EP146 The One About Allergies

Transcript Of Today's Episode

Dr. Martin Jr.: Hello, I'm Dr. Martin Jr.

Dr. Martin Sr.: I'm Dr. Martin Sr.

Dr. Martin Jr.: And this is The Doctors Is In podcast, and this is episode 146. Today, we want to talk about allergies. [00:00:30] One of the things that has become much more common over the years has been seasonal allergies especially just seems so much more common, right? If you go down the aisle of any pharmacy or any grocery store for that matter in the pharmacy section, you'll see there's a lot of different type of antihistamines, and a lot of different type of allergy medications. It's a very common problem.

One of the things that a lot of people don't realize is there's actually a fair amount that you can do from a natural standpoint [00:01:00] to help basically get rid of a lot of allergy symptoms. I know you have ragweed allergies.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. I only get it once a year, don't have any other allergies at any time. But when it starts getting hot, it's ragweed. I remember a summer I was probably 17 or 18 years old, it never came. I thought I got a cold. I didn't know what it was, right? And then when I went to the doctor, he told me, "No, you got allergies." Ever since then, for [00:01:30] three, four weeks or so it seems if it's really hot, it's worse.

Dr. Martin Jr.: And we've had a really hot summer this year.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, in Northern Ontario.

Dr. Martin Jr.: In Northern Ontario, and you were just saying earlier that your allergies this year actually been very good, but you've kind of mixed up a little bit on how you're approaching it.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, and I really found it to be quite, quite effective. I've just never really found anything to be as quite as effective as the combination. We always knew Navitol pine bark extract. [00:02:00] There's actually studies that have been done on allergies, especially hay fever, with pine bark extract. So, it's a it's a tremendous antihistamine natural. So, always used it, get instant relief. But what I found this year is because of our new curcumin that just came out in the last few months, right? That I decided to try using the combination of curcumin and the Navitol. And wow, [00:02:30] I just have been overwhelmed about how effective and how immediate the relief is from seasonal allergies. So, if any of our listeners know what that is and a lot of them do, right? Chronic sinusitis and just ... Because a lot of people have allergies-

Dr. Martin Jr.: Well, curcumin, there is a fair amount of research on curcumin. Obviously, it's a well-studied component of turmeric. It has been shown [00:03:00] to be very effective as an anti inflammatory, it's a anti myeloid plucking, very good for even an antiseptic and it's actually a very strong antioxidant in itself. But it also has been shown to have antiallergic properties.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Properties, yeah.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Specifically, it does inhibit histamine release from muscles, so it is a natural antihistamine and a lot of people don't realize that. And again, the problem with curcumin has always been bio availability, [00:03:30] right? It's always been one of those things it's very difficult for your body to absorb. And a lot of the curcumin that people take, really they don't get a lot of. but now there are a lot better curcumins in the market. We have a very good curcumin as well.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Oh, yeah, ours is top notch.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, curcumin is a great antiinflammatory. You you mentioned you combine that with [crosstalk 00:03:54] Navitol and you get awesome results with that I found what's helped my allergies over the years a lot is when I started [00:04:00] really getting consistent many years ago with probiotics ... I found that really helped my-

Dr. Martin Sr.: Leaky gut.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, no question. And we'll talk a few minutes about histamine and tolerance coming up in a few minutes there. But yeah, I found for myself personally that played a big role in helping curb my allergies. And then same thing, I take Navitol. I find that helps, and this year again because we've come up with curcumin I've added that and I've noticed that's helped definitely. Over the years I've also use something like quercetin. Quercetin [00:04:30] is very effective as well. It seems to have a very good effect on as an anti histamine. Also very, very good for the lungs but so as Navitol, and so as a curcumin as well, right?

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. I like oil of oregano too. We've used it over the years in terms of it's a great anti histamine, natural antihistamine.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Let's talk really quickly about histamine because a lot of people have a problem with histamine so a lot of the taken antihistamine. The symptoms are [00:05:00] kind of ... because histamine basically is just a messaging molecule, right? Some cells use it to communicate with each other. So, it's like a it's a communication molecule basically. And you need a little bit of histamine that's normal, but histamine is released from your cells-

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. Certain type of white blood cells.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah. A very specific type of white blood cell in times of stress or in times of allergy. So what happens is ... Well, [00:05:30] first of all there's no coincidence that a lot of the people that have stress also have allergy symptoms.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:05:39] That's why that's common. When we when we see high cortisol levels, one of the questions that we ask people, "Do you have any unexplained allergies?" And they go, "Yeah. All of a sudden you know, I never used to have that." And yeah, well, that's what that chronic cortisol does, right? That chronic stress hormone over secreted over a [00:06:00] long period of time.

