Tired, Stressed, or Foggy? These 3 Supplements Are Proven To Work [Dr Sarah Myhill]

Remember, big farmer doesn't want healthy people. A patient cured is a customer lost.

Many of my patients say to me, "I think I'm going demented." And actually, they are correct, and we are all poisoned.

Dr. Sarah Myill is a pioneer in functional medicine with decades of work focused on chronic fatigue and mitochondrial health. She believes fatigue isn't your fault. It's your environment, and she reveals the exact protocol to fix it. All the mechanisms that drive chronic fatigue syndrome are being gradually damaged by modern life. Perfumes, cosmetics, household cleaning agents, they can all be poisonous. Suntan lotion, for example, is terribly toxic. You shouldn't put anything on your skin that you are not prepared to eat. Tap water is now not fit for human consumption.

So, at the first hint of a cold or a cough, we want to sniff iodine. Put it into the opening of the salt pipe like that, and then sniff it. It massively reduces the dose of any virus, bacteria, or fungus. Potential for harm, zero. Potential for good, enormous.

Don't think doctors are acting to get you well. Doctors are acting to control your symptoms. And yes, in the short term, you might feel a bit more comfortable. You might have a bit less pain, but symptom suppression is dangerous medicine.

Dr. Myill, I want to start the conversation with your special interest, which is chronic fatigue or feeling tired all the time. Now, if someone's just clicked on this episode, how likely is it that they're going to feel tired all the time? It's a very, very common symptom. When I was working as a general practitioner in the 1980s, it was reckoned that about 40% of consultations centered around the TAT, the tired all the time patient. It's a common problem. But the shameful thing is doctors don't think mechanisms. They don't think causation. Because the important thing to remember about chronic fatigue syndrome is it is not a diagnosis. It's a clinical picture. We have to ask the question, "Why?" Because if you can discern those mechanisms, then treatment is obvious.

And all the mechanisms that drive chronic fatigue syndrome are being gradually damaged by modern life, modern diets, micronutrient deficiencies, pollution, and toxic stress. So, my view is we are probably, there are very few people who are really truly living up to their full potential because we all live in the same world. The world is inevitably polluted, and modern diets are becoming increasingly deficient in micronutrients and increasingly addictive with carbohydrates and ultra-processed foods.

I'll just give you a shocking statistic that I heard the other day at the public health collaboration conference I went to in Solihull recently. Children get 75% of their calories from ultra-processed foods, and teenagers get 86% of their calories from ultra-processed foods. Now, if that is not shocking, you know, well, God help us. I mean, what it means is that those young people who are far more sensitive to the food quality than older people because they are developing. Their brains are developing, their bodies are developing. If they don't have the raw materials in order to develop normally, their immune systems, their brains, and all else, then that is just the beginning of another wave of chronic disease that's going to assail us.

So, when you eat ultra-processed foods or even let's say carbohydrates, how does that cause this fatigue in the body so that someone's going to feel tired all the time from when somebody's adolescence to when they're growing up if they're having this type of diet? Well, several reasons, but the main reason is their impact on mitochondria. And as you know, mitochondria is my area of special interest. And a mitochondria is a universal engine that is common to every single cell in our body and every single cell that's out there in nature, the grass, the trees, the insects, the bugs. It's how we get energy from food. And mitochondria evolved to run on ketones, which can either come from fat or they can come from the fermentation of fiber.

So, for example, my horse, which I've just been feeding in the drizzling rain, she eats lots of hay. She ferments that in her gut to produce short-chain fatty acids or ketones. She runs her body on ketones. So does every vegetarian animal out there that's got a fermenting gut. But humans, we function best if we get our fuel from fat. And people doing a carnivore diet should aim to get, have 80% of their food should be fat. It should be very high. That's the perfect fuel for mitochondria. Now, they can run on sugar. You know, sugar is rocket fuel in the short term. Mitochondria can go faster, but that is not sustainable. And sugar, as it's burned in mitochondria, it produces a lot of exhaust fumes or free radicals for the biochemists out there. And those exhaust fumes are highly damaging.

