Transcript Of Today's Episode
Speaker 1: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by martinclinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Hello, I'm Dr. Martin Jr.
Dr. Martin Sr.: I'm Dr. Martin Sr.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And this is The Doctor Is In Podcast, and this is episode 195. Now, today we want to talk about something that [00:00:30] we get asked a lot, and especially since our last couple of episodes have come out and we talked a fair amount about the three seeds of disease, which we'll kind of summarize a little bit again, we're going to talk about supplements. Again, we get so many questions on supplements, so we're going to talk about supplements in general, which ones we like, which ones we recommend based off of the stage of life that people are in, and we'll do our best to share what we take and why we take it, and we'll go through [00:01:00] that.
Dr. Martin Sr.: We'll have some foundational things and things that people should think of very practically, and here's where you may be deficient and what to look for and this kind of thing. Yeah, I think it'll be a real good podcast.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Now, again, over the last few episodes we've been talking about this concept that we shared in a few webinars, even one of our last ones we did, which was on leaky gut, and it's this idea of the three seeds of disease. These [00:01:30] are the three things that when planted and watered can lead to the top killers, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancers, those kinds of things, and at the end of the day, you and I have said this before, we've talked about this, disease does not happen overnight. You don't go to bed tonight healthy and wake up tomorrow morning with a disease. That's not how it works. There's a process involved.
Dr. Martin Sr.: It's [00:02:00] usually a lot longer than people think, too.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah. It could be decades, could be years. It could take a long time for a disease to set in. Same thing with diabetes, like heart disease, your heart, your cardiovascular system is not healthy tonight and you wake up tomorrow with a heart attack. Heart attack, it could be a ... They call it a sudden heart attack, drop dead suddenly, but on the inside, a lot of times it's been percolating for a while at the very [00:02:30] cellular level.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. Without any major, necessarily any major symptoms or anything that would put the flags up that this was coming on. Right?
Dr. Martin Jr.: And knowing that, so if you reverse engineer disease, you go from heart disease right to the beginning, or cancer right to the beginning, or Alzheimer's right to the beginning, there are three main seeds that have been planted and watered that [00:03:00] led to all the steps necessary to get to those diseases, and those three seeds are leaky gut syndrome, free radical damage, and high circulating insulin. Those are the big ones, the 80:20, like we like to talk about. 80% of the people that end up with one of the top killers started months, years, decades before with chronically elevated insulin [00:03:30] or free radical damage or leaky gut, and because those things are a triangle, so imagine a triangle, at the top of the triangle is high circulating insulin and then the two bottom parts of the triangle are free radical damage and leaky gut.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: They all connected. One can cause the other. So the three of those things lead to inflammation eventually, and inflammation then unchecked leads to all the bad things that happen. [00:04:00] We can test, this day people get inflammation markers checked, CRP, which can pick up long before a disease, but you don't know what that disease is.
Dr. Martin Sr.: No.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Because it's like, "Oh, your CRP is elevated. You have inflammation in your system." It'd be nice if the markers were saying, "Oh, you've got CRP-A for Alzheimer's. You keep on this path, you're going to end up with Alzheimer's." But you don't know that. It could come out as heart disease, it can come out in a lot of different ways, but that's what happens.
Dr. Martin Jr.: [00:04:30] So keeping that in mind, a person who's healthy, right? You and I, we've talked a lot before, trying to define what that means to be healthy because it means a lot of different things, and depending on who you talk to as well, right? You talk to a lot of medical doctors and health to them, if they were to analyze it, would be the absence of disease without even necessarily how you feel.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Right?
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. It's the lab.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, that's right. You talk to, [00:05:00] for example, a fitness person would say, "Well, a person who is healthy is within a certain amount of body fat," but how many people-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Skinny people can be sick, right?