Dr. Martin Jr.: It's funny because one of the things that mom mentioned early on in her story when she went through that real sickness many years ago was that she basically became allergic to everything.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Hyper, hyper, hyper [inaudible 00:06:14].

Dr. Martin Jr.: So she had a real histamine problem, right?

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.

Dr. Martin Jr.: And she had a real cortisol issue and a real adrenal fatigue and all that kind of stuff. But it's interesting, the correlation or the overlap between allergy and stress. Cortisol [00:06:30] are elevated ... cortisol, right? What happens is that under period stress or allergy your body releases histamine. And then histamine, what it does, it does a few things. One, it causes the dilation of your blood vessels. So that that causes the flushing and the rashes or the hives that you see in people with allergies. And then it also increases mucus production. That's when people start getting into sinuses and lungs get affected and cough and they get real asthmatic. It constricts.

[00:07:00] It has kind of a few things, like I said it dilates blood vessels, so it causes flushing. It causes you to release mucus all over the place. And then it has one more effect, it actually constricts your bronchial. That's what causes the wheezing that causes the coughing and the asthma.

Dr. Martin Sr.: That's why there's so much asthma today. Think about asthma rates compared to what they used to be. Do you know that when I was in school, I know that's a long time ago, but in grade school-

Dr. Martin Jr.: Did you have to walk both [00:07:30] uphill both ways?

Dr. Martin Sr.: With snowshoes on for sure. That story's true by the way. But it's amazing nobody that I can remember and I mean this ... Well, first of all, there was no such thing as a peanut allergy. I never heard of that and I mean that, and asthmatic. What? What was that? We never had that. Now it's almost everyone has an inhaler.

[00:08:00] It's so common and there's a lot of things that are going on. Our microbiome our gut bacteria [crosstalk 00:08:07].

Dr. Martin Jr.: That to me is the number one cause. [crosstalk 00:08:11].

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. Absolutely and that makes us more susceptible to allergy type things. It makes us more susceptible and it gives us a real problem with histamine. And so, a lot of these drugs target histamine because if you lower histamine then you get rid of the rashes and the hives. It stops that mucus production. The sinus stuff [00:08:30] and all the lungs, and it helps you breathe better. So, I mean histamine becomes the real problem when it's when it's allergies. But again, histamine is released in response to something. It's the effect. It's not the cause. Something's causing that histamine to be released. And a lot of people don't realize this as well that a lot of foods that we eat also contain histamine. So there's a lot of different ways where we can consume or create histamine [00:09:00] that creates these problems.

And what ends up happening is ... Think about this. One of the things that ends up happening within people and you see this in varying degrees is that they're stressed. They're creating a lot of histamine. They're allergic to their environment so they're creating a lot of histamine, and they're eating some foods that have histamine. So their histamine levels are going up. They're going down. They're going up. They're going down.

Well, like anything else in your body, I don't care what it is. When you start to do [00:09:30] that over a long period of time, your body becomes resistant to it. It becomes intolerant to it. It doesn't respond the same way that it used to. That's where this term histamine intolerance comes from. Because they end up accumulating more histamine than they need and they become intolerant into it. And then they start to overreact to it and it creates-

Dr. Martin Jr.: Like auto immune. Your body just starts turning on itself.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah. It creates a whole bunch of different problems. So [00:10:00] a lot of people have a lot of allergy symptoms, again, because of, as you mentioned cortisol. Cortisol destroys [crosstalk 00:10:09]-

Dr. Martin Jr.: Insulin.

Dr. Martin Sr.: And that's another big one as well is that high circulating insulin can cause high cortisol which causes high histamine. It could create a histamine response.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Well, we used to find, remember ... I just want to bring this up because when my allergy started. I just go back years ago. Not long after that I self diagnosed [00:10:30] hypoglycaemia, like low blood sugar, and that was insulin. High circulating insulin could bring your sugars high, but they can also sink your sugars too low. So hypo often leads ... you got trouble with insulin. If you got your IBO or IPR, you got trouble with insulin. And so right out of the gate, you're 18 years old or whatever. I had trouble ... there had to be some connection between that insulin and the fact that [00:11:00] I never had ...