So, first of all, the fuel is wrong. And the second problem has to do with the supply of fuel. Now, the problem with sugars and carbohydrates is they're very addictive. We eat them in an addictive way. I know I'm an addict. Once I start eating them, I can't stop them. You know, I have the discipline to say no to the first biscuit, but not the second or the third or the fourth. So, guess what? I say no to the first.

Now, if you are running your body on carbohydrates, so cereals at breakfast with orange juice, and then biscuits mid-morning, and then sandwiches at lunchtime, what that means, your blood sugars are up and down and up and down. They're very wobbly. And mitochondria don't like that. They like a very consistent supply of energy. And if your blood sugars are all over the place, when the blood sugar is high, that's when we get the fatigue. And we know that diabetes is associated with fatigue. And then when blood sugars go low, you get hypoglycemic. There's just not enough petrol in the tank, and you become fatigued then. And this is part of the mechanism that makes these foods so addictive because there's a kind of, dare I say it, a sweet spot where you've got the energy, but then you rapidly go too high, and then you rapidly go too low. So, it's for a multiplicity of reasons.

And in addition to that, ultra-processed food is very deficient in micronutrients. And for your mitochondria to function, we need some essential micronutrients like magnesium, CoQ10, vitamin B3, carnitine. Without those, mitochondria simply go slow. So, there's a plethora of reasons why ultra-processed foods are a disaster.

Now, I'm going to tell you, forgive me for, I love telling stories, so forgive me for breaking into a story. And this pertains to the cigarette and the tobacco companies in the 1970s. They were making a fortune. Why? Because tobacco is very addictive. In fact, they had teams of scientists who did nothing but research to try to make that tobacco more addictive. So, for example, they put extra nicotine in the tobacco. For example, they put sugar in the tobacco. But in the 1980s, when the health message started to filter through that smoking is bad for our health and we shouldn't smoke because of heart disease and cancer, the tobacco companies realized this. Tobacco companies like Reynolds in America and Philip Morris in this country, they realized this, and so they bought up the food companies and then they turned the attention of their scientists to make food more addictive. And that is the origin of ultra-processed foods. It's designed to be addictive. It's designed to be addictive because of the crunch factor. That's why we like crisps and like because of the right amount of fat and sugars which give the right feel in the mouth. So this renders these foods very addictive.

But the point is, the gut hormones are not fooled. Gut hormones are far more intelligent than our sense of taste. And so we swallow this food, and the gut hormones say, "Well, that was a load of rubbish you've just consumed. Go and get some decent food. Eat more." And people do, and they gain weight. And we know that gaining weight and being overweight is a major risk factor for a whole range of diseases like diabetes, like heart disease, like cancer, like dementia. So food is critically important. And if people listening to this do nothing other than change their diet, then we've won. We have gained you that the fuel in the tank is the single most important factor for the tired all the time person.

So what you're saying is the mitochondria, so that's on every part of our cells, is what's making us feel tired all the time. So then my next question, you know, people have caffeine all the time and coffee. I think people are going to hate this because they like their coffee. Do you drink coffee by the way? I'm a potential coffee addict. So I don't drink it. So I occasionally have a very tiny snifter because it smells so gorgeous. But no, I don't drink it all the time because what the coffee does is it beats up the mitochondria. It has an adrenaline-like effect. So, yes, it does make the mitochondria go faster, but it's the old story, you know, you it's short-term gain, but long-term pain.

Mitochondria, yes, we it's very useful to be able to gear up energy production from mitochondria in response to stress. But if we do it unremittingly, then the mitochondria eventually, they just cannot go any faster. Now, we have our own endogenous caffeine. It's called adrenal hormones. Adrenaline, dopamine, all these things fire up mitochondria in order to go faster to give us more energy to deal with stress. But we cannot do that unremittingly. The mitochondria eventually get exhausted. So we have to save our precious reserves of adrenaline in order to deal with those serious life-threatening stresses when we absolutely have to spend every drop of energy that we have in our bodies.

So, the obvious example is, if I'm trotting through the jungle, 20,000 years ago, and a saber-tooth tiger jumps out at me, I need every drop of energy to run the fastest 100 yards I've ever done in my life, or I become Tiger's breakfast. So, caffeine is, yes, I do see that there's a use for caffeine if you feel absolutely slayed, but you've got to perform, but that must then be followed by a period of rest where the adrenals can recover and the mitochondria can recover.

