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Founder and CEO of Parsley Health,  Dr. Robin Berzin, joins me for a conversation about gut health and total wellness. We discuss how stress and trauma affect both body and mind, and share practical ways to heal from the inside out. 

Parsley Health is an incredible digital health company that is dedicated to bringing holistic medicine into the mainstream with a focus on using root cause medicine.

What I appreciate most is Dr. Robin Berzin’s mission to make this kind of integrative care more accessible, so that everyone has the opportunity to become an empowered advocate for their own wellness. By bridging the gap between Western and alternative medicine, we open the door for true transformation.

I hope this inspires you to tune in to the wisdom of your own body, follow your gut and find your own unique path to healing.

In this episode you’ll learn:

  • The gut-brain connection and its relationship to mental health, trauma and stress
  • How to improve your gut health and heal root cause conditions
  • How to use intermittent fasting for optimal health and digestion
  • Functional medicine and how you can integrate it into your life in practical, affordable ways
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  • Develop a life-changing spiritual practice in just 3 minutes a day with my gabby coaching membership. Try 7 days free!
  • Dr. Robin Berzin is the Founder and CEO of Parsley Health, a digital health company designed to lower costs and improve health outcomes in patients with complex and chronic conditions using root cause medicine.  Dr. Robin Berzin attended medical school at Columbia University and trained in Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Tech Pioneer, named as one of the 100 most innovative women in business by Inc. Magazine, and praised by Fast Company for founding one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Her first book, State Change, published by Simon Element, is available now.
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This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from any psychological or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified health professional.

dear gabby #206 May 13, 2024 physical wellbeing

how to heal your gut: big talk with dr. robin brazin

[00:00:00] The following podcast is a Dear Media production. I'm Kayla Tsinas, and I have been training a global community of women since 2009. I've created a brand new podcast, Sweat Daily, to help you level up your life and reach your health and well being goals. From fitness tips, to food that fuels you, meditation, to motivation, we've got you covered.

Sweat Daily. The happiest, healthiest, and most confident version of you awakes. Available on Apple Podcasts and wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, Gabby here. This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I'm not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice.

If you are suffering from a psychological or medical condition, please seek help from a qualified health professional.[00:01:00] 

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Hey there. Welcome to Dear Gabby. I'm your host, Gabby Bernstein. And if you landed here, it is absolutely no accident. It means that you're ready to feel good and manifest a life beyond your wildest dreams. Let's get started. Welcome back, my friends. Welcome back to Dear Gabby. With me in the studio today is my very, very close friend, a mom friend, spiritual friend, running buddy, Dr.Robin. Burzin.

She is also a brilliant physician and somebody that I have on speed dial whenever I have any kind of medical concerns. And just such a good friend to me as well. She's the founder and CEO of Parsley Health, which is a holistic medical practice that is setting a new standard of healthcare.

Parsley Health is the leading provider of root cause medicine in the United States [00:04:00] with Robin and her team of doctors and nurses and coaches leading this charge where they're helping people get to the root of their symptoms. They are all experts in the area of functional medicine. This is a proactive personalized approach to treatment.

By looking at all of the possible causes such as food and lifestyle, hormones, stress, trauma, and of course your gut, which Rob and I talk a lot about on the podcast today, functional medicine is a way of looking at your holistic experience and how you can heal from the inside out. Throughout my life, I have followed the functional medicine path, also bridging the gap between Western and alternative medicine, and it really opens up a door for transformational healing The ability to last, really long lasting healing.

So if you're having gut issues, if you're tired, if you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're feeling anxious, if you have skin conditions, if the list goes on, cholesterol is high, you want to listen to this episode because we've got answers. [00:05:00] Robin just shares her great knowledge with us. It's a really important episode for everybody to listen to.

Enjoy the show. So I'm in the studio right now with not only someone who I go to as one of my best advisors medically, because like, I'm a Jewish woman, so like, if you're a doctor, I'm like, Dr. Berzin, come to me, but also a really close friend of mine. So I, have to say that you played two roles in my life, which is that you're on speed dial.

If Ali has like a bowl or something or whatever is going on, or if a cut or something, or if I've got a gut issue, I'm calling you because you're there for me and you're an amazing medical doctor and major entrepreneur with this beautiful business that you've created that we're going to talk about today.

Do you not want to be called an entrepreneur? I'm totally cool with it. Okay. Yeah. Major entrepreneur with this major business that's like a purpose driven business that I care so much about that we're going to talk about today. But you're also my good friend. And literally the conversation that we're about to have here with Robin Brison, Dr.Robin Brison is the same conversation that we [00:06:00] probably had last week at the coffee shop, which is what do you want the podcast to be really?

