Post From drannmariebarter.com
Today on the Gut Health Reset Podcast, we are discussing leaky gut and food sensitivities with Dr. Vincent Pedre! Leaky gut syndrome is a growing concern in the field of gut health. It occurs when the lining of the small intestine becomes damaged, resulting in the passage of toxins, undigested food particles, and other harmful substances into the bloodstream. This can also lead to food sensitivities, which further exacerbates gut inflammation and damage. Over time, leaky gut can impair your immune system and even contribute to the development of chronic diseases. We believe a comprehensive approach to gut health that includes a balanced diet, stress management, and targeted supplements may be the key to reversing this damage and supporting healing. With the right approach, it is possible to heal your gut and start feeling better than ever.
In today’s episode, we will answer these questions:
– How did Dr. Pedre discover his gut health issues?
– What is behind the recent reported rise in gut issues?
– What should you do to immediately address leaky gut issues?
– How do you activate your vagus nerve?
– And more!
Still want to learn more? Schedule with Dr. Barter today!
Recommended Products From Today’s Show
About Dr. Vincent Pedre:
Medical Director of Pedre Integrative Health and President of Dr. Pedre Wellness, is a Board-Certified Internist and Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner in private practice in New York City since 2004. His philosophy and practices are a blend of both Western and Eastern medical traditions. He is a Clinical Instructor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as well as certified in yoga and Medical Acupuncture. His unique combination of medicine is best described as integrative or defined by a functional, systems-based approach to well-being. With his holistic understanding of both sides of the equation, he can help each patient choose the best course of action for their ailments to provide both immediate and long-term relief. His holistic approach incorporates positive, preventative health and wellness lifestyle choices.
Website: https://pedremd.com/
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Dr. Ann-Marie Barter is a Functional Medicine and Chiropractic Doctor at Alternative Family Medicine & Chiropractic. She is the clinic founder of Alternative Family Medicine & Chiropractic that has two offices: one in Longmont and one in Denver. They treat an array of health conditions overlooked or under-treated by conventional medicine, called the “grey zone”. https://altfammed.com/
*As always, this podcast is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure any condition and is for information purposes only. Please consult with your healthcare professional before making any changes to your current lifestyle.*
Transcription:
Dr. Vincent Pedre: [00:00:00] And there are so many people in the world suffering just from IBS alone. Not, not even if we start to take an into account, all the gut related health issues and conditions that are out there, but IBS accounts for about 11.2% of the population, which is worldwide, 896 million people living with a condition that is reversible through diet and lifestyle.
And yet the majority of those people don’t know this. The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.
Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Are you struggling with bloating, gas, constipation, and fatigue, but don’t know what’s causing these problems? The Gut Health Reset Podcast with Dr. Ann-Marie Barter dives deep into the root causes behind these issues that start in the gut. This podcast will give you the knowledge you need to heal your gut and reset your health.
Today on the Gut Health Reset Podcast, we are talking about food [00:01:00] sensitivities, the vagus nerve. Leaky gut in how you can reverse I b s. Thank you so much for joining us here today. I’m your host, Dr. Ann Marie Barter. And today my special guest is Dr. Vincent Pedre. He’s the medical director of Pedre Integrative Health and President of Dr.
Pedre Wellness. He’s a board certified internist in private practice in New York City since oh four. His philosophy and practices are blend of both Western and Eastern medical traditions. He’s a clinical instructor in medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as well as certified in yoga and medical acupuncture.
With his holistic understanding of both sides of the equation, he can help each patient choose the best course of action for their ailments and provide immediate and long-term relief. Dr. Pedre, it is such a pleasure to have you on the Gut Health [00:02:00] Reset Podcast. I’m very excited to hear about your new book, the Gut Smart Protocol.
What inspired you to write this book?
Dr. Vincent Pedre: Oh, wow. Well, this is my second book and it’s been a lifelong journey of dealing with gut issues since I was a child. Uh, from upset stomachs to severe constipation. To eventually turning into i b s after I had been on probably 20 plus rounds of antibiotics as a teenager, and as a result of that, I, you know, now I can say as a functional medicine trained doctor, that those antibiotics wiped out.
