EP192 Leaky Gut Syndrome And Fibromyalgia

Transcript Of Today's Episode

Dr.Martin Jr: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast from MartinClinic.com. Although we share a lot of practical and, in our opinion, awesome information, what you hear on this podcast is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes. So enjoy.

Dr. Martin Sr: Hi, Dr. Martin Senior once again [00:00:30] ready to do another podcast with you folks. I'm doing this on my own and I'm getting better. Feeling a little bit more confident riding solo here as we do podcasts. And by the way, we really appreciate all the feedback we get and we find it fascinating just how many people follow us on Facebook and also, of course, on our emails and podcast, [00:01:00] The Doctor Is In Podcast. So really, really excited and we just want to really continue to give you the best information that is available and the most recent information too.

Dr. Martin Sr: In line with that, let me talk about two studies that came out in the last couple of weeks. I think you'll find them interesting. I'll tie them together. One was a Canadian study that showed ... The Canadian researchers showed a link between the [00:01:30] microbiome, the health of the microbiome, which is your friendly bacteria in the gut, and it's linked to fibromyalgia. And the second study was about fibromyalgia too and it says, here's the headline, Is Insulin Resistance The Key To Fibromyalgia. So we have two separate studies [00:02:00] both of them on fibromyalgia and both of them coming at it from a different angle.

Dr. Martin Sr: And let's just talk about fibromyalgia for a second. I'm looking at a book that I wrote ... And I'm in my study right now looking at a book that I wrote in ... It's got to be the late 80s, early 90s on, it's Steps to Fight Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia and then there's one beside [00:02:30] it actually in French, Le Syndrome De La Fatigue Chronique Et Fibromyalgie published by Quebecor, and I wrote that book in the 1990s.

Dr. Martin Sr: So it's not like I haven't seen fibromyalgia or talked about fibromyalgia. We see it a lot. I always linked fibromyalgia to chronic fatigue syndrome. I always felt that fibromyalgia was a symptom of [00:03:00] chronic fatigue syndrome and I tried to make my case when I wrote those books, that they were one and the same and fibromyalgia happened to be more of a symptom.

Dr. Martin Sr: So fibromyalgia, of course, is severe pain, muscle pain usually, but can be joint pain, unexplained pain, fatigue, usually cognitive issues and oftentimes sleep issues, cognitive meaning brain [00:03:30] fog. And these were the common denominators in terms of symptoms, we put it into a syndrome called chronic fatigue syndrome. And like I say, I might have been one of the few people at the time that felt that fibromyalgia was just a symptom of chronic fatigue syndrome.

Dr. Martin Sr: So let's break down these two studies. One of them is saying that the microbiome, the gut, the ecosystem, [00:04:00] trillions of bacteria, a forest. You need an army, you need a good army of good bacteria to be bigger than your bad bacteria, which you're always going to have bad bacteria in the body. Your body does very, very well with bacteria by the way. You live around bacteria. I have people that they over-clean. I always tell them quit cleaning so [00:04:30] much go out in the garden and get dirty and quit cleaning, quit washing your hands so often.

Dr. Martin Sr: I'm not saying don't wash your hands. I'm just saying that you don't want to be always killing bacteria and certainly don't use any of those soaps that are not really soaps, they're the cleansing things you go in the hospital and your antibacterial chemicals and they strip away all your good bacteria. [00:05:00] And I don't like them. They're chemicals. They go into the body. They destroy good bacteria much like an antibiotic.

Dr. Martin Sr: When the ecosystem, your microbiome, gets disrupted we often call this dysbiosis. It's where I always like to ... And this is simplified. So don't come at me for trying to be simple, but I want to make it so that you understand it. Inside your body there's not billions of bacteria, [00:05:30] there are trillions of bacteria, and your body can survive without those bacteria and they're almost like competing armies, especially within your gut, but anywhere where you have mucus, all around your organs, your brain and in your digestive tract and you have these gazillions of bacteria.

