I Quit Medicine To share The Truth

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 as dangerous as any drug you could put in your mouth. If you do not know what you're doing with them, bad things will happen to you. And unfortunately, frequently those bad things are the same thing you had before you took the vitamin. Therefore, you should pay attention to what you're feeling. 

So, the pathway that I've built that's on my website now has a second half, that's a journal. You have to keep notes of what's happening to you. 

( How many people are experiencing sleep problems in your point of view? )

 Billions. It's around the world. There are sleep study centers in every country that has electricity. in Germany, in Japan, in Brazil, and they're all publishing how abnormal the studies are. This is not what it looks like.

They rarely send out an article saying that we have less REM because they don't have an answer for why. I just happen to be the only one currently on the internet that has a different way of looking at it. (Well, I'm very curious to learn about all of this. I've never heard someone say to me before that vitamins are linked to sleep issues.) 

Absolutely. ( It's typically, you know, put on the sleep mask and close the blinds and make sure it's cold in the room. So, this is incredibly interesting to me. )

Chapter 6: Are Sleep Chronotypes Actually Real Or Just A Myth? 

Let me add one more thing so I don't forget. You and Matt Walker talked about chronotypes. Yeah, there are many dogmatic statements that are being made about genetics and sleep that are not necessarily wrong, but they're also not necessarily right. And I had the same training that you get from Matt Walker. He's doing animal training. We say dogmatic things based on certain studies that we do. And then my patients don't behave that way. My patients turn out to, you know, this person has been working to take this to an extreme. So the chronotype story is you're either an early bird or a night owl and you had shared that you're a night owl and that your girlfriend is an early bird. Okay? 

 And what is being taught is that is your genetic makeup.  Although there are genetic mutations that lead to certain timing of sleep, it turns out everybody I was doing this vitamin stuff with would revert back to fall asleep at 10 p.m. and wake up at 6:00 a.m. Even the people who were working nights their whole life. This woman that I'm seeing who is on disability now because she got a terrible disease that I believe is because she worked nights when she is at home on disability for several years. that I'm still caring for her for that disease. She's still sleeping during the day. 

 Well, why would she sleep during the day? And now I have a whole run of patients who say, "I guess it's because l always work nights." 

It turns out that humans really can't work nights if they have normal brain chemistry. Why? 

 Because we're day hunters. We are supposed to be asleep in the night. And that is our biochemistry. There are lots of animals that are designed to be awake at night. Owls. That's why they use that as a symbol.  And if you do the right thing with their chemistry, and if you insist that they spend more time outside, then they actually revert to falling asleep at 10 p.m. and waking up at 6:00 a.m. It's very difficult to operate, unless you're international like you are, to be falling asleep. There are people who fall asleep at 4:00 a.m. and wake up at noon. That is a very difficult problem to operate within the normal population because the rest of the world doesn't operate that way. And when you think about it a little bit, we actually have certain standards on when we start work and when we end work. And that's the same all over the globe. So there were things that happened to me that surprised me and they became consistent. Okay? And those are some of the things that we're going to talk about. And that's what made me think, you know, this is around the world and it happened at a specific time. There are many diseases that started to be reported in the middle 80s. You guys aren't aware of it because you think it's normal now, but ADD, ADHD, depression, things that are affecting childhood development, which we could discuss at a different time, fatty   liver, certain things like oh increase in diabetes, the things that were diseases that had been described, they're all some of them are old diseases that have increased in incidence, but some of them for the first time, fatty liver was first described non-alcoholic. Fatty liver first described in the 80s. ADHD is similar. So during the time that I don't know why we have this epidemic. I'm still thinking toxins because that's what we've been told. Pesticides, glyphosate and then we get into the area of vitamin D and how did I find out about vitamin D? Why was I sort of forced against my will to step into the vitamin D politics, which is a horrible morass. A complex or messy situation that traps you.

So explain to me your assertion is that vitamin D is fundamentally linked to a lot of the sleep disorders and deficiencies that we see. How can you prove that to me? 

Chapter 7: How Can You Prove Vitamin D Deficiency Causes Disease? 

I think I would prefer to give you these two examples. Okay. 

Because the people who are listening, these are at the two extremes, but it'll cover a lot of the people that are listening. Okay? 

The first is let's call her Meline. 

Meline. She's 32 years old. She's a redhead. That turns out to be important. She's 100 pounds overweight. She just had her first pregnancy three years ago. And she had been told that because she had endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, that she would never get pregnant. But she got  pregnant. She's very happy about that. She had  gestational diabetes, which means she had diabetes during the time that she was pregnant with her son. And now she is pretty much a wreck. She has daily headache, which is why she's seeing me. 

She's on about nine drugs. She has several kinds of pain. She has a terrible pain down the front of her leg that she's been told is endometriosis, growing on one of her nerves. She has terrible burning in her feet. She has terrible reflux. She poops once a week. She feels like she has to get up and go to the bathroom several times a night. She thinks that's why her sleep is so interrupted. 