My gut microbiome led to leak, um, caused me to become sensitive to gluten and dairy, which were the top two food groups in the diet of a teenager. Um, and probably every teenager on the planet, you know, like cereal with milk for breakfast, [00:03:00] ice cream for dessert, sandwiches for lunch. And you know, it went on and on.
So, uh, I was getting overexposed to my top two food allergens and they were destroying my immune system. And I just kept getting sick over and over to the point that doctors were actually worried. And, um, sometimes, uh, this is actually. Crazy to think because I don’t know that this is a practice anymore, but this is back in the eighties.
Um, I sometimes wouldn’t respond to an antibiotic, so they would give me a shot of Gammaglobulin, which was pulled globulins from blood donors. And this is before we knew about H I V before the blood, you know, blood was being screened for all that. And thank goodness I didn’t, you know, pick up anything from that.
Um, but it was sometimes the way, and I could feel the difference once I got those gammaglobulins. [00:04:00] Um, I felt like, wow, this is what it feels like to have an immune system that will fight off an infection for you. But I, I had this desire, and I think this is partly why I went to medical school, to kind of uncover what is, what was the mystery?
Why do I get sick so often? And little did I know that, that it was right under my nose all this time because I didn’t learn that in medical school, we didn’t really learn about leaky gut. We learned about sepsis. Which person is really sick? Sick. They end up in the I C U and their blood vessels become leaky.
So there was a concept of leakiness in western medicine, but when it came to the gut, they would say, well, that’s not, your gut isn’t leaky. You know, it’s a semi-permeable membrane. It lets some things through some things we didn’t understand that gut permeability could be controlled like a dimmer switch.
And so when I finally discovered functional [00:05:00] medicine, and, and by then I, for people to understand, I was already a doctor. I had trained in internal medicine. They would feed us pizza and soda at lunchtime when I was in my training. And then I would be running to the bathroom afterwards. And I didn’t understand because you think, well, this is the way everybody eats.
You know, why is this problematic? And I wasn’t yet realizing the importance of understanding one’s own individuality when it comes to food and how your body reacts to Pood. And I honestly thought that this was just my, my matrix. I was born with a weak stomach. I felt everything through my digestive system, my nerves.
I always felt as a child if I was nervous, I had butterflies in my stomach. So I felt everything through my digestive system and I just [00:06:00] thought, this is my weak point. This is the way the rest of my life is gonna be, and I need to just accept that there are gonna be those moments when I don’t know what happened.
I eat something and I’m running to the bathroom afterwards. Then I discovered functional medicine and learned about the gut microbiome and realized, wow, um, I don’t have a well-balanced gut microbiome like it’s been destroyed by all of these antibiotics. And, and it, and in addition to this stress, you know, we can talk about that, the effects of stress on, on the gut and the gut microbiome and, and on gut permeability.
And so I changed my diet. I started taking probiotics. I started eating or organic, I started incorporating, um, more vegetables. I cut out gluten. Eventually I learned that I was gluten sensitive. I cut out dairy. I found some other foods that I was sensitive to, and I put a lot of caution to the wind thinking, you know, [00:07:00] this sounds crazy, but I’m gonna do it.
You know, the, the science is there and I’m convinced. And the changes that I saw immediately. Like I used to have a sandwich for lunch and then I was fighting to stay awake by three, 3:30 PM and I didn’t. I thought it was just being an overworked doctor, you know, working 12 hour days, like, you know, of course you’re gonna be tired at three 30 in the afternoon.
You wanna just take a nap, but, But when I say I was tired, it’s kind of like that Tom and Jerry tired, where you need to put a toothpick to hold your eyelid open because your eyelids are so heavy that you’re struggling to stay awake while I, I’m in the room with a patient interviewing them, and I think this can’t be because I need to be able to function for 12 hours.