So welcome to Dear Gabby, my love. Gosh, it's so awesome to be here. It's so funny sitting across from you because first of all, We are wearing the same outfit, which was not, we really are. Which was not planned. And second 'cause I saw you last Sunday morning. Not in this outfit. Not in this outfit. Feeling like running after our children on the rail trail. And so it's nice to continue. Yes. And you have three. I have one. So I am definitely not running as much as you are. Gabby witnessed the abject chaos that it is to take.

I'm quite impressed. Three kids anywhere last night. I'm quite impressed though. I mean, you guys have it down. You do a really good job, . I mean, thank God some of our. friends, husbands were there to actually chase some of the children so that I could focus on the little ones. So Rob, let's talk first about Parsley Health because you are very public, like a lot of people know who Robin Brison is, you know, but many people, particularly in New York City and these big cities know about Parsley Health.

It's this [00:07:00] amazing practice that you've created to really democratize. a lot of the healthcare things that needs that we might get from a functional doctor, but may not be able to afford. And now you've made it so accessible to so many more people. And so I just want to start there. What is the mission?

Why did you start this business? And then we're going to go into the doctor questions because Miss Bernstein wants to know. The mission of Parsley Health is to bring what we call the world's best possible medicine to everyone, everywhere. That's our stated company mission. And what we mean by that is this root cause medicine, this functional approach to medicine.

And when I was in med school, I went to med school here in New York at Columbia, and then I trained in internal medicine at Mount Sinai hospital. And in those places I was learning the best foundations of conventional medicine you can possibly get. I'm so grateful for that training. But what I saw every single day was people who were living themselves sick, ending up in the hospital, ending up on more and more drugs, living with chronic illness.

And I could see that the [00:08:00] way we'd set up our healthcare system wasn't going to move the needle on that. And yet I knew, and I was really fortunate to learn about functional medicine, which is this idea that we, we don't just bandaid the symptom. We actually figure out the why and we treat that. And we help people optimize their health in addition to treating disease.

And to me, that was just like, so cool, so obvious. I could not understand for the life of me why we weren't doing that. And I was lucky enough to train in functional medicine with some of the best people, people, you know, Mark Hyman, Jeff Morrison, all your friends and doctors, the midwife. And so I trained here in New York and elsewhere with some of the best people in this field.

And I said, well, these Practices are amazing and the work they're doing is amazing. They're helping so many people. They're wildly inaccessible. And if you don't have six grand to spend day one for an hour with a doctor, why should you need that to get this kind of medicine? So long way of saying I started Parsley Health [00:09:00] to make functional medicine available to everyone everywhere and an affordable price covered by insurance in a way that was just easy to use because health shouldn't be so hard.

But we've made it hard, Robin, you're such an eloquent speaker. like that was extraordinary. I. Well, tell you this, I, if I were listening, I gotta put it on for you, Gab, but if I were listening right now, I'd be like, sign me the up and it's a lot of this is online too. You can do this anywhere. You're a 50 state online and you take insurance and we take insurance right now.

We take insurance in New York and California with a lot of plans and working my little took us off on getting into more health insurance, which is as I've cried a tear or two to gab on over the past couple of years. Definitely the hardest thing I've ever done, but I'm really proud because we were the first ever functional medicine that is in network with health plans.

We're working with companies like Hilton [00:10:00] and Southwest Airlines. We have some really big names on the way. We work with CVS and even one of the biggest health insurance companies in the country came to us last summer and said, you know, we're recognizing that treating the body holistically. Using food as medicine, treating more than one condition in one time instead of just sending you a zillion specialists for every single symptom you have, we're recognizing that that seems like a good idea and people seem to want this.

And you are the only solution that offers this at scale. And I like fell out of my chair, I actually laughed out loud when they came to us. And I heard this because I still thought it would be years away, but what's really cool is I think it's not years away. I think it's here now. And my hope is that Parsley can be part of a movement to make this much more of the standard of care.

Cause I just don't think you should have to be rich or have special access for your doctor to have training and nutrition and sleep and [00:11:00] fitness and supplements and the most advanced diagnostic testing. But today the fact is, and we both know this, we both know the people who practice this way. You have to kind of find these private practices.

They're really expensive. They're all cash. They, they, they're very kind of all over the place. And the other thing about the field right now, which it's not a criticism, it's just an observation is that, you know, we're only the first ones that have take the data backed approach to this. Everything we do is evidence based, all of our protocols of algorithms behind them.

We have a team of 30 doctors all working and practicing this way. Today, this morning, I was seeing patients. virtually and I had a question on how to prescribe something around hormone replacement therapy. I was doing something different and I had a question and I just dropped it into our slack channel for our docs and I know that I have 35 doctors all trained because we have our own fellowship program that trains our docs. Oh, cool. They're to answer my question. And then I was like, how cool is this? My patient's not just getting my [00:12:00] brain. They're getting 35 brains. That's right. And I think that there's a benefit to that too, because, and I did this in the early days.

