Transcript from Webinar:

So today I’m going to answer a few questions and several of them kind of run together. There are actually three of them that fit really well together. And those are the ones that just came in and seem to be the most urgent. So we’re going to take a look at a couple of things here. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. Okay. So a couple of questions. There’s another one hidden into these, one of them is about brain fog. And one is about the hidden causes of anxiety and depression. That one. Is critical. Absolutely critical. After one slide of that presentation, you’ll see why that’s so important.

00:00:44

So the question was, Dr. Nieters. So I’m having horrible brain fog lately. What causes it? And is there anything that can be done about it? Well, heck, yeah, there’s tons that can be done about it. But as you know, every time there’s a question that comes in like this, my first comment is that while usually it’s, yes, we can help. There’s some things we can’t, but generally we can. My first comment, though, is that it is always about the combination of the pathology that’s presenting itself.

Will be a combination of the patient’s physiology and then generally some internal external cause. And so the key is we need to figure out what those are in every case. Now, this is really different than a lot of Western biomedicine.

Now, with some things, they really, really work hard to get to the cause, the root, you know –  brain injuries, etc., cardiovascular, a heart attacks.

Well, that’s not quite true. They don’t, they just kind of fix it, but they don’t really get to the real source of it. But sometimes they do. But many, many things, you come in with a headache, take aspirin, didn’t work, ok take Tylenol. That didn’t work well, take ibuprofen. That didn’t work. Take Aleve. That didn’t work…

00:02:10

And so what we do is we want in Chinese medicine and in Functional Medicine, which is why I love that pairing, we have the same goal. We ultimately don’t want our patients to ever get sick. And if they do get sick or have a problem, we want to get to the root of the problem as quickly as possible. Someone comes in with a headache. We’re going to do acupuncture to hopefully get rid of the headache. And the main point will be to determine what’s causing the headache so that we can ameliorate it completely.

These are some of the causes. I mean, there are hundreds, but these are the ones that I see a lot are covered. I’m seeing lots and lots and lots of brain fog. I’m seeing post-vaccine injury and long COVID.

Of course, I see short COVID too, problems. But I’m seeing a lot of long COVID patients. Interestingly, there are now tests for this. There’s a pre-eminent, brilliant doctor at Stanford and a group that is to develop a series of inflammatory marker tests that can be used to really see what the underlying problem is and then also track the progress.

One of my patients has had that done, and I think there were six items that were indicative of long COVID. And actually there’s a general, like a thermometer there. And she was well up into very clear, long COVID problems. And when we got her next tests back, five of them were significantly better and one shockingly got a little worse.

00:03:58

So her doctors and I are looking to see what needs to happen with that sixth one. But it’s nice that we’re able to track it. So inflammation and general viruses. Always, always, in fact, always cause problems, particularly with blood vessels.

The viruses don’t have a means of self movement. You know like, bacteria can crawl around. Viruses can’t do that. They’re not a living, actually a living organism by most definitions. And so they can just hang out wherever they go. Now, many of them are blown on the air. Many of them are passed through bodily fluids, etc., but they themselves cannot move themselves. And so the way they get moved around in the body is essentially to burn holes in the cells that they’re in to release them from those cells so that they can adhere to and invade another cell.

And they have a variety of mechanisms to invade different types of cells. By the way, you can do a lot of things to protect yourself from those viruses being able to engineer your cells. But that’s really for another day. Also, spike proteins themselves cause significant inflammation. One of my dear friends sent me a picture the other day. And a nutritionist that she sees does live blood cell analysis. So you take blood.

Put it on a slide, a couple drops, and then you look at it under a microscope and take pictures of it. And it was stunning. You could see a platelet. You could see all these red cells that were, you know, minor problems, but kind of moving them around. And then a platelet right and in the middle that was covered with spike proteins. Sharp, nasty spike proteins. And so that was in her bloodstream and moving around. So that’s going to lead to the micro clots.

00:06:02

It’s going to lead to poor circulation. And most of my patients that I treat for long COVID in particular, I’m treating them for micro clots and circulatory problems. And there’s very, very good evidence for this from all over the world. I started doing it quite a while ago when my first Long-COVID patients came in from out of state and from a traditional Chinese medical standpoint and looking at their tongue and feeling their pulses, they had clear blood status. And when I treated them for that blood stasis, which includes micro clot and large clots, also their condition started to improve almost immediately.

