Episode 091: Welcome back to Real Health Radio. It’s another guest interview episode of Real Health Radio and this week I’m speaking with Dr. Bryan Walsh.
Dr. Bryan Walsh has been studying human physiology and nutrition for over 25 years and has been educating others in health for 20 of those years. When he isn’t teaching, he spends his time pouring over the latest research and synthesizing his findings into practical information for health practitioners to use with their clients.
He currently delivers courses in biochemistry, physiology, and pathophysiology as an Instructor at Maryland University of Integrated Health.
In addition, he serves as the Co-Director of Education at Biogenetix, a cutting-edge nutraceutical company, where he formulates products, creates educational modules, and presents to clinicians throughout the U.S.
He is a licensed, board-certified Naturopathic Doctor and has been seeing patients throughout the U.S. for the past decade.
Outside of his professional endeavors, you can find him spending time and having incredible amounts of fun with his wife and five children.
More information can be found about him at drwalsh.com
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to episode 91 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of the episode at the show notes, www.seven-health.com/91.
Welcome to Real Health Radio, health advice that’s more than just about how you look. And here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey, it’s Chris Sandel, and thanks for joining for another episode of Real Health Radio. Today it’s another guest episode, and I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Bryan Walsh. Bryan has been studying human physiology and nutrition for over 25 years, and he’s been educating others in health for 20 of those years.
When he isn’t teaching, he spends his time pouring over the latest research and synthesizing his findings into practical information for health practitioners to use with their clients. He currently delivers courses in biochemistry, physiology, and pathophysiology as an instructor at Maryland University of Integrative Health, and in addition, he serves as the co-director of education at Biogenetic, a cutting edge nutraceutical company where he formulates products, creates educational modules, and presents to clinicians throughout the US.
He’s a licensed, board-certified naturopathic doctor, and has been seeing patients throughout the US for the past decade, and outside of his professional endeavors, you can find him spending time and having incredible amounts of fun with his wife and five children.
I first became aware of Bryan a little while ago. I was searching something and a Precision Nutrition came up on the topic, and he was the author of the article, and so I started to dig more into some of this writing, and then last year I became more aware of him because he was one of the guest lecturers in Ari Whitten’s Energy Blueprint, and I really liked what he had to say, so I reached out and invited him to come on the show, and he said yes.
As part of this episode, there were two main areas that I wanted to chat with him about, and the first was the immune system, and specifically looking at a thing called TH1 and TH2. If you’ve never heard of this before, Bryan does a really great job of explaining it, and then the second area was “adrenal fatigue”, and I’m saying that phrase in air quotes because, while I think it is a very common diagnosis with naturopaths, and nutritionists, and those in the alternative health world, it’s a bit of a misnomer. We chat about this in detail, going through some of the common errors in the way that it is taught and how people think about it versus what the actual science shows, and Bryan has some really great studies to back up the stuff that he’s chatting about here.
This was a really great show, and I love hearing Bryan give interviews because he has a wealth of knowledge, and he’s very skilled when talking about complex ideas, and breaking them down into layman’s terms so that laypeople can understand.
And the first half of this show, it might be more of interest to practitioners because we are talking about things that are a bit more niche, and it is going into more detail, but during the second half, we really cover other topics, and so thoughts and perceptions, and how they can affect your health. And Bryan also comments about what it’s like trying to be healthy while having five kids under the age of nine while working from home. I really enjoyed this episode. I hope you do. Without further ado, here is my interview with Dr. Bryan Walsh.
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Chris Sandel: Hey, Bryan. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for coming on the podcast today.
Dr Bryan Walsh: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.
Chris Sandel: There’s probably going to be lots of people in my audience who know who you are. There’s going to be others that don’t. For those who haven’t come across you before, do you want to give a little bit of background on yourself and what you do?
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah. That’s always a big question. I mean, it depends on how far you want to go back. Basically, I’ve always been into health. I know some people say that, but I remember, as a kid, I would ask my mom to purchase nutrition books for me, and I would read those in the car when my friends were reading comic books, and so I’ve always had this interest in the human body. I was a fitness professional, a personal trainer for a while, and then added massage therapy onto that list, and then became a naturopathic physician because it seemed like the best option for me, but I could have gone the medical doctor route, but I think it would have been frustrating. And to sit through four years of school and have to keep my mouth shut about … because I was already into health, and I was already into how the body worked, and herbs, and those types of things.
I guess, in terms of the short version, conventional medicine offers a lot of really great things, western medicine. They also have their flaws.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Dr Bryan Walsh: I will honestly say I think alternative medicine is the same boat, that we have some really great things that we do, but we really screw some things up, too. What I try to do is bridge the two. I try to take the best of what western science and western medicine offers, and then combine that with what the best of what integrative medicine or alternative medicine offers, and try to get everybody to see the other side, and see the benefits, and take the good from both sides in order to try to help other people. Well, to help patients and to help other practitioners help their patients better.
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Chris Sandel: Yeah, definitely, and I would agree with a lot of that. Where do you maybe see the alternative world isn’t do so well? Where are some of their faults lying?
Dr Bryan Walsh: That’s a great question. The primary thing that I see … Well, it’s easy if I talk about both.
Chris Sandel: Okay. Cool. Yeah, do that.
Dr Bryan Walsh: If you talk to a medical doctor, and you say someone has low white blood cells. What are some potential causes? They’ll say things like cancer, and then HIV infection, and these really horrible things, and what conventional medical doctors are really good at is catching the bad stuff. They’re imbued with that throughout their schooling and their residency, and they’re really good at finding those things.
The problem is that, where they fall short, is if they can’t figure it out, then they don’t know where else to go, so they don’t give much thought to things like intestinal permeability, or having some kind of toxin exposure, or food sensitivities, and I don’t want to talk about the gluten bit, but food sensitivities, or some kind of subclinical infection, or any of these things that alternative medicine is usually the first thing that we jump to.
Alternative medicine and nutritional medicine, what we do really well is we find those things. We look for candida infections, we consider intestinal permeability or a leaky gut, we think that low cortisol is real and it’s not necessarily Addison’s disease or an autoimmune condition. The problem is it that, because we’re all into these cool things, these … I say that as a society we all have ADD because the next greatest thing that comes out, we totally abandon and forget the previous thing before.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Dr Bryan Walsh: If the newest antioxidant comes out that’s more powerful than any other antioxidant humankind has ever known, then that gets all of our attention, and we totally forget all these other really cool ones that we were into just a few weeks ago.
The problem is that we in alternative medicine will run these really boutique labs, these functional labs, like a urinary organic acid test, but the problem with that is that will not catch glucose dysregulation or thyroid dysfunction, or it won’t even find things like cancer.
