Join Dr. Martin in today's episode of The Doctor Is In Podcast.
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TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
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Dr. Martin:Â Well, good morning everyone. Once again, welcome to another live this morning. Nice to have you on with us. Okay, let me finish up yesterday's topic. We talked yesterday about high fructose corn syrup, and we talked about how high fructose corn syrup lowers your vitamin D. Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on high fructose corn syrup. I've got a couple of other things I want to talk to you about. One of the other terrible things about high fructose corn syrup, it has a very high mercury content, a very high mercury content. Imagine that. Consuming of sugar that is at war with your liver and gives you absolutely no benefits and all these side effects. And one of them, it carries mercury, okay?
And a lot of people used to, I remember that you got to go back to my radio show days. A lot of people, we used to talk about mercury a fair amount because it had made a lot of news in mercury and fish. Do you remember that? I was the kind of guy that said, well, I don't want you to stop eating fish. And mercury usually was in that big fish like tuna, for example. And I said, I don't really want you to stop eating fish or even tuna. What I want you to do is stop eating high fructose corn syrup. Because even back in those days in my radio days, I was more concerned about the mercury in high fructose corn syrup. I believe that that was the biggest culprit and not fish. I was one of the very few people that talked about that. What? Yeah, mercury and high fructose corn syrup. So all the cereals and all this stuff where they add that sugar, the high fructose corn syrup and all the soda. Yeah, that was worse for mercury, okay?
Here's another one. Big feeder of the bears. Don't feed the bears. I got a t-shirt. Don't feed the bears. What do I mean by that? Well, when you consume high fructose corn syrup, you're feeding the bears, you're feeding fungus. Now you're going to have some yeast in your gut. Everybody does, okay? Everybody does, and that's alright, as long as it doesn't get into your bloodstream. But one way that you feed it is when you feed it high fructose corn syrup, it adores high fructose corn syrup. One of the beautiful things that happens when you're on the reset, you're not even having an ounce of high fructose corn syrup. Your liver will thank you, you'll thank me later, but your liver will thank you right away. Your gut will thank you. I talked about that dysbiosis, and you ain't feeding the bears.
And some people, by the way, they get a little nauseous almost on the reset at the start of it because the bears are crying out. The yeast bears, the fungus bears, they cry out, feed me, feed me, feed me. What did you do? Why are you not feeding me anymore? You're not feeding the bears anymore. Honestly, guys, where did I get that expression? Honest to God, we have signs in Northern Ontario telling us not to feed the bears. I don't know who. Come here, bear, here little beary, come here. Are you kidding me? They actually, did they think we're that stupid? They got to put a sign up. Anyways, I stole that and said, don't feed yeast. Okay? I don't want people feeding the bears. I call the bears yeast bears that are inside your gut. Don't feed them and they will die off. You get a die off. And sometimes, like I said, during a reset, some people actually don't feel great for a day or two while the bears scream to their death. Okay, don't feed the bears.
Okay, now let me talk to you about something else this morning because I was reading a paper on adrenal glands. Ad renal on top of kidneys. Now, you guys know this. I talk about the adrenals all the time, but what I want to do is just, this was a paper written that showed adrenal gland exhaustion. I first mentioned this, I'm going to say late eighties when we started to see a real uptick in chronic fatigue syndrome. I'm sure people have been tired from the day man was created. Okay? There's always been fatigue, but we never had a syndrome like chronic fatigue syndrome that sort of just came out of nowhere. Guys, I watched it happen, and I actually wrote my thesis on chronic fatigue syndrome when I was doing my PhD for clinical nutrition. My topic was chronic fatigue syndrome, and I actually turned that research into a book that I wrote, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: The Curse of the Modern Women. That became a big seller for me and sort of launched my radio career, tv, some, but radio career. And it was all done on research, on chronic fatigue.
And I'm reading an article, here we are in 2024, and I read this article on, well, it wasn't on chronic fatigue. It was on adrenal exhaustion. Now, I mentioned back, and I'm telling you, in the late eighties I mentioned and talked about this because I was seeing an enormous amount of people that suffered from this. Now, it's still around today. They've changed the name of it, okay, to ME. Okay, now hold your breath for a second as they give you a long word, okay? Myo encephalitis. Okay? And a swelling of the brain and exhaustion, cognitive problems. Okay? I talked about this, like I said, way back when, and then my research showed something that they're talking about in this article that one of the factors, and I believe it's the main factor of why this occurred, was the adrenal glands became exhausted.
Now, again, let me just give you a little bit of physiology. What are your adrenal glands? Add renal on top of your kidneys. Okay? What do they do? Well, they do quite a few things, but the main things they do is add renal on top of kidneys. They secrete adrenaline. Cortisol. Cortisol is the longer acting. Cortisol elevates your blood sugar. Cortisol is needed by the body to wake you up in the morning. So as long as cortisol, I mean, you don't want to eliminate cortisol because you need it, okay? You don't want to eliminate it. So cortisol really should follow your circadian rhythm. What do I mean by that? Well, you're waking up in the morning and your cortisol's elevated. It starts to elevate around four in the morning, and it's starting to get you up. Your heart rate goes up a little bit, okay? It's taking you out of rest and digest, okay? It's getting you up in the morning.