You probably remember when I was like practicing on my own, it's hard to be a private practice with just one or two providers. Like you're sort of on your own. So really proud that we're in network with insurance, that we have this data backed evidence based approach. Because ultimately the field to gain traction has to be a network and be an insurance, but it also has to be more credible, candidly.

Yep. And more standardized. And so that's what we're here to do.

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For someone who's not familiar with functional medicine, define that because I think it is the balance of between, you know, you're a Columbia trained doctor and you are also very up on what is the absolute best supplement that you could take to heal your gut. And that combination of the two is in my opinion, the only way to practice health care.

Yeah, I 100 percent agree. And I, you know, I trained at Columbia, Mount Sinai. These are amazing places, but I didn't see anyone who knew about this stuff. And then I went and trained in the Institute for Functional [00:16:00] Medicine and with these amazing doctors, as I mentioned, and I learned that way of practicing.

One of the reasons we developed our own fellowship at Parsley Health is that we have to be able to train doctors who are like me, coming out of top institutions, great practices, but who needed to learn this stuff and needed to learn it in a standardized way. And so we created that. So how would you define functional medicine?

So for everyone listening is like, what on earth is that? It's a totally normal sentiment, by the way, you don't need to know what it is. So the way that I define functional medicine is that we're here to find and treat the root cause. I'll give you a simple example. You and I could both have migraine headaches.

Turns out a migraine headache could have a lot of different root causes. One could be a dairy allergy or dairy sensitivity. Some people are sensitive to the proteins and dairy. It triggers a migraine. Another could be an imbalance in the hormones in the menstrual cycle. Another could be a magnesium deficiency.

Regular docs don't test magnesium levels. Another could be Too much [00:17:00] caffeine and stress, and I had one patient whose migraines were caused by the fact that she was drinking 40 ounces of coffee a day. 40, 4 0, for like years. Another trigger for migraines could be inflammation and autoimmune disease, another trigger for migraines could be poorly managed high blood pressure, the list goes on.

But guess what a root cause of a migraine is not? What is it not? It's not a painkiller deficiency. Right. That does not exist medically. And yet, in my training at these amazing hospitals and medical centers, I was trained to kind of manage a migraine in the following way. Okay, here's a painkiller. Okay, if that doesn't work, here's a sumatriptan, which is another type of drug for migraines.

All right, now that's not working. Let's go to a neurologist and Botox and a headache center. And now you've taken so much ibuprofen, you have a stomach ulcer and you need an endoscopy from a GI and the list goes on. And so That's managing a migraine. It's not solving a migraine. So, at Parsley, what we do differently is we do this whole analysis.

We call it a root cause medicine analysis when you start with [00:18:00] us. We go really deep into your history and we go all the way back to childhood. Because like most of these conditions didn't fall out of the sky yesterday. They've been kind of around for a while. And so we go back in time. It could be your childhood or your teenage years, or you maybe had this started five years ago.

Like what was happening in your life five years ago? The other thing we look at is what you're eating, how you're moving, how you manage stress. What your relationships are like, do you have meaning and purpose, your sleep, right? We look at all of this stuff in detail. And then we do diagnostic testing and we do the tests that really look at the body as an ecosystem.

Right. I know we want to talk about gut health today, maybe like what's happening in your gut is also happening in your brain. And so the functional testing looks at all that. So we do that. That's this big data set. Our docs are all trained in how to interpret that and how to look at that and also how to get to know you as a human being and see what's really going on.

And then we use that information and we prescribe [00:19:00] holistically. So as opposed to saying just here's a medication, and by the way, we're pro drug, we will prescribe medications. We prescribe drugs every single day. They're very important, but we also will prescribe. a nutrition protocol. Like, hey, you maybe are sensitive to dairy.

Let's eliminate dairy for 30 days and see. And if we help you figure out that dairy is triggering your migraine and we help you find a dairy alternative and then your migraines go away and then the sumatriptan and the painkiller and the Botox and the neurologist and the headache center all go away, that saved you a lot of time, a lot of pain, a lot of money.

You got better. We got great outcomes and we didn't need all of that stuff. And less of a burden on the overall system. And that. And which is why, by the way, for anyone who cares about this stuff, the healthcare system's starting to wake up and care. Right, right. Exactly. Sadly enough. Insurance companies are like, hey, Robin, come on board.

Exactly. I couldn't agree more, and I think that the way that I was brought up was really, really extreme in the functional side. And I've actually gone [00:20:00] somewhat of the other way. So I think there's two sides, right? But that's why I love what you do at Parsley because you just said it. You're like, we prescribe medication all day, every day, but we're doing both.

And you know, I was brought up totally homeopathic. I never fulfilled a prescription until I was diagnosed with postpartum depression and walked into the pharmacy and I was like, how do I do this? I was 36 years old and my husband was with me and I was like, where do I go? And he's like, you go to the counter?

