Hey guys, what is up. So if you know anything about me, you know that I love health. I love talking about health, fitness, all of the progressive medicine type stuff. I came across a company. I became friends with a guy named Matt Dawson who founded and owns Wild Health. He became my doctor. He and Wild Health are much in line with progressive medicine, functional medicine. Basically like ancestral medicine if I dare say. I was assigned a health coach when I came on board with them.

My health coach’s name is Trei Tackett, and you are going to hear me talking with Trei today. We are going to go and pretty much just nerd out on everything from fasting to gut health to hormone levels. You guys are going to hear this side of me, this very passionate health side of me. I’m going to be sure that I tie this into how this affects you, how it effects business, how it effects your cognitive behaviors, the way that you think, how motivated you are, how good you feel. Because ultimately how good you feel is going to trickle substantially into the success of your business or lack thereof.

So I’m really pumped about this episode. I feel like I say that with every episode. I’m like this one’s my favorite, but like I keep feeling that way. Like every episode that comes out I’m like nope, this one’s even better. Like they keep getting better. So this is, again, one of my favorite episodes. I might be a little bit biased because I just get to hang out with Trei, my health coach, and just chat our faces off on all things fitness and health and food and nutrition and ancestry and hormones and all of the good things.

So this is episode number 41. I am your host Becca Pike, and it is time for your weekly dose of Hell Yes Coaching. Let’s go.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Becca: hello Trei. How are you?

Trei: good. How are you Becca?

Becca: I’m good. I am so excited for this episode. I was just telling my husband like my audience definitely has little trinkets of hints at how much I love talking about health and nutrition. Like I’ve sprinkled a little bit here and there, but today we get to go all in, and they get to see the beast that lives within me and how much I love this stuff.

Trei: yeah for sure. Well, you know it’s a passion of mine. We’ve had ongoing conversations about a lot of this. Not going to break and confidentiality with you, but I think you’ve mentioned that I work with you as your health coach.

Becca: yeah absolutely. So for everybody that’s listening, this is Trei Tackett. He is my health coach. He works at Wild Health. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about what Wild Health is and how it’s different.

Trei: yeah for sure. So I was a nurse in the ER. I worked at the University of Kentucky for about six years. Then went to Northern Kentucky for my master’s degree as a nurse practitioner. The reason I wanted to pursue my master’s is because in the ER, you see so many people who come in with the same problems over and over. We refer to that as [inaudible] care, right? You’re just trying to put a band aid on something, prescribe something that may help in the interim, but it usually doesn’t fix the problem.

I was looking for a solution. It didn’t come with my master’s degree. It really was just kind of the same thing but on the front end in primary care. I happened to know Dr. Matthew Dawson who’s the CEO of Wild Health. He was starting Wild Health at the time, and I got the opportunity to join him. It was like a breath of fresh air.

We focus on lifestyle interventions and just general prevention, which sounds common. Everybody says we focus on prevention, right. Like you’ve heard that in advertisements for a lot of different medical clinics. What we’re using is genomics based precision medicine to determine the areas you need to actually focus on and prevent illness.

So we can use the genetics sequencing. I know it’s kind of—I don’t want to get into the details of the science, but we can kind of tell where you’re predisposed to having problems at and then really dial in some of the lifestyle and nutritional factors that can help prevent those.

Becca: yeah absolutely. So I became drastically obsessed with Wild Health when I started working with you guys because it was the first time that I ever felt really seen and taken care of. Like when I contacted you all.

So I know Matt as well. Matt and I are friends. I was just texting him yesterday. I said I turn my back for one minute and you have a partnership with CrossFit, and you just bought the Lexington Legends baseball field and naming rights. Like what is happening? You guys are growing so fast. It’s because of the quality of y’all’s work. Like you guys are booming here in Lexington.

Anyways so whenever I started with you guys, it was like okay you need to send in all these blood samples. Spit in a cup so that we can look at your DNA. There was like pee in a cup, poop in a cup. You were like we’re gonna look at everything about you before we even have our first appointment.

I fell in love with you guys that day because I was like I have always been a little bit different with the way that I want to take care of my body. I don’t want to put a band aid on it. I don’t want to just cure the symptoms. I want to find out what the symptoms are coming from and figure out how to handle those, right. That’s exactly what you all do.

Trei: yeah just trying to get to the root cause. I should not as well. I work with you directly as a client, but most of my focus is on our education program. So I’m constantly evaluating new data, new research, trying to educate our coaching staff and our physicians and our fellowship programs so that we can continue to provide this care and we can spread this word across the entire country. Because essentially we realized okay we can do this and we can keep growing, but we want to train other people to do this same type of medicine. So that’s my passion and my focus.

Becca: Yeah well I was confused when I was assigned to you because I don’t know if it was you or Matt, but somebody said Trei doesn’t really take one-on-one clients. Like his main focus is this other thing. I’m like why am I getting him? What’s happening? Why did I get assigned you? Aren’t you doing other things?

Trei: yeah for sure. I think Matt wanted to pair me with you since he was going to work with you directly. He knew I could help you out a little bit, and he’s a busy guy, right?

Becca: he was probably like these are two of the funniest people I know. I’m going to put them in a room together and watch them. Our health coaching sessions are genuinely just me laughing and talking about my poop. I talk to you more about my poop than almost anyone besides my husband probably.

Trei: yeah I can’t say they’re typical or professional, but that’s fine because I think it’s like a break for both of us. It’s fun.

