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All the magnesium, calcium, selenium, manganese, all these things that nobody's really interested in and they all are in list on their multi multivitamin.
All through the same time frame, people are developing iron deficiency and iron overload. And it turns out that the bacteria have been a pivotal part in our intestine, speaking to our body about whether or not our iron level is low or high in the liver or in the blood system in our bone marrow or in our brain. And if you do not have a specific bacteria
Chapter 11: Why Minerals Could Be The Overlooked Key To Better Health
called Lactobacillus reuteri, you will be missing a brand new metabolite or chemical that was named after that bacteria just in the last three years that's called reuteri. That is one of the chemical messengers that our body uses.
So that means many of the deficiency states that the naturopaths and the functional medicine people are studying are all linked to the fact that this naturopaths and the functional medicine people are studying are all linked to the fact that this bacterial tube has been doing all these things for us all along. And when you lost them, each individual person has its own set of specific deficiency states that must be addressed for their sleep to get better.
I want to go back to Madeline.
Chapter 13: Does Modern Medicine Accept This Vitamin D Theory?
So, my question was because the research that I'm reading says that vitamin D does not cause, trigger or create a B vitamin deficiency.
No, it's not in the literature except my article. Taking vitamin D supplements will not drain your body's B vitamins.
Let me read my title. Vitamin D deficiency changes the intestinal microbiome, reducing B vitamin production in the gut.
The resulting lack of pandaththenic acid adversely affects the immune system, producing a pro-inflammatory state associated with atheroscerosis and autoimmunity.
This is a brand new discovery made by someone who's not a scientist, who's not working in the primary lab, who is a clinician.
And the impact of this is only as strong as I can get this the ideas out there and talk about what happened to my patients.
Now, is it plausible that there's a sort of a intermediary link between the two?
I'm reading some things here that say people are very frequently both low in vitamin D and vitamin B12 at the same time. And this is because they share the same root cause like a poor gut absorption, aging, or a restrictive diet, not because one vitamin is destroying the other. That's what we've been told.
We've also been told that old people don't need as much sleep and that old people get a bad gut as they get old. It is my belief now that it is there is an absolute link between the production of D and I don't have the articles for this even though this is dogma at the moment that our production of vitamin D goes down as we get older. So, if you look back to that person who was 75, who didn't get sick until they were 75, their skin production, even though they're still out there with their truck farm and still raising their own food, their skin production rate of vitamin D goes down. And this is probably true for every animal. And then as their D goes low, they lose their microbiome. And then they die of one of the multiple diseases that are linked to this multiple deficiency state. It's a different lens to look through that says there is actually a system that allowed us to live without medical problems that weren't either related to epidemics of childhood illness or starving to death.
And as long as we had good diets, you can actually look at 1945 to about 1985 and say, what was the ideal for the humans that lived rurally in the United States? Did they live to be 75 years old? and then get diseases.
So it's my claim that those people didn't go to the doctor because there weren't any around them and then things started to happen to them that instead of looking at it through the lens of this disease means this drug that instead we say we should pre-preventing this by paying attention to what vitamin D does in the body and what the vitamin Bs do in the body and ultimately that is linked to most of our diseases.
Chapter 14: What Your Gut Microbiome Reveals About Your Sleep
So l'll read the conclusion of your study here which was published in 2016. I hypothesize and it's important to say this is a hypothesis that the parallel epidemics of abnormal sleep and abnormal intestinal microbiome are linked to one another through vitamin D deficiency.
Proper supplementation doses of vitamin D plus all eight B vitamins appears to return the intestinal microbiome to normal in 3 months. Reinstating the normal microbiome not only treats IBS symptoms, it returns the supply of vitamin B's to their natural daily doses. The B vitamins are neither good for us nor unnecessary. They are good for the person who needs them and only until the normal source picks up again. Both sleep disruption and pain can be caused by large doses of B vitamins once the intestinal microbiome has returned to normal. The B vitamins are very biologically intertwined both in their intestinal production and cellulose cellular use. This suggests that B vitamins, aside from B12, were not meant to be used individually and returning to restorative sleep with normal supply of the building blocks of cellular repair has the potential to repair the pro-inflammatory state seen in association with a chloris atheroscerosis as well as the hyperadrogenic state of associated with hypertension, heart disease and stroke. It appears that given the proper essential elements for normal sleep, the body is designed to repair every physical injury that occurs during normal daily use and may even retain a memory of long deferred repairs. So essentially, you're saying that if you can return the body's vitamin D and and B levels to normal, then the body will kick back up and start producing the everything it needs. Yes, I guess the scientific consensus at the moment is saying that there's not a link between vitamin D and a vitamin B well it's saying that vitamin D does not cause a a vitamin B deficiency.