I wasn't allergic coming out of the gate when I was a kid to ragweed, but, but as I became more hypoglycaemic and had trouble with insulin, well, there's a connection.

Dr. Martin Sr.: It's not a coincidence that a lot of people that aren't well also have allergies. Some of them have a lot of allergies. They become ... and you see this also now. And it's something that you never used to see where people have allergies to fragrances, [00:11:30] any kind of scent just for some people can make them quite sick. They can have a real almost anaphylactic type of an effect when they come into contact with it. There's scents everywhere, there's fragrance everywhere. It's not that they're necessarily allergic to all fragrance or all scents, but there's a certain one or something, some chemical. Because if you look at what constitute a fragrance, the amount of chemicals that make up that.

I remember when I was in micro organic chemistry and we had [00:12:00] to make ... everything was micro. So, everything was just ... we were playing around in the ground level is so small and you know I'm a bull in a China shop. So for me to measure that small, I like I feel like I'm always like Emerald the cook, just kind of like eyeball and everything.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Throw it in.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, you can't ...

Dr. Martin Jr.: Throw it in the sauce.

Dr. Martin Sr.: You can't do that in micro organic chemistry, but I remember in that class we were making fragrances and stuff like that making colognes and we're just kind of doing all these things. It was amazing the amount of chemicals [00:12:30] that went into these scents. And here's another thing as well, when you spend $80 to $100 on cologne or on perfume, and they got like 10 cents worth of chemical sitting there that's great marketing. The fact that they can they throw a celebrity name on to it. I mean, the markups in that are crazy. We used to make these scents for nothing. Of course I was always trying to perfect like the apple pie fragrance and stuff like that, but I always thought that'd be a great idea. [00:13:00] But anyways, I was young back then.

Needless to say, there's so many chemicals that's around now. More people have more allergies. That's a fact today. I mean, a lot of people at some point have some kind of seasonal allergy. At some point some people have it year round. How often do you hear in a clinic people talking about they're clearing their throat all night? And then you know, they got post nasal drip.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Oh, yeah. Incredible. [crosstalk 00:13:27] That's a sign of leaky gut, [00:13:30] Candida fungus getting into it's a low grade infection.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yes, it's a low grade infection or a low grade allergy that they always got going on [crosstalk 00:13:39].

Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah. They always got and your body is overstimulated. And like you say histamine. You become histamine intolerant. Your cells don't like histamine anymore. The mast cells are worn out from constantly producing it, and your cells are just ... It really is ... I always like to call these things like auto immune. It's auto immune like asthma [00:14:00] in my opinion is autoimmune.

Dr. Martin Sr.: It really is an autoimmune.

Dr. Martin Jr.: It's an autoimmune disorder. It's just the body overreacting.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Well, and asthma is another one of those things like anemia. Kind of like, okay, what's causing it? To diagnose asthma on itself, without figuring out what's going on in there, I find is just irresponsible. Why are the lungs constricting that much that it's forcing you to take an inhaler to open up those alveoli and the bronchioli, [00:14:30] all those things. To me it makes no sense. You got to kind of figure out what that what's causing that. And here's another thing as well. How often just by fixing their nutrition and taking some nutrients can they improve their breathing and improve their asthma. It's incredible when you hear the stories of what people can do when they just fix up a few things, and they start to ... If your body's allergic to a lot of things you got a lot of repair work to do.

[00:15:00] You've got to rebuild that foundation from the start. Now it's funny you and I were talking about this. Let's talk about solutions for natural, kind of like that baseline thing that doesn't have an immediate impact, but it definitely has a long term effect would be probiotics, right?

Dr. Martin Jr.: Oh yeah. Absolutely. [crosstalk 00:15:19] Broad spectrum.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, broad spectrum for sure. And people always ask us well how long do I gotta take probiotics for or do I have to take it for rest of my life. Well, ideally yes. People don't [00:15:30] like probiotics that much now that it's just we call it like a multivitamin. It's just something you should be taking every day. But we like to use the analogy of toenail fungus. If you have-

Dr. Martin Jr.: Go to your doctor if you got toenail fungus.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Go get an over the counter cream and read the instructions and they all tell you to do the same thing which is used it for like three to six months because that's how long it takes to kill toenail fungus and for the new nail to grow in and all that kind of stuff. So if you have in one [00:16:00] toenail to get rid of fungus, apply this thing for four or five, six months before you start to see a noticeable difference. Imagine that multiplied by billions in a sense that's in your microbiome. So to turn things around.

