Taking Care Of Your Gut Health

 

Everything begins and ends with your gut health, from your daily mood to the body’s ability to heal itself. Tim Westbrook explores this interesting topic with global educator and keynote speaker Dr. Donese Worden, NMD. She explores the gut-brain connection that directly impacts a person’s mental health, which is especially crucial for someone recovering from addiction. Dr. Donese breaks down practical tips to support your mitochondrial health, the truth about the living bugs in our body, and why you should check your pool every single day. If you want to optimize your gut health to live a healthier and more vibrant life, this is a must-listen discussion.

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Taking Care Of Your Gut Health

Welcome to I Love Being Sober. This is the show that explores how to live an extraordinary life in recovery. I’m your host, Tim Westbrook, founder of Camelback Recovery. We’re going to dive into a powerful topic: gut health, inflammation, and the body’s ability to heal itself. Not long ago, I was struggling with serious digestive issues, SIBO, Candida, and yeast overgrowth. My gut was wrecked. That’s when I turned to our guest, who helped me radically turn things around.

She’s not only a brilliant practitioner. She’s also on a mission to transform healthcare. Dr. Donese Worden is a renowned physician, researcher, and health advocate who’s bridging the worlds of conventional and alternative medicine for over two decades. She’s known for challenging outdated medical thinking and delivering real personalized care. She’s a leading expert in metabolic therapies, mitochondrial health, and evidence-based natural healing. She speaks on global stages, advises health policy, and is launching a podcast tour with legendary motivational speaker Les Brown. Dr. Donese is the real deal. I’m honored to have her back on the show.

Thank you, Tim. I have to say that when you said you had gut health, and you needed somebody to help you get better, and you reached out to this episode’s guest, I thought it might have been Wayne. Here’s why. Stress is a huge piece of our topic. Studies show, and we know, that these companions right here that love us no matter what and no matter how bad a day you had, like Wayne, are maybe some of your best medicine.

I can tell you. My gut issues came to a head in 2024 when I had so much stress going on in my life. That was the pinnacle. We were talking about it before the show. I have had gut issues for a few years. They would be mild, and then they would come on a little more severely. I remember a couple of years ago, you ordered an SIBO test for me, and it sat in my cupboard.

Like any perfect patient.

That was for a couple of years. My gut got so bad. I finally went back to you and said, “Let’s do something about this.”

I say, “Remember that test from a few years ago? You still need to do that.”

Gut Expert Dr. Donese Worden

Let’s talk about gut health to get started. Let’s set the stage for gut health for the audience. What gives you the right to claim you are an expert on gut health?

I would say 25 years of clinical practice, and I’m a researcher. I’m a clinical researcher. I am also a published researcher, so I dig deep into everything. As a naturopathic medical doctor, day one of our school is that health begins and ends in the gut. Four years of medical school with that mindset to begin with, and then all this clinical experience since then, I have cases, patient histories, and data to look at. Are there other people out there who are more experienced in different individual areas as far as research? Probably yes. There will be PhDs, this and that, but as far as a clinician, I’ve been working with it for a long time.

That’s my experience. You’re one of the best researchers. Anytime I go to you with a question or when it comes to my issue, you don’t just go off of your experience and your past knowledge. It seems like you’re always digging up new material and figuring out the best way to attack whatever issue it is.

It’s finding the root of the problem. There might be more than one thing, but instead of, “Here’s a whole bunch of supplements. Take all these things. I hope you feel better. Here’s a medicine,” you’ve got to get to, “Why did the body get to this state to start with?” If you don’t change those habits, even if you get better with a few supplements, antibiotics, or whatever you’re going to try to do, it’s going to come back. It’s always finding the root of the problem. That means mind, body, spirit, and physical. You have to look at all of it.

What Does It Mean To Have A Healthy Gut

What does it mean to have a healthy gut?

It means that for the most part, your digestion is doing its job. It’s breaking down the foods. It’s easily passed. You’re having a bowel movement. We may talk about that in a minute, what a normal one looks like. When everything is working well in the gut, that affects your immune system, mood, behavior, microbiome, mitochondrial health, longevity, you name it. You’re asking the question, “What does it mean?” It means everything. Without your gut health, your body and your brain are not going to work well at all. It’s not going to be at 100%. It may be the demise of you as well. It’s important.

Understanding The Gut-Brain Connection

Can you break down the gut-brain connection for the audience?

The neurotransmitters are the chemicals that our body makes. Everybody has heard of serotonin, I feel better, dopamine, the reward hormone, and all these things. What they’re not realizing is that over 90% are made in the gut. They’re not just made there, but there’s a signal going back and forth from the brain to the gut. “Am I okay? No, I’m not okay.” It works both ways. If the gut is upset, the brain is not going to work well. You’re not going to sleep well. Your focus will be off. Your mood will be off.

If the brain is having issues with the reality of things that are happening in your life, that will affect your gut. That’s why you get an immediate stomach ache, or your stomach feels weird when something bad happens in your life. They’re a two-way street through the vagus nerve, which innervates almost every organ in your body. It’s not just brain-gut. It’s every system in your body. That direct two-way street between the brain and the gut is very important. The more we study it, the more we realize that they are highly connected.

If the brain is having issues with reality, it will affect your gut. Your stomach feels weird when something bad happens in your life. Share on X

I’m pretty healthy. I exercise, I eat healthy, I get enough sleep, I pray, I meditate, and I do breathwork. I’m very healthy. On the outside, I look healthy. I’ve got these major issues with my gut. I don’t think I’m the only one. As I talk about it, it seems like there are a lot of people. Tell me about it.

Seventy million Americans have been diagnosed with digestive health issues. Here’s the thing. Heart disease is our number one killer. Number two is cancer. It’s going to overtake heart disease. Guess which body system we spend the most money on and the most visits to? It’s not for the heart. It’s not for cancer. It’s with gut health. It is the number one reason why people are going to the doctor. We’re spending billions of dollars on it. You’re not alone. It’s big.

It’s one of those things where people can continue living and ignore it.

For a while, until you’ve got a constant stomachache. You can’t think. You can’t sleep. You’re running to the bathroom, or you can’t go to the bathroom. You’re in pain until you can’t ignore it. That’s a lot of people who wait until then. If you’re healthy enough, you could ignore some of those not-quite-perfect symptoms, get a little bloated or a little gassy, or whatever it is. You can ignore it. Most people go, “Doesn’t everybody have that issue?” No.

Common is not the same thing as normal. People think it’s common. Doesn’t everybody expel gas all the time? No. Doesn’t everybody have some bloating? No. It’s common, but it’s not normal. We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves and start knowing how important it is for our gut health. From longevity, mitochondrial health, all the biohackers, wearing all the wearables, and all the things that we’re doing to try to live healthy and live a long time, your gut health is one of the main things.

How Gut Health Applies To Mental Health And Recovery

A lot of people don’t know what to do. We’re going to get there because it’s a big deal. I can tell you. I’ve been working with you for almost a year on my gut. I feel way better, a gazillion times better now than I did a year ago. How does gut health apply to mental health and addiction?

It is those neurotransmitters that we’re talking about. The brain chemistry has a lot to do with addiction, dopamine, and all this, which your audience is already very aware of those neurotransmitters and how they interplay with addiction and mental health. If those neurotransmitters and hormones are not being modulated and not being told to do the right thing at the right moment in the right ratio, it’s going to affect everything that has to do with addiction and mental health. It’s one of those areas where we need to spend more time in recovery. Anybody who is working in these areas has got to start paying attention to their gut health because that makes a huge difference.

Early on in recovery and early on in sobriety, if an alcoholic gets sober, alcohol is sugar. I know for me, when I get sober, I’m cake, pie, Jolly Ranchers, ice cream, or whatever. I had to get that sugar. How are we making sure that we’re eating the right foods and we’re giving our bodies what they need?

Part of that is going to be on the mental health side, the counseling. Some of it is physical. You’re craving sugar because you were used to it from the alcohol. The body’s blood sugar goes down, and the body goes, “I’m craving sugar. I need more.” Something happened here until it gets better. There are ways to modulate that and help those clients be able to get better and make that trajectory easier after alcohol, so they’re not craving that sugar as much. There are ways to look at them individually and personalize a program to help them.

You’ve got to look at the emotional side of it, too. Why were you craving alcohol? It’s probably the same reason why you’re still craving some of the sugar. What are you missing in your life? You’re craving some sweetness or some goodness. Insulin resistance and all the things that we look at very deeply need to be looked at. It can help the recovery process be a lot easier if we personalize programs for people of what they’re dealing with. It is what you do here at Camelback Recovery, what your deal is, and what you’re doing with your clients. You’ve got to look at all of it.

Tim’s Journey From Gut Chaos To Recovery

Let’s talk about my journey from gut chaos to recovery. I came to you. I had a bunch of issues. The first thing you said was, “Let’s get you tested for SIBO. Let’s get you tested for parasites. Let’s do a bunch of tests.” Let’s talk about what happened. First off, why do you test first before making any other recommendations?

