Join us as we dive into the world of the gut microbiome! Learn about the environmental factors that are impacting your gut microbiome, chronic inflammation, and what you can do to fix your gut microbiome. We talk about everything from food & air to mycotoxins and digestive issues with Dr. Asia Muhammad.
Asia Muhammad is a naturopathic doctor that uses evidence-based medicine to provide individualized care to each patient. She has a special interest in gastroenterology, mind-body medicine, and stress management, as increasing research demonstrates the role of stress in disease. She dedicated three years post-graduation to an independent residency at Arizona Digestive Health where she treated thousands of patients suffering with gastrointestinal disorders.
TIME STAMPS
2:34 Dr. Asia’s background in naturopathic medicine (jump to section)
7:00 Chronic inflammation & the impact your environment has (jump to section)
8:42 Environmental factors that contribute to inflammation (jump to section)
11:30 Food & the impact it has on your gut health (jump to section)
13:02 Steps to take to change your microbiome (jump to section)
15:00 Mycotoxin – what they are & how to avoid them (jump to section)
23:02 Irritable Bowel Syndrome isn’t a thing (jump to section)
27:15 Healthy bowel movements (jump to section)
33:15 The brain & gut connection (jump to section)
35:04 Dr. Asia’s tip for living life organically (jump to section)
Transcription Below
Landon Eckles: The organic listeners. Hey guys, this is Landon. Thank you so much for joining another episode of the Be Organic Podcast, powered by Clean Juice. We are so excited to have you in today, and we are going to be talking about the microbiome specifically, change your microbiome, change your life, and we’ve got an awesome guest for you, like always.
I’m going to allow Kat, our co-host, to introduce our wonderful guest.
Kat Eckles: Yes, we are so excited to have Dr. Asia with us today. Asia values the power of lifestyle modifications to achieve optimal health. She uses evidence-based medicine to provide individualized care to each patient. As a naturopathic doctor, she’s able to provide care in the realm of nutrition, exercise recommendations, supplementation botanical medicine, and mind-body therapy, such as hypnosis.
She has a special interest in gastroenterology, mind-body medicine, and stress management, and as increasing research demonstrates, the role of stress and disease. She has received additional training in mind-body therapies including hypnosis, guided imagery, biofeedback, autogenic training, and progressive muscle relaxation.
She dedicated three years post-grad to an independent residency at Arizona Digestive Health, where she treated thousands of patients suffering from gastrointestinal disorders and we’re so excited to have her on the podcast today to speak about something that so many people suffer from.
Dr. Asia, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Asia Muhammad: Thank you for having me. Thanks. I’m excited to be on here with you guys.
Kat Eckles: That’s awesome. And I love it when we get to talk about the role of stress and when we have guests on the show, that really can attest to how much stress can put on your body and how much it really is a root of disease.
I don’t think people even sometimes realize that they’re stressed and realize how much of an effect that’s having on overall physical health. I’m really excited to dive into that.
Dr. Asia Muhammad: Oh, totally. Let’s, let’s go for it.
Kat Eckles: Awesome. Maybe you can tell us quickly your background and tell our listeners your health story and what made you want to pursue a path in naturopathic medicine.
Dr. Asia’s Background in Naturopathic Medicine
Dr. Asia: I got started when I was an undergrad. I thought I was going to go to school and become an MD because that’s all I knew about medicine. My mom, when I was a really young girl, would always say ‘You’d make a great doctor!’ I don’t know how she saw that.
I think if she would’ve told me I would’ve been a great lawyer or a dancer, that’s what I would’ve done. But I, thought I would go to school and be a doctor and I’ve always had an interest in science, in the human body, but I’ve always also been interested in nature. I didn’t know that there was like a meshing of the two.
So prior to like learning about naturopathic medicine, I was just on this MD track. I was in school and I remember shadowing MD surgeons, primary care doctors, and other specialists. This is when I was an undergrad and I just remember always being so bored in these offices with these doctors and wondering if there was more to medicine beyond just the conventional aspect.
