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Dr. Joel Rosen: Everyone and welcome back to another edition of less stress life where we teach exhausted and burnt out adults the truth about adrenal fatigue so that they can get their health back quickly. And I’m really excited about our next guest, Becky rue, she has been a client, patient of mine, a friend of mine, and we’ve also done work together. She’s quite active on social media, she’s had her own health journey, as it relates to thyroid issues and gi issues, and insomnia issues.
And I really wanted to interview Becky, because she’s one of these people that goes down those rabbit holes, and continues to look and bring up new things, and really helps not just herself, get an idea of what’s impacting her and what she needs to do to get better. But she helps a lot of people online as well. So, Becky, thank you so much for being here today.
Becky Rhew: You’re welcome. I’m glad to be here. I am. Yeah.
Dr. Joel Rosen: why don’t you just go? Go ahead, go ahead. Yep.
Becky Rhew: I was just gonna say, you know, having these chronic illnesses sucks. And you have to look at the silver lining, which is that maybe you can help somebody else. And maybe you can help them get from point A to point B, faster than you did? You know, so that’s always the hope that somebody doesn’t have to endure quite the drama that you did.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, yeah, for sure. But with that being said, it’s been a long journey for you, right? So why don’t you kind of take us through the genesis of what you were initially dealing with that, you know, that started your, your search for better health?
Becky Rhew: Um, so my symptoms became really obvious to me after I had two babies. So, when I was, when my second baby was a year old, I started to have a lot of weird symptoms. And it seemed to me to be hormonal in nature, because of the timing of everything. That’s the, you know, the path I was chasing at that time, you know, clearly, this is hormonal, let’s fix the hormones, and everything will be great, we’ll be back to normal. But, you know, as you go down this chronic illness path, you can kind of look back on your prior life and realize, maybe I didn’t really feel super great before that, you know, maybe there were some signs of things that were starting to, you know, go wrong.
So, I worked with you at that time. And, you know, we were, we were working on adrenal issues, and you had me run my DNA. And that was probably the most cost-effective and efficient thing that I did to customize my, my recovery. Um, it just gives you so many, so much insight as to why your body is doing what it’s doing. And one of the main things that I found out at that time, and your, the program that you’re doing now is so much more comprehensive, but we found a lot of stuff. And what I found was, you know, I don’t process certain amino acids normally, and that I have a histamine issue. So, um, you know, a lot of people have allergies.
And those can present in all sorts of different ways. You know, looking back on my past life, I can recall a time I used to get these insane hives after exercise. And I had to go to the hospital a couple of times from having these major hive breakouts, which is kind of weird, you know, but it was isolated, and you just kind of look past it, but you put these pieces together, you know, as time goes on. Um, so I focused on a low histamine diet as one of my main recovery tools. And I found that that was really like the crux of, you know, what would keep me even-keeled. I was having a lot of insomnia as my most distressing symptom, digestive issues, and I found that the low histamine diet was effective kind of across the board.
So that I did that for a while. And one of the things you hope that when you’re doing these things that you will recover and you won’t How to do it anymore. So the low histamine diet like you can’t have, you know, tomatoes, um, I love tomatoes in my past life, you know, tomatoes, citrus, um, what else like things like avocados, you know, it’s just like an apple cider vinegar. Apple cider vinegar is like the healthiest thing anybody could have, it’s so great for your blood sugar, you know, blah, blah, blah, your digestion, it’s super high in histamine. So you have to modify your diet, contrary to a lot of other healthy food plans. And you hope that you don’t have to do that in the long term.
So I would fall off of this low histamine diet and go through periods of feeling not so great kind of thinking, like, maybe I should do that again, you know, going back and forth. Um, you know, I’m a human being. So I have, you know, I like chocolate and ice cream. And so, you know, go through periods of time like that, I was
covered so well, that I became a fitness competitor for a little while. That is, that requires a rigorous training schedule, I was lifting weights a lot, I was doing cardio every day. It was it’s very intense on your body. So, but one of the positive things that came out of it is your diet is extra super clean. So I was able to really see even more, so what kinds of foods were bothering me at that point. So going down this path I did the histamine diet recovered, became a fitness competitor.
Because as you start to put these pieces of your puzzle together, and you look at your hormones, you can see, oh, I have large amounts of histamine. And I also react to something called glutamate. And I don’t process dopamine very well. So all of these things contribute to making some people including myself, a high-energy individual, it’s great for business and work and getting things done, and going to the gym. It’s not great for being calm and getting good sleep and you know, feeling rested. So if you’re a high-energy individual, rest assured that your DNA test will show why it will show the specific, you know, neurotransmitters or amino acids or foods that might be causing you to have that sort of persona. Um, maybe part of it’s working well for you, and maybe it’s not. So I proceeded on this fitness competitor path. And parts of it were good and helpful, the very clean diet was helpful. But obviously, intense training is not the best for somebody with a sensitive body.