00:06:42

So we broke down the clots and we treated them for inflammation. Sometimes we had to treat their lungs and they recovered actually relatively quickly. So poor circulation and blood micro clots are being caused by the virus and the spike proteins. And so then you get inflammation of the blood vessels. It’s been known for decades that the primary cause of death from influenza, in most influenzas, not the really severe bird flu’s or that have come around every couple times a century.

But the seasonal flu’s. The biggest loss of life is from blood vessel and heart inflammation within six months of having influenza. Very few people die of that form of influenza. A few more die from pneumonia. That’s a second. That’s a secondary infection generally. And then within six months, there is a significant loss of life from the inflammation in the blood vessels, and that’s from the virus going through and wreaking havoc.

Same thing happens with COVID. Maybe on a worse level because of the increase in spike proteins now also causes a brain fog. Low levels of certain vitamins are very highly implicated and it may be even more than that or low levels of certain minerals, endocrine dysfunction. And that should be or fatigue not of fatigue, gut inflammation causing brain inflammation. Now, those are all very significant.

So here’s what I was talking about, about the spike proteins, adherence to the platelets. So let’s take a look at vitamin B deficiencies. Now, interestingly, a lot of the deficiencies that you see with COVID are similar to what you see in many other chronic diseases, but also in excess alcohol use, vitamin B1 or thiamine.

00:08:49

If you look up thiamine deficiency, it’ll be very strong. In fact, I recommend you do that. Look up thiamine deficiency and look at the symptoms.

I didn’t put riboflavin here because it’s not as common with COVID that I’m seeing, but that’s also a good one. Look up the symptoms of riboflavin deficiency, and I think you’re going to be a little bit surprised when you compare them to cardiovascular disease. So thiamine is used up in disease and alcohol use. Low thiamine levels are very highly implicated in a variety of conditions, including dementia and neuropathy.

It’s huge in neuropathy. In fact, when I get a patient that comes into my clinic with any form of neuropathy – so, you know, tingling numbness in their feet and their hands – the first thing they’re going to be getting is a fat soluble form of thiamine called benfothiamine. I mean, so it’s fat soluble, so it stays in the system longer. And that is the number one treatment for neuropathies in terms of supplements.

00:09:58

B3 are Niacin. Many cholesterol and high blood pressure problems are cleared with Niacinamide. Niacinamide is the non flushing form of niacin. Some people tolerate actual niacin fairly well and get better results with that. Others use niacinamide. There are a couple of well-known so-called alternative MDs who are using three doses a day of niacinamide at relatively low doses, 50 milligrams for high blood pressure, cholesterol and some erectile dysfunction problems.

Vitamin B5 is critical for mitochondrial function. They’ve got a big map up here of the Krebs cycle. The energy producing cycle, the ATP producing cycle is key. B5 is critical for a lot of those conversions for mitochondrial function. B6 also mitochondrial function, however, B6 deficiency is also implicated in high homocysteine levels. There’s a a chemical.

I’m going to call it a process for now. That occurs in the mitochondria of the cells and that process does not occur properly. Then you produce more homocysteine. This isn’t a biochemistry class, so we’re going to keep it really simple. You produce more homocysteine.

00:11:30

Homocysteine is a marker for inflammation, and maybe even more important is an early marker for increased dementia risk – high homocysteine. So B6 is critical for that. B9, which is folate again is used up in disease and with alcohol use and it also contributes to increased homocysteine levels.

B12 or COBALAMIN is used up in disease and alcohol use. Antacids block its uptake. Low stomach acid blocks its uptake. Vegetarianism exacerbates it because there are no truly pure sources of vegetarian B12. So there are certain supplements that can be taken where they’ve taken algae basically at very high concentrations, and you can get some B12 analogues to prevent B12 deficiency, but you really have to be careful.

So B6, B9 or folate and B12 are really critical to keep homocysteine levels down and to keep brain fog down. So the key here is to keep it pretty simple. You can get a good B vitamin that is a methylated. And so that means it is basically taken in its final form that the body uses, so that if there are any problems, the issues, genetic issues, so that folate and B12 are not properly produced, it gets bypassed.

So you want methyl cobalamin – B12 (methyl) and methyl folate. Now the methyl folate is actually 5 L-methra-tetra-folate. But anything that says methyl before the folate should be good. All right, so just one of those a day should do it unless you have a known B12 deficiency. And then you’d either want to do some injections or some sublingual B12 in addition to mineral deficiencies. I find this is even more of an issue with short term problems.

