Rachel Scheer is a certified Functional Medicine practitioner with a degree in Nutrition Science and Dietetics from Baylor University. She is also the CEO and founder of Rachel Scheer Nutrition, a leading Functional Medicine Nutrition Practice in the United States.
Facing severe gut issues that nearly led to surgery, which would have removed her entire large intestines, Rachel transformed her health through functional medicine, nutrition, and lifestyle changes. She is passionate about helping others do the same.
As an acclaimed speaker and author of "Root Cause: The Complete Guide to Functional Nutrition for Coaches," she is the visionary behind the RSN Functional Nutrition Institute, offering comprehensive certification programs for coaches and practitioners. She is also passionate about helping other female entrepreneurs create their own success and abundance.
Instagram: @rachelscheer
YouTube: Rachel Scheer
Website: Rachelscheer.com
Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer. 00:56 Introduction. 07:18 Surgery vs holistic healing. 08:25 Passion for helping others. 11:20 Overtraining and low body fat. 16:01 Stress, reproduction and health. 17:55 Fitness competition led to health issues. 22:01 Slow, steady weight loss protects muscle mass. 24:07 Higher protein intake, less frequent meals. 27:28 Reducing carbohydrates. 29:03 Dietary, supplements, and inner healing journey progress. 32:53 Book describes gut as largest interface with world. 34:18 Diet changes and gut support. 38:42 Functional medicine approach using food as medicine. 41:58 Demonization of saturated fat and cholesterol. 44:38 Improving gut health for overall well-being. 46:36 Where to find Rachel.
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Hey guys, it's Swank Grill, he's up to 1,500 degrees to grill the juices, steaks you've ever tasted in as little as three minutes. At 1,500 degrees, you get the perfect sear and create a delicious crust on both sides of the steak. This grill is made in USA and uses the exact same technology as the world's best steak houses. I was dealing with thyroid issues, hormone issues, lack of having even a menstrual cycle, but the biggest issue for me was chronic gut issues and this led me to going the western medicine route. I was having to be told that my entire large intestine needed to be removed because of the severity of a lot of my gut issues. The motility of my gut had completely come to a halt now at this point. I was put on 5+ medications, I was on birth control the time, I was on anxiety medication, I was on prescription laxatives and now I'm being told I need to have my entire large intestine removed and barking on this incredible healing journey which ultimately led me to healing my body 100% holistically. I was able to get off all medications, I was able to avoid having my entire large intestine removed. All right, here was Rachel Shear, thank you for joining us. I didn't want to, so describe what you do, so I guess I'll give you an up to you that will see me out with you on the bike. Yeah, the second take will be better than the first, but the background. I am a certified functional medicine dietician, I resume my degree in nutrition science and dietetics from Baylor University and I help people with getting to the root cause of their chronic health issues. I take a holistic approach to healing and my journey into this space actually began more in the fitness world, in bodybuilding, I competed in bodybuilding for three years back-to-back, fitness was my first love, I was a gymnast, I was a dancer. Really, my core focus when I came to health was more on aesthetics and athletic performance, but three years into competing, I started to struggle with a lot of my own health issues and a lot of them revolved around chronic gut issues. I was dealing with thyroid issues, hormone issues, lack of having even a menstrual cycle, but the biggest issue for me was chronic gut issues and this led me to going the Western Medicine route. I did probably every scan test you can imagine through Western Medicine, colonoscopy and oscopy, CT scan, I was sent to every ologist that's out there, I was sent to the endocrinologist, I was sent to even the Mayo Clinic who did more extensive testing and it ended up being, I was having to be told that my entire large intestine needed to be removed because of the severity of a lot of my gut issues, the motility of my gut had completely come to a halt now at this point and it was a very severe case of IBS and that was really the answers that I was given, I was put on five plus medications, I was on birth control the time, I was on anxiety medication, I was on prescription laxatives and now I'm being told I need to have my entire large intestine removed and so for me I was really faced at this point in my life with two decisions, one, to get the surgery, have my entire large intestine removed which at the time was the route I was wanting and willing to take because I was so miserable in my own body and I was wanting a quick fix so one thing that I do speak about quite a bit is I can so empathize and relate to people who are really struggling with their health and wanting that band aid, wanting to take the medication, I'm never against any of that because I was there myself but I decided that I was gonna try to heal holistically, I had that one little piece of hope inside me and this just led to a whole other journey of just becoming obsessed with learning everything that I could about gut health and the gut microbiome and how these microbes are connected to more just digestion but they play a role in our mental health, they play a role in our hormones, they play a role in our thyroid and through this journey I was able to discover a lot of the root causes were really stemming from a dysfunctional gut microbiome which led me to healing my gut when I say healing it wasn't just only