I remember I went and shadowed this vascular surgeon, and he was literally rolling patients in and rolling them out. Placing stints, rolling one in, rolling the next one out, and I just remember thinking, this cannot be it. I didn’t know how else to research alternative forms of medicine.
I just always assumed that the MD route was the only route. I got sick, really sick one semester in school, and I had some sinus issues and then I was overwhelmed with my course load and school. I think that just added to the stress in my body. My mom has this book by this woman, and it says, ND on the back.
I didn’t know what ND meant. I just remember always looking at this book when I was a young girl and knowing that if I had an issue, a menstrual cramp, or a headache, I would open the book flip chart and it would say, if you have a headache, drink this tea or take these herbs. I was always obsessed with this book.
This night, which is crazy how the universe, how God works, you know, the night that I was sick, I was looking through this book. It was also the same night I was getting ready to pay for my MCAP prep course, which is a couple of thousand dollars at the time. I googled ND and I just had this epiphany and I always tell this story where everything just felt right.
I don’t know if I’ve had a moment like that since then, where everything just kind of clicked and it happened within a few seconds. I Googled it and I knew this is what I’m doing. I’d applied and got in.
Landon Eckles: That’s amazing. That’s a really great story and I love it when people just follow their passions.
So many times on this show we get amazing individuals like yourself where it’s something they knew they wanted to do as a child, and sometimes it’s something you kind of stumble upon. And then sometimes it’s kind of a mixture of both, right? The fact that you are doing what God put you on this earth to do is a really cool thing.
Kat and I are huge personal proponents of natural medicine, and we see a natural path and just really love your profession and what you do. Kudos to you, for following your heart on that.
Dr. Asia: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a beautiful journey and it’s not been an easy one, because naturopathic medicine is not licensed in all 50 states.
I’m in Missouri, which is an unlicensed state. There are challenges that come with being a naturopathic doctor and alternative medicine practitioner. But it’s just so rewarding when I see patients and they’re at this starting point, and then we’re able to kind of help them transform their health. It’s really rewarding.
Landon Eckles: Absolutely. Well, let’s jump into really what you do and how you see patients, and what you’re seeing out there. We know that so many people suffer from chronic diseases, right? How many people would you say suffer from these chronic diseases?
Dr. Asia: The CDC put out a statistic a few years back, and I’m not sure if it’s 60 or 70% of people have chronic disease, but everybody that I see is a chronic disease patient. I don’t see acute cases, I see some upper respiratory issues, acute, like cold and flu cases, but most of what I see are people who have had chronic issues for years or decades.
That’s the bulk of my practice. I’d say 99% of my practice is a chronic disease.
Chronic Inflammation & The Impact Of Your Environment
Landon Eckles: Recently you’ve been quoted by saying that chronic inflammation is the hallmark of chronic disease in America and that the majority of contributing factors stem from our environment, and if you change your microbiome, you change your life.
Right? Which is now the title of our show. Can you expand on that for our listeners?
Dr. Asia: Our environment is our lifestyle. It’s what we eat, it’s the air we breathe, it’s the quality of our sleep. It’s what we put on our body. Lifestyle or our environment is an all-encompassing term that I use when explaining our connection with chronic inflammatory disorders and underlying chronic inflammation.
When you look at disease, you see all these quotes online and they say all disease starts in the gut. There is some truth to that. The truth is that the entire point of the GI system is to digest and assimilate our nutrients and protect us from bacteria, viruses, pathogens.
Outside of what we come into contact within our daily lives, the gut is the single barrier that prevents what we put in our system from actually fully getting into the body. When you look at that, I mean, in chronic disease there’s so much literature documenting the role of not only just healthy eating patterns with chronic illness, but just also the microbiome, specifically how the bacteria there changes so much that it actually changes the output into the system, which tends to reflect in chronic disease cases.
