[00:00:01] Welcome to Anti Aging Unraveled, the podcast where we redefine aging and empower you to age your way.
[00:00:08] I'm Dr. Laurie and this show is rooted in the Lifeevity philosophy. Living life the way you want to with energy, clarity, purpose and longevity. Here we break down integrative functional medicine, bioidentical hormones, peptides, metabolic and brain health, gut immune connection, and cutting edge longevity therapies. So you're not just living long, longer, you're living better.
[00:00:34] If you believe aging should be intentional, personalized and on your terms, you're in the right place. Welcome to Anti Aging Unraveled. Let's unlock longevity and help you age your way.
[00:00:48] Welcome back all my beautiful people. I'm Dr. Laurie, your functional medicine guide to lifeevity. Living life on your terms with the energy, clarity and longevity that you deserve. And today we're going to talk about something that is going to flip the script on everything that you've been told about before about anxiety. And the title is your anxiety might be metabolic, not psychological.
[00:01:10] Because what if your anxiety isn't a mental health problem?
[00:01:14] What if it's a metabolic problem?
[00:01:17] Your gut, your cells, your hormones and your environment are screaming at you that something is off.
[00:01:24] Let's unravel this together, shall we? And the questions that we want to ask ourselves are, are you anxious but can't figure out why? Have you been on an SSRI or a medication for years without getting to the root cause? Do you have gut issues and mood issues and wonder if they're connected? Are you in perimenopause, post menopause or Andropausen? Suddenly feel like anxiety has crept out of nowhere? That is so common. And have you ever wondered if your environment, the water you drink, the air you breathe, the food that you eat, might be rewriting your brain chemistry if you said yes to any of those? Stay tuned. This episode is for you. This is what lifeevity is all about. Not just adding years to your life, but life to your years by understanding what's actually happening inside of your body.
[00:02:14] So don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to get more of this content if you enjoy it. So we would love to have you. Let's dive in. Let's go for it.
[00:02:23] So let's reframe the anxiety for a minute from metabolic perspective and talk about why conventional medicine actually misses the mark here.
[00:02:32] So in conventional medicine, when you walk into a 10 minute appointment and say, I'm anxious, I can't sleep, I feel on edge all the time, what happens? You walk out with a prescription and maybe an ssri, maybe Xanax. And I'm not here to demonize medicine.
[00:02:49] That's absolutely. There's a time and a place for that. But what I'm here to say is if we never ask why, we're not practicing medicine, we're practicing symptom or disease management. And that is not how, at least in our practice, how we age our way or age your way. And that's not what we like to practice. We practice how we preach. Right? So this is what we're going to talk about. Anxiety is a symptom. It's not always a diagnosis. It can signal systemic dysfunction. The outdated chemical imbalance model of depression and anxiety has been significantly challenged by certain research and studies. Moncrief et al. 2022 in molecular psychiatry found that there's no consistent evidence that low serotyrotonin causes depression. We're gonna talk about a lot of root causes today. We're gonna talk about gut microbiome imbalance or dysbiosis, intestinal permeability or leaky gut, which are very similar neuroinflammation or toxic burden. What toxins are we being exposed to that might inflame our brain parasite or pathogens?
[00:03:50] Environmental toxin accumulation, nutrient deficiencies, B6, B12, magnesium, zinc, all the cofactors that are involved in neurotransmitter production, Sex hormone deficiencies and imbalances, especially progesterone and testosterone. They're huge ones. Cortisol, dysregulation.
[00:04:09] So our stress response hormone and that what we call HPA axis, which is a hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal access and how they're not working right or they're dysfunctional. And last but not least, thyroid disorder and thyroid disease. So, you know, @mydrlori.com, we don't just ask what do you have? We ask why do you have it?
[00:04:30] Lifeevity, which is what we say is not reactive, it's personalized, it's preventative, it's proactive, and it's participatory. And you are the co creator of your health. So if you want to continue with me and pen your own book of your life, then like this podcast, save more of this content and especially on our YouTube channel and join us on this journey. And the journey is going to take us next to the gut. Brain access.
[00:04:55] This is, I would say, novel to a lot of the talk in integrative medicine, talking about the gut and the brain connection, how they work and Actually, you know that recently RFK was just talking about the gut brain access on a very popular podcast. And I think it's really important to bring to light that this connection is super important.
[00:05:14] Your gut is magnificently underappreciated, wildly intelligent. And here's what I want you to lock into this number. 95%. That's how much of your body's serotonin is recycled in your gut. It's the feel good, calm down neurotransmitter. And it's produced exclusively or almost exclusively in your gut, not. Not your brain, in your gut. So when we're talking about anxiety, we have to talk about the gut first. And we're going to talk, number one about the gut brain highway, which I like to say, like, is one big long system. It's the vagus nerve. It acts in two way, communication between the gut and the brain. If that is dysfunctional or defective, your mood is not going to be appropriate.