Where we go wrong is we I think are attracted to the flashy and the shiny, and we forget the basics. A basic, good blood chemistry interpreted correctly is more important than any other awesome stool test, or a leaky gut test, or SIBO test, or any of those other things.
I think that kind of tells you where I am, that we both are good at looking for certain things, and we’re not good at looking and considering the other things. I look at some of what all these really smart alternative practitioners are doing, and if they’re not running a blood chemistry or paying much attention to it, they’re not going to find these basic things that need to be addressed before some of these other, more unconventional things are addressed.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and I would definitely agree with that, and for me I’m always trying to bridge that gap, and also, I guess, focus on the fundamentals, which I think can often get lost with people trying to find this strange, bizarre thing as opposed to just looking at, okay, what are the obvious things, what are the fundamentals.
Dr Bryan Walsh: I usually get a patient a week that fits into that category, that they want the craziest tests, or they have this really weird hypothesis or theory as to why they’re not feeling really well, and that’s a whole other topic by itself, but yeah.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah, and I will say this last bit too, and I just say this because I don’t know where your listeners are with this, but one thing that I get frustrated about is if you’re part of a camp, you tend to disparage or hate the other camps. So in alternative medicine, if you’re really in alternative medicine, you can’t like the other side. But the point I want to make it we’re not that different in our goals. We just approach it differently. We have to thank western science for just about every single thing that we in nutritional medicine know about the human body, and they find some amazing stuff.
I’ve been doing some work on this gut hormone, GLP-1, and its role in these things called glycemic variability, and the first phase insulin response, and all this stuff, and in medicine, we know about GLP-1 because of western science. Now, what are they doing with it? They’re trying to make a drug that acts on the receptors in the body for this GLP-1. Well, that’s where I’ll stop, and instead, you go to the science, the same science, and you find that there’s a number of different foods or supplements that can stimulate the body’s GLP-1 by itself.
When I say I try to combine the two is I take the science, because God bless them. I mean, they do some amazing studies, but then stop when it comes to medications and drugs, and see is there something that we can do naturally to help support this particular pathway that’s also found in the literature. That’s a general overview, I guess.
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Chris Sandel: Okay. Look, there’s two real areas that I want to chat with you about today. The first is the immune system, the second is “adrenal fatigue”, and I say that in air quotes, and I know they’re very big topics, so we will probably only just scratch the surface on this stuff, and I do know there’s an overlap with this, and also you are well-versed to talk about this and give the listeners really useful information. I guess, to start with, can you describe the concept of TH1 and TH2, and I think I’ve heard you say before that this idea is oversimplified, and so if you do have some issues with it, you can elaborate on this, but just the basic framework, what is TH1, TH2, and what’s its importance.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Sure. I think, to start at the very top, if we were to make a mind map of this, you start by talking about what is the immune system. And there’s various parts to the immune system – your tonsils, and the lymph nodes, and the thymus. But when it comes to the cells of the immune system, they basically come under the category of white blood cells. Now, of that, there’s five major categories of white blood cells, and I’ll name them, and it’s not necessary, but you have neutrophils, and lymphocytes, monocytes, and these are all in the blood chemistry, if anybody wanted to see them.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Eosinophils and basophils. There’s five major white blood cell types. Now, one of those, the lymphocytes, there’s many other subtypes of that. If you’re picturing a chalkboard or a whiteboard, up at the top you’d have white blood cells. From that would be five lines going to five different types of white blood cells, circulating in the bloodstream. Then from lymphocytes, you’d draw a number of more lines coming down from them. When people hear about antibodies, for example, those are made by a specific type of lymphocyte. There are things like natural killer cells, which I think is one of my favorite named cells. It just sounds like you wouldn’t want to mess with that. If you were going to be a cell, I think a natural killer cell sounds good.
There’s also things called cytotoxic T cells, because if people have ever even just remembered back when the ’80s to ’90s, when HIV was coming around, people talking about T cells counts.
T cells are a type of lymphocyte. One of the five is a lymphocyte, but of lymphocytes, there’s many, many, many subcategories of lymphocytes. T cells, B cells which turn into plasma cells and make antibodies. Within the T cells, there’s things like cytotoxic T cells, and those are natural killers, so they attack cells themselves.
There are things called T suppressor cells, or T regulatory cells is more common now, and as the name would suggest, they regulate … they’re like the conductor of a symphony that tell the wind section to be a little bit louder or the macrophages to calm down, and then there’s these T cells, and with T cells, you get T helper cells, which, when you say TH1, that’s T helper cell one, and there’s TH2 is T helper cell two.
Now, the way this kind of works, and this is a lot of fun to go into great detail on, but there are … I’ll just go ahead and say some of the stuff. There’s what’s called an undifferentiated T helper cell, and it’s actually TH0.
Chris Sandel: Okay.
Dr Bryan Walsh: This is a T helper cell. The body’s made this T helper cell to help part of the immune system, but it doesn’t know what the body wants it to do yet. It’s kind of like a worker that gets hired for a job, but they don’t know what the job is specific going to be like. You go to a farm. You say, “I’m going to work in this farm.” The farmer says, “Cool. I’m not going to tell you what you’re going to do yet,” so you’re ready to go, but you don’t know if you’re going to be mowing the grass or shoveling manure.
These T undifferentiated helper cells, the TH0 cells, are going to help. They’re going to stimulate part of the immune system, but they don’t know which it is yet, and they don’t know what it is until the body is … I don’t want to say infected, but something triggers the body to tell that T helper cell, the TH0 cell, to become a TH1 or a TH2 cell. Now, the TH1 side of the immune system tends to stimulate other immune cells, which would make sense. It hits the button. That’s all it does, is it hits a button that tells certain cells. It doesn’t do much itself, it just sounds the alarm.
The TH1 cell, it sounds the alarm to immune cells that attack other cells, so things like natural killer cells. They go right after a cell. The cytotoxic T cells go right after a cell. The ones I mentioned earlier, neutrophils. There’s a bunch of them, and they’re really fast swimmers. They go right after a cell and gobble it up. Macrophages do the same thing. When a TH1 cell becomes active, this lymphocyte, it hits the big red button, sounding the alarm for those cells, the ones that go after other cells, and I’ll explain this a little bit more in a second.
A TH2 lymphocyte sounds a different alarm. It hits the blue button, and then that stimulates cells like antibodies, like plasma cells, B cells that become plasma cells to create antibodies, that attack cells kind of from a distance. I’ll put some better context on this. Viruses are, I think, the most lethal, nasty microbes out there, because they can’t support life themselves. They have to infect another cell, and kind of suck the life out of the machinery of that cell, replicate, and then burst open that cell, kill that cell, and then scamper like little cockroaches to another cell, and keep doing the same thing.