Environmental Factors That Contribute To Inflammation
Landon Eckles: When we’re talking about the environment, you mentioned some things. What are some of those factors that are actually in our environment that could be contributing to some of these diseases?
Dr. Asia: For example, the air we breathe, I just did an environmental toxin test on myself to see if there’s something going on where I live at.
For example, mold toxins. You see a lot more burgeoning literature around mold now or conversations around mold. That’s one that I find to be problematic in almost all the patients that I run these tests on. Everybody comes back with some type of current mold toxicity in their system.
I’m talking about black mold, which is a really toxic mold and affects your neurological system, affects your kidney system, it affects the entire body, your mitochondria, those are just some, in terms of the air we breathe. Then in terms of the foods we eat, that’s a really huge one there.
The types of foods we eat, the quality of the foods that we eat and how they actually positively or negatively change gut bacteria. There are gut bacteria that we know are associated with having a robust mucus membrane in the gut, which is the first barrier of protection in the gut, it’s that mucus lining.
When that mucus lining gets disrupted, you find all types of issues in terms of GI issues, and then also chronic inflammatory issues because the gut lining is only one cell layer thick, whereas your bones are cell on top of cell on top of cell, on top of cell until you get a dense strong bone.
Your skin is the same thing. It’s cell layer on top of cell layer on top of cell layer. Your gut is not like that. Your gut is literally one cell layer. It seems like a lot of layers because it’s folded upon itself when you look at the intestinal tract. But if you were to stretch it out, it’s about as thin as a sheet of tissue paper.
It’s highly sensitive and it’s really permeable to what we put in our body, what we’re eating, what we’re drinking, even stress, and even hormones act upon the gut. I’m going to just keep blabbing, but what was your question?
Landon Eckles: No, no, no. You answered it. I have a couple follow ups for you.
The first thing you said environmentally was mold, right? We’re breathing some stuff that we shouldn’t be. That’s kind of hard to change, right? Unless we’re doing mold tests in our home, Kat and I have actually done that. We’ve had mold tests in our home, and we’ve had some mold remediation because we live in a home that was built in ‘94. There are definitely some things there that we had to take care of. But I think that it’s one that’s kind of hard to control, right? But one thing we really can control is food. And you mentioned that and talked a lot about that.
Let’s talk a little bit about what types of food you eat, what types of food you recommend. Do you believe in organic? I’d love to start to peel back the onion on that one.
Food & The Impact It Has On Your Gut Health
Dr. Asia: I do eat organic foods as much as possible, I eat organic, to be honest with you.
I eat one meal a day, two meals a day max. That’s really because it works better with my schedule. Intermittent fasting works really well for me. I do eat organic. I grew up eating organic. My mom is a complete hippie and she’s completely against the system, whatever the system is for you.
She’s against it. She’s an independent thinker, researcher and she’s always had us growing up in the mindset of really knowing what we’re putting into our body. I eat completely organic. If I am out somewhere, I also will try to source organic meals. If not, sometimes there are foods in the grocery store that, for example, dandelion greens.
If I find those and they’re not organic, I’ll just do a baking soda and apple cider vinegar wash on them to get as much pesticides as possible off of them. That’s how I eat, in terms of organic and inorganic.
Landon Eckles: That’s awesome. I think that it’s funny, you and I are are pretty similar in the way that we eat because I agree with you.
I actually intermittent fast. I actually did a podcast on that, just talking about how that’s benefited me over the past year to year and a half that I’ve been really dedicated to it. Also, of course, organic is a big thing for Clean Juice. We only serve organic foods and that’s something that we’re super passionate about and totally are aligned with you on that. Um, nice.
Getting back to the microbiome and, again, the title of the show – Change Your Microbiome, Change Your Life – What are some steps we can take to change your microbiome? We talked about the diet, but what are some other things that we can do to really change our microbiome?