I had never ever, I'm hearing in Zach's voice, he's like, get to the that medication. That's going to save your life. And so that was actually my journey in medication was through postpartum. And I think that there's two sides to this, right? It's like you can go so down the extreme path of being like, I'm homeopathic and I'm only taking vitamins and supplements and this and that.

But then for me, that almost actually took my life because I didn't medicate for postpartum until four months later. And so I think that that balance that you have, it's so important. And so few people are like you coming from [00:21:00] that way of not, you know, not taking medication, more functional natural approach.

But I always say it's not natural or the highway. We are not going to rakey your UTI away, people. It's not how it's going to work, right? And so, and why should you have to choose? Like I ended up firing my first OB when I, my first pregnancy at Cornell, one of the top hospitals here, because I was just so frustrated how much she didn't know.

Something simple like she didn't even ask about my genetics and she told me, Oh, just take this. you know, over the counter prenatal, something filled with dyes, something that had really inadequate types of nutrients in it, had the wrong type of B vitamins for me, and with my MTHFR genetics, that would have made me a higher miscarriage risk.

Luckily, I know that stuff, so I was already on, like, my prenatal, but most people don't know those things. The rest of the world does not. It doesn't. And is this OB GYN? GYN's fault. Is she not? I mean, she's talented. She's an amazing doctor. It's not her fault, but she wasn't trained in it. And so unfortunately, a lot of our medical [00:22:00] community doesn't have this training and therefore then they dismiss this medicine, despite the fact that the evidence base is clear, right?

And in our world, just like you said, we're not rejecting medications and surgeries and procedures. We're embracing those things. And in fact, we're doing much more cutting edge diagnostic testing and treatment at Parsley than you're actually usually getting. at your regular doctor. And at Parsley, if you're going to go on an antibiotic, you're also going to say, follow it up with this probiotic and this, this diet and take sugar out and blah, blah, blah.

So that you don't go and create candida, right? So you don't get a yeast infection. So your gut's not messed up. And so you don't end up with sinus infections. And do you want to join the team? It sounds like, you know, I literally could be the best publicist ever for your company. I mean, you could be a doctor.

I mean, at this rate, I prescribing, you know, me, I know, I know every damn thing about the, about the gut. Let's get into the gut because Dr. Bernstein here. Is. an expert at the gut, but only because I experienced it. And one of the things that you said that was so beautiful is that you start from [00:23:00] early childhood because for me, all of my gut issues stemmed from childhood trauma.

And so if you have trauma and you're in a constant state of fight flight, and you're constantly in hypervigilance, you're going to create inflammation in your gut and no amount of. Truly, the only real recovery I've had with my gut came from the trauma recovery, which is why I want to just like, you know, give every single reader, every single person and personally like a copy of Happy Days, right?

Because that question of what happened when you were a child is so valuable at the onset of this and the why. It's everything. And even in my medical training, my, you know, conventional medical training, Columbia, they taught us so much. The story, the clinical history holds all the clues. And yet then you get into practice and I, we don't practice this way at Parsley.
Our visits are 30 or 60 minutes with our patients, but out in the world it's 15 minutes. Doctors don't have time to go really back all the way. And so if you tell me you're having gut issues, one of my first questions is, well, when did they start? [00:24:00] Was it two weeks ago, last year, 10 years ago? 30, 40 years ago.
What was happening in your life then? Right. Because I have to go back to that origin story to understand how we got here. That's usually the path out. Correct. That's right. So we'll get into actually some medical things that we can do for the gut and some functional approaches to the gut. But just for listeners, if you know you've had experience with trauma, there's a chapter in Happy Days and it's all about the psychosomatic effects of physical conditions.

And so We could do a whole other episode on that, you and I, but for now we'll park that with the book. But we'll come to the concept of like, gluten, dairy, sugar, stress, what's affecting the gut, and then what is the gut affecting? Brain fog, I mean, everything, right? So dive in here because I'm so passionate about this and I've gone so far down the road of healing the gut and I know all the supplements and many of them help and I also know the trauma recovery that helps too.

But talk to us about the medical side [00:25:00] of it. It all starts with the gut, right? And so like a little quick super mini biology lesson because we say the gut and if you talk to people as I do, talk to patients, you realize people are like, what is that? Really? You know what I mean? Like sort of grounding us in what is happening in our gut, right?

So your digestion, you know, stem to stern, mouth to bum, right, is this long tube. And it's taking in the outside world, which we don't think about a lot, right? You drink water, you drink drinks, you eat food, you take medications, all of this outside world is coming through you. And then your digestive tract has this insane, amazing, cool structure that allows it to take everything from the outside and turn it into something that can go inside of your body.

And it's in doing that, it has to protect you, which is why 70 percent of our immune system is in our gut. And in doing that, it has to be smart, which is why 95 percent of our serotonin is in our gut and why we have [00:26:00] something called the enteric nervous system, which is like a second brain.