I need to be as fresh. It doesn’t matter for the person who’s coming in at 5:00 PM They don’t care that I’m [00:08:00] tired. They need me to be as fresh as I was at nine in the morning. So I wanted to figure out why. And taking gluten out was a big factor. Within two weeks, my energy just started increasing, increasing, increasing.
And because I changed the way that I was eating for lunch and no more bread, no, no pizza, none of those things that we considered are part of the normal American diet. Um, I had so much energy and mental clarity that. I, I realized that this was not an experiment. This was gonna be a lifestyle for me, and I started working with patients on their gut health issues and not because I wanted to become a gut health expert.
Uh, I was already an internist. Um, I was studying functional medicine. I loved all parts of medicine, but I did it because it was kind of the unknown. It was kind of that, that territory that. There weren’t [00:09:00] a lot of good, um, remedies in Western medicine. You know, you give somebody an antip spasmodic, you give somebody, lack sensitives, you give someone a, you know, maybe, um, some type of antidepressant for I b s.
You’re not really getting to the root of the matter. And when I found that language, when I found functional medicine, it was like I found the home I had been looking for within the practice of medicine from the very beginning. And I always wanted to be a holistic doctor. I was into yoga, meditation, all that stuff.
And so I became an accidental gut expert. By taking care of all these people who kept referring patients to me. And before I knew it, I realized that, um, I was just at the tip of the iceberg. And there are so many people in the world suffering just [00:10:00] from i b s alone. Not, not even if we start to take an into account, all the gut related health issues and conditions that are out there, but IVs accounts for about 11.2% of the population.
Which is worldwide, 896 million people living with a condition that is reversible through diet and lifestyle, and yet the majority of those people don’t know this. And that inspired me to write my first book and what happened between my first book and the second book. There’s just been an explosion of research and understanding the gut microbiome and the gut.
And I mean, even western medicine is now. Can’t deny that leaky gut exists because it’s been proven in research and I, I realize working with gut patients that no two guts are the same. Mm-hmm. So how can their diets be the same? And that was the inspiration for my second book, [00:11:00] because I realize that if you have severe gut issues, you can’t eat this theme.
As someone who has moderate or mild issues, there’s certain foods that might not fit right for you in that moment. And if you have them, they can actually set you back and they can set you back for weeks, sometimes months. So I wanted to create a resource for people that didn’t exist out there, because most of the health books on the market are a one size fits all.
Mm-hmm. And what I realized after more than a decade of working with gut patients, Is that there is no one size fits all and you really need to personalize. And it was a much bigger task than I realized. But I, um, I like to live in the ideal. First I go into the macro level and think like, oh, let’s create this.
Like this is beautiful. And then when you start getting filtering down into the details, [00:12:00] you realize, oh my God, like. How am I going to personalize this for people and get them to understand how they can eat for their gut type? And, um, but I think I did it. I think I managed to, to create something that’s gonna help a lot of people.
And I hope, my hope with this book is that people are gonna feel heard and they’re gonna be seen, feel seen, because. Finally, someone’s telling them, you know, you’re not like the next person. And the way you need to eat for your gut may be different from your husband, from your family member, from your neighbor, from your friend.
And that’s okay, because that’s where you’re at right now. And understanding that is how you can heal your gut,
Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: right? So we know that. Um, These [00:13:00] gut conditions, they’re an epidemic. You know, they affect so many different people. Um, what is causing this epidemic
Dr. Vincent Pedre: of gut issues? Geez, I mean, first of all, I’ve gotta point the pit finger at myself.
And when I do that, what I mean is I’m pointing the finger at all the doctors out there who prescribe antibiotics that you know, Are not necessary. And to qualify that, look, I have saved people’s lives using antibiotics. Antibiotics ha can be very necessary at times. The thing is that it’s, I mean, even if you, if you look at the CDC data, antibiotics are overprescribed thousands and thousands of prescriptions.