I don’t like guessing. I like to know what I’m treating because you could go down a whole lane, spend a lot of money and a lot of time on treatments, and it’s not getting to the root of the problem. I need to talk to you for a while to know how much of it is stress. I need to talk to you for a while to know how much of it is your diet or your lack of exercise. Those are huge. When it comes to the biochemistry of the body, I can’t talk to you and ask you, “Do you have yeast?”

I can look at your tongue. I can look at a couple of other things, but the testing allows me to narrow down what, on the physical level, is going to need some help for you to be able to make the behavioral changes that you need to make. I don’t like guessing. I never have and never will. More information is better. In the long run, it saves money and time.

 

You’re a fact finder.

I am very high on the Kolbe score for those of you who are wondering what we’re talking about. It’s not as high as I would think. I’m only an 8. I’m not stuck.

It is pretty high. I’m a 2.

You want to get things done. I want to research it. I like to understand what I’m dealing with, all the pieces, instead of one narrow piece. Here’s the physical side. Here’s the mental side. Here’s what’s going on spiritually and not going on at all with a connection outside of themselves. I want to look at all those pieces at once, then I’ll have a clearer picture of what to do and in what order we need to do it.

You have to look at everything. It’s not just the physical signs. It’s mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. You’ve got to look at all of it. I don’t know if you remember when I came to you. Can you walk us through the process?

You told me you were going to ask that. I had to print this out right here. You asked me to share this. We had done a comprehensive stool analysis a couple of times. We did one in 2024 in August, and then we repeated it in January. What I want to rule out is, “Are there any parasites that we need to deal with?” That’s the big thing right now. Everybody says everybody has parasites. That is not true. I worked with the leading parasitologist in the world, Dr. Omar Amin, and studied with him for four years. The CDC uses him. He’s the guy.

I know that not everybody has parasites. Probably a few more have it than they think, but not everybody has it. Rule that out. When he’s looking at that, he’s also telling me, “Is there mucus? Is there yeast? Do you have particles in there that tell me you’re not breaking it down?” He looks at the comprehensive stool analysis. You have to poop into a big hat or the Saran Wrap, the whole thing, to look. You can tell a lot by what’s happening in the digestion by looking at the end result.

Are you always going to have a stool analysis done?

No. Sometimes, when I talk to somebody. In your case, if you don’t mind me sharing, I remember you said you had some bloating. It wasn’t just after meals. It might have been worse after meals, but you had bloating. Bloating is a big red flag to rule out SIBO, which is small intestine bacterial overgrowth. You will not find that on a colonoscopy or an endoscopy. They can go in both ends. They can’t get to the small intestine like that. The only way to test that is the breath test that you took, which I have here. I want to look at that to see, “Do we have a small intestine bacterial overgrowth?”

That might be one thing, but you might also have a parasite. You might have yeast. You might not be breaking down your food. You may have a food sensitivity that is keeping inflammation going in the gut. You might have other things that we have to look at. I don’t run everybody by these tests. It’s what you would have been telling me, what your symptoms were for me to go, “These are the tests that make sense for those symptoms.”

The Right Time To Get A Colonoscopy

You mentioned a colonoscopy. It’s recommended for people to get a colonoscopy before they’re 45 or 50 or something like that. What do you find out when you do a colonoscopy? Why did you not recommend a colonoscopy?

The colonoscopies, we know now that even though they keep everything sterile, there are bacteria that can grow on some of the tools that they use. We were seeing infections and problems from the colonoscopy. If it’s not needed, I think it’s not needed. You have to look at family history. If you have a colon cancer history in your family, it is probably better to do it younger. Here’s the other thing. We are seeing more colon cancer cases in young people. It used to be 50 and above. Now, it’s in 30 and 40-year-olds. We believe it’s lifestyle, environmental stress, and all the things that are happening in the younger groups of 30 and 40. We’re seeing a lot more of that.

 

If you have symptoms that haven’t been discovered, that we say, “Let’s run some tests. You’ll get better with treatment,” we’re all right. If you still have symptoms, and you have a family history, you should do it earlier. If you don’t, then you could start at the typical 50 years old. If you’ve got one or two in a row with nothing showing up, I don’t know that it’s worth repeating. What are they going to see? They will see, “Are there any polyps? Any growths in there?” They’ll say, “We took them out. It’s pre-cancer. Don’t worry. It’s not cancer. It’s called pre-cancer.” People say, “They said it was normal.” I said, “Let me see the report.” I look at the report. They took out three or four polyps, and the patient heard nothing showing up. Something was showing up.

Those polyps are there because there’s inflammation. Something made those grow. We need to pay attention to what made those grow. I want to hear, “They didn’t see anything. The colon looked healthy, nice, and pink. Everything is working well. No polyps.” That’s a normal colonoscopy. People still think normal means, “I don’t have cancer.” There’s a big difference. It can show us what we call the growth pathology, what they see. They see something. They’re going to snip it off, do a biopsy, snip it off, and do a biopsy. They’re not going to see at a microscopic level that you’ve got a growth, or they’re not necessarily going to see parasites. You’re not going to see any of that. You still need to do the tests that look at that microscopic level, not macro, where we are just looking at the colon.

You were talking about SIBO. I wanted to ask you about a colonoscopy, and I heard you mention it.

Dealing With An Overgrowth Of Bacteria

It’s all good. In your case, we identified Candida and a common yeast. We have bacteria and yeast all the time in our colons. You also had an overgrowth of bacteria, normal bacilli. What does that mean? What do we normally find? What kind of bacteria? E. coli, Salmonella, it’s all there. It’s when it grows out into a larger amount than normal. Now, you’ve got an infection. You had an overgrowth of bacteria. You had mucus. All that is the body trying to coat itself because it’s so inflamed.

It creates mucus, like we do when we have a cold. That’s a sign of inflammation, but you didn’t have undigested tissue. You didn’t have squamous. You didn’t have other things that made me more worried, that I would have said, “I want you to go do a colonoscopy.” You did have Candida, and you had dividing yeast. It was active. You were feeding it something. You’re going to say, “I don’t eat sugar. I don’t have alcohol. I’m not eating carbs.”

Guess what else can feed that? Stress and all the other pieces. It’s not just the foods that allow these things to overgrow, yeast, Candida, which is a fungal type of thing, fungal spores, and bacteria. Your garden was growing the wrong kind of things. It didn’t have the right worms in there. It would be the way to say. The next time we looked at it, though, you didn’t have the mucus. The inflammation had gotten better, but you still had bacteria, Candida, and all that.

That’s why I said, “We’re going to deal with that. We’re going to be able to help you with that.” The SIBO test came back. There are two types of gases, or two types of bacteria, that can grow in there and cause that puff or that bloating, hydrogen and methane. You had a little bit of both. What they do is, after a meal or after a certain time, it’s supposed to go up and down like normal. Yours went up faster than it should have, so we knew that you were producing methane gas and hydrogen. You had both kinds of SIBO.

I remember when I got the test results back. You said, “Here’s the deal. There are two kinds of SIBO. You got both of them, and you got it bad.” Why did I get SIBO?

There is a lot of theory around that, or hypotheses. Some of it is those bacteria usually are easier to grow in the upper or lower in the colon. They’re easier to grow out in those gardens. That small intestine is pretty well protected. It should be. Sometimes, we don’t have enough stomach acid to break things down, to break down some of those infections before they get into the small intestine. There are different ways that it can get in there. Sometimes, a few will sneak in there, but if your immune system is in great shape, it’s going to take care of it.

If stress is on board or all kinds of other things that can decrease the immune system, when the immune system is down and you get a little leak of those bacteria, they’re going to populate in there. They’re going to live there and say, “I like it here. I’m going to stay.” That’s for the whole colon, small intestine, stomach, and all the way up to your esophagus. It’s all about the microbiome. It’s about what bugs are supposed to be where and what pH is supposed to be where.

When you are suffering from stress, your immune system goes down. Bacteria will take advantage of it and populate your body. Share on X

What happens is people get a little GERD, a digestive symptom coming up, and they’re like, “I need to take an antacid.” Over time, we know antacids can make things worse. They have also been linked to cancer and also been linked to osteoporosis, even in men, because they block your absorption of your minerals that you need for healthy bones. There are a lot of problems with that.

Sometimes, that is happening not because you have too much acid, but because you don’t have enough. You’re not breaking down the nutrition from your foods. One of the main causes of a stomach ulcer is H. pylori. That’s a bacterium. What is one of the main causes of growing out H. pylori? Acid blockers. You’re turning off the acid that would have been killing off some of that H. pylori. It’s a vicious cycle. You have to know where you’re at. That’s why some of this testing is needed.

Differences Between Antibiotics Vs. Herbal Supplements

I have SIBO. I have Candida. I have this yeast overgrowth.

You have bacterial overgrowth.