That's why I'm not a big guy on taking your blood sugars first thing in the morning, fasting blood sugars in the morning, your blood sugars going to be up. Why? Well, because you're weak up, your blood sugars are going to go up. That's alright. Temporarily, okay? And then midday. Now you're in your circadian rhythm. Your cortisol is starting to go down, and then by the time it hits evening, you're into rest and digest and your cortisol is low, or it should be. And what I found is people with chronic fatigue syndrome had high levels of cortisol all the time. And this research paper, by the way, an article was talking about when the adrenals become exhausted, okay? Your adrenal glands are the size of chestnuts, okay? About that big, okay?
Think of the size of a chestnut. Adrenal, you got two of them. They're on top of your kidneys, okay? And what they're finding back in the late eighties and nineties, I didn't know this, that the adrenal glands, when they get exhausted, they actually shrink to the size of a pea. So can you imagine? They go from walnuts to a little size of a pea when they get exhausted, okay? Now, what causes the adrenals to become exhausted? Well, I talked about four main things in my thesis, and the way I did it is based on this. I did a questionnaire for probably at least 500 women, and we actually wrote this up. So it was mostly based on questionnaires. And it was interesting because what we found was that these people that were diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia. I'll talk about that in a second. There were four main factors that they had.
One was food. You know me, I'm a food guy. These people generally were big consumers of sugars. A lot of them didn't even know how much sugar they were consuming. And remember, now, this is mostly high fructose corn syrup, and as the sugar of choice and bad oils, middle aisles of the grocery store. And these were people generally that didn't eat a lot of meat, didn't eat a lot of eggs that were avoiding dairy, but on the bad side, were consuming enormous amount of sugar. They didn't even count. They didn't realize how much sugar, but we saw it when we did the questionnaire on their diets generally, okay? Generally, they weren't good eaters. They thought they were, but they weren't. So it became a perfect storm of, one, they were eating way too much sugar, not enough protein, way too many carbohydrates, bread, pasta, rice, cereal, sugar, sweets, pastries, juice, milk from the grocery store, bagels, muffins, fruit flavored yogurt.
Yogurt, plain yogurt's alright for you. It's dairy, but they were into the yogurt, fruit flavored, and this kind of stuff. A lot of sugar added foods, and they weren't eating bacon and eggs. They thought that was bad for them. Okay? So one was diet, okay? Talking about adrenal exhaustion here, the diet. Two, the environment, okay? Again, I'm a why guy. Why? Well, the world changed, and I even mentioned this. I'm talking go back, gee, 30 years I talked about the environment and a hundred thousand chemicals, and mostly in our homes from cleaning products to air fresheners. I wasn't even talking so much about plastics in those days, but just the environmental factors that stress out the adrenal gland. See, you're adrenals guys, when they release cortisol, they don't know if that stress is coming from environment or food or relationships or family things, or this is another factor, okay? So the environment, food.
Three, almost invariably, a lot of stress emotionally. Okay? Loss of a loved one, a bad relationship, financial, divorce, yada, yada, yada. A lot of that and it was common. I mean, it was there almost invariably, I can't even think in 500 cases that there was not a major kind of emotional trauma. Well, now you're secreting cortisol all day long. They used to describe it almost like a vibration inside there. They were just really uptight for a long period of time. Look, guys, you got the fight or flight. It's in your body, and that's all right. I mean, if someone comes behind you and scares you, okay, you need that. The hair is on the back of your head are going to come up and you're going to run or you're going to fight, okay? But they were in this for a long period of time, and that drains those adrenals.
And then fourthly, sleep problems. Your cortisol's high, you don't sleep properly. You don't sleep properly, your cortisol is high, right? Cortisol is meant to keep you awake, not to put you to sleep. Those were the common common factors, common factors in adrenal exhaustion. And here's some signs, and this is going back to my book way back when, and actually I rewrote it. I updated it in a book called Energy Robbers and the Fatigue Cure. That was a long time ago, but I updated it because people had asked me, and we had gone through three or four prints of chronic fatigue syndrome and they wanted a new one. And so I updated it, but generally just put these things that I'm talking to you about.
And here were some of the signs of adrenal exhaustion. One cognitive described as what we call brain fog, but cotton in the brain, like just trouble focusing, memory wasn't quite as good, but just brain fog. I like that term because that's really what it seems to be. Brain fog, cognitive, okay? One of the common things that we saw was they got dizzy upon standing quickly, their blood pressure went down while the adrenals are affected. Almost all of them had a very messed up thyroid without a diagnosis in the sense that, because I've talked to you about this a million times. When you rely on blood work and not symptoms, you can often be duped when it comes to the thyroid, because the thyroid, again, the general principle is that it has many strings attached. But I'm going to tell you what happens when your adrenals get exhausted. You know what happens? You rob progesterone. It's just the way the body works. Body robs progesterone. Your estrogen is dominant. It doesn't mean your estrogen necessarily is high, but it's higher than your progesterone. And you know what happens? That throws the thyroid to a crawl.