Now fortunately for example, our probiotics we got a lot of them in there, they could turn around your digestive system and you can get rid of a lot of symptoms quickly. But again, you don't want to necessarily equate symptoms with being fixed. You got to take [00:16:30] them. You got to build that foundation.

When it comes to allergies, probiotics is that you're taking it now for a future benefits down the road. It's like a savings account or compounding interest. There's nothing real glorified or sexy about compound interest. People talk about it their eyes glaze over or saving. It's just like you're putting in the bank for later. Nobody likes doing that. But it's one of those things you gotta do. Probiotics when it comes to allergies, is that. It's just something you got to [00:17:00] do. So you got to be taking probiotics. That will improve your allergies down the road. We've seen that over and over again.

When it comes to more immediate help for some people. This is the middle of ragweed. We had a ton of pollen this year. I remember going outside and it's all over the car like every day. It's on the table in the backyard. It's just the yellow coding. So, if you had a pollen allergy this year, it was bad. It was a bad one. So immediate things, like you mentioned. You want natural anti histamines. Pine bark [00:17:30] extract which is found in Navitol is a natural antihistamine. Quercetin is a natural anti histamine. Curcumin, natural anti histamine and it's so good for the sinuses too. A lot of good results people get and studies done on curcumin and sinusitis, so you combine the two. If somebody has a lot of nasal symptoms, they could take curcumin, take a pine bark also you can ... we have-

Dr. Martin Jr.: Probiotic.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, probiotic and we have all of oil of oregano and a spray. [00:18:00] A nasal spray-

Dr. Martin Jr.: Spray and pray.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Oh yeah. If I were to act in a serious scene where I had to cry. I'd be spraying that stuff up my nose first. That'd be my secret weapon. It'd give me an Oscar every time. Tears will be flowing down the inside of my nose and it would look like I was just heartbroken. That'd be my-

Dr. Martin Jr.: But it's instant relief.

Dr. Martin Sr.: It's incredible. It is incredible. I like using it. I like using it. But I'll tell you-

Dr. Martin Jr.: You cry.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Oh yeah.

Dr. Martin Jr.: You cry and cry.

Dr. Martin Sr.: [00:18:30] Yes. It is definitely a tool that can be used in Hollywood to get them to cry on demand. It's pretty powerful. But that's a fantastic way as well to get rid of the allergies and sinuses and all those kinds of things. Now a lot of people get allergies overnight while they're sleeping. So you know before bed you could take a curcumin, take pine bark extract and that does the trick pretty good for a lot of people. Also, if you have post nasal drip at night time, do the same thing right? And then also be taking probiotics. [00:19:00] That is a good natural way to help with allergies.

Now, before we kind of end this episode, there's another study that just came out I wanted to talk to you about and it was based on an older one that was done on Parkinson's. And talking about the gut, for example, right? How the gut for a lot of people is really the foundation for their allergies. But the gut is a foundation for a lot of, well, pretty much everything.

There was this really interesting study done on Parkinson's where they found ... They had a hypothesis [00:19:30] that turned out to be actually correct. And what the study did is they showed that when patients had their entire vagus nerve severed. Now the vagus nerve is basically-

Dr. Martin Jr.: Not Las Vegas.

Dr. Martin Sr.: ... not Las Vegas. Yeah. Not the Las Vegas nerve, but it basically goes from the brain to the gut.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah. It's like your butterflies. Think of butterflies. Yeah, you get butterflies in the stomach when you're nervous and vagus nerve. It's funny they call the gut the second brain because it's the only [00:20:00] organ that can operate without the connection to the brain. Yeah. It can operate. It creates neural transmitters. But what they found was, so the direct connection between the gut and the brain was this vagus nerve. And when patients had that nerve severed it basically cut the risk of Parkinson's in half. It protected against Parkinson's disease. And what they're starting to look at now is they're starting to think that Parkinson's for a lot of people starts in the gut and spreads to the brain-

Dr. Martin Sr.: Through vagus.