You made some recommendations, if you remember what those recommendations were. We went on an antibiotic protocol. Let’s talk about the protocol, what you had me do. Also, you had me go on antibiotics. Why antibiotics versus natural versus herbal supplements and so forth?

We used to do pretty well with herbals. None of us ever wants to do an antibiotic if we don’t have to because it destroys the mitochondria, which can cause cancer and everything else. It is a whole other show on mitochondrial health. We don’t like antibiotics except when they make sense, and we don’t have another way to get to it. What we have found is that the old way of us working on SIBO does not seem to be working very well. It’s because the bugs have become resistant.

You know how antibiotics are becoming where a lot of them don’t work anymore. It’s because the bugs have learned it and become resistant, and we’re losing our antibiotics. We’re also losing some of these old, ancient herbals that we’ve got because the bugs have figured those out, like they figured out the antibiotic. I still have some patients that I will try the natural way with. We’ll give it a shot. Let’s see if their immune system, or I think that it’s going to be worth it, or their pocketbook. They can do it because it’s a long haul. It’s going to take months and a lot of money.

What I found was that when we were doing that, it used to work pretty well, these protocols, then it stopped working. It was maybe one or two people out of ten for whom it might work. This isn’t working very well. Being a researcher, I called these companies that do all these tests. I said, “What are you guys seeing?” I know what I’m seeing clinically. It looks like we’re not doing well on the natural end. They go, “You’re right. It takes an antibiotic nowadays.” Even then, sometimes, the antibiotics don’t work because they’ve become resistant to that. You keep having to change some things. In your case, it worked. The antibiotic worked.

You put me on two different antibiotics, and you rotated. I rotated every ten days. After three months, I think it was gone.

You pretty much know if you’re not bloating, that’s a good sign. You can spend the money and retest, but if you’re not having the bloating, then we can say, at least we’ve knocked it down enough where maybe your immune system will take care of it from there. It will be able to do its job. That’s the new protocol. The reason why we had to do two antibiotics is that those bugs are smart. They have found a way to be resistant to antibiotics and the natural treatments for SIBO.

I have a friend who ended up going to another naturopath. Her naturopath went the herbal supplement route. Here we are, nine months later, and she’s still dealing with it. To your point, the herbal supplement route is not working these days.

Give it three months, or even a month. You should start feeling some relief. If you’re not, then you’ve got to say, “This is not working,” and longer is not. I know that a naturopath will say, “Let’s work on the microbiome. Let’s work on the garden. We’ll do probiotics. We’ll repopulate. We’ll do all these things.” That’s correct thinking. You’ve got to change the terrain, or else all this stuff is going to keep coming back. You still have to fix the garden, but sometimes, you’ve got to kill off the bad stuff out of the garden. You’ve got to get your army involved and kill off the bad guys, so you can work on the garden. Sometimes, we want to work on the garden and hope that the body will fix it or be able to get rid of the bad guys. Sometimes, it’s too many in the army.

I’ve heard that once you have SIBO, you might always have SIBO, or potentially, it’s going to come back. You might relapse.

If you don’t take care of that garden. If you don’t change the garden, you haven’t changed anything. It’s a matter of time for it to probably come back. If you’re working on tilling your garden, working on the microbiome, eating foods that are fermented, helping the gut microbiome, and getting the inflammation down, there’s no reason for it to come back. If you had a reason why it started and you’re still living your life that way, it’s probably going to come back.

If you go back to doing what you were doing, you’re going to get what you always got.

Is that a recovery?

It is one of those things.

It is the same thing with your gut. You’ve got to change something.

We had the SIBO. Anything else?

With the antibiotics, you’ve got to be replacing the good bugs at the same time. That would have been in your timing. If you take this antibiotic, then four hours later, you have to take this probiotic and put the good bugs back in. If you do the good bugs at the same time as killing off all the bugs, good and bad, then you’re not replacing them. That’s why the protocol involved certain probiotics, certain bugs that we know are going to be killed by those particular antibiotics. I’m using certain strains of probiotics and put those back in there so we won’t have as much damage from the antibiotic. I don’t have your chart in front of me, but usually, I’ll talk about NAC as well, N-Acetylcysteine.

That protects the mitochondria from the antibiotic. At the same time, I’m trying to protect your mitochondria and trying to put them back in and repopulate your garden. When I say your garden, when you’re born, you have a thumbprint that doesn’t change. Your microbiome that you’re born with is a thumbprint. The only thing that changes is if you have multiple antibodies close together, then your thumbprint is going to change. Otherwise, that thumbprint is you. It is your microbiome.

The microbiome you are born with is unique, like your thumbprint. It only changes if you have multiple antibiotics close together. Share on X

We’re learning more every day about this, which is fascinating. The more we learn, the more we’re going to be working on the mitochondria inside the cell, that little powerhouse. We’ll be working on the biome of your skin, of your gut, and of your eyes. Every cell, we’ll be working at that level. We’re going to have some good medicine at that point. Maybe we won’t have to rely on antibiotics, which we’re not going to have for too much longer. For years, epidemiologists have been saying, “Quit prescribing antibiotics, unless it’s your last resort, because you’re making the bugs become resistant.” It has already happened. Many of the bugs are resistant now.

Changing And Improving Diet

You also had me change my diet. You had me decrease my carbs, increase protein, and increase fat. Maybe I needed to decrease my sugar and my carbs.

That’s right. The carbs are because it was a sugar thing. If you have the yeast overgrowth, like you did, and you had the Candida, anything that grows in the ground is more likely to have some fungal in it. Coffees, a lot of times, have mycotoxins or fungi in it, making sure that you’re not putting these things in every day. For a while, you’ve got to watch what foods you’re eating. There’s an anti-Candida diet, which is low in sugar and low in carbs.

Anything that grows in the ground, be careful of. You can start eating those foods again after the body has healed itself. You add them back in a little at a time to see how you do. If you eat something and it starts causing you a problem again, then you’ve got to say, “Do I have a food sensitivity to that? Is that something causing inflammation, or is my body not ready for the hit yet?”

I ended up going on a keto diet, and it seemed to work.

You’re a perfect candidate because you exercise extremely hard. When you’re in ketosis, those ketones are good energy. That’s your favorite fuel for your brain and your mitochondria. It’s a great way. When you switch from using sugar as your fuel to fat, that is good. It is not just a fat burner for people who want to lose weight. It’s not how we use it in the cancer world or anything else. We’re using it as the best fuel that you can get. You don’t have to be on a strict ketogenic diet, but a low-carb diet. We know your body likes to grow out yeast and Candida. We know that. It likes it. Maybe it was your thumbprint, mom or dad, or something, but we know that you’ll be more likely to have an issue if you start eating a lot of carbs and sugar again.

It seems like a lot of people have Candida. Is it true that a lot of people have Candida, it’s hard to get rid of, and some people don’t ever get rid of it?

No, you can get rid of Candida. You’ve got to starve it out. Don’t give it food. Feed it what it doesn’t need. I’ll tell you one of the simple things, and this is very funny. Oil of oregano is great. It’s been around for a long time. Oil of oregano is a great little natural anti-fungal and anti-Candida. Don’t feed it. Get on the right diet, not to feed it. Oil of oregano alone can be helpful. With garlic, allicin is in there. Some natural things can work well.

My father is 91. He golfs and does everything. He’s extremely healthy. He started having some breathing problems. I didn’t know if it was cardiovascular. I took him to the hospital. Nobody could figure it out. I remembered I took him out of his house. He’s living with me because there was mold that I found behind a picture. Sure enough, I said, “Get the infectious disease in here. You guys aren’t finding anything, heart, lungs, you’re not finding anything. There’s a reason why he’s got an issue going on here.” It was a mold exposure. We found the two molds and what had been found in the house that we were in the middle of fixing up.

Is this place here in Arizona?

Yes, Arizona is one of the worst places. If you have a leak anywhere in your house, it is very likely to grow two of these bad molds, Stachy and Penicillinase. There’s Aspergillus. They grow easily in Arizona. We think, “We’re not mold.”

Because it’s so dry here, I thought we didn’t have mold.

You would think that. We have a lot of mold. Anytime you have a leak in your house, you’ve got to get on that right away. Ozone, you’ve got a remediation company. It’s funny. They said, “You’ve got to go see an infectious disease specialist when you get out of the hospital. I’m like, “I already know what to do, but I was already doing it.” We went anyway. The infectious disease specialist said, “Oil of oregano.” I said, “I like you already.” He knew the antifungals would be hard on the liver. It might not work. He knew the medicines had some restrictions on how they could work. Oil of oregano is for anybody who has those issues.

That’s the recommendation.

They’ve got to be careful with their own medicines. I want to make sure we get to say that in here. Some medications could interrupt or interfere with it, so you’ve got to talk to your doctor, but for most people, oil of oregano is a good one.

Why You Should Check Your Poop Every Day

That’s enough of my journey. I appreciate that. Hopefully, that helps somebody out there. Let’s move on to poop. Let’s talk about poop. I remember one of the things that you said. You gave a talk at Genius Network. You said that people should look at their poop every single day. Let’s talk about it. What should it look like? How often should you go? Tell me about that.