Steps To Take To Change Your Microbiome
Dr. Asia: Some other things we can do to change your microbiome it’s just really simply eating fiber, right? When I say fiber, I just mean fruits and vegetables. You can also do fiber, such as powders. But fiber is like gas for the car, but it’s like gas for your colon cells and your microbiome.
Just like your car needs gas to run, your colon cells need the breakdown products of fiber to run and be efficient. The bacteria in our gut basically eat fiber. Say you’re eating an apple – the bacteria will munch the apple fibers down and produce these short chain fatty acids. They’re these four carbon fatty acids that are essentially fuel for the gut.
There’s so much research around butyric acid as one of these short chain fatty acids, butyrate, that helps with reducing inflammation in the body outside, not only the gut, but the body as well. Prebiotics are also really good. But the interesting thing is prebiotics tend to be foods.
They’re also fiber-rich foods that help to feed the gut, not necessarily all the time, because I do use non-fiber prebiotic sources as well, I do think that prebiotics and fibers, though, are the first two places I start with patients who have any kind of dysbiosis in their gut.
I’ll start with that. I have a case today I have to see that has a really severe dysbiotic gut. What I’m going to do for them is pretty much look at their diet, which I pretty much already know what their diet is, and then add in maybe a really good prebiotic formula and then also push smoothies with them.
Because that’s a really simple way to get some fiber in and pack a bunch of nutrition.
Mycotoxin – What They Are & How To Avoid Them
Landon Eckles: Absolutely, I’m a big fan of smoothies. I love smoothies. We serve a ton of smoothies at Clean Juice. Also, I eat a smoothie every single day for lunch, and that’s certainly something that’s helped my healing process and in my gut,
I want to talk to you a little bit about mycotoxins and you’ve recently had a post on mycotoxins where you talk about mycotoxin testing. You said that you’ve never seen a test come back normal. That really kind of was crazy to me and it really actually blew my mind.
Can you first explain what mycotoxins are and how we can avoid having these toxins in our bodies?
Dr. Asia: Mycotoxins refer to mold toxins, fungus toxins, right? Mycotoxin testing are usually urine testing where you just urinate into this tube and then it processes, and you see the amount of toxins that are there inside of your urine.
It correlates to the body’s burden of toxin. What may be in the system. I’ve not seen a single test come back, I don’t even know how many tests I’ve run, but a lot of the patients I see have chronic disease and so I don’t really expect to see normal tests, to be honest with you.
Fungus and mold are so prevalent in our environment, in the air we breathe, that many people will have some type of mold toxin or fungus toxin in their system. It’s not necessarily the toxin that’s the problem because fungi have been around longer than humans apparently. That’s not necessarily the issue, but the issue is the body’s ability to actually properly metabolize it and break it down.
That’s a bigger issue for me because like I said, we all encounter many different toxins on a daily basis. I find that patients have a terrible time detoxing because their detox pathways are extremely, not shut down, but just extremely reduced in terms of capacity to function.
I found that out through SNP gene testing and there are a few genes, some cytochrome genes and some superoxide dismutase genes and a few other genes that are responsible for certain detoxification processes. I usually always find them beneath a full capacity. I’ve not seen actually one person yet where they have the proper ex genotype that expresses full capacity to detoxify.
When I see no toxins, then my next thought is, well, how well is the body able to actually detoxify. And there are many genes involved in detoxification and we don’t know about the human genome, as of yet, but when I see mold toxicity, that’s where I’ll start. And then if a patient has a lot of the mold, people that I see have really severe symptoms, they have mast cell activation syndrome, which is a really severe and intense syndrome where patients are in and out of the hospital depending on the severity of their disease.
A lot of them have excessive mold in their system. What I’ll do is start them off with genal binders. Binders are things that are supposed to bind up the mold so you can excrete them. When you think about mycotoxins, you’re talking about the mold and the toxins and molds produce.
Because sometimes people will say, well, mycotoxins, but I want to get the mold out too if the mold is producing toxins and how do we get the mold out as well. But mycotoxins is a word that kind of encompasses both mold and mold toxins. Not just the black mold, but toxins that black mold may produce also.