Dr. Martin Sr: What we know is that if you [00:06:00] have a good army of good bacteria and a very strong army of good bacteria that keeps your bad bacteria at bay, this is when you will do well. This is when Hippocrates said it a couple of thousand years ago, that all disease originates in the gut. He was known as the father of medicine. [00:06:30] And who knew at that time how smart he really was, to say that almost all that can go wrong in the body will happen in your gut. I'm sure he didn't understand this whole thing about bacteria. If he did, he didn't write about it, but we know so much more today about the importance of the microbiome.

Dr. Martin Sr: It's an ecosystem. It's got its own DNA. Your microbiome is different than my microbiome, [00:07:00] and just like cells have DNA, your bacteria have their own biomarkers and their own characteristics, but at the end of the day, when you have a good microbiome, you break down food properly. You have much more nutrient absorption when you have a good microbiome. It produces vitamins in your gut. You know [00:07:30] that you have more serotonin and dopamine, your feel-good hormones, you have more of that in your gut than you have in your brain.

Dr. Martin Sr: But what we know now is that it's very important that your bacteria have a good balance between good and bad in order for you to produce and absorb vitamins, absorb nutrients and even to make chemicals like serotonin and dopamine. And when [00:08:00] you have a disruption of the microbiome, at least this study is saying, and of course, if you've listened to anything that we do here at the Martin Clinic and talk about and preach about, that one of the founding, one of the three main culprits in any disease is what we call leaky gut.

Dr. Martin Sr: And leaky gut is when you do not have enough gatekeepers [00:08:30] between your gut and your blood, and you get a prison break because there's not enough border guards and yeast and undigested food roll into the bloodstream unhindered by the good bacteria, because for several reasons, antibiotics. We talked about antibiotics being the greatest discovery of the 20th century and the curse [00:09:00] of the 21st because we see so much more disease, including chronic fatigue syndrome, including fibromyalgia, where there's a disruption and they have it right in the sense that it was something that I was talking about years ago and that is leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky gut, leaky joints, leaky gut, [00:09:30] high inflammation, leaky gut, leaky skin.

Dr. Martin Sr: So again, this disruption, the border guards are gone. You take antibiotics. You have a high gluten diet, which can be very inflammatory. You are loaded up on sugar. You load up on artificial sweeteners, and you load up on [00:10:00] processed foods like trans-fats. And perhaps in the past you've had to take a lot of ... I talked to a patient this morning that lives on Advil and lives on Motrin. People that live on over-the-counter non-steroidal anti-inflammatory.

Dr. Martin Sr: The problem with antibiotics, the problem with artificial sweeteners, the problem with ... Like aspartame [00:10:30] and others like that, the problem with trans-fats, the high omega-3 packaged goods, the problem with gluten and the problem with eating high levels of sugar is that you're disrupting your microbiome in your gut. You are wiping out the good bacteria. And when that happens you get an invasion because when there's not the good bacteria, [00:11:00] the border guards. If they're not there, what happens is that you get undigested food and that creates inflammation. You get yeast, candida, fungus, that creates inflammation. You get bacteria, that creates inflammation, and it's disease without a fever.

Dr. Martin Sr: So you have these conditions where there's so [00:11:30] much inflammation created because of the disruption to the gut and not enough good bacteria keeping the bad guys out. The one study is saying that fibromyalgia seems to be linked to a disruptive microbiome in individuals. And if you go back and read my books, [00:12:00] what I did, and you folks know the way, I think, or at least if you've listened to my podcast you certainly know the way I think. I reverse engineer things. So I look at things and I did not even in the 80s and when there was this, it seemed to be an epidemic in chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia.

Dr. Martin Sr: I was, I think, the first guy ever to say that it was linked to the adrenal glands, [00:12:30] to adrenal glands exhaustion. I talked about, in those days, an overgrowth of Candida albicans. Again, the microbiome being involved. I talked about how when I did a study, I think it was over 500 women that we studied, we did case histories, we looked at as many biomarkers as that you could do and we found that commonality [00:13:00] was that they had leaky gut. We found a commonality that they had taken, most of them had taken a lot of antibiotics in their childhood and there was a real common denominator.