Correct. And you disagree with that? Absolutely.
And now could it be the case that there's some intermediary like i.e. if I take lots of vitamin D, it disrupts my magnesium production and the magnesium production is having an impact on vitamin B. And could it be the case that it's something else?
Yes, of course. Okay.
And in fact, it's way more complicated than you and I have talked about. And where you finally arrive is actually at co-enzyme A deficiency.
And that is a very important chemical.
It runs our mitochondrial health and our ability to make energy. And it's linked to all the degenerative diseases etc.
So, it's not that l don't understand the idea that once you're a hammer, everything's a nail because that's what I was told by all of my colleagues that you're trying to explain everything. It's that I saw Meline go back to work and we haven't even talked about what happened to Natalie.
What happened to Natalie?
Natalie got better and actually how she first with the D like most of the patients, she started to sleep better but at the end of two years she stopped sleeping better. She actually lost weight which was the case with several of the women that were postpartum who had complained about that. So in some my interpretation was in someone who is less affected than Meline was the DB50 combination especially in the setting of being after the pregnancy is really all somebody who was relatively normal at the start of their life needs and then she got better. Her anti-depressant went away. Her postpartum depression cleared her high heart rate. So the other thing that we didn't mention is many of these women who are very interested in exercise and doing exercise had high heart rates of 110 or above sitting quietly and had not been like that before. Their high heart rates come down. So she came back to being her normal self again and did she have to come off the vitamin B? She only took it for 3 months.
Okay. And then she did a multivitamin and then eventually almost everybody needs to be off the multivitamin completely. It is my belief that if all of this happens spontaneously in every other animal on the planet, then we shouldn't have to take supplements either. The squirrels are not going to GNC shops to buy supplements.
That means if there's a mistake made like we move indoors and we give back what is needed to get the normal microbiome, then you should assume that your body will go back to supporting itself. And Natalie's she's good again. Natalie's back to being a triathlete and doing great.
Chapter 15: How To Build The Right Sleep Protocol For Better Rest
If we zoom out for a second, what is the advice you'll give to all of my listeners now? There might be millions of them all over the world. Some of which are struggling with sleep. Some of them just want to, you know, optimize their sleep a little bit. What is the the over overarching advice, the thing that all of them could could do to make sure they sleep better in your view?
One, do the behavioral cognitive stuff first. Make the bike out curtains. Do the whole thing. If you haven't done that with the eye cover, then go ahead and do that. And if that's all you need, do not mess around with supplements.
Two, if you've already done the behavioral changes, then go to my website, read about the ideas, or listen to this podcast, and see whether or not the ideas there feel like they apply to you.
You've come up with this protocol called the right sleep protocol. What is that? And can you walk me through it?
Sure. So, the right sleep program is a process of taking your D to a certain level, supplementing B12 if your B12 is at a certain level below a certain level, taking B50 for 3 months, and then taking a multivitamin. And that is until your body says, gee, I might need more Bs.
This is a diagram. And you have a beautiful step-wise visual assist here. The first 3 months, if your B12 is low, you will take B12 as a separate supplement.
And keep in mind, there's a lot to be learned about multivitamins. For instance, many multivitamins say multivitamin on the front, but they actually have the equivalent of B50 in them. They have 50 milligrams of all these B vitamins. In fact, if you go to an expensive vitamin store, they put up the doses of B s.
The doses of these vitamins are extremely important for the way you feel every day. If you get it right, you feel energetic, perky, and wonderful all day.
If you get it wrong, you feel awful in the same way you did before. You have to look at the back. You have to learn some of the name of these vitamins. Most people are not that interested in that. If you want to get better, that's what you have to do.
So, the first step is you're taking all four of these.
Then in the second step for a period of usually 3 to 4 months, you're still taking B12 if you were B12 deficient.
You're still taking vitamin D and you're adjusting your vitamin D dosing based on recommendations based on your D levels that you're doing every month.
And I show you how to get them done properly because the vitamin D levels that your doctor is doing are not accurate, unfortunately. nor do they know that or care and you're still taking a multivitamin.