Becca: oh man. I love it. So this is what I want to do. I want to just, basically I want to just shoot the shit with you, but I want my audience to leave here just being 1% as interested as I am in all of this stuff. So I’m just going to throw some things at you. Of course I’m going to give you lots of time to talk on whatever you want to talk about, but can I just throw some topics at you?

Trei: Yeah for sure. I would love to talk about—I think your audience would really benefit from some information that I think I could share, and they could apply regarding just being cognitively on their game that branches out into kind of other areas and aspects of health. So yeah for sure.

Becca: yes. Yeah I definitely want to spend a lot of time on brain health because we have a lot of people that don’t know why they have brain fog. They don’t know why they’re so exhausted. This isn’t mainstream information. Unless you listen to these back alley podcasts that I listen to about health and all this new information that’s coming about then it’s like this isn’t the stuff that’s on the news. No one knows why they’re so exhausted. They don’t have idea how the bacteria in their gut is effecting the way that they’re thinking.

You know like it’s so frustrating. I find it, like I’m constantly trying to educate my parents. They just think that I’m talking voodoo because it’s not on mainstream media, but anyway. We’re going to chip away at that. That’s right. That’s why we’re having this episode so we can start chipping away at trying to get it to more people’s ears, right.

Trei: yeah for sure. Let’s do it.

Becca: all right so I was reading the other day that medical knowledge has a half life of 12 to 18 months right now. So basically everything that we learn becomes practically obsolete by new studies within 12 to 18 months. That is how fast and how rapid medical information is coming out, right. I read that in 2030, it’s going to be every 76 days. That’s how fast our technology’s grown, and new information is coming out.

Are you finding that that’s true? Are you finding that you are just learning at rapid speeds to keep up with the quality and the service that you guys are providing at Wild Health with being on the front end of medical advice?

Trei: yeah so that’s very common knowledge I would say. Like the turnover in medical information is rapid, but the problem is that in a traditional medical system you can’t implement it very quickly. There are huge organizations trying to get the education out to all of their providers and that includes nurses and staff at hospitals, right. So there’s a big bulky model that is hard to adjust.

The American Medical Association has to generally improve new practices as well. So you have clinical practice guidelines that can be a little bit bureaucratic and difficult to change. There has to be a ton of evidence come out to change actual practice procedures. So while it’s true that new knowledge and new science is coming out, it’s kind of hard to apply that in the traditional medical model.

One advantage that we have at Wild Health is that we’re constantly evaluating that internally. We’re not necessarily having to adhere to a large organization being ourselves that has a review board or a committee that’s going to say, “Okay this is new evidence and we’re not going to try it until everybody else is doing it.” And that makes us a little bit different.

Becca: yeah absolutely. So whenever I think about my own health, I always think about it in like four main core things. Four main like topics. I think about my light exposure, my sleep, what I eat, and the windows in which I don’t eat. So in my mind, I have them in these like kind of like ladder steps where what we eat is cumulative of not only what I’m eating but the supplements that I’m taking as well, right.

I put these four staples even above exercise. That’s saying a lot because I love exercise. I believe it’s super important. But to me, the light exposure, the sleep, what I’m eating, and what I’m not eating is even more important. What I mean by what I’m not eating, I literally just mean fasting. So you and I have talked a ton about fasting. I believe in the benefits of intermittent fasting through and through.

Whenever I got my bloodwork done with you guys, Matt told me. He was like do you want to know what your top marker is. Like what your top thing could possibly be for your death. He was like some people want to know, some people don’t want to know. I don’t remember how he said it. He probably said it way more professional than that. Way more professional than do you want to know how you’re going to die?

He said, “Yeah you have the markers for blood cancer.” I think the way he said it was pretty substantial. I told him I was like yeah, I had two grandparents that died from blood cancer. He was like, “Okay it’s fantastic that we know this. One of the very best things you can do is intermittent fast.” I thankfully had already been intermittent fasting for about a year when I got this news, and I still am today. Can you tell us a little bit about why that’s so important?

Trei: yeah for sure. That was probably related to a JAK2 snip. So that means you have a variation or risk allele on the JAK2 gene. So that increases your risk of blood cancer with that.

Becca: all I heard was you’re going to die. I was like I’m going to fast every day for the rest of time. I’m going to live to be 200.

Trei: so here’s the kind of rundown on fasting and why it’s important. There’s a bunch of neurocognitive benefits to fasting. There’s a bunch of metabolic benefits to fasting. So when I say metabolic, I’m talking about your insulin resistance or risk for diabetes.

Outside of those there’s something that happens at around 16 hours of not eating called cellularly autophagy. That is just like eating oneself. Autophagy is a process where the body goes in and starts to clean up, right. So you’re taking out these cells that are damaged and old. Whenever cells are damaged or DNA for that matter, that’s when we start produce cancer.

The process of autophagy and prolonged fasting has been shown in multiple studies to reduce the instance of cancer. In actual study in particular that was interesting, those who have had cancer and went into remission and then started fasting actually had lower rates of recurrence. So there’s a ton of evidence behind it. There’s multiple benefits. You just have to know how to do it correctly and safely. So we’ve talked about that too.

Becca: yeah. So this is, in my mind this is the simplest way that I think about it. I think about it like you have very healthy cells that are new and they’re vibrant and they’re in your body. Then you also have very old, damaged cells. Back in the caveman days, people had to fast. That was part of our life, right. Like we didn’t have food readily available all the time. So we were created as like this is a way for our body to detox. This is a very normal thing is to go through a fasting period and your damaged cells die off.

