EPISODE 89: Addressing mental and cognitive health and others by Healing the Gut

Episode 89: Dr. Michael Ruscio

With his clinical and research teams at the Institute, Dr. Ruscio focuses on looking at studies on digestive health to inform his own ongoing clinical research, patient care, and guidance for health seekers and fellow clinicians.

Dr. Ruscio’s research has been published in peer-reviewed medical journals, and he speaks at integrative medical conferences across the globe. While actively seeing patients in his clinic, he also runs an influential blog and podcast, as well as a newsletter for functional medicine practitioners.

Meet Dr. Michael Ruscio in my latest episode of the Thrive State Podcast. We’ll dive in to the many wonders you can do for your physical, mental and emotional health by working up your gut health using the Diet, Lifestyle and Gut Health Foundations Model!

Visit Drruscio.com

Show notes

Watching out for non-GI symptoms of GI issues

It’s important to learn these because you might be chasing the wrong symptoms for the wrong issue.

Food triggers, imbalances in the bacteria, colonies in the gut, or leaky gut can cause unexpected symptoms. Watch out for (non-exhaustive): skin problems, MCI, brain fog, anxiety, depression, joint pain, thyroid problems, small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, correlations to lipids, etc.

Does everything start in the gut?

Starting in the gut is important. Diet, Lifestyle and Gut Health Foundations Model.

The testing doesn’t really change a lot the way how you treat the person. The biomarkers in GI are theoretical for the most part but they don’t necessarily tell you what diet or probiotics you need.

The Ruscio Institute

It’s a multidisciplinary integrative clinic which promotes a more cost-effective model of functional medicine. We take what works from conventional medicine.

Getting bias out of the way, questioning everything you’re taught or told, and taking it on the merits of evidence, can be freeing and get you to really help people. Take the ideas on the basis of what support they have and not what camp they come from.

Gut Health and Diet

• Paleo-like Diet is a rough proximity to the spirit of the paleolithic ancestor diet. Simply put, it means eating food that has not been or minimally processed.
• Pro-tip: Shop the isle of the grocery. Apply the 80-20 principle—if you can’t hunt or forge it, don’t eat it.
• But some people can’t process too many fruits and vegetables. So better to resolve the dysbiosis first. Then you can reintroduce the grains or vegetables. As the gut heals, the lining of your intestines of villi that secrete enzymes repair, making people better able to digest food and develop tolerance.

Choosing your pre/probiotics

• Both work. Probiotics have more evidence for most things. Prebiotics has more probability of flaring for people.
• Start with probiotics: more evidence, better evidence, fewer adverse events.
• People start to look at probiotics as drugs because of what companies are doing on specific strains and specific issues while they actually have tremendous overlap. It’s not about using probiotics like a drug reductionistically but about how we can create a simple guide to using probiotics to heal the gut.
• Three main classifications of probiotics: Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium. Blends, Saccharomyces boulardii, a beneficial yeast.Soil-Based Blends, usually Bacillus species. If we combine all three, they work better than having just one.

How do you actually “heal the gut”

• We don’t always need to quantify, at least in the early phase, pre and post-gut biomarkers. The individual symptoms are a much better way to stir the process than repeat biomarker assessments.
• Elemental diet has yielded great results for gut health reset and even some autoimmune issues. Use your own biofeedback to stir up how long you want to use it.

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