Is the B vitamins are a major player in longer more acute issues, I mean more chronic issues, but the mineral deficiency can show up very quickly. So magnesium gets depleted with stress, with exercise, alcohol use, anxiety, tons of things. And our intake of magnesium is only about half of what it was a hundred years ago. Our soil is very depleted. We eat foods that don’t have as much magnesium in it, so it’s not really in them.

00:14:16

So it’s really a problem. Now for brain fog, Magnesium threonate is the best. Since I mentioned on a show a couple of weeks ago and I know there’s some repeat here, please bear with us.

I’ve had several, several people send me emails saying that the magnesium threonate did amazing things for their brain fog

Next is iron. So obviously depleted with bleeding. Menstruating women, particularly of heavy periods are at risk. Chronic illness. Anemias. Vegetable versus heme iron. So heme iron, which is from meat can be absorbed in the stomach or utilized in the stomach with a pH about three or four, which is not particularly acidic.

Vegetable iron. Like if you eat some spinach, you need a very acidic stomach. So probably in the neighborhood of 1.5 to 2. So that’s pretty acidic. And so if you are trying to get your iron from vegetables, particularly if you do any antacids, it isn’t going to work. You’re just not going to absorb that iron. And so, as I mentioned before, with iron and children and menstruating women, I’m constantly trying to push their iron levels up in menopausal women. And in men, I’m constantly trying to push their iron down. And there’s a very, very narrow window of what’s healthy for iron. If it’s too high, it’s almost like leaving a nail outside. It rusts, which is oxidation. So you get oxidation in your body, which causes all sorts of problems.

00:16:06

And if the iron is too low. Then you’re going to be anemic and you don’t have the oxygen carrying capacity, so it needs pretty close attention.

With low iron, now we’re talking about brain iron here. You can get a much higher level of ADHD, restless leg and a variety of other restless types of syndromes. And this one can be tricky.

So it’s been known. Well, I’ve seen studies going back 30 years showing that almost all children with ADHD suffer from low ferritin levels, ferritin being the storage form of iron. So that’s been known for a long time. Again, I do not see doctors treating it that way, but the studies were quite clear.

00:16:56

However, I’ve seen patients that had normal load of iron, normal iron binding capacity, normal ferritin levels, and they still had these problems.

And so in my mind. I was conjecturing that perhaps the brain iron is low because that’s where the problem is. And so as a lot of those patients, I started adding copper and I would do one week to two weeks of copper at 8 to 10 milligrams.

Now, long term, you got to be a little careful with copper because it competes with zinc. But for a week or two, it’s fine. And I’ve had several patients say, Hey, that was it. It was the copper. It was amazing. So you need the copper for the iron transport and for proper utilization. And then my old favorite sodium. So sodium can be low because of poor adrenal function. Generally from low aldosterone, which is an adrenal hormone. Aldosterone, as I mentioned several times, controls potassium-sodium balance.

00:18:06

And if the aldosterone is low, the sodium will be low. If the sodium is low, it’s not attracting fluid on a large level into the blood vessels. And you will have hypovolemia or low blood volume so that literally you’re not getting enough blood up into your brain. So we can kind of see a pattern here. Iron – You’re not getting enough oxygen up into your brain. Copper – you’re not getting enough iron, with this oxygen up into your brain.

Sodium. You’re not getting enough blood overall up in your brain. So what’s going to happen? You’re going to have some brain fog. Along with brain fog. You also might get orthostatic hypotension. That’s where when you stand up, you get dizzy or lightheaded. That can actually be a life threatening condition. And that’s all often brought on by low sodium.

00:19:02

Okay. This came in literally half an hour or so ago and says, Hi, Dr. Nieters, I received a bottle of magnesium threonate last evening. Took the first capsule of the day’s three capsules serving, at 6:12. Noticed I was actually feeling more relaxed and noticeably better. Within 2 hours I took the second, hoping that I might get back to sleep a little sooner than I actually did, needed to take the third, completing the 3 serving a couple hours sooner than I expected to again feel more relaxed. Now, this is a patient who had just communicated to me that essentially they had lost hope. It was like, I don’t know what to do. I’m on my last straw. I feel horrible. And so her concern now is she obviously doesn’t want to overdose. But her main problem is maybe she is going to run out of it before the end of the month. It’s like, help, help me, help me get me my magnesium.