When I see patients who have mold toxicity, the first thing I do – actually, I don’t actually just put them on binders. I will support the system and give them things to support their liver. I may put them on different burdock for a few weeks and then I may actually support their kidneys as well.
Because your liver and your kidneys are your biggest detoxifying organs, your skin is one too, but your liver, your kidneys, your colon – your liver and your kidneys are really big. With the gut, for me, the biggest thing is just pooping. If they’re getting to the bathroom every day, a couple times a day, that’s great.
I know they’re excreting. The purpose of binders is to help bind up toxins. And then you also want to make sure somebody’s pooping. I they’re binding, you want them to be eliminating it. That’s what can happen, is you have these toxins circulating. The one thing about the body is that it’s going to do its job – it works the same way every day, right? If you are helping to support the system, the system is going to run. When I give patients binders, my thought is, okay, we’re binding this up, but I don’t want it to recirculate. It’s not like the liver’s trying to hurt the entire system, but the liver will just do its job.
If you are absorbing toxins from your gut, no toxins in the gut, which they can be there, but what will happen, is that the liver will once again try to process them and then put them back into the gut to be excreted. If they’re not actually excreted, they get recirculated. It becomes this cycle.
What you want to do is give binders to help eliminate more toxins and then you can repeat mycotoxin tests along with like organic acid tests to just evaluate it from a different component or different aspect, more mycotoxins in the system and see the numbers coming down or reducing. But it really just depends on the patient.
If my test comes back with mycotoxin, which I’m sure it will, I’ll probably do a more intensive protocol because I know my body. But if I have a patient who has a couple mast cell cases, like I’m working on right now. There’s a local GI doctor who will refer me some in his complex cases.
They’re typically always mast cell cases. He usually sees them, he’s a gastroenterologist. He sees them for their GI complaints, but he’s stepping, not necessarily stepping into, but he’s also into alternative medicine, whatever that means. He will send me these cases and it’s so interesting, their symptoms, these mass cell cases, they’re so severe and the slightest thing can send them to the hospital, and they’ll have a severe reaction, like an anaphylactic type of reaction.
It gets to the space where some doctors won’t even touch them because they’re just too much of a risk to treat these patients. They end up being on tons of antihistamines, right? Because the mass cells produce excessive histamines.
They end up being on excessive antihistamine therapies, such as some of the typical anti-acid medications or antihistamines, so being on compounded antihistamines will be on tons of high doses of quercetin and so forth. When I see them, my goal is just supporting their system where they’re at.
Then we’ll begin a really gentle binding protocol. Sometimes I don’t even begin with mycotoxin binding protocols. I’ll just start with gentle binders to make sure their body’s able to tolerate say just a normal fiber binder because fiber’s a binder too, right? It’s complicated, but microtoxins are very interesting.
I really wonder how prevalent this is. You think about all these kids in these moldy school buildings, right? Their learning capacity and their concentration and attention capacity. It just blows my mind that this is not actually investigated beyond what it is.
Landon Eckles: Is this a test that you run on almost every one of your patients that come in?
Dr. Asia: No, not necessarily. It just depends. If I see a case where somebody says they have had severe IBS, I’m not going to run mycotoxin because I pretty much can figure out what that is. Right? I don’t even have to run a test for that. I know they have dysbiosis, they probably have intestinal inflammation and so forth.
I can go straight to protocols for those cases if it’s more like a fibromyalgia, chronic autoimmune case. For really severe kind of sleep issues, hormone issues, I will run them for, for those cases. Outside of that, I don’t run them for everybody. Not everybody actually cares.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome Isn’t A Thing
Landon Eckles: Yeah, I got you.
I’m actually, I’m really glad that you mentioned IBS, which is irritable bowel syndrome. Because you’ve said in the past, right, that IBS actually isn’t a thing. If you’ve been diagnosed with IBS, there’s probably some kind of underlying issue and I’d love, because so many people, if they have an upset stomach occasionally or whatever, say I just have some IBS.
