Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain: 5 Pillars to Prevent Dementia & Alzheimer’s
with Dr. Partha Nandi
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello, everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox podcast. Today we have Dr. Partha Nandi, and he’s going to be talking about how you can heal your gut to save your brain. He has a new book out, and we’re going to be expanding on the very delicate and real connection between the gut and the brain, that gut-brain access, and things you can do to dramatically improve your gut health that will improve your brain health. If you have a leaky gut, you probably have a leaky brain. We’ll talk about his five pillars of health that will help reduce inflammation in your body, including diet and exercise, but a lot of surprising pillars as well. We’ll talk about his new book, Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain, and really what he’s trying to do with his work to help his patients and people live longer, healthier lives and prevent dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, which someone is diagnosed with every few seconds. It’s a devastating illness. We’re going to talk about how to prevent that and what you can do today to prevent that in the future.
Our guest today, Dr. Partha Nandi, is an MD, patient advocate, health hero practitioner, and leader. Born in Calcutta, India, Partha survived rheumatic heart disease, and for him, that made an everlasting commitment to patient care. Through this trial, he got the intrigue and drive necessary to become what he is today, which is one of the leading patient advocates in the United States, Dr. Nandi is a creator and host of the nationally and internationally syndicated medical lifestyle television show, Ask Dr. Nandi. Ask Dr. Nandi tackles inquiries from all over the world, managing to reach over 95 million homes daily. Dr. Nandi’s appearances also include TEDx, college commencements, numerous charity functions, and premier medical meetings. Dr. Nandi also loves to write when he’s able to take a break from being one of the top holistic health practitioners in the nation. He’s also the bestselling author of Ask Dr. Nandi: Five Steps to Becoming Your Own Health Hero, and his new book, Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain: The Five Pillars of Enhancing Your Gut and Optimizing Your Cognitive Health. You can learn more about Dr. Nandi’s work at askdrnandi.com. Dr. Nandi, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Partha Nandi
Oh, thanks for having me, Wendy. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You’re the host of the wildly popular Ask Dr. Nandi Show, where you have 95 million people on a daily basis tuning in or potentially in 95 million homes. Tell us a little bit more about your show and yourself in general, your goals, et cetera.
Partha Nandi
Thank you so much. The television show is really an extension of what I do with my patients every day. We basically want to be able to give people ways to better their lives. We have the saying that we want people to become health heroes, which means to become advocates for their health and really understand what it takes to be able to live a life that’s joyful and vibrant. So, I’m a practicing gastroenterologist. I still see patients every day. But when people have problems, I felt like we needed to reach more than just the one-on-one I do every day. So that’s why we started with the television show, which reached one station in Detroit, Michigan, and then we expanded, and now we’re syndicated throughout the country and the world. We feel like it’s really a great opportunity. We feel lucky to be able to reach folks all over the world to give them some of the tools needed to live the best life that they can.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I know my mom watches your show after I appeared on it many years ago. My mom’s sort of watching it. She loves you.
Partha Nandi
Oh, that’s great. That’s awesome.
Dr. Wendy Myers
But you have a new book coming out. It’s called Heal Your Gut, Heal Your Brain. I thought you had some really interesting insights in this book that’s coming out in October, 2024. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Partha Nandi
Yeah, absolutely. The book is called Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain. We’re releasing it October 1st, and it was really inspired by my dad. My dad was my first hero. I’ll tell you a little bit about him. He was somebody who I call a renaissance man. So if you ever drive on the streets of the road at night, you’ll see these little bits of reflective tape at the sides of the road that keeps you from going off into the ditch or whatever. My dad developed those broad reflectors. So he saved billions of lives. He would also make lots of inventions. One of them was to have a polymer that, in case a runway gets bombed, let’s say he worked with the air force and the runway gets bombed, he would create a plasma or polymer that would make a runway within 15 minutes, and it was harder than that. He was a very bright man. When I was young, he was always there for me, and when I had a life threatening illness when I was six years old, he really showed me what you’re supposed to do. My dad was really everything to me, and after I became a physician and was practicing, he had a devastating stroke.
My dad was healthy, didn’t ever get hospitalized, never was ill, and all of a sudden, he had the stroke, and that stroke really robbed him of control in the last decade of his life. He couldn’t do the things with his grandkids that he wanted to do. My mom and I would joke about how he went on a cruise with my mom and Wendy, within 30 minutes, but maybe not 30 minutes, maybe a couple hours, he would have half the crew reading their palms and that’s who my dad was. He had so much wisdom and was such a gregarious person. That stroke robbed him of the last 10 years of his life. So I thought to myself, what am I missing? What is it that I’m not seeing that led him to have this? Because most of the docs said, we don’t know. He did all the testing and there was nothing there. So at the time when he had this stroke, this is 2007, I didn’t have many answers, but since that time I’ve been researching and looking, I’m a gastroenterologist. I look at the gut and we now have a lot of evidence that the gut is really related to the brain and there’s a big connection.