So, I'm treating her for her daily headaches and her pain. And then I start to think about sleep. And because we've been trained that fat people are fat because they're fat slobs, because they eat wrong, because they don't exercise, it's their own fault. 

I don't even think about the fact that many of these things might have a common source and that she's been tortured by this her whole life. So I send her for a sleep study. She gets on CPAP. Over the time she's on CPAP, she gets a little bit better. Her sleep is better. She feels better. And then I stumble into vitamin D. 

Okay. Now, we're going to set that as an example of the most horrible set of things you could have perhaps. 

And another example, and we're going to watch what happens to these two women over time. 

The second one we'll call Natalie. And Natalie is tall, statuesque, ( person who is very tall and has a striking, beautiful, and dignified body shape) she's a triathlete. 

She is also seeing me for daily headache. She grew up in a family that is of Italian origin. She is dark tan. 

27:47 She swims. She's athletic. She's outside all the time in the summer. Five years ago, she had her first child. Her 

27:55 daughter, she did well. No problems with her sleep. Two years ago, she has her son. And since her son was born, she has 

28:03 not been able to go back to sleep. Even when her son goes back to sleep, she can't. She feels tired. She has postpartum depression. ( The term postpartum refers to the period of time immediately following childbirth, lasting from delivery for about six to eight weeks, though physical and emotional recovery can extend up to a year. It is a time of major physical, hormonal, and emotional transition for a parent.) She had gestational diabetes. Like she's doing everything perfectly. She knows  everything there is to know. She's done paleo and keto. She is very well informed by the things that doctors tell her to do. And now her sleep is also abnormal. And she had a few headaches in high school, but now she has daily headache, too. 

So there's a five year span here where I'm doing CPAP masks and sleeping pills. And those are some of the stories.

 And it's not just limited to women, but l especially want to point out that women are more effective because they have the babies. 

So, the next thing that happens is 5 years into it, I've got this beautiful 18-year-old who's about to go to college. She comes to see me for daily headache. She has a sleep study that shows none of these phases of deep sleep. So, she's having no deep sleep. 

 No deep sleep. And every 15 minutes or so, my interpretation is her brain is trying to get into these one of these deep sleep phases and she wakes up to light sleep again. So every time the brain tries to do this, it breaks to white sleep, light sleep, light sleep, light sleep. She thinks that she's asleep the whole night. This shows that she's asleep the whole night. But her sleep study over my five years of experience is horrifying because it's not just, oh, she's missing a little REM. She has no deep sleep at all. This is a brain stem disorder of chemistry that's going to mean she might meet me 10 years from now with a stroke. I've taken care of 28-year olds who just had a stroke. 

( 28, sorry, 28-year olds.) We associate stroke with being old and having diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. That means I'm looking at this and for the very first time I have actually started to see the diseases that my neurology patients come in with and their relationship to sleep. By the end of the five years I'm doing sleep studies on anybody who will let me. So I'm doing little kids, I'm doing moms, I'm doing dads, I'm doing every single neurologic illness that comes in. They're all abnormal. All of them. This implies that the reason why you get a disease is because your sleep is not restorative. 

That implies that I should think about the body as golly,  ( "Golly" is a mild exclamation. People use it to show surprise, joy, or mild shock. It is an old, polite way to say "God" without using a holy name in a rude way.) I know people who live to be 75 years old and don't have a doctor. They were my grandparents and then they started to get medical problems about age 75 and then they died at 85. 

Why aren't we looking at it that way? Why aren't we saying, "Oh, this means your repair system that's designed to completely repair everything in your body every night." And you talked with um Tara Swat about lymphatic drainage. These things that happen while we're sleeping. It is what makes us last.  Like we're not made of teflon. We're made of these biologic materials and they repair themselves every night. That's a miracle. 

If you view it through that lens, then you start to question why is medicine doing what it is. I'm trained to ask questions for the thing the person walks in for. Let's say burning in the feet. Okay?

 And I'm trained to make a little list of the diseases that have resulted in that and then give a drug for it. And if we don't find a drug that reverses it, which we haven't for burning, but I'm going to tell you why, then we give a drug that numbs the pain a little bit.  We just kind of plastering it over cracks. 

(We're putting band-aids on these things instead of saying, "Well, what do you think led to this?" )

And this glimpmphatic drainage point I think is a really important one because what when I understood this glimpmphatic drainage idea it had a profound impact on my relationship with sleep. I would argue more so than anything else. There's actually a colleague of mine who's currently sat out there right and I have an emoji that I sent to her. She's called Georgia Gibson. I have and she likes to work very hard and I sent her this particular emoji of this  I can't even remember. She told me what the cartoon was, but it's these little fish that come out and clean the big whale. Yes. What's that called? 

I don't remember, but I know what you're talking about. 