Dr. Martin Sr: As this study comes out and as we learn more and more and more about the microbiome, we're finding out more and more about the importance of making sure [00:13:30] that your gut and the lining of your gut, the bacteria in your gut, you got to make sure that you have a bigger army of good than bad. If you have a bigger army of good bacteria versus bad bacteria, it's called you win. And it seems the more we study, the more that this is studied, and I've said this in the past, but at one time when I was in school, they were studying [00:14:00] antioxidants and free radical damage and this was very important and we know lots about that, oxidative damage.

Dr. Martin Sr: When Tony Junior was going through his schooling and in the 90s and his biochemistry and all that, they seem to be talking lots about genetics, genetics, genetics, genetics, but now we're talking more and more and more and the new kid on the block [00:14:30] as far as research is going, as far as people that are thinking outside the box and researchers thinking, they're looking at the health of the gut. And for hormonal reasons, for, like I said, inflammation reasons, for autoimmune disease and there was a study just came out, we had talked about this before, but there was a study out on Parkinson's [00:15:00] and Candida albicans yeast, leaky gut, leaky brain.

Dr. Martin Sr: And it seems that most people with Parkinson's have ... Well, I've never seen an exception to it when I analyzed people. They have leaky gut when they have Parkinson's, so damage into the brain. And remember fibromyalgia, where they have these symptoms of severe pain and inflammation. So what do you do? What do you do [00:15:30] if you are listening and you have fibromyalgia, you have a loved one with fibromyalgia? Mostly women, by the way, it really is. It's a woman's disorder. This ought to tell us something about the modern woman and the fact that they are so susceptible to ... because of hormones and the hormonal changes and the disruptors of hormones, like xenoestrogens, how that can have a [00:16:00] major effect on the body.

Dr. Martin Sr: So what do you do? What to do? Well, number one, number one, cut out the sugars. If you have leaky gut, assume that you do, if you have fibromyalgia, cut out the sugars. Because candida yeast that gets into the bloodstream, don't feed the bears, cut back on sugar, decrease your gluten. I often [00:16:30] say gluten schmuten, because I'm always a low-carb guy and if you eat low carbs, you're going to lower you your gluten. So eat low carbs, eat a lot of fermented foods like sauerkraut and cabbage and kefir, kifer, kafar. I don't know how you pronounce it. But I always say kifer. Apple cider vinegar is very good as a fermented food. [00:17:00] So is balsamic vinegar. I like that. I very much do that. Put it on your salads.

Dr. Martin Sr: And lots of prebiotics. Prebiotics are foods that contain sugar called fructooligosaccharides, a specific sugar that your good bacteria love. They're found in tomatoes. They're found in garlic. They're found in onions. Found in maple syrup, organic honey, [00:17:30] asparagus, Jerusalem artichoke. These are all foods that have prebiotics, some bananas. Don't overdo it with fruit, but bananas have some prebiotics. So get prebiotics in your diet. I like celery. Celery is very anti-inflammatory. Very good for you. I like it.

Dr. Martin Sr: Drink a lot of water. Make sure that it's filtered water and with no fluoride [00:18:00] in it. And of course, number one on the hit parade is probiotics. Take a broad spectrum probiotic, especially with certain strains in there. I love all the strains of friendly bacteria, but get a broad spectrum. Broad spectrum means that you're taking at least 10 different strains, because different strains do different things. So for fibromyalgia, I find that if you want to regenerate that gut, [00:18:30] you need to take probiotics broad spectrum, I love L. reuteri and L. rhamnosus. These are two particular strains I love. I put them in our probiotics and they are very effective in killing yeast and getting rid of mold in the body and getting rid of and helping your microbiome to get more good bacteria than bad.

Dr. Martin Sr: So these are things you can do. Of course, if you have to [00:19:00] take an antibiotic, a lot of people get fibromyalgia, I've seen a lot of cases of severe fibromyalgia come after urinary tract infections, recurring urinary tract infections, and doctors unfortunately like to ... And I understand why they do it. I mean, you have a urinary tract infection ladies and doctors are thinking, they got to kill that infection, kill that infection.

Dr. Martin Sr: The problem is, is that one antibiotic [00:19:30] will kill all your good bacteria. You better replace that. Otherwise, you're going to get a yeast infection. And actually, what's lining your bladder is yeast and that is why you get the recurring infections. It's yeast. It's candida. It's fungus. And the E.coli bacteria or whatever sits on top of it. So you take an antibiotic, it gets rid of the infection temporarily, then it comes back with a vengeance and you do it again, do it again.