And now I know more just how sensitive My body is. If I had known at that time, I probably wouldn’t have gone down that path. But you know, Dr. Joe, like your DNA program is so much more comprehensive now, and even 23andme. But they keep putting out more reports all the time. So I’ve just learned much more about my body and things that I should do and shouldn’t. So the intense training probably led me to have a flare of a thyroid issue. So I had another so my first crash was in 2015. I recovered pretty well and then I had this next crash in the summer of 2018. That’s when I had been competing for about a year and my body just had it. I was also trying a few too many weight loss tricks. Of there are many athletes and fitness competitors who can handle fat burners. So fat burners are, you know, a combination of herbs and whatever that can help your body burn more fat.
They have different functions. And I now know that I probably reacted to a lot of them, and it and it sent me into this crash. My thyroid started swelling. very upsetting if that’s ever you, I feel you. So I go to the doctor and we and I say I have a thyroid issue, I need to go on medication. This wasn’t the first time my thyroid levels had fallen like that. Back in 2015, I had very low t three, t three active thyroid hormone. And I asked for medication at that time, and I was refused. So I just had to suck it up and recover, which I did. So in 2018, I had had it with mainstream medicine that had refused me the thyroid medicine in 2015. So I paid out of pocket went to, you know, a different endocrinologist. And if you pay out of pocket, the doctor will do more of what you want them to do. So I was prescribed thyroid medicine at that time in 2018, I
felt better, in some regards. Probably continued to push me much too hard in the gym for a while. You know, I dealt with the thyroid thing for a while. And it was okay. I continued to try the whole gamut of nutrition plans and diets to find what would make my body would recover me, right? There are so many nutrition plans out there keto, vegan, low carb, high protein, you know, you figure I just haven’t found it yet. There’s, you know, there’s one that’s gonna work great for me. So I’ve literally done everything. And my digestion still sucked. And my sleep still sucked. And it didn’t heal my thyroid.
And finally, in 2019, I was more burnt out, I had to stop lifting weights, and I decided to do yoga. So I started doing yoga at the end of 2019. And it is transformative for anybody that has started down a yoga path and got really into it. They’ll, you know, they’ll say the same thing. It’s very healing. You know, you can’t really put your finger on it. It’s, it’s not so much the meditation, meditation is amazing. But the thing I love about yoga is you can think that meditation is a crock of BS, and it will still work for you. Because the stretching that you do improves your nervous system so much that the physiological and the mental changes, still happen for you.
Even if you hate meditation, you don’t know how to do anything. So yoga healed me in a lot of ways. And I started to feel so much better. My digestion was better, my sleep was better, my mood was better. My outlook on things was better. I felt healed, you know, for a little while. And then right after that happened, we all got stuck in lockdown. And I think a lot of people with an ongoing chronic illness will agree that the lockdown just, you know, kind of sent some of their symptoms spiraling out of control. You are, you know, just everything changed so much. I was previously going to hot yoga everyday detoxing regularly, you know, we’re spending more time outside, then all of a sudden we have the government telling us to stay inside your you know, we’re just withdrawn from our social circles that have, you know, a mental effect, which then has a physical effect. So, I definitely experienced another crash over the lockdown. My digestion was terrible. I had my gallbladder removed in October of 2020. So it’s been like that.
It’s been a roller coaster of a crash, you know, sometimes a very drastic recovery where I feel not even normal, but superhuman, superhuman where I can, you know, be a fitness competitor or go to hot, intense yoga every day. And, you know, then it spirals back down. And I finally got so sick of that, that I already knew the power of, you know, analyzing your DNA, and I reached back out to you, and I was like, You have to help me figure something out, because I’m tired of this roller coaster, and I need to figure out what’s happening here and what I can do. And, you know, your program was his, you know, top-notch, like in terms of looking at those different pathways.
That mine was a hot mess. At that time, by this time, I had learned that I have something called g six PD. So in the summer of 2020, when I was having these major gallbladder issues, 23andme put out a new report. They have these, you know, their programs suck in some ways, but they do have these amazing carrier reports. They put out reports to see whether you’re a carrier, whether would you have a like serious, medically recognized illnesses, such as celiac disease, which I have hemochromatosis, which is it messes with how you absorb iron. Sog six PD is one that all of a sudden, showed up there in my reports in the summer of 2020, because, you know, the science of genetics is just advancing so rapidly, which is great.
It’s great for people with chronic illnesses that are not recovering any other way. So, I didn’t place any significance on this G six PD thing, until I went to one of those spas where they give you vitamin injections. And I’m filling out the form. And there are only two questions on there. And one of them is like, you know, do you have, like, Ms. And the other one is, do you have G six PD, and I was like, oh, shoot, this is a thing. This is like a serious thing. They’re asking me about this. It’s like one of the only things they’re asking me. And I’m such a nerd, I, I would like to know exactly what my body is doing. Because I’m sick of the roller coaster. So I started looking into the G six PD. And I found that there were certain things that would help my body work better. And I started doing them, and it helped a lot. So it helps things help. But what I have come to the conclusion is you cannot consider yourself recovered, in that you can abandon these techniques, and go out and have pizza and gluten and beer and stay out all night. If you want to live a good life with these challenges, you have to get these protocols in place, get them working, you know, sometimes really detox yourself from whatever it is that occurred before and you know, stay on them. I don’t think I’ll be getting you to know, abandoning the low histamine diet again.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I mean, listen back, you said a lot of really important things and this is a great podcast for I think the title would be something along the lines of the path of chronic illness, you know, especially for the sophisticated want to know the answers health fitness enthusiast. And a couple of things that you mentioned in there in terms of reoccurring crashes. You also mentioned looking for almost that what we’re trained in healthcare, are conditioned in the allopathic approaches, the fix the one time fix, and I’ve always said and you’ve probably heard this too is health is a verb, right? It’s always something it’s not a noun, it’s a verb. It’s something that you’re always working towards.
