, it’s more important than ever that your digestion is dialed in.

I hope you’ll join me and the other experts on The Better Belly Project: Crushing the Critters, Plugging the Leaks, & Balancing the Biome for your Best Body Ever

It’s going to be a great online event and I’m so pleased to be part of it. I can’t wait for you to hear the expert speakers: other authors, nutrition professionals, physicians, fermentation specialists and cutting edge experts that are going to be teaching everything belly.

When: December 9th-14th (Put it in your calendar now!)
How much: Nothing!
Where: Here! /online

See you there!