Okay, l'Il put it on the screen. It's from like a movie. So, everyone is probably going to know what I'm talking about. But I sent her this emoji just to remind her that she needs to sleep cuz she needs to wash her brain. That's what I say. I say to her, "You need to wash your brain," which means go to bed. When you go to sleep at night, these cleaners, you want, you know, again, I'm animating this in a way that's not scientifically accurate, but these cleaners come out and clean up your brain and they wash it all and they clean it and they scrub it and they make it all back to normal again. 

So, if you're not sleeping, then you're going to get some kind of buildup of crap and that can lead to disease or, you know, other worse things down the line. 

Yes, that's a perfect description of it actually. And that's about the level of what we know. So, the 18-year-old with no deep sleep, she comes back and say, "Hey, this drug you gave me for my headaches made my headaches better, but I'm so tired." And I'm looking at her sleep study going, "No wonder she's tired." Okay, this is really, really bad. And this is invisible. 

Absolutely invisible to the rest of the physicians cuz she looks perfect. 

So, I do a B12 level and a thyroid test because I have no idea what to do. And the B12 is profoundly low. Low enough that it shows up as abnormal and a little red. Okay. 

Now, the weird part about this is l've never done a B12 level in a headache patient since l've been doing headaches as a part of neurology, which is a large part of neurology. I then start to give B12 recommendations and I do B12 blood tests on all the patients who I have in my little stable of l've done these sleep studies in them. They still are not sleeping well unless the sleeping pill works. So, for about a month, I'm doing B12 tests and then one of my patients says to me, "My doctor said my vitamin D was low." She gave me vitamin D and my wrist pain went away. And I had no clue and I thought, you know, I'm just doing blood tests anyway, which I never did in my headache patients. I'm just going to throw that in. I was completely naive. 

 And because I was naive, I was not afraid to do this. But I did vitamin D levels and B12 levels in a group of about 500 patients between September and December of 2009.  And I gave you the background because I had all these thoughts buzzing around in my head. What are we looking for? 

We're looking for something that it controls the brain stem. Now, they're going from August or September to December. That's in the fall. So, if you're going to make  D in the summer, which is when we're supposed to make it because we're out in the sun, that's all I knew about D is you make it from the sun. It's about bones. They were all low. All of them are low. 

 Two of these guys that are on CPAP come back. They both have headaches. They both say the same thing to me in the same week. You know, I've been wearing the CPAP mask for a whole year. My headaches hadn't gone away. But that little note you sent me last time I was in here when you did my vitamin D level and you told me to get vitamin D. I took that for about a month. My sleep got better and my headaches went away. Now I happen to know that all the D's were low. But D's about bone. Why would it have anything to do with sleep? 

So I go to the PubMed. That's my resource now. I hang out with PubMed all the time, which is that's where you register all your articles that we publish. I put in two search terms, 'vitamin D' and 'sleep', and there are no hits.

   And then I put in vitamin D in the brain and I wind up going to articles by a guy named Walter Stumpf,  S T U M P F whoʻs been writing about vitamin D for 30 years who has actually published that there are vitamin D receptors in this little stripe along the back of the brain stem that paralyzes us. Like he knows the name of this nucleus. He has shown articles where the vitamin D receptors are in this nucleus that paralyzes us and in the nuclei that are the clock nuclei that determine what time it is, what time we go to sleep, when we make these transitions. The brain always knows exactly what time it is. Those areas have vitamin D receptors. 

 That means vitamin D is doing something. 

That means I'm very interested in thinking if this vitamin D is low, like if they say 30 to 100 is normal, and my patients with sleep disorders and neurologic problems have vitamin D levels in the low 30s and below, is there a vitamin D level, not a dose, but a brain or a blood level that I can measure that might make them sleep  better? That would be phenomenal. Should we go down this vitamin D road? I know nothing about it. I start sending people for vitamin D levels and giving them vitamin D and I start reading. 

Walter Stumpf has already put together a beautiful belief system around vitamin D is the hibernation hormone. It allows animals to adapt their body to tolerate winter when there's no food. It tells their body to do things like the thyroid hormone lowers the metabolic rate of all the cells in the body. The weird part is this is written about beautifully by   Walter Stumpf. And because he has a whole belief system that tells what you should expect, he's also published many articles. The first articles in 1982 about brain stem. He publishes articles about postpartum depression, about infertility, about obesity. He's telling us what epidemics are going to happen, but it's before it happens because the   sunscreen's coming out in 85 and the middle of the air conditioning, computer. And when l'm talking about this during COVID-19, it becomes much more exaggerated. Okay, COVID-19 lockdown has brought us all indoors and we're starting to feel the effects of that even more exaggerated. 

 So, Walter has this idea set. I call him up. Luckily, he's retired and he takes my phone call and I say, "Hey, you don't know me, but I'm this clinician in Texas and I have this clinical observation that I've done all these sleep studies on people. Their brain that should be sending them through these particular steps is not. You have shown that there are vitamin D receptors all over the nuclei that should be running this.  Has anybody written about sleep and vitamin D?" 