You clearly don’t agree with that, and you think that there’s something else that’s going on. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve seen in your patients and that they could be struggling with that’s not IBS that might be able to help some of our listeners who think that that’s something they struggle with.
Dr. Asia: Yeah, I honestly love IBS cases because I just love proving a GI doctor is wrong. It’s just because it’s crazy. But I work with GI doctors. They’re in my residency with them, so I’ve seen literally thousands and thousands of patients who have IBS, and they just say here’s some visi, which is a medication for diarrhea, IBS diarrhea.
Here’s some lens. I don’t know, I’m a teaser. Whatever they give them for IBS, constipation. I remember the doctor, one of the doctors I work with, I remember hearing her in a room telling a patient you’re just going to be constipated the rest of your life. Take the lens and life will be fine. It’s one pill a day. You go to the bathroom at the same time. I don’t know why you’re constipated. It’s just happening.
I just remember thinking their entire professional career is understanding the GI track and you can’t even poop. Right? I remember thinking, what is this?
What am I, where am I working? I see these IBS cases and I like to do one of two things. I’ll either go straight to protocols, or I’ll do some functional GI testing just to give us a more objective information to go on. A lot of times with IBS, like I said, I do see tons of dysbiosis.
There’s a history there. There’s sibo, which is small intestine bacteria overgrowth. There is food sensitivities, there is leaky gut, or you have increased intestinal permeability because your intestines should be permeable. If your intestines are not permeable, you’re probably dead because you do need nutrition to come across for your entire body, right?
That’s the purpose of your gut. But when it’s too permeable, then it’s an issue. I see leaky gut, let’s see, that’s pretty much the top three that I see. Sibo, leaky gut, or some type of food sensitivity, or I’ll say intestinal inflammation caused by either history, long history, certain medication use, or I see microscopic colitis, which it’s inflammation of the colon, but it’s not like an ulcerative colitis where it’s macroscopic where you can actually see it without a microscope. You can see the ulcers; you can see the inflammation. If you did a scope microscopic, you go in and everything looks fine. But you take some tissue samples, and you have inflammation on a microscopic level and it’s causing these diarrhea symptoms.
I do see underlying associations with the history of drug use such as ibuprofen, leaf, aspirin, Advil, other medications patients have used long-term. When I see those cases, I either will go straight to protocol, which is four weeks of this, then let’s follow up, see what happens. Or we’ll do a stool test and put together a plan specifically based on the stool test, which ends up being the same because they all reveal some type of leaky gut or inflammatory markers, which is wild because when you see inflammation in the colon, usually doctors say let’s do a scope and make sure it’s not ulcerative colitis and some autoimmune issue. But I have been seeing lately a with underlying intestinal inflammatory markers and it’s not normal.
They’re really high and the doctors don’t know what to do because it’s not, they do a scope, and it’s not ulcerative colitis, so they’re not going to give you prednisone for that or colitis meds or Humira or any of those types of LEA medications, which are like anti-inflammatories for the gut, which is what they give for ulcerative colitis patients.
They don’t really know what to do, so they say well here’s some probiotics. Even then when I was in the GI office, we had a fridge full of the best probiotics that you could ever find. No, they never gave them out to patients.
Never gave them out and they just did not really believe that they did much, which just blows my mind, because there’s so much literature around the bacteria. There are more bacteria in the gut than there are body cells, and so you can shift so much with just probiotics.
Landon Eckles: Wow. We have the best, really incredible.
Dr. Asia: Yeah, it is.
Healthy Bowel Movements
Landon Eckles: You’ve talked a little bit about bowel movements, right? I want to touch on that a little bit. Because it’s not a topic that people either are comfortable talking about or talk about really ever at all. For our listeners, just talk to us about what a healthy bowel movement literally looks like and if ours isn’t in the right cadence or it’s not looking the right way, what can we do to either get healthy or maybe remove some of these toxins that we’ve been talking about.