It’s come so far, in terms of when we first did work together, and the DNA wasn’t as expensive It’s come so far from Okay, let’s go gluten-free. Let’s do the autoimmune diet, let’s you know, let’s heal the gut. Because there are just so many other variables in there. There’s stress, there are genetic components, there’s the environment, there are so many things that you have to understand your specific nuances. The other really important thing you said, and I just got this the other day, Becky, from a client of mine, a prospective client, that told me that they’ve talked to three pretty high-level doctors.
And they said that the genetic test is not anything, it’s not really important. And it’s really frustrating for me to hear that because I know and you know how important it is. It’s like a blueprint. And it’s like, look here, especially if you become a doctor, and you ask the patient about their health history, their specific how it’s showing up, what other environmental factors do they have so that when you put that blueprint down, you overlap those perfect storms of where you are inherently already weak, with how it’s showing up and what the other environmental things are. I told this patient I said, you know, that’s true, it makes me mad because if I didn’t know something that could be helpful, I would be honest, and say, you know, I don’t know, but I don’t want to necessarily commit a, you know, an error of commission in terms of, hey, like, you shouldn’t do that, it’s not going to be helpful.
It’s, it’s egotistical to me, I would rather just say, hey, look, like, I don’t really know about that. But I know that a lot of people could probably get help from that. And it’s just not my area. But what you said was really ringing true in terms of it was the most value for any testing that you’ve done, because it can give you so much insight.
Becky Rhew: And so it doesn’t change, you know,
Dr. Joel Rosen: It doesn’t change, right, that’s a that’s set in stone as you, you that’s your genetics, what do changes, maybe things are getting turned on and turned off, or environmental inhibitors are making things more likely to be expressed, or you’re missing cofactors that could help that specific enzyme that even doesn’t look like it’s a problem, it is a problem. But so what I want to do is some of the clinical pearls that you’ve learned because yoga was certainly a big one for you, I think a lot of people will resonate with and I work with a lot of them too. And you see them on your socials that either their trainers or their or their you know, in the fitness world. And they have just put too much time into that and depleting their body.
And the impact of bad has, especially with some inheritable genetic weaknesses. So with that being said, What would you say in terms of now that when we work together again, and we reopen the genetic test, and I like, you know, said to you like full disclosure back, you have so much more information than we’ve ever had, like, with anyone that I’ve done work with six months ago, or later, let alone two or three years, I want their raw data so that I can give them some more insights. So you mentioned g six PD, which is a very complicated thing. But you also know about now, all the other ways that histamine is being released, right, because it was more of a low histamine diet. But now we’ve told you, and you probably already know, but now you’ve related the iron metabolism issues. You’ve looked at sulfite contributions to that.
Obviously, histamines are released from stressors and the environment, and your immune system. So what are some of the new aha is that you’ve had, that you have now added, I would say to your toolkit, because that’s what it is, right? I mean, at the end of the day, that’s the Zen and the Art of knowing how to manage the information that you get, right, like when to pause, when to not pause when to use this when to back off. But what is some of the newer tools or some of the new aha is that you’ve had now.
Becky Rhew: So it’s, it’s funny, because, you know, you referenced the genetic blueprint. And it’s so important because it keeps you from using things that are potentially harmful to you. Like, as I said, Before, when you’re histamine intolerant, you have to avoid things like apple cider vinegar. Um, you know, you can pull up any other diet and it says, you know, drink a cup of apple cider vinegar every morning. That’s going to cause a lot of issues for somebody that has allergies.
So, you know, I’ve had the opportunity to, for good and for bad to use myself as an experiment. Um, my parents are hippies from the 70s. And they have me taking vitamins when I was a little kid. So I’m no stranger to supplements. And I, you know, when all of this started happening for me, I just started researching it, you know, what can I do, there has to be a way to fix this. Because in my past life, I was okay, I was pretty good, you know, I will take that over some of the symptoms I’ve had since then. So, um, you know, I got so much information from you, I got involved in the bodybuilding world, I, I got some different certifications like a personal trainer, I had the opportunity to learn from a lot of people in the natural health world, and I just learned so many things.
