686: Dr. Amy Myers on a Functional Take on Gut Health, Thyroid Health & Reducing Autoimmunity

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from WellnessMama.com. And this episode is all about a functional medicine take on gut health, thyroid health, and reducing autoimmunity with Dr. Amy Myers. And we go in a lot of directions on this podcast. She is a two-time bestselling author and internationally acclaimed medical and functional medicine physician who specializes in empowering those with autoimmune, thyroid and digestive issues to take back their health and reverse their condition. And she also did two and a half years with the Peace Corps in Paraguay.

And she set off on a journey that would lead her to later launch her now famous functional medicine clinic and her educational content and line of programs that you can find online. And we go deep about a lot of her specialty in this, including her own drastic story with conventional medicine and why she feels it failed her and how she’s vowed to help it not fail people in the future. We talk about the common triggers and causes in the rise of chronic disease, why she defines autoimmunity as a spectrum and the commonalities among them, how to know where you are on the spectrum. She talks about the five factors that can contribute, which are toxins, infections, gut issues, diet and stress, why three quarters of the triggers and causes are not genetic and are within our control to change.

We talk about the power of the mind and how much our inner voice relates to health, and she shares probably the most profound example of this I’ve heard. She talks about her four pillars of functional health, how to address and remove toxins in the body, how our gut cells turn over every 24-48 hours so they can actually repair very quickly, why we need a wide range of foods for gut diversity, including things like vegetables, spices, and herbs, and when to avoid fermented foods, how to know which plant foods are best for your specific genes and ancestral needs, how seasonal eating can help with gut health, and how to apply the 80/20 principle to optimal living. So let’s jump in with Dr. Amy Myers. Dr. Amy, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Dr Amy Myers: Thank you for having me, Katie. I’m super excited.

Katie: Me too, I feel like this conversation is long overdue and I’m extremely excited to learn from you today. I think to start off broad, some background on you might actually be the most helpful starting point for this conversation because you’ve said that conventional medicine failed you and you’re on a mission to keep it from failing other people. And I think your story illustrates a really profound reason why you do the work that you do. So let’s start there. How did you get into this, what is now your whole world and this work that you do?

Dr Amy Myers: Yeah, well, it’s a very long story, but to make it short, I grew up with parents that were very holistic. My father was a professor of Asian studies. My mother taught yoga and jogged back in the 70s. And so if we were ever sick, which was very rarely, he took Chinese herbs. My mother was very familiar with the microbiome, made homemade yogurt when we were little, homemade whole wheat bread. So I sort of grew up with this. My mother taught yoga, meditation, sent me to Transcendental Meditation when I was in high school. So I sort of grew up in a, I wouldn’t classify them as hippies, but just sort of, you know, that kind of world.

And I went to college, thought I was gonna be a psychologist at the end, decided that I wasn’t gonna do that and became a banker of all things. And then read a book called, The Road Less Traveled, it really resonated with me about sort of going out there and not doing what everybody else is doing. And for whatever reason, I always had a passion to give and to help. And so I joined the Peace Corps actually when I was 25. And on my way down to the Peace Corps, I read a book by Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing, and it got me reinvigorated in terms of natural healing, herbs, things like that. Taught myself yoga down in the Peace Corps.

Long story short, came back and decided I wanted to be a doctor. I actually moved out to Seattle to go to potentially naturopathic medical school. And after working with some doctors there, realized that even in Seattle, the conventional doctors and the naturopathic doctors were getting paid differently and just viewed differently. And I thought, well, this is kind of odd because I’m out in the place where they have this school and they’re supposed to be really respected. And so anyway, I made the decision to go to allopathic medical school, but with the idea that I would end up doing something holistic, natural at the end of all of it. So I took all my electives of an integrative medicine. I started a complimentary and alternative interest group. We even started a program at the university. I went to LSU in New Orleans.

And my second year of medical school, I started getting panic attacks. I was losing weight rapidly while eating, you know, Ezekiel bread and vegan butter at night, not to wake up, two pounds thinner. And finally had this tremor that sent me to the doctor and she brushed me off and said, oh, this is medical school stress. Your second year, you’re learning all these diseases and you just think you have all of them. And I said, wait a minute. I mean, I literally lived in the middle of nowhere before cell phones or anything in the Peace Corps. My mother had died unexpectedly of pancreatic cancer in four months right after I got back from the Peace Corps. It’s like, I don’t handle stress like this. This is not stress, something’s wrong with me.

So I demanded a workup and she called me back a couple of weeks later and I don’t think she really apologized and she said, oh, you have Graves’ disease, which is an autoimmune disorder of your thyroid. And that was what was causing all of my symptoms, the insomnia, the weight loss, all of the tremor, everything. And so I was given three terrible choices. One was to have my thyroid blown up like Hiroshima. The other was to take really toxic medication. And the other one was to have my thyroid cut out.

So I went back to my roots and I did Chinese medicine for a couple of months and I didn’t really see a difference in that. Meanwhile, I was eating lots of gluten and vegan cheeses. I was a vegetarian and on and off vegan for 27 years. And then ultimately I succumbed and I said, all right, I’ll take the medication. It seems to be the lesser of all of these evils. Within a couple of weeks, I was feeling horrible. My skin was dry, my hair was falling out, I was fatigued. Went back to the doctor and I was told that I was one in a million and I had toxic hepatitis from the drugs. So I quickly had to get off of that. I nearly had to drop out of medical school because I had to go get in bed and my liver was destroying itself from this medication, and basically had to figure out was I then gonna have my thyroid blown up or have it ripped out surgically.