And he says, "No, but it makes perfect sense. It's the hibernation hormone. What else would you do? You sleep longer. And it turns out that when our D goes very low, our brain actually forgets how to sleep. That's the easiest way to describe it. 

That gal that I showed you, she had not only vitamin D deficiency as the primary deficiency and with secondary deficiency we're going to talk about, but there your brain just becomes completely scattered and it's what it's supposed to do because the D is doing a specific thing. It took me a while to figure out. 

There are articles that actually took Walter's articles and said, "Hey, there are these D receptors." What hormones do that's unique is the hormone goes inside the nucleus of the cell and the nucleus has the DNA and it binds to the DNA and it has a special vitamin D receptor. That's what Walter was measuring. When it hits that receptor, there's a specific protein that that DNA expresses. 

That means that little piece of DNA comes out. It makes this protein. The protein that it makes is an enzyme that makes acetylcholine. 

 So that means I can trace through the scientific literature all the way from the receptor to the articles that use that that showed that it was an enzyme called choline acetal transferase. 

Now the next part is really important because what I want out of this is that Meline and Natalie both get better. 

(Okay, this biochemistry is my thrill. But what the listener wants is "how do l get better?")

 Now, since I started this and the first time l started giving vitamin D was in 2010, this is now 16 years later. 

Is vitamin D any better understood or given out? No. The science is phenomenal. The recommendations for the doctors don't go there. The Endocrine Society are supposed to be the experts in hormones. D is a hormone. 

 I think that's an important point which is a lot of people think of vitamin D as some kind of, well, we think of it as a vitamin but you're telling me it's a hormone. 

 It's the most bizarre thing I've ever run into in medicine. It's really bizarre. Which path? There was a mistake. There was a mistake made in calling it a vitamin. It is made on our skin. 

Now, it turns out animals frequently lick their fur, and they get their vitamin D that's made in their fur from licking their fur. Some of it's absorbed, but the thing that's unique about us and pigs, domesticated pigs, is we're bald. 

That means most of the time we're making it on our skin. It's never supposed to be from the food. It was not ever about the food for us. 

We don't lick our skin. 

Therefore, we absorb it through our skin and we can actually have salmon. The salmon has vitamin D in it. That's the  salmon's vitamin D. It's not our vitamin D. It's like saying you eat salmon, you get salmon estrogen. That should be enough estrogen for you to have a normal period. That's crazy. If your ovaries are not making enough estrogen, you won't have a normal period. Okay? 

They called it a vitamin. And in then early 80s medicine decided vitamins were for lesser humans. Therefore D got pushed into that pile and it got given over the counter. Now, the fascinating part about that is it turns out to be a good thing that it's available over the counter because the lay public once they hear that their whole health is actually tied to this and that they've been doing what their  doctor recommended, which is to use sunscreen and stay out of the sun. And the original recommendation, cuz I was there in the early 80s, was don't sunburn. 

Every sunburn that's a bad sunburn that you peel from will age your skin even if you're 10. 

(Which is, is that true or not?)

 That's true. 

It's true. Yeah, that piece is true. Now, the weird thing is that has been morphed over the last 40 years into "don't ever let the sun touch your skin." People are smart. If you tell them that they can use sunscreen wisely and it blocks the ability to make vitamin D and it has turned into the combination of sunscreen plus being inside much more than we ever were before. 

When you had air conditioning, people slept out on the roof in Saudi Arabia.That means you spend much more time outdoors. And it also turns out there's a particular move in health and wellness which is about the many forms of wavelengths of energy that we absorb that are given to us by the sun that are not UVB. UVB is the wavelength that makes D. There are your podcast about infrared. Very, very important . That means there are many wavelengths of energy and the more time we spend outdoors, the more our body actually uses those wavelengths in our biology because medicine is so conservative and so slow to change. They basically poo poo any new ideas. So hyperbaric oxygen laughed at infrared, laughed at, made fun of and therefore you could actually have your license taken away.

Since doctors are now doing things across video. l am safer in my little place making my comments, making my statements. They're madeup stories. 

( What is a madeup story? )

My telling you my belief system is a madeup story. This is really an important idea. I thought that everything written in a book is true. As soon as the publications come out, as soon as I can go to PubMed, I thought those things written down were true, absolutes. 

( And then you stay in medicine for 30 years and you realize the things that you were taught are not truth anymore. )

Well, that means they made up those stories. 

They do a scientific experiment. You and I are looking at the data, but there's always a conclusory. 

My conclusions from this data are those are always made up stories. And in fact, they're always humans making up stories. 

You and I are not listening to stories that ants make up or that cats make up. We're very human centric. 

We're studying things that are stories that humans make up. 

And we're arriving at a conclusion based on some factors that we can see which is, you know, often causation or correlation, sorry, and not necessarily causation. 

Correlation is very important. We all have a belief system. You and I are building a belief system here. I told you that Walter Stumpf had a belief system. The reason why I'm using those terms is I was really pissed off at the pulmonologist when I realized that woman with the sleep apnea, she wasn't a fat, like middle-aged male with a fat tongue. How dare they? Here are these women. They have headaches. They're suffering. How dare they make up this story? 