Then after the three months that are depicted here, it turns out if your sleep is much better, you will actually get to a place where your body will stop sleeping well again.
And it turns out that your brain is asking for more additional B s.
The basic bottom line is the sleep is a thing that once you learn how to use it and once you learn the concept that if in the third or fourth month of this program, my sleep gets much better and then in the sixth month it gets worse again, what you should take from that is my brain really knows how to do this. It was able to get me to sleep from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. with one brief wake up. Went back to sleep. Didn't get up to pee and I have no pain when I wake up and I feel energetic all day long. It knows how to do that. When it doesn't do it again two months later, the message is not, "Oh man, I knew it wouldn't work cuz everything else I've tried didn't work."
Instead, it means what my brain is asking for is something else. Then you address that.
On my website, I also have multiple videos of Q&As's addressing questions like, I'm in the fifth month and this happened to me, etc.
So, what I would give as advice is one, supplementation is only good for you if there's something wrong with you that you're trying to correct.
Two, keep a log of what happens to that thing because we tend to forget. All my headache patients forget that they had headaches when they go away. That's challenging to a clinician because they come back and they say, "Yeah, I still have headaches." And then their husband says, "Wait, we were in Vegas two weeks ago and you said you didn't have any headaches at all." And she says, "Oh, I know, but they're back now." We view it as it should have fixed me and now it hasn't. This is a different belief system where the answer is your brain is asking you for something. Interpreting what it's asking for is difficult but possible.
So number one was if you do not have something wrong with you, do not mess with supplements, especially D.
Number two is keep a log.
Read more. Think about it. Think about it a little bit. Think about whether or not there are things that are bothering you.
Okay. Number three. Number three is if there's something bothering you, then decide you're actually going to take some time and you're going to learn about a system which allows you to give supplements that lets your body be fully replete, which means fills up all the deficiencies. And that's your final outcome will be great sleep, great repair, and you will be doing things that will allow your body to prevent degenerative illness.
Why don't you just, you know, why don't I just instead of taking supplements or be this, be the other, D, whatever, why don't I just go outside in the sun and have a better diet?
Chapter 16: Is Sunlight And Nutrition Better Than Supplements?
I think that's a a great question. And here's the problem.
So, l've got, you know, l've got all these things, these wonderful things here. I've got some kimchi, which is good for the gut microbiome.
I've heard.
I've got kombucha. I've got some yogurt thing here. I've got I can't even pronounce that. Sauerkraut. Sauerkraut. And I've got some Caffierer. Why don't I just have all this stuff, which is great for my gut microbiome, and then go outside and spend the morning in the sunshine getting up improving my vitamin D levels. Presumably, this is going to help my gut and the sunshine is going to help my vitamin D. Voila.
I think you could actually do that. If there's not much wrong with you, I think that's the better path. Frankly, supplementing with vitamin D is not the same as being outdoors.
Okay, explain not the same.
What do you mean it's not the same? How is it different? Cuz my doctor did a blood test recently and uh I did two blood tests. One at Nikico Health. Nico Health. And the Nico Health test that I did said I was vitamin D deficient, which doesn't surprise me cuz I live in this dark bunker. I never leave the driver studio. People just walk in and I live in here and I eat in here and l am vitamin D deficient, it said. So I went to the store and I just started taking vitamin D. I assume that's fixed it.
Why is vitamin D supplementation different from being out in the sun?
There is a lot of literature about by a gal named Stephanie Senf who says that the vitamin D that we make on our skin is sulfated which is different than the vitamin D we're taking, a supplemented and it has a different behavior in the body.
Number two, it turns out there's a lot of literature that shows that vitamin D is not the only thing made by UVB hitting your your skin. And what it's hitting is cholesterol. And that cholesterol has changed in this chemical called D3.
But there are probably other chemicals that are being made at the same time.
Okay, they are not being taken with that pill of vitamin D3. That is a separate literature that's just gotten really some attention in the last 10 years.
There are all these other things that prevent inflammation that do things to your skin that were actually being made by the sunlight that you're being exposed to that protects you from the damaging effects.
So why can't someone who is really struggling with their sleep, why can't the prescription just be improve your diet?
Have you tried that with patients? Oh, you said you..
No, one of the reasons why these are effective, the fermented foods. Okay, fermented food means you're eating rotting food. That's not the way we call it because it sounds disgusting. Okay, but bacteria are growing in here. Yeah.