But right now in the world that we live in, we don’t have that anymore. We don’t ever have to go without food. We are eating around the clock. So our damaged cells are capable of living way longer than they’re supposed to. Am I on the right track?

Trei: yeah I think that’s true. The body’s always cleaning up those damaged cells, but this is like a hyperdrive for it, right.

Becca: yeah.

Trei: it does help with that process. You have me wanting to nerd out right now, but I’m going to try and resist as far as like some of the other physiologic processes that go on with fasting.

Becca: yeah you can nerd out with us. Just I was—So everybody that’s listening I was telling Trei beforehand. I was like listen, I know that you have your industry lingo that you use, and it comes super easily to you when you’re talking to your nerd biohacking friends like myself. But with my audience I want to make it as layman’s terms as possible because I really want them to have a strong grasp on it and not just be like overwhelmed with scientific stuff. If you want to nerd out and you want to use the real human language, that would be great.

Trei: yeah no. I’ll just say this with regards to fasting. The benefits go across a lot of spectrums. One of those is that if you’re eating up until bedtime, right, you’re still secreting insulin at night. That actually impacts your sleep, which goes into another category like at the pillar of health that you’re referring to. Whenever you’re eating late at night, you’re secreting insulin, you’re actually inhibiting or deep downregulating your growth hormone production which is really important for repair not only of your body but your brain.

So there’s so many reasons that the way we live now in today’s age where we eat from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. if you’re having a bedtime snack. They actually hurt us. It doesn’t seem apparent, right. You’re like well I’m trying to gain muscle. So I’m going to drink the protein shake right before bed and get some carbohydrates because it helps me sleep better. That is actually beneficial if you’re in a really acute phase of trying to build muscle and performance, right? Overall for most people, that can be pretty harmful if you continue to do it for a long period of time.

Becca: yeah absolutely. You were saying that some magic happens around the 16^th hour of fasting. From what I understand, one of the magic pills that happen is the hormone changes that happen, right. Because doesn’t your human growth hormone and your testosterone increases. I think I read one time it was like 1600% for HGH and something along those lines for testosterone.

I was reading about how it makes sense that when we get hungry, we’re not designed to get more tired and more brain foggy. That is a thing that has happened in modern America and westernized culture where we’re becoming so insulin resistance that if we go a long time without eating we start getting tired and lethargic. Really we’re designed to become sharper and faster and smarter when we’re hungry. So our testosterone and our HGH increase when we’re literally hungry so that we can run faster to kill the deer and the wooly mammoths, right.

Trei: right. So that gets into metabolic flexibility, which is really important, and we can talk about that in its entirety because I think that’s really important. What you’re talking about with being hungry, getting groggy, people refer to that as keto flu. If you’re really metabolically flexible, you don’t experience that as much. If you ever talk to somebody that goes into ketosis regularly, they don’t really have that groggy terrible feeling.

Becca: can you say what ketosis is?

Trei: it’s the process of burning fat for energy instead of using carbohydrates for energy. That can be from fuel sources that you consume like high fat foods. If you’re on a ketogenic diet, you’re just not eating carbohydrates. Or it could be from not eating and burning your own fat for energy. Both of those are possible.

Becca: so here’s what you’re saying. You’re saying that it’s super important to be flexible in what you burn. Is that right?

Trei: yeah exactly. So in western standard American diet, or SAD diet is what it’s referred to lovingly. We’re pretty carb dominant. So we don’t ever really get into ketosis. Ideally you would be able to move in and out of ketosis regularly or at least burn some fat. So not have carbs every single day or with every single meal and not be fed all the time. Meaning that we have some time restriction.

That doesn’t mean that everybody needs to eat—I’m going to use the term here, but I’ll explain it—on a 16:8 window meaning you have 16 hours of being unfed and eight hours of feeding. Not everybody needs that. Some people don’t tolerate that well. Some people have too high of metabolic or caloric demand, but you at least need some time without food. 12 hours is usually what I recommend as a baseline just because you can go from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. pretty easily.

Becca: yeah. I’m gonna probably embarrass myself here, but I think about my bacteria in my gut as like my little pets. Like it’s my duty to take care of them. It’s my job to take care of them. They need rest. They’re on a circadian rhythm. Like we already know that. So the bacteria in your body is on a rhythm of when it wants to eat versus when it needs rest, right.

But like also I’ve read so much about how like cravings. Like your sugar cravings. When you are dying for sugar, like you actually are starting to feel sick. Like you need that hit, right, like it’s cocaine. It’s not even you that needs it. It’s your microbiome. It’s the bacteria that thrives on the sugar that is sending the messages to your brain that is telling you to eat or else they’re going to die.

So in my mind whenever I have that feeling, I’m always like die little bitches. Die. This is between me and you. I’m going to win. Something about it being another third party as if it’s not just me makes me feel more empowered to be able to take care of my body. Because I do go through phases of like I will get addicted to sugar. I will gain 10 pounds. I will go and I will become carb dependent.

Then, of course, you know that I go through my phases where I go onto keto for a month of whatever and I do my intermittent fasting. Like you said, it’s just so much different when I am not carb dependent, when I am capable of being metabolically flexible. Like I can go in and out of ketosis. I can go in and out of eating. I have the utmost energy and the utmost clarity and brain function.