And I would say one of the big things that I’ve taken away from everything is that your gut health is one of the major determining factors of how your genetics are going to play out. And I can see, you know, as I said, you start to look back at your life, and you put the pieces together, oh, well, this happened when I did this. And then this happened, and I was good here, but then I crashed. And I can equate a lot of my crashes with antibiotic use. So when you take antibiotics, it wipes out not only the infection but also clears your gut completely of all bacteria. And you, you know, we have just zillions of bacteria in our gut. And a lot of them are very helpful. When they take mice, and they clear out their bacteria and their digestive tract, they will like to die, they’ll die. So that’s like tells you what it will do to you. So your gut health will determine what’s going to happen. Um, a lot of things that I’ve been dealing with Are you just mentioned that sometimes your symptoms will flare because you’re missing cofactors?
Well, that could happen because of malnutrition, which could be a side effect if you are predisposed to celiac disease. Right? So there’s your gut being the major determining factor as to you. You becoming you know, malnutrition, and then you don’t have the cofactors. Now, your genes are going haywire on you. Gut health plays a huge into the histamine issue. And something that I’ve been working on lately is, and I had the opportunity to do this a few years back, is, you know, when I tried to hit a low histamine diet, I also learned that there are certain bacteria that help your body degrade histamine.
So you could either take a Zyrtec or you could take a probiotic, and populate your gut with these bugs that will do that for you. And that’s going to be a more long-lasting fix. Because unless you take an antibiotic, those bugs are going to stay there, and they’re going to be your natural antihistamine. So that’s what I’ve been working on a lot lately. And it produced a lot of results for me in a short amount of time.
When I got your latest report, it has a long list of things that I can do. You know, it says you have these genetic things, and these are some things that you can do for it. But when you look at the first page of your report, it says if you’re I don’t remember the exact wording but if your gut is not working, none of these other things are gonna work. So, if you know, chronic illness is a tedious and expensive endeavor. So, I want the biggest bang for my buck. And that is, you know if none of the other fixes are going to work until you heal your gut, then heal your gut. Right, you’re not going to absorb any nutrients until you heal your gut lining. You’re not going to recover from infection. If your bad bacteria are populating the good bacteria, so I’ve been working on creating an antihistamine gut, and it’s working really well, I stopped reacting to foods, my nose wasn’t stuffy anymore. I even stopped reacting to my cat, so much your sleep will improve once you get the histamine under control. So working on fixing your gut to be more histamine proof is a nice thing you can do that has a long-lasting effect and doesn’t require you to eat a boring diet, you know, it can even broaden the range of foods that you’re able to have. So some of the ways that I’m doing that, there are certain bacteria that will help you do that. And you can buy them in, you know, over the counter, not over the counter probiotics, the probiotics you want for histamine intolerance, or you have to order them online. Word I think I read this online, the worst thing you can do for histamine intolerance is to buy a probiotic off of the shelf, at CVS, or wherever they’re all garbage, they’re all going to cause more symptoms for you. With the exception of one, there’s a probiotic called culture L, you can get that anywhere. CVS, you know, anywhere Walgreens, culture l that’s one of the good strains. I’ve been using some other bifidobacteria, which’s very helpful. It’s been a very specific process. And I’ve been using a lot of butyrates, which is I know, is one of your favorite remedies, you know, for the gut. I know, especially when, when you’re using antibiotics, that you’ve said that it’s very helpful, then, but it’s also can be helpful. You know, you can have genetic issues that predispose you to gut issues. And then you need those special supplements like butyrate. There’s, you know, there’s just a lot of really cool advances, you know. And on the note, fixing the gut. It’s so funny, because you, you said that, you know, your patients have been to other doctors. And I know that by the time your patients get to you, they could have been to like eight doctors, you know, they’re going through the circus and not getting anywhere, and they come to you and they’re on like five prescriptions, and none of them are healthy. But it’s funny, I have talked to so many doctors that told me that if I wasn’t celiac, then I should be eating gluten. And, you know, gastrointestinal doctors, you know, naturopathic doctors, gut health specialists. You know, they’ll tell you, gluten is wonderful for you, as long as you’re not celiac. Well, what I found for myself is that celiac is the term for when your gut is so ulcerative, I guess is the word your gut is just so deranged, that they do a colonoscopy, and they say, yes, you’re celiac. The only remedy for that is a gluten-free diet. So I go to all these gut health specialists and I’m like, Well, my digestion sucks. And they’re like, well, we should do a colonoscopy. And we should also
test your blood for celiac, but you have to eat gluten for two weeks before that, and I’m like, there’s not a chance in hell that I’m doing that. Those are going to be the worst two weeks of my life. And you can find very good information. You know, from doctors, such as yourself and elsewhere that the standard for diagnosing celiac should be the genetic test that tells you, you are gluten intolerant. Don’t eat gluten, should you continue to eat gluten, your stomach lining will become so assertive that you will have a colonoscopy and they will diagnose us celiac. So the line between gluten intolerance and celiac is just that you ate so much gluten, you destroyed your gut. So I had to make the choice for myself that I didn’t want to do that and I’ve had to look a lot of Doctors in the face and say, I’m not having a colonoscopy, I’m not going to eat gluten for two weeks, so you can test my blood, I’m pretty sure from my genetic test that says, You have seen, you could get celiac disease, you know, I’ve had to make a lot of these decisions for