One of my goal in writing this book is so that others don’t have the same fate that my dad did and the families, like myself, my sister and my mom, who had to really go through seeing him and really not being able to do any of his normal daily activities, I want others not to go through that and that’s kind of the impetus. That’s what inspired me to really write this. I think that there’s a lot of evidence now, and we will talk about it, that really can prevent people from having the same fate as my dad. That’s what this book is about. I think it can really change lives. We tell people and my patients that every three seconds, someone is diagnosed with dementia. Every six seconds, someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Every four minutes, someone dies of a stroke. These are not just small numbers or something that happens once in a while. This happens all the time and we’d love to be able to prevent as many people from suffering from these neurodegenerative diseases as possible.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and so I want you to talk about the gut brain access because there’s such a huge connection there, but on the same token, there’s so much working against our gut and a healthy gut microbiome like the chlorine and just your showering and every day and your shower water. If you’re drinking tap water, you’re getting chlorine in your food glyphosate, which kills your gut bacteria, natural and prescribed antibiotics and it just goes in smoky and kills the sugar, destroying your gut microbiome. Most people are exposed to that every single day. So, it’s no surprise that people’s guts today and their gut microbiome is a complete wreck.
Partha Nandi
You’re a hundred percent. You said all the things that we’re going against. It’s like a salmon swimming upstream, except we were not equipped to swim upstream. That’s why we have all these problems, not just with the brain, but everything else. But the connection you asked me about the connection between the gut and the brain, the gut and the brain are intimately connected. And remember that to me the gut really is the center of your health. It doesn’t just talk to your brain. It talks to every part of your body, so to speak, including your heart and joints. It can be responsible for autoimmune disease. It can be responsible for people with arthritis. There’s a lot that the gut’s responsible for, but the gut and the brain have a special relationship. It’s kind of like, if you’ve ever seen two teenagers talking about a Taylor Swift concert. That’s how much the gut and the brain talk. They are communicating all the time. The way they communicate is the first one is a direct one, which is by something called the vagus nerve, which is the longest nerve in the body. There’s a direct communication between the brain and the gut and it’s bidirectional, meaning the gut talks to the brain and vice versa. So what happens is that there’s direct signals that are sent to the brain from the gut saying, Hey, everything is good. And the same thing with the brain, and you talked about this a little bit.
When you are stressed or you’re getting stimuli in your brain, your gut is told to kind of take a pause. It’s not important for you to be able to have the right microbiome, have the right nutrients, and have the right milieu. It’s really important that the gut and the brain have to function well together. Then you have to remember that the gut wall, and I’m sure you’ve talked about this before in your podcast, is actually one cell layer thick. So on one side, there’s poop on the other side, blood. It’s one cell layer thick that’s preventing poop from going into your blood. When you have problems with that gut wall of integrity, when you have little cracks in that wall, we call that leaky gut in functional medicine and holistic medicine. We’ve talked about leaky gut for a long time in traditional medicine, which I’m part of as well. Now they say there’s no such thing as a leaky gut, but there’s a new name for it. It’s called intestinal permeability. So intestinal permeability means just what I said, little openings in the wall that allows inflammation to occur.
If you have inflammation, we’re not talking about big pieces of stool going back. We’re talking about little tiny solutes, little tiny pieces that are not supposed to go into your blood. For example, parts of a bacteria that’s in your gut go into your bloodstream. They go outside where the gut wall is and that begins the cascade of inflammation. So inflammation, which your body thinks is abnormal, starts to fight it. Now that happens once in a while, that’s okay. And if it happens a lot, when you have a leaky gut or you have a distal permeability, that inflammation continues unabated, so it just continues on, that inflammation can spread to other parts of your body. For the brain, it can go to what’s called the blood brain barrier. The blood and the brain where the brain actually connects to the blood as a barrier. The brain does not want anything to go in there unless it absolutely needs it. So when you have inflammation that begins to your gut and goes into your body and it can affect the blood brain barrier. It can cause little cracks in that barrier. Once you have inflammatory mediators or stuff that can inflame your brain, the brain begins the process of inflammation. Again, if it happens once in a while, it’s okay. If it happens more, more than just, once in a great while that happens on a chronic basis, it begins the process of inflammation. So that’s the second way the gut and the brain can really connect or are related.