With 500 million nerves in it, which is so crazy. And your gut is this really smart organism. And at the same time, it's really delicate. The lining of your intestine is one cell layer thick. Really? One cell layer thick. And so it's also really delicate and relies on all the bacteria and microbes that are in there to protect it.

And so when we're bringing in all these things and we say, well, why are everybody's guts so messed up? Because 40 percent of Americans have some sort of irritable bowel syndrome, uh, acid reflux, GERD, right? Irritable bowel disease, which is Crohn's, colitis, autoimmune diseases like celiac. We've really done a number on our guts, big time, huge, which is why this is so common.

And what I see all the time before we get into how we fix it is like people ignoring this. A lot of people just live feeling really uncomfortable in their digestion and they sort of tell [00:27:00] themselves like, Oh, this is just the way it is. I just have reflux every time I eat. And I always remind people, this is not normal.

Like you should not live this way or feel this way. This is the most important organ because it's taking in the outside world. And so when we think about what's impacting our gut today, the most, it's our gut. a number of things that are really, really common that we're all doing. It's foods that can be toxic to the gut.

So everyone always asks, well, is gluten really that bad? Or is wheat really that bad? Or I feel fine when I eat it. For some people it's okay, but the gluten protein is in and of itself for a lot of people, really destructive to that single cell layer, tiny tissue paper. Delicate is the word. Delicate lining.

And it's like a sort of a bull in a china shop running into it. And so you can get these microscopic holes. All the pesticides and chemicals in our environment make these microscopic holes too. It's what is called, for people who listen to this stuff, it's called intestinal permeability or leaky gut.

Chronic stress. So being in trauma and [00:28:00] fight or flight for long periods of time. I think gastritis. Yeah, that happened to me. It immobilizes your gut. So that nervous system, which keeps your gut moving with you, without you having to think about it. When you're in chronic stress and chronic fight or flight, it's paralyzed and things stop moving naturally and then you get reflux, you get bloating, you get small intestinal bacterial overgrowth because you don't have that normal motion of your gut, you get constipation, sugar, high sugar diets, Americans eat 152 pounds of sugar a year.

What? Yeah, average across just naturally occurring and added sugars. It's gross. It's gross. And that is destroying the good bugs in our gut that are protecting our gut lining. that are making neurotransmitters like GABA that are important for our calm and our focus, that are keeping that immune system that's in our gut happy so that we don't get chronic inflammation.

So you basically, if you're ibuprofen, I'm talking about that a lot today, but those over the counter drugs also can really mess with your gut. [00:29:00] alcohol. Although I remember it's like really if you take a lot of it, right? Like, well, a lot of people are taking a lot of it. Yeah. It's not like the once a week you're taking it around your period.

You're taking it around your period. People are taking it like every day, some of these medications and a lot of other medications. I mean, medications that one of the common asthma drugs has just gotten a black box warning because of it's Impact on mental health. and what it's doing to that gut brain access.

So there's a lot of medications that we don't even think of as impacting our gut, right? They're for something else. They're for our asthma. They're for our headache. And sometimes you have to weigh out the risk reward of those medications. Absolutely. And some of them you're taking them all the time. And it's not that those medications are bad or you shouldn't take them.

It's just bringing awareness that Those, plus the foods, plus the alcohol, plus the stress, plus the pesticides, etc, etc, etc, are all, plus just infections that we get, right? Common parasites. All these things come together. If you had a lot of antibiotics, you can mess up your gut microbes. And then become more susceptible [00:30:00] to parasites.

Exactly. And none of this is our fault, by the way. Like none of this is. intentional. It's just the way we live our lives today. It's also particularly in American culture, just very common. Yes. And so when you eat this way, when you are living this way, and when you're stressed all the time, that intestinal permeability is there, your immune system gets triggered, and then it leads to this chronic inflammation.

And that's when we start to get brain fog. We start to get autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis. eczema. Celiac disease for some people really shows up with anger and irritability and skin rashes and joint pain and brain fog without any digestive symptoms. Wait, talk to me because right now I have brain fog, but I've always had a lot of brain fog, which is all gut related.

Yes. Even if I have a slice of pizza, let's just say I'm like, Oh, I'm going to just have like a cheat day. I literally can't remember anything the next day. Or that night, I can, I literally can't like say words. I feel the exact same way though. Yeah. I, if I [00:31:00] have a slice of pizza, for me, I'm gluten sensitive in that way.

I'll get little breakouts, like I'll get eczema on my scalp and I get brain fog and irritability. And a lot of people are eating this way and they don't even realize that it's the foods. Yep. And so, so much is in our gut, but the coolest bit is that you can actually heal all this stuff really beautifully.

And by eating real whole foods, by cutting out the sugar, for some people cutting out the gluten for at least four or six weeks, Just experimenting, like starting to see what you feel like without some of these things. Be mindful about your consumption of things like ibuprofen, right? Am I taking it every day?

