I Quit Medicine To share The Truth
Vitamin D Expert: The Supplement World Is Giving The WRONG Advice!
Nearly 1 in 3 American adults now take vitamin D, but Dr. Stasha Gominak says many of them are taking it wrong, and that done carelessly, supplementing can leave you worse off than before.
Dr. Stasha Gominak practiced neurology for over 20 years. She earned her MD from Baylor College of Medicine and completed her neurology residency at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. After working with her own patients patients, she believes that nearly everyone struggling to sleep shares the same hidden deficiency, a conclusion she published in 2 papers and built into RightSleep, the method she now teaches full time.
She explains:
Why she believes your skin is the best producer of vitamin D, and why she says no amount of pills or salmon can replace it
Why she believes insomnia isn't a behaviour problem but a chemical deficiency, and what she thinks changed when we moved indoors .
□ The role she says your gut bacteria play in producing your B vitamins
□ Why she believes taking vitamin D on its own can burn through your B vitamins, and what she says happened when she tried it herself
□ Why she connects the rise in conditions like ADHD, depression, fatty liver and diabetes to the same period, and what she thinks links them
□ Why she considers supplements a form of biohacking, and just as risky as any drug if you get them wrong .
1 Intro
2 Why So Many People Are Suddenly Struggling With Sleep
3 Why Healthy Young People Are Waking Up Exhausted With Headaches
4 How Your Brain Secretly Controls Every Stage Of Sleep
5 How Vitamin D Could Be The Missing Piece For Better Sleep
6 Are Sleep Chronotypes Actually Real Or Just A Myth?
7 How Can You Prove Vitamin D Deficiency Causes Disease?
8 What Happened When I Started Treating Patients With Vitamin D
9 Does Vitamin D Deplete Your Body's B Vitamins?
10 Can Vitamin B Supplements Really Fix Your Gut?
11 Why Minerals Could Be The Overlooked Key To Better Health
12 Does Modern Medicine Accept This Vitamin D Theory?
13 What Your Gut Microbiome Reveals About Your Sleep
14 How To Build The Right Sleep Protocol For Better Rest
15 Is Sunlight And Nutrition Better Than Supplements?
16 Can Redheads Naturally Produce More Vitamin D?
17 Why Spending Too Much Time Indoors Is Hurting Your Health
18 Can You Still Make Vitamin D On Cloudy Days?
19 Can Vitamin D Lamps Replace Natural Sunlight?
20 The Best Diet To Boost Vitamin D And Improve Gut Health
21 What Actually Helps If You Have Sleep Apnoea Or Narcolepsy?
22 My Most Controversial Health Opinion Explained
23 The Best Day Of Your Life And Why It Matters
Chapter 1: Intro
The vitamin world is giving the wrong advice. For instance, if you do not know what you're doing with them, they're just as dangerous as any drug you could put in your mouth.
The next thing is supplementing with vitamin D is not the same as being outdoors because we absorb it through our skin.
But what we've been told is don't ever let the sun touch your skin.
And another example is when we're deficient in this vitamin, our brain actually forgets how to sleep.
And I know that because I'm a neurologist and I wanted to tell the world about what my patients and I had and discovered together about making sleep better. And billions around the world have a sleep problem, but no one's treating it.
And the usual sleep treatment is behavioral like blackout curtains, go to bed at the same time.
But that is not something that's helped the people who wind up with me. They've tried all that already. And I've taken care of 28-year-olds who just had a stroke.
(sorry, 28-year-olds.)
We associate stroke with being old and having diabetes anđ hypertension and heart disease. (No.) So then I did a whole bunch of sleep studies because we found some exciting things by accident that turn out to have to do with vitamin deficiencies and deficiencies that have developed from being indoors too much. And we're starting to feel the effects of that like obesity. But there there are no obese squirrels in my backyard. The only obese animals are cats and dogs that we keep inside. And then we found out most of the sleep disorders are really linked to the gut, the microbiome and we could go into that but one of the interesting thing I learned was vitamin D is a hormone. There was a mistake made in calling it a vitamin.