So, yeah, it's another addiction. I was going to say, yeah, so it's another addiction, but I think people have it a lot to get energy. So this is the same thing we talk about carbohydrates and the ultra-processed food. They keep doing that because you have your blood sugar up and down, but as you said with the caffeine and the coffee, it makes your adrenal fatigue over time because you're ruining your mitochondria. It's getting shaky. Not to say people should quit their coffee. I'm just saying this is a big reason why people can feel tired all the time because it's not the solution. Correct. It's not the solution. It's a short-term panacea. You know, it's like taking paracetamol for a pain. It doesn't address the root causes. You know, it reduces the pain. But the problem with taking symptom-suppressing drugs, and that's what caffeine is, it's a symptom-suppressing drug. It doesn't address the underlying pathology. And so, it stops people really looking for why they're tired. Is it my diet? Is it my gut problem? Is it because my mitochondria are deficient? Is it because my mitochondria are poisoned or something? Is it because I've got an underactive thyroid? These are all other factors which we can easily correct. Well, it's easy to correct intellectually. In real life, of course, it's not so easy to do. But they're all these are all interventions that are within the power of everybody.

You see, I've now come to the view, as I'm sure you have too, that there just aren't enough practitioners to go around. People have to do it themselves because the wretched doctors are not asking the right questions. They're not looking for root causes of disease. It's all about symptom suppression with drugs, which again, as I say, short-term gain, long-term pain. But I think my job is, as I call it, to give people the rules of the game and the tools of the trade so they can do it themselves. And what's more important is that these tools mustn't be too expensive because my patients with chronic fatigue syndrome often they can't work. They can't earn money. And so I have to give them things that we can all afford, we can all do. And as they improve, then they can get back to work and so they can pick up and start to earn some money, etc., etc., etc.

Perfect. Well, I feel so sorry for those people that have actual chronic fatigue syndrome. But for those watching that might be thinking, well, how do I know if I'm just feeling low, I have a bad diet, or how do I know if it's actually chronic fatigue syndrome? What are some symptoms and how do you diagnose it? Especially, you said that the doctor's not going to help you, so we got to help ourselves.

Okay. Well, most people realize they've got chronic fatigue syndrome because they can't do what all their friends seem to be doing. But if you've got poor energy delivery mechanisms, then you will have physical fatigue. And very often people say, "I can't get fit. I've got no stamina. I can't sustain physical effort." But the key feature of chronic fatigue syndrome is when you really overdo things, you pay for it the next day. It's called post-exertional malaise. And post-exertional malaise is pathological fatigue. So, I have a busy day today. I will be chatting with this morning. I'm doing some seeing some patients later. I should be out in my garden hopefully later on this afternoon. And at the end of the day, I should feel tired, but then I'll have a good night's sleep, and tomorrow morning, I will be as right as rain and ready to go again. So, that's what characterizes pathological fatigue when people know they have to pace their activity.

And then we have the brain symptoms because although the brain weighs just 2% of body weight, it consumes 20% of all the energy generated in the body. It's massively demanding of energy. And if you slow energy delivery mechanisms of the brain, then you will get brain symptoms like poor concentration, poor short-term memory, can't multitask, can't think clearly, very often procrastinate. "Oh, I'll do it tomorrow." All these symptoms of the brain just doesn't work properly. In fact, many of my patients say to me, "I think I'm going demented." And actually, they are correct. They are going demented, but it's a reversible dementia. By putting in place all these interventions to improve energy delivery mechanisms, the foggy brain is restored, and suddenly their sharpness comes back. And many people comment to me when they start the paleo ketogenic diet, which of course is the starting point to get into ketosis, the first thing that comes back is their sharp brain.

And one of the reasons for that is, as we've mentioned, is the upper fermenting gut. Because the upper gut should be sterile. It's kept sterile by stomach acid. And if you overwhelm that with too many sugars and carbohydrates and processed ultra-processed foods, the bacteria move in, the yeast move in, and they start to ferment. And they ferment to produce alcohol, ethyl alcohol, propyl alcohol, butyl alcohol, lactate, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia compounds. All these things make for a foggy brain. So that's a foggy brain is another symptom of poor energy delivery mechanisms.