I reached out to Andrew Weil, I looked in all the research, I could find nothing that gave me an alternative or natural approach to this. So I made the hardest decision of my life and I had my thyroid radioactively ablated.

And after that, I was still in medical school. I graduated, I became an ER physician at Shock Trauma in Maryland, and then ultimately an ER physician here in Austin, Texas. And… One day I just said, I’ve got to get back to my roots. I mean, though they, conventional medicine, treated my graves by blowing up my thyroid, and now I don’t have a thyroid, there’s gotta be something better. I’ve gotta get back to. I went to medical school in the first place.

So I went to a conference about functional medicine, which is really getting to the root of why you have certain conditions, particularly autoimmunity and figuring out how to correct imbalances at that route and ultimately hopefully reversing or healing, whatever’s going on with you. So that really resonated with me and why I wanted to go to medical school to begin with. And so I dove straight in and eventually opened up a world renowned functional medicine clinic.

I left the ER, wrote several books, which are behind me and, and, you know, went full force into functional medicine and now helped literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world, but certainly thousands of people with Graves disease reverse their condition and not have to do what I did. So that’s why I say it’s my conventional medicine failed me and is my mission to not have it fail you too. So that was a bit of a long story, but that’s how I got to becoming a functional medicine physician and then ultimately now owning a health and wellness company. As you know, Amy Myers MD.

Katie: Oh, and there’s so many specific directions I want to go in this, because I know there are many people listening who have some form of auto-immunity or thyroid issues. There are definitely people going through gut issues. And I also know that there are probably some common themes that run throughout a lot of these problems. So I’d love to talk first about what you see as some of the big triggers or contributors to the rise across the board in a lot of these problems that we’re seeing certainly in America, but in other parts of the world as well.

Dr Amy Myers: So in terms of all chronic conditions and autoimmunity, so I write about in my first book, the autoimmune solution, I was the person that coined the phrase, the autoimmune spectrum. So by that is, you have someone down here with little to no inflammation, and then you’re working your way up higher on the spectrum with more inflammation all the way to full blown chronic autoimmunity.

Now there are probably very few people have absolutely no inflammation as we know, babies are being born with toxins and whatnot in the world, but most of us sit somewhere in this spectrum all the way up to chronic disease or chronic autoimmunity. And there are five factors that I write about in both of my books, and that is toxins, infections, our gut, leaky gut, food, since our diet, and stress. And so I can walk through each of these and how they’ve really all of these areas have exploded for many of us. We know that there are more toxins in the world than there’ve ever been, right? We know that now looking at studies with cord blood that there are many, many toxins already in utero when a baby is born. So, and those toxins are increasing daily. And if you want, we can get into why that is.

We are, you know, a lot of children are already being, babies are being born with leaky guts. More children are being born with C-sections. More moms are getting antibiotics, you know, when in utero and getting these toxins, eating a diet that’s inflammatory. So babies are already being born with, you know, little gut microbiome or a disturbed microbiome with C-sections and just, you know, how we’re going through the world.

Our diet, we, you know, processed food. We were just at a big water park yesterday and looking around, I mean, the number of people that I saw that were just in weight. And I mean, I’m not even talking looking fit was very few. So we’re already, you know, we’re many, many people in our society now are just eating very inflammatory diets with these overly processed foods. As you know, the wheat has been modified. And so there’s more gluten in our wheat. There’s roundup in our food. And so we’re already having inflammatory foods. Leaky guys were having more toxins.

We’re living in a stressed out world. We have EMFs bombarding as we have our cell phones on at all times were available. The stressors facing us every day of just increased as well. And then infections more and more infections, right? I mean, we saw, you know, with the pandemic with Covid. I mean, we have these Infections, whether they’re viruses, the Parasites, their bacteria, they’re becoming super bugs, they’re becoming reactivated, they’re becoming, you know, they’re living inside ourselves and possibly getting reactivated over time. How many people do you know that have had COVID multiple times? So what is that doing to our immune systems?

And certainly, I hope in this conversation, we’ll get into the solutions because I’d never like to, tell people big, scary thoughts and that, and just to get them overwhelmed because I’m really a solutions oriented person.

But those are the things that I see that are really contributing to autoimmunity and just chronic inflammation that’s leading to, obesity that’s leading to… dysregulation of our metabolism that’s leading to diabetes, you know, all of these very chronic and frankly preventable diseases that we have now.

Katie: Yeah, like you, I think this is a very multifaceted problem. And I like that you take a multifaceted approach because I’ve seen many people wanna focus on just one of those areas. And certainly if it were just diet, I look at the data and say like, our diets actually haven’t changed enough to justify the rise in obesity, even alone or diabetes. There’s obviously many factors contributing, but also I know, and I know you speak to this a lot as well. Like you said, there are many solutions and there still is ability to live optimally when you have the knowledge to do that.