That might be a little too much, right? Drinking plenty of water, taking a good probiotic. You can start to shift these things and start to get your digestion back on track. And then meditation, spirituality, stress reduction, using the Gabby Koji nap to stay on track with that. That will help your gut start to move in the right ways and start to take care of itself [00:32:00] better.

Yeah. And I think that we can also They have to go together. You could do all the spiritual work but then eat like crap and still have gut issues. You could do all the holistic things and eat perfectly and have the most beautiful alkaline diet but be living with undiagnosed and unaddressed major PTSD symptoms and do everything perfectly and pristine in your stomach like I did for many years and still have major gastro issues if you're not addressing the root cause in that case, which is also the psychosomatic Yes.

Yes. And you have to look at it holistically. I mean, that was also the thing about my. Again, amazing conventional medical training, but that also blew me away was that we treat the mind and the body as so separate and yet they're deeply connected. And so at Parsley, when we get to know you, we're asking all these questions about your life and your relationships.

Are they additive? Are they harmful to you? Are you managing stress with like destructive habits? Are you managing stress with like yoga meditation? Like where are you in your mind, body, spirit connection? [00:33:00] Right. Because we have to know that, otherwise, how can we come up with the right prescription? And how can you really fully address the root cause condition if you're not also addressing the psychosomatic condition?

Yes, exactly. Like, I had a patient this morning, she's a young woman, she's had two kids, her metabolism has shifted a lot after baby two, she's done having kids, so she's got weight gain, and she's like, you know, before the kids. it would feel like this if I wanted to lose weight and now it feels like this.

She's also got Crohn's disease. She's actually got severe Crohn's. When I met her, she'd already had part of her intestines taken out. So she's got autoimmune. She's in her thirties, weight gain, and she's got a lot of emotional stuff. I know. So she's got an emotional eating component. So we were teasing out today, uh, What is inflammation from autoimmune?

I'm going to test her hormones and I'm going to look at thyroid and estrogen and progesterone and adrenal hormones. And then where's the emotional eating coming in? And is intermittent fasting a tool that she can use for [00:34:00] herself? Or how can we look at how she's using sugar as a coping strategy? Right?

Like all of it goes together. And so I'm going to want to work with her, but I'm going to work with her on all these different dimensions, which is going to include the testing, but also include the drugs, but also include how do we get to kind of your emotional body as well. Beautiful. I love it. I love it.

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intermittent fasting.

So I've heard like pros and cons, right? I can see very clearly how it would be very beneficial to the gut and then therefore hormonally and brain and all the other areas. I've also heard some folks, just personal stories, right? Of folks saying like, Oh, it really messed up my hormones or blah, blah, blah, right?

So, um, Folks that are interested in intermittent fasting, sort of like, what is it? How would we use it? What would we use it for? Because I'm asking for a friend right now. [00:38:00] So I really like intermittent fasting and really it comes down to basically taking a break and eating. The classic way to do it is a 16 hour fast, which just means.

Say you finish eating dinner at 8 p. m. You don't eat again until 12 noon the next day. If you finish dinner at 7 p. m. you'd eat again at 11 a. m. the next day. If you're an early eater like I have become with the kids, six, then I'm eating again by 10 a. m. the next day. Why do we care about this? Well, it gives your digestion a break.

And does that mean no water? Oh, no, no, no. Water's great. And what about calories? And, but a black coffee you could have, you wouldn't have that. In the morning you can have black coffee. Yeah. And you can actually have, I actually shared this with my patient this morning. You can have what I call my morning glory coffee, which is coffee blended with some coconut oil and some cinnamon, which I like because it like frosted up and it makes it taste good.

And the coconut oil, if you eat a Basically, pure fat in that fasting window, you don't mess up the fast because the body is still in a mode of burning fat for fuel. So like, why do we do [00:39:00] this? What does intermittent fasting do? Well, it gives your digestion a break. It if you do it overnight, allows your body to kind of work through the stores of carbs called glycogen stores in the liver.

If you always have plenty of those around, the body never has to burn fat for fuel because it always has plenty of carbs. that are much easier that are right there. And so when it comes to weight loss and intermittent fasting, intermittent fasting works essentially because of that. And because of calorie restriction, the most recent research on intermittent fasting is basically that people lose weight because they're just not eating as much.

It's like that simple. It's not really rocket science, but what I think intermittent fasting can do is it can help us not. turn to our carbs in the morning. A lot of people are eating very carbohydrate based breakfast. And in the morning time, your cortisol is actually at its highest point of the day. And when you eat a lot of carbs and your cortisol is high, that's when you tend to store those carbs more as fat, especially abdominal fat.

And so it's better to eat your carbs a little bit later in the day, if that's an issue for you. [00:40:00] So when you asked about hormones, because I actually talked about this recently and someone just posted today, um, Well, what about I'm a woman? What about my hormones? I know that there's people out there who say, you know, women should never intermittent fast.