[00:05:57] Gut microbes synthesize and modulate certain neurotransmitters. Serotonin, dopamine, GABA and acetylcholine.
[00:06:04] And when that microbiome is dysfunctional, we're not right, and we get anxiety. The gut contains over 100 million nerve cells, more than the spinal cord, believe it or not. That's kind of crazy to think about.
[00:06:16] And if those nerve cells are not being bathed in the right environment, again, that stimulation of neurotransmitters is inappropriate. Inappropriate. Gut microbiome balance, inflammation and intestinal permeability disrupt the signaling that goes between the gut to the brain, enhancing and contributing directly to anxiety, depression and cognitive decline. There's plenty of studies that I will link you guys to on this information, but really they link the gut brain access directly to ibs, chronic fatigue syndrome, mood instability, and play a key role in where immune activation and microbial balance regulate anxiety and mood. So let's talk a little bit about what happens when the gut barrier is disrupted. And this is when we get a compromise, or I always say there's a leakiness to the gut where the gut cells actually separate and they get some kind of fluidity through them. And when this barrier is compromised, we get certain levels that are elevated, zonulin, something else called LPS antibodies or lipopolysaccharides. And they're inflammatory bacterial fragments. They enter the bloodstream and they trigger a systemic inflammation. And when they trigger this inflammation, guess where it can go? The brain. It can actually create direct neuroinflammation, mood dysregulation, anxiety and cognitive function issues. So not only do we get disruption of this vagus nerve and the serotonin and hormone signaling, we actually can get direct neuroinflammation of the brain from different LPSs or a compromised gut barrier, but primarily from bacterial fragments entering the system and stimulating the brain to be basically not effective. Let's talk about some short chain fatty acids and mood. So short chain fatty acids are basically something called, there's something called butyrate and it's produced by the beneficial gut and the bacteria. When we have a good, again, it goes back to that good microbiome. If we have the right butyrate, it actually supports gut repair and it's very neuroprotective. When we have low butyrate, it tells us on labs that you have a compromised gut integrity and may have impaired brain health.
[00:08:28] So reduced butyrate producing bacteria, there's certain bacteria that we can check for, are consistently found in patients with chronic fatigue and mood disorders.
[00:08:38] So again, why do these patients have a microbiome that's not appropriate? And what came first, the chicken or the egg? We can hypothesize that this gut microbiome that's dysfunctional, not having the right amount of short chain fatty acids, not having the right amount of butyrate, will actually create mood disorder and fatigue down the line. One last kind of key dimension in here is something called beta glucuronidase, and they call it the hidden hormone saboteur, if you will. Elevated beta glucuronidase promotes estrogen recirculation. We talk about this in a lot of podcasts that I do. Estrogen is recirculated in the gut. So, so beta glucuronidation is the process by which we can recirculate some of this estrogen and we actually also use it for our toxin clearance.
[00:09:27] So if we don't do this efficiently, we get estrogen dominance, which estrogen can drive us to be emotional, irritable, anxious, because it gives us a high estrogen, low progesterone state essentially, and sleep disruption. So this is actually a gut problem with the hormonal and mental consequences.
[00:09:47] So we're going to talk about hormones in a little bit. But if we think about this in kind of stages, the gut really is the precipitating factor. It is the main part of the system that's not functioning that actually has the trickle down effect. So poor beta glucuronidation, poor estrogen recycling, also poor toxin excretion, more anxiety. So, so when I Look at a patient who comes to me that's anxious, overwhelmed, can't sleep, feels like they're maybe crawling out of their skin. My first question is not usually, do you need Prozac or any other ssri? My first question is, what is your gut telling us? Because so often the gut is the beginning of the story.
[00:10:28] It's just literally the start of the journey. And really, most treatment protocols that we do start with the gut as well.
[00:10:36] But spoiler alert, the hormones are writing a chapter too, and we're going to get there in a minute. But you know, when again, as I just alluded to, all of the recycling that happens in the gut unfortunately leads to poor neurotransmitter function, poor glucuronidation, poor detoxification, poor estrogen recycling, and all the things that lead to anxiety. So, you know, key studies that I want to kind of call out just to have data on this. And I will put this also in the notes 2019 from Cryin et al Nature Review and Neuroscience had foundational research on the microbiome gut brain access 2017, dining and crying again, showed the title of theirs is Gut instincts Microbiota as a key regulator of brain development, aging and neurodegeneration. And a lot of data on IBS and anxiety comorbidity studies showing 50 to 90% of IBS patients also have anxiety and depression. So what is the common link? Right. So we can only surmise that the microbiome and the poor recirculation that's happening in those particular patients are contributing to their fatigue and some of their mood disorder. So let's break down this SSRI problem.
[00:11:52] And as physicians and as a society, are we masking a deeper issue here? Are we not addressing the elephant in the room? So I want to tread carefully here because I'm not an anti medication doctor. I'm an anti. This is the only answer person.
