438 Naturopathic Physician Shares Easy Lifestyle Changes That Make The Biggest Difference In Optimizing Your Health and Healing, Energy, Stress, Breathing, Philosophy of Holistic Medicine, Dr. Jannine Krause

Learn True Health with Ashley James

Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!

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Dr. Krause's site: https://doctorjkrausend.com

Easy Lifestyle Changes To Improve Overall Health

https://www.learntruehealth.com/easy-lifestyle-changes-improve-overall-health

Highlights:

• Importance of breathing
• Physiological signs that the body is in stressed mode
• Drinking water makes a big difference
• Checking mineral status to see where you’re deficient in
• Physical signs that you have mold in your house

There are many health and nutrition advice out there that sometimes we try to do them all at once and get overwhelmed. But in this episode, Dr. Jannine Krause says, “less is more and daily routines are more important.” She talks about little tweaks we can do to improve our overall health such as breathing and drinking water.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. In today’s interview, you’re going to learn easy lifestyle changes that you can start doing today but will make huge changes to your overall health and well-being. One of the habits I highly recommend you take on is soaking in magnesium. If you haven’t already, go to learntruehealth.com and search Kristen Bowen and listen to my episodes with Kristen Bowen. She shares about all the benefits of soaking in magnesium. No, I don’t mean Epsom salt or those magnesium flakes. I’m talking about her concentrated, undiluted magnesium from the Zechstein Sea that also contains other cofactors. We’ve actually had over 2000 of our listeners purchase her magnesium soak and have amazing results, and many of them have shared the results in the Learn True Health Facebook group.

I myself have had fantastic results. I love soaking in her magnesium. They’ve done tests where they’ve seen that the body up takes 20 grams of magnesium while soaking in it. All you do is put a quarter of a cup of her magnesium soak in a big bowl or basin of water and put your feet in it. Just enough to cover your feet, and it doesn’t matter what temperature the water is. If it’s summer you can have cool water. I did that last summer when it was really hot and it was very refreshing. And of course, over the winter, it’s nice to have hot water to put your feet in. And then you soak for about 45 minutes. You can do it between 30 minutes and an hour to optimally get all the magnesium that you’ll get in that session. You stay in it for an hour.

For children, you can actually put it in their bathtub. It’s completely safe. We noticed right away that our son started sleeping better when we put the magnesium soak in his bath, and he became calmer, which was really exciting. My restless legs went away. My fatigue that I had. I was still having sleep problems because my son was colic, so I’d be up with him in the night and I would have fatigue. I noticed that my fatigue was significantly diminished. I had more energy, my muscle cramps went away, and I’ve been oral magnesium for years and I was still deficient. She explains why you can take her magnesium, her soak, and her magnesium and even if you’re taking oral magnesium, you’ll have even better results because your soak absorbing. Your body absorbs what it needs.

So go check out my interviews with Kristen Bowen. You can actually just purchase her magnesium soak by going to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. That’s livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and be sure to use the coupon code LTH. That’s the special listener discount. I also highly recommend checking out her Magnesium Muscle Creme as it is, in our home, absolutely mandatory to always have a jar of her creme around. If anyone in our family has a headache, usually just a tension headache, we rub it on our neck and our headache immediately goes away. It is very soothing for any kind of aches or pains. And it’s highly concentrated magnesium that you would put locally on the skin. I’ve also used it on my son when he had a bump and he had some pain because magnesium helps the body to turn off the pain response.

There are many uses for magnesium and I absolutely love her magnesium products. That’s Kristen Bowen. You can go to learntruehealth.com, type in Kristen Bowen to find all the episodes with her. She shares about even how she’s used magnesium to help rid herself of parasites, so we’ve had some create interviews and great discussions. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group and ask. If you’re interested, ask other listeners, other members of our community to share their experiences with her magnesium soak. I just think it’s a wonderful habit for self-care. It’s something that you can do while you’re watching TV or even while you’re working during the day at your desk. I often do it when I’m doing an interview. You can also use her soak in the bathtub like I mentioned, you can even use it in the sauna, or you can go outside because it’s the summertime and soak your feet outside while you’re just enjoying nature and breathing or reading a book.

This is such a great habit that’ll help you to decrease your stress levels and achieve the goals that our doctor today in this episode is going to share with you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode and other episodes with your friends and family. Please continue sharing this podcast so we can help as many people as possible to learn true health.

[00:04:43] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 438. I am so excited for today’s interview. We have on the show one of my favorite kinds of guests, Naturopathic physician Dr. Jannine Krause. I’m so excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

[00:05:08] Dr. Jannine Krause: Thanks, Ashley.

[00:05:09] Ashley James: Now you practice Naturopathic medicine and acupuncture and you are also a podcast host, so we’ll make sure that the listeners know how to get to your podcast—The Health Fix podcast. I will have the links to your podcast and website in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. You went to Bastyr University here in Washington State. That’s a university I’m very familiar with. So many of the Naturopaths that I work with have gone there. How long has it been since you graduated?

[00:05:44] Dr. Jannine Krause: I graduated in 2007, so it’s been 13 years actually this month. Wow. Yeah, 13 years.

[00:05:52] Ashley James: Time flies, right? It just feels like yesterday. That’s crazy. Since you started practicing, in the last 13 years, what has really surprised you? Have you had any big aha moments as a doctor?

[00:06:07] Dr. Jannine Krause: Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think in the last, I’d say, five years, it has started to come together for me that less is more and daily routines are more important than all of the herbs, supplements, and trying to really spend a lot of effort on testing the daylights out of people. While that’s still important, it’s just that I’m finding that less is more and some of our daily routines might need to be tweaked to get the results we’re looking for.

[00:06:40] Ashley James: What kind of daily habits did you tweak in your clients that saw you maximize the results, that had you have those aha moments?

[00:06:49] Dr. Jannine Krause: One of the biggest ones is breathing, which seems silly because obviously we have to do it, otherwise we wouldn’t be alive. Actually, having folks take the time to slow down their breath but also target it when they’re feeling stressed or when they’re finishing up a workout. Because so many folks I see, I’m in a little bit of a different practice may be in terms of I have a lot of folks who have chronic pain and chronic illnesses, but then I have a whole other subset of folks that are athletes. Pushing themselves to the limits and finding that gosh, they just seem wired all the time, anxiety, and things of that nature. But if we could get them to breathe and slow down for five minutes after a workout, it’s like this parasympathetic reset. Finding that breathing is this amazing tool was kind of a big game-changer.

[00:07:46] Ashley James: I love it. It’s so funny. My husband holds his breath all the time. He doesn’t realize he’s doing it, but when he’s stressed or concentrating, he’ll hold his breath, and then he’ll just do this big exhale. I’m like you got to breathe. You just have to take slow deep breaths, become more conscious of it. If people do that when they get tensed up and then they hold their breath, do you have any steps for teaching people how to reorganize their brain so they begin to breathe in a healthier way?

[00:08:13] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. It comes down to setting a routine. It’s much like anything that you’re going to practice like learning how to ride a bike. You had to do it a couple of times before you got in your groove. In the same case with breathing, I have folks waking up in the morning starting their breathing practice. Some people are already down with meditating and have that going on. They’ve got their thought process going and they’re just not really taking advantage of the breathing aspect that they could integrate into it. Or we have another set of folks who the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning, they grab their phones and start looking at the newsfeed, texts, or things of that nature.

There’s a great little time frame in our morning when we first open our eyes that we can work on some of our breathing techniques. I’m talking like five counts inhale, seven counts exhale, that kind of stuff. And then finding time throughout the day that we can practice it. Usually, I’m finding that folks will have little stressors right around the time that they’re either driving to work or right before they start work, so I’ll do another session then. And then after work kind of trying to close down the day because I think so many of us like go from work and then boom right to the next thing.

Now, granted, the coronavirus has given us a little time to not have to have so many social events after work, but unfortunately, so many people don’t take advantage of that time frame after work to unwind. And I think that’s a great time to start to practice working on breath work and flipping out of the sympathetic mode into a parasympathetic mode so that you can chill for the rest of the evening.

[00:09:53] Ashley James: For those who don’t know if that is, you’re switching the nervous system into a state of healing and switching it out of a state of stress.