First of all, it should be almost every day. If you skip a day, it could be that you went through something stressful. The body shuts down because the body says, “Do I need to run from a bear and survive, or do I need to have a bowel movement?” It’s going to choose to survive, and it’s going to shut it down. If you’ve been under stress, and you don’t go, then that’s understandable. A normal bowel movement, for the most part, is from the elbow to the wrist, about that long. It is about as big around in the middle as your wrist. It is a medium brown color, not too dark, and not too light.

 

Light is gallbladder, fats, and all kinds of problems. Medium brown color, and it shouldn’t smell bad. That means you’ve broken down your food well. It should be easily passed, so you’re not having to strain or push. That’s a beautiful, wonderful bowel movement. What’s funny is a lot of women will go, “What? I have never had,” and men will go, “I got that. Yes, that’s my normal.” Women are like, “What?” Women ruminate more. The brain of a woman never shuts off. A man’s brain can shut off.

When I say, “Tim, what are you thinking?” and you go, “I’m not thinking about anything,” your girlfriend gets mad at you, “What do you mean you’re not thinking about anything?” You can turn your brain off. Except for a little bit in the back, for vision, you can turn it off. Women cannot. It’s always wiring and firing both sides of the brain. Men do one side at a time. As far as the brain being able to keep things a little bit under control, men have a little bit easier.

That’s part of this brain-gut connection we’re talking about. Women have more trouble with digestion than men. Making a fully formed, nice bowel movement is harder for the most part for women. It is not the diet because men and women sometimes eat the same. They’re in the same families. It’s this processing of never being able to just, “I’m not thinking about anything. I’m relaxing.”

It’s got to be the mental and emotional.

It is. You ask any woman, when they travel, they will tell you they get constipated pretty much. It’s part of it because they’re the ones who are packing and making sure it looks right. “Did I remember everything?” For the most part, men are going, “Let me throw some stuff in the suitcase, and I’ll be okay.” Women have everything that’s got to match and all those kinds of things. It is a lot more self-induced stress over travel. We haven’t elucidated all of that, but I will tell you after many years in practice and thousands of patients, that’s common. That is well-known. When women travel, they get constipated. Men generally have a better time producing a normal bowel movement than a woman does.

How often should someone have a bowel movement?

What I want to hear when somebody comes in or I look at their intake is they say, “Every morning, I get up, and I have my coffee,” or “Before I have my coffee, about every morning, I have my nice bowel movement. It’s nice. It’s formed. It’s soft. It’s easily passed. I’m done for the day.” I’m like, “Hallelujah, amen. Let’s move on to the other things while you’re here.” When I hear that, I say, “I’ve got a much easier job getting this person better.”

Again, not to make everybody stress out if you don’t go every day, but for the most part, some people might have two bowel movements. It’s half the size of that, but within a day, let’s get that amount out. Sometimes, you were born with it torturous. It is anyway, but sometimes, it’s harder for people to physically or mechanically make that size of a bowel movement. You don’t have to change for that.

What should someone do if they don’t have healthy bowel movements or healthy poop, if they’re constipated, or if they have diarrhea?

You know the answer. You’ve got to go to the doctor who can look at this, find out the root of the problem, and what’s causing it. Fix that, and then get back to a normal bowel movement. People will say, “I’ve never had that my whole life.” I say, “Have you been constipated your entire life, even as a kid? Tummy aches?” “Yes.” My first test that I do is food sensitivities. You’re probably eating the same foods you did as a child. Something is causing inflammation.

Sometimes, they stop eating those foods, and the constipation goes away. It’s finding the root of the problem. Working with a practitioner who works in gut health is important. It is going to get your colonoscopy, and they go, “Everything is fine. You don’t worry. You had a few polyps. We took them out of there.” They weren’t cancer. They were polyps. They shouldn’t be there.

What’s the cause?

Just like in addiction and recovery, what’s the cause? What’s the trauma behind it? What is it?

Always look for the root cause of the drama behind addiction and recovery. Share on X

Figure out what’s underneath it.

It’s the same thing with everything in health.

Connection Between Gut Health, Mitochondria, And Inflammation

Let’s talk about hidden factors, inflammation, mitochondria, and more. You said that gut health, mitochondria, inflammation, and even energy levels are all connected. Can you break that down?

Everybody, go back to school. You remember the little mitochondria that are inside the cell. That’s what produces ATP. ATP is energy. That’s energy for the cells and energy for the body. That is your energy fuel. If something is disturbing the mitochondria, it can’t produce ATP. You’re going to feel it. Your energy level is going to be down. Mitochondria, when they get damaged in the metabolic cancer world where I sit, we believe that’s the true root and cause of cancer. It is mitochondrial damage.

Sugar and all the things that we all know are bad all put stress on the mitochondria, your energy level, and your absorption of your ability to break down the foods. You might be eating healthy, but if you can’t break those foods down and extract the nutrition out of them to go where it needs to go for this body to function, you’re still in trouble. Maybe you need digestive enzymes for a while while you’re trying to figure out what’s happening.

For some people, I will say entrepreneurs, biohackers, and people who like to go, go, go, and have a self-induced stress, good stress even, digestive enzymes seem to be one of the best things. It is also for athletes because you’re putting a lot of stress on these systems. Digestive enzymes help you break down that food. From your protein, your fat, your carbs, you’re getting the best extraction of those nutrients that you can. A digestive enzyme before meals is good for pretty much most people. I am a big fan of digestive enzymes for a lot of reasons.

I know that.

You can’t see it, but you can, in time, feel it.

What’s in a digestive enzyme anyway? How does it work?

Your body makes enzymes, and then you’ve got enzymes in the food. Enzymes are the thing that, when you slice a vegetable or fruit, starts turning brown. It’s pre-digesting itself. If our body is making all that it needs to make, we’re good. It breaks down protein. Proteases break down proteins. Lipase breaks down fat. All the different types of enzymes break down the different macronutrients. They’re specific to help you break down each one of those types of food. Sometimes, somebody might need a little bit more of one than the other. We adjust which formula would be best for them.

Do sauerkraut and fermented foods do the same thing as a digestive enzyme or similar?

No, not really. They’re all related. If you get one thing better, then it gives a chance for the other things to get better. When you’re eating fermented foods, you’re working with the microbiome and those bugs, good bugs and bad bugs. Our body, we’re mostly bugs. People think it’s us. We’re very little DNA that’s us. What we consider Tim’s DNA that makes you Tim, that’s a little bit of what this body is. It’s mostly bugs. People get freaked out about that, but that’s the truth. We’ve got to learn to live with the bugs.

How many bugs do we have?

I forgot how many billions. We haven’t even identified all of them. We know that these biomes, these colonies of bugs, bad bugs and good bugs, some are good for us and some are bad for us, but we’re mostly bugs. Those help you make more of your good bugs. They’re food for your good bugs. They can, in the long run, help with digestion, but digestive enzymes are enzymatic activity. They go in there and help you break things down. They’re more of a mechanical fix. Eating fermented foods is a different way of making your garden.

That’s when I say work on your garden, the good bug versus bad bug ratio, that’s what that stuff does. I will say you’ve got to be careful. A lot of people are trying to make their kimchi and their matcha. Some serious problems can happen with that. If you’re not doing it right, you can make yourself very ill and end up in the hospital. If you’re going to do that, do it right. The problem with buying it in the grocery store is that once they’ve homogenized and pasteurized it, which they have to by law, like raw milk, you’ve lost the benefit. Sauerkraut is a pretty good one. You don’t have to worry about that. That’s a good one. You can buy it and know that it might help you a lot. If you’re going to make your own, be careful and do it right, or else it could cause more harm than good.

I’ll just go to Costco.

Remember, in Costco, they have to homogenize and pasteurize it. You might get a little bit of benefit from it.

I‘m talking about sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is good, and that raw sauerkraut.

I’m talking sauerkraut and kimchi. Costco sells both of those now.

Their raw sauerkraut is great. It’s raw. It’s not cooked. It keeps all the things. Costco, I’m a big fan.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Scottsdale Meat Market, 32nd Street in Indian School.

I don’t know.

They have raw milk.

A lot of farmers’ markets and these little places do. FDA frowns on it. If you get a bad batch of that, it could kill you. It’s dangerous, but it’s also some of the best medicine that we can have. If you’ve got a reliable source and you drink a little bit of it, and especially if you’re in good health and your immune system is in good health, I’d say I’m not against raw milk. If your immune system is suffering and you get a bad bacteria out of that, it could kill you.

How much raw milk should I drink?

If you’ve got good health and everything’s going well, say half a cup a day or a cup a day. That might be good. Again, it’s a Catch-22. I can’t tell you that it’s safe because it hasn’t been pasteurized and homogenized. Once they do that, you’ve lost a lot of the benefit. All you do is get the bad stuff from the dairy that we don’t want. Here’s what you do. You get your own cow.