And they're secretreting things like B vitamins and rutery. They're making a yeast bacterial mixture. So there's fungus growing in there. There are viruses in there. There are many microbiomes. Microbes. Microbes.
Thank you.
Look at me. Look at me. Awesome. That means you're eating bacteria.
You're basically eating a food that has to be 50 in it, which is great.
Yeah. So, why don't you give because I have no idea what the time frame will be for this having that success for you. This is the easy way.
This is the fast way. This is the way I can tell you that I've had more experience with my clients over time.
And if you want to fix something that's really badly off, by the time you get a sleep disorder, for those that can't see because they're just listening on audio, you're pointing at the vitamins.
I'm pointing at the vitamins and the step-wise approach, which is the fast and easy approach.
Exactly. And if you don't want to use supplements, I would support you all the way. In do what?
In going outside, just what you've described. I think the healthier approach to all of our diseases is to be outside the house much more and to include these fermented foods.
Chapter 17: Can Redheads Naturally Produce More Vitamin D?
Now, on this point of being outside much more, some people live in cloudy places.
You know, I spent a lot of my life living in places like London in the UK. Exactly.
And there's not much sunlight, right? So, what do I do about that?
Remember how I said that Meline was a redhead? Yeah. That turns out to be important. So, melanin is the pigment that humans have in their skin. And you have more than I do. I put more melanin as I stay out in the sun more and I tan. That melanin is absorbing energy. It's there to protect you from over exposure to sunlight and damaging effects on the DNA of your skin. The red head people's gene usually comes with freckles which means that there is only little tiny parts of the skin that have melanin.
And the redhead gene came about in the far north Viking, Scotland. And those places don't get much sunlight. That means it cleared out the blocker of the thing that collected that energy and allowed people who lived in very overcast environments to make D because the melanin didn't block the conversion to vitamin D and all these other things that it does. So redheads actually have a bit of a superpower when it comes to their relationship with the sunshine, they can make significantly more.
That depends. Now, if you pick up all the Scotsmen and you put them in Texas and Oklahoma, which is where I live, and many of therpeople there nave rea nair and they came from
1:35:57 energy and allowed people who lived in very overcast environments to make D because the melanin didn't block the
1:36:06 conversion to vitamin D and all these other things that it does. So redheads actually have a bit of a superpower when it comes to their relationship with the sunshine, they can make significantly more.
1:36:15 That depends. Now, if you pick up all the Scotsmen and you put them in Texas and Oklahoma, which is where I live, and many of the people there have red hair and they came from Scotsman, the problem is they're now in an environment with very high sun levels. It's very hot in the summer and they cannot tolerate the level of sun. That means if you get to a point on the world where you pick up big populations and you move them into another weather type, they have not had enough time to adapt. There are things about melanin amounts and our survival that make a difference.
So I still recommend that supplementing with D is not the whole answer.
Supplementation in and of itself is not what we want. What we want is our kids to be outside much more. There are now new learning environments for kids where they're out in the forest, where they're not enclosed in school rooms.
Chapter 18: Why Spending Too Much Time Indoors Is Hurting Your Health
There's some interesting stats I found which says that 90% of Americans spend close to 22 hours inside the house every day. That was from USA Today. And roughly 20% of Americans never go outside regularly spending 24 hours indoors.
And downstream from vitamin D, there's not just sleep disruption. There's lots of problems, isn't there? Yes, I can start listing them and they're all related in the background to what we've talked about. But diabetes, even though you've had lots of really interesting shows about that, diabetes is happening in parallel with the sleep disorder.
It's not caused by the sleep disorder.
It has similar chemical in the background. There are many types, but diabetes just means there's a mismatch between the amount of insulin from the amount of sugar. Let me say that I'm not trying to say that America doesn't eat badly. America eats badly. I was just in Europe and that eating patterns in the US are terrible.
But there are other things that are playing a role and diabetes shows up. Remember how Meline had gestational diabetes and so did this wonderful Natalie who did everything we told her to. Why would Natalie show up with gestational diabetes when she's not fat? Her supply of this thing called co-enzyme A is not enough to keep up with supplying the child and herself. So for a while she really has a deficiency state and you start to see it. We've learn to measure the sugar and the measuring the sugar is one of the signs of a deficiency state that's in the background that actually affects a hundred things in the body. It makes acetylcholine which allows our whole autonomic nervous system to sleep nor to react normally. So it affects all of those things that we do is when we're training and it also affects cortisol levels. You must have co-enzyme A to make cortisol. You must have co-enzyme A to make melatonin.