myself to be my own advocate. And that sucks a lot of the time, it sucks that, you know, you could pay a doctor and go to them and think that they have your best interest in mind. And they want you to do something that potentially damages gluten for two weeks, which you know, could cause you five months of discomfort. So, not eating gluten, being very meticulous about that, not even a little bit of gluten. I’m learning about you know how other grains contain gluten. Learning about how you can create a histamine-proof gut. My son’s coming out here, I’m learning about how the bacteria the right bacteria can help. Other things such as your liver and your gallbladder and your bladder and your ovaries and, you know, your esophagus and your you know, just everything. Um, I think I’m on my own social media, sometimes I’ll talk about gut bacteria. And I feel like it probably weirds a lot of people out. Because, you know, we’re such a germ-phobic society. And, you know, with vaccinations and antibiotics, and when you talk about bacteria, most people probably perceive it in a negative light, unless you’ve had to go down this rabbit hole of like probiotics, and how do I fix my gut and everything. But, again, I would say that that’s probably the thing that has made the most dramatic results for me, and I’ve had the chance to see it several times. You know, after every single one of my crushes. It’s had like a digestive component. And I’ve had to focus really hard on the elimination diet and using the right probiotics. And, you know, it’s, it can make such a huge difference in a short amount of time. So that’s just like the most easily digestible no pun intended thing that somebody could do with a wide array with a wide, you know, variety of symptoms, histamine intolerance, you know, gluten intolerance, celiac disease, you know, seasonal allergies, like my mom has seasonal allergies. And I keep telling her, Well, you can take this probiotic, and it will help you, you know, if we fix the reactivity of your gut, your seasonal allergies will decrease. And that just doesn’t make a lot of sense, you know, to a lot of people, but that’s, you know, that’s how it works in the kitchen.
Becky Rhew: So some of the other things I’ve been working on is the thyroid, of course. And that’s such a huge issue, too, especially for women, and especially after having children. It’s just, it’s just widely known and accepted that pregnancy will cause thyroid issues. And, you know, it has a hormonal component. And so that’s something that I’ve been dealing with.
Becky Rhew: so, I’ve been dealing with my thyroid. Something that was so interesting to me is that a lot of times I wasn’t able to tolerate the medication. And that’s, you know, that’s not a great rare occurrence. There’s a lot of different types of thyroid medications. They have different combinations of hormones. Some of them are synthetic. Some of them are natural, desiccated, meaning they’re from, like a pig or something. And so I wasn’t able to tolerate them all of the time, you know, I feel really great during the day, but then it would really mess up my sleep at night. And you just have this doctor looking at you like, Well, why can’t you take the medication? And I’m like, I don’t know, it’s, you know, it makes me feel really weird. You know, for me, I found that that has a few factors. One is when you’re committed to healing your body because you don’t want to go on the cycle of mainstream medicine, getting put on tons of medications at age 40.
And still feeling like crap, when you’re committed to healing your body. Your thyroid will occasionally heal itself or recover slightly so that your medication needs decrease. So that’s something that I’ve had to watch, which is, as my gut health improves, other things improve, and that includes my thyroid. So that it has been difficult to do working with mainstream medical doctors. And for the most part, I’ve gotten the best thyroid care, you know, getting a doctor that I paid out of pocket because they’ll let you adjust your medication as needed according to your symptoms rather than just according to your bloodwork. So that’s another expensive, somewhat unfortunate outcome of trying to take really good care of your body, that your thyroid guy recovers and you know, you have to modify your medication a little bit.
The other thing I found out, as something I found out on our on the latest genetic report that you did for me, is that I have something called Gilbert syndrome. And I think that’s probably like a widely recognized term that, you know, even people that haven’t run their DNA may know that they have that. So that’s just mainstream medicines, way of saying that you’re not, you don’t process medications. Well. Well, the other thing that you don’t process Well if you have Gilbert’s syndrome, could be thyroid hormones. So now it becomes, you know, it can become overwhelming. And it’s, it’s indeed like you’re looking at your genetics or a blueprint. Because now you’re looking at, well, if I heal the histamine and the celiac in my gut, that my thyroid might improve, but I’m not detoxing hormones and medications.
Wow. Um, so, you know, it’s overwhelming for me at times, and I fully recognize that it’s probably overwhelming for anybody dealing with these things, once you start to go down these rabbit holes of how do I recover? So, you know, my heart really goes out to anybody dealing with it, because it’s just so you know, you want you always want the doctor to give you like a convenient diagnosis and treatment. And, um, you know, that’s just not the path that I took for my that I want for myself. I didn’t know it’s not the path that was a lot of people want for themselves, because what you find is that medication that they’ll give you for the convenient diagnosis doesn’t alleviate all of your issues. You know, I’ve had the opportunity to experiment with such a wide variety of, you know, diet approaches, supplement approaches, different exercise approaches,
that I mean, I’m definitely very much my own science experiment at this point. Sometimes, you know, I’ll take it too far. So I try not to do that anymore. But You know, then you can start to look back and put together those pieces of, wow, I had these periods of time when things were really going well, and I recovered, what was I doing then. So I would say one of the other main things that I’ve started doing to track that is keeping a journal. Sometimes it’s really tedious. But keeping a journal of you know, today, I took these supplements, and I had these foods, and, you know, these other things happened, and I felt this way.