Viruses affect your cells. Now, just imagine this. Well, let’s just imagine tennis balls or something. You have two similarly-sized tennis balls. One of them, you can picture it as like Pac-Man. That’s going to be like a natural killer, so a cytotoxic T cell. When it comes to one of your own virally infected cell, it can attack it. It’s the same size. It’s like two dogs of the same size will go out for each other. That’s the same size.
Now, there are some bacteria that are the same size or smaller than our cells, so we want a TH1 stimulation when we get infected by small microbes, so things like viruses or smallish bacteria. Essentially, again, if you picture a tennis ball, it’s going to go after other balls that are the same size as it because it stands a chance. But now consider that you get infected by a parasite. Now, parasites, to use this metaphor which I’ve never used before, is if you take a beach ball or a basketball, and that little tennis ball, Pac-Man comes up to that. He’s like, no way. This thing’s going to crush me. I don’t stand a chance.
Parasites are still microscopic, but they’re essentially worms, and there’s different types. They’re pretty large organisms. If you get infected by a parasite or a large bacteria, our own little cells aren’t going to do much for that, so we need to stimulate … that’s when the TH2 system says, all right, and if you can picture it like in the army, the tanks and the mortar launchers that aren’t on the front line, but they’re launching these things from the back at the enemy, it’s kind of like what our antibodies are doing from the plasma cells or the B cells.
The TH2 system tends to stimulate immune cell activity that’s going to combat larger microbes, and the TH1 system is for smaller microbes for our cells to attack itself. Now, it’s not that simple. There’s more involved, but that’s a pretty easy way of looking at it.
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Chris Sandel: Okay, and so a lot of what people then talk about, and often talk about as being a problem, can be if someone is TH1 or TH2 dominant. Are you able to speak to that a little bit?
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah. What I just presented was, I think, throughout antiquity, probably what our immune system did. But now, for whatever reason, we’re seeing this … I think you can call it an epidemic of autoimmunity, and what autoimmunity essentially is, is your immune system, for some reason, looks at you, parts of you, proteins on you, as a foreign agent, as an antigen, as foreign. Remember, our body, our immune system, it’s so awesome, is designed to attack anything that’s non-self on the inside.
This is why, incidentally, just to make this realistic for people, this is why, when somebody gets an organ transplant, you hear about that somebody will reject an organ transplant, and they have to suppress the immune system, because if I got one of your kidneys, that’s your kidney, and that has your individual fingerprint on that kidney that is, and this is amazing, unlike anybody else’s in the entire world that’s ever existed, except if you have an identical twin. It’s amazing. But anyway, so my body would see your kidney as non-self, and it would attack it. It sees microbes, and these viruses, and parasites and bacteria as non-self, so it attacks it, but for some reason now we’re seeing this epidemic of autoimmunity where the body is looking at its own proteins as non-self, and it attacks it.
In many cases, not all, somebody that has an autoimmune condition will generally, not always, be swayed towards TH1 or TH2 dominance. That’s not a problem in and of itself, necessarily, except for the fact that it’s kind of … it’s supposed to be sort of like a teeter-totter. And if one side’s up, the other side’s down with TH1, TH2, and if it gets skewed one way, then that’s where you start to get some of this excess tissue damage. But with autoimmunity, it’s a whole host of variety of things.
The T regulatory cells aren’t working very well, the T suppressor cells might not working very well, there’s an imbalance with the TH1/TH2 system. There’s all these things, and this is where the oversimplification that I’m really glad that you mentioned I think comes in.
It is a really useful tool clinically to consider this TH1/TH2 dominance. However, there’s some interesting papers that talk about … there’s a concept, usually in neurology, called plasticity, that the immune system may even have a certain amount of plasticity, and it is just that. It’s an oversimplification. It’s accurate to say that it’s an oversimplification, but it’s also accurate to say that it’s clinically useful.
Now, the problem that I see a lot of people getting into is, as clinicians, we look for the really easy answer, and to say, “Oh, you’re TH1 dominant. Here, take these botanicals or these nutrients.” Well, you don’t know if they really are TH1 dominant. The testing is good but not great for those types of things. There may be fluxes and shift. The immune system I think is almost as dynamic as the nervous system, in terms of our understanding of it, and that includes the microbiome, for example. It’s not a really easy answer. You can’t walk around to somebody, meet them in a bar, shake their hand, and say, “Hi, I’m TH1 dominant.” It’s not that simple. You don’t want to label yourself with this because it is an oversimplification.
The only component of it that becomes interesting is, and this has kind of been overblown, but there’s something to it, is that certain botanicals, or certain nutrients or certain compounds can actually push your support, the TH1 arm of the immune system or the TH2 arm. However, and I’ve actually spent a lot of time looking at this, there’s a lot of contradictory results in the literature when it comes to these things. It’s not as simple as saying, well, echinacea supports TH1, because there’s studies that show that it supports TH2 cytokines too.
It’s not that simple, but the takeaway, I suppose, is if somebody has an autoimmune condition, and takes a botanical, or an herbal formula, or whatever it might be, and feels significantly worse every time they take it, A) you probably shouldn’t be taking it or drinking it, if it’s coffee, for example, but B) that may be an indication that it is pushing your immune system in a direction that your immune system doesn’t want to go.
On the other hand, if you take something, and it’s possible that somebody drinks coffee or tea, or takes echinacea or licorice root, and they feel markedly better, and I’m not saying … I mean, cocaine makes you feel good, supposedly, but I’m not talking about that effect. I’m talking about really genuinely feels better. Not stimulated, not more energy, but just feels like, you know what? I feel better on the inside. Maybe that’s something that’s happened to be really good for you because it’s affecting your immune system in a positive way.
Chris Sandel: Is this how you do that with clients, in terms of “I’m going to give you these botanicals, or I’m going to try out this thing to see what’s going on with that system”, or are you doing some form of testing that looks specifically at markers around the different types of immune substances so you can then make an assessment of TH1 versus TH2?
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah. Those are funny questions. When I first learned about this stuff, like most people, well, I used to. I don’t do it too much anymore. Kind of go hook, line and sinker. You just go right into it. You hear about testing the clients, and giving them the botanicals, and seeing how they fare when they take them, and then, of course, there is testing that is available. It’s questionable of its accuracy. It tends to be kind of expensive, and when it comes to the price, do you want them to be spending money for you and your time with them on tests or on supplements, and in some cases there’s a finite amount of money that they can spend, so I try to do the most I can without testing, I will admit. There is testing out there, but, I mean, my wife wouldn’t let me spend thousands of dollars on tests, so I don’t ask other people to spend thousands of dollars on tests as well, and I try to do the best I can just using my clinical judgment.