[00:10:01] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely, yes. We’re all sympathetic-driven just the way our society is. Meaning, that we’re constantly on alert. Our nervous system is in fight-or-flight mode most of the time. And to switch into parasympathetic, which is known as rest, digest, and I add in the chill component, it’s huge for us because so many people are caught in being chronically fatigued and chronically anxious because they’re literally running marathons within their body. Whether they realize it or not, that sympathetic mode and that fight-or-flight mode just keep them on for hours and hours on end. Taking more time to pull yourself out of it and flip that switch is huge. It can be a game-changer.

[00:10:48] Ashley James: Since Naturopathic medicine is science-based, what changes did you see in labs? Or did you actually see some changes when your patients started to change their breathing that had you go aha, this minimalistic approach is actually we’re maximizing all the things we’re doing with them because they’ve started to breathe better?

[00:11:12] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. I think that’s one of the ways when I started to connect like huh, if we tried this, would it change labs? In particular, a couple of different things that I’ve found over time—cortisol, in particular saliva cortisol tests are something that I use. I use it in terms of four points. If folks who are listening aren’t familiar with a saliva cortisol test, you are going to spit into a little tube and you’re going to do it when you wake up, before lunch, before dinner, and before bedtime. What we’re going to do is look at that pattern in terms of what’s happening with your cortisol release. Naturally, we’re supposed to have higher amounts of cortisol in the morning, then it’s going to taper off, and it’s going to go down lower to get us ready to go to bed in the evening.

What I found, with a lot of folks who were not taking the time to breathe and were pretty stressed out, that we had either really high spikes in the morning right about the time the folks were going to go to work. Or we were having higher earlier spikes, say 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM in the morning, which can also be related to hormone stuff and we can talk about that later but I would see that. And then I would see the second blip of an increase in cortisol right around the evening time, almost like someone was becoming more amped up and the body was having signals that they should have more cortisol around 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM.

With working with breathwork, I timed it to when the cortisol was out of range. Like I mentioned before, the morning is always a good time for most people. I see that 9 times out of 10, then I see it 9 times out of 10 before work, and then this evening time. I had people working on their breath work and then three months later or six months later, depending on the individual we were retesting. Sure enough, we were able to bring down the cortisol from doing that.

I also added in a little bit of ashwagandha as well in some cases, so I can’t say 100% breathing, but I did see, in quite a few folks, quite a difference of bringing things down. That was one of my first inclinations like okay, we can do this. Then the next was starting to look at hormones and thyroids because so many people are on thyroid medication and they’re not seeing results. They’re not feeling good. As a Naturopathic doctor, I get mad. I’m like I’m not fixing this person. Why am I not helping them? What’s going on? What are we doing wrong?

One of the things I found is that if we can get the body out of sympathetic mode a little bit more, we start to see the T4, which is your hormone that comes directly out of the thyroid, we start to see that coming up and we start to see conversion better. T4 is the hormone that comes out of the thyroid and it gets converted to T3. We’re starting to see higher levels of T3 compared to someone who had lower T3 levels, and we’re just getting more and more medication to try to bump up the T3, so a little Cytomel if you’re familiar with that medication, that is a T3 supplement. I found that these folks didn’t need these medications anymore. Almost as if their metabolism was starting to kick in naturally on their own when we were working with getting them out of sympathetic mode and more into the parasympathetic mode with breathing.

[00:14:28] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I love it. The body becomes more efficient, it responds to protocols. I think, in this society, we really do not value getting out of stress mode. We really don’t value self-care. It’s kind of like oh yeah, that’s for other people. I’m a mom. I also have a job. I have this, I have that. We think I’ve got to cook dinner, then I have to do this, and I have this list of things I have to do. We don’t put self-care on that list because it doesn’t seem important. I was just talking to a client yesterday. She has these bouts of panic attacks where it’s so bad she has to lie on the floor and just do breathing. Her whole body feels like it’s dizzy and spinning and her heart is pounding.

We talked about a list that she can make of things that really help to manage her stress like going for walks, taking a hot shower while doing some breathing in the shower, and having a tickle fight with her kids. Make a list of things she knows gets her out of stress mode and to do them throughout the day. I said, “I bet if you think about the last time you had one of those panic attacks were on the floor totally unable to be there for your kids because you have to lie on the floor for 45 minutes. If you think about it, there were signs leading up to that. There are signs throughout the day leading up to the heart palpitations.”

If she’d go to gone to an MD, they might have put her on medication for the heart palpitations, medication for high blood pressure, and medication for the anxiety. Meanwhile, none of those medications—they mask symptoms but they’re not addressing what caused her to have a panic attack in the first place, which is not taking care of herself in terms of self-care, managing her stress, and doing activities that get her body out of the sympathetic mode and into the parasympathetic healing response. I just can’t imagine how many people are on drugs—multiple drugs. And how many people are on drugs, like you said, with the thyroid medication where the medication isn’t even working efficiently because of their lifestyle. Simple things they could change. Their lifestyle is causing their body to break down instead of being a healing mode.

I’d love for you to talk more about the physiological effect of stress on the body and the physiological effect of getting out of stress mode so we can really understand how important it is to put the self-care, install the self-care. As little as five minutes in the morning doing some deep breathing, install self-care throughout the day in order to make the whole body go into that healing mode and stay away from the disease mode, which is being in chronic stress mode.

[00:17:40] Dr. Jannine Krause: I think one of the big connections that I like for folks to make here about the physiological effects of stress—I have so many folks that come in to see me and they have the anxiety and different things that we would think about—stress. But what they don’t connect is why is the wait keep going up? They’re like I need more thyroid meds. I need my hormones adjusted. No, I don’t think it’s all that because I’ve done that with so many people.

In my 13 years, I’m kind of like no, it’s lifestyle. I’ve seen it over and over again work, but physiological effects of stress—you’re going to gain some weight or yes, you could lose weight. But what happens is we start to have fatigue. Fatigue to the point where you wake up in the morning and maybe you’ve had 8 to 10 hours of sleep and you’re like I feel like I got no sleep. I’m so tired. I could sleep for 20 more hours. Just wanting to like pull the sheets back over your head and just crash back out.

Where another area of fatigue you can see as folks might be getting out of bed and kind of plugging through the day but like 2:00 PM they’re starting to really crash. I mean not just like you can solve it with going by the candy dish at the office or picking up a snack. It’s like you have to lay down on the couch and actually take a nap. That is where we’re really starting to hit the wall with stress.

Another biggie, physiologically, that I’ll see with folks is that we actually see the labs start to change. I was talking about it a little bit more in terms of the thyroid where the TSH, which is thyroid-stimulating hormone and this is signaling from the brain to the thyroid, this number starts to go up. It may not be in a completely abnormal number, so let’s say it’s around 2.5, 3. The number at which conventional medicine starts to say you need medication is around 4.5. Some doctors are changing that. Naturopaths start to think about uh-oh, we got problems when we’re seeing that TSH around 2. This is going okay. So our brain is trying to tell our thyroid, hey, we need something going on. Metabolism is slowing down. What are we doing? Why aren’t you responding to me?

That’s one physiological sign. T4 is another one. This is where that hormone coming out of the thyroid starts to also slow down. Now, we’re not pumping out the main hormone from the thyroid that has to get converted for us to have proper metabolism. Now, we’re having issues with low T4 and T3. That could be some physiological changes that you might see. The next thing is blood sugar starts to creep up. We’ll see that someone’s A1C, which is blood sugar, over time in about three months average snapshot of what’s going on with their blood sugar. You might start to realize all of a sudden oh my gosh, I’m pre-diabetic, which is an A1C of 5.7 or you might be right on the borderline or you might actually have your fasting glucose going up. You’re going okay, that’s weird. You’re gaining weight on top of that, and your thyroid numbers are starting to suffer and be lower.

These are some of the physiologic signs. Now, another physiologic sign that’s really common, and a lot of people will start to play off, is multiple food sensitivities. When you start to be like I just can’t tolerate foods anymore, or I can’t tolerate dairy, wheat, or wine. That’s usually when people start getting upset is when the wine is starting to bother them and I’ll get complaints, but that is a sign that you’re physiologically starting to become stressed because your body’s getting overloaded. Rashes are another big physiologic sign that we’re starting to overload the system. That’s a snapshot of what’s most common. I will tend to see things where we’ve got autoimmune antibodies starting to pop up. When we go specifics, we don’t see anything specific but the autoimmune antibodies come up as well, so the body starts to attack itself a little bit.