So the things linked to vitamin D are everything from bone disorders, autoimmune diseases, mental health, brain disorders, cardiovascular, metabolic issues, immune infections, and then certain cancers.
l imagine at this stage in the conversation the audience are very much looking for like actionable advice. So we've talked about the Right Sleep protocol which is this sort of vitamin approach and then the other approach is to get outside in the sunshine more and you don't have to be in direct sunlight.
You have to be in direct sunlight to make vitamin D on your skin. Okay?
But you should limit the amount that you do so you do not burn your skin. That it's important that UVA, if you're going to use a tanning salon, if they're using UVA, you are not making vitamin D from that. So, there are different kinds of beds. UVA will still tan you, but it will not make vitamin D.
Chapter 19: Can You Still Make Vitamin D On Cloudy Days?
So, you don't have to be in direct sunlight. So, if I'm at a window and I can't see the sun and it's overcast, am I still making vitamin D?
No, you can't make anything through the window. Okay. So, what I go outside, I can't see the sun cuz there's clouds. I'm still making vitamin D.
Maybe it can be that you will actually still get a burn. Okay, that is from UVA and UVB penetrating that cloud.
Okay, so that does mean that you can make some vitamin D on a day that it's cloudy.
And the only way to know how much vitamin D you are actually making is to do your vitamin D levels over time.
Looking at some data here, it says that um you can make a little bit of vitamin D during overcast times. Um up to 80% of UV radiation still penetrates light cloud cover. So, you can absolutely still make vitamin D, though it might take a few minutes longer than it would on a completely clear day. When it's thick, dark, and overcast, or dense storms or clouds, that can block up to 70 to 90% of UVB rays. On these days, it's incredibly difficult for your skin to produce any meaningful amount of vitamin D. You know these like lamps that they put on desks and stuff? Can you get vitamin D from that?
Chapter 20: Can Vitamin D Lamps Replace Natural Sunlight?
No. But make let me make you a point here that's not in my field but in the infrared field.
There are so many other wavelengths of energy that you receive when you're outside. So you can be sitting on a porch where you're not in direct sunlight and you are still receiving the bulbs that we used to use.
Now you'll get H hallogen or LEDs and they do not give off infrared light energy. So, an incandescent bulb is the old school glass light bulbs. The kind Thomas Edison used to use. It creates light by running an electrical current through a metal filament until it gets so hot that it glows. Because it relies on raw heat, an incandescent bulb 💡 behaves exactly like a miniature fire or a tiny piece of the sun. So, yeah, those incandescent bulbs are harder to come by these days, but yeah, my fiance, she's a big fan of them. Yeah.
And she's trying to fill our house with them. Yeah, she's right.
Chapter 21: The Best Diet To Boost Vitamin D And Improve Gut Health
So, is there anything else? You know, also l've got these prebiotics here.
Prebiotics. Probiotics. A lot of people say that you should take prebiotics.
Probiotics. Have you tried giving them to your patients?
I was on probiotics and so are my patients when we started and it had not corrected the microbiome. It was just a try. We're going to dump the bacteria down there and maybe they'll get back to normal. Okay. That is what a probiotic is considered. They have the actual bacteria freeze-dried and you eat the bacteria. Kind of gross when you think about it as being poop bacteria, but that's what it is. Okay.
Now, what prebiotic has that's different is that you feed the bacteria and they feed you. That's really what happens. What I love about this is there are different things that they're feeding the bacteria. We're kind of interested in what they think.
How do we know what they think?
Well, what if I change to carnivore and all of a sudden my belly gas goes away?
The carnivore diet where you just eat meat, mostly meat. Let's say 90% meat and most of my belly complaints go away and I poop regularly. Then you've just been very successful at making your bacteria very happy. What if the next client who I have is a mostly plant-based?
Then I have to change the way I think and the way I help them and encourage them to recognize that when we're feeding mostly plant-based, we have a different set of bacteria.
Now, let me propose something to you. Humans cover the globe like cockroaches.
We are very successful and we have a hugely varied diet. I would claim that means you should eat the diet that works for you. The place where you see something that is really important for the US is the original articles about vitamin deficiency states were in two groups that ate a pure carbohydrate diet. So the claim right now for most the people that are interested in healthy diets is 1:45:12 if you eat a fully carbohydrate diet, you're set up for failure in a million different ways. And then they talk about the diet you should eat. There are two
1:45:21 incidences from the 1940s where the first vitamin deficiency states were described and both of them turn out to be purely carbohydrate diets. One of them was in the Japanese prisoner of war camps and the batan [clears throatl death march in World War II where they had rice, rice, rice.