nutrition protocols, it was also having to heal myself holistically because one thing I always say is the whole person must heal for the gut to function optimally so I went through this entire really unraveling of my life and who I knew that it was embarking on this incredible healing journey which ultimately led me to healing my body 100% holistically, I was able to get off all medications, I was able to avoid having my entire large intestine removed and this led to a new passion and purpose for me to want to help other people and get to the root cause of their health issues that was frustrated with traditional western medicine and that's what got me into functional medicine with my background in nutrition and dietetics, it became certified through my own healing journey, I started to create my own coaching methodology and protocols and now today my practice has served over 5,000 people with taking a root cause approach and it's incredible because it's evolved into what I now call a root cause revolution and really just a pivotal shift in what we consider health care to be because a lot of what really we have is sit care not health care so my whole approach and mission revolves around helping people heal holistically and not just survive but really thrive in their life again. It's awesome that you were able to get through that without having to have the intellect that I do because I see so many people with interesting things like the blind material about this medicine idea is to have found for thousands of people with clothes and also to allow us to admit that significant percentage of people will end up going on to some sort of resection over to the plus fold the whole intersection and I think most of them are able to maybe participate in their life style of the church when someone's up with it. As a fitness competitor, bodybuilder, I'm sure you're very, are we about to eat about to go? Are we probably had a free styling routine and by probably most our parents, as well as people about what you're super qualified, what do you think was driving your pathology in your beautiful, temporary situation, I don't know, but it was the main memory of the wall state of Nashville, so like a lot of them when they get rolling that this is what happened to me that as I play triad that we often see all of that but what do you think was wrong and then because what were you doing with the wall? Yeah, in your craft, my diet was pretty good, at least from a macronutrient standpoint, I ate whole food most of the time, however there was things that were in my diet that probably wouldn't be considered gut friendly because when you're competing in bodybuilding, you do try to rely quite a bit on artificial sweeteners and foods just to try to get any amount of flavor because your food is just so bland but in terms of what led to a lot of my health issues, I was under a massive amount of metabolic and physical stress and most disease that develops in the body really is a byproduct of some type of stress, this could be dietary stress that leads to chronic inflammation, leads to gut inflammation, leads to hormonal imbalances, leads to mental health issues, this could be because of metabolic physical stress like I was under where I'm maintaining a very low percent body fat, I was around 10%, I was competing in back-to-back competitions for about three years, you could say I was over-training based off of how much food I was in taking at the time in order to maintain 10% body fat, your body is in a chronic catabolic state which is a breakdown state and right bodybuilders we tried to avoid cortisol as much as possible because cortisol breaks down muscle tissue, we want to avoid that, so what do we do, we do a high protein diet to minimize as much loss as possible of skeletal muscle mass but we also don't think about what happens to the gut, what happens to our endocrine system as a byproduct when we're under physical stress that is chronic, when we're under metabolic stress that is chronic and the gut completely shuts down, it stops producing digestive enzymes and the motility comes to a halt, the thyroid slows down, the bodies slows down, it's hormone production so testosterone, estrogen, progesterone for women all begin to slow down, that leads to amenorrhea as the thyroid begins to slow down which is a protective mechanism, motility also further slows down in the gastrointestinal tract and that chronic high levels of cortisol which is catabolic, it breaks things down when it's chronically elevated, it's actually anabolic when it's acute, like doing a nice bath or doing bouts of resistance training but when it's chronically elevated we don't think about the fact that the gut lining is also a muscle tissue and it's only one cell layer thick, so what starts to happen is the gut is shut down and now the gut lining begins to break down leading to intestinal permeability otherwise known as leaky gut so we start to get bacteria, foods and toxins leaking into the bloodstream stimulating a immune and inflammatory response so this is where a lot of people develop food sensitivities and they can't tolerate a whole lot of foods, maybe they develop skin issues and even in later stages we can even see the onset of things like an autoimmune condition begin to develop and with the gut completely shut down for a lot of the time and intestinal permeability beginning to develop this also creates a train in the gut where bacteria imbalances can begin to occur so some people can actually pick up pathogens especially because the immune system becomes suppressed when we're under that much metabolic and physical stress, this could also be emotional stress, everything that I'm talking about it just stress and what the body does as a byproduct of chronic stress so all of these things together creates a really a whirlwind where disease begins to develop, we start to see gut issues