And then, of course, if you have poor energy delivery mechanisms to the heart, then it cannot be powerful as a pump. Now, this applies particularly to my very sick patients who may be functioning at 20 or 30% of their full potential. And if the heart cannot pump powerfully, you get instead of getting these nice strong beats, about between 70 and 75 every minute, you get these rather weak, flabby beats. It's not strong. So to maintain cardiac output, the heart has to beat faster. So often these patients have a slight tachycardia at rest. Maybe it's running at 85 or 90 beats per minute when it should be between 70 and 75. Now, that is okay for circulation. Of course, it's much easier to circulate blood when you're lying down because blood is circulating on the horizontal. Problems really arise when they stand up because when you stand up, you have to increase cardiac output by about 20% to account for the uphills and the downhills of the circulation of blood. And but if your heart is already weak, it's already a bit flabby, it can't beat any more powerfully because the mitochondria don't work there. So the only way it can increase cardiac output when you stand up is to beat faster. So these poor people when they stand up, the heart starts to go 100, 110, 120 beats per minute. And of course, that too isn't sustainable because that too requires energy. What happens? Blood pressure falls precipitously, and they keel over. This is called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Dreadful name, but it's symptomatic of poor energy delivery mechanisms to the heart.

And by the same token, if you can't get energy to the heart, then one of the ways the body can compensate in the short term is to move into anaerobic metabolism, produce energy without oxygen. Athletes, of course, do this at the end of a race. If they're doing a 1500-meter race, for example, they run aerobically for the first 1300 meters, and then they sprint the last 200 meters, and they get that extra energy from going into anaerobic metabolism. You get a little bit more, not much more, but a little bit more. But they time their race so when they get to the finishing line, they are so full of lactic acid because that's what happens when you go into anaerobic metabolism. They literally keel over. They cannot run another step. They push themselves to their nth degree.

Now, fatigue syndrome patients do the same in the heart. When they push themselves, the heart goes into anaerobic metabolism, and that produces lactic acid. And lactic acid is very painful. It causes angina. Now, the problem with fatigue syndrome patients is it takes an awful lot of energy to get that lactic acid back to pyruvate. And so that angina, that lactic acid burn will persist for certainly minutes and sometimes hours. They are told by their cardiologist, "Oh, this isn't angina because angina always clears in a few seconds." But the cardiologists are used to dealing with angina not due to mitochondrial failure but due to poor blood supply to the heart. And yes, if it's due to poor blood supply to the heart, then yes, the lactic acid burn fades in a few minutes or seconds. But not with fatigue syndromes. So these poor people get told they've got atypical chest pain. I mean, what a joke of a diagnosis that is. You know, it's not a diagnosis. It's just a clinical picture, but it's symptomatic of poor mitochondrial function in the heart, poor energy delivery mechanisms to the heart.

Now, of course, what makes the difference between an alive cell and a dead cell is energy. If you can't supply energy to a cell, it can't function. It's dead. And the energy molecule ATP is needed for every single energy-requiring process in the body, like contracting a muscle, making a hormone, conducting a nerve, and so on. And so if your mitochondria are going slow, every symptom in the body, there is potential for to produce any symptom. Everything is going to go slow. It's a metabolic disaster. And of course, when they all stop, we die.

So, it illustrates the point that poor mitochondrial function is implicated in every pathological disease you care to mention, from diabetes, dementia, heart disease, cancer. Mitochondria are all centrally important. So we should see fatigue when we're not living up to our full potential as a forerunner to potentially other more serious conditions. So we need to take mitochondria very seriously, is what I'm trying to say.

Now, as Dr. Myhill mentions, your body is just like a high-performance engine, but that engine is only as good as the gaskets and the seals that hold it together. And later in this episode, we're going to talk about all the nutrients that you need to support your cellular energy. But as we know, in our modern world with all the chemicals and the processed foods, this can actually put more strain on your gut. And when that happens, these everyday toxins get into your blood and basically put sugar in your gas tank, where now your tank needs extra support to work optimally.