I also feel like you were ahead of the trend, you and your parents with the meditation side, you mentioned stress being a big factor. And not that that’s by any means a cure-all, but I would say the vast majority of people who come on this podcast even mentioned meditation as being a really valuable tool. And we know that like mental health and mindset also impacts our physical body and the research seems to just increase on that. I would guess many people also can resonate with even your story of having to demand a workup from your doctor. I hear from so many moms and women who know something’s wrong and are brushed off. I had the same experience being told everything’s fine, your thyroid is normal and having to demand very specific tests to even get an answer.

And then from there to figure out solutions largely on my own, because I didn’t have a you close by in my early phases that could help me get there more quickly. So I love that we now have so much more information and people like you who are helping people get specific targeted information. I’d love to go a little deeper beyond, I love for instance, that you define autoimmunity as a spectrum. I think that’s a really helpful tool versus a simple yes or no, do or don’t kind of answer.

But then within that, there are so many categories of autoimmunity. So are there common causes that can kind of show up in the body differently based on genetics for instance, or do things seem to line up with like specific triggers creating more specific types of autoimmunity?

Dr Amy Myers: This is a great question. I mean, the research shows that, you know, really only 20% is genetic based. I mean, back in the day, we thought as we all, I’m sure you’ve talked many times on your podcast about epigenetics. You had this gene, you got this disease. We now know that these genes can be turned on and off, and these SNPs. And we know that people, even without the genes for Celiac, can actually get Celiac. So it’s not all about the genes. In fact, about 75% of it is these environmental factors that I just mentioned. And so that’s actually the most empowering part of all of this, is that is in your control.

And that’s really what I talk about in all of my books is about, instead of getting weighted down by all of this information, think about that, two thirds or three fourths of it is in your control and things that you can do to change, which is how we’re able to reverse autoimmunity.

So back to the autoimmune, I mean, I could see three people with, let’s just say Hashimoto’s or Graves. And the reason that those three people have that same disease could be for vastly different reasons. One could literally just have a gluten sensitivity and leaky gut and we get them off gluten, heal their gut and their antibodies are reversing for Hashimoto’s.

The other could be that they’re in a, very stressful relationship and a horrible job and stress is their biggest trigger and they also have a gluten sensitivity. And then the third person could have all five of them. I mean, I know that throughout my lifetime and things have come and gone, I definitely had all five. And by the time I was seeing people with seven, eight autoimmune conditions, of course they generally had all five.

But in conventional medicine, as we’re taught to hear a disease, name the disease, give a drug, we’re not even thought to ask about what’s going on or look for the deeper root cause. But even if we were, I’m sure they would be saying, oh, well, it’s Hashimoto’s and these are your only causes. And it’s simply not true. I mean, I saw it day in and day out in my clinic of just, how people are coming.

Now, I would say based on the literature and the research of Alessio Fasano, given gluten and autoimmunity and the theory behind molecular mimicry, and if your listeners don’t know what that is, I’m happy to go into it, I do recommend that everybody who’s on the spectrum has antibodies or has actually been diagnosed with autoimmunity get off of gluten because of these cross-reactivity in this molecular mimicry. It’s so very strong, particularly with thyroid conditions or autoimmune thyroid conditions. So that’s why I did mention gluten in each of those examples because the correlation is so high that I do recommend everybody who has autoimmunity be off of gluten.

Katie: That makes sense. And certainly like my parents, for instance, have noticed that change themselves as they’ve gotten older and they benefited from going off gluten. Though I do hear from a lot of people that notice in certain other places in the world, they actually seem to do just fine with certain foods that they cannot eat in the U.S. And I’m curious if you’ve had experience with that and if you know any of the reasons why is the food supply that different in other places compared to the U.S.?

Dr Amy Myers: Yeah, so I too have heard that and I’ve traveled to Europe but because of my history and what I know, I don’t tempt fate and I don’t eat gluten when I’m out of the country. I certainly heard that time and time again from patients in my clinic that they did that. But I also had a woman who was diagnosed with polymyositis and she was doing very well. And then she went to Europe and she ate a bunch of gluten and didn’t feel like it affected her but then she came back and had a very big flare. So if you are diagnosed with full-blown autoimmunity, I still would not recommend that you do that. However, the theory behind this is that they have much, let’s just take Europe for example, much stricter laws about using Roundup, about genetically modifying their foods. They’re using ancient grains. They’re not using the same level of pesticides. In general, they’re eating a healthier diet but apparently the wheat is more of our ancient wheat.

And just to remind your listeners, so what happened with our wheat is we didn’t modify it. We hybridized it. And when we hybridized it, it meant that this could be grow heartier, it could grow bigger but it also had more gluten in our wheat. And so that’s really part of the problem is, and then you add Roundup on top of it, which is supposed to, you know, increase the permeability of your brain, your gut, all of the toxins with Roundup disrupt your microbiome, then we really have this problem, right? I mean, it’s not, it’s that our wheat has more gluten in it, it’s that it’s filled with Roundup, it’s that we’re living with leaky guts, most of us, and then we’re eating so much more gluten.

So it’s in everything, not just bread. It’s from our shampoos to the most of the sushi that has crab meat in it is not real crab meat, it’s actually a glutinous, you know, it’s actually all gluten to create this mock crab meat, for example. So we’re just getting exposed on so many different levels and in such a more intense way than our parents or certainly our grandparents or great grandparents.

Katie: And I’d love to now start going through from your ethos, the solution focused sort of guide and touch points of some of these different conditions. Because like I said, I know many people listening have or are experiencing some of them.