I used to challenge people with certain substances, but I don’t necessarily anymore do a challenge. The way the challenge was originally taught was you have an autoimmune patient. Give them some TH1 botanicals for three days, take a couple days off, and then give them a bunch of TH2 botanicals for a few days, and the results were sometimes good, sometimes not. It wasn’t consistent enough for me, and so I don’t do that anymore, but what I do more often is I very often, I’d say 90% of the time, give somebody TH1-type botanicals to see how they do, in cases of suspected autoimmunity, low cortisol.
It’s something that I’ve seen more and more, that I feel like a lot of people have, that they need that TH1 support, and let me just add to that, one of the possibilities with this are subclinical infections. A viral infection in some cases never goes away. What happens is you get it, you get sick, but then the immune system can keep it at bay, and what can happen is somebody will get stressed. Not a lot of sleep for a few days, and then the viral infection will come back, in the case of herpes, for example.
These TH1 botanicals, my question is, is it supporting a abnormal TH1/TH2 system, or is it supporting the body’s immune system to fight off a subclinical infection that I think a lot of people have, but there’s not a whole lot of great testing, and the one that is, it’s really expensive. For whatever reason, I see people really benefiting more from and needing the TH1-type botanicals.
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Chris Sandel: Okay. Cool. Moving on now to the second thing that I want to cover, which is the adrenals and adrenal fatigue. And I think this is a topic that contains a lot of, A) confusion, and B) pseudoscience. And I heard on another podcast, I think it was, where you in the interview said Hans Selye got it wrong, and maybe as a starting place you could explain what Hans Selye had proposed, how he’d got it wrong, and what appears to be maybe a more accurate description or narrative in regards to the adrenals and stress.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Sure. Yeah, so Hans Selye, I mean, God bless him for all the work he did. It was tremendous. It’s just science offers us more information. I’m not going to disparage the guy because, seriously, he was the grandfather of the stress response and the cortisol response. Back in the day, he would test this usually with mice and stuff, but basically what he said was that when a stress was applied to a mammal, that there was an initial, what he called the alarm phase. If you could picture, I guess, a graph, that’d be like a flat line that goes straight up, and that’s the alarm phase, and that’s our hyper stress response. Supposedly we make a lot of cortisol, and then, if the stress continues to be applied, then that line that went up curves and starts to come back down. Now, as it drops down, it crosses over the same area as it was in the baseline if that makes sense.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Let’s say it was zero. Zero was baseline. It went up to 10, and it came back down as it’s crashing down. It went back through zero, and that’s called the resistance phase, according to him, and this resistance phase was the stress is still being applied, the body’s resources are starting to become challenged for some reason, and this was, I think it was back in the ’20s. Starting to become challenged, so we’re not mounting as strong of a stress response as we were prior, and then, if the stress is continued, then that will continue to go back down, past zero, into negative numbers, and was called the exhaustion phase. A really cool model, and again, it was the best we had at the time, and it made a lot of sense, and everybody jumped on this.
Dr Bryan Walsh: The problem is that, I don’t know, for whatever reason, in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, everybody used his model for stress, and adrenal fatigue, and adrenal exhaustion. They call it a number of different things. Adrenal exhaustion, adrenal fatigue, adrenal burnout, and so then you take these naturopathic, nutritional, functional medicine, alternative practitioners, and they’re running these salivary cortisol tests, which would track your cortisol throughout the day, and if your cortisol came back low, what we were all taught to say was, and this is what everybody said, was you have low cortisol. Here’s this chart showing the alarm, resistance, exhaustion phases.
You have been stressed for a really, really long time, and your adrenal glands are just burnt out, and they cannot make any more cortisol, and it can take, and I’ve heard people that train other practitioners to say this, it can take a couple of years to rebuild, in quote, rebuild the adrenals. That’s what we taught, and I’m sorry to say, I don’t think it’s recorded anywhere, but I absolutely said that to patients, until I started really looking at physiology, and that’s when my eyes were open to this concept.
But that’s the old way, and by the way, I’m not the one saying his model is old. That’s published. I mean, there are some really brilliant people in this world of stress physiology that said thank you, Hans Selye, for all you did, but it turns out you were actually really wrong, and I think profoundly wrong is in one paper.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and was it James Wilson, is it that book that really propelled this whole idea, and really got it into the naturopathic field, and thinking …
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah, supposedly. Chiropractor James Wilson has a book called Adrenal Fatigue. If you look up anything on adrenal fatigue, he’s credited with coining that term and talking about it, yeah.
Chris Sandel: Given what you described there, and the fact that Hans Selye got it wrong, so what’s more of an accurate description of what can be going on?
Dr Bryan Walsh: Wow. Okay. Well, we have a few hours, hopefully, to talk about it, you know? No. Well, it doesn’t have to go through that trajectory.
First of all, that there are many different kinds of stress, which a lot of people are familiar with now, but that somebody can … Let’s just first talk about psychological stress, mental/emotional stress. You can apply the same mental/emotional stress to three people. One of them will have increased cortisol response, another one might not have any cortisol response beyond normal, and another one can have a low cortisol response, and it’s because there’s so many different factors that are going on inside of the body that can speak to the adrenal glands or the HPA axis, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, that tells the adrenal glands to release cortisol or not.
His model or trajectory of first it goes up, then it comes down, then it goes crashing down to exhaustion isn’t true. And in fact, you can take somebody, like yourself, totally healthy, normal cortisol, and then you get the flu, or you get some virus, or you get some kind of infection. It depends on the infection, but there is a really good chance that your cortisol will go from normal straight down to low, and then when the infection is resolved, then your cortisol will come back up. You didn’t go through the alarm phase, the resistance phase, and another case would be cancer. Cancer will very likely cause low cortisol, and never had a high cortisol alarm phase.
There are people that can exist forever in the alarm phase. They just have a really resilient stress system, and they can just keep making cortisol. His model of it goes up first and then comes down has been pretty much disproven. You can go from normal to high, normal to low, from low to high. There’s too many other variants going on, and to say that adrenal fatigue, as it’s named, as somebody once said and I liked it, it’s a lazy diagnosis because it doesn’t speak to why the cortisol’s low in the first place, and there are some biochemical reasons where somebody may not be able to produce adequate amounts of cortisol, but it’s not fatigue.
When people say adrenal fatigue, they’re saying that the adrenal glands are tired, they’re worn out, they can’t make cortisol anymore, and that’s not the case. They either can’t make it for a biochemical reason, it’s not fatigue and you don’t have to rebuild it, or it’s being suppressed, and they can make it just fine, but the body’s telling it not to. And the other bit I’ll just ask is why is there not fatigue of any other gland. Why don’t we have pituitary fatigue, or testicular fatigue or hepatic fatigue, and it’s only these poor little, unsung heroes, stress adrenal glands that have this fatigue syndrome. I think it’s kind of silly, really
00:35:05
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and I think you break it up in terms of the way that you talk about this with adrenal inhibition and then adrenal insufficiency. Are you able to explain either what they mean, and maybe some examples of how that would come to be?