These are all some of the most common physiologic signs that I see in my practice in addition to pain. Pain comes along with the CRP, which is known as C-reactive protein. That’s an inflammation marker in our blood. That’ll start to go up and the pain will go up. Sed rate which is how sticky your blood is as I talk to folks about. Platelets might increase as well, and you might even see eosinophils or basophils which are white blood cell markers that there is an allergic surveillance reaction going on in the body. That it’s sending off signals something isn’t right. I’m getting overloaded. Ashley, that’s what I look at to see what’s going on physiologically if someone is starting to get to overload of the sympathetic nervous system mode.

[00:22:32] Ashley James: Can you walk us through physiologically? So someone’s in stress mode for a long period of time. What’s causing multiple food sensitivities? Is it that when we’re in sympathetic nervous system response that the body shunts blood away from the core, away from digestion so digestion suffers? Does being in stress mode affect the microbiome? Does it increase the chances of leaky gut? Or is it that when people are stressed out they’re probably eating foods that are harming their gut? Can you just walk us through what you think is the root cause of why long-term stress causes food sensitivities?

[00:23:15] Dr. Jannine Krause: I think all of those. D, all of the above. Your microbiome changes as you’re stressed because certain bugs are super sensitive. The lactobacillus family is extremely sensitive to stress, and you’ll see it low on stool samples in someone who’s really stressed out. Your gut lining separates the part with stress. One of the most, I guess, common examples I use in my office is looking at some of the big marathon runners who win. A lot of them will have bowel issues, and unfortunately, sometimes they get documented on some of the media in terms of the gut not behaving. There is a true thing of gastritis related to exercise because of the stressors it puts on the body. You don’t actually have to run a marathon to have that same kind of reaction.

The other thing with like you were saying the blood shunting away and being in the muscles because we’re at this state of any moment we need to run away from that bear. Not having the blood in the digestive system to help us with circulating the molecules, things sit longer, we don’t produce digestive enzymes like we should. We don’t produce the hydrochloric acid to break things down like we should. So that, combined with when we’re stressed, we’re usually eating on the go. We’re usually not sitting down and taking our leisurely time to eat. We’re eating faster so bigger pieces of food get in the gut. They sit, they ferment, they irritate the lining, and now we’ve got issues with leaky gut happening there.

Yeast is another common bug in the gut that is naturally supposed to be there, but in excess, its little finger that grows out and spreads cells apart. That can be a leaky gut factor. And we also have the factor of declining estrogens, in particular estradiol and progesterone. Lower amounts of estradiol will also have an effect on the gut lining just like it has an effect on your skin. I like to tell folks that what you see on the outside on your skin is kind of a reflection of what’s on the inside of your gut lining. So if you’re getting wrinkly, chances are, the inside of your gut is getting a little wrinkly and might be getting a little leaky at the same time.

Progesterone, if we drop on progesterone and just a little insight for folks if it’s not been mentioned or you’re not familiar, when the body stress we steal progesterone. We steal the precursors to make cortisol versus progesterone. Progesterone is needed to keep histamines in check. So if you’re eating a lot of high histamine foods like tomatoes or let’s go with nuts, seeds, or maybe some aged cheese, chocolate, all the good stuff in life. All of that stuff can create more histamine reactions within the gut, which creates more of an inflammatory reaction. And now we end up with leaky gut too. There are a lot of different factors that can be contributing to this.

[00:26:11] Ashley James: It’s really interesting about histamine that it’s converted in the gut. Isn’t it converted in the large intestine? Or it’s broken down I should say.

[00:26:25] Dr. Jannine Krause: Yes. The liver and large intestine have a lot to do with histamine breakdown.

[00:26:33] Ashley James: Can you explain a bit about that? Because I think a lot of people have allergies and then they just take medication for it. But of course, my listeners want to do things naturally and actually get to the root cause and heal. I had a woman who was on medications for many years. It was a prescription drug for hay fever and having to deal with pollen. She lived up in Northern Alberta. She said that if she didn’t take her pill every day, during the spring, summer, and even into the fall, if she didn’t take it she wouldn’t be able to drive. Her eyes would itch and burn so bad her face would become puffy. She just couldn’t even see enough to drive.

She started cleaning up her diet. She cut out all the gluten grains and took in a lot of antioxidants, took in some supplements. One day,9 she’s driving to work and she realized she had forgotten to take her medication and she wasn’t having that response. She freaked out. She stopped taking the medication just to see what happened and sure enough, she couldn’t believe it. But I’ve heard this over and over again that when people cut out foods and focus on healing the gut and focus on taking care of themselves that their doctor told them, their MD told them they would have allergies their whole life. That’s it. You’ve got to be on this medication for the rest of your life.

It’s such an injustice that is done, which she actually looked at the side effects that it said that if you took this medication long-term it can cause cancer, and her doctor never warned her about that which is really frustrating that there are nasty side effects to so many medications and yet we’re just masking a symptom of a broken body and we can heal our body. Just tell us a bit more about how we can help the body to metabolize histamine correctly and correct the situation for those who have allergies.

[00:28:31] Dr. Jannine Krause: Sure. Histamine, we have a couple of different things. Diamine oxidase, otherwise known as DAO, is the enzyme that helps break down excess histamine in the body. It can do it in our kidneys, it can do it on the lining of our intestines, also helps in the liver, and this enzyme is a game-changer, but it can be blocked based on certain foods, and it can be blocked based on how irritated a gut is. What can you do? There’s a lot of foods and there’s a whole list—and I think it would be exhaustive for me to do the whole list—but often what I’m finding is having folks go through a list of the high histamine foods to just really go okay how many of these am I eating in a day and how much together?

Because tomatoes and cheese—like aged cheese’s—that seems to go together in a lot of recipes, so do spicy foods, so do things like having pineapple salsas, for example. Now you’ve got pineapple and you’ve got tomato. Two things that are super high in histamines. It’s a little bit of slipping out the histamine connection there. There’s a gal, Dr. Becky Campbell, she has a great book that I use for patients because it has four phases of helping you go through the histamine connections in the body and going okay, how many of these things do I eat at once? I joked earlier about the delicious things in life being part of the problem with histamines because what I often will find is folks will come to me after they’ve been to like a wine party.

They’ve had aged cheese. They’ve had like almonds. They’ve had chocolate. They’ve had sausages or different types of cured meats. And they’re like I’m so itchy and I don’t feel good. It’s going oh my gosh, you just ate every single high histamine food in the universe in one evening. Unfortunately, it’s overloaded, builds over time. One of the ways that we can help our body to clear these guys is to limit the amount that we have in one sitting, but also I will have folks—if you know you’re going to go to a wine party and you know you’re sensitive and you’re just like I don’t care I really just want to have fun—take a combination of nettles or quercetin. My favorite is a brand and called Ortho Molecular D-Hist. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that guy, but it’s one of my favorites for just knocking down histamine so that we don’t have a reaction when we go out for that food.

Now granted, is something happening in your gut? Absolutely. It’s not going to cure the issue, but it will help you to manage these things. Typically, as in the case of your gal that you’re mentioning, I’m usually going to find out how many of the high histamine or DAO, diamine oxidase, blocking foods are they eating and can we remove those over time while giving quercetin, nettles, and things of that nature to try to help manage this. Now, there are also ways to clear out the liver a little bit because sometimes the system you will build up when our liver’s overloaded with toxins et cetera. I will often use milk thistle, in that case, to help clear the liver out just kind of push things out of the way and detox.

Then we have the whole concept of MTHFR, which sounds like a dirty word but methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase deficiency. This is a mutation and you’ve probably had someone for sure talk about this on your podcast. This can be another issue and we’re looking at B12 and folate as being helpers to clear out some of the histamines as well. N-acetylcysteine can help. And looking just that the overall life’s lifestyle is kind of my favorite is looking at how many things that we added adding up to the system. Keep in mind that the more stress you are in general the more your body’s on surveillance mode, and histamines are your natural neurotransmitter in the body to tell the body something’s up, something’s happening.

[00:32:59] Ashley James: I love that. This is such a great example of Naturopathic medicine versus allopathic medicine. If you go to an MD—I’m not MD bashing. I just want people to understand that we have been brainwashed our entire lives by the mainstream media, by Hollywood. We have been brainwashed our whole lives to think that allopathic pharmaceutical-based MD medicine is the only doctor to go to and that all these other doctors are quacks or they’re “alternative medicine”. As part of their marketing campaign, they started coining holistic medicine alternative medicine to say that it was less than. That this is something that you would go to maybe in addition to or less than. It’s a nice alternative, but it’s not the main medicine. It’s clever but it is so it’s so misleading.