And I would say going in one unrelated tip that I always give in the beginning of this conversation is I learned to shift my, even my speech and how I talk to myself from instead of saying, “I have Hashimoto’s”, I would say “I am healing from Hashimoto’s” just because I feel like the mindset is a huge piece as well. But on that note, I feel like it’s really helpful to have the tools to know how we are going to heal from these various things.

And you’ve mentioned gut health as a foundational thing to a lot of different conditions. So I’d love to start there and hear from your perspective, what are some of the key things that people need to be aware of and avoid when it comes to gut health? And what are some of the key sort of universally beneficial things we can do to improve our gut health?

Dr Amy Myers: Yeah, if I may digress to one story that hints to your speaks to your speaking to yourself and it is a very powerful story of a woman in my clinic who had vitiligo and she had. She had moved here from Africa and she worked and she had been under a very abusive extreme situation and was able to come into the country because of that. And then she felt her need to give back to the people of her country that were also my immigrating into, into the United States was to be an interpreter.

And what I learned from speaking with her was that she had to, as an interpreter in a court of law, you have to say, I this and I that not they, you have to be the person to interpret. And so what I realized after going through many visits with this woman and not making a lot of progress is that I thought that she was taking on each of those people’s stories by saying, I, I this, I that. So she was reliving, though it was their trauma, she was reliving it as if it was her own trauma. And I suggested that she needed to give up her career or her job. She didn’t take that lightly, but anyway, about six months later, she called back or emailed me back and said that she finally did and her vitiligo was starting to resolve. So it’s just speaking to what you were saying and the power of the mind of setting yourself up for these, setting your body, preparing your body at all levels, preparing yourselves for healing. And that journey can be very different for everyone.

So back to the gut. Well, let me say that I have four pillars in the Myers way, which is the program that I came up with after working with tens of thousands of patients. And the first one is to get rid of gluten, grains and legumes. And I mentioned the molecular mimicry with gluten grains. I know legumes, you’ve probably talked about this extensively, can have anti-nutrient properties. They can have lectins in them, things that can irritate the gut. I was a vegetarian for 27 years. I mean, I had a lot of gut dysbiosis going on.

And then there are infections such as Candida, SIBO that are fed on carbs, even if they’re healthy carbs as beans and rice and things like that. So I do recommend that people give these things up, gluten indefinitely, but the grains and legumes, at least for days or longer till they start, heal your gut and then we can dive into you specifically. There’s a four hour program with healing your gut and we’ll dive into that and the specifics that I use.

Then we want to tame the toxins and that is really about, look we live in a toxic world. So I recommend if you are able to, to create an environment at home, at your office, wherever you’re spending most time, that filters these. How do we get toxins? Well, we breathe them in, we get them in through our skin and we ingest them in. So having HEPA air filters in your home if you can, having water filtration not just at your faucet but also you know in your showers, using all-natural toxin-free cleaning products and beauty products and then you know making sure you’re eating organic. So did I get through skin, breathe, yeah okay.

And then you want to work to get them out, that’s my two-step process. So you want to, how do you get them out? You pee them out, you poop them out, you sweat them out. So you want to make sure you’re peeing and pooping every day, you want to make sure you’re exercising or doing infrared sauna, something to sweat every day if you can. And then you know I use two supplements that of course we have glutathione and coconut charcoal. So acetylated glutathione, you need to make sure that it’s acetylated. Some people use liposomal, I tested them all in my clinic. I prefer an acetylated glutathione for me personally and what I saw found work best. And then you know so that pulls the toxins out and then something like coconut charcoal is going to bind it. So peeing, pooping, sweating every single day.

Then we want to relieve our stress. I don’t say, you know, get rid of your stress or, you know, because we live in a stressful world and you can’t just say, okay, I’m not gonna be stressed. You’ve got to find ways to give pause. So I have relieve stress and heal infections. And relieving stress is really about the things that we talked about. And look, I learned meditation, you know, 30-something years ago and I don’t always do that every day. So it’s finding what works for you, right? I mean, is that a walk for me? I do a lot of swimming. It’s the only place, hyperbaric and swimming, it’s the only place nobody can bother me and get to me. So those are big stress relievers for me, but you need to find what works for you, your downtime.

And then the infections are these chronic infections such as Epstein-Barr, herpes, these latent infections that can reactivate a chronic Lyme and dealing with these infections. And, you know, I can go through some ways if you want for those as well.

So that’s the four pillars. And then back to healing your gut, which is one of the major parts of one of the second pillar of the four pillar program. And there’s sort of the 4R approach, which I’m sure you’ve had a lot of people talking about. But again, the first thing is to remove. And what are you removing? It’s back to these foods. You wanna remove gluten, you wanna dairy. Gluten and dairy are the two most inflammatory foods, but sugars, processed foods, foods dyes, GMOs, I mean, you want to get these things out of your diet.

And most importantly, you wanna remove any infections that are in your gut. And this is different than those chronic infections. This is SIBO, Candida, Parasites. And certainly if you have auto-immunity, very rare, I saw anyone that did not have one or both of those. And they’ve now become, if you’re on social media, everybody’s talking about SIBO and Candida. I mean, back when I was, you know, you mentioned I was one of the originals. I mean, I was, I mean, back when I was talking about this stuff 10-15 years ago, there were not many people talking about this. And I saw it extensively in my clinic, getting rid of SIBO, getting rid of Candida. We can also walk through how, you know, I’m happy to share exactly how to do that.