Dr. Asia: This is my favorite thing to talk about. By the way. I love talking crap.
Landon Eckles: Yes. That’s funny. That’s great.
Dr. Asia: Isn’t that a funny answer?
Landon Eckles: That’d be a cool podcast. Talking crap, but literally. Anyway, I might change the title of this episode to Talking Crap with Dr. Asia.
Dr. Asia: You should.
Landon Eckles: Yeah. I love it.
Dr. Asia: That’s awesome. The best bowel movements in the land look like this. They are nice, formed sausage shaped stools that easily come out. You get this urge to go to the bathroom. You sit on the toilet, the stool is expressed, and that’s it. It’s not a lot of straining. There aren’t little, small pebbles at the bottom of the toilet.
They’re not pencil thin stools that you got a strain and push out. There’s not undigested food in the stool. There’s no mucus, there’s no blood. All of those are signs of unhealthy bowel function. When I see that patients will say they’re constipated. I’ll say like, what does constipation mean?
Because it means something different for everybody. For me, constipation is that it takes me three days or beyond three days, once a month or once a week, which I’ve seen that. But for some people, constipation is just, I go to the bathroom once a day and it’s this really small amount of stool, which is still constipation, right?
But they’re not fully evacuating. I will ask them, the first thing I ask is, what’s your eating frequency? Because if you snack all throughout the day and you’re not having solid meals, it’s going to change how your bowel frequency is as well. It changes your stool volume. That’s one thing I’ll ask patients.
If they say, I eat three meals a day, then I say you’re obviously constipated if you’re only having small volume stool. That’s how I start when I ask about bowel habits and bowel frequency and when I see bowels that are small volume or hard to pass, obviously there’s a few things I think.
Number one, are you drinking enough water? If your body is dehydrated, your cells are dehydrated, your skin’s dehydrated. It’s going to pull it from your colon. Your colon is where we get our water from, your colon, your kidneys too, but your colon is a big source of water exchange in the body.
If your body’s dehydrated, it’s going to pull it from your intestinal tract, which means your stools are going to be more dry in heart. That’s one thing I’ll ask. I’ll ask about fiber intake. Are you eating five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day? Everybody says, no. I can count on one hand. I can count on one finger how many people I’ve seen that are say I eat five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
One serving is a half a cup. I’m say, listen, make a smoothie and then have some veggies for dinner and lunch. You can pretty much get more than that, in that capacity. That’s one thing I’ll do. I literally have seen patients just change their bowel habits with constipation. Just by changing their diet.
No supplements, no fiber powders, nothing like that. Even just drinking water has changed people’s bowel habits. There’s one group of people that I really find it hard to manage their constipation, and that’s people who have a history of eating disorders for years. Because what happens is their colon becomes antic.
There’s no tone to it. It doesn’t actually move. It didn’t have to move. Right? For years they either have used laxatives and the gut just doesn’t have that normal spastic capacity to move stool down. The laxative just softens the stool and it all just rushes out. Or there’s the other picture where they eat and then the food is kind of expressed back up, vomiting.
The bowels don’t have to work. That patient population is the toughest population that I’ve ever had to treat where constipation is concerned. I still haven’t figured it out, to be honest with you.
Landon Eckles: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s so complicated, right?
Dr. Asia: There’s just so many things to think about. Back to what you said, I can personally attest to, I was having some constipation issues, and, honestly, I just started drinking more water and that literally was the thing that I needed to do. I realized I wasn’t drinking enough water and that helped me, you know?
That was the thing. We talk about some of these really crazy complex, issues and its diet and water, right? It’s just these things that are so simple, but then we sometimes just need that reminder.
There isn’t a magic pill, it’s just – hey, diet, exercise, water, and some of these things that are so simple to talk about, but we really have to have the responsibility discipline to do it right.