That's it. And they're outside all the time. They're not vitamin D deficient. They're discovered to have beriberi.
Beriberi is a disease caused by a deficiency of thiamine (vitamin B1), which can lead to symptoms affecting the cardiovascular and nervous systems. There are two main types: wet beriberi, which impacts the heart, and dry beriberi, which affects the nervous system.
And beriberi is an old disease described in Japan when you take off the rice casing. So ultimately they gave back meat and vegetables and beriberi is described as heart failure, non-healing ulcers of the legs, bright shiny red skin and burning in the feet that we see in the elderly in the US all the time in the hospital that is now ignored. But you can actually get to a state where you're feeding only carbohydrates. But now the lens you're looking through is I was feeding my bacteria a purely carbohydrate diet. I therefore selected for bacterial populations that were not producing the B vitamins that I needed.
It's seeing it through a slightly different lens. The same thing about pelagra which is actually a niacin deficiency in adults and children that were institutionalized in the south of the United States in the 30s and 40s and fed corn grl as their only food. So there's still a piece of information there that is your diet absolutely affects who lives inside you. And once you have a purely carbohydrate diet for many years and you're D deficient, it is very likely you're going to have to do something more aggressive, either change your diet and do fermented foods and change to a meat and plant diet and you're going to have to watch what your body does. And if you're not able and in and my claim would still be the sleep that you have should still be your best measure of whether you've succeeded in what you'd like to do.
And again, to track your sleep, there's lots of different ways to do that.
Obviously, none of them are perfect. Um, but you can buy sleep trackers and those kinds of things and see how you're doing.
Yes. And I would also say use your sleep tracker. I don't use mine regularly because I get obsessed by it. II start to think, "Oh, I only had an hour and a half of REM. I'm dying." And I just get spiral downward. Okay. So, what your body is saying to you is still very important. I didn't have sleep trackers when I was seeing all these things that were happening to Meline and and Natalie. I would listen to what they said about their sleep.
I imagine a lot of people are struggling with sleep or they have a partner or friend or maybe just because they want to optimize their sleep a little bit. And what l've really taken away is that um a lot of sleep related issues start in the gut microbiome. Yes.
So we want to try and fix the gut microbiome. And how we fix the gut microbiome is can be dietary. It can be through supplementation.
But we want to try and do it through diet first and fermented foods.
Um and then the other thing is sunlight plays a big role. You're smoking again. You're doing a fabulous job.
Oh, you're so sweet. Um the other the other thing is sunlight plays a big role because it produces vitamin D and amongst other things which also can improve that balance and help us sleep better.
Yes.
And we also want to try the stuff that everybody talks about. Matthew Walker talks about temperature and yes eye masks and all that kind of stuff. I guess the big insight here is that vitamins play a really important role in sleep. Yes. As you've seen through the thousands of patients that you've spent time with and helped to uh restore toa healthy sleep state.
Yes. That's a beautiful summary.
Chapter 22: What Actually Helps If You Have Sleep Apnea Or Narcolepsy?
What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? Is there anything at all?
We have skipped the people who have been told they have a disease narcolepsy or sleep apnea where they're told there's a specific this is a genetic thing and you have to do these specific things.
For instance, for narcolepsy, this is an attack of sleep that takes you out and you become l'm sitting here talking to you and I fall asleep.
That turns out to be treatable in the same way. You're saying a lot of it can be about vitamins.
Yes, you can sleep deprive anyone to the point of falling asleep when I talk to you. All you have to do is, you know, two or three nights that you miss and you can still become taken down by an attack of sleep. That really is what narcolepsy means. That means medicine in its attempt to classify things have said this is a disease and the idea that they are all about our body falling out of its normal state.
What's different about people who have that a a specific diagnosis like sleep apnea and narcolepsy is they are unlikely to be able to cure that with going outside and kimchi. They are at an end stage. Your body was really set up to be able to deal with different diets, getting up in the middle of the night, take care of your baby, traveling long periods of time, all these stressors that we've had for the last 300,000 years. It was set up to do that and to get back to sleeping again.