So once you start to notice some trends, that’s, you know, that’s your body telling you, this is working for me, you know, keep doing those things. So you can keep doing those particular things, and let the other things go, regardless of, you know, what medicine says, should or should not work for you. So, yeah, I would say, healing my gut, and keeping a food journal has been, you know, very transformative, and in a short amount of time.
Dr. Joel Rosen: I mean, I would put in there a couple of other things. I mean, that was a great answer, lots of tools, clinical pearls in there that I want to kind of re summarize. But the other thing I would put in there, Becky, is just your, your desire to get better and to continue to learn your body and not accept that. It’s just it’s it, you know, a lot of doctors will say, there’s nothing we can do, you just got to accept it and maybe get put on an antidepressant or you know, so I would give you kudos for that. And I think that also is that double-edged sword of you mentioned, you had some major debt, you have major genetic susceptibilities, and you have the environmental perfect storm that creates them to express. But the flip side is having high glutamate and having high neurotransmitter function is, is very helpful for that stubborn, sort of wanting to figure it out, and perfectionistic.
There’s a Cinderella or Goldilocks zone for all of that. And that’s the Zen and the Art of what we talked about of understanding your body and doing the journaling. Just to recapture again, on the doctor with the celiac. Yeah, anything to say on that is all celiacs are gluten reactive, but not all gluten reactive or celiac, right? And that’s an important thing, because hey if you’re not celiac doesn’t mean that you’re not gluten reactive, it just means that the target tissue is the GI tract.
So that’s really frustrating, especially to tell someone that if they are to go on it, I mean, I think there’s research that shows I know kharrazian is doing research that shows that can create like a chemical cascade for six months or longer just doing that and that it’s an antibody, and now you’re turning on expression. It’s just ridiculous for so many reasons. Let’s just put it that way. But the other thing I wanted to mention with the AHA is for you, just because I remember now, as we talked about your genetic test, don’t ask me where my keys are, although I’m doing a better job with that.
But I can remember your specific pathways in my brain. So you know, I know another one was the fact that okay, well, I’m very aware of histamine and I agree 100% with healing the gut do not pass go until that’s dealt with your low histamine foods support that will help clear that out like da o enzyme, the specific bacterias short-chain fatty acids, which are just really great for modulating the immune system and decreasing the inflammatory response specific befuddles asked you a couple of other questions in terms of other strains that you found to be helpful.
Becky Rhew: But it’s really nice. It’s nice when you find things like the butyrate, the short-chain fatty acids, that have such a wide application to heal a lot of things, like, don’t feel that, like, they’ll heal the gut, but then they also, you know, it’s like a laundry list of other things that they do. So it can feel overwhelming when you’re like, Oh, God, I gotta take 40 supplements, but a lot of them, you know, you can look and see where they have a broad application and a lot of raw.
Dr. Joel Rosen: 541 you know, like so many application claustra, is that way too, you know, but so back to that is one of your major things was iron absorption and iron, more importantly, iron metabolism, and that’s a whole other we’ll do another we’ll do a part two, okay, we’ll do a part two, but there’s definitely that you know, getting bad advice again, and saying, well, not only can you Take some gluten and test it for you to see if you’re celiac or you know what, you’re not celiac. So just go ahead and eat gluten, or you know what just take the more iron because you know you’re deficient.
And then as a result that creates more free radicals, which ultimately puts more cars on your histamine highway. And here you are, you know, either being on point with your histamine diet, and it doesn’t matter or being off point with your histamine diet, and it makes it even worse. So the iron is a major player to that, right? We all
Becky Rhew: major crash for me.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Right, right. And then, and then glutamate in and of itself, if you have inflammation will not get cleared out whether or not you have genetic susceptibilities. But you don’t want I mean, you don’t do this, but a lot of people would eat the MSG and the artificial sweeteners, and on the natural flavors, that’s going to create major challenges as well. You also had to sell fight stuff, we’ll save that for another, we will do another podcast, for sure. But those were things like really, Becky, you do have some major perfect storms going on, right.
And one of the things that really kick it off, I tell people, for women that are listening to this that are on that path of chronic illness, they’re fitness enthusiasts, and then they have a family, they have children, and it’s never really the same. And if that’s the case, it would make sense, the analogy I use is, it’s like you have a house, and now you just, you know, put an addition to the house. And that’s gonna cost you a lot of finances to put another wing on your house. And if you’re already depleted in finances, you don’t bounce back from that very quickly. Because now you have to live and you have these expenses, and you’re never really cutting down the deficit. But then you have another child.