And then I began to realize they made up those stories. That was their best guess. 

That is every single person who sits on this side of the table. It's their best guest. 

 All of us are or you wouldn't have us on here. Very enthusiastic about our guests. But it's very important to realize that every belief system means you see the world through that. But it always has blinders. 

There are things that you won't be able to see because of it as well. 

Then you must move into a point of view which is I need to stay flexible. What if new information comes? Yeah. 

Okay. So the debelief system at the moment is that it's a vitamin and there's a huge political fight within the medical literature. It's very weird. The debelief system. What do you mean? 

 Medicine has decided that the only way you can get any important information is to have a control group, a study group. 

The study group gets X, a drug, in this case, vitamin D. And you compare the outcome of both groups. 

And what does the other group get? A placebo.

 Basically, they think it's a drug, but there's nothing in it. Yeah. And then you compare the outcome. 

The problem is in no biologic pathway is there only one variable. There's never one variable. And that means when you give one a hormone, you also need to know that hormones are always in done by blood levels and that the normal state for the human body in every biologic animal including plants is that hormones stay in a tight little narrow band. Too much and too little are both not good. Always goes towards the middle. In the lei experience, this is why we do blood levels of testosterone. If we give you testosterone supplement, if we give you estrogen in thyroid, even lay people know. 

My aunt would get crazy when her thyroid was off and it could be too high or too low. D is exactly the same. Yet, they do these studies based on a fixed dose. So it doesn't matter what the level is, what time of the year, how much sun they're getting, they're all getting 4,000 IUs. 

So they could be having too much or too little. No blood levels are taken. 

( So you're saying that it should be personalized the amount ot vitamin D. )

 Absolutely. Any hormone that you take, if you compare, that's why the Endocrine Society is so important. They know in 2004 when they gave the final recommendation for the doctors and practice, they know that the studies that have been done so far are rarely done in the way a hormone should be studied. And they say that in their report. They spent a whole year looking at this chemical, all the research that's done. And they say, you know, we don't really have any good studies. We don't have any clinical studies like mine for instance where we're relating the dose that we give the person to the blood level that's achieved. 

Therefore, you would think they would say we need more studies. No, here's what they said.

 Therefore, you should not do vitamin D levels and you should not give recommendations about vitamin D, taking it or not taking it. You should just avoid the whole conversation because what's going to happen when you do a vitamin D level is you're going to call me up and you're going to say what dose should I give the D level is this and we don't know, so they've said, don't be curious, don't do it. That's insane now.  That means the lay public is coming to me and other people on the internet and they're coming to podcasts like this to learn about it and there are a lot of conflicting attitudes foods.

 I may be one of the biggest recorder in my brain, which is not in a data dump that I can put into an article of how to manage vitamin D   levels, what you should do, what you should do with dosing. And that's one of the things I have in this workbook that we're going to talk about. 

Chapter 8: What Happened When I Started Treating Patients With Vitamin D 

( I'm very curious about Meline and Natalie still. )

Great. What happened to Meline and Natalie? 

 Okay. For two years, I'm talking to Walter on the phone and I start giving vitamin D to my patients and I learned that every single person needs a unique amount. Very scary. That means everybody else is saying, "Oh, take 5,000, take 10,000, take 20,000. I take 100,000 once a month. Okay? 

And I find out also that if you get past about a level of 60 years old, that's when they come back and say, you know what, my sleep is better. Now, importantly, I still was operating under the false belief that there's only one variable. Okay? 

I came up in medicine using drugs. That means you match the drug to the complaint. Oh, that one didn't work. And then we do this one, and then we do this one. Okay? 

 I'm ashamed that I looked at it that way, but that was my training. So, I thought vitamin D was going to fix everything. Within the next 6 months, my   patients start to come back and say horrible things, like my joints ache all over and my doctor's about to send me to the rheumatologist who does autoimmune diseases, like arthritis. Exactly. Then the next person comes in and says, "I've got this terrible burning in my hands and feet." And another woman comes in the same month with burning in her hands and feet. Two women, same month. They have nothing in common except they both have headaches and they've been doing vitamin D with me for two years. And they say, they want to know, is this related to that vitamin  that I've been taking with you? And now I'm very freaked out because l'm afraid that what l've been doing even though their sleep is better and we're all happy about that headaches were better, now they're a little worse again is I've put them in a situation where  they are now using more of whatever these building blocks are and I've actually forced them into another deficiency state. I'm making them make more repairs and now they're deficient in something else and I don't know what. 

Now, a patient walks in with a book. 

 This is why I'm telling you that my patients are the ones that taught me all this stuff. And I'm telling you these embarrassing stories because they come in and they say, "Did you do this to me?" That's very uncomfortable. And I don't know, but I feel a commitment that I better find out.