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah. Insufficiency is the … and the conventional medical model, it acknowledges adrenal insufficiency. I mean, that’s a term. This, I would say, is more of a subclinical adrenal insufficiency or a functional adrenal insufficiency. Their adrenal insufficiency is usually due to an autoimmune condition called Addison’s, where it attacks the adrenal glands, and they can’t make cortisol anymore.
I would call this a functional adrenal insufficiency, and this is a case where the adrenal glands cannot manufacture cortisol adequately. This could be due to certain nutrient deficiencies. This could be due to excess oxidative stress, or what’s called reactive oxygen species. This could be due to mitochondrial dysfunction within the adrenal glands. There’s an NADPH deficiency, which I won’t get into, but it’s just the adrenal glands can’t make cortisol because they don’t have the necessary tools inside the cells to do it.
You need nutrients, you need healthy mitochondria, you need to have limited reactive oxygen. You need these things to be able to produce it in the first place. Now, of the causes of low cortisol, I suspect that that’s not the more common reason, and that the other one that you mentioned is adrenal … and you could call it one of two things. Adrenal suppression or adrenal inhibition, which is basically the same thing, and this has influences by the body, usually the immune system, that is intentionally telling the adrenal glands do not produce normal levels of cortisol, which means for right now, I don’t want cortisol, so stop producing it in any appreciable amounts.
Now, somebody might hear that and say, well, why the heck would the body want to have low cortisol? Well, here’s the thing. This happens all the time when people get an infection with iron levels. The body will actually sequester iron during certain infections because iron will help the microbe replicate, so as a defense mechanism, the body says, well, let’s hold onto all the iron as tightly as we can to limit it for this infecting microbe right now, so that it can’t replicate, and then we’ll heat the body up a little bit so we can cook these microbes, and then we’ll get rid of this thing that could otherwise kill us if we’re not careful.
For the body to intentionally increase or decrease certain things is not abnormal, and so I don’t think it’s abnormal to think that, in certain cases, the body actually wants, or prefers, or intends or desires low cortisol for other, bigger reasons than what we might want, for example.
You asked if I could explain it or give an example. The biggest thing that I think contributes to this, and there’s really some awesome papers on these things, is the immune system. That going back, and I really appreciate that you put these two topics together, going back to the TH1/TH2 system, that TH2 will tend to inhibit cortisol. I’ll say that again. The TH2 system we talked about earlier tends to inhibit cortisol. Cortisol tends to inhibit the TH1 system. Let’s say, for example, that you had somebody that had a viral infection, or a small bacteria, or a cancer, or something where we want our own cells to attack these other cells.
We would want the maximum amount of TH1, and let’s say you were the designer of the body. Say, listen, you have virally infected cells. You have an option of which one of these you want. If you don’t kill this thing, it’s going to kill you. Which one do you want? It’d be like I want not just a little TH1 activity, I want as much as I can possibly get, because otherwise this thing is going to kill me, and if nothing else in our life, we are about survival, from an evolutionary perspective.
The body, knowing that there’s some kind of infection, or autoimmune condition, or cancer, says, all right, we need TH1 activity. Hey, adrenal glands, stop making cortisol for a little while because every little bit of cortisol you’re making is suppressing a little bit this TH1 system, and we want as much of that as we can right now to wipe this thing out, so just slow down on your cortisol production. So the adrenal glands do, and by doing so, then you get maximum TH1 activity to attack whatever the body deems necessary to attack, and I think that that’s probably one of the more of the two, insufficiency or suppression and inhibition, I think suppression and inhibition is the more common reason for low cortisol.
Chris Sandel: I mean, it’s really interesting you say that, and I think a lot of the time, the problem I see around the adrenal fatigue-type issue is people get really hooked into the adrenal fatigue part of it, in terms of, okay, I need to be giving herbs or I need to be giving nutrients that are supportive to the adrenals, but without pulling back and taking that bigger picture approach, and asking, okay, well, what’s really going on? What could be potentially driving this? It’s not just the adrenals, it’s, as you say, the immune system, or there could be a whole host of other things.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Well, and here’s a great example, is, listen, I was taught the very same thing. Everybody is, until you go out and you do your own research on things, and so I was giving those adrenal supportive botanicals, like adaptogens.
I was doing that. I was giving the licorice root. I was doing all these things that we were taught to do, and one time it didn’t work, and it was when I started to understand this other portion of the immune system. It was my wife’s patient, I will admit, and I told her, after reading about it one night, I was like, “Listen, sweetheart,” because this woman’s cortisol wasn’t improving at all, and I said, “Give her all these TH1 herbs.” She didn’t know why. I said, “Let’s just give it a shot,” and we test people every 30 days if we’re trying to get their cortisol up.
But there was no change for about three months, then all of a sudden, the only change we made was by giving a bunch of TH1-type botanicals, which again are … there’s some contradictions in the literature about those, and her cortisol was perfect, and that was the time. I will say now, I love, as a class of botanicals, adaptogens. I think that Mother Nature, or God and whoever just knew what they were doing when they made adaptogens. But I will tell you, if I ever see low cortisol, I never use adaptogens anymore. I don’t even use them. I think that, if somebody’s undergoing some stress, I think they’re worthwhile to take, but I don’t even use adaptogens for low cortisol anymore. I just go straight to the immune support.
00:42:30
Chris Sandel: Is the immune the big piece that you think is having an effect on this, or is it other systems or other areas that you think is equally as important?
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah. No, that’s a really good question, and that really speaks to my …. I mean, I’m of a really simple brain when it comes to this stuff. You kind of have to look at all the systems of the body. You said, all right, well, what systems could potentially affect the adrenal glands? The integumentary system, or skin. Probably not that. The musculoskeletal system. Potentially it might be releasing a couple of things, but probably not. You can go through the systems, and what you would really come down to is the nervous system would probably impact it, the endocrine system and the immune system, and I think that those would probably be the big three systems that could theoretically impact adrenal function the most.
Of those, I will say, well, it’s not a physiological system, but the mental/emotional system, like your perspective, perception of life system is a big contributor, too. But I think the immune system is one of the biggest ones. I think the nervous system is closely related to that, and then the other endocrine organs, which includes fat, fat cells. I think they’re involved too.
Chris Sandel: I know there’s a lot of focus these days on the microbiome and the digestive system. Do you think that has a huge part to play in this, or it’s smaller than those other ones that you mentioned, and you think it’s irrelevant?
Dr Bryan Walsh: No, no, no. It’s good. I think we know far less about the microbiome than we think we do, by far. I’ll just give you one quick example of a study that really should have gotten more attention. It was in mice, which most of them are, but what they found was, is that children-aged mice, I don’t know what they call them, but mice as children, both boys and girls, share the same bacteria as one another. They have the same species of bacteria in the same ratios, and I didn’t know this, but then when mouse puberty hit, and boys become men and girls become women, what happens is … it’s really interesting, that their bacteria change.
