Donna: Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is a licensednaturalgutcures.com.s3.amazonaws.com/transcripts/Ritamarie_Losc… · in the gut and leaky gut being a segue to so many different diseases

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Gut-Hormone Connection Guest: Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure your condition or to be a substitute for advice from your physician or other healthcare professional. Donna: Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is a licensed doctor of chiropractic with certifications in acupuncture, nutrition, herbal medicine, and

HeartMath. She’s also a certified living fitness instructor. She’s a coach. And she’s actually trained hundreds of others in the art of using palate-pleasing whole fresh food as medicine. She’s a bestselling author and speaker and also an internationally recognized nutrition and health authority for over 23 years of clinical experience. She offers online courses. She’s got a really great course for practitioners. There’s a practitioner’s certification program that helps professionals, healthcare professionals, to unravel the mystery of their clients’ complex health challenges. So she’s a great person to train with. She’s also the founder of the Institute for Nutritional Endocrinology. She specializes in the wisdom of nature to restore balance to our hormones, especially our thyroid, our adrenal, and also insulin, too. So it’s a natural for me to invite Ritamarie on, who happens to also be a friend to talk about the gut and the hormone connection. Welcome, Ritamarie! Dr. Loscalzo: Thank you, Donna! I’m so excited to be here! Donna: Well, I’m so grateful that you’re willing to be on because this topic that


we’re going to talk about today, hormones in the gut, is one that I’m sure people have a lot of interest in because many people know that they have a hormone imbalance or maybe they’re not making enough hormones, they might not be tying it into their gut. So this is just great that you’re an expert on this topic. Dr. Loscalzo: Well. Yeah, I’m excited to be here to talk about this, Donna, because it is true that people don’t make the connections. We compartmentalize the body. Like, “Oh, I have this problem with my hormones. I go to a hormone specialist. I have a problem with my gut, I go here. A problem with my brain, I go to somebody that specializes in neurology.” And really so much of it is tied together. And the gut is the seed of just about everything, as you know, which is why you specialize in and are doing this Summit. Which, I’m so excited to be a part of. Donna: Well, we needed you a part of this because this is a great topic. Now, hormones, what hormones are we referring to here because Mike Mutzel and I did a talk on gut hormones. Which again, people don’t know they have hormones in their gut, all the along the digestive tract. So we’re not talking about the hormones actually in the digestive tract, right? Dr. Loscalzo: Well, yeah. So that’s an important piece. And Mike’s already covered that. So we should cover something different. And the thing that people don’t realize is I like to look at the gut is it’s probably the biggest endocrine gland we have in the body, if you can call it that. But it’s the biggest secretor of hormones. And hormones control it. And there’s that internal control that Mike talked about. But then, there’s the outside control. The effect of hormones on the gut and the effect that the gut has on the hormones. And people don’t realize that. Donna: So what is basically the connection between the gut and the sexual hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, growth hormone, all of those hormones? What’s the connection between the gut and those hormones?


Dr. Loscalzo: Well, there’s a connection between different hormones. So you mentioned some of them. There’s also thyroid hormones. There’s adrenal hormones. But beyond the hormones that might control the gut function itself, there’s hormones that are secreted by the pancreas that indirectly affect the gut. They’re blood-sugar balancing hormones. And those affect the gut, as well. And the gut affects those. So there’s this like, this part’s connected to that part. What was the old song about the thigh bone’s connected to the neck bone thing? It’s all interrelated. And if you have hormone imbalances and you don’t address the gut, then the hormone imbalances, all you can really do is do symptomatic band aid control, not root cause because a lot of times the gut is routed in, is going to have an effect on the hormones. So it’s a two-way street basically. So you asked specifically about sex hormones and growth hormone and all these different things. So, for example, let’s just pick one out of the blue. We’ll pick testosterone. Testosterone low levels, efficiency of testosterone, can lead to inflammation in the gut. And as you talk about in so many of your presentations here and so many of the great speakers talk about inflammation in the gut and leaky gut being a segue to so many different diseases. Well, low levels of testosterone can cause the inflammation in the gut to get worse, so maintaining healthy levels of testosterone help with, not only with inflammation in the gut, but as a result, the absorption of food and food allergies and all the other things that can happen as the result of a leaky gut. So that’s just one example. Donna: Who’s likely to have a low testosterone problem? Dr. Loscalzo: Well, that’s a good question. So we would think right away, we go, “Oh, men, it’s a problem in men.” So men as they age and go into what’s called andropause, which is the male equivalent of menopause, although, it’s not as obvious and it’s not as much talked about, but as men age, if they’ve been leading, especially a stressful lifestyle, which a lot of men are, they’ve


been wage earners, they’ve been taking care of families, they’ve been in business, and they get to this point where they’re approaching 60, 65, the testosterone levels start to take a dip. Now, they naturally go down a little bit. So we can look at normal aging and pathological aging. So normally, just a lot of things start to just gradually decline as we age. But the dramatic drop that happens at what we lovingly call andropause can be a result of having chronic stress throughout their life. So not having enough of the precursors, the building blocks that help make testosterone, and those are gobbled up by the stress hormone cortisol in trying to keep the person alive and well and functioning. So it’s a much more rapid decline in people, especially men who are leading a more robust and out there and successful lifestyle. But they’ve been burning the candle at both ends. So that’s one set of people. But women, women we all, we need testosterone. We are not just estrogen and progesterone. We’re not just female hormones. Men have progesterone and estrogen. We have testosterone, just not in the large amounts that men would have. So when the testosterone levels in women, they can start to decline. And they get overpowered by the estrogens because we have estrogen dominance in this society big time. And we might have talked about that before. But estrogen dominance is a serious problem. And it can contribute to not only gut issues, but to cancer-type issues—estrogen-type cancers. So we see this a lot because of the pesticides in the environment. We see it because of the pesticides in the food. We see it because people are eating foods in plastic containers and heating them in the microwave and causing the leaching of those estrogens into the food. There’s the toxic estrogens like the pesticides look like estrogen. But they don’t act like estrogen in the body. But they create an imbalance between estrogen and testosterone. So there’s all things that we’re doing on a day-to-day basis that are contributing to this problem of hormone imbalance.