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, how many people have stopped into our office that can step on stage at a physique competition and they don't feel good? So I mean, we've talked a lot in the past just trying to define healthy, what we mean by that, and ultimately, health, if a person's healthy, they should feel fantastic. They should feel good, [00:05:30] their energy should be good, they should be sleeping well. Those are the things that really, ultimately, that are at the foundation of what health means. It's pretty hard to say you're healthy if you don't feel energetic.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Vitality and-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yes.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yep.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It's hard to say you're healthy if you're not sleeping at nighttime.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So at the very foundation of what it means to feel like you're healthy, a person is energetic, they're sleeping well, they don't feel stressed. There's so many aspects to health, [00:06:00] but long before disease sets in, you have those three seeds that we are fighting every day. Every day, every day we're fighting those three seeds, because look at all the things that can cause leaky gut syndrome. Look at all the things that can cause high circulating insulin. Look at all the things that can fight free radical damage.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So when we talk about supplement, people always say this: "Well, do you need supplements if you're healthy?" We would say that's a great time to take them because you're constantly, every day, every [00:06:30] hour fighting these three seeds that are trying to get planted. And unless your diet is amazing, it only makes sense based on the research that we have today to take some form of supplements, and we're going to talk about which ones we like for somebody who's feeling pretty good. Let's look at the three seeds, right? So when people ask us, "Well, what's the foundation?" Well, let's look at the three seeds. If leaky gut syndrome was a problem, then we love probiotics.
Dr. Martin Sr.: [00:07:00] Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Martin Jr.: You know, it's funny, over the last five years, if you look at research, a lot more is being done in the area of the microbiome, right? And it's funny. Microbiome was just, you have a few pounds of bacteria that live on your body, in your body, that they're starting to think of as another organ because if you didn't have them, you would be dead. You need them for so many aspects of your life, so you need a healthy microbiome to be healthy.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. Isn't it funny [00:07:30] that-
Dr. Martin Jr.: 10 years ago, you never read about microbiome. We were talking about leaky gut and probiotics, but it was very difficult to find information on it. Now there's a lot-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Even in mainstream medicine, it's incredible.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Even Harvard has set up the Human Brain Microbiome project because people thought we were crazy, people thought we were crazy, which is fine. We don't care. That doesn't bother us. But when we used to talk about the effect of probiotics on the brain or all these different things in the brain, [00:08:00] they thought we were crazy because they always said the same thing. "The brain's sterile." Now even Harvard set up a whole human micro brain biome project because they're trying to identify all the microbiome in the brain.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. And look what they're saying. Again, just a little bit off the topic, but when you think of ... I think I was telling a patient this morning about the gut brain connection for Parkinson's, and even Harvard admits that there seems to be a connection [00:08:30] to what your bacteria are doing-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Because a percentage of them have candida in their brain.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, yeah, and they see it.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And we're not saying that everybody that has Parkinson's is due to the fact that they have candida.
Dr. Martin Sr.: No, but there's certainly ... There's-
Dr. Martin Jr.: But it's worth looking at.
Dr. Martin Sr.: It's worth looking at and it's certainly worth, if you knew that you had a good chance or whatever chance that is of maybe preventing something like Parkinson's-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Well, you're brain ... You make serotonin in your gut than you do in your brain. That's how important your [00:09:00] gut is to your brain health. So you can't ignore one in the other. That's why we like probiotics. We think people, even healthy people, should be taking probiotics.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Not in yogurt, by the way.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah. Yogurt is a terrible form of probiotics. I mean, listen, you've got to give the food companies credit. They've done a great job of marketing yogurt as, one, healthy, first of all, and two, as a good source of probiotics, when, for the most part, a lot of yogurt isn't healthy because [00:09:30] it's just loaded with sugar. People don't like real yogurt.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Well, it tastes awful.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Most people don't like real yogurt.
Dr. Martin Sr.: No, but seriously.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Like, I mean, if you're a normal human being.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, like real yogurt.
Dr. Martin Sr.: I mean, real yogurt ... I mean, I remember-
Dr. Martin Jr.: How it used to be when the old immigrants used to ... They don't like that stuff.
Dr. Martin Sr.: You know that ... You don't remember this, but when you were a kid, you wouldn't remember because you would have never tried it, that you could make your yogurt. Okay? You cultured milk. I mean, there was nothing that taste worse than that. Because we [00:10:00] had a machine at home. Do you remember that?
Dr. Martin Jr.: No, I don't remember.
Dr. Martin Sr.: See, I know, because you would have never as a kid-
Dr. Martin Jr.: But it's funny because people say they like yogurt, and it's like, no, you like the modern version of yogurt, sweetened with foods.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, like you like [inaudible 00:10:13], whatever they're making. That ain't real yogurt.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Well, first of all, it's pasteurized at 1200 degrees, right? It has to be.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yup, by law.