So to support my health and keep my engine performing at its best, I use a whole food supplement called Armra Colostrum. It's a powerhouse that has over 400 bioactive nutrients in every serving. And I have personally seen some big benefits, especially in my skin. And when you think about the healthier looking skin and all the extra energy I'm seeing, it really makes sense because colostrum is the first milk produced after birth, and it's designed by nature to have vital nutrients needed to reinforce a strong immune system and a healthy gut. The best part about Armra is that they only use grass-fed colostrum in its most natural form. And the unflavored version is 100% carnivore. And I use four full scoops of the unflavored Armra every day mixed in cold water to keep my gut barrier strong. So if you want to try Armra Colostrum for yourself, just head to tryarmra.com/theprimalpodcast or enter code theprimalpodcast to get 15% off your first order. I've also linked them below in the description. And thanks to Armra Colostrum for sponsoring this episode.

I think most people watching would have some sort of disease. Pick something. And they're going to have something they've probably been diagnosed with or even something as little as acid reflux, which is not so little. And everything goes back to your mitochondria. So people would be experiencing fatigue, feeling tired, and then as we said, having wanting to have the caffeine. I want to talk about these underlying energy systems. So you mentioned the mitochondria, you also talk about the thyroid, correct? Why is that important and how does that affect energy production?

Okay. Well, the full analogy is that if we think of our body as a car, the diet is the fuel in the tank. We need some oxygen. We need our mitochondrial engine. But then we need a thyroid accelerator pedal and an adrenal gearbox. And the thyroid gland determines the rate at which mitochondria go. And if our thyroid is underactive, and that is incredibly common, you could have perfect mitochondria, perfect fuel in the tank, but they're only going to get 15 miles an hour. And guess what? I want my mitochondria to go 50 miles an hour because I'm going to get a lot more done.

And I say the underactive thyroid is extremely common. And there are multiple reasons why that is the case. The thyroid sits in the neck like a dicky bow tie where a dicky bow tie would sit, and it's about the shape of a dicky bow tie as well. But again, I think that we are destroying our thyroids largely because of pollution. And one of the biggest pollutants, of course, is the spike protein of vaccines and other vaccines which drive autoimmunity. And autoimmune thyroiditis is becoming extremely common. There's another reason why the thyroid is going down because the pituitary gland is also being poisoned.

So the pituitary gland in the brain is has been described as the conductor of the endocrine orchestra. So our thyroids function because the pituitary gland kicks it into action at just the right time of day and of night. Now, the pituitary gland is very susceptible to poisoning. Now, I learned this in 1990 because I was involved in a group action of farmers who'd been poisoned by organophosphate pesticides. It's called sheep dip flu. And there was some legal aid money available for them, and they were paid to go up to be investigated by Professor Peter Bian, consultant neurologist at Glasgow. And he did pituitary function tests on these farmers. Now, these tests are very expensive and very detailed. It's not something that is available to us peasants on the grassroots. But what he demonstrated is that they all had poor pituitary function, and that was due to poisoning by organophosphate pesticides.

Now, one of the most widely used pesticides in the world today is glyphosate, trade name Roundup. It is also an organophosphate. Please look at the work of Stephanie Seneff, who's written a fantastic book called "A Toxic Legacy." And there she details the multiplicity of ways by which glyphosate is poisonous. And what's so interesting is the amounts of glyphosate used. So she calculated that the amounts that are used on the American population equate to about £1 per member of the population per year. It's in all foods. If it's not organically grown, almost certainly it will be present in that food because it is so widely used. It's the most commonly used pesticide, herbicide, in the world today.

So, one of the problems for my poor patients with fatigue syndromes is they don't have much money. And what I want them to do is spend whatever they can on the best quality food they can possibly stretch to. And I'm increasingly coming to the view that organic food is so important. Now, this particularly applies to fruit and vegetables and seeds and nuts and so on. Meats are much lower in pesticides than our fruit and vegetables. So this is another reason to go meat-heavy because, as I say, we are all poisoned. We are. And one of the joys of eating a high meat, fish, egg diet is it's low toxic. The plant-eaters and the vegetarians can't believe this and throw their hands up in horror when I say things like this. But the point here is, if you look at life from the point of view of a plant, it doesn't want to be eaten. It doesn't want to be attacked by bacteria, by viruses, by fungi. And of course, they're all susceptible to this. And so they make their own poisons in order to render themselves as poisonous as they possibly can. So this is why most of the foods that are in the world, we can't eat. Most of the foods are poisonous to us. There are many we can tolerate.