Donna: And also young men, too. A lot of times people think it is a problem for older men or as they age. But young men, I know that the endocrinologists and functional medicine doctors like you are really concerned about how young men in their late 20s, well even early 20s are low in testosterone. And I think it’s pretty much in a common agreement that it’s a combination of stress. Because everybody’s overly busy today. And then, like you said estrogen dominance. We have young boys that are getting too many chemicals in their body, making them feminine. And then the chemicals and heavy metals and all, that’s pretty much from what I understand is causing that low-T, as they call it on TV— Dr. Loscalzo: Low-T. Yeah. Donna: And in men and young men. And so again, it’s managing stress and getting the toxins out of the body would be the answer for that. But what about the gut? Like, where’s the gut involved in the T picture? Dr. Loscalzo: Well, I think a big part of it is when we have an imbalance in, say gut flora, and the microbiome is out of balance. And we’re producing endotoxins from those out-of-balance bacteria. And it’s causing an inflammation in the cell walls. We’re actually not able to recycle and actually get rid of a lot of the estrogen. So that’s one way. We’re not able to get rid of those estrogens after they’ve been conjugated by the liver and set to release to go out, they get stuck. They get trapped because the digestion is sluggish because we’ve got inflammation. And instead, they get recycled. And so that leads to an estrogen dominance, as well. But those aren’t, again not the functional estrogen. So what we see is we’ll actually see people who are estrogen dominant. They have too much in the way of estrogen molecules. But they’re not really functional active estrogens. So they actually can show signs of estrogen deficiency and estrogen dominance at the same time. And that leads to issues.


It throws off the balance between estrogen and testosterone, but also the balance between estrogen and progesterone. And progesterone is very protective and is very anti-inflammatory. And it helps to soothe and calm. And when we have this predominance of all this estrogen, we can be throwing off the progesterone and the testosterone, as well. Donna: When you asked me to come one time to Austin and speak at a conference you were doing on this topic, I did more and more research on it. And I found out very interestingly that men have a different immune system than women do because of the microbes in their gut and because they have high levels of testosterone. And what I learned was that in a man’s body, because again of their hormones—their high testosterone—they have a weaker innate immune system. In other words, if they get attacked by a virus or a cold or something, they’re going to come down. Women will have more resistance. And a man will come succumb to that virus, let’s say, more easily. But men rarely have autoimmune diseases. They can have an autoimmune disease. But women because they’re strong as far as an innate immune system, that first response, but then, they’ve got issues with autoimmunity. So I think that would be a really good thing to talk about, too. Let’s talk about Hashimoto’s and the thyroid because that’s a really big problem. I understand from the statistics that of young women going in for, say, this person has a thyroid problem getting tested, they test their thyroid antibodies. And they find out that about 80% of women with low thyroid, do you have Hashimoto’s? So can we talk about that for a little while and the connection with the gut? Dr. Loscalzo: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the gut, it’s estimated now, it’s really been theorized that all autoimmune diseases start in the gut. And when we have increased intestinal permeability and we’re allowing things to get into the bloodstream that shouldn’t be getting into the bloodstream, it


creates this massive immune process where the body starts attacking. And these a number of theories about how the autoimmunity gets started. One is the crossfire, the drive-by shooting thing. So the immune system is shooting and trying to get rid of these toxins and these undigested food particles and bacterial endotoxins and bacteria themselves that end up in the bloodstream that don’t belong there. And the body, “Attack. Attack. Attack. Attack.” Well, there’s organs and glands that are in the vicinity that get that drive-by shooting. So that’s one. The other is molecular mimicry or cross-reactivity, as it’s sometimes called. And that’s where the way that the immune system works is it only really looks at a pattern of three amino acids to make a decision as to the identify. And so that’s like you’re walking down the street and they see your shoulder-length brown hair. And they look and they say, “Oh, that must be that woman that escaped from the penitentiary down there because she had shoulder-length brown hair.” And they start attacking you. It’s mistaken identity. Like, you’re in the crossfire of this. And you’re like, “I’m okay. I’m innocent.” So the thyroid may have this three amino acid pattern. They have tyrosine, alanine, and glutamine in this three pattern. And that’s what the gluten or the dairy, the casein, or the egg protein or soy protein or broccoli protein or whatever it is that got into the bloodstream when it shouldn’t have looks like it has this same three amino acid pattern. So the body says, “Oh, look over there, more. More of that stuff that we ought to kill.” And it starts killing the thyroid. Donna: That’s a great explanation. Thank you for that. That was perfect. A very good visual. Dr. Loscalzo: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s what happens. Because then the immune system starts to crossfire. And then, you’re attacking. And everybody’s saying, “Oh, this person has a thyroid problem.” And quite frankly, most doctors in the Western hemisphere do not test for Hashimoto’s. They don’t test for those


antibodies. It’s getting more and more popular now. But I am still shocked when I do these courses. I just recently finished or last year did a thyroid course where I have a couple hundred people coming through and learning how to balance their thyroids. And I was amazed at how many people had been on thyroid medication for 15 years, were not getting better. And they’d never had their antibodies tested. And we tested them. And sure enough, what comes up? They’ve got Hashimoto’s. Doctors missed it. And so they’re barking up the wrong tree, so to speak, when they start attacking and saying, “Okay, we just have to give you thyroid hormone.” That’s not the problem. The problem is the mistaken identity. The problem is the immune system is misfiring. The problem is there’s some inflammation that’s directed at the thyroid that shouldn’t be. So what we want to do is go, “What’s the root cause? What’s the root cause? What’s the root cause?” And when we trace back to what’s really causing it, one of the primary ones is the gut. And we need to go back. And we need to heal the leaky gut. We need to get rid of all those foods that are attacking them and causing the leaky gut like the gluten and the casein. And for some people, it could be broccoli, whatever it might be that they’ve developed a sensitivity to. Eliminate the foods, heal the leaky gut. And then, look at, “Okay, what else is stressing out the immune system?” It could be heavy metals. And then, you’ve got to look at the microbiome. You have to look at, “Are they getting enough fermented foods? What kind of fermented foods are going to work for them?” And really trace back and drill back to the gut. And when you go back and you start healing the gut, you see cases of not just Hashimoto’s, but other autoimmune diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis start to get better because the root was in the gut and the immune system. The gut causing an immune system problem, causing the thyroid. But you go to the doctor and they’re treating the thyroid, which is the tertiary problem you can’t fix, if you don’t fix the root cause.