Trei: you crack me up talking about the little bacteria’s ass there. So but it’s actually a really good analogy. Because a lot of the bad bacteria, I say bad bacteria. I mean bacteria that are associated with harmful outcomes in gut health or inflammatory whatever it may be feed on simple carbohydrates. Those that are considered good feed on complex carbohydrates or fibers. So you’re thinking things like vegetables, right, a salad, broccoli. They’re soluble fiber like sweet potatoes. Good bacteria typically feed on those.

The interesting thing is whenever you’re eating more sugar, you get more of those bacteria right. So then they’re gonna…There’s a thing called gut brain access where the bacteria in your gut actually communicates with your brain and causes you to have those cravings. It’s bio-directional. So the brain impacts the gut. This can be seen in things like irritable bowel syndrome.

Whenever you’re overstressed and you’re in a constant state of sympathetic dominance meaning that norepinephrine, epinephrine, the fight or flight thing. So when you’re in that state of sympathetic dominance, your gut actually has poorer health. On the contrary, if you have poor gut health from inflammatory foods, simple carbohydrates, it impacts your brain. So again it’s bio-directional. It’s really interesting.

It’s something that I wanted to talk about a little bit too because we have kind of a misconception I think that we can optimize our brains through just sleep and stimulants, right. So we want to wake up. We want to take our coffee in the morning or whatever it is. Modafinil or whatever medication or drugs you’re into for the day.

Becca: heroine.

Trei: I don’t think that one’s probably going to help. Maybe some people. There’s a lot of heroine junkies running around eastern Kentucky. I’m from there. So they seem pretty hyperactive. The thing of it is that your brain is actually better in balance. The process of homeostasis in the body is really important. That just means balance, right? So you need to balance nutrition, you need to balance sleep, you need to balance the times that you’re up meaning your sympathetic nervous system’s activated. You’re going. You’re feeling on.

You also need to balance that with the times that you’re down where you’re resting and the parasympathetic dominance. We’ve talked a little bit about that Becca with things like meditation, right. Ways to slow down. It’s hugely important that we have this balance in our lives.

So if I was going to give you an example and make this applicable to real life, you wake up and you’re in a groggy state. You kind of want to get upregulated at that point. So there’s ways you can do that. Sunlight exposure is great. This stimulates what’s called a cortisol awakening response.

You get sunlight in your eyes and your body says it’s the morning. It’s time to go. I do this by just taking a walk outside in the morning regardless of the temperature or weather. If it’s pouring the rain, I may hold off and I’ll just try to stand in the window and get some sunlight and meditate maybe. But you stimulate that cortisol awakening response. You get your body going and allow it to produce its own cortisol.

You do that before you have cortisol because if you’re having coffee before you get that natural production, the body is a little bit confused about okay am I making this? Is it coming from an external source? Are you actually getting as much benefit because it’s already going to be spiking your cortisol at that point anyways, your body is. Then you go through the day.

If you stay in a sympathetic dominant state, you’re kind of going to get burnt out, right. You’re not relaxing. So you have to have peaks and valleys. I do this by taking mindfulness breaks or just doing some simple breathwork. That allows me to de-stress, get out of that sympathetic state for a bit, and then focus again later.

It’s kind of a concept of working like a lion. If you set there at a computer all day and you’re just grinding, grinding, grinding crushing coffee, you’re not as effective. If you’re taking that sprint, relax, sprint, relax, and it’s a homeostatic process as well. It really, really is beneficial and keeps you on point.

Becca: oh man. I am loving this interview because this is exactly what I talk about all the time. Like this is a business podcast. So like I said, I trickle in all the health stuff and I’m constantly talking about like the sprint type of work where you work really strong for an hour. You get up, you move around, you do other things, you literally turn your brain off from work so that you can come back, and you can sprint again. So I love hearing the science behind it.

So while you were talking, I have some questions for you. Back to the brain gut connection. We’re learning a lot that our gut health has a ton to do with cognitive behaviors and problems like depression and addiction and ADHD and all kinds of stuff like that. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

One time Dr. Dawson sent me an article about antibiotics and what can happen to your brain after antibiotics. We were kind of like nerding out on this. This was the new study that had come out. It was saying that like in the first year after taking antibiotics, you are 16 times more likely to feel depression. Then there was something about suicide rates being linked to a specific amount of time since the last antibiotic use. Can you tell me just a little bit more about why that would happen and what is the big deal between the gut and things like depression and addiction?

Trei: Yeah so I don’t have the study in front of me, but I can tell you that those numbers are close. I’m familiar with the study. Instance of depression increases significantly. Instances of anxiety actually increase even more. With regards to what’s actually happening, you’re killing off bacteria, right? There’s good and bad bacteria.

Antibiotics are necessary and life saving in many cases. We’re not anti-antibiotic. We’re not anti-western medicine, but they should be used really prudently meaning that you should use them only when necessary. That’s kind of the discussion we had with you, right? It was just do you have to have these or is this something that your body is going to be able to defend on its own?

Becca: one of my favorite things about you guys is that you have helped me through incidences now, four, where I was prescribed an antibiotic and I didn’t feel like I was in a life or death situation, and I didn’t take them. So I don’t know if you were around when I went through the whole upper respiratory infection and then there was the thing with my eye. There was just a few incidences where I was prescribed antibiotics.

You know it’s so frustrating like the society that we live in where someone prescribes you an antibiotic for something very small that is not life threatening and you say that you’re going to decline it. They look at you like you’re crazy.