We all have time for that.

It is one more stress.

Impact Of Mitochondrial Health On Recovery And Mental Health

Mitochondrial health impacts recovery and mental health.

If you think about mitochondria, they don’t just produce ATP energy. They also affect the immune system. They affect the ability of the body to modulate the brain chemistry. They are the powerhouse for most things in the body. As we learn more, the more we’re going to know about how they are very intimately involved with the brain. As far as recovery and all that, we need more studies to know what we could do and would do, particularly to mitochondria, if we have the ability to test and say, “What’s going on with your mitochondria?” We don’t have that ability right now. When we know that, we can say, “This matches this. This matches that.” We’re not there yet, but we do know there’s a strong connection.

Is that anywhere in the near future where we’re going to be able to test mitochondria?

We can test it now. You can see it underneath the microscope, so you can see how active they are. It’s in research. It’s an expensive thing. It’s in the research world. We’ve been doing that. Dr. Robert Elliott was one of the top researchers in the country and actually in the world. He was one of my mentors years ago. We were looking under microscopes at mitochondria at that time and putting things in the medium to see what happened to the mitochondria when we did it, including music, because we knew we could see changes with frequency from different things. There’s a lot that we have to learn, but we know they are sensitive to the environment around them. That means everything, light, sound, touch, bad bugs, good bugs, all of it. We’ve got a lot to learn.

It is stress and toxic conversations. It’s like surrounding yourself in a positive environment and around positive people. Imagine that. I feel a lot better.

Another thing is nature.

My dogs.

Yes, that’s the best. That has been studied. We know what that does to us with the dopamine and the serotonin. They are great little healers. The other thing is nature. We talk about forest bathing, nature walking, and all that. I’m almost to the end of a fascinating book right now called The Light Eaters. It’s about plants. In the botanical world, there is a fight between them right now. They don’t want to say they’re like humans, but there are other groups that say they can hear, smell, feel, taste, talk to one another, and communicate through.

We do know that the chemicals that they do with each other, which I can’t wait for the studies to show what happens to us, produce chemicals that travel across from one tree to another one far away, to say, “Guess what? I’ve got predators. You’d better start making some chemicals.” It’s fascinating. Think about how we all came from this plant world and all. What it’s teaching us is the intelligence of plants, whatever we want to call that. They act a lot like we do.

They have a lot of the same capabilities. They eat light. We eat food, but otherwise, we’re pretty similar. That’s why we do need to spend more time outdoors, not just for vitamin D from sunlight and the immune system, but getting out there in nature with those trees, the grass, and these plants. They have a lot of wisdom there. Reading this book was another reminder of the importance of getting out there and not just taking your 10,000 steps on the cement in the city. You’d be better off with 2,000. It’s 7,000, by the way. The new study says we only need 7,000 steps. It’s going to constantly change. That’s new. I would say it’s 5,000 in nature.

My Garmin says I reached my goal. I’m at 3,300 steps. I’m like, “How is that my goal?”

You have to tell them your goal. I had 10,000 on mine.

It seems like it has a different goal every day. It could be 7,500. It could be 10,000. It could be 15,000 steps. I always hit my goal, but it seems like the goal is different every day.

I know that on different monitors are different ways, even on your phones, like Pacer and other ones that look at how many steps. What if less steps if you say I don’t have time to drive? What if 3,000 steps in nature would be better than 10,000 steps on the concrete? We’re going to get there. That book is fascinating. Everybody should read it. The Light Eaters is by a scientist and a researcher. She went all over the world. Some plants mimic other plants. They disguise themselves. They look like the plant next to it. You wouldn’t think that a different plant would be able to grow leaves and look like the plant next to it. It’s amazing. They’re smart. We should be around them more often.

I’ll tell you what I did. I spent a week up in Flagstaff. I was out in nature, bike riding, and it was so beautiful. I felt so good. We stayed at this little Airbnb. It was on about a 10,000 or 12,000 square foot lot, and a nice outdoor space. We were looking at a field. I felt like we were in nature.

It is the energy exchange that we know between people. We know that our brains will entrain and sink into the same rhythm. Our hearts will, as we sit here in time. I believe we do the same thing with plants. What if you’re with good people that you love being around, and you’re surrounded by nature? Everything is on a frequency, and this is not the woo frequency. These are real, measurable frequencies. It is the chemistry between what they have and what we have. The more we’re learning about plants, they are smart and amazing. That’s perfect. You want to say, “What’s the best healing?” Maybe it’s going to your Flagstaff spot with somebody you enjoy.

It is hiking Mount Humphreys or going on a hike out in the woods.

It can be sitting for people who can’t hike. Get out in nature and sunlight. It’s some of the best healing we’ve got.

How To Support Your Mitochondrial Health

One last question on the mitochondria. What’s the easiest way for somebody to start supporting their mitochondrial health?

First, don’t stress it, which is stress, also glucose, sugar, and all the things that we know that hurt cells. That’s all the bad stuff we’re not supposed to be doing. Things like N-acetylcysteine, NAC, are good for mitochondria. Alpha-lipoic acid is. I think resveratrol. Some supplements can support it. That brings us to something we probably ought to discuss. NMN, NADH, and all that, the science is there of what that looks like from longevity and what that can be. It’s exciting.

In my world of cancer, we’re concerned. We can already see, and you know the mechanism of how that goes through, that it may support cancer growth as well. Until we know more, I’m not in favor of everybody taking those supplements. The president of one of the companies called me to do some research for them. I said, “Do you believe that everybody should be on NADH and all that? What about cancer patients?” “No, they shouldn’t be on that.” I said, “Don’t you agree that most of us have cancer cells all the time?” “Yes, but we’re not going to.” I said, “I know that.”

We need to be careful jumping on the latest bandwagon of what’s the biggest longevity thing right now in mitochondrial health. You’ll see it. There are a lot of supplements out there that say they support mitochondrial health. What I know is what has been out long enough, like alpha-lipoic acid and acetylcysteine. Those have been out long enough for me to feel okay with recommending them for mitochondrial health. For the new stuff, we need to wait, in my opinion.

What’s the one thing besides taking a supplement that someone can do to support mitochondrial health? Is there something?

Yes, polyphenols and all the things like the vegetables and a little bit of in-season fruit. If you watch the glucose levels, keeping your insulin resistance, not making your pancreas have to work hard against all the carbs and the sugar, all that stresses mitochondria. It is all the diet, lifestyle, and exercise that we’re talking about. I will say this. If you over-exercise like marathon runners or others, that can stress the mitochondria. There’s something called hormesis, which means a little bit of stress to the body is good. It wakes up the immune system and makes the muscles. When you work out, you tear down the muscle, and you eat protein within an hour so you can build it back up.

A little bit of stress is good. It keeps the body awake and alive, but too much stress keeps it broken down. There’s a fine line between knowing where your line is and where too much is too much. Mitochondria, too, can only make so much ATP. Do I want them fighting disease? Do I want them helping with the immune system and the brain, and all the wonderful things that it does? Do I want it busy there, or do I want it taking all of its energy to try to repair you because you rode your bike for however many miles?

A little bit of stress is good. It keeps the body awake and alive. But too much stress will keep it broken and down. Share on X

As I’m prepping for Costa Rica.

That’s what I mean. It’s good, but if that brings you joy, that brings you relaxation, that helps with your recovery, there is a fine line.

It’s the mental, emotional, spiritual, and all of those things. That’s what I’m working on, all of those things.

When you are able to meditate and feel your body, and know, “Where am I? Who am I? Where am I? How is my body?” You can tap in. You’ll know, “I’ve been pushing a little too much lately. Body, I hear you. I’ll calm it down a little bit.” Your body says, “I am good. I am ready. Let’s go.” Go for it. It’s about being body and mind aware and spiritual, all of it. It’s being aware. How much do we spend time trying to listen to our bodies? How much time, as opposed to “Let’s ignore it and do all the things that are supposed to be right for us. Let’s biohack and do all these things,” but not paying attention to what the body’s telling you? That’s an art. That takes patience and awareness to know how much is too much.

For so long, I didn’t have any awareness. Most people don’t have awareness.

They don’t. “Tell me what to do, what to eat, and how much to exercise. I’ve got a symptom. I’ve got bloating. Get rid of it. Dr. Worden, figure it out, do it, and get rid of it.” I’m going, “Yes, but wait a minute. We can, but what else?” If you want to be 100% and live longevity for a long time, we’ve got to become more aware.

The Body’s Unique Ability To Self-Heal

Let’s talk about self-healing, the body’s inner pharmacy. You say the body can make its own antidepressants, pain relievers, and even sleep aids. Can you explain that?

Those chemicals and those hormones that we make are far stronger than any medicine that we’ve got. Morphine is our strongest pain medicine. It’s our strongest. At least tenfold stronger than morphine is what our body makes. We have the strongest medicines, not only the strongest, but our body knows the right dosage. It knows the right timing. It knows if it’s going to interfere with something else and contraindicate. There’s nothing smarter and better than your body’s immune system because the body knows what it needs.