The third one you talked about, which is the microbiome. So we have this trillion member army within the gut of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa. They all have been living in our gut for really thousands and thousands of years. Remember the microbiome actually was there way before we were there, 15 million years ago. And then they got smarter and got better and then they lived within us. We give the microbiome assists. We give them nutrients to help them survive, have them thrive and get the right environment so they can be in the right environment and live, but they give us this amazing stuff that we need through thousands of years of evolution.
They give us products, for example, neurotransmitters. Many folks don’t know that, for example, serotonin, which is your feel good hormone, 90 to 95 percent of it is made within your gut and it’s made by your microbiome. So it’s important to have a healthy microbiome. Something called GABA also can be made by the microbiome. So the microbiome creates neurotransmitters, which are basically transmitting into your brain to be able to help them help the brain function help you. For example, we call serotonin the feel good hormones. If you don’t have the right environment, the right amount, the concentration of neurotransmitters, you may not feel yourself. Sometimes we wake up or we’re throughout the day, you don’t really know why you don’t feel like you’re up to it. It may be that your gut health is not what it’s supposed to be and that’s why it’s not creating the neurotransmitters. In addition, the microbiome can create short chain fatty acids, which remember I talked about the gut wall. It keeps it strong so that stuff doesn’t get through into your bloodstream from your intestine. So the microbiome is super important. The last piece is the inflammatory cells and the immune system of the gut. The immune system of the gut is so important to be able to function properly. If you don’t have a functioning, proper immune system in the gut wall, it’s got the most sophisticated immune system. If it’s not functioning well, then you can allow inflammation. You can allow aberrant inflammation, inflammation that’s not needed to go to parts of your body, including the brain. So, it’s super important to be able to keep your gut healthy.
You talked about that wherever you go, it seems like there are factors that didn’t exist even a hundred years ago that are eroding your microbiome. It’s not so much that everything’s so bad that all hope is lost. It’s not that. It’s just that we’ve introduced so many changes that are negative in such a short period of time that your body just cannot accommodate. For example, we didn’t have fast food restaurants a hundred years ago. We didn’t. But in the last 50 years, we put so much stuff in our food that our microbiome doesn’t even know what to do with it. They’ve never seen it before. Same with all the toxins you talked about. So, there’s just an abundance of stuff that really tries to erode your gut health. What I’m saying to you is that we’re seeing this epidemic of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, for example, and it’s at a large part due to the fact that your gut health is poor. It’s important to highlight that.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are largely preventable. That’s why I love that you are talking about this and have a book about solutions because there is so much working against our guts and our brains, but there’s a lot of different things that you can do to fix that. One, I think there are a lot of people walking around just feeling depressed, anxious, or just flat because they’re not making the neurotransmitters that their gut bug should be making. So what are some other symptoms that people have? They have leaky gut or also, they’re going to have a leaky brain if they have a leaky gut. What are some of those other symptoms that people should maybe be on the lookout for?
Partha Nandi
That’s a great question. I had a patient this last week. His name was Henry. He came to me as an executive and he said, Dr. Nandi, I want to crawl up in a ball. I don’t have any more meetings. I don’t want to do anything because I can’t think properly. So one of the things that people talk about is brain fog. You feel like you can’t quite concentrate, whether you’re in school or work or in your personal life. You feel like a little shield is placed in your brain that doesn’t allow you to have good concentrated thought and focus. That’s one of the big symptoms that we talk about, which is brain fog. If you really go after your gut health, you could change that. It’s not a miracle. It doesn’t happen within a day, but over days and weeks, you can make those changes. The other things are, for example, forgetfulness. Small things that you think, hey, where did I put my keys? And if it happens once in a while, it’s one thing, but forgetting to, for example, call a friend that you always did when they had a birthday or heaven forbid, even forgetting names of loved ones, this is what you can have as you go through the process of neurodegeneration.
What happens is that on the outside, people look great. I mean, think about it, if you don’t succumb to heart attacks or cancer, then what do we worry about? We worry about losing our mind, but thinking about the fact that maybe one day, someone you love may not remember what you are. Think about that. That’s what we worry about. So can be very subtle symptoms of your memory or focus. My dad, for example, was very charming. So he got away by explaining it away. He was driving, went for an errand, and really forgot why he was there. This predated the stroke by at least three years. We look back at it as a sign when you’re doing things and you can’t really focus on it or you even forget about it. So those are some of the signs you can look at.