So I do want to say a little something on magnesium again. I know I’ve talked about this some, but when you consider that it’s a cofactor meaning it combines with some other enzyme or chemical in the body.

To work in over 300 biochemical reactions. And almost everything you can imagine. It’s important for protein synthesis. It’s a big player in cardiac rhythm. Low magnesium or extremely high magnesium will really affect cardiac rhythm. It’s important for nerve functioning basically, and nerves can’t function without it. It’s important for muscle functioning again. Basically, they can’t function without it. It’s also important for bone growth and health and for regulation of blood pressure. So it’s critical.

00:20:54

It is possible to get a toxic dose, but it’s rare and I talked about this before. So the things that can throw it off are kidney health or bad kidney health. Bad small intestine function and something that’s causing it to come out of the bones and cells. Now, under excretion by the kidneys, you usually see an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) under 30. And if it’s under 30, you will know. Your doctor will tell you, or if you are seeing me, I’m going to go into red flag mode there. Because this is going into a a much deeper level of kidney failure. But you can get some or over absorbance in a small intestine that’s relatively rare. You can get displacement of stored magnesium into the serum, something that causes it to be over released. Often that’s going to be anxiety, stress and adrenal hormones.

Now then you can get hyper magnesium and lead to magnesium toxicity. The most common findings of early onset type toxicity are diarrhea.

Now, loose stools are generally normal. We give a magnesium to cause looser stools and to get over constipation. But if there is really a lot of diarrhea and fatigue. If you have any nausea or vomiting, then definitely stop the magnesium. And we should get a magnesium test on you. Muscle weakness, low blood pressure. Those can all be signs of early onset toxicity. Again, this is really, really not common, but still we want to watch for it. And since this person asked, we’re putting it out there.

00:22:44

So endocrine dysfunction, adrenal fatigue – level two, that’s what I would call functional exhaustion. You can go to work. You can come home. You can talk to your kids for 10 minutes and then you’re done. If you’re going to the couch or you’re going to bed and you don’t want to interact with anybody, but you’re still functional.

00:23:06

Adrenal fatigue – level three is really nonfunctional. This is chronic fatigue. People say, Oh, “will,” yourself through it. Come on, let’s do this. No, it ain’t happening because you can’t function at adrenal fatigue – level three. When I sent my patients over to Stanford, chronic fatigue patient, actually, I didn’t send them, they went to Stanford’s Chronic Fatigue Clinic. Those people were told to not get out of bed for two years. That is not my recommendation. But they have to be very careful for two years. So adrenal fatigue level three can definitely cause this. We do a regular test in our office quite routinely, probably on 80% of new patients. Some we don’t because it’s obviously not a problem. But in Ragland status, we’re taking the blood pressure with them lying down and then having them stand up and testing it again.

The blood pressure should go up ten points or more. If it drops ten points there, it would then be 20 points low. And that’s generally fatigue, adrenal fatigue, level two. If it gets under 30, if it drops 30, then we’re definitely at level three. The medical diagnostics for orthostatic hypotension are a drop of 20, so it’s kind of in between my two key points there. And then we do TCM Pulse taking and if you take a pulse and someone has hypovolemic, you will call it blood deficiency because you basically in some patients can’t identify a pulse.

You know, it’s there. You know, it’s a lot. They’re alive. You can feel something, but it’s hard to even give it a quality. And I call that minute. And in some of those patients, they can’t even get a blood draw, seriously. I have one patient who tried to do a fingerstick and literally what came out was like a powder. It was so dry and she was so hypovolemic. And of course she had very severe orthostatic hypotension. She would stand up and literally pass out to fall on the ground and lose control of her bladder and bowels.

So that’s obviously pretty extreme. That’s what can happen with severe hypovolemia. Also, hypothyroid can cause this.

00:25:31

Now again, depending on who you talk to and how you parse at all, there are between eight and 27 types of hypo thyroid affect. Not hyper, but hypo. And western medicine looks classically at one of those. Occasionally at two and rarely at a couple of others.

So if you have high TSH, that’s thyroid stimulating hormone, high or high reverse T3 or high TPO, which is thyroid peroxidase or high anti-thyroid globulin. Those are all symptoms or tests that validate hypothyroid.

If you have low T4, low T3, and this is not testosterone, this is the thyroid hormones, low free T3 or low free T4, any of those.