Donna: In Body Ecology we have the step-by-step principle. And I always tell people you’ve got to be focused on four things in the beginning. At the very first step on your journey to wellness, you’ve got to create an energy. You’ve got to conquer any infections in your body because they’re causing lots of inflammation. And you have to cleanse out the toxins and correct digestion. And so in the beginning, I love it when people send me their information. But I’ll say, “Well, do you have any hormone testing that’s been done lately? Any results from that? And they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, my doctor told me my thyroid was normal.” And I said, “Well, do you have it?” First of all, they don’t even ask the doctor for the test results, number one. Secondly, when you ask them, they just have the TSH, which is just really is definitely not enough information to even begin to know if your thyroid’s normal or not. So it would be good to just have it down for record here that if that’s what you’re thinking is your doctor’s doing, you need a different doctor or a better doctor or ask him for a full thyroid panel. But what’s also interesting, too, I see this a lot is that they are already on thyroid hormone, especially if they’re older. And they’re not on the right thyroid medications. So let’s just take a moment to talk about the right thyroid medication. Dr. Loscalzo: Sure. Yeah. So a lot of times, they’re just put on T4. The most common prescription is Synthroid or Westhroid or something like that. Yeah, I think that’s it. No, Synthroid or levothyroxine. Sorry, Westhroid is actually a natural one. But Synthroid is T4. So our thyroids make mostly T4. Like 80% to 90% of what the thyroid produces is T4. And there’s two main thyroid hormones—T4 and T3—for those not familiar with it. And really the number, the three or the four has to do with how many iodines are attached to a ring in the middle of tyrosine, which is an amino acid. So we have either four or three. The active form is three—T3. The storage form is T4. So the T4 has to get converted to T3.


So I’m glad you brought this up because this is so connected to the gut. So they give them the T4 medication. And they look and they just go, “Okay, this other number called the TSH, it looks fine. It looks fine now because we gave T4.” And really, it will because most of the time because it’s just the brain saying, “Oh, how much thyroid hormone is there? Oh, great, we don’t have to make TSH. We’re going to lower that down. It’s going to be fine because there’s enough T4.” Meanwhile, there’s plenty of T4. But there’s not enough T3 because one of the places that the T4 gets converted to T3…So we have this nice stable act form that goes floating around T4. But the T3 is short-lived. It gets into your cells. And it gives you energy and does all the stuff. Well, T4 has to be converted to T3. Well, one of the places where the T4 gets converted to T3 is guess where? The gut. Donna: The gut. Dr. Loscalzo: Yeah. Donna: I know 20% of the T4 is actually made in the gut—20%—happens there, as well. Dr. Loscalzo: Yeah. Yeah. So the body can make the T4 in other places other than the thyroid, as well. And 25% is what I’ve heard is the conversion. It may be higher, it may be lower in some people. It doesn’t matter, the numbers. But it matters is that a good percentage of that is happening in the gut. The rest of it’s happening in the liver. So if you’ve got a problem with your gut, chances are, too, your liver’s pretty stressed because there’s a circulation called the enterohepatic circulation from the gut to the liver, the first pass. So if you’re producing a lot of toxicity in your gut, you’ve got a lot of dysbiosis, a lot of bad organisms growing there. And they’re producing all these endotoxins and lipopolysaccharides and all these things. That stuff can flow right to the liver. So chances are good, if your


gut’s a mess, your liver’s going to be really stressed. So another huge percent is converted in the liver. So between the liver and the gut, 75% of that T4 gets converted to T3. So if you give someone T4 medication and they’ve got a gut issue, they’re not going to be able to convert it. And they’re going to still have symptoms, even though the lab tests look normal. Donna: Well, going back to the step-by-step principle that I find really useful for people is that create energy, correct digestion, concur infections, and so on, when you’re doing that, when you’re correcting digestion, you’re eating right. So you’re bringing the infections under control, like candidiasis, for example, the energy pops up. And this explains it. So, so many times I’ve said to people, “It’s nice to know what your results are right now. But let’s wait three or four months.” They go back and they get tested. And it’s amazing how many people have pretty normal looking thyroid hormones. And so I think that there’s way too many people are being put on thyroid medication—I know you agree with that—without doing the basics. And the basics would be fixing the gut, cleansing out the toxins. And then, of course, you’ve got to bring infections under control. And I just wanted to add that acetaldehyde is a dangerous toxin secreted by yeast all the time. And that acetaldehyde prevents T4 from converting to T3, as does cortisol. So let’s move to stress and cortisol and the effect that that has on the gut. Dr. Loscalzo: And this is widespread. So the stress has an affect indirectly through the thyroid. So we’ll start there. So like you said cortisol, which is our stress hormone gets secreted when we’re under stress. And it’s great when a tiger’s chasing you to have elevated levels of cortisol because what it does is it takes the energy away from the non-essential things when it comes to getting away from tigers. And that’s the gut. We don’t need to be digesting when we’re running away from a tiger. And it puts all its energy to getting away.