Now that I have kids and they want to put my kids on antibiotics for like the sniffiest of noses, and I decline it, I’m looked at almost like a bad mother when I have all of these studies in the back of my mind. I’m just like it’s not worth it. This is a sniffly nose. I’m not going to hurt their microbiome for the next three years and possibly let them lose bacteria that they may never come into contact with again.

Trei: yeah. I want to be very careful not to be anti-antibiotic because I absolutely think they’re necessary. It doesn’t always have to be life threatening. There’s times where you can need an antibiotic for something to prevent worsening outcomes, but exactly like you said. Most of the time we don’t need them. That’s because a lot of the time it’s not bacterial.

So if you have a kid with a runny nose for 10 days, the majority of the time that’s viral. The same for adults right. Whenever you’re talking about the gut and the outcomes that are associated with it and you’re killing off those bacteria, you mentioned this already. It takes a really long time for that to recover.

The microbiome that we’re born with actually starts at birth and the actual method of birth, so whether it’s vaginal or c-section. You get a ton of good bacteria from vaginal birth. That microbiome sticks with that child throughout their life. There’s been studies that have shown that the microbiome you develop is one that you have in adulthood. All those nicks and hits that we take really do impact our gut health. So it’s important to maintain it.

Becca: yeah so I wanted to ask you this. So like you said, babies who go through the vaginal canal get into contact with a very important bacterial strain. Would that be the right word? Bacterial strain?

Trei: it’s probably more like a plethora or a set of bacteria.

Becca: like a lot of strains. You go through, you get these strains that cesarean babies don’t get, right? So I was a cesarean section. I wasn’t breastfed. So I didn’t get the bacteria from breastfeeding. Oh can I—I’m going to go back to that story, but can I just. I’m going to announce the craziest fun fact that I’ve ever heard in my entire life.

Trei: let’s hear it.

Becca: I still think about this fact, and it’s been like seven years since I heard it. Like my mind melted. Okay so now I’ve hyped it up so much like it better be good, right. Okay so I read that when you’re breastfeeding your baby, we usually think that milk is just coming out of mom’s nipple into the baby’s mouth. But what actually is happening is also the baby’s saliva is going into the mother’s nipple and the mother’s body is turning into like a little pharmacy, and it knows what the baby needs. So that at the next output of milk, it give that baby whatever it needs.

So like if your baby is dehydrated and the saliva goes into your body, like your next output of milk is going to be much more watery or it’s going to have the bacteria or antibodies, antivirals that it needs. What the fuck? That is crazy.

Trei: so the human body never ceases to amaze me. That kind of stuff when you learn it you’re like, “Oh wow. We have really smart bodies.”

Becca: oh my god. We have the best bodies. I am like blown away by that, by mothers, by birth. The whole thing is just mindboggling to me. Anyway so I was not breastfed. I was a cesarean section. I was on antibiotics literally my entire life. Like I don’t know what happened back in the early 90s but. I don’t know if it was just my family or what, but I felt like me and all my friends were on antibiotics every month. Everything was strep throat. Everything was a problem. Everything needed antibiotics. I was on antibiotics my whole life.

Guess what? Now I have like all these autoimmune problems. I’ve got all of this digestion problems. Like all of these issues that I’m facing. But for someone like me that is doing a lot of the things to rebuild their gut health, am I a lost cause or no?

Trei: no, not at all. So we talked about small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Turned out it wasn’t the case for you, but I just want to use that as an example. When you have a dysbiosis, meaning something wrong with the gut bacteria. Some inflammatory process. It’s out of whack is what dysbiosis means for lack of a better term. The instance of autoimmune disease is way higher. You can resolve that.

So using SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth as an example. When treated, instances of autoimmune problems with the thyroid go way down. So if you’re having, you’re probably familiar with these, the TPO antibiotics. It’s common with Hashimoto’s disease or an autoimmune problem with the thyroid. Those antibodies go away in some cases when you treat small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

Becca: yeah.

Trei: That kind of stuff is modifiable. So is the overall gut microbiome, right. By eating prebiotic foods and even taking prebiotic supplements. So we’re not talking about probiotics where you’re taking that probiotic you get from the pharmacy everyday that has however many billion bacteria in it. You want to build your own bacteria by giving them the food that they want to eat. Those are the healthy carbohydrates and fibers.

Becca: prebiotics are the food for your probiotics. Is that right?

Trei: Right. Well prebiotics are the food for your gut bacteria.

Becca: I mean that’s what I meant. Yeah.

Trei: yeah.

Becca: yeah okay so let’s talk about supplementation a little bit. First and foremost from what I understand and everything that I’ve read, but I’m also biasedly a very big Rhonda Patrick fan. From what I understand, vitamin D is one of the most building block basic vitamins that our body needs and uses for everything from immunity to digestion to sleep. Everything.

Trei: hormone precursor.

Becca: yep. According to Rhonda, according to RP, that’s what I call her because we’re so tight. She says that if she had to only pick on supplement, it would be vitamin D. You know I’ve noticed. I’ve been taking vitamin D now religiously for about three years, and I haven’t been sick once. I have felt fantastic. I haven’t dealt with any winter blues. I am taking a higher dose of vitamin D. I supplement it with vitamin K as well. Can you tell us a little bit about why Americans are lacking vitamin D, first of all, and the importance of it?

Trei: the majority of Americans are actually low on vitamin D meaning below the standard range of vitamin D. Under 30 is what that number is. If you think about it, none of us are outside very often. We don’t get any sunlight exposure.