They have different ratios of different species after mouse puberty, and so the researchers think that there’s some sort of crosstalk between the bacteria and the hormones, the sex hormones for these given mice, because when they wiped out the bacteria in male mouse, their testosterone dropped. When they wiped out the bacteria in female mice, their testosterone went up, and so what they theorized was, they called it the microgenderome, which is just fantastic.
But what they hypothesized was is that when pup mice are children, and they haven’t had a big, hormonal surge yet because they haven’t hit mouse puberty, but when they do, the gut bacteria say, oh, okay, you’re a boy mouse. You want high testosterone. I will help support your high testosterone, and then the female mice said, oh, you want low testosterone and higher estrogen. I will help support that, so that when researchers wiped out their bacteria, it totally messed up their hormones, which you wouldn’t expect happening. That’s to speak to the fact that they do more than we realize.
There is, and I find this fascinating, there’s some evidence that chemical toxins become more toxic when they’re exposed to our bacteria first. That certain botanicals don’t work if they’re not first metabolized by our bacteria before they get absorbed into us. To ask if they’re involved in some way, the answer is, I’d say, absolutely yes. The question is how.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Dr Bryan Walsh: I mean, our gut bacteria have been shown to alter our stress response in the brain. If it alters the stress response in the brain, it probably alters the stress response in the adrenal glands. One other last thing that’s really important to mention is if you have abnormal gut bacteria, then they release something called lipopolysaccharides, or LPS. And just to get a sense of what lipopolysaccharides do, when researchers want to stimulate an inflammatory response in a laboratory animal, they inject them with lipopolysaccharides because they’re highly inflammatory. I just basically say they’re the poop of bad bacteria.
These bacteria inside of you, the unfavorable ones, the gram-negative ones, release these lipopolysaccharides, which can contribute to leaky gut or intestinal permeability. When those go out into the system, lipopolysaccharides absolutely can suppress cortisol. Getting back to your question, yes is the answer to your question. But the how, there’s many different hows. One is abnormal bacteria or dysbiosis can cause intestinal permeability. Lipopolysaccharides going systemic can absolutely, and have shown to suppress cortisol production in the adrenal glands. All of these things are involved.
00:47:55
Chris Sandel: Okay, and you kind of alluded to it before, but in terms of someone’s mental state, or their thoughts, or their happiness levels, is that something you chat a lot with clients about? I mean, it’s definitely a big thing that I talk to with clients, because I think how people think about their lives and think about themselves has a huge impact on how their body reacts, how they react to food, but I just want to find out from you, is this a big part of your practice?
Dr Bryan Walsh: I’m grinning from ear to ear right now because I can go ahead and say there’s no other more important factor than that, period. That physiology and biochemistry, they’re really fun. They’re linear. It’s black and white, in some cases. It’s tangible. Lab tests are tangible. Supplements are tangible. We live in the world of, if you can see it, then you believe it, kind of thing.
But I will go ahead and tell you, man, that once … I mean, I cannot say this in a more profound way than right now, but there is no bigger factor than one’s perception of self, of life, of the world, in impacting our overall health, and I will say physiology, and if you want a couple of quick studies …
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Definitely.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Studies, and this is what I love, just to back this up. What you’ve just approached is … I don’t have the answers to all this stuff. How do you get someone to change their perception? People have been trying to look at all the different techniques, EFT, and cognitive behavioral therapy, and alternate nostril breathing. I mean, people have been trying to play with the mind for a really long time, so I don’t have the answers, so I don’t talk about it often, but I will tell you that I think it’s a more powerful influence, A) than we give it credence for, and B) than we even realize.
A couple quick studies. One, there was a woman that was in charge of this … such a great study. What she did was she basically whipped up a smoothie in her kitchen, essentially. She whipped up a shake. It was a vanilla shake, and she manufactured two different cans for this thing, and she dumped … You’ve got to wrap your head around this. She dumped the exact same shake into both cans. One can was called Indulgence, and the label on it was … I forget the exact calories. It was like 700 calories, lots of fat, lots of sugar. Just this rich, thick, delicious, indulgent shake.
The other can had the same shake in it. This one’s called SensiShake shake, and it was something like 140 calories, low fat, low carbs, low sugar, but you understand, you blend a shake, you pour it into two separate cans, and it’s the same stinking shake, man. It was the same thing, and she did two things. One was she looked at their satiety level.
Now, this is subjective, and they, across the board, it was statistically significant, said that … and the subjects were told to really analyze the can beforehand, so they really knew what it was they were drinking. The people, when they drank the SensiShake, said that they were still hungry and they weren’t very satisfied, and when they drank the indulgence shake, that they felt satisfied and full. Well, it was the same shake. How can you do that?
But what I really love is that she actually measured a hormone. She measured the hormone ghrelin, made by your stomach. It’s a satiety hormone. Ghrelin was different based on what the people thought they were drinking. Basically, if they thought they were drinking this low-calorie diet shake, their ghrelin levels were higher, saying I’m still hungry, versus the other people that drank the indulgence shake. They had lower ghrelin levels, and their body hormonally was saying I’m full, thank you very much. But the thing is, is they drank the same amount of the exact same shake.
What they thought they were drinking impacted at least one hormone. Who knows what else? When you hear something like that, I always just sort of lean back in my chair, and I think what the heck are we doing? What do we think we really know? The placebo effect is tremendous. The studies on placebo is tremendous.
The other study I was going to mention is more recent. Fantastic study. I love this researcher. She’s done some of the coolest research over the years. But what she basically found was is she took two groups of type 2 diabetics, and she put them into two different rooms. In one of the rooms, the clock was correct and accurate, and the other room, the clock went too fast, for example, and so the time was actually wrong, and what she found was is their blood sugar varied based on the time that they thought it was based on the clock. It wasn’t a biological clock inside their body.
They were asked to do a bunch of activities, and hang out in this room, and keep an eye on the clock, and all these things. Their blood sugar was affected by what time they thought it was, not what time it actually was, which was, again … Here we have all these type 2 diabetics, and they’re regulating their blood sugar, and their perception of time altered their blood sugar levels, which is … You can’t even wrap your head around that.
Anyways, to get back to what I was saying, there’s no more important factor than our view on ourself, on others, on the world, and yes, I absolutely talk to people about that. I don’t always crack that egg because some people just … I don’t know, man, they’re hard to get through, but every once in a while you’ll get through to somebody and really make a change.
00:53:44
Chris Sandel: Yeah. If you’re in that realm, what is the stuff that you’re suggesting that they’re either doing, or reading, or how do … and I know it’s going to be different depending on each individual, but are there certain things that you lean more towards that you think have a real benefit?