[00:12:09] SSRIs save lives. But here's the honest and uncomfortable truth is that functional medicine has to say out loud, we have been prescribing SSRIs based on theory, the serotonin hypothesis that the research is now really seriously questioning. And more than that, we've been handing them out without ever looking at anything. We're not looking at the gut, we're not looking at hormones, we're not looking at toxins or the nutrients that are lacking or under underlying this. So we're going to talk about the serotonin hypothesis and how that's under fire. And we're also going to talk about the things that SSRIs don't address.
[00:12:46] And the chemical imbalance that low serotonin equals depression model was really widely promoted for decades. I mean, for decades that has been kind of the promoted theory. And a landmark 2022 umbrella review in molecular psychiatry by Mein Creef et al. Or mine. Creef, excuse me, found no consistent evidence of a relationship between serotonin and depression, challenging the fundamental and foundational premise of SSRI prescribing.
[00:13:16] And we all know if we prescribe SSRIs enough, that SSRIs work for some people.
[00:13:21] But the mechanism might be more complex than simply raising serotonin levels. We know that sometimes they work for a little while, stop working. We also know that certain ones start working for a while and then stop working.
[00:13:33] So let's think about the things again that SSRIs don't address. What is not being taken care of here? Gut dysbiosis. They don't restore microbiome balance neuroinflammation from that lts or toxic burden. That lipopolysaccharide, that leaky gut bug. Immune stimulation, the blood brain barrier permeability that actually exists because of leaky gut and the increased permeability of the entire brain, to butt literally the lining from the top to the bott. Nutrient deficiencies as we talked about, that are required for serotonin synthesis. Parasite and pathogen driving immune activation. Environmental toxin overload. I love to talk about my buckets. Environmental toxins, pathogens or bugs, Food sensitivities. These, these can all create a gut problem and a hormonal problem leading to brain issues. And then last but not least, the declining hormones that happen with age, we lose progesterone, we lose testosterone. The hormonal drivers of anxiety that go completely unaddressed by SSRIs really are hormones.
[00:14:36] So I think there's a gut SSRI paradox. SSRIs act part on the gut, but the gut has an abundance of serotonin receptors. SSRIs cannot alter the microbiome completely. Some studies show that they actually reduce microbiome diversity, which is really interesting. And this raises the question, are we treating a gut problem with a brain drug and inadvertently making the gut worse over time? If we can see that maybe their microbiome is. Their diversity is actually decreasing. We want a very diverse microbiome. It's a healthy. That's a healthy gut.
[00:15:12] So I think that's really important to remember. And then when we give SSRIs, we're giving them to women that are Menopausal, postmenopausal, perimenopausal, and to men that are experiencing andropause.
[00:15:24] But they're not replacing progesterone. We're not addressing testosterone. We're not restoring any of the rebalance to the neurosteroid pattern that governs GABA receptors in our brain. That makes us calm down. And our amygdala, which is our stress response, none of that is being addressed. We're really just addressing a serotonin problem, which is not really the whole problem, especially for people that get this later in life.
[00:15:48] And the anxiety might be entirely hormonal based upon body changes and aging.
[00:15:55] So to me, the functional medicine question that we need to be asking ourselves before prescribing is, what does this patient's microbiome look like? Is there dysbiosis, leaky gut, or a pathogen present? We can look for these things, guys, and we are going to talk about that. What are their neurotransmitter levels? What are their toxic burdens? What are their CO factor nutrients like? What's their nutrient density look like? What are their sex hormones doing specifically? Free and total testosterone and progesterone and estrogen.
[00:16:23] So I can't tell you how many times patients come to me on SSRIs who were never tested. Very basically, their hormones were never tested. And we test them. Lo and behold, their progesterone has tanked, maybe even earlier than regular menopause. Their testosterone is on the floor, their GABA is dysregulated, their nervous system is running on empty. Maybe their cortisols are all over the map. And an SSRI didn't cause that. An SSRI can't fix that. I always like to say, you know, we don't have an SSRI deficiency. And what about just doing the testing? It's not hard to do. You just need to learn how to do it and where to find it. And that's where I come into play. And that's why I encourage you to follow us on our YouTube channel and of course, like these videos that you enjoy because you will find so much more content like this to help you on your health journey. And it's really important that you continue to be your own patient advocate. I can only do it for you from afar, which is why you listen to me. But it's really important for you to understand yourself and be your own advocate as well.
[00:17:22] So let's have a little bit into microbiome, your inner ecosystem, and actually some specifics we can talk a Little bit about parasite, a little bit about candida and yeast. And I think this is all over social media right now and all over kind of the news right now because your microbiome is like a rainforest inside your gut. There's trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses, all in a very delicate ecosystem. And when that ecosystem thrives, you thrive. When it collapses. What we call dysbiosis, it's microbial chaos. And dysbiosis doesn't have to just be a dysfunction of your natural microbiome. It could be pathogens, which is what we're going to talk about, that shouldn't be there. And your mood and your energy and your brain and even your hormones all pay the price. Right. So let's talk briefly about some of the key ratios that we can look at in labs. We can actually test for this stuff that are linked to metabolic and mood disorders. Ratio of firmicutes to bacteroides, which we can check on labs. Low diversity of microbiome. We talked about that earlier.