00:26:28

It can be hypothyroid. And that will certainly, certainly leave you with brain fog because you’re not getting enough energy and enough fluid movement up into the brain. Then there’s a space access dysfunction, which is really a combination of many of these. It’s important to remember that everything runs on feedback loops, and if things are out of balance for a significant period of time, they will send faulty signals to your brain, your hypothalamus, and your pituitary.

And even when you get back into normal health, they sometimes don’t start to send the correct messages. And it’s a continuing problem. Then we have gut inflammation, and this is the primary cause of all inflammation. It’s a major cause of anxiety, which I’m going to handle in my next answer. It’s a major cause of depression. A huge cause of depression. Again, I’m going to answer that in the next answer.

Major cause of ADHD and associated conditions because it affects the absorption of minerals, that affects the absorption of vitamins. It itself releases storms of cytokines and other inflammatory chemicals which travel throughout the body and inflame the brain or the gut or the joints or wherever else they happen to affect. Now, it’s also the primary cause of autoimmune disease.

00:28:08

Gluten is the number one food to be avoided for Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and it’s a significant cause of brain fog. Those of you that have done our liver detox, you know, I spent a lot of time talking about hepatic encephalopathy. Hmm. Great words, huh?

Encephalopathy means it’s a problem, a pathology in the brain. And hepatic means that it’s caused by the liver. So the liver is doing and not doing things that contribute to inflammation in the brain. Now, this is a well known Western condition. It’s there’s an ICD ten code for it.

However, like many conditions, it’s only diagnosed as a problem when it’s extremely severe. But even at low levels of brain fog, it is still hepatic encephalopathy. The liver isn’t doing its job of clearing certain chemicals. Among them would be ammonia. The ammonia levels rise and if you have high ammonia levels, you will have brain fog and worse, bad breath, all sorts of things. So it is a significant cause.

00:29:26

Is that gut inflammation? Now here I’m using the liver as an adjunct to the gut. It’s not actually directly connected to the intestinal system, but it has a huge role in intestinal health. Okay. I think we had a couple of questions there.

00:29:46

Kathryn: Can you speak about topical magnesium chloride versus consuming magnesium?

John: Yeah. We use a tremendous amount. I guess I should stop. Stop sharing.

Kathryn: You did.

John: I did. Okay.

We use a lot of topical magnesium at our clinic. I use it on my feet every day. I have very badly damaged feet. I also have a knee injury and I use magnesium lotion on them every day, every night. And I get great results with it. It’s fabulous. It penetrates and my wife goes through cases of it, literally cases of it every month for her professional athletes and or college athletes, massive amounts of it.

00:30:34

It does penetrate very, very well. Mine also has Arnica and a couple of other things in it, and that seems to work even better for me than just the straight magnesium. But I love my topical magnesium.

They are different function though, they will both help with relaxation of muscles. The topical will get rid of soreness better and the internal will cause more relaxation. It’s a GABA agonist, it helps sleep, bowel movements, etc.

Kathryn: And I just posted the magnesium webinar on “the balancing point” today. They can refer to that.

John: Well, there we go. And we carry CogniMag. Yes, there are a couple of good ones from other companies. I just really like this one. We get very good results with it. And was there something else?

00:31:26

Kathryn: Yeah, we had a question regarding tattoos and health in general. (Mm hmm.) The risks of getting risks, etc.. Yeah.

John: Now we’re getting into almost vaccine type territory. Huge, huge disagreement about tattoos. I have none. When I turned 60, I said, you know, you’re old enough to make a decision now. And I decided on a couple. But then when it came time to go get the film, I decided against the tattoo. Inks can spread that they do spread. I had a family member, a niece who had her thyroid gland removed, and when they checked the lymph nodes adjacent to it, they found that they were filled with tattoo ink.

I don’t like that idea. If I could be certain, absolutely certain that the ink did not move at all, I’d be okay. Now, a couple of my favorite patients are tattoo artists, and they are really, really good people and they are certain that it never causes any problems. I’m not saying it does. I’m not saying it doesn’t. I just don’t have enough clear information. The metallic ones are the ones that I would be most concerned about. But I do know that many of them spread.

Now, that may be bad tattooing. It may be any number of things that I’m unaware of, but I know there are many cases where it will spread. And so it gets into the lymphatic system. The garbage dump, the sewer system. And then it travels throughout the body.