Now, we have a fantastic liver, of course, that deals with that, and that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to deal with plant toxins and plant poisons. But if we overwhelm our livers with all the other nasties, with glyphosate in food, with heavy metals, which we are all inevitably exposed to whether we like it or not, with volatile organic compounds, glue, cosmetics, household cleaners, all these things, they have to be poisoned too. They have to be detoxified too, and we can end up overwhelming our body with poisons.

Now, I'd love to do a podcast on this, Reena, so please invite me again. But I've got a whole session on about glyphosate or heavy metals, well, on why we are all poisoned and what we can do to get rid of them. Because, as I say, one of the reasons we're seeing so much tiredness and fatigue now is because we are all poisoned. When I do tests of toxicity, whether that's fat biopsies or looking at heavy metals in urine with a chelating agent, I've never seen a normal result. You know, we are all poisoned. And we should all do these detox regimes because we can never get rid of all of them, but at least we can get the idea is to try to get them to a level where the body can deal with them. So, we have to help the body all we can to reduce that toxic load. Stop poisoning our mitochondria, stop poisoning our thyroid glands, stop poisoning our pituitary glands. And you know, there are other reasons to do this because many of these poisons are known carcinogens, and we are seeing cancer going through the roof at the moment. So I'm increasingly coming to the view that we all need to do it all. You know, we it's not just a case of, "Oh, I'll have a go at some heavy metals." "Oh, that doesn't work." "Oh, let's try some chemical detox." "Oh, that doesn't work." "Oh, let's have a go at the diet." We all have to do it all.

Can I ask one question before we get into the actual detox? I want to talk about the upper fermenting gut. Can you just explain these little toxins that we're being exposed to every day? Like, for example, our toothpaste, the fluoride. So, if you use Colgate toothpaste, or what are some other common examples that people are probably doing every day?

Oh, we've asked two questions there. We'll start off with the common toxins. Yes, of course, fluoride is very nasty, toxic stuff, and it's particularly toxic to the thyroid gland. Why? Because fluoride is a halide, like iodide. Fluorine and iodine. They're related compounds. And of course, the thyroid needs iodine to be able to work. And we are all iodine deficient. If you're not taking an iodine supplement, it's very, very likely you'll have iodine deficiency. And the point about iodine is we can use it in different ways. We can take it in tiny, tiny doses to just about stay well. We can take it in normal doses, as I call it, therapeutic doses, in order to protect us from heavy metals, improve our antioxidant status, feed the thyroid, improve oxytocin production in the brain, detox heavy metals, and other important things. And then we can use it in super high doses as a disinfectant. It's a fantastic defense against disease.

One of my favorite tools is a salt pipe with iodine in it. So, and this is what we should use in the event of any acute respiratory infection. So the first hint of a cold or a cough or a sniffle, we want to sniff iodine. So you get a couple of drops of Lugol's iodine, put it into the opening of the salt pipe like that, and then sniff it. So I put my finger and thumb over the mouthpiece like that. Don't put it in the mouth. It makes you cough. Sniff it like that. And the point is, by sniffing it, that saturates the nose, the sinuses, the nasopharynx, the larynx, the chest, the bronchi. It massively reduces the dose of any virus, bacteria, or fungus that might be in the lungs. And that helps the immune system to get ahead of the game. That helps the immune system to kill the microbes before they become so numerous that it becomes impossible. So that's a great resource.

But yes, the bottom line is, if you can smell something, it's in the brain. So, you know, perfumes, cosmetics, household cleaning agents, they can all be poisonous. Whatever you put on your skin, you shouldn't put anything on your skin that you are not prepared to eat because those chemicals are well absorbed through the skin and they bypass the liver. They go straight into the bloodstream and cause a poison before the liver has a chance to detoxify them. So, you know, think of any cleaning agents, creams, perfumes, ointments that you might put on your skin. Ask yourself, "Would I happily eat these things?" And if the answer is no, thumbs down. Suntan lotion, for example, is terribly toxic. We shouldn't be putting suntan lotion on our skin, and there's not a scrap of evidence that they protect us from skin cancer either. So, that's another fallacy. But, you know, it's the old story, follow the money. You know, what does big pharma make from selling suntan lotions and every single other product that you just mentioned?