[00:18:30] Associated with anxiety, depression and cognitive impairment. There's keystone species that are critical for, for gut barrier integrity and anti inflammatory signaling. And that would be Akkermansia, which is getting a lot of attention these days, and Faecali bacterium. And they're critical for gut bacteria and integrity. The lining, I always say that gap in the lining needs to just be closed and intact. So if we don't have these bugs, we need to correct that dysfunction. I think the more obvious culprit is the parasites and the yeast overgrowth and fungi that exist.
[00:19:04] And parasite infections are way more common in developed world than most people realize. And actually we're probably one of the few countries that don't do parasite cleanses on a regular basis. But they can trigger immune activation, nutrient depletion, especially B12 and iron and zinc, all critical for neurotransmitter production and regulate systemic inflammation. This creates a neuro inflammatory cycle that presents as anxiety, brain fog, irritability and mood instability. Well, that sounds like every hormonal patient that I have. Right. So again we can check for these things. It can be missed on regular stool tests. That's why we need the more advanced DNA based testing. Unfortunately, regular stool testing does not really account for very accurate microbiome and actually parasite testing. So I highly recommend using one of the more advanced testing companies which your provider can help you with.
[00:19:59] And yeast, same thing. Candida and other fungal overgrowth will actually produce what's called an acetaldehyde gliotoxin. So it's a toxin of the brain produced by yeast and fungal overgrowth that impairs neurotransmitter synthesis. So again, brain fog and anxiety, guys. So when you think about these symptoms, they sound so much like just hormonal patients.
[00:20:25] It's not something I would tell someone. There was serotonin deficiency, but maybe a hormone imbalance that could be caused by a gut imbalance. Right. And a yeast overgrowth. Sugars, not metabolic, not metabolizing sugars efficiently. High sugar diets, and on top of those hormonal shifts will also antibiotic overuse. All of these things can cause yeast overgrowth or fungal overgrowth, especially when going to menopause and perimenopause and andropause, because our PH of our bodies change and we get new bugs that like to take over.
[00:20:54] So, again, these are things that we can test. We're going to talk about some of my favorite tests that I use, but there's a lot of tests on the market.
[00:21:02] And this is where functional medicine, I think, gets exciting because we actually get answers. It's like tangible, right? It's in your hands. And I use the vibrant panels from vibrant-wellness.com it's one of the most comprehensive gut panels available. There's so many.
[00:21:17] And the stool testing we can get, oh, goodness gracious. It's 200 microbes, bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, parasites. We get all the beneficial bacteria, so 150 beneficial, 76 of the harmful ones. Your keystone strains that I talked about, that should be there. Your microbial diversity. So how rich is that ecosystem?
[00:21:39] That short chain fatty acid stuff that I talked about earlier. And butyrate, we're going to see how much butyrate is your system making. How's your beta glucuronidase system? Can you detox? Can you regulate that estrogen hormone? We're going to look for leaky gut markers like zonulin and lps.
[00:21:55] So again, now you guys are starting to hear these things more than once. Inflammatory markers, calprotectin and MMP9 and eosinophils and beta defensins. We're looking for these patterns and these I can even look at the neurotransmitter patterns, which is even more exciting.
[00:22:11] What are your neurotransmitters in your brain actually doing? What's turned on, what's turned off, what's low, what's high, what should be worked on. You can look at the rhythm patterns, something we call it diurnal catecholamines. What is going up and down your epinephrine and your norepinephrine. I know this is called the gut zoomer, but really, this is a gut brain test. In one panel, it literally directly connects your microbiome and your mood to chemistry, your brain chemistry and your gut chemistry, your inflammation, your detox pathways, and your stress response. So all in one. And because beta glucuronidase is included, we can actually see if your gut is sabotaging your hormone balance, which is huge. And that will lead me to maybe do a hormone panel. So this is the kind of gut testing everyone that changes lives, because it finally answers the question of why, why are things happening? The gut brain access bundle, if you really want to take this step further, we can add on a full neurotransmitter panel, which is their. Their basically their brain panel.
[00:23:12] And it gives us gaba, it gives us serotonin, tryptophan, all the things. So it's huge. I can't tell you how much this changes people's lives. And to be able to test and see what's going on. And if I. If you're at an age where I know that there's hormone dysfunction going on, or I start to see things in this gut panel, we can start to look at the hormones. And this is where I think a lot of regular medicine can do things pretty simply, but they miss the boat. So. So I'm passionate about this segment because this is where I see the biggest gap in conventional care and where functional medicine makes the most profound difference, is in hormones. We have been so focused on serotonin and dopamine for all these years that we've almost entirely ignored the neurosteroids, the sex hormones that are supposed to be keeping your brain calm.