What we have to understand is that when you go to an MD, you’re given maybe 15 minutes. Their type of medicine is great for surgeries, for acute injuries, not chronic injury but acute injury, and infections. They’re great at trauma care. You want to go to an ER filled with MDs if you have some kind of trauma.

[00:34:31] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. Yes, do not come to me.

[00:34:33] Ashley James: But that’s where it ends. Or I should say, you go to more of a specialized one like an OBGYN or you go to one for those specialized care. The Naturopath where they shine is when you go to them you’re going to get a 45-minute to a 90-minute appointment, they’ll examine your entire life, and they figure out you’re not breathing. You change your breathing now all sudden your thyroid medication is working. They dissect your life and figure out—and they take labs and they’re a real physician but they figure out how can I help your body heal itself. You go to an MD they’re philosophically different. They’re reductionistic and that they’re looking to reduce you down to symptoms and parts and manage the symptoms. Whereas it’s a totally different philosophy that you have as a Naturopath.

Naturopathic medicine is looking at the body as a whole and how the system as a whole affects itself. How is something as simple as not getting enough sleep or quality of sleep is affecting your stress levels, or the fact that you ate certain foods that are triggering histamine and you’re in stress mode and now that coupled with not breathing enough, for example, is making your thyroid medication not work. These are things that an MD would never see because it’s not part of their training or their philosophy when they approach medicine.

We as consumers, we as patients need to know when to go to which doctor. You’re not going to always go to a plumber for every problem in your house. Why do we always in our society go to the same doctor for every problem? It’s ridiculous. That’s my little soapbox. I love Naturopathic medicine. Because of Naturopathic medicine, I was able to reverse some major diseases and that’s why I do the show, why I do this podcast is to keep spreading this message so that people who didn’t know that Naturopathic medicine was available could find doctors like you.

In the last 13 years, you’ve been helping people, helping support the body’s ability to heal itself. Can you tell us some stories of success where patients came to you with chronic problems and through working with you, the body was able to heal itself?

[00:36:45] Dr. Jannine Krause: Yeah, absolutely. Probably one of my favorite stories that I have, and I still see this patient to this day because we’re still working in terms of maintenance for chronic pain. Because as an acupuncturist, I do believe that. This is something too that I’d love to folks to really embrace is that we need maintenance. It’s not like we just take care of ourselves and all of our main symptoms go away, our stress goes away, and life’s perfect. We need to maintain ourselves. It’s the same with a weight loss program. You can’t lose your 100 pounds and then expect you to go right back to your way of eating.

I have quite a few folks who are on maintenance programs for helping to keep their body just in balance, little tune-ups. Today actually, in fact, I saw a fellow of mine who has had over nine different surgeries from multiple different accidents that he’s had over the years. He had very, very chronic pelvic pain to the point where he wasn’t able to urinate properly. He was just not even able to sit properly. I mean everything hurts—standing hurt, sitting hurt, laying down really flat, and still was about the only thing that he could do when he came in to see me.

We looked at his labs, we looked at his lifestyle, we looked at where he was hurting and came up with a plan. Ultimately, what happened over time with this fella, we were working on breathing and in particular, a lot of trauma stuck in his body from the multiple accidents that had really shut down his ability to metabolize carbohydrates. He was ending up gaining weight and the weight just kept going up and up and up. Of course, he wasn’t moving because he was in so much pain.

We first started working on what was going on with his stress management because the pain, of course, creates stress. It took us—and we’re about four years in. I see him about once every six to eight weeks. He just came back from a very long motorcycle ride from here over to Boise, which is a good eight plus hours. His muscles felt pretty decent, but if he had done that when I started working with him, things would have been extremely tight and tense and he would have suffered for multiple weeks.

By working with his breathwork and working with acupuncture to help with controlling pain, I also worked with some herbs to help his body to manage stress better, adaptogenic herbs. In fact, my favorite one is ashwagandha for calming elevated cortisol. I also worked with some cordyceps to give him a little bit of energy. I like to think of ashwagandha and cordyceps as giving a little gas, then putting a little bit of the pedal, and then finding what that sweet spot is for someone. We worked with that for him to manage the stress.

Now in addition to all of this with the pelvic pain, we did pelvic floor release techniques. I actually work with a public floor physical therapist with this fella as well. On top of that, he had a lot of gut issues and multiple microbiome bug infections, so a little bit of SIBO going on. In this case, we treated his gut lining, worked on getting it healthy, and then worked on what I call a weed and feed, which you may have heard from some other Naturopaths if you’ve listened to this podcast long enough. But what we did was we helped him to balance out his microbiome. We found that part of his microbiome issues really was coming from just grabbing quick foods because when you’re stressed, when you don’t feel good, and when you’re in pain, you’re grabbing quick stuff and just whatever is going to feel good at the moment and not necessarily great in the end.

We found a huge connection with this guy and his gut and inflammation contributing to the pain. Once we were able to get him eating a little closer to nature, teach him how to cook a little bit because he wasn’t so great in the kitchen on his own, we found a lot of big changes. I didn’t have to use a whole evil protocol as I call it with fancy antibiotics and things to take care of his SIBO. We rechecked it, things are good to go. It just was ultimately calm the stress down, work on breathing, work on some meditation with him, and work on visualization to work on clearing the pathways to open up the flow of blood in his body to create some blood flow for where he was having the stuck.

When I call it the stuck Qi, this might sound super woo-woo to folks, but the pain is blockage in the body. It’s energetic blockage if you get it to the woo-woos, but if you get it to more of a scientific pattern, you look at it in terms of circulation. As we’re finding with a lot of the research on coronavirus and COVID-19, a problem that a lot of us have when it relates to pain, when it relates to stress, when it relates to organ failures and multiple breakdowns in the body is circulation. Pain is a circulatory problem and so is an issue like a digestive complaint such as SIBO. Many folks have been through so many different treatments of bug-killing, weed and feed, and all of those different things and not had success. I truly believe that it has to do with circulation.

The last thing that I did with this fella is worked quite a bit on visualization with circulation in the gut and visualization with circulation through the different acupuncture channels. Taught him a little bit about where they are, how they move, and really starting to enhance that and added in nitric oxide boosting supplements to help with the circulation. And then on top of that, some vitamins and minerals to help with mitochondria. Because if we can’t get the blood circulating, we can’t get ourselves in little factories, the mitochondria working properly.

The combination of all of those together was what got him to be where he is today—riding motorcycles and doing so much better. There are some things I can’t change because of his accidents, but he is going from lying in bed and not functional whatsoever to up and about and participating in life again. That’s huge.

[00:43:31] Ashley James: I love that story and just what a contrast. Did he go to MDs before he went to you?

[00:43:38] Dr. Jannine Krause: Oh, yeah. He had been to so many different docs. I think he had said, at one point, 35 people. He had it on his list in terms of all the different consults. It’s crazy.

[00:43:51] Ashley James: And they tried a bunch of different drugs, right?

[00:43:53] Dr. Jannine Krause: A bunch of different drugs. He had been on antidepressants, gabapentin for nerve pain, Vicodin, you name it. By the end, they were just like maybe you should do some medical marijuana. Maybe that’ll be the answer to your issues and left it at that and tell him we don’t really have anything else for you. Really, his biggest issue was the pelvic pain and pelvic floor dysfunction. Even though he had pelvic PT and even though he had tried to work on it in the conventional model, the pain meds weren’t working, the gabapentin wasn’t working. They’re about to consider a biologic for him for his gut because they were like you’re headed towards Crohn’s. It was just a change in the diet. He didn’t need the biologic for the gut. It’s crazy.

[00:44:49] Ashley James: When you say biologic do you mean a stool transplant?

[00:44:55] Dr. Jannine Krause: No, an autoimmune type of medication. An immune blocking medication.

[00:45:03] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I get so frustrated when I hear that because so many people become so sick from all the meds. The body doesn’t have a medication deficiency.

[00:45:13] Dr. Jannine Krause: He was not having a medication deficiency, and if he hadn’t gone to Naturopathic doctor, what would have happened? Who knows? I mean much like many people who have given up on their life, really. I don’t want people to give up.