 And a woman walks in with a book that's called The Pain-Free Promise of Pantaththenic Acid. God forbid, it's another vitamin. 

So I happen to have developed over the same time period this weird buttock pain. I can't sit down to talk to my patients at the end of the day because my butt hurts. So I feel like I have the same thing. So l read this book. It says pantaththenic acid is a chemical that makes this thing called co-enzyme A. Co-enzyme A is responsible for making cortisol. 

And I don't think that's causing this burning, but this is something I need to know about. And cortisol is big in sleep. We talk about cortisol all the time, the timing of it, and it's huge in inflammation. I go to the vitamin store, 

 I find panthenic acid. The book says 400 milligrams is the right dose. So, I pick up the 400 milligrams and I go to the B complex. I find something called B 100, which means there's each one has got 100 milligrams or 100 micrograms. I go home with these two things. I start taking them and I give recommendations to anyone who comes in that one week where I have a sleep study, they have a new complaint, 

I give a recommendation of B100 and B5. What the book did was it sent me to the references. The articles that she references are from the 1950s in this creepy lab next to the lowa State prison where they're doing these creepy experiments on prisoners before it becomes illegal. 

They published this article saying if you block panaththenic acid for two weeks, you see four things. 

They can't sleep. 

They have belly complaints, bloating, and all sorts of things. 

They have a funny puppet like gate and they have burning in their hands and feet and I go, "This is wonderful." So that was one of the motivations. So the cortisol link to pain and the burning in the hands and  feet. Now I've got it in my head that I've made them use more of the B vitamins. 

Chapter 9: Does Vitamin D Deplete Your Body's B Vitamins? 

( So let's just pause that. So you're saying that by asking your patients to take more vitamin D, you're saying that the body has also started to use more B   vitamins, which means that by taking more vitamin D, they're now deficient in B vitamins. )

Yes. ( And so when you use vitamin D, you also use more B vitamins. )

 There's another point that I'm about to make, but you summarize it perfectly. 

 So the next question would be, okay, I'm taking 400 milligrams cuz that's what it says in the book and that's the only dose that was on the shelf in the vitamin store. 

 I get to the end of the week and I realize I have restless legs and my restless legs has been much worse this week. This is probably too big a dose and I stop the 400 milligrams and everything goes away. My butt pain goes away like in a day.  400 milligrams of B5. 

 So panaththenic acid is called B5. All the patients who come back say were you trying to kill me? This 400 milligrams here. I got so agitated, I stopped it after two days. I felt like I was crawling out of my skin and I couldn't sleep at all. If you block B5 you get insomnia. That means it has power in sleep. D has power in sleep. 

But it turns out if it has power in sleep, your body has a very specific amount that it wants. If you give it too much, it's not happy. If you give it too little, it's not happy. And it turns out that instead of giving you  little, it's not happy. And it turns out that instead of giving you one thing when it's low and another thing when it's high, which is what I would have anticipated, it goes back to the same thing. When it's not happy, it just stops sleeping. Now, a couple of them come back and say, you know, I stopped the 400 milligrams because I was so agitated, couldn't sleep at all, but I stayed on B100. I feel great. My sleep is perfect. My pain is gone. And I said, that's what happened to me. It's just like too weird. This chemical is doing something and it's acting. What I would say to my patients is be very careful with this because I don't really know what dose you'll need. 

 If it's too much, it'll act like caffeine. It'll keep you up at night. Okay. 

Then the next thing that happens is a gal comes in and says, "You know, you gave me that B 100 and I ached all over. I would get up in the morning and I go and she said, you know, I broke it in half and I'm taking that and I feel great." What you'll see here is B50, which is 50 milligrams of each, but all eight B's has 50 milligrams of B5 in it. 

 It turns out if you've been taking D for two years, you've actually worked your way into a place where your body has been using more Bs and you are now very profoundly deficient. But she did not take two years. She was a new patient to me. She had not been on D for that period of time. The reason why this discussion is important is there are millions of people who started taking D and CO who by the fourth year after taking it started to have burning in their hands and feet. They're not even taking it anymore. They took it from 2020 to 2023. Their levels got into the 60s. Their doctor said, "Hey, 60 is enough. Stop taking the vitamin D." 

But they still show up with the B vitamin diagnosis. And they go to their doctor and they say, "Oh, well, you've developed lupus. Oh, or you have this. 

1:00:35 Oh, or you have that." These are all diseases that have been described already, but they haven't been described as B vitamin deficiency states, which is 

1:00:44 bizarre, but that's the historical point. All of the literature says B5 deficiency doesn't exist because it's in  every food.

Chapter 10: Can Vitamin B Supplements Really Fix Your Gut? 

 Now, I'm reading that literature and it says thamine, which is B1, has a poop bacteria source and a food source. 

 B2 poop bacteria and a food source. All of them come from the poop. 

( What do you mean come from the poop? )

 These eight chemicals called B, all of them are made by bacteria and we absorb them. Everybody knows that we have the wrong microbiome. And we've all been told that it's toxins. 