And then you want to replace anything that’s missing. So are you low in stomach acid? A lot of people are, you know, they’ve been taking acid blockers. You need that acid to kill off Parasites. You need that acid to kill off SIBO, to kill off Candida. You need that acid, of course, to break down your proteins and the rest of your food. Do you need digestive enzymes? A lot of people are low in their digestive enzymes because they’ve been eating horrible chronic diets, or they’ve been on chronic PPIs, or other medications that have, you know, prevented their actual, you know, their pancreas and their gallbladder from actually working. So I replaced those things. Sometimes that’s temporarily, sometimes that’s, you know, very long-term, but a lot of times as people begin to heal, they can get off of these supplements. But in my experience, it is, it’s, you know, it can be, you know, intensive on the, you know, supplement and dietary lifestyle change in the beginning. And then, you know, as you move down the spectrum, you can see where you can free up.

You want to… you want to re-inoculate with a good high quality, high dose probiotic. Now, if you’re dealing with Candida, I recommend we have a hundred billion unit probiotic. If you’re dealing with SIBO though, I recommend a soil-based probiotic because SIBO is Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth and that can generally be an overgrowth of lactobacillus. And most standard probiotics or high quality, whatever, have lactobacillus in them and ours do because it’s the number one bacteria in our gut. And so that’s where I differ on those two.

And then we actually want to, remove, reinoculate, well, I guess repair. And I’m doing that generally. Your gut cells turn over every 24-48 hours. So they’re gonna repair generally on their own. But I typically recommend that people do something to help this process jumpstart this process. And we have a product called Leaky Gut Revive. It’s actually one of our number one products. And it is 3000 milligrams of L-glutamine, which is the amino acid that helps your cells rejuvenate, but also what we have in the product is a lot of different things that help you to produce mucus. So if you think about your gut, what is it? I mean, it’s a mucus membrane. And a lot of people are missing that mucus or have the mucus level has been disturbed. So it’s slippery elm, marshmallow root, Deglycyrrhizinated licorice to help your body create more mucus in the entire GI tract.

And so those are the four things that I do to help restore your gut health. And often the next question is, do I have to do these things forever? You know, it really depends on where you’re looking and where you are on that spectrum. And, you know, I take Leaky Gut Revive, many, many days of the week. We live in a toxic world and I just, you know, to keep myself as well as a probiotic and digestive enzyme, so.

Katie: Yeah. So I took so many notes on that. I love also that you talk about that simplification process that often it’s the taking away of the exposure and it’s not often that we have to necessarily do so many complicated things once we understand the problem.

And that I love also that you talk so much about the body sort of being designed to heal and that it regenerates and that it’s meant to move toward healing if we support it in doing that. And that story you told about her inner talk is probably the most profound example I have heard of that. That’s incredible.

Also from a gut health perspective, I would love your kind of confirm or deny from a doctor’s perspective. There’s also been on like Instagram and TikTok, a lot of circulating talk about how we need diversity in what we do consume to help kind of culture the right balance of gut bacteria. So you mentioned avoiding the triggers like gluten and dairy and legumes, but also it seems like a lot of us are eating kind of just a very narrow range of plant foods and that we can benefit from a wider range of vegetables and plants and spices that have different benefits. Do you agree with that assessment and things like fermented foods being beneficial as well?

Dr Amy Myers: Yep, so the short answer is yes, and I’ll get to fermented foods in a second, and if I get off on a tangent, please remind me. But so yeah, I mean, and also there’s even, depending on where your ancestry’s from as to what microbiota might be in different proportions within your gut, in your microbiome. So people who live in Asia or descendants of Asia, Africa versus United States, are you mostly European? There are ancestrally different microbiota, and so there are many tests. I don’t know if you’re associated with one like microbiome or Viome or somewhere else, so if you have one that you recommend. Look, they’re all, it’s pretty new research, so there’s a lot of debate about how accurate these things are. They can be helpful though, but not only do you want diversity within your own gut, you wanna make sure that you’re getting the diversity that is meant for your ancestral history.

And so that is very complicated, and understanding that, and so using some of these tests, I think that they can be good as a guide. And yes, if we’re looking back to how we ate, our ancestors ate, they didn’t have the, as you know, walk into the grocery store or Instacart and have someone deliver your fresh berries to you all year round. We ate a much wider variety of a diet and we stopped and started various things depending on when they were in season. And that allowed for diversity just inherently because you ate what was available to you. So yes, I mean, look, we all, even those of us in this world, right, where I believe I am, certainly we’re busy, we’re creatures of habits, we know what we like. It’s super easy, you pick out meal plans and you repeat them over and over. But yes, ideally we would all be eating a lot more diversity.

Back to the fermented foods, I believe that I differ here than many people. And this again is based on my experience as a clinician working with thousands of patients, which is since most people, at least that I saw with auto-immunity were coming in with SIBO and Candida, I do not recommend fermented foods right off the bat. And this was a very, you know, paleo fx. I think that’s where you and I actually met, you know, and I spoke there for many, many years, and I would always have people come up to me afterwards and say, I started eating all these fermented foods because everybody here is telling me to do that. And I got all this gas and all this bloating and I feel miserable.