[00:23:59] They keep it calm and clear and resilient. I'm talking about progesterone and testosterone. So we're gonna take a deep dive into those hormones. Talk about those very hopefully, simply, easily and consistently. And again, I encourage you to follow us on our YouTube channel and like us on our podcast, because this is where you're gonna find. And you can even set the settings to have more things like this on your YouTube channel so that you can hear more and more and more about this information and really help yourself. Right? We wanna get you into the right hands, like myself or other providers, to be able to address these things and address them thoroughly. And it's really important to take these into your own hands. So I want you to think of progesterone as your own brain's natural volume. I mean, that literally not Metaphorically, progesterone is, and its metabolite, which is allopregnanolone, acts directly on gaba. Think about GABA as calming. These receptors in the brain that do the same thing that benzodiazepines do, they bind to the same area. And GABA and progesterone both calm the nervous system at a neurobiological level.
[00:25:01] So what happens physiologically when progesterone drops?
[00:25:05] Your brain loses its natural brake pedal and anxiety sometimes becomes severe. It's mysterious in onset, and it's honestly written off by most doctors as just stress. But it starts to move in more consistently. And this happens sometimes suddenly for women and for men, Honestly, for men, it's a more of a testosterone problem, generally speaking. But for women, this, this allopregnanolone is a very positive and potent stimulator of the GABA receptors. And GABA is the brain's primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. What does that mean? It calms it down. It quiets the firing of the neurons, it reduces anxiety, it promotes calm and sleep. So if you're turning up the volume on that and your brain's natural calm down signal, that's really what we want to do, right? That's what fixing the gut's gonna do. That's what putting back progesterone is gonna do. It's gonna actually help the calm down, signal the switch to get turned back on. So you get that and you get better sleep. Mental clarity. That's a huge one. With brain fog and mental clarity, you don't need an SSRI necessarily, or any of these other calming agents for the brain. You just need a little bit of progesterone, specifically bioidentical progesterone, I hope.
[00:26:19] And when GABA signals weaken because of normal progesterone and allopregnet alone drop, you get an elevated amygdala in the brain. Activity, anxiety gets worse, irritability gets worse, insomnia gets worse, and you have emotional overwhelm. Sound familiar? To most of my women, yes. Perimenopause or early menopause, when progesterone drops, estrogen stays high, testosterone's gone, which we're going to talk about again.
[00:26:46] A big cause of our brain dysfunction. So, you know, low progesterone basically creates an overactive amygdala where everything feels threatening, even when it shouldn't. So women that describe, and this is a really common one, basically everything feeling like they're being threatened, dread, panic, doom. A lot of them say that everything is Doomed like they can't watch the news anymore.
[00:27:11] And that is there's a neurobiological explanation for that panic is that low progesterone level and your amygdala basically not getting calmed down by GABA receptors. It's an overactivity of that amygdala. Another interesting tidbit about progesterone, it actually plays a critical role in the synthesis and maintenance of myelin.
[00:27:31] And myelin is that protective sheath around the nerve fibers.
[00:27:35] It's essential for fast clear transmission of the brain. Progesterone deficiency actually might contribute to brain fog just by decreasing that nerve sensitivity. And obviously with the anxiety and the overwhelm, it can go together. Right. So we know that that's actually, I think to me one of the more interesting things about progesterone is that myelin sheath is going to be not produced as critically as well. Right. Because we don't have as much progesterone. And progesterone also isn't anti inflammatory as most of our hormones are.
[00:28:08] So it has a direct anti inflammatory effect on the brain. It modulates microglial activity, the brain's actual immune cells helps to suppress that neuro inflammation.
[00:28:19] Progesterone deficiency contributes to the neuroinflammation that underlies anxiety and depression, especially later in life. So you know when testosterone drops first early in per. I call it peri. Perimenopause. In perimenopause, progesterone is the first hormone to decline, often years before estrogen shifts. So this is why anxiety, poor sleep and mood changes in the 30s and sometimes even 30s, but 40s and often are the first menopausal symptoms. I will tell you, almost always women come into me saying they're short tempered, they can't focus, they can't sleep and they're anxious, they get new onset anxiety disorder. Same thing after childbirth, dramatic post delivery progesterone crash, chronic stress. If you're a type A or under new stressors, cortisol is made from the same stuff as progesterone, guys. So there becomes this push and pull in two directions. We call it a steel syndrome, right, where you're robbing one side to pull to the other. But now progesterone can't be made effectively.
[00:29:21] Cortisol takes over and it depletes that calming pool. You get high cortisol, you're stressed out, your progesterone is down and now you're really stressed out and then you stop getting a period and all of those things, which is a progesterone collapse in itself.