Dr. Martin Sr: [00:20:00] I find one of the antibiotics, and this is just by the way ... By the way, one of the things that I found can be a huge, huge factor in the cause of fibromyalgia and a major disrupter to the microbiome in the gut is medication of Cipro, which is a very, very strong and powerful antibiotic with a multitude [00:20:30] of side effects. So look, don't get me wrong, I'm not against antibiotics. They are the greatest discovery of the 20th century. Quote me. I've said it. Saved millions and millions of people's lives and they still do. Thank God for antibiotics. And I mean that.

Dr. Martin Sr: The pharmaceutical industry has done some wonderful things and one of them is the antibiotics. You have a raging infection my friend, you need [00:21:00] antibiotics. I got no problem with that, but just remember the disruption of the forest inside of your body, the ecosystem being changed and the imbalance of your bacteria because of antibiotics, and one of the worst antibiotics on the market. If you see your doctor is prescribing you Cipro, ask your doctor to change that prescription to get another. I just find that Cipro has [00:21:30] a huge, huge warning on it from Health Canada and the FDA.

Dr. Martin Sr: And far too many people have had major, major side effects. I could list them out for you of this medication. So again, I'm not against antibiotics, but I don't like Cipro. If you can stay away from that one. And you know how the American commercials tell you, "Ask your doctor if this drug will be good for me." Well, [00:22:00] if you get Cipro, ask your doctor to change the prescription. Take another antibiotic, not Cipro.

Dr. Martin Sr: Okay, so I'll just quickly say that the other study, just closing up here, was talking about fibromyalgia and the link to insulin. So here we go again, one of the major ... We have three things that we talked about that are at the root of all disease. Three things. One [00:22:30] of them is leaky gut. The other one is a free radical damage, oxidative damage caused by the environment, caused by bad food, glycation, what we call glycation end products, which is a AGES, and glycation end products are caused by sugars and the sugarization of our foods and [00:23:00] where the average person now is consuming into the close to 200 pounds of sugar.

Dr. Martin Sr: This creates an enormous amount of glycation in the body where it ages the body and hardens the blood vessels and it's a destructive thing. So that's number two. And number three, very similar because it does come from sugars, and that is high circulating insulin. [00:23:30] And high circulating insulin, you get insulin resistance, it gives you inflammation in the body. This can be very silent. You might not know it. But you might have some symptoms of acid reflux. You might have some joint pain. You might have tendonitis and you're wondering where it came from. You might have uric acid.

Dr. Martin Sr: And these things are all caused by high circulating [00:24:00] insulin and that insulin should have a part-time job and insulin's job is to convert, to store, take your sugars, get them out of your bloodstream, store them, store them, store them. You eat too many carbohydrates, your insulin goes up. Your insulin resistance goes up. Your insulin still has to do a job, but yourselves say, "No, I don't like you insulin. Get away from me." But insulin will not quit. It'll create more and more [00:24:30] and more and more and then you'll become more and more and more resistant to it and now your inflammation markers and your body go way up.

Dr. Martin Sr: And what this study was saying is that there's a huge connection between our food, insulin, crappy carbohydrates, processed crappy fats, the high vegetable oils. And what they do is they elevate insulin and as you elevate insulin, [00:25:00] you elevate inflammation, and it seems to be another very, very important factor when it comes to your symptoms possibly of fibromyalgia.

Dr. Martin Sr: So two interesting studies. I hope you enjoyed our little rent again today. And if you have any comments or any questions, we're happy to to get them from you. Go to our website, MartinClinic.com. [00:25:30] And if you have any topics that you would like us to touch on, we sure love your feedback. So don't hesitate, we care for you deeply and until the next time.

Dr. Martin Sr: Thanks for listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast from MartinClinic.com. If you have any questions, you can reach us at info@MartinClinic.com. If you're [00:26:00] not a newsletter subscriber, you can head to our website and sign up for free. We also have a private Facebook group that you can join. It's a community of awesome people. Finally, I do a Facebook Live every Thursday morning at 8:30. Join us again next week for a new episode.

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