Even those who are outside are typically using sunscreen. That’s been a common recommendation over the years from all of healthcare providers to prevent skin cancer, preserve skin health. There’s validity to that. There’s a drawback in that we’re not using as much vitamin D when we’re using sunscreens and we’re covering our bodies and protecting ourselves from the UV light.

The hemisphere that we live in. If you’re north of Kentucky then you’re probably not going to be getting very much vitamin D, especially through the fall and winter months. So all of those factors really impact it. There’s other factors including genetics that prevent you from converting sunlight to vitamin D as efficiently.

So the majority of people really do need to supplement vitamin D. The level that we’re aiming for is above 50 most of the time. If your doctor’s looking at it, they may just want to get you above 30. But we found that people really have optimized immune vitamin D levels above 50.

Becca: yeah. So I don’t know if you know this, but I’m a plant lady. I have a lot of plants. My house is just filled with them. They’re everywhere. When I think about sunlight or even water intake, I always think about my plants. because like if they miss a few days of sunlight or a few days of sufficient watering, they look so sad. Like they literally are drooping to the floor, super sad.

I’m like I know for a fact that this is what we’re like. When people are feeling like absolute dog shit, the first thing we should thinking about is like how much light exposure have you had? How much light has gone? From what I understand, getting light into your eyes is enough. Like you don’t have to be bathing in it. Like you can literally just go outside and be in the vicinity of sunlight. But also the amount of water that we take in and the dehydration.

Trei: you think of sad humans whenever you think of sad plants. It’s actually a great analogy, right. You have seasonal affective disorder where people are not getting sunlight in the winter and the sun’s going down really early. They’re in their office all day, and when they come out, it’s dark. Yeah. I think we’re like sad plants, right.

Becca: well sometimes I see people and I’m like that looks like my plant. Like they look sad like my plant that I haven’t watered in a long time. Then I see people that are vibrant and alive, and I’m like they look like my plant that I water all the time.

Trei: but I did want to, you were talking about supplements a little bit. I do think vitamin D’s important, and it’s actually the only supplement I take on a daily basis. I take some other things sporadically like creatine and some other stuff, but there are some supplements that I take on a one off basis. They’re interesting. They sound funny. It’s called a nootropic.

The one that I probably lean towards the most and get more regularly is lion’s mane. It’s a mushroom and it looks like a lion’s mane. If you google it, it’s really interesting. I just take the extract. Four Sigmatic has a product. There’s a bunch out there in the market. I take it in my coffee, but it increases what’s called brain derived neurotrophic factor. That just means that it helps your brain grow essentially is the most basic way to say that. But what I really like about is that it enhances cognitive focus during the day and it kind of replaces caffeine a little bit in the morning for me.

You know sometimes people ask me. They watch my businesses build and grow really quickly. I don’t consider myself the sharpest crayon in the box. It’s not like I’m overly…I don’t know. To me it’s like I would give a lot of my success to the amount of effort that I put into cognitive enhancements or cognitive clarity just based on what I’m eating, what I’m supplementing with.

So like if this is the brain that I’ve got. I’m educating it every day. I’m doing the best that I can. Why not have like all motors firing? Why not have as much as I possibly can to use of it? Like why not be efficient with it? To me it’s like eat, sleep, sunlight, supplementation. These are the things that will build your business because these are the things that will give you clarity throughout the day.

Trei: so if I’m thinking about like nutritionally negative things, it would be processed food. We talked about the gut biome. So this is going to negatively impact the gut biome. In processed foods, there’s some toxic oils. When I say toxic, it’s not like a toxic gas.

If you have a highly processed seed oil that’s been highly heated, it loses all of its antioxidant properties and keeps all of its inflammatory properties. That inflammatory property crosses the blood brain barrier and actually causes neural inflammation. There’s studies out there on that one from the Mayo Clinic in 2012 that actually pulled that data from.

Then if you’re really wanting to think about okay I’m not gonna consume sugar. Can I have sugar replacements? Things like aspartame, sucralose. These are known to actually and have been studied to worsen mood. So making you feel more depressed. Making you feel less energetic. That’s probably one of those areas where people are looking to replace sugar. They don’t want to just cut it. There are some healthier options in that area like monk fruit and agave, but I still try to avoid those for my metabolic health as much as I can.

Becca: what about stevia?

Trei: yeah, it’s okay.

Becca: when you say neural inflammation, what you literally mean is like swelling of the brain.

Trei: yeah. Not necessarily swelling like a measurable swelling, but just a more inflamed state.

Becca: yeah and that is directly effected with mood. It must be. Like I do my own bits of biohacking. Like I’m going to eat this for 30 days. I’m gonna see how I feel. I’m gonna journal about it. I’m just like really curious about what my body does and what it can do and what inhibits it from working at its most functional potential, right? To me it’s like when I’m eating poorly, when I’m not really watching what I’m doing, my mood is complete shit.

It’s like this is the stuff that I want to scream from the rooftops to people that I feel like isn’t being talked about enough. When people come to me and they’re like, “I feel really shitty. I feel really bad. Something’s actually wrong.” My first thought, and I don’t ever want to sound compassionate. I’m like my first thought is always what are you eating? What are you doing? How much sunlight have you had? When was the last time you had an antibiotic? What was that about?

People a lot of times they don’t want to hear that. They’re like no, it’s the circumstances of my life. It just sucks. It’s like well, how much less could it suck if you were performing optimally? I know this for myself, right? I have circumstantial stressors in my life that feel like a really big deal when I feel like crap, and they feel like not a big deal when I don’t. Like that’s all the science I need to know.