Dr Bryan Walsh: You know, I’ve heard it once said that there are as many ways to meditate as there people on the planet, and that speaks to the fact that certain things will resonate with people.
For some people, journaling is it. You couldn’t pay me, I think, to journal. Meditation, or yoga, or Tai chi, or emWave from HeartMath. There’s so many different things. Cognitive behavioral therapy has some good papers behind it. But see, I like cognitive behavioral therapy because, if you know anything about it, it basically dismantles your illogical thoughts. We might have a fear or worry about a thing, and it basically forces you … I mean, at its core, it really says, all right, well, is this really about what you think it is, and inevitably, it’s not, and then it gives you some tools to replace that with.
But I have to be honest, is no. I am actually not a fan of therapy. I have known people that have been in therapy for 30 years, and they don’t seem to be one ounce better than they were 30 years prior. On the other hand, I’ve seen people in an hour realize things about themselves and never be the same again. I mean, you take an extreme example, like a near-death experience. But you can have emotionally near-death experiences, where you were so broken down by events of your life or realizations of your life that you, metaphorically, symbolically died, and see the world differently, and no therapy needed.
I mean, regardless of one’s thoughts, but someone can find Jesus, and man, they’re never the same again in some cases. There are some people that follow Jesus and they’re completely nuts. I mean, I don’t know the answers, but the conversations I try to have with people are the deep ones. They get to the core. I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it. But talking about it doesn’t really seem to fix things in people. It’s getting to the real core of … It’s hard to get into in this short podcast, but really diving deep, and, yeah, and figuring out someone’s big fears, and it’s not the fear, it’s why. Why the fear?
Let me just give you a quick example of that. Somebody can say, oh, I don’t know, I’m afraid of losing my job, and that stresses me out, and it keeps me up at night, because there’s been layoffs, and I’m really afraid. Well, I’m going to go ahead and bet money that that’s probably not the big fear, because you could say, all right, well, let’s say that that happened. It did. You got laid off. Well, then what happens? Well, then I’m not going to have any more money and I might have to move out of my house, and you say all right. I play the game. It’s just called so what. Say, so what? So you’ve lost your job, now you have no money, now you have to move out of your house. So what?
Well, then, if I’m not making any money and I move out of the house, my wife’s probably going to leave me. All right, so she left you. Then what? If you keep going, you realize that it’s not really about losing the job. That’s not what they’re afraid of. They’re afraid of being alone, or being so shamed in our modern tribe, if you will, that you’re no longer a part of the tribe. Being alone is a symbolic death when you consider how people need to feel significant in their lives. If you don’t feel significant, then you don’t exist, in some ways.
Anyways, really getting to the core, and I will say that’s funny is, is when some … if you can keep playing that game, sometimes people … I’ve had people laugh at the end because they’re like, you know what? I don’t really know why, because you can just keep going, and it just dissolves the fear. They’re like, you know what? That’s a dumb thing to be thinking about. I don’t know why I’m even really afraid of that anymore. It’s getting to the core issues, and what their fears are really about, and the stuff hurts, man. I’ll tell you, when people … you’re probably familiar with EFT and some of these other things, but those don’t … I’m sorry, but if you’re not in pain thinking about some of these serious hurts…
If you have a stone, a little stone in your shoe, it will affect your gait. It’s a tiny pebble, and it will affect the way that you’ve been walking for the past 20 years. We avoid pain at all costs. You know that you have a piece of steak stuck in your teeth because it causes a certain amount of discomfort. We avoid pain as humans.
Including mental and emotional pain. If you’re doing EFT on yourself, and you’re like, I deeply and completely love myself even though I’m gassy, or whatever it might be, if it doesn’t hurt, if you don’t have a problem approaching some of these issues because they are so painful, then you’re not getting to the core issues, and you can talk about it for 30 years, if that makes sense.
Chris Sandel: No, definitely.
Dr Bryan Walsh: I hate to say it, but we avoid the painful stuff on purpose, and you can talk about all these other little peripheral things all you want, but until you get to those core issues, the ones that hurt the most, the ones that make you feel like you die, which I feel like is necessary to be reborn in all sorts of different ways.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Anyhow, so yeah. No, I try to talk about that with people. It’s not easy, and like I said, you don’t always crack them, and they’re just stuck in their thought process, but getting back to the surface level of stuff, there’s not a shred of doubt in mind that people’s biology, if you will, biochemistry, physiology, is impacted by their perception of the world, the way that they view themselves
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I mean, that was a really good answer, and I really enjoyed what you had to say there, and yeah, getting to the core I think is really important, because so many people’s supposed problems are distractions around or away from getting to the core, and it’s then easier to deal with those little distractions as opposed to really getting into the deeper stuff.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Well, and to summarize all of that by saying this. This is a call about health. There’s a lot of people that claim they want to be healthier, and my question to that or them is why? Why do you want to be healthier, and inevitably it’s to be happier.
They think that being healthier will … Everybody is searching for happiness. Everybody, and some people choose to do it through health. If I had more energy, then I would be happier, or if I lost some fat, then I would be happier. If people can shift their thought process of … If I could find out why I’m tired, then I’ll be happy. That’s legit, man. I get it, but I will say is don’t lie to yourself about … You just said it. You put it exactly, talking about distractions. People look at the health piece as the distraction. No. You want to be happy, and then you have to ask yourself, well, why are you not happy?
What is limiting your happiness? Is it really your health or is it something else? I think a lot of people are barking up the wrong health tree, looking for the super supplements, or super diet, or super thing, but in reality, man, if you’re not happy on the inside, there’s no supplement, diet, anything that’s going to make you happier. No, I really like what you said about the distraction piece.
01:01:55
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Look, Bryan, I know we’re nearly out of time, but there’s just one more question I want to ask, and one of my listeners pointed out recently that I regularly have guests on my show who are young and child-free, and so when they’re talking about health practices or self-care, their experiences may be different from someone else, and you are someone who has five kids, I think all under the age of eight or nine, or something crazy, so-
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah. The oldest, he’s going to be nine in a month, yeah.
Chris Sandel: Okay. I would love for you to just talk a little about what that looks like for you, how do you eat well, or exercise, or get downtime, or be healthy, given those kind of demands.
Dr Bryan Walsh: You know, I mean, whatever listener, God bless you for saying that, because I would listen to these … whatever it was. Self-help gurus or business gurus, and be like, if you want to make money, you’ve got to wake up an hour earlier, and just start writing. I’m like, are you kidding me? There’s mornings my kids wake me up in at four in the morning, sometimes it’s five in the morning, sometimes it’s six in the morning, if I get to sleep in. It’s just a joke, you know?