What happens is it’s different for everybody, Wendy. For example, there’s a patient of mine who was so high functioning for his level. He was 70 years old, but this guy was a high school principal, dressed to the T, always could give you great clothes and then he’s funny and you always got jokes. But, he became normal, meaning like his colleagues, he had lost a step or two. So it’s always looking at ways in which you can find out what she was and where you are now. It’s relative. We’re talking about not just memory. Let’s say if you’re talking about movement disorders like Parkinson’s, you may have had a patient named Jimmy, whose only symptoms are a very slight tremor. He was actually in his thirties. He’s had a child and he had no thought about Parkinson’s, but he saw a slight tremor that began and in the beginning, he just blew it off. But then when he saw a doctor that said, have you been tested for Parkinson’s and lo and behold, he had it.
So you can have various subtle signs. You have to be able to know that. You have to be able to look for those, but what I’d like to do is see, Hey, can we address your gut health way before that happens? Because by the time you have symptoms like Alzheimer’s and neurodegenerative diseases, you said it really well, they are reversible diseases. We used to think, hey, you’re just getting old, and that’s what it is when you get old, the disease that you have, that’s what we used to think. But now we know that Alzheimer’s is basically a disease where you have inflammation that’s out of control, inflammation that’s not needed, and that inflammation creates havoc inside your brain, causing these things we call amyloid bodies that are not allowing these neurons to communicate.
So when you think about what is a thought, we think our thoughts are our own and the most intimate part of our life. But when you think about a thought is just an impulse between two neurons based on the biochemistry and the neurochemicals that are there whether you have the right concentration of the neurotransmitter and whether they’re firing correctly or incorrectly determines your thought it’s really sobering because you could become somebody else. You could lose that part of you because you’re just not paying attention. So the idea is that we can then think about it before we have those problems. Some of the subtle side of the doctor, but it’s not inevitable. To me, this is not an inevitable state that you can live your best brain health and you can live your best life and we know the relationships are there and how we can stop it. I’ll give you an example. When people say, well, I’m not quite getting this, how can my gut be related to Parkinson’s? Well, we now know there’s a gut first hypothesis. Imagine when you look at the brain of a Parkinson’s patient, Wendy, you have these things called Lewy bodies. These are just misshapen proteins that are all over the brain and they’re allowing the brain not to function well, that gives us symptoms of Parkinson’s, the tremors, the movement, the virginity, and eventually, patients with Parkinson’s lose their cognition. But when you look at animal models years before Parkinson’s, you see the same Lewy bodies, these same misshapen proteins in the walls of the gut. So you’ve got those same misshapen proteins and it’s funny. What happens is that when you have one misshapen protein, it causes the next one not to be made correctly. And it goes on and on.
In mouse models, when you take off the vagus nerve, it decreased the transmission of these misshapen proteins into the brain. So this gut first hypothesis with Parkinson’s lets you know, hey, you know what, we may have a chance to stop this horrific disease. My wife’s grandmother is always the life of the party. She was amazing. The Parkinson’s robbed her of her life. We know about Michael J. Fox, who he was and who he is today. Imagine if we could have thought about 30 years before his diagnosis and talk about his gut health. These are examples of what we can do to really change the equation and it is exactly what you said. It’s not inevitable.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What are some of these changes that people need to make? There’s a long list of diet and lifestyle things and supplements people can take, but what are your top picks, the lowest hanging fruit that people need to do to save their brain?
Partha Nandi
That’s a great question because you go everywhere, everybody’s got advice for you, from your gardener to your neighbor, et cetera. The way I think about it, I call it the five-pillar method of changing your gut health. So the five pillars that I use is, one hace a purpose. Number two is, we all think about this, is food and nutrition. Number three is movement, but specifically movement with purpose. Four is community, some people call it tribe, and last is spirituality. So I’ll go through those with you. Purpose driven living is to me the hardest one to have and now people and lots of my patients, especially young patients, are walking around aimlessly. The people don’t have a drive or don’t always know what their purpose is. What does that have to do with gut health? What does it have to do with health in general? When you have a purpose-driven life, not less than a dozen studies will tell you that your risk of the most common diseases goes down. And why is that? It’s something that we talk about and I’m sure you’ve talked about as a fight or flight mechanism. When you have purpose-driven living, you have less unrest. When you have less anxiety about, Hey, what am I doing next?