[00:29:37] PCOS is a similar scenario. We know estrogen takes over, progesterone is lower, higher anxiety. So again, why do we not treat the progesterone in these women? That's a huge question that I really have no answer to. But when I can say is looking at these neurosteroids or the, or the sex hormones is very important.
[00:29:59] How many women do I have that come to me on antidepressants, anti anxiety meds for years and nobody ever checked their progesterone. When we check it, it's essentially zero. And like I said, that's where we get into this big conversation of why did we do this? Why are we not checking this? Why are we not addressing the elephant in the room which really is that progesterone deficiency. The other one to talk about is testosterone. And I think looking at testosterone is really important because testosterone, especially in men, as it declines, it's a really good anti inflammatory as well. Right. And testosterone is one of those hormones that's overlooked in women. And I will tell you it has a huge role in how their brain functions, their mental clarity. And conventional labs, again, they'll tell us that it's normal. That's the problem. We need alternative labs for females or at least interpretive ranges to look at these critically.
[00:30:58] So I want to know the bioavailable testosterone to a patient, total and bioavailable. So I want to know something called a binding globulin, which a lot of doctors don't check. I want to pair that with the actual total testosterone and know how much testosterone is freely and bioavailable in your system.
[00:31:17] Because it's not as bad as much for testosterone about how much you have, it's about how much your body is processing and clearing.
[00:31:24] And it's really important to know that. And when we check our labs, if she can check under regular labs, I can do it on a hormone panel with Vibrant as well, or one of my Dutch panels. But we're looking for estrogen, progesterone, sex hormone binding, globulin free and total testosterone. We're looking for all of these things and I would love to know how you're breaking down your estrogen, which is an even more important marker. And I want to remind you guys that testosterone, when it goes down, the inflammation benefit of it goes away. And that is as true with joints as it is with neuroinflammation. We know that low testosterone can absolutely affect the brain and it actually will also affect the ability of, especially when you're putting back testosterone. We need to know how well do you aromatize or make estrogen, or how little or how much estrogen do you make? Because again, it goes back to that estrogen recycling in the gut. If you can't recycle estrogen in the gut, your serotonin and your dopamine are gonna be not basically distributed appropriately. They're actually not gonna be even. You're not gonna get any signaling really to the brain, especially if they're not recycling in the gut. And you're gonna get this whole access shift where you actually can't make your testosterone, you can't make your serotonin, you can't make your dopamine. It's kind of a crazy cascade in men and women. But I will tell you, men are more symptomatic from low testosterone and anxiety. It's probably one of the first things that comes up with men, when they come to me with new onset anxiety, they say, hey, I can't sleep, I have brain fog, or I'm anxious, and I never was anxious before. And really that testosterone inability and that aromatization of estrogen, the inability to do that in the gut is really how this pathway starts to occur. It's that lack of serotonin recycling.
[00:33:16] So, you know, I think, you know, you learned about the testing, you're learning about hormones, but what about toxins? We can test for toxins too. We live in a very toxic world.
[00:33:28] And I don't say that to scare you. It's more of an awareness is power, right? We talked about this earlier, being your own advocate. The air, the water, the food, the cookware, the personal care products, we're swimming in an ocean of environmental chemicals. And the research is now showing to us very clearly that these toxins don't just affect your liver or your hormones, they affect your brain. They sabotage the very hormones that we just spent the last however long, 40 minutes talking about.
[00:33:57] And what are those things? We have heavy metals, we have mycotoxins, we have the forever chemicals, right, the PFAS's. And I really want you to understand, a lot of these are old.
[00:34:09] You know, even if you've gone to glassware, even if you've stopped cooking in plastic, in the microwave, even if you stopped using lotions with parabens and all the other things, they take a while to clean out of your system. And you can do things to help them come out of your system over time. But I think that's really, really important to remember. This doesn't have to Be new. Okay, obviously we want water filtration and we want air purifiers. But some of these toxins can be old. And that's where the testing is really important.
[00:34:35] We're looking for mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium. They accumulate in the tissues, in the nervous system.
[00:34:42] Heavy metals are purely linked to anxiety, brain fog, cognitive decline, neurological disorders, and autoimmune dysregulation.
[00:34:50] Heavy metals suppress testosterone production. So again, we kind of go back to what came first, right? The low testosterone or something causing it. Leading cadmium are endocrine disruptors that actually affect the cells in men, specifically the Leydig cells, and an ovarian function in women. So we know for a fact that that can decrease testosterone production. Again, looking at contaminated water, seafood for high mercury, old paint, dental amalgams, industrial exposure, breast implants, silicosis, things like that, we want to make sure we're addressing all of the various options that could possibly be causing hormone dysfunction and toxic neuroinflammation. We talked a little bit about molds and just to bring it back to the mold toxin is really the problem. That is what's neurotoxic because it crosses the blood brain barrier and absolutely directly impairs brain chemistry. So anxiety, brain fog, fatigue, mood instability. Again, memory molds are dramatically under diagnosed. We call it water damaged buildings, WDBs. Some people are very acutely symptomatic. Walking into a water damage building for 10 minutes, five minutes even, because that neurotransmitter effect is so rapid mitochondrial dysfunction, the ability of the cells to produce cellular energy and suppressing the immune system. So we know that there's also infers with what we call steroidogenesis, the process by which we make our sex hormones.