[00:45:27] Ashley James: If he had seen him an enlightened MD who had sent him to a pelvic floor physical therapist, which I have a really great episode all on that by a pelvic floor specialist. It’s so cool. It’s such an amazing therapy for those that need it like women. Most women pee when they laugh and that means they should go see a pelvic floor physical therapist. Men have this problem too, right? If men have problems urinating, have pain down there, or ejaculation issues, they should get examined by a pelvic floor physical therapist because there are so many muscles down there. Often, we’re doing Kegels wrong and putting it out of balance.

If he had gone to just that, he still would have had his other problems because you addressed the root cause which was the way he ate, how he manages stress, his emotional issues around food, and managing stress. You approached his life from an emotional standpoint and a physical standpoint and then supported the body’s ability to heal itself income into balance. That’s what we all want to do. I just tweaked my diet. I eat very clean and I just made a tweak to my diet in the last week and I’m waking up two hours earlier now. I’m like whoa, I have way energy. It’s just amazing how we can make these—I like how you said it. You said less is more. We can make these simple changes in our life and get these big results.

I want to learn more from you today. I want the listeners to learn more. What kind of small changes can equal the biggest results?

[00:47:13] Dr. Jannine Krause: Okay. We’ve already talked about breathing. The next one—it seems like a duh kind of component but it is really important and often gets passed off—is really making concrete habits around drinking water. It really does make a difference. You really do need at least half your body weight in ounces of water a day. Hands down. I’ve seen simple things change just with hydration. In particular, I see a lot of pain and I work a lot with chronic pain. Having someone better hydrated—let’s put it that way—can make an absolutely huge change in someone’s quality of life, but also in terms of gut function. In terms of overall function.

Another big thing is getting outside. I just interviewed, on my podcast, Ian Hart. He’s a great fella who has a book dedicated to connecting back to nature. He and I have a very big love for folks getting outside, smelling the roses, taking your shoes off and earthing. My dad, I grew up in the middle of Illinois. Super conservative area. I was the hippie child wanting to run around with my bare feet. I love it to this day, and I find a lot of people get great, great results with just calming their nervous system by taking your shoes off, getting outside, and just really feeling the ground again or just growing some plants, growing some herbs. Whether it’s cilantro or something. I don’t know why that one just came to my head. Oregano, mint grow in the Pacific Northwest like wildfire here, but these are things that they’re very simple that we just don’t think about.

Another big one is channeling your inner five-year-old. So much of what’s gone on with our life of adulting and having to be professional and having to change ourselves and not being true to who we truly are, it wreaks havoc on us. There are a lot of folks out there who are not in careers they want to be. There’s a lot of folks out there who are not in relationships, and they’re also not in a space of their being who they actually want to be. I have folks look at who they were that when they were five and what did they love to do and playing more during the day.

You had mentioned your five-year-old son. Just looking at kids and how they play, as adults, we’re too cool for that. I don’t know why we are. We need to go back to that and really honoring. You’re sitting there and you’re like ugh, my workdays grinding. I’m not really having fun. Okay, fine. Go outside. Who said you can’t go outside? Who said you can’t walk outdoors? Who said you can’t jump rope anymore? Who said you can’t use a hula-hoop? Whatever it is. It’s something that I think is absolutely huge and can make a world of difference. It also ties into my next thing that I work with on a lot of folks.

I put folks through nine movements in my office. It’s hinging over, it’s lunging, it’s squatting, it’s reaching forward, it’s reaching back, it’s turning left to right, and using those motions to see how good is your mobility. Because if you can’t really bend over well, chances are your rib cage is locked up. If you can’t reach overhead very well, chances are that’s a rib cage and a neck issue as well. And this box your ability to breathe, but it also blocks your ability to send proper signals from your nervous system to your brain and from your brain back down to your nervous system. All of this locked up in the body we have miscommunication.

Now, we’re contributing to that vagus nerve, which is our most important nerve of regulating the nervous system for those of you folks that are listening in. But it’s also the nerve that controls inflammation in the body. If it’s telling your body like you’re hunched over, your rib cages are all collapsed in, it doesn’t rotate left to right very well, you might not be pooping very well, you might not be breathing very well, you might have gas, you might have bloating, and it’s not SIBO. It’s just that your thoracic cage is not moving well. What happens is your body can’t control the inflammation in your intestines, in your gut, in your stomach. We have a lot of things related to this.

I really, really work on mobility in my office big time with folks. I put you through the movements and we figure out how we can get you to move as best as possible within your motions. And I see a lot of change with that simple mobility.

[00:51:54] Ashley James: If they didn’t even realize it. They’re doing mobility tests and all sudden you point out that their ribcage is jacked up. How do you fix it? Do you give them exercises? Do physical manipulation? Do you send them to a chiropractor?

[00:52:13] Dr. Jannine Krause: It depends on the situation. Most of the time, I am going to work on exercises because a chiropractor love chiropractic, not knocking on chiropractic at all or not even knocking on myself because with acupuncture, it’s something I’m doing to you. But we also have to have the homework because I’m doing acupuncture and telling your body okay, this is what you’re going to do, body. Here’s the plan. The body has to go along with it and be like okay, right. I’m going to come along. But we have to have the day in day out, and the exercises are what get the results. It’s not all the manipulations. It’s not all the acupuncture.

I believe it works, but I believe that it’s focusing on the right exercises and having someone keep you accountable, but also having someone watch and make sure you’re doing it right, which where PT can fall into place. But the problem and the limitation with PT—and this is because of insurance restrictions, I know from having so many good friends that are PTs—is that we work on the body segmentally. When I’m talking about exercises, I’m not just talking about your ribcage. I’m talking about what’s happening in your lumbar and spine, what’s happening in your pelvis, and what’s happening in your neck. Connecting it all together exercises not just ribcage exercises.

I believe that exercises are the way to go, and yes I do some manipulations. I do a lot of cupping. I do a lot of Gua Sha. I do a lot of PNF kind of stretches and myofascial release. I think myofascial is one of the most amazing things in the universe, and there are so many studies in Germany. If anyone’s listening to me and going myofascial, what the heck? It’s the wrapping around your muscles. If you imagine chicken. That wrapping that’s around chicken when you pull it out of the package, that is your myofascial tissue that can be stuck to your muscles but also stuck to your skin. And it has a lot of nerves in it and it can tell you where you are in space.

If it doesn’t know where you are, if your body doesn’t know where you are in space it’s going to send a message of pain. A lot of chronic pain and a lot of chronic trauma pain has to do with myofascial connections. There is a ton of research coming out of Germany. A doc with the last name Schleip. It’s great stuff. You can totally google myofascial Schleip and you’re going to come up with a ton of info on it. And I do a lot of myofascial work because I think that is, in addition to the exercises, some of the most bang for your buck to get results.

[00:54:41] Ashley James: How do you spell Schleip?

[00:54:43] Dr. Jannine Krause: S-C-H-L-E-I-P.

[00:54:46] Ashley James: Thank you. I had this really weird occurrence in my abdomen almost like a hernia. I actually got examined by a Naturopath and he wanted me to go see a surgeon. I had remembered that I was told by an old school Naturopath, been practicing for over 25 years, something like that. He said always go to a Bowen practitioner for hernia. I went to her three sessions it took for this so-called hernia to go away. And she said it actually wasn’t hernia. It’s very common after women give birth that the abdomen splits open. I forget the technical name for it. You’re going to say it and I’ll remember it.

[00:55:36] Dr. Jannine Krause: Diastasis or diastasis recti.

[00:55:38] Ashley James: Diastasis recti, that’s right. The abdomen splits open, and she did really neat things. A lot of free range of motion. She would do a range of motion and then she would touch my clavicle and then she would say okay, lie here for 15 minutes I’ll be back. Then she’d come back, do a free range of motion, and then she would touch my shoulder. Then she would have me rest. The whole time I’m thinking this is a complete rip-off. She’s not touching my abdomen. This doesn’t hurt, it’s supposed to hurt. She’s working on the fascia, it’s supposed to be painful. She’s barely touching me. I stood up and I felt two feet taller and I couldn’t believe it.