Hey, what about water? Like the tap water that people might be drinking, is that full of toxins as well? Yes, potentially. Yes. It's full of chlorine, chloramine, pesticide residues, heavy metals. Tap water is now not fit for human consumption. So, we should all be at least having filtered water. I bought my daughter for Christmas a glass sort of tank, like a big tube with a tap at the bottom into which you put some sticks of activated charcoal, and that helps pull out many of the heavy metals and the volatile organic compounds. And you can taste the difference. That's what's so interesting. You can really taste the difference.

I'll tell you a fluoride story now that you will love. And this is about a wonderful book called "The Hidden Cause of Acne" written by Melissa Gallico. Now, bless her, she had terrible cystic acne and wanted to know why. Just like any intelligent person, we want to know why. She works for, I think it's the FDA, so she's no fool. She's intelligent. She's a bright lass. And initially, she followed the work of Gordon Lorraine, who was the first advocate of the paleo ketogenic diet. And what she found is her acne was massively improved by dint of doing a paleo ketogenic diet. She got it down to about 20% of what it was, but she couldn't get rid of that last 20%. Now, she was working all over the world. She was being posted in different areas. And what she found is that when she worked in some areas, her acne completely disappeared and resolved, and then go to other areas of the world, and it came back, you know, back to the 20%. And so, of course, you know, why? That was the big clue. What was the difference between our and other? What was the difference? It's fluoride. When she excluded all the fluoride from her water, from her toothpaste, from her dental treatments, etc., etc., her acne disappeared completely, and she's written a fascinating book about it, "The Hidden Cause of Acne." So, it's just a lovely example of how something we think maybe has health benefits, it doesn't, is potentially very toxic in the sensitive few.

It's very interesting because your views are very, they're not controversial to me or somebody watching, but to your peers, it's very controversial. And even for your ideas about chronic fatigue syndrome, you were actually suppressed and you were kind of banned. Do you think the mainstream is still against you or kind of with you now? Totally against me. Why? Because the mainstream is educated by big pharma. And remember, big pharma doesn't want healthy people. Big pharma's mantra is, "A patient cured is a customer lost." So, what big pharma wants is lots of unhealthy people. And because guess what? They will then go and see their doctors, and then big pharma educates the doctors to provide symptom-suppressing drugs. So, don't think doctors are acting to get you well. Doctors are acting to control your symptoms. And yes, in the short term, you might feel a bit more comfortable. You might have a bit less pain, lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, or whatever. But symptom suppression is dangerous medicine because if you suppress symptoms, you accelerate the underlying cause.

I've just been involved in another General Medical Council hearing concerning an 84-year-old lady who was fit and well, very active, functioning at a very high level. Three weeks later, she was dead. Now, the reason she died from sepsis, she died from an abscess on her spine, which then progressed into sepsis. And the doctors didn't diagnose this. Why? Because they didn't understand how the drugs that they were prescribing her were causing the immunosuppression and allowing that infection to run riot. So she was already immunosuppressed by dint of pre-existing medical conditions and glucose-6-phosphate deficiency, which we know causes immunosuppression. But when she started to get the symptoms, instead of asking the question, "Why has she got these symptoms?" they said, "Oh, well, we'll just give you some painkillers for your back pain." And those painkillers including non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. And we know that naproxen, aspirin, ibuprofen, all these drugs are immunosuppressive. They then gave her diazepam ostensibly to control the muscle spasm. All the tranquilizers are immunosuppressive. And then they gave her pregabalin, which is also immunosuppressive. So that allowed her infection to run riot, and it suppressed the very symptoms that should be telling doctors she's getting a lot worse. And by the time her spinal abscess and sepsis was diagnosed, it was too late, and she was dead.

So this is a microcosm of what goes on at a greater level for so many people. They are given symptom-suppressing medication, and that prevents a proper diagnosis. And a proper diagnosis implies identifying the mechanisms because if you can underline them, identify the underlying mechanisms, then that has obvious implications for management. So this is why I'm the most investigated doctor in the history of the General Medical Council. No patient complaints. All the complaints have come from other doctors who don't understand what I'm doing. This last one was from a coroner who didn't like the evidence that I presented at an inquest, or from the General Medical Council itself because I'm so anti-establishment. And the shameful thing here is the General Medical Council is conflicted because it is bankrolled by big pharma. So, you know, what hope have we poor peasants? We're given all this so-called pseudoscience, which isn't science. We're plied with drugs without and vaccines without proper informed consent, and that is a disaster for our long-term health.