[00:36:19] So again, it's this massive trickle down effect. We have mycotoxins affecting our hormones. We have our hormones making neuroinflammation. We have our mycotoxins making neuroinflammation. We can't. Our gut gets disrupted and then we can't recirculate our serotonin and we can't make.
[00:36:35] It just keeps going, it doesn't stop. It's like these circuits or this, I call them spiderwebs.
[00:36:41] PFAS's are forever chemicals, nonstick cookware, waterproof clothing, food packaging, drinking water, Very, very strong endocrine disruptors, meaning they bind and disrupt our hormone signaling, suppressing testosterone, interfering with progesterone. Again, this cycle just continues down to the anxiety PFAS accumulate over time. We talked about that. They cannot ease you can't clear them without support. PFAs are the one of the few that really need. If they're positive in your system, we really need to aggressively go after them with binding agents and various detox protocols. Okay, so I think just remember we talked about the gut microbiome. We talked about toxins separately. But remember, toxins can create a gut toxin problem or a gut toxin connection, which can then create a gut brain anxiety loop. So remember, this isn't about them in isolation. I'm trying to talk about them maybe in synergy or in groups of two or three intentionally, because heavy metal exposure exacerbates gut permeability. Gut permeability exacerbates, you know, leaky gut, which it is, which will exacerbate the brain inflammation. Right.
[00:37:52] So we want to make sure we're understanding that fixing one is going to trickle down and affect the others. It's a bidirectional burden. Right. What detox pathways are we working on? Glutathione methylation, the processing of xenobiotics and xenobiosis.
[00:38:08] They are all compromised in people that have a high toxic burden. There is a really good toxin Zoomer, which we're going to talk about from microbiome that I often add on. Again, I love my three buckets toxins, food sensitivities, right? And then our environmental, sorry, environmental exposure, food tox and our bug buckets, if you will, toxic infections. This zoomer. And you can get these
[email protected] by going on and doing our intake and really becoming a patient of ours and letting us help you. But when I'm working on a patient with anxiety, fatigue or mood symptoms that don't respond to the usual interventions, I'll start going to the vibrant wellness talks in Zoomer or a total talks panel. And these panels will give me literally so much information about toxic burden. They'll give me the pfas, they'll give me the mycotoxins and molds, industrial chemicals. They'll also give us some of the gene snips that you're responsible, that help with your detox genetics, what you don't metabolize while what you do, which is really, really, really important, if you don't have good methylation pathways, I need to support you in methylation.
[00:39:17] So we don't just care and measure what's in your body. We want to understand how well your body can clear it. And that's key for these tests. 87 toxins it checks for, and it's a urine Based at home collection. Actually, all of these collections and tests that I talked about are all at home collections, which is wonderful. And I pair these three together, the gut zoomer, the toxin zoomer, as well as the environmental or your environmental detox or your detox protocol. So your cellular detoxification protocol. I do them all as part of like a pair. And I will tell you those toxins show endocrine disruptors are which ones are suppressing you, which ones we need to work on, which ones we need to detox.
[00:39:56] It's invaluable. Even if you just got the information and let us review it for you or your provider review it for, it's invaluable. And obviously getting the hormones, looking at the depleted testosterone and progesterone and cortisol and putting that pieces all together, they tell you exactly where to start and in what order. And that's the key to what we call our patient journey. And you know, I briefly just mentioned cellular detox a little bit early, but cellular detox is really the missing piece, right? We need to make sure our gut is doing what it's supposed to do. Our stool, our urine, but our cells actually getting the toxins out of our system, our cells into the bloodstream so that we can excrete them.
[00:40:39] And that's really where this oxidative panel comes into play. And knowing how well does your body clear certain things and what is dysfunctional mitochondrial dysfunction, when it declines, we get fatigue and anxiety anyway, when we get these what we call reactive oxygen species that our mitochondria can't get rid of, which is a sign of oxidative stress, it causes neuroinflammation, that causes the liver to get backed up because the cells are getting things out into the system, but we can't clear them, right? So phase one and phase two of liver detox pathway can get bottlenecked and we can't get rid of it. So toxins start to recirculate over and over and over, starting to create this endocrine disruption, which interferes with our hormone synthesis again.
[00:41:23] So we talked a little bit about, kind of briefly said, what do we do? Glutathione, nac, methylation, support binders, saunas, obviously hydration. We have targeted antimicrobials for bugs and molds and things like that.