Landon Eckles: Right. There you go. That’s exactly what it is.
Dr. Asia: I just don’t think that health is so complicated. I think it becomes complex and complicated when we get to a space where we’re not really mindful and cognizant, but it’s complex and complicated when our body’s got into a space of, not no return, but essentially that cusp of no return where so much damage and oxidation has happened, then you have to start peeling back these onion layers.
So many times in young populations, I see the diet is so terrible, lifestyle habits, and then we get older and we wonder why we have all these issues. They didn’t come from us as we’ve aged. It came from us when we were younger and just setting up these habits from a young age.
The Brain & Gut Connection
Landon Eckles: Exactly. Absolutely. We’re getting close to time, but I did want to ask you about how your brain and your gut work together. Because I’ve heard recently that your gut is basically your second brain in your body, and it’s kind of been a revelation over the last 10, or even 20 years, but closer to 10 years.
Just in layman’s terms, how does your brain and your gut work together and why is it so important to have a healthy gut?
Dr. Asia: Your brain and your gut are connected. They are connected through a nervous tissue. A lot of times we say a lot of your brain chemicals are made in your gut, which is true.
When you look at some of the more recent research, we’re finding that a lot of the brain chemicals that are made in the gut actually don’t really ever get to the gut. They kind of say in the intestinal track. There’s more of a connection the other way, where brain processes, stress, cognitive processes actually can stress the gut out.
It actually can create more intestinal permeability in the gut in terms of that leaky gut picture. We know that components from the gut – when they get out into the system – can actually cause inflammation more in the brain, central nervous system area, there are associations with leaky gut and certain intestinal markers that have been found in patients who have altered cognitive function or chronic inflammatory brain diseases.
There’s a huge brain and gut connection. Literature is still burgeoning. We know that when you use hypnotherapy, which is mind body techniques, which is something that I am familiar with, you can see people’s GI symptoms start to shift because that connection is so sensitive.
Dr. Asia’s Tip For Living Life Organically
Landon Eckles: It absolutely makes so much sense. Well, Dr. Aja, I have really enjoyed talking crap with you. It was an absolute pleasure and you’ve been an awesome guest on the show. I’ve got one last question for you so our listeners can find out more about you and what you do.
I’d love to ask you about your socials, your different handles. But my question for you, and this is something we ask most of our guests, is how do you live your best life organically?
Dr. Asia: I live my best life organically – maybe this is going to sound cheesy – but smoothies are my thing and I’m not sure if that’s the answer you’re looking for.
Landon Eckles: No, it’s great.
Dr. Asia: You can do so much with a smoothie. There’s so much you can sneak into a smoothie. I contribute a lot of my success or health success to the ability to make a bomb smoothie and just throw everything in and not really worry about taking a lot of little capsules throughout the day.
I will even open up some of my supplements and put them in a smoothie just for ease. I know a lot of people have blenders and, our new age, which maybe this isn’t the new age, but a lot of us have blenders, so it’s really easy to buy some organic bulk fruit from Costco or Sam’s, make some smoothies, add in some powders, add in whatever you need to add in and sneak it in. That’d be my tip.
Landon Eckles: I love that. That’s literally one of the basic reasons why we started Clean Juice was exactly what you said. We are big believers and proponents of that. I just appreciate you Dr. Aja. Thank you so much for coming on our show. Tell our listeners where they can find out more about you.
Dr. Asia: Yeah, you can find me on Instagram. My Instagram is just Dr. Asia Mohamed, m u h a m m a d, and then my website is just asiamohamed.com and you can find me there.
Landon Eckles: Awesome. Thank you so much. We appreciate you.
Dr. Asia: Thank you for having me.
Landon Eckles: It’s been our pleasure. Thank you so much for tuning in today to be organic. We’re so excited for you to become healthier and body and stronger in spirit. If you like what you heard today, please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcast to never miss an episode, and we’d love to connect with you over on Clean Juices Instagram.
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