And that's completely not true. Many women do great with intermittent fasting. Now for some women, if they're already too thin, if they're dealing with our orthorexia or if they're having low body mass index for them, Adding on intermittent fasting can kind of be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

It can be too much pressure on the thyroid. It can create sometimes irregular menstrual cycles. So this is where anyone like me on a podcast talking about this stuff, you also have to know your body and hopefully say, well, maybe this is something I'll try. If somebody's hormones are off, intermittent fasting, a 16 hour fast once a week or once or twice a week.

It's not going to mess 13 or 14 hours or do it a little bit shorter, right? It's not going to hurt you. Now, again, if you're doing it every day for months [00:41:00] on end and you have a hormone imbalance, you have a thyroid condition, you have certain types of female hormone conditions that might not be for you.

And that's where I recommend working with a doctor who's actually literate in the stuff and can test your hormones and understand what's going on. But I find for far more people than not. Listen, it's a tool in the toolkit. Yeah. Yeah, it is a tool and you can try it and you can see if it's helpful. I like it.

I think starting slow with these kinds of things, I know for myself, it's not very effective for weight loss. Not that I need to lose weight, but I, I find that I actually gain weight when I intermittent fast because I eat fast. much more at that, because I'm an early eater. I have to eat like the moment I wake up because I just, I'm, I also eat, I stop eating around six, seven o'clock, but I'm hungry in the morning.

So then if I don't have that shake in the morning or whatever it is that I would normally do, I'll start like at 10 o'clock, like having three lunches. So it just hasn't been that great for me. And every, it's like you knowing your body. Like for me, I like intermittent fasting, but [00:42:00] I can't do it every day.

And like today I was hungry this morning. Yeah. We ate a lighter dinner last night. I was done early and I was on my way to work and it was 8 45 and I, I needed to eat something. Yeah. And so that's okay. It also is like, you can play with these things, these practices because they're just really about finding what your balance is.

Finding your balance and knowing what's right for you and trusting your intuition and your body. trusting your intuition, your body. And then what would be the number, the top three things people can do? I already know the answer to really support their gut without seeing a functional doctor, without any of this.

So much you can do. So number one, what you're putting in your mouth every day, if you can just do a simple like elimination, try like wheat and added sugar. Doesn't mean you have to be sugar free. Try wheat. Dairy is another big culprit. If you're suffering from digestive distress, wheat and dairy are going to be your top two.

I know there's other things. I know there's a long, long list of things that can irritate the gut, cause immune issues, cause digestive [00:43:00] distress. Start with those two, cut them out for at least four weeks and then reintroduce them one at a time. You might be blown away at how you feel and it's a free intervention and you do not need a doctor for this.

Second one is, I think a lot of what you talk about, it's, it's breathing for 10 minutes every day. It's facing and getting help and support for your fight or flight, your trauma. The, most people are living in like an emergent state all day, every day. Yeah. I would definitely agree. definitely agree with that.

And that's actually why, so the, in the Gabby app, what we're trying to do is like give people two minute practices. We're about to roll out every day, daily two minute practices and just keeping it so easy to access. And I feel like I need to give every Parsley member that happens. We'll figure it out because I want people to heal through healing their nervous system as well.

And so you and I have such a shared intention, which is healing through [00:44:00] root cause condition. And it's beautiful to be in the presence of doctors who care about your nervous system and your emotional state. And I'm just really proud of you for making that your commitment.

And also I'm just proud of you for trailblazing this. because it is a movement. You have been the catalyst for this zeitgeist, really, because it's in the air, but it's not necessarily something that would be this rapidly well known, particularly in the medical space, if it weren't for Parsley. And you work your ass off to get it there.

And you just do such a beautiful job. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. I love you. I love you too. I love you. So proud of you. We're out here doing it. Together. We're on a mission. We're on a mission. We're on a mission. And, and Gabby's also, I call the, to everyone when I'm like freaking out. So I'm one of the lucky few people who has a, has a dial up, dial up to Dr.Bernstein just like she has Dr. Bersin. I got Dr. Bersin right there and I was, I'm glad, here's my last question for Dr. Bersin. Whenever I notice my gut get really off balance, if I've been like eating too many protein bars for [00:45:00] meals, right? Like that's a big one for me if I just get, that's not a whole food.

I will start drinking about eight ounces of aloe in the morning. is so soothing to my stomach. And is that okay? Yeah, it is okay. I mean, aloe can really help soothe your stomach. They actually put aloe in some of the supplements that are designed to heal the gut. Often they'll contain aloe, they'll contain glutamine, they'll contain de glycerized licorice.

So there's a few substances out there, people, that will help heal that gut lining, that leaky gut I was talking about. Although if you're going to keep bombarding your gut with stress and all this other stuff doesn't work. You can't keep take the supplements because not going to help. And then drinking aloe for some people that can lead to the gut moving too fast.