(Well, I'm very curious to learn about all of this and also you've come up with this protocol called the right sleep protocol. Can you walk me through it? )
Absolutely. (Here's the first part of it.)
Chapter 2: Why So Many People Are Suddenly Struggling With Sleep
( What are they going to get from sitting with us and listening to us? How is their life going to improve? A completely unique and new way to look at why they are not sleeping well or why they have medical problems. I hope they will come away with the impression that I want to find out if my brain chemistry is normal or not normal for sleep. And you were a clinical assistant at professor of neurology at Stanford University Hospital and also you did a neurology residency at Harvard Medical School.)
Yes. I grew up in California. I became a biochemist and then I wound up being interested in medicine because biochemistry is being applied to humans in medicine. So I became a physician and then I went into neurology and I'm a neurologist and then by accident somebody insisted that they wanted a sleep study and this was in 2004. now.
(So you became you were a neurologist, you became a doctor and then you fell in love with sleep.)
Yes.
(How many patients have you worked with on the subject matter of sleep? What's the wide range of symptoms that they were experiencing and problems that they had just to get a sort of context on the variety and broadness of your experience? )
Probably 200. Since leaving neurology practice, I started a online business where I became a sleep coach. I'm estimating that I have affected another 5,000 to 6,000 people. And that's because I have a workbook that we're going to talk about. I have set out a series of steps that you should do and that those steps are based on brain chemistry, not on 'you do it wrong' which is what is all over the internet. You are just doing it wrong. The usual sleep treatment is behavioral, blackout curtains, white noise, go to bed at the same time, recognize your bedroom as a quiet place for sleep, etc.
That is not something that's helped the people who wind up with me. They've tried all that. They've tried everything. (So what are the range of symptoms?)
The first experience was with women who had headache. One of my patients said, "These drugs you're giving me haven't worked. I want a sleep study." She had sleep apnea. She was young and thin. She did not look like a fat older male with a fat tongue, which is what we were being sold at that time. The people with sleep apnea have a fat tongue. It gets in the airway and they need to wear one of these things over their face at night that blows air up their nose.
She put on the CPAP device. She came back two months later. Her headaches were gone. She'd had a daily headache for like five years. So it worked.
Yes. And I was like, well, no, there's no way because headaches are really a brain stem function problem. I have this whole construct in my mind and it's a biochemical problem. So, I think maybe it's allowing her to stay in deep sleep longer and she's making the chemicals that I'm focusing on that, allow her head pain switch to go into the 'off' position, which is where it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be 'off' until somebody hits you in the head and then it turns 'on'.
Hers is just turning on spontaneously all the time. So then, I did a whole bunch of sleep studies in young healthy females who had daily headache. They would frequently say something like, "I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and I can't go back to sleep. I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and my sleep is lighter after that. I wake up at 3:00 a.m. with a headache." And then I have, let's say, as an example, a little Mexican lady who comes in from northern Mexico. She's now living in Texas with her kids. She had never had headaches until she moved up and she's living with one of her grown kids and she's coming to see me for headaches. We happen to have a beach house in Mexico for a period of about 14 years. So I would go down there and I would think, what's going to happen to these people that have sleep apnea who don't have any electricity and they're living in palapas that are made of sticks with a thatch roof. They're still doing the same thing that they were doing 2,000 to 4,000 years ago. And you can't tell if the little vetsitos, the little old people are 60 years old or 80 years old. They might be 90 years old. They're not fat. They're not tired. They're great grandfathers. I begin to realize this is about living outside.
Humans were meant to live outdoors like every other animal. We have decided that we are special, but we're not special. Our biochemistry is like every other animal.
Okay. So, these two inputs are coming all at the same time. And I'm puzzling over these sleep studies. That first gal had sleep apnnea, but most of the women that I sent for those studies, they did not have sleep apnea or come back on the front page would say no significant apnea. There was a significant score. How many times do you stop breathing during the night? And then the next part is what do they have that's wrong with them? That came about a year and a half later when the pulmonologist says, "I don't know if you've noticed this, but your population has a really unusual finding. Most of them have delayed rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, no rapid eye movement sleep, or they have rapid eye movement sleep apnea, meaning they only stop breathing in rapid eye movement sleep.