Well, fermented food is meant to, I like to think of your gut kind of like as a fish bowl. And it’s fish food to feed all the fish, which are the good bacteria and bacteria, I mean, bad bacteria. You have good bacteria, bad bacteria, a little bit of yeast, maybe some Parasites in your gut. In an ideal world, it’s living there harmoniously in a perfect balance. When these things get out of balance, if you’re feeding in fish food, then the Candida, the SIBO, they’re gonna eat this up as well. So that is the perfect example. If you start to take a prebiotic, you take fermented foods and you’re reading somewhere and you take that and you get bloated, you have gas, you don’t feel well, it could be that you took too much, but generally, and you need to start off slowly, generally that to me tells me that you have Candida or SIBO or both because it’s feeding those infections.

So my recommendation for my patients and what I recommend in all of my articles is to hold off on the fermented foods and the prebiotics and all that stuff, get rid of these infections. Once you’ve gotten rid of these infections, you’ve gotten your microbiome cleaned out to basically all the good stuff, then start adding in the fish food, start adding in the prebiotics, start adding in the fermented foods and help to flourish and reestablish and keep that microbiome in balance.

Katie: And I know that it seems like SIBO and Candida are recurring themes. I’m assuming you see these a whole lot in your clinic. Any other tips specific to those and or just symptoms that people might… to pay attention to, that would be an indication that that would be a good thing to see if you have.

Dr Amy Myers: Yeah, okay. So yes, after writing a thyroid book and an autoimmune book, the number one thing that people come to us for is SIBO and Candida. So I would love to talk about these.

So first, Candida is Candida overgrowth. We all have a little bit of Candida, but this is when it gets overgrown. So what are some trigger words for me? Brain fog. That if I hear brain fog, number one thing that I’m thinking, besides maybe gluten sensitivity, is Candida, unexplained rashes, itchy rashes, things you’ve gone to the dermatologist, they don’t know when they’re like put a cream on it. That often is candida. Psoriasis, eczema usually has a candida underline. Of course, if you have recurrent yeast infections, you have recurrent dandruff, things like that, that is yeast. So, and then, so gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, you can have any of these, but generally it’s these skin issues and the brain fog is the number one thing I think of.

How do I deal with candida? You go on a low carb diet, a candida approved diet, and you’re not, in my opinion, eating these fermented foods. You’re definitely getting rid of sugars and carbs. And then what I use for my patients, we have a candida kit and program, so I created two supplements. One, Candefense, and the other is Caprylic Acid. Caprylic Acid comes from coconut. It’s the acid in the coconut, so it kind of pokes these holes in the E-cell wall. And then the candefense is enzymes that digest the cell wall. And then you re-inoculate with really good quality high probiotics. We have a hundred billion unit probiotic. So that’s my Candida.

SIBO is Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth. And the triggers that I hear there are bloating is really the biggest one. I woke up, my stomach was flat. I ate one meal. I looked six months pregnant. Rosacea is a big one for that one. And then the other is most people think of SIBO as having diarrhea, but it actually can cause constipation in a lot of people.

And there is also a SIBO Hashimoto’s connection, because if you have low thyroid, then your digestion slows down, the food is left in your gut longer, and then the bacteria there go in to digest and they’re just creating these different gasses. And then it’s also a three step program. The diet is very similar to the Candida one. In fact, you can basically use the same and we often have people who come to us and they’re treating both at the same time and I’ll be happy to address how to do that because it is slightly different when you’re trying to do both.

So diet, you wanna starve the yeast, I mean, starve the SIBO. Then you wanna prune back the SIBO with microbe. We use a herb microbe clear. Now, if you are seeing a physician because this has become more widely recognized and there is an antibiotic, Zifaxin, which I’ve taken several times. I’ve given it to my patients. It’s one of the few antibiotics I prescribe, very specific to the gut. It does generally work very well. However, it’s very expensive and most insurance does not cover it. So that’s why I created the micro clear because I had all these people in my clinic that could not afford to pay thousands of dollars for this antibiotic. I mean, some were so desperate. They did, but the herbs work really well. It’s, you know, berberine, wormwood, black walnut, a host of, herbs that just sort of pr want to kill all your good bacteria. Too much of a good thing created a bad situation, to kill back some of the you want to re inoculate you re-inoculate as I stated. So if you wanna treat both at the same time, what I recommend is it’s essentially the same diet. And then you can take the MicroClear, the Caprylic Acid and the Candefenol all at one time. You can work your way up and we explain how to do that. And then what you wanna do first is to take the soil-based probiotic and make sure you’ve gotten rid of the SIBO first. And once you have, you’ll then take the billion unit probiotic after that. So it would be like a 30 days instead of and are sort of 30 days, you’re doing 60 days of all of this.

Katie: That makes sense.

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And I’m glad that you brought up enzymes as well, because that was on my list to ask you about. It seems like it’s not even just what we eat necessarily, but also how much we can digest and absorb of what we eat. And it seems like I’m seeing more in research and from people I know like you, talking about the importance of enzymes, which can really be helpful as we get older, or if we have specific conditions especially. I see that in minerals as recurring themes right now. It seems like many people have struggles in both of those areas. Do you find those are common in your patients as well?