 

When can it produce all that? When is it aware enough to say, “I need to produce some anti-inflammatories right here,” or “I need to try to help heal the gut up. I need more peptides or proteins?” It’s when you’re in that parasympathetic relaxed state. When you’re telling it, “Go,” and it could be “something exciting go,” or it could be something, “I’m going to be eaten by a bear,” it doesn’t know the difference between running from a bear or going to something you’re super excited about. It knows it says, “I need to shut down a few things right now so that you can go run.”

When it shuts down, it shuts down your digestion, your libido, and your ability to repair, the DNA repair even. Everything that’s not vital to survive in that moment gets shut off. How often are you doing that in your day? Even in your sleep, if you’re not sleeping, your brain is still running from the bear in your sleep. The body doesn’t have time to recover, repair, and do all the magic that it does. That’s why meditation, prayer, and all those things are very important.

That is Joe Dispenza‘s teaching. He spends a lot of time talking about the body. Your body is its own pharmacy.

That has been said for millennia. All the yoga masters know what our body produces. We have the science to show it. What happens when you’re in that state, when the brain is in the brain waves that are slow and they’re coherent? They’re in these orderly rhythms. What happens to the physiology of the body and the repair? We can see it. It’s been known.

How many Joe Dispenza retreats have you been to?

We started with Joe because my husband has been doing a lot of the music for him for many years. Barry would play live with him, and I would go with him. I don’t know. Maybe not as many as you’d think. I was too busy. It is maybe seven or eight.

Somebody told me that in his retreats pre-COVID, he would have a couple of hundred people there.

We were with him when it was even smaller than that, when he was starting. That gives hope to everybody who has this message that they want. Good teachers with good things. You do your thing. If you’re walking your walk and talking your talk, and you’re authentic, it’s going to grow. Now, he’s got thousands. It sells out in fifteen minutes.

We signed up for the ten-day retreat in Cancun. We were there ready to sign up when registration opened. The registration was twelve pages. Yes, no, you had to answer all these questions. You had to do it correctly. We’re frantically trying. I get in, and then Jennifer gets in a few minutes later. I heard that it sold out in less than ten minutes.

They do all over the world.

They had 10,000 people on the waitlist by the end of the first day.

Here’s the thing. People are searching. People are looking for something. They like a message like what Joe says, “This is in your control. Let me teach you how the brain and the body work. Now, it’s up to you. Do these processes.” He doesn’t put himself up as a guru, “I’m going to heal you.” He said, “You can heal yourself.” That’s a good teacher, an educator. There are others out there, but Joe has a great personality. It’s word of mouth. People are like, “That was awesome. I like that. I want to go back.”

He’s so good. He’s funny.

He walks his walk. He’s authentic.

I love it. I’m a huge believer in his work. It’s whatever I believe. If I believe I can heal, guess what? I can heal. If I can calm myself down, if I can pray, if I can meditate, a lot of these problems are going to be resolved.

What Joe is talking about is science. He’s teaching the research. The research is there. His inner science is connected to him, some of his research on some of his processes, and the guided meditation with music. It’s music and meditation together. What they’re seeing is DNA repair. It’s amazing. This is at the University of Southern California in San Diego. The research that’s coming out of that is mind-blowing to the world of people who are stuck in, “You’ve got to show me the science. I don’t believe any of that stuff.” It’s like, “Here it is. Look what we’re seeing.” They are still like, “That can’t be right.”

We’ll have to do more studies. We’ll have to do more. In time, it’ll be known. If you’re doing it for yourself, you know it to be true. It could be any process that brings you peace that gets you to that parasympathetic relaxed state. It could be music. It could be something else, but whatever it is that gets you to that place, that’s where the healing happens. It’s real. We measure it.

You’re answering this question, but what do you think is the easiest way for someone to tap into their inner pharmacy?

They’ve got to find that process that does it for them. It might be trying to get out in nature for a minute because the brain is so busy. I’ve got somebody who suffers from a lot of anxiety, this and that. If I say, “You need to go meditate. Quiet your brain,” it’s going to be a miserable failure. That’s another thing that they say, “I can’t do. I’m a failure at that.” Guided imagery, somebody talking them through it, sometimes, they can’t even do that. They say, “I don’t want to tell somebody to let me float in a bubble. It’s driving me crazy. I don’t like that guy’s voice or whatever it is.”

You start with breathwork and the music that they like. It’s the preferred music that relaxes them. It’s breathing in and out. When you do breathwork, what does that do immediately? That brings you right to your body. It brings you into feeling what we’re talking about. When’s the last time you were body aware? Breathwork is one of the best ways to do that because when you try to wrangle down the mind, sometimes, it’s hard. You’re not going to win for a while.

I would say speaking to breathwork, even breathing, most people don’t breathe. I learned that when I went and saw my friend, Larry Arnold. He’s one of my coaches that I work with. I wanted to do an Ironman. I remember I went to him. I said, “I want to do Ironman, but I can’t run more than 5 or 6 miles.” He worked with me for one session. He said, “I can tell you that you’re not breathing.”

It is diaphragmatic breathing.

I’m like, “What do you mean?” He had me put on some boxing gloves. I went through and did some boxing with him. Next thing you know, I’m seeing stars. He said, “I told you. You’re not breathing.” I was walking around with very short, shallow breaths. Now, I notice. I can walk around and see that most people are walking around with very short, shallow breaths. It is going to increase mental illness. You’re never going to be able to get to that parasympathetic space. You’re never going to be able to tap into the body’s pharmacy.

I was in pain management before I started working in cancer. I’ve always worked in the mind-body part. In pain management, especially in cancer patients, when they’re given morphine at the end or they have bone metastasis, the bone excruciating pain, there’s only so much the meds can do. The best pain relief is the breathwork. I have taught for 30 years. I teach people, and I say, “Lie down and see when to take a deep breath.” They’re doing it up in their chest. That is only oxygenating up here. If their belly is not coming up and down, they’re not using the diaphragm. If you watch an opera singer, and they’ve got big breath and are brilliant, you never see their shoulders rise. You don’t see the chest rise. This is all relaxed.

There is only so much meds can do. The best pain relief is the breath work. Share on X

It’s all there in the belly and that diaphragm. I teach them. The best way I know is I put their hands on me. I say, “Just feel this.” I’ll put it on my sides, or my front, and the back. I’ll take a big breath, and I’ll breathe it out. Even feeling me, they’re like, “I didn’t believe that your rib cage could do that.” I said, “That is control of breath, even the front and the back. You can control that diaphragm.” That kind of breathing is what everybody needs to learn how to do. Anytime you’re stressed, anxious, or whatever, you’ve got a presentation, whatever it is, or there’s something that is tempting you that you want to go do that you shouldn’t be doing, do some breathwork because that’ll bring you right back down into feeling your body.

Breathwork, in my experience, is the easiest. It’s the quickest way to get grounded and change my mental state. I do breathwork every single day. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is breathwork. I pray, I meditate, I do gratitude lists, but breathwork is always part of my morning routine. It’s something I do.

When you do it and you meditate in the morning, you put yourself into this good state that we’re supposed to be in. When the day goes by and life is happening, you know if you’re getting too far away from that field that you felt in the morning. If you don’t do that work and you’re always running, grabbing, and doing, you don’t know any difference. When you wake up in the morning and before you go to bed at night, if you ground yourself and get back into that state those two times, then when your life is happening to you, you know, “I’m getting too far away from it. I need to do breathwork.”

I do well with certain music because I’ve trained myself to be able to do so with what we call ambient music. I know what it’s doing to my heart and brain entrainment. I know the science of what it’s doing, so I can immediately tap in. Sometimes, breathwork makes me think, “I’m having to work hard on my breathwork.” The music lets me be. Everybody is different. You’ve got to find out what works for you.

Everything To Know About Supplements

Let’s talk about supplements, scams, and what to know before you buy. I think this is all people, not people in recovery. This show is for everybody. People want to feel better. They want to feel better fast. They’re spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on supplements. What should people be looking for? Let’s talk about supplements.

First, we’d like to think we could get it all from our food. We can get a lot from our food. It’s still our best nutrition. It’s the best, but sometimes, it’s not enough or not the right amount. If you’re working with somebody who uses supplements and has been trained in it, and I will say a regular, traditional, conventional medical doctor, they’ve either had zero classes in nutrition, especially supplements, or they’ve had one basic class. You’ve got to go outside of that.

You’ve got to work with somebody who’s an expert who knows. We’ve got to be careful with functional medicine and other things that we spent thousands and thousands of dollars on testing. If you would sit and listen to the patient, like I listened to you, and you say, “I bloat,” I go, “I got to run a SIBO,” or I could have run twenty different tests to look at all of it. It’s cool. It’s fun, but it’s very expensive. We’ve got to be careful because sometimes, we find all these little things, and we start prescribing a supplement for each one.