When we were hunters and gatherers, when we were chasing animals and just raising crops, we had a very specific purpose. That’s just to survive. We wanted to eat food and make sure our family is living, but that’s gone now because a lot of our basic needs are met. Then it comes to, what do we do? What was going to give us purpose and joy? When you have that purposeful living, you’re taking away that fight or flight response. You’re decreasing your cortisol. You’re decreasing your inflammation. Clearly, it helps your gut because when you reduce your microbiome thrives, your gut wall integrity is improved, and your gut is essentially in the best state it can be just by doing one thing, which is to have a purpose-driven life. So when I talk to my patients and people who come to me with advice, I talk to them about really finding a way to be able to deliver purpose. I talk about it in my book, Heal Your Gut, Save Your Brain. So, purpose is the first line. Before you do anything, there’s got to be a why. Why are you doing this? It can’t just be because you want to look good with a tank top or in a bikini or whatever it is. Those are superficial goals because, eventually they’ll fade away. So you’ve got to be able to find why you’re doing what you’re doing.
You know, I said, for me, everything I really do is to be able to help folks to be able to have better lives and also for myself. I want to be around for my kids and their grandkids to be in the best health, not just physically, but mentally. That drives me and my wife. We jump out of bed. We don’t just roll out of bed and they go, my God, another Monday or whatever. Every day is a joy. Number two is food and nutrition and not a diet because any diet you use is just another word for failure. Simply put, if you want to do something very simple, just pick whole foods. Whole foods, less processed fats, less processed carbohydrates. Try to have fermented foods, which are foods like Yogurt, sauerkraut and kimchi. If you look up fermented foods, every culture has them. There are tons of them that, if you could incorporate into every meal, those are the probiotics that you give into your gut. A little bit of terminology, the food that your gut bugs, which are the probiotics, get and help them grow and feed. If you’ve got a trillion plus bugs in your intestinal system, and you give them a few billion, that’s a factor of at least a thousand. So you need the food in order to be able to build that up. Prebiotics give you the food. Robotics are the actual bacteria, and postbiotics are the products that I talked to you about and that the bugs make. Neurotransmitters, short-chain fatty acids, are the post biotics. When you give fermented foods, you’re giving direct probiotics. A lot of fermented foods also have prebiotics within them to be able to give the food for the bugs. So if you have a great diet plan, you could actually not destroy your gut. Like you talked about, if you have a pepperoni pizza once in a while, it’s okay. But if you have it every day, that is a nuclear bomb for your gut. It doesn’t know what to do with the processed carbs. It doesn’t know what to do with the preservatives. It doesn’t know what to do with the bad fats. Here’s what happens. The gut then reacts to these foreign substances as if it’s some enemy like it’s a bug. It creates this inflammation, and that inflammation then results in all the things we talked about. So, having a diet plan is crucial.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about seed oils? I think the industrial seed oils are so insidious and inflammatory and in all the foods and such a huge contributing factor to gut and brain health issues.
Partha Nandi
Yeah, we typically just use olive oil for our cooking because we believe that there’s some controversy in the seed oil because people feel like there’s not enough evidence. I think there’s enough. There’s enough smoke that there’s some fire. I try to, if I can, write to most people that have seen good results with oils. I use olive oil. I sometimes use avocado oil as well. But I agree with you, using the seed oils can be detrimental to your gut and there have been multiple studies that show it. So if you can avoid them, please do. There are people in the world and people who are watching may not be able to afford anything else. If you cannot, then I get it. Use it sparingly. But if you can, avoid them because that wreaks havoc in your gut and your gut health. The whole key to this is that I really follow the 80-20 rule, at least the 90-10 rule, meaning that most of the time, 80 – 90 percent of the time, you do everything you can to be able to follow these principles. But listen, I have kids. I have to go to a birthday party. I don’t give them a menu before I come, like I don’t want this, I don’t want that, so you kind of live. But if you do most of the time, 80 to 90 percent of the time, the things that we’re talking about, it’ll be more than okay. I think you’ll be better off than 95 percent of people out there.
There are so many places that you don’t even know if they’re using seed oils, or if they’re using preservatives. They’re not going to tell you. We don’t eat out at all. The only time that we eat out is when we have to, like if we’re traveling. One of the things I talk about in my book is that if you eat out, then what you’re doing is you’re basically exposing yourself to these toxins that you have no control over. The folks that are out there are trying to make money, which is nothing wrong with that, but you have to know and accept that risk. So your point is really well taken. I think we have to be able to know one of the things we have to do when we have a diet plan is to do something unbelievable, go into the kitchen and not just have a cup of coffee to talk to someone, but actually cook, especially if you cook with your family. That’s one of the pillars that I talk about: community. If you are cooking and eating with your family, it’s incredible. The amount of benefits you get are many. And it’s not just the nutritional content. It’s all of the bonding and the benefits of community that you get when you’re cooking with your family and they also learn, like my kids know how to read labels. They know what foods to eat, what not to eat. They also go to birthday parties, also go to people’s houses and they don’t say, well, I can’t eat this or I can’t eat that. But they know, and they have control just 90 percent of the time. They picked the right thing.