Yes. That’s a touchy one because I don’t know anything else there. No. Okay.

00:33:14

Okay. Anxiety and depression are brain on fire. There was actually a book called Brain on Fire, and it’s a superb book. It’s about a young woman who was grossly misdiagnosed for years. Put in a mental hospital, and finally some brilliant doctor figured out that her brain was on fire. She had massive inflammation. After that was discovered, they have found many, many, many more cases of people that have been wrongly diagnosed as having severe mental emotional problems.

00:33:51

And the issue is that they had severe inflammation in the brain. It’s not easy to find, actually, you think it is, but there are some very specific tests that need to be done in most cases. Okay. So I’m going to talk a little bit about Brain on fire. So the question was, I’ve read that anxiety and depression can be caused by gut inflammation. Is there good evidence for this and how common is it? There is massive evidence for this. There is new evidence coming out weekly.

I belong to or I get the newsletter for MDs, “Medscape.” And typically there are four or five articles in a week about Gut, inflammation and problems that it causes, including anxiety and depression. So this isn’t a fringe thing at all. The Chinese have known this for 2500 years.

I’m sure probably the great physicians you know of, Hypocrites and the Socrates and all those great people knew it. However, it really fell out of vogue with pharmaceutically based medicine.

Because that it didn’t treat gut inflammation, so they just overlooked it. Let’s just forget about that and look for some other problems. And of course, they came up with the treatments that, you know, benzodiazepines. They came up with SSRI’s, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and a whole host of other drugs, none of which is very effective, and many of which increase dementia risk and some of which increase suicidal ideation.

So some problems there when we forget the lessons of history. So there was an article and I’ve given some credit here to Ron Grisanti from Functional Medicine University. You’ll see his name in a bit. Much of this, probably a third of it, came from some information that he sent out.

00:35:56

And what we’re looking at is anxiety tripled from 2019, you know, before the pandemic until now. From 8.1% of the population to 25.5%. So fully one quarter, one quarter of our population has diagnosable and diagnosed by medical standards, anxiety and depression. As we know from studies done at Stanford, there were two done there and from other hospitals and health forums.

85 to 90% of all all visits to doctors are about their route anxiety. And when we see that 25.5% of the population has this anxiety and that that’s tripled, actually more than tripled. That’s pretty frightening.

Depression almost quadrupled. At one time, a 6.5% were diagnosed and now it’s 24.3%. And unfortunately, a lot of people that I see have both anxiety and depression at the same time. So it’s a little scary.

Well, what’s going on? Well, there’s a lot going on. We’ve got fear and panic. Right. The whole country is in a stage of panic. Just listen to the people around you or don’t listen, actually. But if you do listen, if you turn on the news, if you read the newspaper, it is doom and gloom and hopelessness. We’re seeing the highest rate of inflation since at least the sixties and back. The measures of inflation that we now have have been so changed that our rate of inflation would be astronomically higher than what we’re being told. I mean, just go to the food store. It’s crazy.

And so this is not an accident. We are being programmed to be fearful. We are being programmed to a sense of helplessness. How do you control a person? How do you control a population? How do you control a group? You instill fear and helplessness. You go back to the writings of Goebbels and Hitler’s people. They were quite clear about that. That’s all you need to do to control the population. You make them hopeless. You make them fearful. And then you tell them, I have the answer.

I alone have the answer. And they will do anything you want. They will. I mean, literally, literally anything you want. And again, it’s driven by gross overuse with the news media way, gross overuse and fascination with social media. There are many studies showing that there is a direct, direct causal link between social media time and social media and depression. And this is even worse with teens. There’s a such a massive correlation.

And then, you know, you had your kids home during the pandemic. You know, you used to get a couple days a week where you didn’t have to deal with that. And now at least there was until recently, they were there all the time. Your partner was home. Now, a lot of people found out how much they really loved being with their partner, and a lot of them discovered how much they really didn’t like being with their partner. So again, that can cause a lot of anxiety. There was a significant increase in alcohol use and I have to get that exact number, but it is much higher, which again will deplete B vitamins.

00:39:32

It deplete magnesium. It changes mood. And so that’s been a significant problem and then a really significant increase in eating junk food, causing gut inflammation. Someone that I know has a sister that was working for one of the snack cake companies back East, that will go unnamed. But they had their best months in history at the beginning of the pandemic because everybody was eating junk food.

And so you’ve got this guy with this little workout regimen there is lifting those 2 pound weights.