Trei: right. It’s just a concept of resiliency, right. How much stress can you deal with and how many things can you accomplish to avoid having that stress. Anxiety is a totally normal response. Evolutionarily speaking, anxiety was beneficial, right. If you had something that made you nervous, it was probably that you didn’t have food or that there was a threat to your life. That would help you get away from that threat or resolve that threat. That’s what anxiety is, and anxiety can be healthy.

If it becomes stress and becomes overwhelming, we don’t have enough resiliency to deal with that or we’re overstressed. It’s not that we’re always just not resilient enough. As we increase our resiliency through cognitive health, we can deal with those stressors more effectively.

The main keys to that, as you said, nutrition, avoiding inflammatory foods, processed foods, simple carbohydrates, bad oils. So if you’re thinking what’s a bad oil it’s just a vegetable oil is actually not healthy. Seed oils are not great. If I have an oil it’s avocado or olive oil.

Then if we’re going to promote cognitive health, if we’re thinking about nutrients that are important for the brain, prevent inflammation, to enhance cognitive function, I actually use spices quite a bit. They’ve been shown to prevent depression or reduce symptoms of depression. So turmeric is a really good one. Saffron’s not a spice, but we use it in that same culinary way. It’s a good option there too. Omega-3 fatty acids are really important for the brain. So fish that are high in omega-3s.

Becca: you know I’ve never heard eastern Kentucky come out of you before until you said spices.

Trei: did the “I” get long?

Becca: oh it got so long. Spices.

Trei: spices.

Becca: it was great.

Trei: it sneaks out sometimes.

Becca: felt a little tinge of home there. Yeah I love it. Okay so we’ve gotta wrap this up. Before we do, I wanna hit on one more thing before we do our closing conversation here. I want to talk about sleep. I think it’s overlooked. We’ve been taught that quantity is what you’re going for, and that’s not the case now. We now know it’s quality. It’s like eight hours of shitty sleep has nothing on five hours of very high quality sleep. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Trei: first of all, I can’t recommend five hours of sleep, but I think you’re right.

Becca: wait, let me ask you though. If you had someone who said, “I got eight hours of super shitty sleep. I was like drunk, hungover. My body was still metabolizing all the bagels I ate right before bed. I watched TV right before bed, but I slept eight hours kind of.” Or if you had someone that had extremely well groomed sleep hygiene and they said, “I slept for five hours last night.” You looked at their Oura scores, tell me which one would be better.

Trei: I pick the five hours every time.

Becca: yeah of course.

Trei: yeah but I’m still gonna tell you to sleep like maybe six and a half, seven. Because I almost guarantee in that five hour window, you didn’t get enough REM and deep sleep. We’ll talk about sleep architecture really quickly, but yeah you’re right. Quality of sleep over quantity 100%.

Becca: what can people do to ensure quality? What does that look like?

Trei: yeah. So there’s kind of two levels to this, basics, and biohacker. So Becca the biohacker’s gone all the way. A lot of people don’t want to mess with data. They don’t want to track with an Oura ring or anything like that. So we’ll go with the basics first, and then I’ll jump into some of the more advanced ways you can do it.

First of all probably the most important factor you can have in getting good sleep is setting a nice circadian rhythm. You have to have a routine. Routines important for success in life for your daily activities but also for your sleep. So going to bed at about the same time each night, waking up at about the same time each morning, and then doing the things we’ve talked about already. I’ll jump back into them quickly to stimulate what would be a normal life for a human 200 years ago.

So you wake up, you see the sun. You move around. You’re not setting and looking at a device in your bed. Also too with wake up, waking up without an alarm is possible if you get into this routine. It’s the most beneficial way to wake up. I’ll talk about that when I talk about sleep architecture. Going through the day having balance, not having too much caffeine in the afternoon.

Then when you get ready for bed, you want to stop exposing yourself to stressors and blue  light at least two hours before bed. Two hours is lenient because I would really like to say like three to four, but that’s not possible in most of American culture. You stopped exposing yourself to your device, your blue light, it allows you to start producing some of the chemicals that are important for you to go to sleep. That’s melatonin and it’s your cortisol dropping. Those are really important for you to get tired and feel sleepy.

Then going to bed in a dark environment. Cool environment. About 65 to 67 degrees is ideal with no light or sound. You do that, you go to bed, you get into the sleep architecture.

So in the first part of the night, you’re going to go into what’s called deep sleep. This is really important for your brain clearing some of the physical toxins from the day. The glymphatic system. It’s like the lymph system, lymph nodes for your brain dumps all the bad stuff out during this phase. It also happens during intense exercise. It helps us reduce the amount of toxins and waste in our brain through cerebral spinal fluid.

Then a little bit longer you start going into REM sleep stages. This is like the computer doing the old defrag system. When you had that old PC on your desk that got slow, and you had to click defrag. The brain starts to organize memories and create new pathways to access those memories. So you can remember what you did from the day before. You get the most important memories and focus the things you’ve learned from the day before during that REM sleep stage.

If you ruin either one of those stages of sleep, you have a negative outcome associated with your cognitive performance. You can do that by either going to bed too late or waking up too early. You don’t really know that unless you track it. I use an Oura ring to track my sleep and see how much of both of those stages I’m getting. For me, I can go to bed pretty late. I can go to bed at like 11:30, go straight into deep sleep for almost two hours, which is ideal. Then by 7:00 to 7:30, I’ve gotten enough REM sleep. If I wake up at 6:30, I don’t get enough REM sleep.