I bought a package of four sessions. I didn’t even need the fourth session. It was done, it was corrected. My husband who had had a chronic shoulder injury that would keep coming back for 20 years, got on the table. By worked on him I mean like she would vaguely touch an area then say okay, lie here for 15 minutes then come back and just gently touch another area after doing a range of motion. Again, we feel like she’s like a witch doctor. She said she was just helping the body release the stuck fascia and his chronic shoulder pain for 20 years just disappeared. It was amazing. It was so cool. He walked out of there having a full range of motion of his shoulder and he just couldn’t believe it. Really, really neat. It’s so cool.

If I’d gone down the route of what the doctor first told me to do, I would have gone to a surgical consult. I would have gone down that road and I might have had some surgery to put some mesh in my abdomen whereas go see a Bowen practitioner. We have to know when to go to what practitioner. You’re looking at the body using physical medicine while you’re also looking at the person as a whole and their life as a whole. You had mentioned also drinking half your body weight in ounces, and for those who are on kilograms, you take your kilograms and times it by 2.2 and then drink that many ounces a day.

[00:57:57] Dr. Jannine Krause: Yes. We got to cover the Canadian folks and all of the European folks. I’m not as good at my metric system at all. I apologize.

[00:58:05] Ashley James: No, it’s fine. Maybe about 10% of our listeners are around the world and so just for those who are like I don’t know how many pounds I weigh. Basically, drink a lot of water all day long as much as you can, right?

[00:58:18] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely, water. And sometimes I’ll also say if you got some really good high-quality sea salt hanging out, throw a couple of grains in there. I like throwing berries in my fruit versus the citrus because I do think it can have a negative effect on the enamel if you do it too much. But having a little bit of raspberry, a little bit of blackberry, whatever berries in season. Or even apple kind of tastes yummy in there. I like to throw a little piece of fruit, a couple of grains of sea salt and now you’ve got like natural Gatorade if you will or a natural electrolyte drink because it helps.

A lot of us, we’re burning through stuff during the day and maybe we feel dizzy, which is a super common symptom that a lot of people who are stressed out will feel. Sometimes, it’s just you need a little bit of electrolytes because unfortunately, the stress that you’re putting on your body is making your body think you’re running a marathon. What do folks need when they’re running marathons? Electrolytes. Sometimes it’s just you drink your water and throw a little bit of electrolyte trick in there and see how it goes. It sometimes can be a game-changer.

[00:59:23] Ashley James: Coconut water is great for that as well. A lot of headaches, nausea, and dizziness lately because people are wearing masks and definitely wearing masks incorrectly, but medical masks—the disposable kind—should only be worn for 20 minutes and they need to be thrown out. People are keeping them for weeks and weeks. I’m frustrated because I almost fainted in Whole Foods a few weeks ago. I was wearing a medical mask. They hand it out to you at the door, so it was a new one. I’m standing in line. I’ve been in there maybe 15 minutes and all of a sudden I started blacking out. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I’m getting dizzy. I’m falling over. I was so terrified. My heart was pounding and it took me hours to recover. I was exhausted afterward. The rest of the day was shot. I felt so sick.

I came home and I’m thinking what’s wrong, what’s wrong? And then I read an article about hypoxia where you’re breathing in your own CO2. You’re breathing it in the mask, and these are the mask they’re handing out at the door. I’m not exerting myself. I’m just walking around a grocery store. I spoke to a gentleman at a grocery store who was helping me find something last week, and he was wearing a mask. I asked him, “Have you noticed that you or your co-workers are experiencing headaches?” And he says, “Yes. We all have chronic headaches now.” And he said, “I actually blacked out a few weeks ago.” I told him about hypoxia, but it’s very concerning especially for our state—Washington state. Our governor has now mandated that everyone wear masks in public.

I went to Amazon and googled breathable masks and I found one that’s meant for hunting. It has lots of little holes in it and it’s very breathable. I’m very afraid for people especially children because they’re putting masks on children. If I, as a healthy adult, in 15 to 20 minutes of wearing a medical mask can get hypoxia, imagine what these children—they’re going to get brain damage basically from low oxygen. Especially since now they’re talking about children wearing masks eight hours a day or six to eight hours a day when in school and when in school buses. It’s very scary and they need to know, people need to know that if you start developing headaches—you talked about breathing is so important. And lack of oxygen from not breathing correctly can lead to all these problems. What about wearing a mask? Have you seen, in your practice, people have any negative problems with masks and how do you handle it?

[01:02:12] Dr. Jannine Krause: Oh my goodness, yes. This has kind of put a wrench in some of my breathing techniques with folks that have gone back to work because obviously, they have to have the mask on. But yes, I cringed about Inslee’s comments of us having to have them on no matter what because not only am I seeing hypoxia issues, I’m also seeing a lot of sinus issues and allergy issues increasing. Because unfortunately, a lot of folks in Washington or probably in a lot of states where it rains a little bit more, we’ve got a lot of folks that have mold already in their sinuses.

We add the mask to the mix and now we’re going to have folks that are recirculating what they’re breathing, and if they’re breathing out some methane or if we’re looking at it in terms of methane or hydrogen that’s coming from bugs that are in their gut, now we’re recirculating that back through up through the nose and through the sinuses. And it makes me wonder, what are we doing to our microbiome of our sinuses and our digestive systems by recirculating air too? Not only the hypoxia component, I’m also thinking like what are we doing? Is there going to be an uptick of folks with a lot more of allergies and issues of that nature?

In my office, we’ve been doing sinus needling and we’ve been doing a lot more of reinforcing when you’re at home, that’s when you’re doing your deep breathing. As much as you possibly can, getting outside in your backyard and really trying to make a conscious effort to get the masks off more often than not. And when folks are going back to work, I’m going all right, try to take time before you go to work out in your backyard. Just breathe a little bit without that mask, and when you get home, that’s like you’re unwinding as I mentioned earlier. Taking the time to unwind in your backyard and get some fresh air that’s not recirculated before you go back inside. Because now, on top of it, one in every two homes has mold issues in Washington State.

We’ve got folks being in homes more and more mold exposure there, then you’re breathing stuff. This is a problem we’re going to have. Honestly, you’re absolutely right. We’re going to have respiratory issues that are going to compound by a lot. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing at all. I’ve started to have people use essential oils in masks to help with at least opening up vasodilating and opening up the respiratory areas. I’ve been using a combination of grapefruit and eucalyptus for some people. The doTERRA Breathe works, thieves works, or anything that’s going to help to open up the sinuses—thyme, tea tree—great stuff.

[01:04:57] Ashley James: My favorite is Olbas. Have you heard of it?

[01:05:02] Dr. Jannine Krause: No. What is this?

[01:05:03] Ashley James: It’s my favorite. You can get it at pretty much every health food store, Whole Foods, wherever they sell a bunch of supplements, but I’ve been using it since the 90s. It’s been around for a long time. It’s a synergy of essential oils for breathing, the sinuses, and the lungs. I had this wicked, wicked science infection when I was a teenager. I went to the crunchy hippie, you know that smell? There are no health food stores anymore. Do you know the old school health food stores? Because I grew up in them. My mom had me on soy milk. We were dairy-free. I’ve been seeing a Naturopath since I was six years old. My mom would take me in. I was never allowed to have chocolate, but I’d get a carob or there would be this Rice Dream was the ice cream that I could have. Or they even have this frozen banana with carob coating on it or something or they would give you a little honey stick.

I remember walking in and I would smell all the herbs combined. I just loved being there. I get if I could ever smell that smell going into the old apothecary, it just brings me right back. I love crunchy hippie health food stores. Anyways, if you go into any of those, you’ll find Olbas. They now have a bunch of different things. Just get the essential oil, just get the actual drops, not anything with a carrier. I like putting three drops in a big bowl of steaming hot water, then you put a towel over your head, you lean over and make like a tent, and breathe in the vapors. Oh, it’s so great. It opens up all the sinuses. That’s my favorite synergy for essential oils for breathing.

[01:06:46] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely, yeah. I’m looking at it right now. It’s got peppermint, eucalyptus—I do not know how to say that word—cajeput. Don’t know that one. Wintergreen, juniper, clove, all amazing stuff. What you just described, a steam inhalation, would be a great therapy. In fact, I just talked to somebody the other day about bringing back the steam inhalation therapy—as a breathing treatment—to help open those sinuses.

[01:07:11] Ashley James: And then I love doing colloidal silver nasal spray. Colloidal silver is really good for helping prevent viruses from taking hold. Can you tell us a bit about that?