Boy, that’ll do it, especially if I down hundreds of hot dogs or whatever. And then you’ve got the the little girl looking through chocolate donut eyeglasses, because that’s the way to satisfy your serotonin levels and makes you feel happier for a short period of time. And so today, I’m going to focus on gut inflammation, including leaky gut, food sensitivities and microbiome disorders. Now, before I get into that. I’m going to tell you this is going to be different.

I’ve been teaching Leaky Gut literally for over 20 years. I’ve been treating food sensitivities for over 20 years and testing and treatments, etc., and microbiome disorders forever. What I’m going to talk about in relationship to anxiety and depression is going to be a little bit different. So if you’ve listened to lots of webinars about generalized, leaky gut and food sensitivities, that’s awesome. Keep listening to them because the more you get reminded, the better. However, I’m going to hit some slightly different points with that.

Now, one of the things is, and this is a quote, I should have quotes on it. This is the quote from Ron Grisanti, a functional medicine university says, “Fortunately, it may just be possible (meaning it is) that the neurotransmitter paradigm simply is antiquated and does not address the underlying root causes of these mental disorders.” Well, there are tons of books. There are many brilliant speakers out there that are pointing to exactly that fact that the neurotransmitter deficiency theory of depression has never been proven conclusively.

That the source arise in general are no better and sometimes worse than placebo.

There are many herbal treatments, hands on treatments, acupuncture, etc., that are dramatically I mean. The Cochrane Collaborative just went it was astonishing, the number of studies that they indicated showing that acupuncture was dramatically better than drugs at handling anxiety and depression. But still, still, we’re seeing this neurotransmitter paradigm where we’re going to throw an SSRI at you.

00:42:31

And what if it doesn’t work? Then we throw a different SSRI at you. And what if that doesn’t work or you lose your sex drive completely, which can happen with many of the SSRI’s. Oh, sorry about that. Well, here’s another one. Try the third one. Let’s see if that one works. Now, I’ll tell you, there’s one vitamin, one vitamin that gives more relief from depression than all of the SSRI. Now, it doesn’t always work, because if you’re not deficient in it, it’s not going to matter. And I believe that the SSRI’s do help some people because my patients tell me that they do.

I’m just saying they’re not very effective and that whole paradigm is antiquated. Now, here’s what you respond to. Again, it says, After reading and researching and doing a deep dive into possible root causes of these mental disorders, I found something amazing and life changing.

That’s all the time we have today.

So this is to be continued. I really hope you come back with me next week because I’m about to come in to this from a little different angle than most of you are used to. And I’m going to give you some very grounded hands on the things that you can do, some testing that you can do yourself, some supplements that you could try and will work through this anxiety, depression, through the old paradigm into a new and much more modern and much more successful paradigm for mental health.

Okay. So I’m going to call it a day today because I don’t want to get started on the next section because that’s really separate unto itself. So I want to thank you for tuning in. I wish you great happiness and great health. And I’ll be back with you at 3:00 next Tuesday.

Bye bye.

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REFERNCES:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4361085/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20227485/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5997866/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22814704/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31163212/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159112000025

https://europepmc.org/article/med/28342944

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269881117711708

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11080527/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11394936/

benzodiazepine anti-inflammatory

Gut Brain Connection

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31144383/

Gut Bacteria Anxiety

Lactobacillus (L.) rhamnosus

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520190110.htm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5641835/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jnr.24476

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3052397/

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Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM, is an acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, functional medicine, writer, teacher, and leader in the community. In this episode, John talks about his experience with the importance of finding your vision and purpose in life, in order to create the right goals for you.

Disclaimer: Dr. John Nieters received his Doctor of Oriental Medicine and Acupuncture degree from Five Branches. His use of “doctor” or “Dr.” in relation to himself solely refers to that degree. Dr. Nieters is a licensed acupuncturist in California. This video is for general informational purposes only. It should not be used to self-diagnose and it is not a substitute for a medical exam, cure, treatment, diagnosis, and prescription or recommendation. It does not create a doctor-patient relationship between Dr. Nieters and you. You should not make any change in your health regimen or diet before first consulting a physician and obtaining a medical exam, diagnosis, and recommendation. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. TheBalancingPoint.net, Alameda Acupuncture, and Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM are not liable or responsible for any advice, course of treatment, diagnosis or any other information, services or product you obtain through this video or site.