And when you don’t manage that it’s called a miscarriage. Right. So if you’ve had a miscarriage, it’s because you don’t have an equal proportion of supply and demand, you don’t have enough bank money in the bank, a physiological bank account, and pregnancy will totally drain your battery. So two kids later, you know, you went through a healthy pregnancy, but it was draining to yourself to the point where now you’ve turned on these expressions. And now you do have the perfect storm. So lots of amazing insight on your part in terms of understanding like going back and head because I remember I mentioned to you with your HLA genes, or your kiss enzymes, hey, you know, this isn’t even predictive of celiac, or gluten reactivity.
But celiac in general. And I would probably recommend, Becky, because you have so many other on-ramps to your histamine highway to go gluten-free, not just gluten-free, but go grain-free. And I think I saw a light bulb go above your head thinking like, Oh, yeah, I remember when I was paleo or carnivore, I did really well with that. So I think you just continue to layer information that you now have another piece of the puzzle to like to feel better. And you’ll say that like, you’ll get a tax Hey like I did this, and it was amazing.
I felt really good. And then you know, so there’s a lot of wins in there. There’s a lot of aha in there. Just to go back. What were some of the histamine based you know, from that you have to order that you can’t get over the counter, what were the strains that you would recommend,
Becky Rhew: Hey, so the major histamine reducing strain is bifido longum. That’s the one. And, you know, if you start taking it, you shouldn’t react to it at all, there will be no bloating, nothing, it’s like it should work really well for you. And you can’t find that one single strain by itself anywhere in the store. So if you know, if you’re having a major histamine crash, it’s probably preferable to just start out with a single strain. So like probiotics in the store, they’ll say like, you know, 80 billion bacteria 10 strains, that’s like the worst thing you could take with histamine intolerance, because there’s going to be like, two or three strains in there that they produce histamine, the worst, so it’s good. If you start slow, you know, you get this single strain, bifido longum. And you just start with that and make sure that you feel good. And like I did in the beauty rate because beauty rates were pretty benign. You know, we all have butyrate in our gut, we should have a lot of it. If you don’t have it, you have a leaky gut. So that’s a really benign one you can add-in. Another thing that I’ve really liked is something called human milk oligosaccharides. So that’s kind of along the lines of colostrum. So, colostrum is another really safe benign thing that most people could take.
And they will just feel better and better. colostrum is like, you know, breast milk. So if you were, you know, thankfully, I was breastfed at a time as a child. But if I wasn’t like, I can’t even imagine what my health would be like, now. But being breastfed protects you from a lot of this stuff. It sets your gut up with natural prebiotics and probiotics and immune factors that prevent that protect you from a lot of this garbage. So you know, me being breastfed as a child probably helped me for a long time, until I then took antibiotics and you know, wiped out the terrain. So some ways you can take your gut back to that, like the infancy stage, is by using colostrum. You can get it at health food stores or online.
It’s really, really great really healing. There are so many really good studies about it. It’s very good for athletes, even just the act of exercising, briefly causes you to have a leaky gut, doing like a crazy hit workout, you have a leaky gut for even like a few hours after that tape, they’ve done studies taking colostrum cuts that by like 70%, so it’s so effective for leaky gut. And they have something else now called human milk oligosaccharides or HMOs. It’s a specific prebiotic that they’ve isolated as the prebiotic thick that human breast milk. So again, if your gut has become so leaky from living in this toxic world, taking antibiotics, eating gluten, your stressful job, you want to take your gut back to the infancy because it was perfect then, right. So we want to like take ourselves back to that. So these human milk oligosaccharides are a super cool prebiotic that they’ve come out with now. And I find it very, very effective. You know, normally, things like fodmap, fodmap, vegetables, things like cauliflower and broccoli, they normally caused me a lot of bloating.
But after I take this prebiotic for a while, it really eliminates a lot of that. So I’ve seen it’s very effective for me, it’s totally tasteless, I’ll give it to my kids. You know, because now seeing how many crashes I’ve had, you look at you start to look at your kids, and you’re like, I gotta figure out how to prevent them from going through this, you know, so I work a lot on my kids’ guts. That’s it That comes out wrong. I work a lot on my children’s digestive health. So especially if they’ve gone through a period where they had to take an antibiotic, it’s imperative to give them you know, the same things afterward. A lot of times, I’ll hide it in like a smoothie.
You know, I’ll dump like some colostrum in there. So prebiotics, some bifido longum, culture owl, you can get that anywhere. That one’s really good for histamine. And, you know, it’s a lot of it’s tasteless. A lot of kids are really hip to you know, Okay, I’m gonna take my vitamins or my probiotics or whatever. So, you know, what’s good, for me has been good for them as well.