And people lived for long periods of time. That wasn't the average, but there were people that lived to be 75 years old 20,000 years ago. That means that's the best we can do. If you have a disease of your sleep switches, you are really severely affected. And my experience would say that that person is not going to be able to approach it by just going outside and doing kimchi.
That person is going to need some extra help and they're going to need sometimes professional help with someone who's seeing it through this lens because they go through changes. They for instance when when you get them a little bit better so that they're sleeping at night, they actually start to have nightmares.
What that means in a setting like that is they've actually gotten into REM sleep, but they haven't gotten perfect chemistry so that they sleep through the REM phase, finish up, go into light sleep, and then go to the next. They've awakened, so they can't keep themselves in REM. There are transition states where they actually feel like they're getting worse.
So, there are all sorts of things that I've been able to see that are not talked about at the sleep meetings that are totally fascinating that are halfway better and that people can cure their narcopsy. I have one gal right now who just called me to become a client. She has narcopsy and she has completely cured herself by using nicotine patches around the clock. 1 Why? because there is only one drug that duplicates acetylcholine completely and it's nicotine.
So she stopped smoking and she uses nicotine patches. Nicotine is the duplicate of acetylcholine.
Acetylcholine allows us to focus, pay attention, be distracted, and come right back during the day. It is in control of our ability to concentrate. At night, it allows us to get into REM sleep. That one chemical does wake and sleep, doesn't it, in different parts of the brain.
That means she is using something that has been terribly vilified. Tobacco is considered to be the cause of all evil.
It turns out, oddly enough, the guys with Parkinson's disease who smoked throughout the last 30 years have been shown to do better because Parkinson's disease is an acetylcholine deficiency state. First to give a bit of background on I guess the problem we've really talked about.
I have this lttle paragraph here which I thought summarizes the nature of the problem and the sleep epidemic. It says while industrialization first disrupted our natural rhythms by moving society indoors, the true explosion of sleep disorders occurred in two modern phases.
A medical boom in the 1980s and a digital epidemic in the 2000s. In the 1980s, the formal recognition of sleep medicine and the intervention of the CPAP machine diagnosed millions with obstructive sleep apnea, sparking a surge in clinical treatments. The medicalization transformed into into a cultural crisis by the 2000s as sedentary indoor lifestyles starved us of natural daytime sunlight. Sunlight exposure is vital because its high-intensity brightness resets the brain's master internal clock and suppresses daytime melatonin, which establishes a definitive biological countdown for deep sleep at night.
Deprived of this anchoring cue and bombarded by a 24/7 hustle culture and smartphones pumping blue light into our bedrooms, society succumbed to a devastating double-edged sword. too little sun by day to synchronize the brain and too much artificial light by night to allow it to rest. The modern circadian mismatch culminated in an acute spike during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, solidifying an era where our indoor environments are fundamentally at war with our evolutionary sleep biology.
I love that. Who wrote that? Is that AI? It was AI that wrote that.
Yeah. Now, that's the fascinating part of this. Al doesn't care whether or not my colleagues think I'm crazy. Al is not affected by what the endocrine society says about D. AI is just giving us the raw data. Okay. Then if you put in there something like what does Dr. Gmanac think about whether or not sun exposure is the whole story for sleep?
And you'll start to see my stuff leaking through there saying, "Yes, it's true that the pineal gland makes melatonin and that is part of how we get to the 1000 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., but it's also true that vitamin D has receptors in the brain stem. That means that we are at the edge of about a big change where some of these ideas that we talked about today that are very deep and very wide are going to be there available in a beautifully written way by AI. And I think in this particular case we've jumped around medicine and its craziness and its conservative feeling.
It's been taken over by an an electronic thing that's not affected by our cultural ideals of who's smart and who's not.
Chapter 23: My Most Controversial Health Opinion Explained
What is the central idea that you believe that most of the mainstream industry don't believe? I wilI I will do as you say and I will ask the AI. Most of the sleep disorders including sleep apnea, narcolepsy, all the ones that the neurologists have described are really related at basis by D and multiple things that are made by the microbiome that the microbiome and the D deficiency are very much linked and that there are hundreds of things that are playing a role in our sleep switches that are supplied by the microbiome.
So, I will summarize that as are many of the sleep disorders caused by the microbiome.
I'm using Gemini Pro, which is the most advanced model. I always use it for fact checking and stuff. So, it says you are completely wrong. I'm joking. Didn't say that. ( Iaughter)
It says yes, the connection is massive.