But the cortisol also interferes with an enzyme that converts T4 to T3 called five prime deiodinase. And when it can’t like take away that extra iodine to make T3, because that enzyme’s stuck, your numbers look great. Your T4 looks great. Your TSH looks great. But your free T3 is in the toilet. You can’t do it. And a lot of docs aren’t testing for free T3 either. So they don’t even see this problem. As a functional medicine doctor, I’m testing for T4 and T3 both because I want to see what the conversion is. But most of them aren’t. And, in fact, when I tell my clients, if they’re going back and if it’s an Internet program and I can’t order the labs for them, they’re going back to their doctor to order it, I tell them have your doctor order free T3. And they come back and say, “Oh, the doctor said that my TSH is fine. So there’s no need to measure that.” And another one said, “Well, I don’t know what free T3 even does. So I’m not going to measure it.” So I’m like, “Try this.” Like, what do you mean? Do they go to sleep during their thyroid lectures in medical school because obviously they must have taught it? But they didn’t emphasize it. They taught it as like a cool fact about what happens and how it work. But they didn’t connect the dots clinically to how important it was to measure all of this. So in my practitioner’s trainings, I’ve had medical doctors come to me and said, “My God! Thank goodness, I finally understand how the thyroid works. And now, I feel like I can actually help people.” So it’s wonderful stuff. So we now have not enough T3 as a result of this interference. So now, we don’t have enough of the energy making. So the cells, the enteral sites, which are these cells in the small intestine and all the other cells that line the gut, they need to be doing work. They need to be secreting what they’re supposed to secrete, whether its enzymes or moisture, mucous, they need to be able to pass nutrients through, prevent toxins from going through. They need energy. Every cell in our body needs energy. So now, you don’t have enough T3. So the cells in the gut are slowed down.


On top of that, going back to the cortisol, the cortisol because you’re supposed to be running away from a tiger and not digesting food, it actually causes the sphincters in the different spots in the digestive tract, there’s several of them, to shut down. And those are just little valves or passageways from one part to the next, those close. And it shuts down the secretions throughout the digestive tract. So stomach acid down. Digestive enzymes down. Bile down. Lubrication down. So how are you going to digest food if you don’t have the mechanisms to happen? Plus, all the compartments are shut. Donna: That’s why one of the symptoms of low thyroid is constipation? Dr. Loscalzo: Yeah. Absolutely. Everything slow to down. Things don’t move properly through. So we’ve got the influence of the thyroid on the gut. We’ve got the influence of the adrenals and stress on the gut. Okay. Whether, it’s directly or through the thyroid’s, we get a double whammy there. When you get elevations, when you don’t have enough…Okay, so going back to estrogen or testosterone, if we have too much estrogen, it interferes with the conversions. It interferes with not just the conversions. But it interferes with taking the storage form of the hormone and making it free, and freeing it up. So it binds. It causes more of the thyroid binding globulins when you have too much estrogen. When you have too much testosterone, you have too little. And so how does that affect the gut? Well, if you have too little T3, then everything’s slowed down. You have the sluggishness. You have the constipation. The immune system fighting off the gut bugs, the bad gut bugs. So you have a sluggishness. Now, on the end with the too much testosterone, I know earlier we talked about not enough. But when you have too much testosterone, it’s actually causing to have not enough of that thyroid binding globulin. So you have too


much thyroid hormone, which is going to cause an opposite extreme. The stuff is rushing through the system. We have diarrhea. We have things running through the system much too rapidly. So you don’t have time for all the nutrients to be absorbed. So either way, we’re getting problems with the testosterone. And it’s like the Goldilocks principle of not too much, not too little. Everything has to be just right. Donna: Well, I wanted to add to that a little bit more about candidiasis again and the effect they would have your hormones. The yeast actually consume estrogen. They eat it. It’s a food for them. And they will also make estrogen to feed themselves. So that’s another thing that will keep someone estrogen dominant, throwing off your hormone balance. So again, I think that’s another really important reason. Besides fixing the gut, you’ve got to bring infections like systemic yeast infection and candidiasis under control, as well, because there’s also going on, which again if you’re on a gluten-free, sugar-free diet and dairy, I think especially in the beginning you’ve got to be off casein and so on, that that’s going to bring your yeast infection under control. So that’s also occurring, as well. And a lot of people don’t realize that yeast actually make estrogen to feed themselves. And that’s going to be contributing to your total body burden of estrogen. So everything you said also fits into that picture, too. Now, stress, cortisol, like what do you do when you’re working with somebody and you know stress is a big issue for them, and it’s probably not going to go away, what are some of your top say, top three or four suggestions to help them manage stress better? Dr. Loscalzo: Yeah. So my top suggestion is breathing because that’s what we forget to do when we’re under stress. We do that shallow [pants] breathing. But we don’t do those long, slow, deep breaths. And the long, slow, deep breaths are what’s replenished and rebuilt and allow more oxygen to flow through the tissue, allow for healing.


So before you eat, you want to be able to shift yourself from the cortisol, the high cortisol state, which is what’s called the sympathetic-dominant nervous system, and you want to shift into the parasympathetic dominant system. And when you’re in the parasympathetic dominant, you’ve got the vagus nerve that’s going to feed the digestive tract that’s going to have it functioning properly. The vagus nerve’s part of the parasympathetic. So when you’re in the state of stress, the vagus nerve can’t flow. And I know you probably are speaking to Dr. Kharrazian. And he’ll mention the vagus nerve. I’ve heard him speak before. He goes into a major detail about that. So I don’t want to talk too deeply about that. But that vagus nerve is so critical to the right functioning of the digestive tract on a neurologic level. And so we want to get ourselves into that state where, “Ah, the cortisol levels go down. The DHEA levels go up. The vagus nerve is free to operate the way it should. The valves are open. The secretions are happening.” And so what I always have people do is something that we used to do as a family, but maybe not in this way, was grace before meals. So whatever your religious or spiritual background is, it’s taking time before you actually eat the food to breathe and go into appreciation. And that can do wonders alone. I’ve had people just do that for a few days, and seen their digestion improve dramatically. So you just stop. And it’s the stop is the first thing you do. It’s just stop. Whatever you’re doing, stop. You don’t have to just shovel the food in while you’re watching the computer or reading the newspaper or listening to the news. Just stop, take a few deep breaths, [inhales], look at your food, take in the colors, the smells, and just allow yourself to really feel grateful that you have that food there. That that food is going to nourish you. That that food is going to become your cells and just really appreciate it, and then, take time to chew. It goes a long way towards helping digestion.