[01:07:21] Dr. Jannine Krause: Oh, yeah. I love any type of nanosilver products because what they’re doing is they’re a great scrubber of your gut lining too. So when taken internally in the gut, they are much like the effects that you’ll see with n-acetylcysteine. They just scrub the lining. So not only do they kind of cleanse out anything that’s non-beneficial, they do the same when you do the spray in the nose, the throat. It’s just kind of wipes stuff out.

I like to use colloidal. I like to use them combined with dead sea salt. I have a thing for the two of them because I like the combination because the spray will just cleanse things and wipe out when you see it wiped out, and then the salt kind of regulates. It’s like the regulator in there. I like using both of them together and neti pots. I don’t use the silver in the neti pot, just to be clear, but I do use sea salt too in neti pots and then follow with a spray because I think it’s a great way to even things out a little bit. I think that could definitely be something that folks could add to their regimen. It kind of helps the headaches, help with preventing hypoxia, but also the side effects of having these masks on for so long.

[01:08:39] Ashley James: I wish people would not have the mask on their nose and just breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. I mean what they’re trying to have everyone do is prevent the droplets from coming out of your mouth, but if you breathe in through your nose you’re getting fresh air and then you’re breathing out the mask is no problem. I’ve seen a lot of angry people. Put your mask back on. Anyway. We’ll get through it, we’ll get through it. I want everyone to know that if they start having headaches or feel dizzy then that’s a sign that they’re oxygen-deprived and we’ve got to focus on the breathing. As you mentioned how important breathing is to staying alive and staying healthy.

[01:09:30] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely.

[01:09:33] Ashley James: Let’s see. We’ve talked about—oh, mold. Let’s go back to mold for a sec. How could someone identify that mold is in their house? I’ve had a few actually really good episodes on mold. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and type mold in. I have two episodes on natural mold mitigation, and it’s quite interesting, by a company called Green Home Solutions. I think they might have a branch in your area, but they use an enzyme. It’s a patented enzyme that actually digests mold, so not only does it kill it but it breaks it down so that it becomes inert and doesn’t harm you anymore. Because if you just bleach mold, it still is harmful to the body. The mold is dead, but it still releases the spores which harm us. So we have to be careful with how we treat mold. Maybe talk about how do we know we have mold? What are the physical symptoms that there’s mold in the houses that are harming us?

[01:10:26] Dr. Jannine Krause: One of the big things that folks will notice is they’ll start to have more sinus issues. I mean headaches and sinus issues are usually the number one. Chronic fatigue like starting to really be exhausted. Sometimes a cough can also be a big sign that something’s not right. I’ve even had people with wheezing and they’re like I never wheezed before and now I have asthma and then we’re like hmm, yeah, that seems odd. Asthma kind of symptoms. Things of that nature can definitely be a big sign that something is not right. Ways to actually test it, there’s a couple of different ways.

You can run through regular labs IgE, which is an immediate sensitivity reaction, just to see if you’ve been exposed more or less. And sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not a foolproof plan but because it goes through insurance, I like to test it just to see what we get. Just drag on that and see what happens. If we’re really serious about going okay, we know someone has mold. We’ve seen it in the home. If we absolutely have seen the mold in the home and oftentimes what happens and I encourage everybody to check this out.

Look at your mattresses, look behind your bed. That seems to be the hidden area for a lot of molds to hang out for some reason. Most of the time, what I find is that because the bed sometimes always ends up against the wall that is connected to a bathroom if you have a master suite kind of thing going on. But taking a look at that and then taking a look in your closet. If you can, if you have carpet, peel up the carpet in your closet see what’s going on in there because I have seen some issues there for folks. Around the windows we all kind of know but still taking looks there. If you do have smoke going on, it’s possible that you could have it in your body as well.

A really great test is a test by—I can’t remember—I think they might be Genova. For some reason, my mind just went blank on me but MycoTOX is the name of the tests. Either them or Great Plains. I can’t remember. Anyway, don’t quote me on that one folks because I am losing train of thought at the moment on that. But it’s called MycoTOX. You can Google that and it’ll come up what the brand is. That test can tell you what toxins you have in your body that are being produced by mold. You can basically take it and look back at okay it’s this particular mold based on the toxins that are produced, and that’s one of my best ways about going about it if nothing comes up from the immediate sensitivity reactions.

You can’t get testing for mold through Alcat, which is Cell Science Systems. They also will do a delayed sensitivity mold test for you to see if there’s anything that pops up on that end. And then, like you said, Green Home Solutions. There are also some DIY mold tests that you can pick up on Amazon, through Home Depot, or Lowes and just get you a really good sense of what’s going on in your home because I do think that it is something to not overlook for sure.

[01:13:30] Ashley James: Absolutely. It’s so crucial. Going down your checklist, what else is really important? We’ve got the breathing as the number one. Drinking enough water. Obviously, eating a healthy diet and stress management. What are the impactful tweaks that are just small tweaks that make the biggest difference?

[01:14:00] Dr. Jannine Krause: We talked about mobility but another big one that I think can make a huge difference is looking at your mineral status. So many of us are deficient in magnesium and selenium. Molybdenum could be also an issue. I think looking at where your minerals are at can give you a really good sense of how is the body working on a baseline level, and do you need some foods that are either rich in those minerals or do we need to maybe have a little bit of some mineral supplementation for a little bit, retest, and see how things are going. I would say, probably 80%-90% of the patients that I have tested for magnesium deficiency came positive with magnesium deficiency. Vitamin D deficiency is another big one. I’m saying minerals, I would also say looking at some of the crucial vitamins too—vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E, in particular, is a biggie.

Genova has a test called NutrEval, and they have one now that you can do at home, Metabolomix I believe is how you say that one. And it looks for these things and tells us how are the mitochondria functioning. Because this is a nice little tweak that while not pro here’s your suitcase of supplements, I do think that tweaking what we might have some deficiencies in is key for helping ward off or manage what’s going on in our body at any given time. That would be something else that I would be really taking a look at.

My other big thingy is looking at heart rate and heart rate variability, which can be tweaks that if you have a wearable that tells you where your heart rates out like a Fitbit or Apple Watch, you can see the actual reaction that your body has to stress and how high your heart rate goes up, but you can also attenuate it meaning breathing down your heart rate. But you can also use your heart rate variability to tell about workouts and if you’re pushing yourself too hard.

In my practice, I do see a little bit more athletes and one of the big things is overtraining. The everyday exerciser might be overtraining themselves and burning themselves out and not know it. Paying attention to heart rate and how your heart rate changes over time can be a really big deal, plus paying attention to make sure that you are not redlining your heart rate with every single exercise because that’s at the point in which your exercising is not benefiting you. It’s actually pushing your cortisol levels up and you’re wondering like I’m working out so hard, why do I keep gaining weight, doc? Why do I keep being more tired? Because you’re redlining every single workout.

That’s another big tweak is looking at your heart rate and breathing down your heart rate and keeping it at certain levels at certain times. Part of it’s called conditioning training and that’s one of my specialties here in the office as we work with heart rate variability and keeping people exercising, even though they might be fatigued and getting them watching their heart rate so that they don’t overdo it. Because most of the time, the reason we can’t exercise and feel so tired is because we jump into a workout right off the bat and wear ourselves out too quickly.

[01:17:25] Ashley James: What kind of tweaks make the biggest difference to someone’s diet?

[01:17:32] Dr. Jannine Krause: Fiber. Fiber foods. We have the whole should you eat Keto, should you eat paleo, should you eat this, or should you eat that? Really, I tell people you should eat your vegetables. It’s probably not the most popular answer that people want to hear because I know that a lot of people want to hear intermittent fasting. They want to hear this diet, that diet is the best way to go. And honestly, if I’ve looked over my 13 years of practice, what gets me the best results in lowering cholesterol, what gets me the best results in mineral status and just overall health and gut function, it’s eating your veggies.

Of course, folks might argue, well I can’t tolerate this veggie. I can’t tolerate that one. Okay. So the other big game-changer tweak would be to cook your veggies, and I’m not talking nursing home style. Blanch them, sauté them lightly. Just something so that they’re a little predigested for you. If we’re talking about things that have lectins, then I’m going to say put them in the Instapot or pressure cook them so you can destroy the lectins, but veggies. I’m not saying be vegan. If you want to do that, great, but really five-plus cups a day, venture on the border of six to eight a day and you’re going to see some change in yourself—a lot of change.