My fourth pillar is community. If anybody’s heard about the Rosetta effect, or if you haven’t, look it up. Rosetta, Pennsylvania, a group of Italian immigrants were in the 1950s, and I think it was a doctor who went and visited that community. They saw that these folks were not getting any or very few heart attacks and the people that were thriving in their 80s and sometimes even 90s in the 1950s when half the country was dying of heart attacks and the life expectancy wasn’t great. What they found out was the biggest factor that helped these folks to have longevity and freedom from some of the biggest diseases was community. These retired immigrants, when they walked home from work, they talked to their neighbors. They ate with their families. They did things together. There are people that ask you, how’s your day? And they want you to just say, fine. They don’t want you to even go on and tell you about their day, but this community that we’re talking about actually wanted to find out about your day. They were actually joyous. And that, again, created this environment of protection. That protected these folks from so many diseases and I believe it’s because of inflammation.
It’s the same concept as purpose-driven living. When you have a community that supports you, not yes, people that just say everything you do is great, but people support you and you feel like you’re part of a community, human beings thrive when we are in the community. That same unrest is decreased. Your fight or flight mechanism, that unopposed cortisol goes down and you have decreased inflammation. There are multiple studies to show community based populations have increased longevity and decreased diseases and it goes back to your gut again to decrease inflammation. The last pillar I’ll talk about is spirituality. Spirituality doesn’t mean that you have to go and pray every day. If you want to, you can, but spirituality to me just means that you understand your place in the universe. You understand what’s happening. It means a walk and walk in the garden. Does it mean yoga? It could mean Tai Chi. It could mean any form of spirituality. And again, that has been shown to improve not only gut health, but your overall health.
It’s the same principle. What you’re doing is trying to decrease unrest in your body besides the toxins that you know that you can identify. One of the biggest toxins we have is under both stress and unrest in our lives. From our kids and their phones, blasting them with all kinds of stuff from the adults and in every kind of stress where your boss, your spouse, your entire life is filled with so much stress. You need a way to be able to oppose that. When you don’t oppose that, your body doesn’t know that your boss yelled at you or somebody screamed at you when you’re driving. It thinks you’re still chasing an animal. When we were hunters and gatherers, we had one job to eat lunch and not be lunch. So we have that great mechanism that was in place and we still have that within us. When we have this unopposed stress, this unopposed unrest. This spider flight is activated. When you follow these principles, these five pillars, you can really change that. And then it affects your gut, affects your brain, and it affects the rest of your body.
That’s the approach I give to folks. I say, Oh, listen, you don’t have to do all of it all the time because think about it: many of my patients are not even 30 or 40. They’re 50, 60, 70s. They’ve spent their entire lives living one way. And to me, it’s just taking one small step of these pillars and just doing it every day for a week and you see there’s a difference. Over time, they noticed dramatic differences and not only into their gut health. I was the other gastroenterologist. A lot of my patients were biased. They’re coming to me because they’re bloated, uncomfortable, having digestive problems, but what they don’t know and until I asked them is, do you ever feel like you have the symptoms of brain fog or, are you having joint pains? There’s so many connections between what they come to see me for and other more subtle signs. So, that’s how I approach giving them the keys to be able to help their gut health and then subsequently their overall health.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Say someone has a lot of these symptoms that you mentioned, and people go to their doctor or their gastroenterologist, is there some sort of testing that people should do to test their gut microbiome to see what gut bugs they need, et cetera? Is the average gastroenterologist going to be advising them like this or doing testing like this?
Partha Nandi
That’s a great question. Most will not. Most will just say, hey, you’ve got this and this is what I can do for you. I’m sorry I can’t help you. I think you have to be able to know the tests. This is why we can look at our book and we talk about ways in which you can test. There are some systems there. The one I’ve looked at the most is called Viome. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. Let’s say we talk about this is bad and this is a good microbiome, but those are generalities. We can get more specific. For example, you may be missing Prevotella. You may be missing certain species of a bug. So for you eating Brussels sprouts may not be the key. It may not be what you need, but maybe you need to eat less of those. One key is that when I talk about nutrition, you have to pick a variety of foods, not just one vegetable or not just one pasture-raised meat that you have. You want to be able to have a variety. When you get tested with your microbiome, it can vary. You should not just get tested once. At least I would at least do it twice a year so you can see if there have been changes in your microbiome that you’ve made a dent in because if you don’t do that, it’s not always a static thing, meaning that it may have changed by the time you last tested it.