You’re on 30 supplements or 40 supplements more instead of, “Can I find one thing that covers three areas?” More is not better. There’s a time and a place. I’ve got to have a reason to have somebody on a supplement. If you called me and you said, “Why am I on this?” I look back at my chart and tell you exactly why I have you on that, not just, “Here, take this. I hope you feel better.” That’s the first step. More is not better.

Which ones do you need? What are you not getting in your diet? You need extra support, because you like to ride your bike and do things that are extreme, so you need extra support. If we’re looking at longevity, what are the things that might help you on that? You look at the pocketbook. Say, “How much can we afford to do? Is it real?” There’s a biohacker out there who says he does 100 supplements a day. No one knows how those interact with one another.

There’s no way for him to know that. Are they canceling each other out? Are they causing more harm than good? Just because something is good for this and that’s good for that, how they interact together, it’s an art to know that some things we know you can’t do together. Most things we don’t know. That’s the first step. The second is the quality of the supplements. I’ve been in the nutrition industry and have helped formulate. I was part of the team that brought pea protein to the market.

It didn’t exist before we brought it in because all the healthy green drinks were spiking blood sugar levels in patients. I was noticing it, and I’m like, “Everybody is doing the green drinks because they’re not eating enough greens at all, but their blood sugars are going up. What in the world?” We realized you had to put protein and fiber in it. We changed the industry. Because I’ve been in that world for a while, I know the quality of a lot of it that’s out there. It’s not good. I would venture to say 90% or more are suspects.

They may have heavy metals. They may have bacteria growing in there, or they may have fungi. They might’ve tested their batch of whatever their ingredient is at the beginning when it came in, but it sat there for a year while they’re making products out of it, and it grew fungal. It grew all kinds of bad stuff and bacteria, and they didn’t test the end batch. I have a full-time person. All they do is look at the quality. I’ve probably got 50 or 60 companies that I work with.

I want the best product for the best price. I’m not tied to a company, but I spend a lot of money. I don’t even pass that on, but I would spend a lot of money because I know how bad a lot of the things are there, even if it’s a good company. Every time they give me beyond a certificate of analysis, if they pass my quality control, which is far more than anybody I know asks them to do, at least I know I’ve got a shot that whatever the patient or the client is getting is good quality and it’s not going to be harmful.

It has in the bottle what it says it has on the bottle. That’s very important. Sometimes, it’s not even the same substance. Sometimes, I tell patients, “I’d rather you be on nothing than a poor quality supplement because we’re getting arsenic, lead, and mercury. We’re getting bacteria and fungi. That’s no longer healthy. You’d be better off without it.” You’ve got to be careful. If you’re buying it wherever, here are some things to watch for. You can ask any company about something you put in every day. You can call the manufacturer and say, “Can you send me a certificate of analysis on these batch numbers right there on the bottle? Can you send me the CFA that you did the testing on this?”

If they’re a great company, they’re going to go, “I’d love to send you that. Thank you for asking me. That’s great. Good question.” They’re going to be happy to send you that. If they say, “No, we can’t. It’s proprietary,” it’s not. If they say, “No, it’s too costly,” it’s not. If they won’t give you that, move on and don’t use that company. There are far more things than that, but that’s a basic, good way of knowing that at least they’re trying to do something. If they won’t do that, I say don’t do it.

Here’s the problem with buying it from big boxes. It could have been a good quality product. It was tested, but they’ve set that in a warehouse, where it got hot. All the active ingredients have been depleted. You want to work with somebody who’s getting it direct from the manufacturer, keeping it cold, keeping it protected, getting fresh batches, and doing all that stuff. It’s a full-time job, but that’s the best way. What you’re getting when you buy a big box, you have no idea what you’re getting. They’ve found companies that took labels off and put fake labels on different things. It’s bad out there.

That’s why I always buy my supplements through you, because I know you do all the testing. You do the certificate of authenticity or whatever. I don’t even want to worry about it.

I won’t sell it unless I have that. First, do no harm. That’s our first tenet in medicine. Everybody is selling all these supplements and doing all this. They say, “My doctor has his name on it or has a doctor’s name on the label.” I don’t care what’s on the label. I care what’s inside that bottle. Doctors aren’t trained in that. We weren’t trained in quality control, even those of us who studied it. It was part of our curriculum from the beginning. We’re not trained in it.

One thing I’m thinking about here, as we’re talking about supplements, I remember I used to take Athletic Greens. I was training for a half-marathon. I was running a lot. I remember I couldn’t run for very long until I had to go pee. You said, “Wait a second.” You asked me a couple of questions. You discovered that I was taking Athletic Greens. Do you remember what you said to me?

No, but I can imagine what I thought I said.

I think you said it has stevia in it.

Again, not a study. I have to look, but I don’t see a study. I’ve had enough men, golfers, and those who are active who say, “I’m having to stop and urinate all the time.” The big key was stevia. I’m like, “Am I the only one seeing this?” I’ve asked some other practitioners. They go, “I don’t know. I’ll have to keep an eye on it.” I have found in my practice that as soon as they stop, they don’t have a problem.

As soon as I stopped taking Athletic Greens, I no longer had the issue.

It’s not that Athletic Greens is bad. It’s that it had something in there that wasn’t good for you.

It was the stevia. That’s it.

It is one simple little thing.

Dr. Donese’s Recommended Gut/Brain Health Supplements

Do you have any foundational supplements that you recommend for gut or brain health?

It depends on what’s causing the problem, but I like Keto Brainz. It’s a coffee creamer. It’s got a nootropic in there, which is good. MCT and all that help the brain, and the brain likes that. I like that. As far as gut health for most people, they’ve got to ask their doctor what medications they’re on. A good one that hits a lot of bases is butyrate. Butyrin is the name of the bottle that I use. Butyrate is a protein. That helps heal up the gut wall lining, so stress, bad food, and all those things that damage the gut wall lining. It’s a good healer.

It also has some potential to fight cancer. I like it for a lot of reasons. I like butyrate, and good-quality protein helps. We’ve got to have more protein. Fish oil is great for the brain. I like resveratrol for a lot of reasons: brain and gut, antioxidant, and mitochondria. I like that. The basics are that if you’re not eating fish, you need a good quality omega-3 without mercury in it. If you’re not eating enough protein, the butyrate makes sense.

Maybe you need a protein powder. They did a study. Seventy-five percent of the protein powders on the shelf had excessive levels of lead and arsenic in them. That’s just the ones they tested. You’ve got to be careful, but a protein powder if you need it. If you’re not getting enough protein, that helps the gut. I’m probably missing some things, but the basics.

What kind of protein powder do you like? I take a hydrolyzed bone broth protein.

Bone broth, for some people, if they have a histamine issue, can make things worse. You’ve got to take it. If your gut starts bothering you more, then you may say maybe it’s a histamine reaction. One of the things when we have to go on a low histamine diet for some patients, I’ve found that bone broth is one of the culprits. It’s high in histamine. I like basic proteins. I like the pea protein. I brought that because it’s a good branched-chain amino acid, all the different pieces that you need in a protein. Very few people are allergic to peas. It’s a good one from quality. I like pea protein.

The one I’ve got is a Protein-Zyme. I like it because it’s pea protein. It’s very low in sugar, and it’s naturally occurring. It tastes good. People like it. It has enzymes in there that are going to help you break down those proteins even more, those peptides. I like Protein-Zyme. There are other good proteins out there, but as far as quality, I will say a lot of people do egg and whey. They do all that, but a lot of people have sensitivities to those. If you haven’t done a food sensitivity test to know that you’re not having an inflammatory reaction to those, you probably shouldn’t be doing those every day. It’s individual. I’ll tell you what. Pea protein is a really good bet because few people have a pea. Out of thousands of tests that I’ve done, I’ve had one or two people who reacted pea.

If someone is trying to build muscle, is pea protein going to do the trick?

It’s got a good branched-chain amino acid in it. It does. That’s where everybody goes, “You need whey protein. It’s got more in this and that.” That’s not necessarily true. If you don’t have a problem with it, then I’m okay with it. What you’re after are those branched-chain aminos. You’d need more of it. That’s where creatine and L-carnitine make sense. Creatine and L-carnitine are very good to take after your workout, and even when you’re not. Those, we’re learning more and more about. That will help gut and brain as well, secondarily in the brain, but for muscle recovery, those are important ones.

It seems like there are more and more people who are talking about creatine these days. It is even 5 grams a day.

Or more, but you have to start slow because it might bother your gut until it gets used to it. Start low and slow and work up. More research is coming out, both on L-carnitine and creatine. They’re looking great. Especially as we age, we lose muscle and we lose balance. That muscle is very important as we age.

Why does creatine help?

It helps rebuild the muscle. It’s one of the feeders that’s going to help give it what it needs, so you don’t get muscle atrophy. That would be the way to say it. There’s a whole chemistry behind there, but I don’t think your audience is going to want to hear it. The studies are clear, and they’re looking better and better. Most researchers in this world of longevity, athletics, the Department of Defense, NASA, the Navy SEALs, and all that, L-carnitine and creatine both look good. I do a little bit. I try them all.