[01:18:51] Ashley James: It is so true. Get in those vegetables. You had mentioned earlier about increasing circulation and increasing nitric oxide. I had Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn on the show, who is a cardiologist that heals heart disease naturally. I mean four clogs in the heart totally reversed with vegetables, basically. But he says drizzle your steamed vegetables with balsamic. That balsamic increases nitric oxide, which opens up the cardiovascular system, and it’s very healing for the endothelial lining of the cardiovascular system.

He has people eat zero oil because oil is proinflammatory to the lining of the cardiovascular system, and he has them eating something like six servings a day, so six bowls, basically. Six times a day eating a big bowl of steamed greens with a bunch of balsamic on it, and it tastes amazing. I didn’t like balsamic, but I started experimenting and there’s so many different balsamic out there. I had this one that’s fig and maple, oh my gosh. It’s like eating candy. It tastes so good. The Kirkland brand at Costco, that’s a good one. I like it. But there are so many different balsamic out there. If think you don’t like balsamic, I would just explore the different balsamic because there are many different ones out there. And it’s so good for you. That and beets, right? Beets help the body with nitric oxide, so they’re also great.

Any superfoods like saying have some beets every day? Any superfoods that are very healing for the body that people might not know about?

[01:20:37] Dr. Jannine Krause: I don’t know if there would be not that they know about but maybe not that they knew what they had in them. Celery has nitric oxide boosting abilities. Arugula also does. My favorite most bang for your buck veggies are microgreens because they have a ton, just packed with vitamin A, vitamin C, and a lot of folates in there because they’re like the little babies that have to grow up and get all that nutrients to a big plant, and why not eat them when they’re nice and densely packed full of nutrients. Microgreens are like my game changer solution for a lot of folks.

I said arugula, spinach, as long as you don’t have a histamine issue or anything going on with oxalates and kidney stones you could be good with the spinach because that’s also in nitric booster. Five ounces of spinach boost your nitric oxide. Beets, like you had mentioned too, I can’t say enough about beets. If you don’t like them, play with trying to figure out a way that you might find them delicious. They’re not what you might have imagined. At least in my age range, I used to think that beets are just like the canned, gross, and slimy things. It’s not all like that. There’s so much more to them.

And then I’m a big fan of sprouted seeds like sunflower seeds because of the progesterone boosting component for ladies in particular. I love just thinking about sprouted any type of like even pumpkin seeds. It’s got a good estrogenic effect. You can use it for balancing hormones. Those are my favorite go-to superfoods that I will typically use. Actually, one of my most favorite ones most recently, as long as you don’t have issues with the garlic family, is the black garlic. So delicious and so great for adding flavor, but also has a lot of the same properties that garlic has but without all of the pungence and the breath effect. I mean if you eat a lot of it.

[01:22:43] Ashley James: Awesome. Cool. What homework do you want to give us? Do you have any homework that you’d love to assign us that we can apply to our life today and start seeing a difference?

[01:22:53] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. I would give three things and you can choose whether to do all three or you can choose to pick one. If I had to like put all of my little tweaks that give you the most bang for your buck in order of what I see affecting folks the most that I’m going to give them to you. Number one is breathing, but breathing fresh air. If you can get outside—and granted I know that there are smug and things of that nature, but sometimes, just getting out of your home, you actually might have more beneficial air for you. If you can get out by the trees and in a little bit of natural fresh air, so much better. Bonus point to that, take your shoes off and really get back in touch with feeling nature and experiencing nature.

Then my next thing from there would definitely be going on the lines of working on finding out about your pain in terms of where does it feel stuck? Where do you feel like things aren’t moving well in your body, and either finding someone to help you with a little myofascial release, or even just starting with yourself and doing gentle massage to that area. Now, I am saying this and going I didn’t say anything about lymphatic drainage or lymphatic work, but that would be another thing for another day. But I do support it in terms of helping move your tissue.

So get outside, breathe some fresh air, and while you’re outside breathing some fresh air, see where there’s something stuck in your body and give it a little love. Give it a little gentle massage. And while you’re breathing, hold on to that spot and try to imagine taking what’s stuck in that spot and pushing it out through your feet. And that’ll give you a little technique to manage stress, get some good air in, but also work on some stuck stuff in the body so we can improve circulation over time.

[01:24:52] Ashley James: Do you have any studies that you can cite where they have proven that visualization has a physiological effect on the body?

[01:25:04] Dr. Jannine Krause: You know what, yes. In terms of the detailed ones, I might have to give you some details after we’re off the call because I don’t think I’ll be able to pull up right at the moment. But Dr. Joe Dispenza, everyone’s familiar with him. He’s done a lot of work on visualization and change in terms of results that happen as a thought of visualization. It’s not 100% related to pain, but in some cases it is. We also have a lot of data on Qi Gong. A specific style of breathing-related visualizing while doing Qi Gong, that can help with change as well. I would probably say, and I’m quickly trying to put it in my computer really quickly here if I could find something briefly that would help you, so I don’t waste anybody’s time. We could probably give you some data afterward if you’re cool with that.

[01:26:06] Ashley James: Yeah. I could totally put the studies in the show notes. Off the top of your head, do you remember the results from reading any studies where they found that visualization actually opened up blood flow, for example?

[01:26:25] Dr. Jannine Krause: One of the studies that I’ve reviewed here is the Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Journal article back from 2018. They were assessing acute physiological and psychological effects of Qi Gong in older practitioners. And what they found is that the heart rate variability, so the amount that the heart rate could be controlled over time improved. Because as I had mentioned before in the interview, heart rate variability is something that can tell us if we’re tapping into our parasympathetic rest, digest, and chill state. If we’re not getting into that state, our heart rate variability increases. How do we get our heart rate variability to keep it in check and manage it? We have to have proper circulation.

This study was really awesome in that it looked at the correlation between the amount of times that someone was doing Qi Gong and their overall effect on heart rate variability. These folks were able to keep their heart rate in check much better by performing daily Qi Gong. We’ll have the link to this article so that you can see that Qi Gong does work. It’s not so woo-woo, and we’ve got some great data behind it. And why one of the things that I recommend for folks day in day out for helping with chronic pain and stress management.

[01:27:55] Ashley James: Awesome. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Can you tell us how we can work with you?

[01:28:04] Dr. Jannine Krause: Sure. I am in Tacoma, Washington, so if anyone is local, you can come see me in person. I also offer programs online where we can do one-on-one coaching training, and I look at your labs. We go through all of that stuff to give you a great plan that helps address all of the issues that you’re dealing with. You can also find me on my podcast The Health Fix Podcast. That one is on every single area where you would find normal podcasts, and then my website is doctorjkrausend.com. You can find me over there, and I’ve got all kinds of info in terms of resources, blogs, and past podcasts. That’s a great way to get ahold of me. If you’re wanting to see my personality and a little bit more on me, you could head over to Instagram @drjanninekrause and you’ll find all kinds of fun stuff over there as well.

[01:29:01] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You’re welcome back anytime. Always love to have a Naturopath on the show. Any last words of encouragement for those who are on the path to supporting their body’s ability to heal itself?

[01:29:18] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. Keep in mind that you have everything in you right now that you need to heal you. You just have to tap into it and work consistently. What happened to you didn’t happen overnight so it’s going to take some time to undo what’s happened, but you have everything there. It’s just a matter of practicing and working a little bit at it, and you can do it. You’ve got the tools right there. Just tap into them. Get an advisor, get a mentor, or somebody to help you with accountability such as Ashley or myself, and find someone who’s a really good fit for you and get that work done. You can do this.

[01:30:03] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much.

[01:30:05] Dr. Jannine Krause: You’re welcome. Thank you.

[01:30:07] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You can go to learntruehealth.com and check out all of the wonderful resources there. We transcribe all of our interviews, so you can scan through and read interviews. We have some really great free goodies on the site as well. If you have a friend, family member, or yourself suffer from anxiety, I have a wonderful course where you learn tools on how to eliminate anxiety. How to turn off the anxiety response in the body, how to decrease stress, and increase health mentally, emotionally, and physically.

So go to learntruehealth.com, search through the menu. You’ll see there are many resources on the site available to you there. Thank you so much for being a listener, and thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Let’s help turn this little ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to learn true health.

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