Dr. Martin Sr.: You can't put it on the shelf without it.
Dr. Martin Jr.: By law.
Dr. Martin Sr.: By law, and then come on, I mean, like yogurt was ... A farmer could make yogurt if they let [00:10:30] milk just culture. Right? Just let it rot out.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Well, call it, that it's culture.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Do you know what I mean?
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yup.
Dr. Martin Sr.: But do you think it tasted good? Come on. But to get a good broad spectrum probiotic, we always talk about that, like coming back to the importance of probiotic, and Martin Clinic made a shift, I don't know how many years ago. We used to say take probiotics couple of times a year or whatever, but now, even if you're healthy, you want to be health, you want [00:11:00] to stay healthy, one of your greatest things that you can do overall for your health is to take a broad spectrum-
Dr. Martin Jr.: It's because our microbiome is constantly under attack by everything.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, now we see it and the research is so much more prevalent, and you know what I mean? Now it's, I don't think there's any question now that anybody, any kind of functional medicine doctor would agree 1000% I don't think without any exception.
Dr. Martin Jr.: No.
Dr. Martin Sr.: There seems to be no more fight to stop people from taking probiotic. It just [00:11:30] all positive. It's just good.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah. I mean, if you Google, you'll always find studies that talk against probiotics, but you can find anything against anything. From a practical standpoint, we see the effect that probiotics have-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Well, and clinical, we just know what it does.
Dr. Martin Jr.: We see the effect it has on people. So all right, so that's the first seed that's there.
Dr. Martin Sr.: And you know what? Even babies.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah. We get asked that question a lot.
Dr. Martin Sr.: You know, because a lot about, what about kids? Well, I'll tell you, kids can take probiotics like nobody's business.
Dr. Martin Jr.: My kids have been taking probiotics.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. Since they're babies, right?
Dr. Martin Jr.: Before they swallow. They used to [00:12:00] ... Again, I tell this story a lot because it's funny, but my son, who's married now and has a wife, and he's getting older, but for the longest time he used to think apple sauce was brown because I used to open up pine bark and probiotics and mix it in there.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Put it in there.
Dr. Martin Jr.: He wouldn't even taste it.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Kid didn't even know he was taking it.
Dr. Martin Jr.: I remember the first time he discovered that applesauce didn't look like that, because he ... His whole world came crashing down around him because it was all built on a foundation of lies.
Dr. Martin Sr.: What was Daddy giving me? Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But that's the reality, right? [00:12:30] So probiotics, somebody who's healthy, probiotics for sure, because of the three seeds of disease. Let's talk about the second one, free radical damage.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Well, free radical damage, there's a lot that has been written, studied in the areas of free radical damage. Probably the most accepted theory of aging has to do with free radical damage. Our body is rusting out as we age. The very same thing that gives us life and oxygen that we [00:13:00] breathe rusts ourselves. So free radical damage is a big part of aging. However, accelerated free radical damage is what we run into today. Stress, chemicals, toxins. I mean, there's so many things that can cause an increase in free radicals that our body cannot fight them off, so it's a battle that our body loses faster, our cells start to rust out faster, our mitochondria, and this is a [00:13:30] big aspect of functional health as well, your cells have mitochondria, which are the-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Little battery packs.
Dr. Martin Jr.: That's right. They're the battery, the little Energizer Bunny. A lot of disease starts with a dysfunction of your batteries, and free radicals love attacking cells-
Dr. Martin Sr.: And the mitochondria of the cells.
Dr. Martin Jr.: ... and the mitochondria.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Effects your ATP. You're not going to send out near as much ATP.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It just kills your energy.