Donna: So you’re basically saying that mealtimes can be a great time for practicing to manage stress. It’s another form of meditation. Dr. Loscalzo: Right. Exactly. And it doesn’t halve to take long. You don’t have to take a half an hour to go into lotus position and meditate before you eat. You can do it in as little as a minute. And you do it. And then, you just redo it throughout. After you eat, you put your fork down. You chew. You breathe. And then, you take your next forkful instead of just sitting there and like just “Scarf it down as quickly as I can,” never put the fork down, never really close your mouth. You just chomp, chomp, chomp, put more food in and swallow. And that’s horrendous for your digestion, on top of the fact that the cortisol is there, but you’ve got all these undigested food particles because you haven’t taken time to really chew it. So just a few little hygiene things that you can do at mealtime can go a long way to reducing the stress. Donna: So I just want to summarize that because as simple as it is, it was great advice. The vagus nerve connects the brain and the gut. So the best way to relax the vagus nerve is deep breathing. Like, you can breathe, hold it for a count of four, five, six. And then, breathe out again. And just doing that a few times are now going to relax the vagus nerve. And now that connection between the gut and the brain is going to work for you while you eat. And then also, I 100% agree. Someone told me, a spiritual teacher once told me a long time ago the best way to handle stress is to be grateful and be grateful for everything, even the challenges, even over busyness. At least, we are busy. At least, we have work to do. For example, some people in the world are poor. And they have nothing to do and sit around all day. So you can always twist the situation in your mind to find a reason to be grateful. And gratitude is a great way to handle stress. So that was very important tips. I wanted to make sure we said them again. So people caught that.


And now when you have high levels of cortisol, obviously your blood sugar’s going to go up. And so many people today, they aren’t necessarily diabetics. But they’re on their way because they’re insulin resistance. So let’s talk about insulin for a little while. Dr. Loscalzo: Right. So insulin’s the hormone that your pancreas produces in order to help you to get the sugars from your bloodstream and into the cells. The pancreas also produces digestive enzymes. So when you overload the pancreas, first of all, over time, you can have it not be able to make everything it’s supposed to. So if you’re eating foods that are really, really hard to digest and processed and fried and heavily cooked and there’s no life left in them, that’s going to stress your pancreas. And that stress on the pancreas can cause dysregulation in terms of insulin and glucagon, which are the hormones that balance your blood sugar. So when we eat, the body detects, “Well, how much sugar is in that food?” There’s a few of those gut-related hormones that go, “Ooh, there was sugar in that hormone. Let me send a signal to the pancreas to say sugar’s going to be coming. Get ready and produce the insulin.” Or there’s these other mechanisms like that. And I think Mike might have talked about some of those mechanisms in the gut. But the point is that the body gets ready for it. And then, the sugar enters the bloodstream. And then, the pancreas secretes the insulin. But if you’re eating a lot of what we started right out from the beginning, right, Donna, with processed foods, sugar, you’re going to need a lot of insulin in order to get that sugar into the cells. The sugar can’t go into the cells by itself. It needs insulin to transport it. So think about this. It’s a little carrier. And after a while, you just start to produce all this insulin because there’s so much sugar in the blood. The cells say, “No way, no more, I’m done.” And they turn off. And it’s called insulin resistance.


Then, you have these high levels of sugar in the blood. Then, what happens when you have high levels of sugar in the blood is it creates damage throughout the entire body. So now, you’ve got this high level of sugar that’s feeding your yeast. You have this high level of sugar that’s getting into the bloodstream. And it’s stimulating insulin. And the insulin is then stimulating storage of fat because that’s what it does. If it can’t get the sugar into the cells to produce energy, it’s going to store it in the fat cells. And you get overweight. The fat cells then produce inflammatory chemicals. The fat cells can actually store and release at the least opportune times estrogen. So we’re back to the beginning where we talked about estrogen/testosterone balance. And then, there’s inflammation that’s produced by having high levels of insulin, which can further the leaky gut. So it’s this mad vicious cycle that we need to put an end to. Donna: And it means getting off of sugar. But in Body Ecology, we have lakanto and stevia as a substitute. So you don’t have to be on sugar. And you have put into place different ways of managing your stress in order to control the sugar. Dr. Loscalzo: Absolutely. Every time you get stressed, the cortisol is released. And one of cortisol’s jobs is to release sugar. Why? Because it’s supposed to be fueling your muscles to go run away from the tiger, climb up the tree, fight it. But you’re sitting at your desk watching CNN or eating food while you’re looking at your financial reports. And the stress doesn’t give you that avenue for burning that sugar. So that sugar gets elevated in your blood. And here’s something else for those of you who may not care about your digestion as much—and you care about what your waistline—cortisol, the way that it gets more sugar is to go eat up your muscles. And then, once the sugar elevates and you get all this insulin produced, but it can’t get it into the cells because you’re insulin resistant, the insulin then takes the sugar and stores it as fat.


So stress is a really great way to convert muscle. Your thigh muscles into your belly fat. So when I say that to people, they go, “Ugh! Okay. Okay. You got me convinced.” Donna: That’s so true. And one thing I’ve stumbled upon recently, too, that I thought was pretty fascinating. Serotonin is made in the gut as are a bunch of neurotransmitters. And it’s made in the brain, but not so much in the brain, mostly in the gut. It goes all over the body. But I came across this amazing research showing that serotonin sits right beside the same cells that store insulin. So there they are beside each other in the pancreas and the beta cells. And the serotonin actually triggers the release of insulin. And I just find it so amazing how everything is intertwined with everything else. So having a healthy gut, which is producing serotonin, and then appropriately releasing insulin as it’s supposed to is just again that’s why we often say it all ties into having a healthy gut, which is producing the healthy neurotransmitters. And then, you feel good. And you feel happy. And you feel relaxed. And you just sleep better and so on because that’s important. Dr. Loscalzo: Absolutely. That’s a great point. And then, the other thing I was thinking the other day about how the gut flora, like bifidobactor, which is one of the good bacteria that live in our gut that we replenish when we eat probiotic foods. And you’re such a big proponent of probiotic-containing foods and fermented foods. So this bifidobactor actually produces GABA. So GABA is one of our relaxing neurotransmitters that helps us to fall asleep at night, helps us to stay calm in the face of stress. So if we don’t have enough bifidobactor, if we have a messed up gut, and we have candida overgrowth or parasites or the wrong kinds of bacteria, we don’t have enough of this bifodobactor, it’s not there to produce GABA for us. So sleep disturbances can be related to gut issues.