While we can't say the microbiome is the sole cause of every sleep disorder, scientists now know that a damaged gut is a major hidden driver of poor sleep because both the melatonin pipeline starts in the gut. Manufacturing the calm down chemical is in the gut and the cortisol alarm system is linked to the gut. The trickiest part of the microbiome sleep connection is that it is a birectional loop. A bad microbiome causes poor sleep. Poor sleep alters the microbiome. So, while anatomical issues like a narrow airway causes sleep apnnea, or light mismatch, like the lack of near infrared light, play huge roles, fixing chronic insomnia often requires healing the gut just as much as fixing your bedtime routine.
The lack of near infrared light, that's amazing. Medicine will Iclears throatl not be talking about that anytime soon.
It's too wacky. It's too woo woo. And yet that means those ideas are available to us.
Chapter 24: The Best Day Of Your Life And Why It Matters
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is more.
Yeah, I guess it is a question. It says, "Describe the best day of your life."
l'm gonna have to stick with what pops into my mind first, which is relatively recently.
We were in Sevilla, I think, and it was very hot and my husband and I have been traveling for three or four weeks together, which is the longest time we've spent together in a long time. And we were sitting playing canasta outside underneath an umbrella that had little misters. And we were just sitting there playing canasta together. And it's not about it was not about accomplishment. It was about having this marvelous circumstance where we're just hanging out together and having a very pleasant time together. That was my my best day recent memory.
Dr. Stasha, where should people go to learn more from you? Dr. Gominak, no period after DR.com ( https://drgominak.com/ ) and I have a YouTube channel where I have lots of I have a whole series of 50 things called sleep chats where I talk about if I have carpal tunnel syndrome, will Right Sleep program help me? I have this well right and why l'II link all of that for you below so everybody can go to those resources.
They'll be in linked in the description below of this episode.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Addendum
How Does RightSleep® Work?
First, let me address popular misconceptions about insomnia.
It’s not uncommon in Medicine for sleep problems to be labeled as “your fault.”
“You don’t exercise enough.” “Your bedroom isn’t right.” “You watch too much tv” or “you are on your computer too much”, the list goes on.
Here is the truth: If you have normal brain function you will fall asleep and wake feeling rested, regardless of being on your computer, looking at your cell phone, or thinking “too much,”.
RightSleep will give you the tools your brain needs to get back to normal sleep!
Although giving your brain what it needs to go back to normal function includes vitamins, such as Vitamin D, this is not a one-size-fits-all vitamin recipe, since everybody is different.
The year-long program will show you not only what to do, but also how to listen to your body and assess your progress as you go, giving your body what it needs to heal.
The RightSleep® Process
Your path to healing moves through three phases over an average 1-2 year timeline.
1 HEAL YOUR GUT
In this phase, we are providing D and B vitamins to bring back your optimal gut bacteria, so that they will help you sleep.
2 SLEEP BETTER
In this phase, we optimize your D level to help you sleep better than you have previously, so you will start making long-term repairs.
3 MAINTENANCE & REPAIR
Once your sleep is optimal, we will add more supplemental B vitamins to support your unique deferred repairs.
Dr. Gominak wearing scarf
I'm Dr. Stasha Gominak
RightSleep is not a "quick fix" program - It's a lifestyle.
The initial phase of sleep repair typically takes one year, and you’ll continue to implement the principles of RightSleep as an ongoing practice for life.
Success with RightSleep requires your participation.
A vitamin D level that is too high is just as problematic as a vitamin D level that is too low. You will learn the signals your body uses to tell you you're “out of range” through a combination of blood testing and journaling your observations. The Workbook describes how to do this in detail.
How Is RightSleep® Different?
RightSleep is not a one-size fits all vitamin "recipe".
Our initial goal is to improve your vitamin D deficiency. Since everyone starts at a different level of deficiency and moves toward the ideal range at a different pace, you’ll need to listen to your body and do vitamin D blood levels to determine what’s best for you. The Workbook includes guidelines on how to do this, and also encourages you to customize based on your body’s unique response.
very enlightening. It takes a while to see the whole picture because the approach is so different than what others are teaching us about sleep.-- RightSleeper
RightSleep® Workbook
The workbook (ahora en español) features a step-by-step proprietary process that allows you to restore your sleep naturally through over-the-counter vitamins that restore your gut microbiome and lead to deeper, more restorative sleep.
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