Dr. Martin Sr.: And that ATP is like octane, right? It's your fuel.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Which is why a lot of people [00:14:00] take antioxidants, they notice their energy gets better, which is ... So we love antioxidants. Now we've said this on our last episode, but our favourite antioxidant by far, not even close, is pine bark extract, which is what we use in our Navitol formula, but we love pine bark extract because it's a super polyphenol. It just, it's a strong antioxidant. And you know what one of the things about pine bark that I like is? Your brain has a force field around [00:14:30] it, right? I mean-
Dr. Martin Sr.: It's a grid.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It has a force field around it. It only allows certain things in it. Now, growing up watching Star Wars, I mean, we have an idea what force fields are, right? Think of the Death Star. They had to blow a hole into the smallest aspect just to get rid of the shield so they could take down this whole thing. But what's interesting, our brains have a force field. It's called a blood-brain barrier. It's protected by this barrier. So blood has to go through this barrier to get even into your brain, and this barrier doesn't allow [00:15:00] things to get in that shouldn't get in.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Now, you have a ton of circulation in your brain, but a lot of things can't get into it to help promote better blood flow. Pine bark crosses the blood-brain barrier, which again allows it to do a lot of stuff in the brain, so that's one of the reasons why we really like pine bark. So that's the second seed. Now the third one is food, obviously, because high circulating insulin. If you want to ... I mean, insulin is a food hormone. You eat food, it's broken [00:15:30] down fast or slow into glucose, your blood sugars elevate. That's toxic, so your body secretes insulin. Insulin is a partitioning hormone. You either burn off that energy right away or you got to store it. You can't keep it in your blood. Glucose cannot be stored in your blood. It can't. It's not a storage facility for glucose, so you use it as energy or you have to take it out of there and store it, so [00:16:00] your body stores it in the muscles, stores it in-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Liver.
Dr. Martin Jr.: ... the liver, and when those are full, it makes fat cells. And for most people, they have an unlimited ability to make fat cells. In fact, blood glucose is so toxic that your body would rather take it out and put it into fat cells than keep it in ... It can't. Right? So I mean, that's why it puts it in your liver, it puts it around your ... It puts it everywhere. It's bad [00:16:30] news.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Out, out, out, out, out. It has to get out.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But the problem is, because we eat all the time or we're eating foods that spike our blood sugar so much that we need to make so much insulin, eventually we have a problem of insulin resistance, which is characterized by high circulating insulin. Insulin is always present. It's always trying to balance out the blood sugar levels in your blood. It has to do something. So eating in a way that keeps your insulin low is the [00:17:00] best way to keep inflammation down and all these kind of things. Right? Which is why we talk a lot about avoiding crappy carbs and sugar. Crappy carbs, because people ask us this all the time, "What do you mean by a crappy carb?" Crappy carb is a combination of fat, usually vegetable oils, and sugar or high starch. Basically it's processed food.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yup.
Dr. Martin Jr.: That's crappy carbs. Fruit never caused a problem [00:17:30] in the first place, but fruit can become a problem when somebody has high circulating insulin or they're diabetic.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, and this is sometimes we'll put a disclaimer on fruit because-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, fruit.
Dr. Martin Sr.: ... if you're metabolically challenged and you making lots of uric acid and this and that, which we know comes from high circulating insulin, well, sometimes I get pretty strict with patients, right? Like I say, "Well, yeah, you know what? I'm going to put a little asterisks by the fruit."
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, because fruit is not a problem until it is.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Until it is, [00:18:00] right? And then you got to go, "No, like I want you to cut back. Can have some berries and a few cherries and that, but I'm going to get you to cut back just because you've got ... You're metabolically [inaudible 00:18:10] challenge I've got to fix." Once we fix your metabolism, you start breaking these things down, your insulin goes down, your inflammation goes down, your uric acid goes down. We look at all these things and then say, "Okay," but when we think of the amount of sugars that we consume, and like you say, the crappy vegetable oils [00:18:30] and the crappy carbohydrates, our bodies usually ... Most people are metabolically, and you said it about the mitochondria and that, most people, they're in trouble. They just don't because of years of abuse of over-
Dr. Martin Jr.: And a lot of those crappy carbs are loaded with energy, just loaded with energy, and your body can't use it right away. It can't burn it. It goes into storage, [00:19:00] and energy gets stored. That excess energy gets stored in fat cells, right? It just, again, blood sugar is so toxic. We have to, insulin gets-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, your body has to react to it, 100%.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So if a person keeps their crappy carbs down, so if they live a low insulin lifestyle, and there's a lot of ways that people can do that. We talk a lot about the different ways to live a low insulin lifestyle. One is eating below their carb tolerance, in a sense. There's a lot of different ways there, but if a person lives [00:19:30] a low insulin lifestyle and they take antioxidant probiotics, that covers the basics. But there's a few other things based on what we see and based on what is out there in research, there are four common deficiencies that is pretty tough to get in diet every day, which is why we would recommend a lot of people when we see them-
Dr. Martin Sr.: [00:20:00] Supplement.