Oh, yeah. Tony Robbins has his hour … you wake up and you have your hour of power where you do all this meditation, and bounce up and down, or whatever. Are you kidding me? My kid woke me up at 5:04 this morning, just as an example. Tomorrow it might be … who knows? Anyways. No, so great question. That’s the reality of this thing, I think. Back when I was single and I didn’t have kids, my health schedule was amazing. I mean, you count every calorie, and you exercise when you … Oh my God. It was so easy. Go to bed when you want to, wake up when you want to.
Listen. I’m so sleep-deprived, it’s not even funny. I mean, with five kids under eight, I am inevitably up about two or three times a night, no exaggeration, from a kid that falls out of the bed, or somebody needs water, or somebody has a bad dream, or somebody starts sleepwalking. No exaggeration, and the six-month-old was sleeping well, and in the past month hasn’t, so I am chronically sleep-deprived. That’s just the reality.
Getting back to the perception thing, I think that that’s a big piece of this. I could look at it as, oh, I’m so tired. My kids are waking me up. I’m becoming unhealthier because of it, or I could say, you know what? I’m waking up because I love my kids so much that I wouldn’t want them to have a nightmare and not have a father to pat their back back to sleep. Or if they’re thirsty, not have somebody to get that water for them, and I don’t know that it’s making me unhealthy. Quite honestly, I’m getting up for my kids out of love, and if I was staying up all night watching TV, that would probably have some negative health consequences, and who knows? I don’t know. There’s no studies on getting up for reasons of love and protection.
Anyways, you know what? Well, that’s a really good question, man. I have to be honest, that’s probably the best question I’ve been asked. You have to change your perception of, if I can squeeze in some exercise today, awesome, but if I don’t, I’m not going to get upset about it.
I have a home gym, essentially. I’ve just either made or bought small pieces of equipment for really inexpensive. I have an Olympic barbell set. I made a set of squat racks out of some wood. I found a pull-up bar for really inexpensively, and I have a couple of kettlebells, and that’s kind of about it. That’s all you really need.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I come downstairs, and usually I have two or three of my kids down here with me, and it’s kind of a pain because, if I’m doing burpees, I might accidentally kick one because they’re in my way, and they don’t appreciate where I’m going, or they’re talking to me when I’m seriously out of breath, and trying to count my reps or whatever, so it’s not ideal, but they get to see Dad exercising. I think they’re probably ingrained some really good stuff into them, I think, so that’s good. But if I don’t get around to it, to not get overly disappointed.
The other thing is you can do stuff with kids. I mean, go outside and run around for a while. They have an incredible amount of energy.
There’s that. Eating, I think it’s a combination of having children but also just getting a little bit older, that, you know what, I think we split hairs, and we start to obsess about way too many things.
Chris Sandel: Agreed.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Our oldest has an anaphylactic dairy allergy, so we pretty much don’t have much dairy around the house, because if there’s any accidental exposure, it’s a pretty bad scene. We tend to be dairy-free in our household. We tried the gluten-free thing for a while. I’m not totally convinced on the whole concept. We make everything. I say, of how many meals a week, 21 meals a week, we go out to eat maybe once a month. We buy taquitos or something from the store because … My wife home schools, too, if you can imagine this.
We make our own bread and give them sandwiches with deli meat, and if someone has a problem with deli meat, then that’s fine. We grow a garden. We have some chickens. We have four chickens, not a whole lot. I cook every meal for them. I’ll make waffles, or I’ll make pancakes in the morning, or eggs. Sometimes we’ll whip up a smoothie for them. What else do we do? I don’t know. For treats sometimes I’ll make them cinnamon roll. Lunch, sandwich. Dinner, we always make dinner, and we always cook our food. We try to buy organic as much as we can. We kind of live out in the country, so some of these grocery stores don’t have a lot around here, but we try to buy organic. We use pretty toxin-free cosmetics, and toiletries, and cleaning products. But the bottom line is, is we don’t go nuts.
I’m not opposed to sugar. I grew up on sugar. A lot of kids grew up on sugar, it’s just in moderation. I don’t know if that answers your question. My wife and I try to make time for each other to exercise. Oh, we have far infrared sauna that we got a while back.
It’s supposed to be this meditative time for me, but my kids are always outside the window of it, talking to me the entire time, so that doesn’t work. Yeah. We move around a little bit. We try to get some outside time when we can. We have a garden, so we can take all the kids out, and that’s a little bit of movement and a little bit outside time. We make all of our food. We eat very little processed food, but we’re not opposed to it. It just doesn’t taste as good, quite honestly, and our kids have even commented that, when we go out to restaurants, it’s not as good as when Daddy makes it. Yeah. I don’t know if that answers it.
Chris Sandel: It does, and I think the big thing that I like about you and also just that answer in particular is there’s a real sanity to it. I think people just taking everything, as you said, to the nth degree or to the extreme, and I think just being practical, and it’s like, if I can do these extra things, I will, but you know what? If I’ve got five kids, maybe not everything’s going to get done today.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Oh my God. Are you kidding me? I mean, and when I talk about making dinner, I used to … I love to cook. I used to make these really elaborate meals for my wife when we were dating and we didn’t have any kids, and now it’s what can you do in a half hour with chicken, potatoes, and some kind of vegetable, because … Something. Just get it cooked and try to make it halfway decent. Same with lunch, man. I mean, it’s so busy, but you just do what you can, and you have to let a lot of things go, and you have to sacrifice, and you have to let yourself go and say, you know what? Who cares if I don’t exercise?
Or maybe exercise early in the morning, or super late at night, or whenever you can. That gets back to the perception thing. I love my family, man. They come first, and I have my needs, but my needs come last. Maybe they shouldn’t, but I wouldn’t trade any of them for anything in the world. I may not have a six-pack anymore, but you know what? I have five awesome kids, and I would rather have them than a six-pack, and I’m totally cool with that.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Cool. Well, look, Bryan, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this conversation. If people want to find out more information about you, where should they go, and I’ll put all of this in the show notes, and if there’s anything else you want to promote, feel free to do so.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Yeah. Well, I don’t know if people are interested. Drwalsh.com, is not the fanciest website in the world. My wife put that together for me, actually, but …
You know, it’s sort of my hub where any projects that I have … I have a lot of projects coming up. I’m going to do a recorded two-hour webinar on this whole adrenal fatigue topic, for example.
Chris Sandel: Cool.
Dr Bryan Walsh: And some various things, but yeah, I have a couple of programs that people can check out there. There’s some YouTube videos I’ve done for a variety of things in the past. I’ve done quite a few podcasts and things, so yeah, drwalsh.com. That’s the place that you can find most of those things.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Well, look, thank you again for coming on the show. I really enjoyed talking about this information, and you were talking about stuff that most people just aren’t sharing, and I know the listeners are going to really enjoy this.
Dr Bryan Walsh: Cool. I’m glad I could help. It was a lot of fun.
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