Dr Amy Myers: Absolutely. So just to be clear, the enzymes I was referring to in the in the candefense are enzymes that break down the yeast cell wall. But I yes, our digestive enzymes are one of our top sellers because so many people do have these issues of having been on chronic medications and whatnot. And I always said in my clinic, it is not the saying the old saying that you always heard you are what you eat. It’s actually you are what you digest and absorb. So there were plenty of people again, because they read the books before they came or they met me at paleofx and they were already coming in eating these really good diets. But then I would do lab testing on them to look at their minerals, to look at their vitamin levels, to look intracellularly at what was going on. And they were not getting the benefit of this. So you can be eating the best diet in the world. But if you then can no longer digest and absorb it, if you have low stomach acid and you’re not breaking down the proteins into amino acids, then you’re not absorbing it. If you don’t have what you need to break down carbs and fats, you may not be absorbing it.

Or, you know, if you have that and then it gets all the way down to your small intestine and then you’ve got SIBO disrupting it, or you have leaky gut and then you’re not absorbing these. So I mean, the gut, I always say is the foundation and the gateway to your health. I mean, if your gut is not functionally on all levels at an optimal level, you’re either already have problems or you’re going to have problems. And that is why because I speak so much about this, even though I’ve written these other books, I think people come to me for gut because I just saw it time and time again, and people who had no digestive issues. I mean, people who came in and said, oh, no, no, I’m eating this great diet. You know, I have two bowel movements a day. I don’t have any gas. I don’t have any bloating. I’m fine.

And then we do a comprehensive stool test. We’d see their digestive enzymes are low. We’d see they have vegetable fibers in their stool. We see, you know, we see their amino acids are low. And I could see it in all of these functional labs, not conventional labs, but functional labs of how, you know, they thought that their gut was fine. And they were eating this incredible diet, but without having their natural inherent ability to break down and digest and absorb things, absorb their nutrients, they were then deficient in these.

And, you know, in terms of mineral deficiency, I think that that’s probably twofold. One, our food is very different than it was for our ancestors. There are many, many studies that I know you’re aware of, of. You know, our soil is not as nutrient dense as it used to be before. So then the plants coming up out of the soil do not have the same level of nutrients they used to have. And then again, we’re living in this toxic world, our guts are leaky. So that’s leading to mineral and vitamin deficiencies. And it’s frankly why I recommend everybody take a multivitamin daily. I mean, I have an article on this about all the reasons everybody should be taking a multivitamin because of what we’re just discussing, the soil, the nutrient level in our food, our leaky guts, our inability to digest and absorb.

Katie: Yeah, I’m glad that you got to explain that so comprehensively, because I’ve wondered if this is actually another missing piece because of the depletion of our food supply and why we’ll see people who appear to be in really good health who will have these random conditions that seem to come out of nowhere. And it seems like at least some of them could be linked to mineral deficiencies that people wouldn’t necessarily even be aware of. So I’m so glad that we got to talk about that.

I’d also love to hear any tips that you are able to just sort of generally give to your patients or that you can give here are sort of the 80/20 that move us toward optimal or that seem to be relatively universally beneficial. One I’ve given on here over and over, for instance, is the importance of natural light, which is free. I’ve noticed a big difference even in my labs from getting morning sunlight and a little bit of mid day, midday sunlight every day, which makes sense when we consider that our bodies have an electrical component and that we need light for so many things to happen within our body.

But I’m sure that you have a much more comprehensive list. So for anybody who’s trying to move that needle toward optimal, what would be some of the things on that list for you?

Dr Amy Myers: So I guess when we were talking about toxins, I didn’t finish my thought of saying that, you said 80-20 and my mind just went to the 80-20 rule. So let me go to toxins and then I’ll talk about diet.

Toxins, so we have a home, and I understand not everybody can have these things, but we have a home air filtration system, water filtration system, all of these things that I talked about, we only eat organic in our house. And that is so that when I go out into the world, I make the best choices that I can, but I recognize that I travel. I have a child. We, you know, I was telling you, we were at a water park yesterday. They said no outside food. We brought outside food. I mean, we just explained we have a lot of food sensitivities, right? So we’re not forced to eat that food, but then I’m in very chlorinated water, right? I mean, I live a life, but if in your own environment, you can control what you can control, then you go out into the world and you do the best that you can. But there’s no way to avoid these things. And so I definitely follow that as a rule. Like, you know, be as strict as you can in your own home and then go enjoy the world and do the best you can when you’re out there.

Now, when it comes to diet, there are certain aspects that I don’t, when it comes to auto-immunity and the link with gluten and then the molecular mimicry and the cross-reactivity of gluten with casein, I do not recommend anybody with auto-immunity eat dairy or gluten. And so for me, those are non-negotiables no matter what. If you had a gun to my head, I would not eat gluten, or dairy, but so those are not negotiables. But again, I do think it goes back to what you were saying. If you’re eating organic or if you have the liberty or as you’ve moved your way down the autoimmune spectrum, it’s not to say I never eat sugar, it’s not to say I never eat corn, it’s not to say that I don’t ever eat grains or legumes. I’m in Texas, love some black beans and rice, but I do these things infrequently to where that I know when I’m drinking my leaky gut revive every day or, taking my enzymes when I go out, I can do these things, right? I’m well, but I’ve gotten hit with toxic mold three times in my life now. And I’ve moved up that autoimmune spectrum. And then I’ve got to get back to very clearly doing things, um, in a very deliberate way and being way more careful than when I’m well and can, can go back down, down the spectrum.