And actually the, um, there was, um, there was an analysis that came out last year. That showed that Hispanics and African Americans are [00:14:00] actually more likely to be overprescribed antibiotics than any other en ethnic group, I think by 30 and um, 30% and 25%. So we’re writing too many antibiotics, and those antibiotics are destroying the gut microbiome.
It’s one of the biggest gut disruptors. Then you take all of the things that have to happen in our food supply from the, the shift to processed foods. To having gluten is present everywhere, but it’s not just that wheat gluten is present, it’s that the wheat has been changed. It’s been hybridized in the same wheat that we used to eat.
Our ancestor eat is not the wheat that we eat now in the United States. We’re eating the dwarf wheat that has 30 to 50% more gluten, and our genetics don’t evolve that quickly to be able to handle. A protein molecule that is actually very difficult for our digestive enzymes to break down. And what we know from research is that gluten increases gut [00:15:00] permeability by stimulating the release of a protein called zonulin in the cells that line the intestines.
And so it doesn’t matter if you’re normal, if you’re what we call non-celiac gluten sensitive, or you have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune intolerance to gluten all these levels. Have a certain level of increase in gut permeability. Now if you’re normal, you might not feel it so much, but I think also this is why we’re seeing people evolve chronic health issues later in life.
You know, because, um, Alessio Fasano, who’s a very famous researcher, who’s looked at the effects of gluten on the gut and, and, um, you know, what is, what is it that creates autoimmune disease in the body? And he came up with the triad. Which is there is a genetic predisposition, but your genetics don’t mean your phenotype.
It don’t mean that if you’ve got a gene that you’re going to express it later in [00:16:00] life. So there’s a genetic predisposition, then an environmental trigger, and what he found and hypothesize is that gluten, in some ways, the gluten molecule looks like the surface of bacteria. So the body will recognize it or.
Not, or in other words, not recognize it itself. So recognize it as an invader. And then third in this hypothesis is leaky gut. So if you have an environmental trigger, genetic predisposition, and leaky gut, you’ve got the three triggers for developing an autoimmune disease, a chronic health condition in your body.
So, I mean, throw in pesticides, pesticides, act as antimicrobials. They disrupt the gut microbiome. Glyphosate is a chelating agent. It, it also disrupts the, the gut microbiome and, and then throw in all the stress that people live in, in the modern world. [00:17:00] I actually think that our lives are more stressful now than they were.
Back in the 1970s when I was born pre-internet age, you know, and certainly technology has made a lot of things better. But at the same token, I think, and look, you know, we’re talking here, we’re using technology to reach people. I think there’s some great positives from technology, but I think there’s a lot of negatives as well, because I think in some ways they’ve had a loose touch with our humanity.
And our own bio rhythms and understand that we, here, we’re flesh, we are not computers. We’ve got a circadian rhythm. That circadian rhythm is mirrored by our gut bacteria and it determines a whole host of things. So these are. I would say some of the, the more prominent reasons, you know, you can [00:18:00] throw in alcohol like the, um, the abundance of, of the alcohol and, and drinking and, and I’m not by any means anti drinking or judging anyone who drinks, but the science is clear that alcohol causes disturbances in the gut.
Microbiome leads to leaky gut. And increases inflammation by increasing interleukins, like interleukin six, interleukin 10 in the body that then make you pack on more fatted in the middle, and then that increases inflammation and increases your risk for chronic disease. So, you know, there’s, there’s a confluence of triggers out there, and some of them are under the control of trained medical professionals.
Who should be more judicious about how they prescribe antibiotics? Cuz, and, and look, the truth is that we were in Southeast Asia. If we’re in Mexico, you don’t need a prescription. [00:19:00] You just walk into the pharmacy and you go and buy an antibiotic. And I’m not sure that that’s right either, because, um, I can’t trust the layperson to know when their symptoms require an antibiotic and when it doesn’t.
And that has led to a lot of antibiotic resistant organisms out there as a result. Absolutely.
Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Hey, this is Dr. Anne-Marie barter. Have you ever spent hours searching for the right supplements to heal your body and when you finally…