Antibiotics are the major thing that are blamed. But we now have a huge body of literature about the microbiome being abnormal. 

 The gut microbiome. 

Yes. The other weird part about it is there are these guys in Oklahoma, Gl surgeons, who are giving poop transplants. 

 (Give me context on what that is.)

They take poop from one person and they push it up the other person's butt. Like we've spent a hundred years, saying stay away from the poop. It's bad for you.  Don't go from the poop to your mouth. Okay? 

We've made this idea that the bacteria, we're fighting against them. They're trying to take us over and they're bad and we're fighting against them. But as people are dying of things like claustrdium difficil, which ciff is the way it's shortened, they're dying of cadiff infection and they're doing poop transplants and they live. It turns out that the 8 B vitamins were first described as bacterial growth factors. 

 They are chemicals that one bacteria is able to make and it pushes it out of its cell into the environment. And this one next to it, that's a different one goes Goodie, give me that. And those guys live together as a group, a commensal,  meaning each one of them derive benefit from having the other one there. So there are four big groups of bacteria that is the normal human microbiome. The word commensal means an organism that lives on, in, or with another species, getting food or benefits from the host without helping or hurting it.

Well, why are there four? Why is it always this four? And how come we only know about 2% of them? For saying all these things that the microbiome is wrong. 

 Turns out we only know 2% of 200 bacteria that are normal occupants from the mouth, from the lips all the way to the anus. We only know 2%. 

 But we have the genetic footprint of every single one. We are able to take them out of the poop or out of the small intestine or out of the mouth and we can say these are the genetics and we've named all of them. So we know there are 200. Okay.

And the article that they write is, you know, it looks to us like the reason why this foursome of groups hang out together is because they all at least need one B vitamin and they produce at least one. 

So they all have a relationship to the B vitamins. And we should start thinking about the microbiome as the production system that supplies the B vitamins to the body. I didn't find that article until after. But here l am back again with one big question. 

These two women with the burning in their hands and feet, why did they get B vitamin deficient? If the Bs come from the food, they've had the same diet all along. And I haven't controlled their diet. I haven't made them change their diet. Why did all of these people come back with these complaints? 

 The one thing we know is many of them have IBS symptoms, which are a signal that the bacteria isn't right. 

IBS. What's that? 

Irritable bowel syndrome. Yeah.

Diarrhea, constipation, bloating. My belly isn't right. Yeah. 

Because I had assumed that D was going to fix everything. Vitamin D. 

 The vitamin D was going to fix their belly and it didn't. There were several things that did not get better. One, their IBS didn't get better. Two, they didn't lose weight. 

That was really weird because they were out exercising more. They were out exercising in the middle of the day, but they didn't lose weight. That means there's still something wrong in the background where they didn't lose weight. 

So, I'm stuck with, okay, why didn't the D fix the B thing? Oh. Oh, these were all described as bacterial growth factors. I have assumed that vitamin D was a bacterial growth factor because Walter W talked about the GI tract having all sorts of receptors for vitamin D. And so I assumed that the bacteria that lived inside us needed vitamin D to be normal. And therefore I assumed that IBS showed up in the 1980s because we went into D deficiency and that D deficiency caused this IBS. There were no articles about that in humans until 2020 when COVID came and they actually started to realize that the people who wereD deficient died in COVID and they started to actually look at oh is the microbiome playing a role in our immune system? Yes. If I give vitamin D, will the bacterial makeup of my stool change in a positive way? 

 Exactly. Does the poop bacteria makeup change in a positive way? We know we've seen people who don't have inflammatory disorders and they have these this bacterial makeup. Will giving vitamin D change the population? And yes, that's the answer. Now I realized now I'm giving two bacterial growth factors D and now I'm giving B 100 and I'm giving a large dose of all eight B's. Remember that give all eight.

 That means by accident I have actually given eight bacterial growth factors that are necessary for bringing the poop bacteria back to the normal human makeup that it's supposed to be that it has always come to be spontaneously. 

 That's a really important point. All the other animals in the world, they're not obese. There are no obese squirrels in my backyard. The only obese animals are are cats and dogs that we keep inside. 

 So to summarize for me, what is the link between vitamin D and the B vitamins? 

It turns out that all the Bs come from the microbiome. Yes. Okay, I understood that. 

 In order to have the correct microbiome, we are actually commensal organisms with our microbiome. That means we have to provide D. They in turn provide us with Bs.

 Okay. So isn't that a good thing that you gave them D then because then their body makes B. Yes. But it didn't make B on its own. 

 Otherwise, those side effects like my butt pain wouldn't have been there. 

Okay. So, let's bring that let's bring that into focus. The D by itself did not correct the microbiome. Yeah. 

 So, when I took 5,000 of D between 2020 and 2023, and I took it for three years because my doctor told me it was okay. But in 2025, I started to have rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. The D did not correct my microbiome. It actually made me deficient. I'm going to give you the drug for rheumatoid arthritis. I'm not going to picture it as, oh, you need B50. 