[00:41:40] So really important to understand that this isn't a one step approach, this is multi step. But now you're gonna find out why, right? Why your anxiety might be rooted in your gut, your microbiome, your toxic burden A hidden parasite, depleted progesterone, declining testosterone or impaired cellular detox, probably with a combination of all the above. Right. So again we talked about these spiderwebs or these cycles of two or three. So what do we do about it? This is where LifeEvity and our Real3 method becomes your personalized action plan, honestly. And this is where functional medicine providers really excel. And we have a system in our own practice which is called Real3, which is a very precise way to go about treating your acute problems and your chronic problems, such as detoxifying and getting longevity parameters in place. Because we want you to age your way and live as long as you want to live the way you want to live it. And that's when it goes back to doing the testing. Right? We, we do these zoomers. We look for comprehensive hormone panels, we're looking for nutrient and thyroid panels. We're getting the gut restored, right. We're eliminating pro inflammatory foods, we're targeting very, very, very specific strains of probiotics and, and prebiotics and getting the leaky gut repaired. Right. These are all key to getting the brain back on track. We're working on your targeted hormone deficiencies. Hormone therapy is not really one size fits all. I think that oftentimes in a lot of hormone functional medicine practices, they really focus on a one size fits all profile. And it really depends on your labs, your genetics and your personal health history to know what you need and how you need it.
[00:43:19] Especially if we're talking about improving neurologic outcomes.
[00:43:22] And only after we fix all of that do we start to reduce your toxic burden. Because if we don't, you can't clear the toxins. We want to make sure your body is capable of clearing out that bucket. If you're not capable of clearing out that bucket, you're going to feel sick and you're going to get worse.
[00:43:39] So we work towards clearing that out and then replacing and rebuilding so that we can rebuild neurotransmitters nutritionally with supplements, with lifestyle. Right. We want to make sure we get you sleeping, that we start getting your mind body practices in check. We start targeting breathing resistance training. Actually resistance training is one of the most evidence based interventions for raising testosterone. Right. So just getting that back on track, adaptogenic herbs that calm the system and support testosterone and cortisol and calming that, calming that. Basically the gaba, I call it the twitchiness, right. Because the GABA receptors are all exposed and not getting enough basically saturation and stimulation and getting that vagus nerve involved, getting the breathing and the cold exposure, right, Doing the cold plunges, all of these things help to rebalance that nervous system. But they really have a hard time working if the gut is not in check. They really have a hard time working if we don't know what we're looking for. What's our major dysfunction if the hormones aren't put back?
[00:44:46] It all goes together and they work together. And those tests are so important.
[00:44:51] So this is what lifeevity looks like in our practice. For us, it's personalized, like I said, proactive and participatory.
[00:44:59] And because you're a part of this team, we don't want to hand you a pill and send you home. We want to build a map of your unique biology and walk you through it, walk with you, your gut, your hormones, your toxic burden, your nervous system and all of that. That is the Age youe Way promise. And that is why, you know, I want to walk with you today because anxiety is real. I want to make sure we're addressing this as a symptom, not just walking into your primary and having a 10 minute conversation about anxiety.
[00:45:28] It's not in your head. It might be in your gut, your cells, your mitochondria, your progesterone, your environment.
[00:45:34] And you deserve to know the root cause of that anxiety. You deserve to know and have testing that actually looks inside your unique biology. And you deserve a provider who can ask why and not just to prescribe. Progesterone might be tanked, testosterone might be depleted, and you might be running what we call dysbiotic chaos. Right? Your gut's just a train wreck.
[00:45:56] Your cells could be swimming in these forever chemicals and mycotoxins and completely creating metabolic chaos as well. So they need metabolic solutions, not a brain pill, not a serotonin pill. And they're powerfully addressable when you know what you're dealing with. So this is again, this is lifeevity. This is living the way you want to live and it's extended, it's vibrant, purposeful longevity. So it's all on your terms, guys. At your pace, the way you want to, aging your way. So if this resonated with you, I hope it did and come find me. @mydrlori.com we offer virtual and integrative functional care nationwide and use the most advanced testing possible, including vibrant panels and other testing panels from other companies.
[00:46:43] And because honestly, you deserve the answer. It's not just prescriptions. So fill out our online intake on the website mydrlori.com all spelled out M Y D O C O T R l o r I.com to get started and let's get on your Life Jeopardy. Journey because this moment you decide that you want to ask why and not just be given another pill. I'm Dr. Laurie and I'll see you on the next episode of Anti Aging Unraveled. Thank you.
[00:47:13] Thanks for joining me on this episode of Anti Aging Unraveled, where longevity is personal and you're empowered to age your way.
[00:47:22] If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe to the podcast or our YouTube channel, Anti Aging Unraveled and of course, follow us on social for more tools, insights and conversations rooted in lifeevity philosophy, living life the way you want to take your next step, visit mydrlori.com, click get started now and fill out your wellness or weight loss intake to begin your personalized longevity journey. Until next time, keep living with intention, vitality and purpose. Here's to longevity, lifeevity and aging your way.