When you do that, you also get recommendations on certain foods you can have and certain practices, certain supplements you can take. We’re giving general advice, which is good. But you can get one step further and really talk about, hey, can we actually see what we need? And even more than that, you can get, for example, should we take one of the short-chain fatty acids that these bottles make is butyrate. Should we just directly take butyrate? Because at the end of the day, when we’re looking at the microbiome, we’re looking at what it’s doing. We are interested in what it’s making and how it’s affecting our environment. So we’re getting better and better at actually going to the postbiotic that it’s made. It’s not that perfect because even though we may make mutarate and it looks chemically the same, it’s not in the same environment or the same form that the microbiome is making. I still think it’s worthwhile to feed the microbiome and know what deficiencies they have. I also think that taking it one step at a time and not overwhelming yourself with too much information is really important because otherwise you get lost.
So many of the folks that I’m sure are asking you for advice and coming to me, they get lost in the details and they forget the big concepts that you can follow every day that can make significant differences in their lives. I think if you make small changes that are achievable that leads to significant changes throughout your life. One of my favorite athletes, his name is Tom Brady, says, I don’t feel like I’m better than anybody else, but I make these consistent changes every single day and that leads to huge changes in the rest of my body. I think that’s the philosophy that we take. Listen, we’ve got evidence, for example, with strokes. We have experiments in animals that show that if you take a young mouse and they have a stroke, but you give them the microbiome of an older person, their post-stroke outcomes are the same as the older mouse. And then if you take the older mouse and they have a stroke and you take the microbiome of a young mouse, “their stroke outcomes” are much better, very similar, to the young mice. So just tell you that if you make these changes and like you’re talking about, more specifically, you can actually change the outcomes of even a disease like stroke. If I knew that when my dad was so alive, my dad passed away sadly in 2017. If I knew those factors, because at that time we didn’t have this kind of knowledge we do now, we could make some specific changes that may have changed the outcome for him. We’re talking about, will fecal microbiota transplantation change the outcome of somebody with Alzheimer’s Parkinson’s or stroke or multiple sclerosis? These are things that are just on the horizon, but if we go further back a decade back or even two decades back and start some of these principles, we can really make a dent in these diseases.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
A lot of what you’re saying is very simple, taking away some problematic foods in your environment, reducing stress in a lot of different ways and adding in some of the probiotic foods, maybe foods with oligosaccharides and sugars, and very importantly, not thinking about your gut issue. There’s just a physical solution like diet and whatnot. There’s also the spiritual and community component
Partha Nandi
I think that it has to all come together. You can’t just talk about, hey, and nothing is in isolation here. Your whole body is connected. I’m talking specifically about the brain in my book, but you know this will have effects all throughout your body and you have to be holistic in the way you think. If you don’t, then you’re missing key parts of it. That’s what I think is really important. In the book, we give support in science. To me, it’s very important that we don’t just say, well, you know, I had a couple of patients and this is what happened, or we talked to somebody. It’s really looking at the science and looking at research and saying, is this in this field of gut brain? There are very few of these placebo control studies that drug manufacturers make, for example, because we’re still at the cutting edge. Even 10 years ago, we didn’t have some of this information that we do now. So, it’s important to also support some of this to me with science and we talk about that in our book quite a bit and talk about how you can really change the environment for diseases like stroke and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, but also for people who don’t have it. Many of the people listening today don’t have those diseases, but what can you do to really optimize your brain function?
We talk about the executives. Some of them I know take ice baths in the morning or do all these hacks to be able to get the best performance. Well, all you have to really do is some of these simple things, and it’s simple when you talk about it, but it’s very complex when you try to do it. All of us have been there everywhere you go, there’s all these temptations and foods and activities that really wreak havoc in your body. Something as simple as getting on a social media app before you go to bed can wreak havoc on your sleeping habits. When you don’t sleep well, your entire body is in disarray, including your gut because that’s the time to repair it. So it’s really looking at all of these factors holistically to be saying, what can I do? And it goes back to having a purpose driven life. When you have purpose, you don’t have to be convinced to do something. Like my kids have these little iPads and when you forget to charge them because they know it’s not charged and ain’t going to be able to use them. It’s a simple example that when we know what we want, if we want to be able to do something that we find as pleasurable, we find it as important, then just it’s autopilot. It doesn’t have to sit there and convince somebody to be able to do it. That’s the key about being holistic and not just saying, I’m just going to do this. Most people think about diet and they think about changing your gut, but it’s way more than that.