maybe bacteria begins to overgrow, I ended up having SIBO so that small intestinal bacteria overgrow this was leading to poor motility, constipation chronic bloating because the bacteria that began to overgrow were not fermenting on all the foods that I was eating, I had food sensitivities, hormone issues of course because that had declined, thyroid issues because that had slowed down getting sick a lot because the immune system had slowed down and this is really how disease begins to occur really for anybody and my story yes maybe unique to me but it's not really unique, it's for anybody who is struggling with any kind of chronic stress, whether that's dietary stress, metabolic stress, environmental stress, emotional stress, physical stress, this is really the normal cascade of what begins to happen in the body. It's interesting I've seen a number of former physical athletes, it seems to me that maybe this might not be a bad experience but maybe that's not true but it seems to me this proportion like women anymore and she was certain, carrying cancer in her body but as a female it's the equivalent to a guy walk around about 3% of their 7% make a difference in essential fire requirements so that's extremely, I think what's the media's, the standard for women is so much below what is physiologically close to being normal with it that it may be this proportional and it affects a lot of women, confidence with their sports that have lots of other issues of distinction that is that the interest that you most who saw or was supposed to kill 100% men definitely have more resilience when it comes to stress and a big part of that is men don't have to worry about carrying a baby like our bodies are built completely different and women are not little men that's actually not my quote, I've heard that quote before said by I'm blanking on her name which is incredible when it comes to sports nutrition but a lot of what's out there is treating women as if they're a little men but women and men are completely different when it comes to physiology a woman has hormones that fluctuate throughout the month versus a man's hormones really fluctuate throughout a 24 hour period men can handle more bouts of stress where women cannot so this is where too with the fluctuation of female hormones and especially when a female's body fat percentage it gets below a point of where reproduction can really occur the body is always trying to protect itself so what it's going to do is it's going to essentially turn off the body's ability to procreate because the body's saying we are not in a healthy enough place in order to have a baby so everything always comes back to our ability to really procreate so I remember even being a competitor at the time like I was like oh great no menstrual cycle this is awesome and it's a true sign of overall health libido sex drive do you have a healthy menstrual cycle these are things that are incredibly important but women definitely are more prone to a lot of these health issues due to their cycling nature of their hormones due to their not dissimilar ability in terms of resilience and then also women are more prone to develop autoimmune conditions so women are more prone to develop IBS and all a lot of this comes back to the uniqueness in our physiology do you think I don't know if you still can keep it brain like that maybe I know you still know that's awesome here you you're so so quite fitting obviously yes you still like this point as you are you said if you were to go back to cocaine and could you do it in a different way so that you would not develop those same issues you think is physically possible I to an extent yes I think anybody can if they want to compete in a healthy way now to get to a point where you're going to be incredibly competitive and win that's a bit of a different story and I think for most people who step into bodybuilding and competing it starts off as a very healthy venture I know it did so for me I found fitness it changed my life I felt confident for the first time in my life and I was like wow I want to really see what I'm capable of I want to do a fitness competition and the double-edged sword was I won my first competition and because I had my background in nutrition and dietetics I never sought out a coach or an expert I was like hey I know what I'm doing and it's working I'm winning so I just continued on with what I was already doing and I got to the point where aesthetically I was doing incredibly well when it came to these body building competitions but that didn't mean that I was healthy and that sort ultimately led to a lot of my health issues down the road and what's also interesting is not a single physician when I went to Western medicine route was able to really see what was happening and that was what was so mind blowing about my entire experience I had done all these scans and tasks and put on all these different medications to manage these symptoms given a diagnosis of IBS but I'm birth control okay you have hypothyroidism here's here's synthetic T3 medication for you to get on and if one person would have actually just taken a moment to get to know me to look at Rachel to look at my lifestyle to say hey this girl's really lean she's competing and look at the overall picture and how all of this was connected was in my opinion pretty obvious what was probably leading to a lot of these health issues and that's where I really began to experience what was broken in our system and I'm not against Western medicine by any means because of course it's incredibly important when it comes to acute based issues but where I see people really struggle is with these chronic health issues when it comes to IBS it comes to autoimmune conditions it comes to depression, anxiety that are really rooted in lifestyle they are lifestyle diseases so giving somebody a medication isn't going to fix something that is rooted so much in lifestyle yeah and then you're adding that certainly not that's the mindset isn't actually one big service and it obviously are it's yeah we do okay with cute trauma and cute vascular department that we're really nice with this one the whole way this one oh I guess you know obviously you come from the United States background in volunteering in Santa it was there about it already bit any further push the USDA yeah basically many ones what are your thoughts on that oh yeah I do not teach anything that I learned when I was studying nutrition and dietetics in university so my philosophy is very different because I remember even being in school and having a physician was all calories are equal it doesn't matter in terms of like macro nutrient intake that's really the only thing that we need to pay attention to and there wasn't really a whole lot of emphasis necessarily around even proper macro nutrient intake it was just based off of the RDA and we know that the RDA recommendation of protein is the minimum amount that somebody needs in order to really not be in more of a very unhealthy state it is by nowhere near as optimal so there wasn't a whole lot of talk about that and then not to mention I can think back to a lot of the recommendations around like carbohydrates and grains and things like that where that was a lot more basic and more general for the public and I think if we look at a lot of what the RDA recommendations were compared to even what I see now in my functional medicine practice there was a lot of recommendations around foods that aren't necessarily productive for overall at least gut health because that's what I focus on so much in my practice but do you see that obviously you've got to start getting lean and maintaining while slowly the high protein that I'm sure at typical bodybuilding that is based on chicken and bran but I think that's pretty much you didn't know that I did play in Chilean sea bass a lot though okay so okay is that is our ability to do that and it's like potentially out there so in terms of just basic vegetable carbohydrate and protein when it comes to bodybuilding is there a better way to get ready for for a fitness contest or figure contest your bodybuilding how it does without taking your hormones and chewing your gut boom the time starts yeah there's definitely better ways as slow as possible is always going to be the best bet so the slower we can go into any kind of weight loss it's going to be beneficial because it's going to protect skeletal muscle mass so what I see a lot in the bodybuilding world is a lot of these competitors will try to put on as much muscle mass as possible in the off season which is really just a ticket to eat more whatever they want they usually put on muscle but a good amount of adipose tissue to go along with it and then they have to go into a 12-week cut where they usually go into very intensive training hours and hours of cardio I remember even looking at some competitors work out regimens and they were doing two hours of cardio a day combined with resistance training eating a thousand calories and of course they did lose weight but it was at a very rapid rate of weight loss which is gonna put the body in a very stressed state versus if we can slow down that rate of weight loss I never did that hold back and forth of bulking or cutting or any of that actually as I came out of competing it was a very slow weight gain that I went into where I put on 15 pounds but it was over the course of honestly five years and it was weight that I actually needed to put on I also think to a lot of competitors they try to minimize fat intake as much as possible and we really need adequate fat intake in order for hormones to function the way that we want them to so all of our hormones are made from cholesterol so if we're not getting adequate cholesterol intake if we're not also getting adequate fat intake this is gonna lead to hormonal imbalances but also not to mention if we just get to a low enough percent body fat of course that's gonna also lead to hormonal imbalances also I'll say this the six small meals eating that throughout the day a lot of bodybuilders will do this in order to try to protect their skeletal muscle mass as much as possible it does work in essence in terms of providing the muscle with feeding windows throughout the day especially when the body is operating more in this catabolic and breakdown state there it needs to be more of a distribution of protein throughout the day protein intake actually needs to be higher versus when we're trying to build muscle because the body's actually going to burn a lot of these amino acids that it's in taking for fuel instead of just supporting that muscle mass but we also see that when there is frequent eating throughout the day the gut actually doesn't get as much time to rest and repair so we have something called a migrating motor complex which are cleaning waves that sweet bacteria throughout their gastrointestinal tract and peak MMC action takes place about three to four hours in between meals so for competitors or anybody who's really eating constantly throughout the day they're disrupting their MMC action so people who eat right when they wake up and the old advice of small frequent meals boost your metabolism that's been myth busted for sure but all of these things combine between rapid weight loss the body going in this catabolic state constantly eating throughout the day with not adequate fasting periods and then really lowering their fat intake I think if we could modify those things at least a bit maybe not eating seven meals during the day break it up to four meals throughout the day if we could slow the rate of weight loss and if we could keep fats maybe a little bit higher I do think we could avoid some of the health issues I'd say the other part of this would be not staying in the very low percent body fat range for an extended period of time and that was really what I had to learn because I was like all right great I'm winning I'm just gonna keep competing back to back and I never did any sort of a reverse or bringing my calories up or trying to get my body out of this low percentage that I was in and that was a big mistake because my body just inevitably was just operating in this very catabolic and breakdown stress state so going in it and then knowing when it's time to come out of it is also pretty important. So you were at a point you said you were faced with the loss of the prospect of the day going on a month on medication I was a nightmare what what did you end up going to let it out? Goodness a lot of different things first started with me just researching and learning a lot about the microbiome which really wasn't talked about at the time I think the conversation revolving around SIBO was relatively new I actually went to a gastroenterologist his name is Dr. Kenneth Brown and he was on the front end research of SIBO and he was really one of the first people to bring up SIBO to me even when I went to the Mayo Clinic and I went to these different gastroenterologists no one who is really actually talking about the microbiome besides the fact of hey maybe you should get on a probiotic and the probiotic recommendation was pretty general get on the aligned probiotic that they have at the CVS pharmacy so I was like oh SIBO this is interesting I started to research and learn more about it and I actually started to shift my diet around a bit I had to do more gut healing diets for me a lot of the triggers were fiber right which we think of fiber is it's great and it's healthy and it is for promoting gut health but when you have an unbalanced microbiome or you have bacteria overgrowth fiber is a pre-biotic fiber so pre and then biotic bacteria so it feeds bacteria that is in the gut so if you're somebody who has a lot of overgrowth or a lot of inflammation fiber is actually going to be adding more fuel to the fire of what's really happening there so I had to go on actually a lower fiber diet I had to remove a lot of fermentable carbohydrates which helped a bit symptomatically but it didn't really fix the problem but for me especially as I dove into more of the SIBO research in the microbiome that was really a tell sign of there was something going on more so with my microbiome so this led me down the route of doing stool testing doing breath testing which is really the type of tests that are needed for assessing the microbiome stool tests are great they don't diagnose SIBO but they can look for dysbiosis and balances in the microbiome it can look for parasite overgrowth it can look for fungal overgrowth it can look for how well you're digesting and absorbing your food it can look at intestinal permeability breath pastorly is the gold standard for assessing if there is any SIBO present looking at hydrogen and methane levels that are in the breath so of course I tested positive for all of these things I had SIBO I had the dysbiosis I didn't have pathogens thank goodness I had intestinal permeability I started to look more into functional medicine protocols revolving around addressing SIBO dysbiosis and healing the gut lining which revolved around further dietary changes a little bit more restriction supplements to help regenerate my gut lining at that time I had to go through a killing phase of a lot of the bacteria that was overgrown I did multiple rounds of antibiotics I continued to relapse actually then had to go more of the herbal route and now this journey is almost getting to be about a year long but I am making progress I am seeing improvement but it'd be more like okay maybe symptoms aren't as bad but they're still present they're in my life and it was really shortly after I started implementing a lot of these functional medicine changes right I'm the testing now I'm making the dietary changes I'm using the functional medicine supplements and doing the eradication protocols and I'm seeing improvement but continuing to relapse was when I started to take a much bigger look at my overall health and mindset and this actually led me down the road of doing more of the inner healing work that I needed to do because there was questions around why did I push my body to such extreme points and having to make some pretty big changes in my life on really the relationship that I had with myself my view of self which so much of it at the time was actually stemming from my work and my physical body and bodybuilding it's not a healthy sport by any means but this actually led to a much deeper healing journey with myself combined with a lot of the functional medicine efforts that I did and it was the combination of all of these different things where I just I remember one day I think I was like going out to eat at a restaurant and I didn't even think anything about gut issues and I was like oh okay I think they're gone and then that continued on for a period of time not saying that I never had issues but was the combination of all of these different things that allowed my body to fully heal and why is say the whole person also must heal for the gut to function optimally we have to look at what really led to these problems in the first place and traditionally speaking we could say it was the gut and it was these imbalances and it was the metabolic stress but what really led to that in the first place and that's where we really come back to the self. You mentioned that we got our gut capability and got this selectively bomb it wasn't stopping our past cuts or in some parts and there's a voice to assess that there seems to be significant relationship between their like what only building on them means is a space in war videos that you'll still put on my post shows. How do you I guess in your practice right now I suspect that is something you look at or you know is that something you can assess. I know it's a little sugar test there it's thankful how to tell some. How do you how are you assessing the gut I guess in general it would be the person that's what you do. Yeah so we do stool testing at my practice and we do breath testing as well with looking for lee gut specifically we look for a marker in the stool it's called fecal anti zonulin and this marker is typically higher when somebody has intestinal permeability because zonulin is going to be the gatekeeper to those tight junctions in the gut. And how often are you seeing that is important that is a pretty pretty greasy get out of an ethically common. I'd say more people haven't than not however most people who are coming to me are coming because they have some kind of a health issue but I think what's confusing for people is often people who don't have gut issues maybe they have other health issues right they have allergies or they have sensitivities skin issues and they're like what my gut feels actually fine and then they do come back with quote-unquote gut issues or gut imbalances. Yeah I see that you mean like I mean using carnivore diets to help people and that's been seemingly very remarkable. A fan of the carnivore diet actually for severe cases of autoimmune in my practice we put quite a few people on the lion's diet which is even more restrictive if you're familiar with that than the lion's diet but it's worked incredible for autoimmune conditions because most of the foods that these people are really struggling with carbohydrates and there are different lectins in the foods and different kind of immune triggers so carnivore can be greater than even for people who are more ill like a client I had with rheumatoid arthritis and multiple autoimmune conditions and extreme flares for her getting on and all lines based diets really helped a lot. Yeah yeah when I wrote the book I described that version as well or a neococal combo which is do you want to obviously a 70% of your system resides and I guess obviously there's a huge it's the largest interface with the outside where most people don't realize that the gut is that strong to our body and inside of our intestines are external to the body and that's certain to patient with the world and it's our largest on a certain set of some people close and her skin is actually smaller surface area wise than it's the lion if you bend out at the buff bug concern so it's got quite a huge impact but what other obviously food impacts the gap to talk about it while there's a lot of the big stress whatever there's lots of different impact then what what do you how long does it take you're testing for anti-zylon how long do you see you can turn out on it what is it to pull time for you keep the web so if it goes out and you see me up to ask you just send it yeah it varies for each person the gut lining regenerates every three weeks but I think what we're really looking at is the person actually removing the things from their lifestyle and diet that are leading to leaky gut in the first place right so this could be it could be non-diet right it could be the stress that they have in their life this could be yes food triggers alcohol intake could be playing a role gluten and wheat can be a big trigger for a lot of people with intestinal permeability so are they actually removing those things from their diet and then are we giving the gut what it needs in order to heal and thrive so often what I'll see is people will take a lot of the gut healing supplements they'll get on the alleudamine the aloe vera the licorice root or the colostrum which is great but they don't actually continuously keep out the things that are needed for the gut to actually heal and regenerate so we can get four months or six months down the road and we retest and we're like okay it's improved but you still have a good amount of intestinal permeability so we need to continue to work on it yeah that's our origin in itself but no matter how much energy you take we should keep origin in itself it's I know that's a little inflammatory term but where we're going to think this is going on right you mentioned wheat and moving them and probably out of sugars in some ways and sugar what are the big foods that are really common all the same it's like a little problematic but that can be probably chiggy or chiggy but things so yeah wheat gluten sugary we already mentioned those ones alcohol vegetable oil seed oils inflammatory fats emulsifiers which is more so a food additive they found that those can be very disruptive to the microbiome and then there's environmental factors too so like cleaning agents we commonly use in our home herbicides pesticides a glyphosate all of these things can disrupt the gut yeah it's interesting because what we're going live estate was approved back in all over the 70s very effing hours but this whole was I didn't want to affect my own physiology but what it does do is affect the gut by microbiome and supply for so you know I was like things like rain products since I think blooms particularly people with the grain as it's used as it does occasionally with the skin in Asia always when it's upcoming all of a salt and something happens you've gone yeah it's oh for sure yeah I added high on my tests I always when we run talks and panels on people I always tell them it's not a question of really if you do it's just more so high much and really common ones I see glyphosate BPA is really common most people also have a little bit of mold mycotoxins usually the most common ones which are more food-based mycotoxins right that can be found in rice or coffee and then in more severe cases we may see more home environmental based molds that are a lot more problematic for people okay you measure the BBA so I assume you know what we keep here what these