 So, you gave B50, but then didn't they have another problem? Most of the time, what happens after the B50 is everything comes back to normal. 

The GI tracttorrects You have to take it only for 3 months. I was taking it for four and a half months and I started to wake up and feel old. 

Yeah. 

And everything I just parenthetically told you about the the GI tract was percolating around in my brain. And what I had told my patients was, you know, I think we've stumbled on the growth factor that the right microbiome needs. 

And I think the reason you became B vitamin deficient was because it was the wrong microbiome. But when we give them what they need, they're going to grow back. 

Okay. Fine. They're going to grow back and they're going to do their job. 

Okay, so they're going to produce B50. They're going to make that. 

Let me summarize that. So, by giving them B50 for a short period of time, you're kind of jump-starting the gut microbiome and then you don't want to keep giving it to them or else they're going to become like dependent or not do their job properly. So, you want to give it to them for 3 months. 

 Let them jump start and then they'll do their job and then you leave them alone. Yes. And I want to add one more thing. 

  The way you think about it is probiotics are bacteria.  You dump the bacteria down and you swallow it. It goes into your small intestine. But if it does not have the growth factors that it needs, which every bacteria has its little set of growth helpers, it needs to be able to absorb from the actual juice that's down there. If it doesn't have that, it can't reproduce.  Every bacteria that's sitting in my small intestine right now 12 hours from now is going to be in a different place. 

 A day from now I'm going to poop it out. Who's up here now? The great great granddaughters of the bacteria that are sitting there while you and l are talking. They reproduce rapidly. You have to picture them like a river. Like we're sitting in, we're looking at the river and the water looks like this and 10 minutes later the water looks the same but that's not the same water that we were looking at 10 minutes ago. That water is downstream. That means the level of reproduction that they are expected to do requires constant production of these growth factors. 

Now it turns out that you don't have to think about that. All you have to do is have the normal bacteria that was generated spontaneously when you were born because mom was giving you D in her breast milk and it also had eight B's. Those eight B's came from her normal microbiome in the breast milk. 

 That means you had everything you needed and then you were out in the sun. You were born in June or July in the summer and then you got D on your skin and that process has replicated for 300,000 years for 250 million years. The dinosaurs had a microbiome in their intestines. This is so old it's unimaginable. 

( So what is the conclusion here then? Because I do want to bring this back to Natalie and Meline. Okay. I still haven't figured out what  you told them to do. )

Stephen, you are so smart and it's so such a pleasure to talk to you. These are difficult points. 

Meline is struggling with all these things. She's slowly getting better. Then we do the D. She's  slowly getting better. Then we do the B 100. And then it's freaking awesome. She starts to lose the pain that she had down her leg. The burning in her hands and feet goes away. Her sleep gets much better. Now she's into year three and four of what becomes the Right Sleep program and she's still on 30,000 IUs of D a day. That's an immense dose. Most people are taking 5 to 10. She's been taking 30,000 a day for four years. Her D level has stayed the same. She's in the 60s. She's doing a great job of keeping everything the same. 

That really means that her body is using 30,000 IUs of vitamin D a day for four years. That's a very important concept because it means she is using so much more than anybody else is using in my practice. Most people are on 10,000. 

 But she's making these amazing repairs. 

Her depression is gone. She's stopped three medicines that we've been using for pain control. She now gets up in the morning and she feels energetic. She's starting a program that the Texas state has for going back to work. I mean, I was like, "This girl's never going back.  She wants to go back to work. She is a totally different person."

 Now, importantly, she is not 100 pounds thinner. She's still 100 pounds overweight. And that is one of the things that happened in most of my patients and clients. The body will not lose that weight until it's really made every repair it thinks is necessary. And then it decides that it's not going to need this fat anymore. 

 So with her, did you take her off the B vitamins? 1:13:07 The routine is that one, they have to do D and this will become the Right Sleep program. 

 But they have to do D because they're not getting sunlight. Correct. 

 We, none of us really get enough sunlight. 

 Correct. So and we can talk about supplement versus sun, but the D is pivotal to the entire program and it has  to continue. And if you have a sleep problem or medical problems, you will do better if you get your D above 60 and keep it around there.

 That is not the same as saying what is the ideal D level for a human who wants to over achieve. It is not the same. 

Okay, so she's on D. She stays on D the rest of her life as long as she needs it. And she's always checking her D levels. Then she goes on B 100. She happened to be one of the ones that was on D by itself for 2 years. If you have been on D for two or three or 5 years in the past and have developed B vitamin deficiency states, then you will have to go back on D with the B50 and you will do that for 3 months and then you will stop and you'll go down to a much lower dose that's a multivitamin. 

One of the things in the background that we haven't talked about yet is there are actually hundreds of things that the bacteria are doing for us that are just starting to be reported. But they have been pivotal all along in all the minerals, all the minerals that show up in a multivitamin.

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