I’ve never taken L-carnitine before.

Think of it like creatine.

Do you buy it like creatine powder?

Yes. You can do it in powder. They also come in capsules, but everybody is getting capsule fatigue. Who wants to do that? There’s no flavor to it. Throw it in water if you want, or make a shake. I trade off between the two because they’re a little different, but they’re both accomplishing the same thing. As we learn more, I may switch one over the other, but right now, they’re both looking good.

What about MCT oil? Sometimes, as Dave Asprey says, if you take too much MCT oil, you’ll get disaster pants.

You can.

Why does that happen?

I would say, “Why are you getting that? Why can’t you do it?” That’s back to the gallbladder or liver. If the gallbladder cannot break down that fat, then you need to start looking at the liver and gallbladder. You should be able to do a pretty good amount of MCT oil and not have a problem. If you do, then we need to look deeper. Why? We don’t want to go super high, but our cancer patients, we’ve got them on high doses of MCT oil. We make sure the guts are good. The gastrointestinal system includes the liver and the gallbladder in there. If that’s all working, then we’re good.

Bulletproof makes two different kinds of MCT oils. One is $10, and one is $20. I was going to ask you this before. Is it marketing? Supposedly, the more expensive one is better for your brain health.

They’re a little different in the molecular makeup of how they’re doing it. The science is there, but it’s still a little bit weak. If you’re not having to use it for a medical condition, like for cancer and this or that, it probably won’t matter. Get the less expensive one. They are different. The more expensive one might be a little bit better, but as far as I can see, I don’t see enough to make it worth double the amount. Dave doesn’t own Bulletproof anymore. He’s part of it. He’s got his new Danger Coffee.

How To Address With Your Body’s Main Problems

Action steps. Where do you begin if you’re struggling? Someone might be bloated, tired, foggy, and desperate. What’s their first step?

Get the testing. Go back to your regular doctor under your insurance. If you’re bloating, ask them to do a SIBO test. If you’ve got other stuff, they’re probably not going to do a great job. Go get a colonoscopy to make sure it’s not something serious. Once you get your colonoscopy and you’ve done a SIBO, the tool analysis that they do, I don’t think it’s worth doing that much. You’re going to have to get into a specialist, somebody outside of conventional care that looks at gut health from this microbiome look, the things that we’ve been talking about. Get to somebody who understands gut health and can help you find the root of the problem. Start with your insurance and see.

I remember when I talked to you. You said that we need to test for parasites. I had a concierge doctor. He’s a naturopath and a medical doctor. I saw him in 2017 or 2018, and he ordered a stool test for me. They didn’t find anything. After talking with you, what I learned from you is that sometimes, you have to make sure that whoever is doing the testing is reputable and good because it’s not easy to find a parasite. Am I saying that correctly?

When I mentioned a minute ago, Dr. Omar Amin and the way he tests for it, the way that we test in America for parasites is his system. He found a better system where he could identify more. CDC and everybody say, “No, we’re not going to change the system.” He went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he lost. He goes down and crosses the border into Mexico to read it the correct way. He finds parasites when nobody else does.

That’s why when I think we’ve got a parasite, that’s who I trust. If he says no parasite, there’s no parasite. If I see from other testing, basic labs, sometimes, they can catch a parasite. Sometimes, they come back and say, “No parasite.” I go, “A negative is not a negative to me, but a positive, great. Let’s try your insurance. See if we can find it under that.” If it’s a negative, it doesn’t mean negative. I’m probably still going to want them to do a different type of test from somebody that I trust because he named a lot of the parasites. Their names came from him. He’s that guy. That’s who I use. I know the extent he goes to find it.

Positive And Negative Impact Of Wearables

What about the tech side, wearables, trackers, and biofeedback tools? Are they helping? Are they hurting? What are your thoughts?

Both. If you’re motivated to do better with your sleep, turn off the phone, get the room dark, and all that, because you know that your sleep has been on your wearables, telling your sleep has been crappy for a few days. You know why? You had the TV on, you’re on your phone, or whatever. It helps you get yourself back into a process that you know you should be doing. Wearables give us information at the beginning, and it’s good. I like it. Heart rate variability is very important. It tells us a lot of information about you. Some of the wearables are not 100%. Most are not 100% accurate anyway.

 

Even for sleep patterns, they’re about 60% to 70% accurate. Are you getting alpha or delta? Maybe, but you can see patterns. That’s valuable. I do. What I also see are people who are glued to their wearables and their tracking systems. We were talking a minute ago about “When was the last time you checked in with yourself? How do I feel?” not, “What does my watch say? What does my ring say?” How do I feel?

It’s doing some good things if you’re using it to make good changes and you’re not stressing about it. I will say this. Some of the most stressed-out people I know are the biohackers. That’s because, “I should be doing this. I heard about that. I got to go. I need this supplement. I need this wearable.” They are so longevity-focused and biohacking-focused. They are stressing out, and I think that’s more harmful than not knowing.

I’ll tell you. I’m laughing because I woke up and I looked at my Oura Ring. It says I had a 92 readiness score. It says I’m a sleep champion. I posted it on Instagram. I’m like, “I guess I feel good. Now that I saw this, I feel good.” I need my Oura Ring to tell me how I feel.

That’s my point. We’re losing contact with ourselves. I like data. You know I like data. I’m a researcher. I like the wearables for a lot of the things that they do. They’re not 100%. None of them is. There are gold standard ways of doing things, but they’re in research labs. There’s a time and a place for those wearables for sure. I will have patients do it so that I can see some things that I need to see, but to be glued to them and be saying, “My device is telling me that I’m ready to get up, roar, and go.”

If you tapped in with yourself, maybe you weren’t, because it’s only looking at a few things. It can’t look at everything that comprises whether you’re ready to go or not. The things it’s looking at, it’s analyzing and saying this, this, and this. It’s funny. We start looking at that data more and more and saying, if you’re using it to motivate yourself and it’s a good motivation, great. Your doctor may want to look at a few things.

It is the placebo effect.

Placebos are real. Your Oura told you you were ready to go. You’re like, “I’m ready to go.” Were you ready? How do I feel? Everything, not just my body, but everything. How do I feel?

Get In Touch With Dr. Donese

We’ve been at it for a minute here. This has been an awesome conversation, Donese. I appreciate you being here. Can people book a consult with you if they’re struggling with gut health, energy, or whatever? How can they find you?

They can. For your audience, I’ll do a free ten-minute consult. Call the office at 480-588-2233. If I think it’s pretty straightforward and easier, I’ll probably refer them out to some good people because I take complex cases now. I’m very selective in who I take. You got in before I started saying no to everybody, but I will take some. If people say, “I’ve been struggling, I have been through this. Nobody is figuring this out,” those are the cases I like to do. They can call, and I’ll jump on there. We’ll decide. Do I need to see you, or do I think go do these things? If you don’t get your answers there, come back and see me. I do a lot of that, trying to help people without having to come in.

Did I miss anything? Anything I should have asked you?

No, you asked it. The whole thing is that we have what we need. We have everything that we need right here. Learning to tap into this is the best medicine.

That’s all the time we have. Donese, thanks again so much. I appreciate you. I got a lot out of this. For the audience, thanks for tuning in. I’ll see you in the next episode.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Donese Worden’s Website
• Camelback Recovery
• Les Brown’s Website
• How Entrepreneurs Can Better Manage Stress Featuring Dr. Donese Worden #177 | Genius Network
• The Light Eaters
• Joe Dispenza’s Website
• Keto Brainz
• Dr. Worden’s Health Hot Seat

 

About Dr. Donese Worden, NMD

Dr. Donese Worden is a renowned physician, researcher, and health advocate who has been bridging conventional and alternative medicine for over two decades. Known for her fearless pursuit of truth in healthcare, she challenges outdated medical paradigms and champions personalized, patient-centered care.

She is a leading authority on metabolic therapies for cancer and chronic disease, with a focus on mitochondrial health and evidence-based integrative protocols. Dr. Worden is a founding member of SIMO—the Society for International Metabolic Oncology—a global coalition of experts advancing science-based approaches to cancer care.

A powerful communicator, Dr. Worden has delivered keynotes at top institutions and international stages, including the United Nations. She is currently touring with legendary speaker Les Brown, and together they’re launching a new podcast that blends motivational insight with grounded medical truth. Her upcoming television series, Health Hot Seat, brings traditional and alternative medicine face to face in a groundbreaking debate format.

Dr. Worden also serves on the Editorial Board of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, guiding public conversations around nutrition and supplement quality. As co-founder of Prove It Research, she helps verify health products through clinical research and third-party validation. She also contributes to healthcare policy on the AzNMA Legislative Committee.

With her unique blend of medical expertise, media experience, and commitment to truth, Dr. Donese Worden is changing the way we think about health—one conversation at a time.