(What's rapid eye movement sleep?)
Chapter 4: How Your Brain Secretly Controls Every Stage Of Sleep
So, this is called a hypnogog. And on this bottom axis is time. On this axis is a representation of what phase of sleep you are in. And it turns out that when we enter sleep, we go through what we call two lighter stages of sleep. The first phase that we enter is here, it's wake.
Couple of times this person woke, may not even be aware that they woke up and went back to sleep. But we enter sleep in light sleep one and light sleep two. These are called that because when the sleep experts started studying this in 1970, that's relatively recently. You could easily awaken someone out of these phases. Okay? And it has a certain brainwave pattern generates. And then they go into a phase that's called deep sleep or slow wave sleep. Everyone who has a sleep tracker device which is very common these days is now becoming familiar with, I have this much deep sleep. I have this much rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Deep sleep is really in the sleep industry called slow wave sleep because the brain waves are these slow big pattern.
We always go through a couple of light sleep phases and then we go into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and then we go through light sleep phases and then we go to deep sleep. Now the pivotal question that I asked the pulmonologist, why would my patient have stop breathing, that's what apnea means. Why would they stop breathing only in REM sleep? I thought this was an anatomic problem.
And he said, 'Well, we get the most paralyzed of all in REM sleep.' And I went, paralyzed? I am in amazement. Do you mean I'm paralyzed while l'm in bed? What if l stop breathing? What if my brain doesn't ever not like unparalyze me? That's terrifying. And it turns out every animal, including fruit flies who we're doing sleep studies on, get paralyzed in sleep. We get the most paralyzed in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. When this part needs to get repaired, it gets paralyzed, too. That means you have to have an anatomy that stays where the tube that you're trying to breathe through stays open while you are unconscious and trying to repair everything in this area. And I want to pull out the brain 🧠 to let you know where this is happening and why it's so important. This part that's white is called the brain stem. This part is actually fully in control when you are asleep. There's a little switch up here that goes boop. Stephen, you're not conscious anymore. The brain is still extremely active. In fact, the waveforms that they record from up here look the same in rapid eye movement sleep as they do in wake, suggesting that all sorts of things are happening.
Like you wake up abruptly because some a noise happens and you're in the middle of a dream. You're traveling. You're flying. You've huge colours going on. Your brain is extremely active during this time, but you're not aware of it. And this part right here, it is running your heart rate, your blood pressure. It is paralyzed you. This is where the autonomic nervous system comes in. The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are centered right here. They are meant to be the automatic driver of all the processes that you use during the day and they run sleep. This process that we're talking about here is fully run by the brain stem. So the sort of sleep wake cycles.
Exactly. The sympathetic is called fight or flight. The other one the parasympathetic is called rest and digest. It also is experienced as a state of calm. Okay. It is also what happens when we have an orgasm. There are things that are happening in the brain stem that feed back to why do they fall asleep?
Why do the guys fall asleep on top of her? Probably because it actually might increase the likelihood of fertilization. Maybe it has a survival risk.
These are all unconscious things that we don't, we aren't trained to connect together. But once you get into the parasympathetic nervous system, it turns out that the parasympathetic and the sympathetic are also very involved in what's happening here. And the basic idea is the first half of the night, and you'll see that we've also broken it into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 cycles usually of about an hour and a half. The first half of the night till about 3:00 a.m. is mostly run by the sympathetic side, which is the fight or flight side.
Yes. So when you're well balanced and you have a completely normally operating brain stem, you will have a couple of branches of REM sleep. But my patients did not have any REM sleep at all in the first half of the night. And in fact, they might have been lucky to have a little half an hour here between 4:30 and 5, if at all.