So just like you could get, you could digest, watch out people. If that's happening to you, then maybe you just don't need it. Yes, exactly. It's not happening to me. And also drinking enough water. I mean, the other thing for the gut is just a lot of us are dehydrated and sitting all day. If you're immobilized, if you're in the hospital [00:46:00] for some reason, you're going to get constipated because you're not moving.

Exercise actually is a movement of the body stimulates the digestive system. Drinking water stimulates and helps the digestive system move. Those two really simple things. I have days where I just sit on my butt all day and stare at a zoom screen. Yeah. And that is not good for our digestion. So can you like get up every 30 minutes?

Can you walk? Can you take walking meetings? Can you make sure that you're a brain break? Brain breaks and also gut breaks. Gut breaks, brain breaks. We could do this forever. Okay. I know. Or just have a yoga mat if you can near your desk or not everybody has the privilege of being able to do that, but definitely just get out and walk around the block.

Yeah. It's so important. And stretch. Even just doing like a simple stretching routine at night. For me, like a mini yoga, but I know I'm a yoga nerd, but like, you don't like yoga. I love yoga. No, I do like yoga now. I never liked it, but now actually my body's needing it. When you told me that, Tara Stiles is our best friend.

So we're pretty set up. Yeah. [00:47:00] When Gabby told me she wasn't into yoga, I like, basically my jaw dropped. I like hit the floor. I was like, what? Gabby doesn't like it. I'm a yoga nerd, but I know a lot of people don't like it. But just stretching like before bed triggers your parasympathetic nervous system. I always think about you when I do that.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just like it gets you out of your phone and out of the day and present and into your body. That's why I like yoga. I mean, yoga for me has been my therapy for 20 years. Yeah. It's amazing, but it is so therapeutic. And you know, there's so much stored trauma in the body. And so it's such a somatic healing experience.

So if you're not ready to do the therapeutic work, it could happen on the mat. Yes. A hundred percent. This is our plug for TerraStyles. This is our plug for TerraStyles. And Yeah, I mean, I taught, my book is called State Change, and I talk about this a lot, that my sort of awakening into health and being interested in health and medicine, because I wasn't pre med in college, was yoga.

And that made me interested. And now that's like, now [00:48:00] I'm sitting here with you talking about gut health. So watch out if you do yoga, people. It could lead you to a very surprising thing. It's beautiful. I love you. I'm so proud of you. Everybody go to ParsleyHealth.com, right? ParsleyHealth. com. Everybody go to ParsleyHealth.com, definitely.

So what happens when you get to ParsleyHealth. com? Is it like questionnaire? I mean, I, I was part of the Parsley Health Collective like a decade, like for so long now, but what is the, now what is the onboarding process? So it's super simple. You can just join now and sign up online. You can schedule your visit with your doc right away, create an account and schedule a visit with us.

If you have questions and you're not sure, we offer a free 15 minute consult call. Whoa. With one of our membership advisors. Wow. Who are awesome. By the way, the woman who leads that team on our team is just my hero. She's so amazing. And they will talk you through, is this for you? How does it work? How does it work with my insurance?

So yeah, about 50 percent of our members do a call and sign up. So that's free. Sign up for one of those, learn more. We also have something really cool right on the homepage of the website, which is [00:49:00] your symptom score. And you can do that and it covers nine aspects of your body. It covers your hormones and your heart health and your mental health, like how you're feeling.

And it's such a good check in. You could do it every day if you want and you'll give you a score. But a lot of us are just not feeling what's happening in our bodies or we're, we're unintentionally ignoring it because we don't want to deal. And that symptom score can just be like a little number. Oh, how am I feeling?

And if your symptom score is really high, we give you a little readout of it and we tell you, well, This is pretty high, and if you have symptoms that are really high, it means that there are things happening in more than one part of your body. So if you've got hormones that are amiss and heart health, or if you've got mental health and skin and bones and joints, that might be an indication that you have an underlying condition.

And only 10 percent of Americans get preventive testing. Hmm. We wait till the wheels are falling off the wagons to get testing and then it's, sometimes it's too late, right? So just even doing that symptom score can give you [00:50:00] like a little bit of a sense of self reflection. And then, okay, what do I want to do with that?

Do I want to take the score to my, primary care doctor or my functional doctor? Do I want to work with Parsley? What do I want to do with this information? But hopefully it gets people sort of into their bodies a little bit. So smart. Parsleyhealth. com. I think a lot of people listening are going to be running over there now because It's a beautiful way to heal.

Thank you. Thank you. I love you. Love you.

If you made it to the end of this episode, that means you're truly committed to miracles. I'm really proud of you. If you wanna get more Gabby, tune in every Monday for a new episode. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of the guidance or special bonus episodes. Your experience of this show means a lot to me.

So I really want to welcome you to leave an honest review and you can follow me on social media at Gabby Bernstein. And if you want to get in on the [00:51:00] action, sign up for a chance to be dear Gabby live at dearGabby.com. See you next week.

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