Dr. Martin Jr.: ... supplement with them, and those four things are B12. Right? Because if you have any kind of digestive issue at all.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Any kind of medication almost takes away your B12. You got any kind of acid reflux or you got any ... You're not breaking down. B12 is a large structural vitamin-
Dr. Martin Jr.: And if you're not eating a lot of meat, a lot of red meat. So we like-
Dr. Martin Sr.: You're not getting it.
Dr. Martin Jr.: We like B12, we really like vitamin D. We talk a ton about vitamin D, [00:20:30] again, because the correlation between low blood levels of vitamin D and all cause mortality-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Heart, brain.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Heart, brain, that's right. All these things, immune system.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Cancer. Diabetes. Diabetics are very low in vitamin D, just generally, they are.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And it's not like if you take vitamin D, you're going to cure diabetes. We're not saying that, but they're associated with each other. And then we like omega-3, specifically DHA.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, I love it.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And we like magnesium because that's such a common, common deficiency.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. It's not [00:21:00] in the soil anymore, so there's very few people ... And you know what? Your body doesn't work properly without magnesium. You know, there are 400 or 500 things that happen to your body that magnesium is part of, right? It's part of the equation in almost all your cellular function and muscle and synergy between your synopsis in your brain. They need magnesium, and we're not getting a lot of it. It's just not in the ... If it's not in the soil, it's not in [00:21:30] the food.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So what we've been sharing so far really is the foundation that most people would do well on, right? Antioxidant probiotics, keeping insulin low, magnesium DHA, vitamin D and B12. It sounds like a lot, but it's really not. That covers a lot of the bases, and if you feel good, you have good energy and you're taking those, awesome. But what happens when symptoms [00:22:00] start to show up for people, hormonal symptoms? Then you address those symptoms, and we've got a lot of episode podcasts where we talk about hormones, we talk about brain, we talk about those things, but that's ... The foundation has to be there. Then you can address symptoms, then you can kind of go from that direction. Really, it's not complicated.
Dr. Martin Jr.: All we've done, and what we do for ourselves ... So let's talk about that. I built my routine [00:22:30] around those three seeds. I take the stuff that most people are deficient in, and then I like to optimize or hack a few other things that I take stuff for.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Right? I like, because we live in a stressful world and we know the effect that cortisol has on inflammation-
Dr. Martin Sr.: You want to keep that down.
Dr. Martin Jr.: I want to keep that down, right? So I take stuff for cortisol. I take stuff to help control cortisol.
Dr. Martin Sr.: I like stuff for testosterone, as a man.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So do I, I take, because of that, because again, as we age, [00:23:00] it's harder. It doesn't mean that ... It's funny because I used to say this because that's what was written, was that as we age, our testosterone levels go down. But if your testosterone levels are low, as a guy, it's not because of age, it's because of other factors first. Age is not a determining factor for that. There's other things that settle in, and because you and I understand how important testosterone is for a man, we like to take nutrients that help boost natural production of testosterone.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Martin Jr.: We like that stuff. [00:23:30] I know the powerful effect that curcumin has with DHA on brain, so I like to take curcumin as well. I take a lot of things. I mean, it's funny. If I go on a trip, I almost need a separate suitcase sometimes it feels like, but I would take a lot of things, but I have good energy. I sleep well. I feel good. So that's what I do, and I know what you do everyday because we talk about that and you do a lot of the same stuff that I do. You're big into oils, you're big into omega-3s as well. And again-
Dr. Martin Sr.: [00:24:00] I just want, I want to be able to function at a high level.
Dr. Martin Jr.: You're 67 and you play ball a couple of nights a week.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yup, yup.
Dr. Martin Jr.: You have good energy. You sleep well. You're lifting weights at the gym all the time.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yep.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So it's interesting, right? Because people ask us all time, "What are you taking?" They want to know what you're taking because you're healthy, and so they want to ask those questions all the time, so we felt it would be fun to do a podcast on that. But the most important thing is to cover your bases, the three seeds. Cover your bases. Make sure [00:24:30] those are taken care of, take care of those deficiencies, and it's amazing how much better people feel when they do those things.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Absolutely.
Dr. Martin Jr.: All right, so we want to thank you for listening. Have a great day.
Speaker 1: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast with your hosts, Dr. Martin Jr. and Sr. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening.