By now, you probably know a thing or two about how important gut health is to brain health. I remember when I was first learning about this connection, each new discovery blew my mind!

​​… but in that way that’s like “oh… that makes so much sense!”

Do you realize that the number of neurons that are in our guts are comprable to the number of neurons in our spine! That’s why we experience gut feelings, butterflies in the stomach, and sometimes things are so emotionally challenging that they are “gut-wrenching.”

And… as I point out in How To Feed a Brain, “about 90 percent of the body’s total serotonin and at least 70 percent of its melatonin is found in the gut!”

I’d like to share more about this topic!

So let me introduce you to​​ my friend, mentor, and colleague, Steven Wright. 

Steve is a digestion expert, Medical Engineer, and a Kalish Functional Medicine Institute Graduate. He’s spent close to $400,000 overcoming his own health challenges using everything from western medicine to shamans. He and I started connecting back in 2014 and we ended up working on some projects together, including a leaky gut healing program called solving leaky gut.

Now, Steve is the founder of healthygut.com.  

Importance of Digestion to Healing:

The human organism has a limited amount of resources to allocate towards healing. And, in all of its wisdom, the brain and body allocates those resources towards normal bodily functions that keep you alive before healing higher level brain functions (like language, walking, balancing, feeling, smelling, hearing, or even seeing acurately). 

This is a very important theme that guides treatment with my one-on-one clients.​​

This is one reason why digestion, the assimilation of the most mass that our organism takes in (other than air) is ESPECIALLY important to brain health. 

Many connections in my brain have been damaged, and I think of rebuildng those connections like building a bridge. What do we need to build a bridge?

1. We need quality supplies (Brain building nutrition)
2. We need skilled workers (Targeted therapy)
3. We need to get that supplies to the construction site (Digestion)

Resources:

• Links

• • Healthygut.com
  • Functional Nutrition Training

• Gut/Brain Supplements:
  • Holozyme

 

AI Generated Transcript:

Cavin Balaster 0:11
Hey y’all welcome to the adventures in brain injury podcast. My name is Cavin Balaster. I’m a severe traumatic brain injury survivor who is given less than a 10% chance of recovery beyond a persistent vegetative state.

If you get a chance, leave me a review on iTunes. You can go to fedabrain.com/itunes, or on Spotify or on Google Play or whatever. I lost all of my reviews. So that would be super helpful. Anyways, let’s get to the podcast. Here’s the Steve Right. What’s up, man? Welcome to the adventures of brain injury podcast. It’s so good to see you. We’ve known each other for years, because we have similar ways of doing things as far as like, being faced with a debilitating condition of sorts and figuring it out. And empowering ourselves. And I have so much appreciation for you, Steve, for how you’re affecting the world and really helping others to take control of their health. So yeah, why don’t why don’t you like what got you into this once you tell your story a little bit?

Steve Wright 1:59
Yeah, thanks, man. Well, it’s an honour to be here. It’s great to connect again, guys don’t know is is Kevin and I work together. But he back in the day. And then we were we were friends prior to that, or at least talking on the internet prior to that. So back then, I was running a company called STD lifestyle with my good buddy Jordan, we started this because there was a diet it was kind of like paleo minus a lot of other things. You have to cook your food at home, it was called the specific carbohydrate diet. And it is a diet that I switched to in 2010. That took away bloating that used to feel like knives were stabbing me in the gut after every meal. And that’s kind of what got me into this stuff. I you know, I probably would have resisted it longer. But I was starting to get in trouble at work. And my boss was trying to tell me basically, if I want to continue to work there, I’d have to fix my gut. And that was missing dates. And it was just affecting, you know, my gut was affecting everything Little did I know at the time, I was also suffering from my first panic attacks, anxiety, depression, I was still overweight, I had acne. Now, after going through functional medicine, and being on this journey for like, 14 years or so, I knew that there was quite a bit more going on at the time. And it wasn’t just a nutrition that got me to where I am today. It was a combination of all types of functional medicine, integrative medicine, a trauma, healing, emotional work. So the whole the whole gamut. And that’s just kind of who I am. I’m a little weird, kind of like Cavin, we just can’t stop digging when we get an idea. And so that’s led me to spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars, somewhat responsibly, somewhat irresponsibly, just trying to track down things that work for myself, make me feel stronger, healthier, sexier, and then trying to share those things with the world.

Cavin Balaster 3:44
Amen. Yeah. And, you know, the reason why I mean, I was so interested in you early on, and honestly, I didn’t have huge digestive issues, personally, but I understood the power and importance of digestion, to our overall health. You know, an analogy I use, I say, many connections in my brain had been damaged. And I think of rebuilding those connections like rebuilding a bridge. And to build the bridge, you need supplies, and you need skilled workers, supplies, building nutrition, the brain building nutrition, the right kind of nutrition, skilled orders, be the therapy, the targeted therapy, if you need the right kind of therapy, but we also need to get the supplies to the construction site. And that’s digestion. And that’s imperative. You know, we can have the best bridge architects, most skilled designers, but if we don’t have transportation, getting the nutrients there, it doesn’t matter. And this is part of, you know, I recognise the gut brain axis. And that’s what I’m talking about here is like how the gut and the brain are interrelated. And, Steve, I know you could talk on that for a bit

Steve Wright 4:59
Yeah, well, you know, you were one of the first pioneers really, really championing that. And so I’ll give you a tonne of credit. You’ve, you’ve been on stage talking about it even maybe more than I have. So, yeah, I mean, look, I think it’s, it says simple. I like to think of things these days in multiple facets like rotating a diamond, because things are so complex, but our brains want to make them so simple. So the simplest way to look at this is whatever is happening in your brain, if you identify as having a brain injury, or a brain issue of some type, that is also going on your gut whether or not you feel it or identify with it. And vice versa, if you have a gut issue, chances are it’s going on in your brain. And the statistics show that for instance, like I think it’s 40 ish percent, somewhere between 40 to 50% of people have, and this is pre pandemic data. So of course, it’s probably higher now, just due to the way the world is have anxiety disorders, if they have gut issues, and people are in the 70 to 80 percentile, who have depressive episodes if they have gut related issues. And so we know, we intuitively know like when you have fear, if you feel fear in your body, you feel it in your gut, you feel love in your gut, you feel all these emotions that are really related to the brain, you also feel them in your gut. And so that at the simplest level is like just know that these two organs are really talking all day long every day, and they’re what’s happening in one place is surely reflected in the other. And the way they’re reflected is exactly what you said, there’s similar proteins, if the the proteins that are expressed that make the gut barrier leaky also make the brain barrier leaky, there are immune cytokines, that if they’re overexpressed in the gut, likely are travelling systemically up to the brain and causing issues up there. One might even say that, potentially where we’re headed with all this research, and all this really cool stuff, and 10 years from now, if they listen to this podcast, maybe they’ll hear her first, which is that a lot of the therapies that we actually use, that we think are impacting the brain are actually impacting the gut, which then sends signals to the brain to act differently. And so what exactly how that works and everything. I think we’re about to dive a little deeper in there. But just I think it’s really clear from the research that if you have a head injury, you basically have a gut injury, and then vice versa. So it’s, I think it’s no coincidence that, like you said, nutrition is really, really important for brain health, but even the best Atlantic cod, salmon or cod, salmon, the sun, even a fish. That’s what we don’t want to be eating. But even the freshest, you know, wild caught, right? If you can’t break that down and get those nutrients, then it’s really hard to repair anything. Hmm,

Cavin Balaster 7:44
amen. Yeah. And that’s, you know, also there’s stuff about electrolytic, absorption and other things that can be affected from illega, which is pretty common with Brandon. I mean, it’s probably almost certainly I mean, you damage your brain, you got a damaged blood brain barrier. That’s kind of what happens. And if you have a damaged blood brain barrier, you probably have a damaged gut barrier, as well. So this is where we talk about leaky gut. And we worked on a project together for leaky gut. And because it’s so powerful to healer, digestion, in order to heal our brains, I believe it’s like 60% of the signals from the bidirectionality of the gut in the brain. 60% go from the gut to the brain. Additionally, the same, the neuronal network that’s in your gut is comparable to the amount of neurons in your spine. It’s almost I realised this, and how important the it’s called the enteric nervous system in the literature, and then enteric nervous system, I feel like probably be part of the central nervous system, because they’re so interrelated.

Steve Wright 9:09
Yeah, yeah. They’re deeply related. And I think that’s why things are so interconnected. Where if you so I have history of like seven serious concussions, and I never had like long term concussion related symptoms, but I have no doubt that it was, it was part of my matrix of issues. And so I’m definitely fascinated by by brain injuries. And you know, what can happen here? And I think one of the things that’s really tough it appears for people with brain injuries is like, sometimes you can’t even work on the brain. It’s like not even stable enough or it’s not even. There’s not enough tolerance in the human system to be able to even focus on the injured part. And so I think the beauty of Talking about the gut brain axis is that we can work on something that directly influences the brain and can bring it stability through the enteric nervous system through the vagal connection. And just through reducing any extra inflammatory cytokines that are circulating through healing, you know, just getting better nutrients from extraction from food. And so I think that’s the beauty. And I guess the message that I want to share today is like, look, you know, you’re in bed listening to this, and things are really dire, I’m really sorry. And maybe if you’ve been trying all these brain specific things, maybe give that a rest and focus on the gut and see if you can gain a couple levels in the gut, which should unlock other things later on in the brain. And I think that’s sort of the message of hope. And the best thing is that there’s tools out there, we’ve we’ve been, I’ve been working with them, you’ve been working with them for over a decade now and failed a lot of things. But I think we’re getting a pretty good like understanding of what does work and what doesn’t work to bring about some change.

Cavin Balaster 11:02
Yeah, man, and what the fact is, your body has a limited pool of resources to allocate towards healing. And your body’s brilliant, the human organisms brilliant in allocating those resources towards vital functions. First off, so if you have some like frontal lobe problems, but you also have an infection in your pericardium, that could kill you, your body’s focused on your pericardium, not your brain, you know. And same with your digestion, if your digestion is impaired, like it’s not really a first of all, you’re not even getting the nutrients you need to your brain. So that’s the first. I mean, think of it this way, our body interacts with the outside world through a couple of different avenues, you know, our skin, of course, the oxygen we breathe, and the food we drink, are some of the main ways and then for women, intra vaginally as well. But that’s where stuff from the outside comes into our organism. And we have so much control over what we swallow what we put into our mouth. And this is where, when it comes to empowerment, digestive empowerment in taking care of our digestion is one of the most accessible ways we can do so and you know, thinking about your story, Steven, it’s like, you know, you you are in this place, and your boss is like, figure it out or find another job, right. And so you put on your engineering cap, and Steve’s background is engineering. And he kind of reverse engineered how he could heal himself. And so why don’t why don’t you talk about how that went? And what you found some of what you found through that?

Steve Wright 13:06
Yeah, so I think I was, I’m not sure exactly what I was studying, it actually might even been like business related stuff, or financial related stuff. But I think it was Jim Rohn, who’s like one of the guys that everybody steals his work, he was just a powerhouse and self development said, like success, or maybe the Zig Ziglar I don’t know, it’s like one of these old school guys who kind of like was the some of the best of the best. And they always say, success leaves clues. And so the approach that I took was like, follow people who struggle, struggled or have the same issues I had, and then got rid of those things, and now have the success that I want. So in this case, somebody who had a bunch of bloating and now can eat a much bigger diet or have a normal life, or doesn’t have that kind of bloating, and so, I would seek out those people, many of those who are not just one but multiple people, and then just interview them, pay them work for free, do whatever I could do to try to understand how they did it. You know, is it replicatable? Or was it just a one off thing that was really unique to them? And so, I think where I’ve come in, is that the gun industry has made leaps and bounds over the last 14 years. Like it’s, you know, when I started this, it was really wild, wild west, and there was not a lot of info on the internet. And that’s part of what I’ve dedicated a big portion of my life to and you have to cabinets to just put in your information on the internet for people who are looking for the stuff. But we’ve also I’ve seen 1000s and 1000s of people now trying different things at different phases. You know, like, for instance, salicylates were associated to this type of compound, mostly in vegetables and as well as in fruit, and they’re a part of the poly phenyl group. And if you look at polyphenols in the brain, you’ll just see tonnes and tonnes of literature showing how good they are. If you look at polyphenols in the gut, you’ll see tonnes and tonnes of literature about how good they are. But back in like 2011, there was all these people who solicited tolerance. It was like this big kind of FAD for a while that you should avoid all salicylates, which is essentially impossible. It’s one of the hardest things to do. Now, it doesn’t mean that 1% of people have a salicylate intolerance. It definitely says that there is a group of people who have real negative thing here. But the majority of us do not. And I share this just to say, as let’s let’s come back up now and to fat again, that success leaves clues. And if the majority of people you’re following, haven’t seen these types of things before, they may be not like you, they may be like an easier case or something like that. And so what I can say now, after seeing these 1000s, of people that was quite a tangent is that if you focus on the supporting structure of an organ, whether it’s the brain or the stomach, or the small intestine, and you just get that organ, the right support to do its job, a lot of other things begin to unlock. And so instead, I think the gut healing industry is really super highly focused on fibres and probiotics and prebiotics. And it’s not that those things don’t matter. Just like for some people, salicylates are a really, really big deal. Those products do matter. And they’re very helpful in the right context in the right healing plan. But even more important to get even better success is just focus on the organs first, do the can the stomach do its job, because a lot of times, if your nervous system is all jacked up after a brain injury, or just due to stress, because you’re trying to heal so bad, your stomach acid is probably going to be low. And this is going to compromise everything from the moment you begin to eat it. If your digestive enzymes are low due to again, same things low nutrients, stress, injuries, maybe some infections, things like this, again, everything you’re doing, you’re getting, like 3040 50% of what you’re eating, and you’re always just behind the curve, trying to heal. So if we just focus on the terrain is what the naturopath call it, but I just think of like the organs can the organ do its job if it can’t, let’s start there. Like if if you don’t have teeth, blend that stuff up in a blender. That’s the, you know, the microbiome, the mouth, the tongue, it’s supposed to cry that stuff up. So let’s just go organ by organ and make them work. And it’s pretty wild and amazing what happens when you can get those organs back in working shape?

Cavin Balaster 17:27
Yeah, yeah, and blending things up in a blender that’s really relevant for some, but I do work with clients in those who are receiving nutrition through a gastric feed, right? Like it’s bypassing the oral cavity and going directly into the stomach. And the other aspect of that when we chew food, we’re also producing saliva, which is mixing in there, and there are enzymes in our saliva. So I always add in digestive enzyme, and especially amylase with that bolus of food. So speaking of enzymes, you know, I know you have a lot of experience with different kinds of enzymes. And what is your experience been with enzymes?

Steve Wright 18:14
Well, you know, again, I tend to go down rabbit holes, I tend to try to find the best of the best and try not to compromise. I’m just a little, you know, superpower kryptonite there for me. And back in the day, for my own bloating, I got very well and I was in a really solid place. And then my life got turned upside down. My girlfriend at the time was diagnosed, she’s no, my wife, and she’s now just fine. But she was diagnosed with breast cancer. My other business was falling apart. I just signed paperwork on a new house, her mom had stage four cancer, it was like everything came back at me. And this was like in 2018 or so 2019 I guess it would have been there 2019. And so all that stress came back and destroyed my digestion. And I guess that’s just to say that, like, look, I have just as many supplements as I have books behind me. And if you can’t see this, because you’re listening to it, I have quite a bit of books. And so I had the availability of a lot of things and a lot of people and I couldn’t necessarily figure it out. And so I was trying like, for, you know, of this brand and for this brand. And I was kind of getting results. And it reminded me like, Oh, this is exactly what happened when I had a practice, you know, three years ago, is that you can couldn’t ever really get repeatable results. And as an engineer that’s like my, that’s like the bane of my existence. I gotta get repeatable results for people. And so what I learned was that when you create enzymes in a lab, they’re literally called an April enzyme APO meaning without, and the without is a mineral cofactor. And if you extract that enzyme from a cow, or a pig or a human, and so you have pancreatin on the back of your, your enzyme bottle, that’s an extract from an animal and that envelope is called a whole enzyme who l ie it has the mineral cofactor with the enzyme and the enzymes need a pH window, and they need a mineral and the mineral gives them electrons and turns them on the pH window is kind of like a window in time that says, Alright, go do your thing, you know, go go mix it up in there. And so without those two things, that’s kind of how the body doesn’t destroy itself, right? Because the pancreas is making all these powerful proteases and lipases, and amylases. And if, if it didn’t have a way to control the pH, it could eat us, you know, potentially, from the inside out, I guess, if you were to look at it that way. And so if you get the right pH, and you get the electron, and you get them in the enzyme, you can make magic happen in the gut. The problem is, is that our pH could be off due to our environment, our stomach acid, things like this. And our mineral cofactors could be off due to not having the nutrient in the food, right, because basically, the food has to contain magnesium or calcium or zinc, in order for it to be liberated in order for it to donate an electron to a lab grown enzyme that was not prepackaged by the body. And so this sort of explains the inconsistencies, one might see if you buy even a very expensive enzyme off the shelf, and you don’t notice any benefit. And then the other thing that I found through a deep deep dive into cancer and psychiatry and all kinds of other fields, is that the the dosages that we’ve been using in gut health and autoimmune related stuff are sometimes like, miniscule compared to what you would use if your life was on the line, and you had no other options. And so there is a school of cancer training, and they do some really good work. I’m not saying it works for everybody, because it doesn’t, but it’s the Nicholas Gonzalez lineage. And they used up to 160 enzyme capsules without food per day. And so we as like digestive people were like giving two per meal or something. And like that ratio is is crazy, right. And so the point being is what I’ve learned is that regardless of whether you try the whole time that I’ve created, you try Cavin Zanza, let me try anybody else’s enzymes, the pH in your body, the minerals in your body could be so different, you might need eight capsules of a certain brand per meal. And the safety profile is such that you could take even more than that. And as long as you don’t have an active ulcer, you know, you won’t have probably have any pain, you’ll probably be just fine. Now don’t go from two to eight, build your way up there. But the point being is I think enzymes are being chronically under dosed. And I think we’re starting to fail to grasp the need to build products that tolerate a body that’s healing, like you said, who may not have the optimal pH or the optimal minerals to work.

Cavin Balaster 22:56
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s, that’s what’s really cool about what you do, and how you practice and what your site provides for people because it helps people find that sweet spot where it works. You know, when I, when I was training in functional nutrition, that was a huge piece of it. We wouldn’t build out protocols, we build out systems of like how we can work with people in order to find out what’s going to be the best next move for that you know, what’s going to bring them to a better place, or what we’re going to test out and find out then get more information to tell us, which is often by giving the treatment, seeing how that works out and using that information to decide what the next move is. So yeah, man. So yeah, you you created a whole design, which is unlike other enzymes in that it has the mineral cofactors. It’s so whole enzyme. And yeah, and I haven’t seen this and this the other thing about what you guys do is you offer a money back guarantee of some sort with it, right? So it’s like, you know, so I often say like, you’ll be happy you tried it, even if it doesn’t work, because then you’ll know it doesn’t work and you won’t lose anything. Right. And so I really appreciate that you do that. Yeah. What else can you say about that?

Steve Wright 24:37
Yeah, well, I mean, I think number one is that the world has 1000 You know, 10s of 1000s Probably supplement companies and as somebody who loves them and has been taking supplements since I was 13, trying to grow muscle and not get picked on at school. I have a graveyard of products that I had hopes and dreams and I paid money to try them. read about them I, I had hopes and dreams that they would fulfil whatever it told me it was going to do, whether it was gain muscle or helped my digestion or help my brain help my eyes. And a lot of them ended up in the graveyard, the supplement graveyard, which is, you know, I think where these products go to die where you just don’t want to throw them away yet because, you know, I spent 50 bucks on that, or I spent 80 bucks on that, or, you know, I had I thought that that compound, the research said it would work and it doesn’t. And so, when we pivoted the company to healthy gut from SCD lifestyle and started to focus on trying to create the best products in the world, in certain classes of products was like, it’s just me, it’s the truth is, is that you can have the best product in the world. But if you get the dosage wrong for your body, then it’s going to end up in the supplement graveyard. And that’s not the company’s fault, per se, but I think it kind of is. And so what I want to do at healthy gut is provide the opportunity for the other 50%. Because if we look at statistical curves, if we look at a bell curve, we know that 34 to 36% of people will have a differential reaction to any one compound, they will either be a hyper responder or a Hypo responder, there’s a large percentage of folks if you give them one pill, even though that’s what the back of the bottle says even though that’s what the study says they might not see any benefit, or they might see too much benefit. And so the point is, is that if you get in this far, you’re listening to this podcast right now, you probably are you have a higher likelihood of being a hyper or hypo responder, because if you are more average, you probably have gone this deep down the rabbit hole of trying to heal your brain and heal your gut. So there’s a selection bias for you to likely be already a hypo or hyper responder, and anybody can be different ones. And the only way to know is to do what Cavin said, which is to pick a product that you believe is world class or that you believe in for what’s going on, and then play with the dosage. And so we offer 60 days, we offer health code, we have health coaches on like four of them on the team, give us a call, send us an email, interact with us on our Facebook group, because we know that sometimes a 250 pound man can have a mind blowing breakthrough with one whole design per meal, just one pill. And we know and we have plenty of case studies showing 100 pound women who need six per meal before they see a mind blowing breakthrough. And so 50% of anything is just picking the right product that’s built properly. But the other 50% Is that experimentation and that guidance trying to find out what’s right for your body right now. And so that’s part of the message I want to get out there about healthy gut or any product from any other you know, Dr. Greider for, you know, really high end nutraceutical product, is to be willing to play with it. Talk to the company, try to figure out how you can use it for your situation.

Cavin Balaster 27:52
That’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I love it, man. totally appreciate that. And also, so So this is a holiday time. It’s really a powerful product, you have it set up. So if you go to feedabrain.com/gut, it’ll take you to Steve site. And it’ll automatically put in the coupon code where you get $15 off, and free shipping. So that’s pretty awesome. super appreciate that. And I think it is the place to start. When it comes to healing. Your brain is healing what you have control over First off, and even in my book, I’m in foetal brain, I talked about how we have less control over the air we breathe besides choosing not to smoke and putting an air purifier in our owns. But we have so much control over the food we eat, the things we drink and the supplements we take. I want to touch on some of the things but why don’t we save it for another interview? I definitely want to talk about hydrochloric acid and pH and more of that. So we would love to have you back on at some point. But yeah, Steve So and and I, man, congratulations. Getting married. That’s That’s fantastic, man. Thanks, man. So so good to see your, your smile like, man, we’ve known each other for quite some time and just it’s really cool to see. I think we talked for several years during the pandemic and whatnot. And it sounds like you’re having a rough spot. And knowing you you probably dropped into some shamanic work and some trauma healing and really like dove in and found some some really powerful things and I can relate with that as well. And super, super happy for you. You look great and I just appreciate you. And to all the listeners. I know they appreciate this information and what you’re doing to support people as well. I really love that you have health coaches on staff to help people find the right dosages.

Steve Wright 30:18
Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. I’d love to be back. And yeah, hopefully even if gut is not like someone’s issue or they have a digestive enzyme that’s working, hopefully the principles around dosing and statistics and things like whether it’s curcumin, fish oil, vitamin D, K to melatonin, I don’t care what the compound is. That lesson is true and needs to be something you’ve focused on with your practitioner work with Cavin he’s very experienced with these types of things because it’s mind blowing when you can get that right dosage and sometimes 500 milligrammes is right, but sometimes 1000 is right, so, yeah, thanks, man. It’s been a great journey. It’s great to see you again. You’re looking great and looking forward to next time.

Cavin Balaster 30:59
All right, yeah. Thank you so much. Tell next time started as Steve right he’s awesome. That was so cool. I really appreciate that guy. And he makes he has like a handful of products that are the best of the best are like what work you know, Xin engineering he wants to have things that are repeatable results and whatnot. You can feed your brain.com forward slash gut did not will take you to his website and give you 15% or $15 off plus free shipping, or use speed of brain.com or sorry, foetal brain is the coupon code when you check it out. Thank you guys if you get a chance let me review on iTunes Peter brown.com forward slash iTunes and all that stuff have an awesome day and we’ll see you next time

right take care take away

someone take me do someone take me judo?

did take me

take a data takeaway

So, one day we do data

Transcribed by https://otter.ai