microplastics through and everybody mends testicles and dabbles what else and how can everyone how do we know is there a way are there any effective ways to because assuming we are probably exposed to it on them some hoarding hours but probably all of a sudden how do we is everything we can do to mitigate that and think yeah I think it's a combination of two things one avoiding what we can like we don't need to major in the micros but the things you can control over like one of the things I did I switched all my Tupperware to glass Tupperware instead of plastic Tupperware I stopped using a plastic cutting board and I went to using a wooden cutting board I tried to minimize drinking out of plastic water bottles I made sure I got a good water filtration system I pay more attention to the kind of makeup that I use my shampoos the topical things that I'm putting on my body so I made some changes but I'm also not going to be the person who obsesses over it either too we live in a toxic world and I think sometimes we can just get overly hyper focused but yeah should we try to be more cognizant in making some of these changes to promote overall health I'd say yes and then the second part of this is really just supporting your body's own detoxification processes so making sure you're getting adequate antioxidants a lot of people have methylation issues we see that quite a bit in our practice so supporting methylation through making sure you're getting adequate b vitamin folate intake making sure you glutathione levels are optimized making sure gut health is in a good place because your gut is also important for detoxification so supporting our body's not 12 detoxification I think making some of these changes can actually go a pretty long way for people and especially we've seen it time and time again in our practice someone will come in and their toxic load is pretty high we'll support detoxification we'll do a little bit of an environmental clean out and actually their levels go down exponentially I'm actually very impressed to see the amount of improvement we see when we retest we haven't been fished in this guitar at functional medicine watch I guess maybe what does that mean to you what is functional medicine mean because yeah yeah I'm the end weightless trapper simply yeah it means root cause approach essentially there's a lot of different functional medicine practitioners which physicians can be functional medicine practitioners dieticians but whether you're actually practicing medicine would need to go back to what your base education and license is truly in so we're more I guess you could say functional medicine nutrition we are partnered with a medical care team where we can offer medicine and hormone replacement therapy and all of that but my coaches and myself we primarily use food as medicine we do more of the functional medicine diagnostic type testing although we don't diagnose we utilize that testing and then we create the protocols using functional supplements food lifestyle changes then if needed refer to the medical care team you can do some other more medicine-based options we all you mentioned body well in the hour anti-catabolic effect of even your protein meals which is it's true I mean so that's why we give what you thought on protein these days I'm from a lines of just a healthy person and not a fitness body but a competitor they know is it is that we still under eating protein as a society are we over guiding any what are your thoughts I think the conversation is definitely changing I can give a lot of things to my good friend Dr. Gabrielle Lyon who does muscle centric medicine she's one of my best friends and she's done an incredible job with just shifting the conversation revolving around protein so people are more aware but I'd say still on average most people not looking at bodybuilding but just overall health are massively under eating their protein intake most people aren't really focused around resistance training they're not focused around skeletal muscle mass I love her conversation about how the problem is not that we are over fat it's that we're under muscled and excess adipose tissue is really a symptom of the root problem which most people are not focusing on skeletal muscle mass my recommendation and my practice is at least one gram per pound of ideal body weight in terms of protein intake yeah yeah and I know Gabrielle Lyon yeah like the stuff do you find that that that work in aviation changes with age activity sex is there any little caveat so what yeah as we get older protein intake also needs to increase because we actually become more catabolic the rate of muscle protein synthesis also decreases what you we often see as older men or women who get into their menopausal years they actually eat less protein when what they really need is the opposite so even increasing beyond up to 1.3 grams per pound of ideal body mass would be more ideal for women and their menopausal range or guys even at the equivalent age too. That's why I met him when we were sitting there like a lot of protein out of training and I walked in and I walked in and I walked in and I hang out and I think that's it that's a good sign to help in that aspect. I guess you mentioned carbo dyadic, rid me up to you when you were in that all the synthetic school that's you know by addition school you would have been acting well as you know our young dude's secretary that's gonna kill you what do you thought your behind that sort of sentiment. In terms of in dietetics where it was just avoid saturated fat and oh like the demonization of saturated fat and cholesterol and that being the problem yeah yeah I disagree with that and that was definitely what we were taught a lot in dietetics. I actually tend to have my cholesterol a little bit on the high end and I think to cholesterol saturated fat it's not the problem and I'm sure you know