Dr. Martin Jr.: ... [00:20:30] through the vagus nerve. So it's a gut problem.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Remember, this is probably 100 podcasts ago that we talked about when they looked at Parkinson's and even a mouse-

Dr. Martin Jr.: They had fungus in the brain. [crosstalk 00:20:45].

Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, remember that?

Dr. Martin Jr.: They found a high percentage of fungus in the brain, and then they speculate that people with Alzheimer's dementia also will almost be like a bacterial infection that's causing ... It could be one [00:21:00] of the causes. I mean, high insulin is another definite cause. Brain shrinkage from a number of different reasons is another cause-

Dr. Martin Sr.: Triglycerides.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, all those things exactly. But you're right. It's interesting that they found in Parkinson's ... I can't remember the percentage, but it was more than a majority of them had fungus, actual fungus in the brain. So, obviously it traveled there via the gut, right? It's amazing again, as we read the studies how important gut health is. Now [00:21:30] the difficulty is this when it comes to gut health, unless somebody has a digestive symptom, they don't think about their gut. If they're digesting everything, and they're not getting heartburn or they're not getting a lot of bloating, and all those kind of things or their bowels are normal. They don't think about their-

Dr. Martin Sr.: They don't have IBS, so they [crosstalk 00:21:48].

Dr. Martin Jr.: They don't think their gut is a problem. And it's really, really hard to convince somebody that gets no symptoms that their gut can still be a problem because they don't think of joint pain as a gut symptom, and for some people it is.

Dr. Martin Sr.: Skin.

Dr. Martin Jr.: [00:22:00] That's right. They don't think their skin is a gut symptom. They just think of the digestive "symptoms." And so, it creates this real problem to convince some people. Sometimes this is what we tell people. And this is gonna sound funny, but it's the truth. Sometimes when a person gets a digestive disorder like an IBS, it actually saves them from a lot of future problems if they take care of the problem, because they're being alerted to the fact that they got a real gut issue going on. And when you correct that, you correct [00:22:30] a whole bunch of possible future stuff that's going on.

It's the same thing. So if somebody ends up with Parkinson's because of a gut issue, which research is showing, that's very possible, but they had no digestive symptoms, they got no warnings. It's truly a silent killer. It's truly a silent problem. Sometimes we get these digestive issues and it's a blessing in disguise. It wakes them up to the possibility that could have been a lot worse in the future. So [00:23:00] anyways-

Dr. Martin Sr.: Very interesting.

Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, for sure it is. And, you know, we understand dealing with people in health care over a long time that nothing motivates somebody like pain. If they don't got pain, they're fine in their eyes, they're healthy. No pain they're healthy. We use a lot of times the pain that they have as an opportunity to really give them a whole changeover. And some people they're never sick, [00:23:30] never pained and then they get cancer. It just like what happened there?

Uncle so and so, never was sick, never had anything and then died of a heart attack, right? Never had ... How often do you hear those kind of things? And it's like, but yet this person here, they were sick and they're fine. And because sometimes again, when when they get those early sicknesses, they tend to take care of it after and then it protects them from a lot of things. But that's just an interesting observation that we've noticed [00:24:00] just dealing with people over the years that it's much easier to talk to them about their problems when they have pain.

It's very, very difficult to sell prevention or wellness. I mean for the most part. People want to be well and they want to prevent things but they say they do it they want it but it's not as easy as when they come in and say, "I got real bad digestive issues." All right, let's get to work. It's a lot easier that way.

Anyways, we're at a time we want to thank you for listening. If [00:24:30] you have any questions at all. You can email us at info@martinclinic.com or you can go to our website. We got live chat there. If you're not a newsletter subscriber we talk a lot about these studies in our newsletters. You can join there at our website martinclinic.com. Every Thursday morning we do a Facebook Live, get a lot of viewers. A lot of people coming on and asking questions so it's a great place to do that as well. We also have a private Facebook group that we started so you can join there. Go to our website again martinclinic.com. Join our private Facebook group. And in there you can ask a bunch of questions.

[00:25:00] We're gonna be doing a lot of cool things with that group coming up, especially as we get later into the summer earlier in the fall. So anyways, we want to thank you for listening. Have a great day.

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