Donna: I actually think bifidus is one of the most important bacteria to take. We put it in our multipack of product that we have that people take at mealtime. And the reason it’s in there is it’s very easy to destroy bifidus. There’s a lot of it in the baby’s gut after birth. And then it diminishes. And there’s like you know how many people are eating a high-saturated fat diet today? Well, the saturated fat destroys bifidus. So it’s a very fragile bacteria. And I really do think it’s very good to supplement bifidus bacteria. So there are a few companies that just do bifidus products. But I didn’t know that about GABA. So that’s great to know. I know that genetically, you can test your genes. Like, I’ve looked at people’s gene tests, as you do, Ritamarie, which is one of the reasons we’re friends is we have so many things in common. It’s terrible to get us together because then we can’t separate from each other. But there’s genes, quite a few of them actually, that you look at to find out are you actually producing enough and then is it getting into the cells because there’s a GABA receptor SNP or variation that you can have that…And man, I see that a lot in people. Here we are going through a stressful time. And we need GABA, some other neurotransmitters. I didn’t know that about the bifidus. So I think that’s great because I’m a big fan of finding ways to get GABA into the body. So thanks for that. Now, one thing you do at your trainings and teach people to do this, which I always thought was really cool, is you teach people how to monitor their blood sugar. So can you tell us how to do that? Dr. Loscalzo: Yeah. Sure. I love it. I happened on this years ago when I was testing people and going, “Huh, I wonder why? I wonder why this is happening?” So we started testing blood sugar. I love it. And I teach people in masses. I’ve probably taught, probably close to a thousand people by now, taking them through step-by-step testing blood sugar.


And why is that important? Well, we know that diabetics do that because they want to maintain the right level of insulin or whatever the other glucose-lowering drugs that they’re on. But why would the average person want to measure their blood sugar? After all, it pokes your finger and you get blood. And who wants to do that? Well, it gives you so much information about how your body’s processing your food and which foods are more ideal for you and which foods you probably ought to stay away from. So the way I do it is we want to get a baseline. So right before you eat a meal, you get a baseline of your blood sugar. And if it’s a first morning meal and you’re just still calm and all, your blood sugar should be between 75 and 85. That’s a good level of blood sugar. And so you start it of, you write it down. And then, you eat your meal. You write down all the things you’ve eaten because we’re going to play detective here. So write down all the things you’ve eaten at the meal. And then, you test the blood sugar. Now, there’s any number of ways you could test it. Some people like to just keep testing it. Like me, I just as well test it every 10 minutes. But that’s a little bit much. So you can take it right after you finish eating. If it’s a short meal and it only takes you 10 minutes to eat the meal, then you could wait 15 minutes before you test it. But if it’s one of those nice leisurely meals, test it right after because you want to see what your blood sugar is right after you eat. So say it was 83 to begin with. It goes up to 88. You’re going, “Okay. Cool. It’s up a little bit because the sugars are getting into my bloodstream already.” And then, you test it every 15 or 20 minutes for the first hour to hour and a half. And what we’re looking for is when it goes up and then when it starts to come down. So it’s really good to try to catch that peak, which is usually between a half an hour and an hour, usually 45 minutes for most people, and then goes back down. And you can tell by a couple of things. How high it goes and then how low it goes after the meal, how well you’re maintaining blood sugar. So ideally, it


should never, ever go above 110. And in a super, super healthy person, it wouldn’t even go above 100. Even if they sat down and ate a meal with lots of sugar, if that’s not something they do all the time and they’ve disordered their blood sugar, a healthy person who just is given this test of just sugar, their sugar won’t go above 100, 100, 110. Some people say, “Oh, my God! But that’s a sweet thing. Of course, my sugar’s going to go up.” No, it shouldn’t because the symphony that your pancreas plays with glucagon-insulin. Glucagon-insulin, it keeps it in a tight narrow range. But you know that if it goes up, if it goes up above 110, above 120, more like 140 or 60, which is still considered—which, 140 is still considered like borderline for a diabetic. For in a diabetic, it’s going to be going up to 160, 180, 200—that’s downright dangerous because when it goes up above 120, you start to get damage to the peripheral nerves. That in diabetics, we call peripheral neuropathy. And when it goes above 140—and in some cases even between 120 and 140, but definitely above 140—it causes retinal damage, which is what we end up in a diabetic calling diabetic retinopathy. But it happens every single time. So when you suddenly get diagnosed as diabetic, 20 years after all this stuff is happening, it’s not like you suddenly developed retinopathy or neuropathy. It’s been brewing for all these last years because every time it goes up, there’s a little more damage, a little more damage, a little more damage until the damage becomes such that you start to be symptomatic. So I love to empower people to do this because then what do they do once they have this? Well, you’ve written down everything you ate. Now, you’re suspicious of everything in that meal. Generally, there’s going to be one thing that’s going to stand out. “Oh, it’s probably that because that has higher sugar.” If you’ve had a salad and some vegetables and a bowl of pineapple, it’s more


likely to be the pineapple than the salad or the vegetables. So then you test another meal. You take out the pineapple, just have the salad and vegetables and see. Or you test again and you take out the pineapple and test that. And then, you stay away from for 30 days all the foods that create a problem with the blood sugar going above 110. And you know what happens? This miracle happens that we know our bodies are so capable of healing. The insulin receptors heal because they’re not bombarded with all this insulin all day long. And suddenly, we’re able to maintain more steady blood sugar. People who are diabetic that do this, they come into my programs. And they start with this. And their numbers are really high. So we can’t, of course, keep them down necessarily to below 110 with very many foods. But even if it’s a handful of foods that they can stay there, suddenly their fasting blood sugar, instead of being in the 150-200 range is down into below 100 range. It happens that quickly. And for those who are not diabetic yet, what we’re doing every time we keep those insulin levels down, we’re protecting the inner linings of the blood vessels because those are the cells that do not become insulin resistant and instead become stiff. As a result of all the insulin, that’s what in many cases leads to the hypertension and the heart disease. Donna: And I want to add, too, this is really important information we’re sharing here. You had mentioned about your sugar gets out of control and then it damages your eyes. It also damages the brain. And we have 79 million baby boomers in the U.S. alone. That doesn’t count all the other countries in the World that eat like we do. Seventy-nine million baby boomers are aging. And they will be blind. They will probably live into their 80s and so. But they will be blind. And they will have dementia. Who’s going to take care of them? So this information, getting this out, getting this tool out, measuring your blood sugar, and then making those receptor sensitive again, that’s very, very important.


Now, you said okay, test your blood sugar. Tell us the best way to test the blood sugar. Like, what do you have people buy to do that? Dr. Loscalzo: You’re going to laugh when you hear this. It’s a little $10.00 to $15.00 blood glucose meter that you can buy on Amazon. That’s in any drug store around. And you buy it. And you buy the strips that you continue to test with. And it’s really easy. It’s got a little thing, a little lancet, a lancing device that you use against your finger. You get a tiny droplet of blood. You put it on the end of this little strip that’s in this meter. And the meter tells you what your blood sugar is. Tiny. Little. You can carry it around with you, very portable. It’s one of the best inventions ever, in my opinion. Because I’ve seen so many lives transformed when they start to do that. It’s totally amazing. And you said something that I just want to make sure nobody glosses over. You said that it affects the brain. And it is now widely known, even in the conventional medical literature. This is not just in the alternative, functional medicine circles. That Alzheimer’s is actually insulin resistance of the brain. And they’re starting to call it type III diabetes. Donna: Good point. I’m glad you pointed that out. Great. Yeah. Yeah, man, it’s scary unless, we do something about it. And, of course, obviously it means changing your diet. So we’ve talked about the key hormones. We’ve talked about the gut, the gut-brain connection and the hormone connection in the gut, so all that. Now, let’s give people some last minute practical information I know we think alike as far diet goes. But let’s wrap that up. And what do you do? How do you eat? What suggestions would you give people going forward to fix the problem to have balanced hormones, and healthy brain, and good vision, and etcetera? What will we do?


Dr. Loscalzo: Well, so much of it is what you’ve been teaching in your books and in your programs and what so many people are saying. And I hate to just sound like, “Oh, it’s so simple.” And it can be complicated. And then you can work with somebody when you have more complexities. But really, you’ve got to get out the processed food. You got to get off sugar. And when I say sugar, I don’t just mean table sugar. And I don’t mean just high-fructose corn syrup. I’m talking the maple syrup and the agave and the coconut syrup and all those other things that might be considered healthier sugars. You can use Stevia. You can use the lakanto. You can use monk fruit. Those are sweet. And you can provide yourself with amazing dishes, amazing desserts. I have like a whole chapter on desserts in my blood sugar balancing recipe guide. They taste great. But we’ve got to get off of that stuff. We’ve got to get off of the gluten because the gluten causes inflammation in the gut. Every single time anybody eats gluten, whether they have sensitivity, antibodies to it or not, it’s causing a leakiness of the gut. And it will be a transient leakiness that lasts about 90 minutes. But think about how often people are eating the gluten. And after a while, you go over the threshold where it can’t heal itself anymore. And now, you’ve got a permanent leaky gut. So we’ve got to get off the gluten. You’ve got to identify food sensitivities. I find that casein, I absolutely get people off casein. Some people can add it back later in the raw, fermented form. But initially, you’ve got to get off the casein and any of the processed foods and any foods you’ve already identified that you have a sensitivity to. Even if it’s just like, “Oh, when I eat that food, my nose gets stuffy for a little while. But I can deal with it.” No, don’t deal with it because that stuffiness is an indication that there’s inflammation in your body. And that inflammation is going to create more of a problem in the gut. So absolutely, any foods you already know.


I always take people off the top six. Gluten, dairy, corn, soy, eggs, and peanuts for at least six weeks to allow the gut to heal. And I get them off of sugar. And those are the main ones. And anything with processed oils. Hydrogenated oils, heated oils, other than coconut and olive oil, which can tolerate a little bit of heat, but heated oils and any of the processed oils. And any of those oils that you buy in the health food store that say “cold-pressed oil,” it’s rancid. Because oils like that cannot tolerate light, heat, or air. They’re sitting on the shelf. They’ve been transported in trucks across the country, especially in the summer heat. And they’re in clear glass bottles. And they’re getting bombarded with the light. So it’s just not a good thing. So getting them on good fats, off the allergens, off the sugar, and onto just whole fresh foods, fermented foods, and eating and breathing and slowing down at least when you eat. We can’t control the outside. I can’t control if you have a cranky boss. I can’t control if your kids are on drugs. I can’t control that. You can’t control that. And the sooner you realize you can’t control it either, the less stress you’re going to have about it. But you can control when you sit down to eat a meal, you can sit there in gratitude. You can breathe. And you can absolutely make mealtime sacred. Donna: Great! That’s perfect. And you reminded me of gluten. We didn’t really point out the affect that gluten’s having, say on the thyroid. And hormones, for example, and dairy, and they’re having a huge affect on the body, too. So will you just add in a little bit about that. Dr. Loscalzo: Gluten is one of the most critical things to get rid of in any cases of autoimmune thyroid. We hit on that earlier. Like, the autoimmune where it’s attacking, gluten is the most common thing to cross-reactive thyroid. So you’ve got to get off of gluten in order to heal your thyroid. It creates the inflammation. It creates that leakiness. So whatever’s in the gut at that time, whatever food you haven’t chewed well because you’re sitting


there scarfing your food down and can’t get fully digested because you’re not making enough digestive enzymes because your body thinks the tiger’s chasing you, that food leaks through your digestive tract into your bloodstream and triggers an immune reaction. So gluten done too much, it creates holes in the gut. And it attacks the thyroid. No good. Dairy, when you look at diabetes, especially autoimmune diabetes, which is type I and also something called latent-adult onset autoimmune diabetes, which is a very common problem that’s most likely misdiagnosed, I’ve found that in a lot of people. And basically, it’s where there’s antibodies attacking the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. And so instead of treating somebody with type I diabetes with just putting them on insulin and sending them away, you’ve got to look at what’s causing the body to attack the pancreas. So dairy has been implicated. Study after study after study that when you get people off of dairy, that their type I diabetes or their autoimmune diabetes gets dramatically better. Will they ever be able to go off it completely? In some cases, yes. In a lot of cases, no. It depends on the damage that’s been done. But dairy is a big no-no. Casein is glue. They actually make glue from casein, which is the primary predominant protein in cow’s milk—casein—80% casein. And if you eat this casein, it can actually get glued into and gummed into and impair the absorption between the cells in the intestinal tract and on the villi and the microvilli. So that’s how the dairy affects it. Donna: Well, gluten, too, how do people take gluten? They have a sandwich and it’s on a mushy bread. Or they have pancakes, cookies, cakes, something. And that’s in a flour form. That’s like glue, too, in the intestines. So these foods are definitely the opposite of the foods the gut needs to be healthy. Dr. Loscalzo: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And you know it’s different. But when people say, “Oh, it’s so hard.” Tell me about it. What’s harder? Giving up gluten and dairy or spending your day in the bathroom with bloody diarrhea


or running to the bathroom or being constipated or having reflux. To me, those symptoms are much harder than giving up the foods that are causing them. Donna: And we can throw aging into that, too. I could say that’s another thing. Everybody’s going to age much, much faster if they don’t have a healthy gut. And they’re eating this way. Well, are there any last thoughts that you want to leave us with because this has been a great interview. You’re such a good teacher. I’m very, very fortunate because everyone I’ve interviewed, everyone’s a great teacher. And that’s so important. I’m hoping everybody listens to this interview more than once. There’s lots of juicy information in here, especially going out to the store and buying a little kit so you can measure your… Oh, here’s a question. People are wondering probably. Does that hurt to do that? I’m wondering if you do it every 15 or 20 minutes, does that hurt to stick your finger with that little lancet? Dr. Loscalzo: It hurts less than a mosquito bite. But I won’t say it doesn’t hurt at all. You do get used to it. But the first couple of days, people are going, “No.” But the people that are so reticent to do it, like, “Oh, that’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt.” When they finally start, they get addicted to it because the information is so great. And it’s like, “Oh, let me see what that did to my blood sugar. Oh, I just got stressed. I just yelled at my kid. Let me go see what that did to my blood sugar. Oh, I just ran. I wander if that brought my blood sugar down,” You get really curious about what’s going on. And so there is a little prick to it. No problem. But some people say, “Oh, that wasn’t bad.” Oh, most people say that wasn’t bad. Usually, the anticipation is worse than the actual prick. But I’m not going to lie and say it doesn’t hurt. Yeah, there’s a little bit. I don’t notice it anymore. Because I’ve done it so


many times over the last few years, it doesn’t bother me. Donna: I just thought I’d throw that in there as a last minute thought. But a last minute thought for you, what would we want everybody would remember? Dr. Loscalzo: What would remind me? So here’s what I would like you to do is if you have any symptoms, you’re tired, you’ve got joint achiness, you’ve got hair falling out, anything at all that’s happening in your body… Donna: You’re not sleeping. Dr. Loscalzo: You’re not sleeping. You’re biting people’s heads off. Yeah, all of those. You’re depressed. I could go on with a list of symptoms that goes way very long that’s related to gut stuff. Instead of going and seeking help or seeking the over-the-counter medication or the latest herb or the doctor that will support that symptom, think, “What’s underneath this symptom? Could it be my gut? Am I doing all the things that I could do to support my gut?” And think about the things that we talked about. The managing the stress and breathing before eating and having appreciation, the slowing down and chewing your food thoroughly, getting off of those top foods—the gluten, dairy, corn, soy, eggs, peanuts, and sugar, and processed fats—getting off those foods. And you can always add them back later and test after you’re well, but getting off those foods and then, absolutely and looking at fermented foods. And you’re doing this stuff before you go running off for the latest and the greatest headache cure or the latest and the greatest herb or drug to deal with insomnia or constipation, look to your gut. Donna: Perfect. Now, you have a practitioner training. And we have lots of practitioners listening. So I’m sure they’d like to know why do the practitioner training? Dr. Loscalzo: Yeah. So I have a practitioner training because I’m really


passionate, as you are, about changing the way healthcare is practiced because right now we practice on a disease-management model. And that’s not really doing people justice because it’s just adding Band-Aids to problems. So what I do is I train practitioners, and different types of practitioners. I train MDs or just hire this conventional model and say, “What can I do differently?” I train nurses who are like, “I’m tired of just being in this hospital setting. I want to get out there and really help people.” Psychologists. We have people that are chiropractors, acupuncturists. People who are health coaches who’ve gone to IIN or other schools like that that do health coaching. And we just take them deep. We take them into the nutritional endocrinology. How does nutrition affect the hormones in the body? That’s not just looking at thyroid and adrenals and the sex hormones. It’s also looking at those other hormones like the endocrinology of the digestive tract. The heart has hormones. The kidneys produce hormones. The brain. So we’re looking at the body from that endocrine-nutrition approach and teaching them to have a very systematic way of looking for the root cause. And it’s extremely exciting to me. Donna: Well, you can’t just do one type of training. Like, you can’t go to medical school and think that’s it and go out and practice. I think people are getting more and more savvy. That they need to seek a functional medicine doctor. Doctors that are trained in functional medicine, have had this type of training. Or they’re in the process of getting it. And it’s a whole different type of ball game out there now. So thank you very much for offering the training and making it available. I know how excellent it is. And thank you for doing this wonderful interview. It’s been great! Dr. Loscalzo: Thank you so much for inviting me! And I’m just thrilled to have the opportunity to share this!

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Donna: Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is a licensednaturalgutcures.com.s3.amazonaws.com/transcripts/Ritamarie_Losc… · in the gut and leaky gut being a segue to so many different diseases