Now, almost invariably, they had major thyroid symptoms, sluggish metabolism. They had even a loss of appetite, but didn't mean they were losing weight, thinning hair and dry skin, cold, mostly cold, cold hands, cold feet and cold nose. I used to touch their nose in the office, your nose is freezing. What are you, a dog? No, but their thyroid was sluggish and fibromyalgia. Now, I've written books on fibromyalgia, and I always tell people, look, fibro doesn't come on its own. It's sort of an autoimmune, and you get severe pain and unexplained pain, and it's no fun under the sun. I saw a lot of that. It was like an epidemic. But even remember, the rheumatologists came out with all these trigger points. They used to put pressure points on your back and that, and they'd tell you whether you had fibromyalgia or not. I used to see a lot of fibro, but I always used to say, this was me, and I believe I was right. Fibro is just a symptom of adrenal gland exhaustion. It's a symptom of chronic fatigue syndrome. It's a symptom.
The four things, environmental, relationships, food, and a lack of sleep. What comes first? Cortisol, stress and then you don't sleep properly. Exhausted, but not sleeping. exhausted, but not resting, not getting into the five stages of sleep. So this was a big, big sign of adrenal gland exhaustion. Oftentimes an increase in the pulse rate. And what other symptoms? Sensitivity to light. Very sensitive. And a lot of people, because one of the common things was leaky gut, guys. One of the common findings, and mostly with digestive issues too. A lot of them had digestive issues, and they developed these hypersensitivities to food that they never had before.
And what I used to do, one of my biggest treatment plans was, you be your own doctor and let's find out what foods are bothering you, and you cut them out. Don't rely on a food test because it'll all come back. You won't be able to eat anything but figure out, and especially anything sugary in that, that's what they desired. But boy, oh boy, we took them off of that stuff. We took them off sugar. We allowed them a few fruits, but we took them off of that. So those were the major signs, and that what was happening. You know when I read this article and I go, well, man, oh man, it's incredible. And you know what The problem in medicine is, okay? Generally, when it comes to the adrenals, there's two diseases that they look for. Addison's and Cushings, okay? If you don't have Addison's and Cushing's disease, most physicians, the adrenals, what are you talking about? They don't even look for it generally, even endocrinologists, you don't have Cushings. You don't have Addisons, I know, but it was sort of subclinical in a lot of ways. It was subclinical. There was no real blood test or whatever to find it.
Now, one of the things that happened, they usually had a lot of inflammation in the body if they would've tested their CRP. Well, good luck with that 30 years ago. And so it was fascinating, these stories and these tens of thousands of people and mostly women, and we created a course. I remember this. I don't know how long ago did we create the course, the metabolic storm. It came out of that where we talk about the pyramid of the metabolic storm, the thyroid on the top, the ovaries on the bottom of the pyramid, the adrenals halfway up, and the pancreas, the insulin. These were major, major, major problems, and you had to look at that person. In order to get results you had to get that person. It was a holistic, you had to look at the whole thing to get them better.
People came, I'm not kidding you all over the world to see me in my practice, because once I wrote a book, once I published that thesis into a book, I was on the radio, I was on tv. I did probably 150, 200 radio shows all over North America, and reputation gets out, go see this guy. Why? Because he's going to find out what the real problem is. People were falling through the cracks. Nobody knew, oh, you got mental illness? You know how many times I heard that? You're just mentally you're depressed.Â
I remember I was doing a public radio in the United States, and I was on, and they had a physician on, I don't know if he was an endocrinologist or not. He said, you know what this is, Dr. Martin? He said, this is mass hysteria. I'm quoting him. It's women. They're depressed. It's hysteria. He said, and you know what? I didn't even have to say a word. It was a phone in show. And boy, people phoned in. Oh, did they ever give it to that doctor? I just, listen. I had a chance already to present my case, and he dismissed all of it. He dismissed all of it. I mean, I'm talking over 30 years ago that this happened, and the radio show listeners, they called in and they gave it to 'em. They went up one side of them and down the other, and I found it comical.
Okay, guys, again, thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it. Watching when you can watch it live. You know what? I'm just going to tell you, I'm going to take a day off tomorrow, okay? Little holiday tomorrow, so keep that in mind. Tell your friends, okay? We'll be back Friday for question and answer Friday. Okay? So send in your questions to info@martinclinic.com. We love you dearly and sincerely. Okay? You got questions. Don't be shy. Ask your questions. We love to answer your questions. Talk to you soon.
Announcer:Â You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!