Becca: That’s so interesting. Yeah so for people that are looking to lower their blue light exposure late at night. Let’s say they aren’t capable of detaching from their phone or whatever. I use blue light blockers, but what I’ve found even better is that most devices have an app on there. You can get an app.

Like I have an app that at 6:00 p.m. every night it automatically turns on and it takes away 75% of my blue light. So my phone almost looks like almost like a book to be honest. It takes away a light, and it looks more like what you would get one of those old school Kindles, you know. Like a newspaper.

Trei: right. So the iPhone has a night shift mode that you can turn off. I actually really like all of the sleep features that the iPhone has right now. You can set a bedtime reminder where your phone is not easy to unlock after a certain time. If you do unlock it, it’s shifted away from the blue spectrum. Both of those are really beneficial to the iPhone. Blue light blocking glasses are obviously an option if you’re on a computer. Like you said, there’s a ton of apps out there you can download to shift away from blue light. There’s a black and white function on the iPhone.

Before we finish, I just wanted to talk about dopamine. If any of you are interested in dopamine and how addicted to dopamine we are, you should check out Andrew Huberman’s podcast on it The Huberman Lab. He goes into detail about dopamine, and it is the most interesting podcast. He really explains how dopamine dependent we are, where we’re getting it from, and how that’s kind of harmful to our cognitive performance.

Becca: well thank you so much Trei.

Trei: yeah. Then a couple–

Becca: oh yeah.

Trei: no  I was just going to say a couple other things I didn’t get to touch on. So not everybody is going to avoid alcohol all the time, but alcohol is pretty harmful to your sleep. We talked about that. It’s harmful to your brain. It’s a neurotoxin. There’s a couple other supplements out there like one from Botanic Tonics. It’s called Feel Free. I’ve used that in the past as an alcohol alternative. I don’t take it too late because it’s a little bit stimulating, but it’s really nice to just have a relaxing euphoric feeling without having that alcohol hangover effect.

Becca: that’s interesting. So I’ll drink a glass of wine when I’m cooking probably two to three nights a week. We eat dinner really early. Like just as a family like we’ve always eaten at about 5:00. So I usually start cooking around 3:30 or 4:00 because we usually do pretty substantial meals around here. We’re all eaters.

I’ve noticed that it has significantly helped me Oura scores that I now have my glass of wine literally at like 4:00 and then it’s over by 4:30. Then I have until 10:00 to get it out of my system before it’s time for sleep. That has substantially helped me without me feeling like I have to get rid of my wine all together.

Trei: yeah. Yeah that’s a common recommendation for us too, right. We tell a lot of people that that like to have a glass with dinner. Have it before dinner. You get the effect quicker. You’re going to feel good, feel giggly, have fun, chat with your family. Then the food consumption comes afterwards. It doesn’t slowdown that metabolism,

Becca: yeah, yeah. I love that. Is there anything that you feel like we didn’t hit on today that you would like to as far as just the body?

Trei: no I don’t think so. I mean what I want people to take away from this is that cognitive performance doesn’t come from trying hard. It comes from doing things right in a lot of different aspects of your life. Sleep impacts it. The way you wake up. The things you eat. The way you move during the day, taking breaks. It’s all about balance. There’s a ton of different factors that really impact your cognitive performance. I think if I had to list the most important thing to get right it would probably be sleep closely followed by nutrition and then movement as a to be.

Becca: yeah, yeah absolutely. Okay so tell us where we can find you. I want to make it very clear that if you are interested in becoming a Wild Health member, you do not just have to live in Kentucky. This is not just a local thing. You guys are all over the United States, right. How can we find you? What can we do?

Trei: yeah so you can go to our website. It’s wildhealth.com. You can sign up there and actually have a unique discount for your listeners. It’s GET20, and they’ll be able to use that during the checkout process to get 20% off a membership. It’s ongoing discount. So it doesn’t expire. I’m happy to be able to offer that to everybody. We’ll put a link in the podcast notes and that discount code too.

Becca: oh we are so special guys. That’s awesome. 20% discount for all listeners. Thank you for that.

Trei: I have a couple. Like that Botanic Tonic and the Feel Free supplement that I have, I have an affiliate link with a discount for it as well as the Thorne discount. So if anybody’s interested in one of the nootropics that I take, it’s called Memoractiv. It’s kind of a combination nootropic that supports not only the brain through nootropic supplements, but it has some other really nice blue light protections in it. So it has some antioxidants, somethings that are beneficial to the actual eye like carotenoids that help you deal with that blue light exposure that you get each day. Those are the two things that I actually use because I am at my computer quite a bit.

Becca: yeah I love that. Thorne, you said Thorne you guys have a discount code for. That’s the supplement company that I use now. Like I have fully switched over to all Thorne products. Do you find that they have like the highest quality as well?

Trei: yeah. For sure. So it’s all third party tested. We’ve been to their facility where they actually produce the supplements. We’ve been to their headquarters. We’ve added a ton of supplement companies early on in Wild Health, and this is the one we felt most comfortable with their science and quality. An American based supplement company like that with third party testing is really important to make sure. The supplement industry is pretty unregulated. So knowing where you’re getting and what you’re getting is really important.

Becca: yeah absolutely. I love it. Well thank you so much Trei. This has been super fun for me. I always love sitting and chatting with you and talking with you and hopefully we can do this again soon.

Trei: yeah. Yeah I’ve had a blast.

Becca: all right thank you so much. We’ll see you soon.

Trei: all right bye.

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