this but being an advocate for the carnivore-based diet but really the problem is insulin resistance it's metabolic syndrome so it's chronic inflammation paired with insulin resistance paired with yeah sometimes hyperlipidemia and cholesterol that's really setting somebody up for a lot of downstream negative health issues, cardiovascular risk factors but cholesterol in and of itself when elevated is not a problem now people can do more extensive lipid panels especially if there maybe is a little bit of a genetic predisposition but I find that the conversation around cholesterol and demonizing it and also minimizing cholesterol from people's diet who have really high levels and especially if they're dealing with insulin resistance really isn't still fixing the root of the problem. Yeah one of the interesting things it most people will realize about saturated fat in this country or about three percent of the fat lead insurance when this country comes from taste that meat or meat or anything else. Most of our saturated fat come true about this or to collect thick packaged meals and pizzas and things like that to us we're mostly on from just that is it the saturated fat or is it the house package that I think yeah probably more than one. So as far as the use what kind of conditions I mean obviously you've got a lot of conditions. What have you seen downstream deficiency that doesn't match well on electronic arthritis? What type of things I mean is it more health? What are the types of things that are gut health? Yeah autoimmune conditions like you mentioned rheumatoid arthritis is a huge one. I'm a hashtag so people who have autoimmune issues with their thyroid. Mental health is also really huge. Most of our neurotransmitters are produced from the gastrointestinal tract. However I will say this when people quote online that 90 percent of our serotonin is produced in the gut. They also don't realize that most of those don't cross through the blood-brain barrier but there is an impact on the vagus nerve and neurons that fire together. Pretend actually fire other neurons around it. There is a strong association between dyspiosis, leaky gods, mental health issues, anxiety, depression. Nervous system regulation is also incredibly important for somebody who's struggling a lot with the nervous system. We want to of course work on the brain. We want to work even on a lot of the root causes which can often be rooted in trauma or chronic stress but we also want to tackle it from the gut side as well too. We want to make sure the gut is nice and strong and healthy which means that we have a good diversity of different types of bacteria in the gut, types of overgrowth that are in there, that the gut lining is nice and strong and healthy, that the immune system is in a good place in the gut. Definitely mental health is huge. They've even shown that poor diversity in the gut, poor gut health is also rooted in neurological disease too. It's one of the best things that we can do for preventative health when it comes to things like Alzheimer's dementia along with of course a lot of the other lifestyle things that we'd focus on, adequate omega fatty acid intake overall lifestyle supporting skeletal muscle mass is also incredibly important. I'd also say overall skin health is also a big one we see a lot so people come to us with acne, psoriasis at the core can still be in autoimmune condition but we have our gut skin connection so we have our skin microbiome that plays a role and just like you alluded to earlier right the gut is not actually inside the body it's a hollow tube and if you think about it actually connects quite a bit with our skin outside our body so when our gut is healthy that plays a massive role in our skin it plays a huge role in our immune system we can also go into allergies sensitivities so people who have a lot of environmental or food allergies working on the gut and the immune system there can also improve a lot of those. Do you see, I'm sure the answer but I'm sure there's one, one bite it's all size is type of thing. Do you see any trends like I see but I've seen in my experience I see people that have central nervous system issues or small fat becomes more important as a natural nature. Do you see any kind of distinguishing future for this disease probably just one of the things that we would call those is another reason we here as well have the same thing. No there's definitely different diets that can be associated with different diseases for example autoimmune conditions we see work very well on carnivore, lines based diets and if they can follow that for a period of time and do a good job healing their gut because actually what's happening is the gut is getting a chance to rest and heal transitioning to more of an autoimmune protocol which is more so just removing common triggers like nightshades things like that that are found in common carbohydrates in somebody's diet for someone who's maybe struggling with neurological issues the ketogenic diet yeah has been shown to be incredibly beneficial we know people with epilepsy the ketogenic diet has done wonders for so a lower carbohydrate diet higher fat intake so there definitely are more specificity is that can come to specific diseases in terms of macronutrient intake and the types of food that one is eating. Which we're about out of time unfortunately it's been totally blocking to you can you be sure like this will people find you if they want to maybe I know you're are you I assume you're probably online you said that you're live or what you've got far here if they want to have your session with you yeah I'm the most active on instagram you can follow me at rachelshear my practice is at rachelshear nutrition on instagram and my website is rachelshear.com if you want to learn more about my practice and everything that we do it's awesome it's a Thank you, Sean.