The gut’s a muscular organ. If you don’t move, you sit in your butt all day long and wait for DoorDash to deliver the food, your gut will not be healthy. If you don’t move, you won’t have the milieu, the homeostasis of energy to be able to provide the right environment for your gut to function. Microbiome and the correct hormone production that is your immune system will be disarrayed. That’s why we have disease. At least 10 patients today have messages to me about Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. It’s an epidemic. So it’s the things that we’re doing. Every day it’s wreaking havoc, but it’s not inevitable, and we can make simple changes too. It has to be simple because if it’s complex, and it’s formulaic, and you have to do 10 things and 15 things a day, it just becomes untenable, and people can’t do it. That’s why I’d like to keep it as simple as possible, so people all over the world can really be able to reach the goals that they want to.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What do you want your readers to really take away from your book, The Heal the Gut, Save Your Brain?
Partha Nandi
Thank you. Brain health and the deterioration of brain health is not inevitable. You have the power in your hands to be able to change your future to be a health hero. You just make these small changes every day to be able to achieve the health that you deserve. I think that when we do that, we can really make a dent in this. It’s not a mountain that you’re climbing. It seems like it’s, oh my gosh, I have to do all these things. I don’t want to do it. It’s really taking small steps every day, actionable steps consistently that can lead to amazing changes that are proven by research and science.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I had a friend of mine. He’s passed now, but he worked as an attorney until his late eighties. He played tennis, which is so good for your brain as well, that hand eye coordination. He ate an amazing diet, mainly like a paleo type diet, and he was sharp as a tack and very active and healthy until late his eighties. I just thought that is what I’m aiming for. That is what I want, but he was very disciplined, very, very disciplined in all of his, every facet of his life with the exercise, the diet and, being purpose driven, working late to his 80s. A lot of people aren’t so purpose-driven and just can’t wait to stop working. But when you’re doing something you love, for me, I can’t imagine not working because I really enjoy what I do. But for him, it was just very inspiring and you can live a life like that. You can make those consistent choices.
Partha Nandi
Yeah, and the key is that he probably enjoyed himself. The thing that I’ve seen a lot of people do is they go to the gym, but they hate it. They do something, but they hate it. When you do that, you actually are underacting any benefit that you’re giving yourself because you’re constantly in a state of unrest. I mean bad relationships, bad jobs, all of it. You have to really examine yourself and make some tough choices. At least, most of us that are watching this can make those choices. There are certain parts of the world where people watch this, but they don’t have those choices. I understand that. So you have to do what you have to do. But for most of us, we have those choices. If you’re in a bad relationship, then make the tough choice and look for changes if you need to or at least get some therapy. If you’re at a bad job, there’s other jobs out there. Your life is not all about just continuing to live somebody else’s dream or continuing to look at social norms. It’s really about looking at yourself. When you take care of yourself, you’re actually taking care of your family and your kids as well. You want to be the best version of yourself to be able to thrive. Many of my patients are living to the 80s and 90s, but they’re in a nursing home. No, they’re getting a foley catheter to get their urine and they’re getting feeding tubes. That’s not what we’re talking about. You can do that just like your friend you talked about. The other part of it you have to really understand is what I want. If you do that, coupled with some of the techniques we talk about in our books, you have a great chance. There are thousands and thousands of people in communities that do this every day and they thrive. We just have to do it to be able to take a step back and say, it’s maybe not the big house, the big car, the big whatever that’s going to drive you because at the end of the day, that only gets you so far. It’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s so true. You have to examine yourself and say, what is it that I really want and how can I achieve it? If you do that, then you could break it down and we break it down in this book. We give recipes about, Hey, listen, if you don’t know what whole foods mean and how to be able to for your gut and brain health, we’ll show you how to do that. If you don’t know how to live purpose-driven lives, we’ll show you how to do that. There are dozens of people who have done this and they’ve done it successfully.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well, Dr. Nandi, thank you so much for coming on the Myers Detox Podcast. I love giving people resources like this, say when they go to their doctor and they can’t really get the answers, the underlying causes of what ails them so much. Having resources from a medical doctor who’s doing this every day and giving you all of those pieces that you need to really address the larger underlying root causes of your health issues. Thanks so much for your contribution. Everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning into the Myers Detox podcast where we have experts from around the world that are talking about detoxification, anti aging, bioenergetics, and so many of the kinds of advanced health topics that we talk about on this show. So thanks for tuning in.
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The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of the information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests’ qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