The second half of the night from 3:00 am to 7 am is run by the parasympathetic side. That means if you look at it in a certain way, you could say, well, wait, maybe they've lost the parasympathetic driver for the second half of their night. Seeing all these sleep studies that did not have this phase of sleep, they're actually one of the amount of REM sleep they should have. And as I go back through all the sleep studies, I realize, well, wait, don't we kind of do mood in REM sleep?
(What do you mean, do we do mood?)
When trying to link the comments that my patients have made and the drugs that I give them, I realize I've been giving out anti-depressants to this group of young, healthy women with headaches because they frequently say, "I'm in a terrible mood." So, they can't remember. (Isn't there a body of literature about memory being made permanent during REAM?) Yes, memory is linked and mood is linked. If I'm allowed to go back to sleep, if I have the proper brain chemistry to allow me to fall back into REM sleep, I will wake in a better mood. Those are the sorts of things that the patients will tell you if you ask about it and if they're able to fall back to sleep. Because my group did not have sleep apnea and could not wear CPAP masks. What's wrong with them? Why aren't they in this phase of sleep? This is a neurology problem. This is not a pulmonologist. This is not about breathing. This is about this brain stem and what is the chemistry of this? So then I go to the anatomy and then I find out what are the cells in this brain stem area that make us paralyzed.
Chapter 5: How Vitamin D Could Be The Missing Piece For Better Sleep
Just to make sure I'm with you, you're asking that question because you figured out that the women who are struggling with sleep and getting headaches have less of this REM sleep which is associated with being paralyzed. So the question you've then asked is, what are the chemicals that help us become paralyzed?
(Yes.) Okay. ( What are cells that take us into these what is the chemistry of that? ) Since l am so focused on biochemistry, there's actually a deficiency in a neurotransmitter that our moving doors means that we've lost a neurotransmitter that we must have to be normal humans.
And the reason why they don't know it is because there are no drugs that duplicate acetylcholine. There are no drugs. But ultimately what we found out together was that vitamin D makes the enzyme or the protein that makes a certain reaction happen that makes acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter the chemical that the autonomic parasympathetic side uses. We hear all the time about epinephrine and norepinephrine or adrenaline and noradrenaline. That's what happens when somebody rear ends you. Your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up. That's all dominant here. If you're wearing a sleep tracker, you'll see that there's a measure of what's called heart rate variability that goes up as the parasympathetic becomes dominant as the rest and digest.
Exactly. So all of the messages that we have to increase the heart rate or decrease the heart rate or to have a bowel movement or be constipated or to digest our food, those are all eventually run by a chemical and our body and our brain use these chemicals to send messages. This is actually a chemical deficiency state that happens when you move indoors.
Sunscreen, computers, and air conditioning all started in the 1980s.
And the reason why it's not as evident to you as it is to me is that I was alive before the 1980s. There were two kids in my class of 300 that were overweight. They didn't go on diets. They didn't have any trouble sleeping. They weren't on anti-depressants. The things that weren't common when I was a teenager that are common now are striking for those of us who are this age because we know it wasn't like that. What we've been told is it's toxins in the food.
It's that we aren't doing it right. I don't think those are things when you say 'I'm not doing it right,' then you should be able to tell me how to do it right. And that's what a lot of these podcasts are about. (How do I change what I do so I can feel rested and be at the peak performance of my life? That interests a lot of people. )
I would claim that there's a deficiency state in the background that you can actually fix and you can fix it, but it's through vitamins. And the our ideas about vitamins are wrong. Completely wrong. We've been taught that vitamins are not important or vitamins are very important, but they're easy to use.
They'Il never hurt us. Uh you just take a certain like who's your recommendation? What's the vitamin D recommendation dose that this guy's given out? We've been told things that are actually not true. And medicine hasn't taken responsibility for the fact that this is the core of biochemistry.
It was done by physicians. These original research articles in the 40s and 50s that the word vitamin was used was done by medical experts.
It's unfortunately been given to the government to give recommendations. It should never be in the hands of the government. The government doesn't know anything about our biochemistry.
So the supplement industry at the moment is a mess. And I say that only because I have seen dramatic things happen to my patients that are not what l expected. And vitamins are a form of biohacking. They're just