And I’ve seen positive changes in their behavior with their sleep with their digestion. So, yeah, it’s controlling that the histamine reactive gut, and it allows me a lot of leeway with the other things to where I haven’t, you know, a lot of the things on the last report you gave me I haven’t even had to go down, you know, to step three, four and five. You know, when you start at step one, heal the gut. It will take you so far that a lot of that other stuff is superfluous.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yes, yeah. But you know, in again, I guess your defense, you had a lot of other factors that were in because you got was already on your radar. And you were already I guess it’s always nice to have outside eyes to remind you that you know, what’s on your radar doesn’t necessarily mean it’s being taken care of, or contained terms of all the things that are impacting it, and I think that’s been so helpful for you. So Becky is always on…
Becky Rhew: the peroxynitrite was a big gut health one that’s like,
Dr. Joel Rosen: Oh, yeah, Yeah, that’s it that well, that I mean, there’s again a lot to do with the domino effect of histamines, and then, you know, depleting your B vitamins, and then not being able to quench free radicals and then the impact that has on neurotransmitters, it’s just, it’s amazing how the domino effect happens. And yeah, so as far as I know, like on social media, cuz you have a great following on Instagram, you share recipes, and you show some of the things that work for you and for kiddos with their moms and their families. So where do they find out more about what you do, Becky?
Becky Rhew: Um, my Instagram, my handle is left a little period, like a mother. So when I’m like when I was lifting, it’s like lifts like a mother, right? It’s like a play on words. But I do a lot of yoga now because I love it. And so maybe I should change my handle eventually. But I probably want like,
Dr. Joel Rosen: Oh, it’s good to see you there. For sure. And I definitely want to have a follow-up one of these because there were a lot of things we didn’t talk about. We wanted to talk a little bit more about g six PD. Of course, some of them, you know, when you went to the IV, and you found out that you had Are you that was a thing, they asked you the question about g six PD and you’re like, Okay, I got to know about this. And then maybe being told something improper, like an ad would deplete your G six PD, and how that may have cut your nose off to spite your face. There’s a whole bunch of rabbit holes to go down with that as well. I guess the last question I would ask you is for today’s podcast.
What do you wish you would have known then that you know now like the sage, Becky would have told the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Becky, back then because you were from a family that was holistic, you know, and it wasn’t like you were doing major ruinous things. You were just part of the normal, you know, girl thing, what would you tell you? What would you have told yourself back then?
Becky Rhew: Well, when I had my first crush, I was the histamine, adrenaline glutamate driven, Becky that I am now. But you know, I was, I was working out a lot more than I should. My first crash. My first health crash was preceded by exactly one month of CrossFit. I purchased a Groupon for CrossFit and went for one month and towed the body and you know, so if I could have you know when you go down this path, there’s a lot, there’s like supplements and there are foods you have to eat and blah, blah, blah, and like, it’s kind of overwhelming. So now, I would just love to never take another supplement again.
But what I do now to minimize that really uses other things yoga, get your butt outside in the sunshine for one hour every day. I use a ton of acupressure. I use acupressure all the time, I have an acupressure mat, I have an acupressure pillow. I do acupressure on myself all the time. So, I would, you know, I would not discount those nonsupplement recovery methods. And so if I, you know, if I could have looked back, I probably would have gotten 2015 Becky into yoga, right away.
Um, because it’s very healing again, as I said, you don’t have to believe in meditation, just by strengthening your nervous system, you achieve all of that healing, even if you think meditation is a bunch of garbage. So, you know, if you’re an athlete, or you’re like a hard charger, you know, like a warrior mindset and you find yourself in one of these adrenal crashes you probably you might think Yoga is a bunch of fluff and I can’t do it because it’s so too easy for me. And people tell me that all the time, but it’s, you know, it’s just one of the things that were really healing so you know that getting to yoga, get yourself outside and you know, learn about things like No acupressure and just things that all those things that really bring your nervous system back into harmony. chiropractic is another one. That’s another one that when I’m consistent with it, a lot of the other symptoms are really diminished. You know, it’s just those, those, those practices that make your nervous system happier.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, that’s really good. I mean, I’d also just you’ve invited me over, although I haven’t had time you have a yo hot, a hot sauna, as well. And then I think we even talked about it in terms of how essential oils and diffusing can be really helpful for that as well. So lots of really great advice there. I appreciate your time. Definitely, you can see the evolution of a journey.
And it can be I’ve seen it from outside and inside. And I see a lot of people that tell me it’s so complicated, and I just want the easy fix. I think the reoccurring theme is there is no easy fix. I think that it’s a verb, I think that you have to be your best advocate, you have to look into what makes you unique, genetically, and how the environment overlaps that I love the idea of meditation and mindfulness and breathing. I also like the idea of the gut health and the histamine, the different strains to be able to do, and, and then journaling and looking at these connections and seeing, you know, Becky as a study of one, but also, you know, tweaking and coming up with changes and I mean, I just wish you continued success and health with your body and fewer crashes.
But you know, the other thing is, is that you continue to get back on the bike, so to speak, and climb up the mountain when you do have a crash. And that’s the resilience of why you continue to you know, continue to heal. So thank you so much, Becky, for being here today. I appreciate all your time. And did he get what he wanted in the kitchen or what?
Becky Rhew: I don’t know maybe?
Dr. Joel Rosen: All right, well, good. Oh, I will look forward to part two. I’ll keep you to that. We’ll go around the G six PD NA de sulfite, glucuronidation acetylation pathways. And if you if your thought this one was informative, our next one will be even more. So. Thank you so much for being here today.
Becky Rhew: Thank you
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