So I don’t know if that fully answered your question or if you want me to think about some other things that are free. I mean, stress relief generally is free. My swimming is free that I do. Hyperbarics may not be, playing with your child, playing with your puppy, going outside in natural light, sleep. I mean, the only people say, how do you do everything that you do? Well, it’s only because I do have a husband that if I need to, if there’s something happening with the dogs or a daughter gets up in the middle of the night, I need my sleep. If I do not get my sleep, I move up that spectrum on autoimmunity. So sleep is free. Maybe everybody doesn’t have the same support that I have, but sleep is an excellent free resource that allows your body to heal and allows your body to detox. And I make sure to the best of my ability that I am getting a solid eight, if not ten hours of sleep is what I need to really be optimal in my life.

Katie: Yeah, the almost 700 people I’ve had on this podcast, I’m yet to hear a single person say sleep is not important. It seems like the only universally agreed upon thing. And like you said, sleep itself is free. There’s lots we can do to optimize sleep, which I tend to prioritize even in my budget because we spend hopefully so much time sleeping that I feel like changes we make there have benefits and sleep makes all these other things we’re talking about so much more effective because your pure body is able to like rebuild and heal during sleep. So I love that as a universal tip, one that definitely cannot be overstated. So I love that you brought that up.

And as we move toward the end, a few questions I love to ask. The first being if there is a book or a number of books that have profoundly impacted you personally, and if so, what they are and why.

Dr Amy Myers: Well, the one that I thought of when you, I knew you were gonna ask me this question was M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. I thought I wanted to be a clinical psychologist, but I read that book, in high school, I believe. And I think the thing about it for me is my life has been the road less traveled. I mean, as you mentioned, I was really one of the originals back in functional medicine, speaking about all of this stuff. And you have to be brave to do that. I mean, to be frank, I wrote an article just literally quoting the CDC about things you could do in lieu of a flu vaccine and got reported to the medical board. And it was right before my first book was coming out.

I do feel between the Peace Corps, the Chinese herbs, traditional conventional medical school to then going to become a functional medicine physician that I’ve really embodied that in my life and just encourage people to follow the road less traveled. I mean, thankfully for people like yourself, you have helped get the word out and broaden the message that functional medicine and other things are available to people instead of conventional drugs. So thank you very much for you following the road less traveled and getting that out, but letting people know that you don’t need to be afraid to travel this road less traveled. And there can be great benefit at the end of it that doesn’t involve lots of drugs and a poor quality of life. It actually involves maybe simply giving up a couple foods, adding in some sunlight, healing your gut. And you can have an incredible life pain-free and drug-free.

Katie: I definitely second that book recommendation. And also thank you to the work of you and so many others who have helped make this message much more available to everyone out there. I know I hear from so many moms who are now moving into the functional medicine approach with their families, which is really encouraging for me to see, because I think when the moms start making the shift, that’s when society really starts to shift. And I know you’re a mom as well. So I’m really grateful for the work that you’ve done. And lastly, any parting advice for the listeners today that could be related to everything we’ve talked about or entirely unrelated life advice that you have found helpful.

Dr Amy Myers: That is a big question. But I think the only thing that is calling me at this moment, and I don’t know if you’ve done a podcast on hyperbaric, and I’m certainly not a hyperbaric expert, but I can just speak to if you’ve hit a plateau in your autoimmune journey, and you’ve been working with a functional medicine physician, and you’ve followed the things that I’ve laid out today, and you’re not getting well, look into hyperbaric, I have seen the most profound, healing from hyperbaric of a woman who was in, I had a plateau with, she was in a wheelchair and it just called me and I said, go do 20 sessions of hyperbarics and call me back. And she was walking again.

I myself got to a plateau in my journey at one point several years ago, changed nothing, only got into hyperbarics every day for almost a year. All of my autoimmune markers went negative, they’ve remained negative. I then got COVID, thought I was getting Long Haul COVID, five sessions into hyperbaric and it was completely gone. And certainly anybody dealing with long COVID, I would highly recommend hyperbaric.

So, that’s, you know, more and more places are popping up that you can go sort of like a sauna and pay for an individual session. This is not a plug and you can delete this, but you know, I have an Oxy-Health one and they have a rent to own, you know, situation if you are in dire need. And so that, I don’t know, I was just called to say that because I feel like it’s something that a lot of people aren’t talking about now. And I have seen some incredibly profound, just life-changing events with hyperbaric if you hit a plateau, or just as part of your journey of healing, that is really incredible.

Katie: Awesome. Well, I know you’ve mentioned several of your books and products today. I’ll make sure that links to all of those are in the show notes for you guys. If you’re listening on the go, that’s all at wellnessmama.fm. I know you also have a ton of educational resources available on your site, so I’ll make sure you guys can find those as well. Or of course you can Google her name and it will all come up. Thank you so much for spending time today, for getting to go deep on so many of these topics and for the work that you’ve done for now decades, helping thousands and thousands of people.

Dr Amy Myers: Well, thank you so much for having me and helping me to get the word out. And I really appreciate everything that you do.

Katie: Thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.