I mean, the MHRA, for example, which is supposed to regulate medicines, new medicines that come into this country or are used, but it's 85% bankrolled by big pharma. It's conflicted. And June Raine, who was the chief CEO of the MHRA during the COVID nonsense, allowed the rollout of COVID vaccines without proper scrutiny. They were not safe, and they were not tested. They were not effective. In fact, she actually said the MHRA is no longer a regulator. It's an enabler. So, what's the point of it? If it's not regulating, if it's going to encourage the use of all these things, what is the point? And the point is, follow the money. As you said, follow the money. Anything that you have to buy, pray it's got toxins in it, it's going to wreck your health.

So, let's not even wear makeup. I'm a bit scared to come up here and not wear any makeup. But maybe I should just start doing that because people like, "Gosh, Reena, you look ugly." Don't worry. I'm bald. I look ugly all the time. You look, but you look nice, Dr. Myhill. You look beautiful. But if somebody like me, like I don't know, like I should just probably try not to wear makeup. Anyway, let's move on to the fix. So if doctors are not going to help us, we have to help ourselves. So let's first understand the root cause. So we spoke about the mitochondria, the thyroid, the adrenals, all that affects the energy systems. How does the upper fermenting gut affect your energy as well?

In a multiplicity of ways. Now, to understand what the upper fermenting gut is, we have to understand first of all what the normal gut is. Now, the normal gut is just a tube. It starts at the mouth. It finishes at the anus. It's about 30 feet long. Now, the first 25 feet of that gut should be sterile or near sterile. Yes, the last 5 feet is where the microbiome resides. It's teeming with microbes, and that is an essential part of our health. But the upper gut should be near sterile. Now, that is maintained by having an acid stomach. And when I say an acid stomach, I mean very acid. It can be as much as pH 2, which is extremely acidic.

Now, if the acid gut fails us, and it can fail us for many reasons, then instead of foods being sterilized when they get into our gut, because whenever you eat food, it's full of bacteria, it's full of yeast, and so is much water, but it is killed off by that acid. Now, if that acid fails us, and we can go into the reasons why that could be the case, then instead of being sterile, we get sugars in there, we get carbohydrates in there, and the bacteria and the fungi move in, and they start to ferment. And they're given a very comfortable time there because they're nice and warm. They're well-fed. They've got a nice comfortable ecological space. They sit on the lining of the upper gut and render it leaky. So that causes problems.

So, as we've discussed, one of the problems we get is the microbes themselves produce toxins like alcohol, lactate, hydrogen sulfide, and that poisons us. Having made themselves comfortably at home in the upper gut, the microbes, they don't want other people moving in and taking their space. So they produce toxins to keep other microbes at bay because there's another battle going on there. And those toxins include bacterial endotoxin and fungal mycotoxins. And guess what? They're poisonous too. And in addition to that, those microbes are as hungry for micronutrients as we are. So if we start taking nutritional supplements, we end up just feeding the fermenters instead of feeding our bodies.

But I think one of the most pernicious parts is, as we've touched on, these microbes make for leaky gut. And therefore, there is potential for those abnormal microbes, which are not evolutionarily correct, to get from the gut into the bloodstream. And if they get into the bloodstream, they get stuck at distal sites in our body. They get stuck in our joints, in our muscles, in our skin, where they drive other pathology because they drive inflammation. And inflammation in the joints causes arthritis. We know, for example, that ankylosing spondylitis is driven by allergy to Klebsiella bacteria in our gut. They drive fibromyalgia, which is pain in the muscles. I think they drive intrinsic asthma, which is asthma that people very often get with age, ichthyosis in the skin, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bladders, and interstitial cystitis.

And what's even more interesting is you can get these, and this is not my hypothesis, this is Nishihara, a Japanese researcher. You can get these microbes into the brain. And in the brain, there's potential for those microbes to ferment out neurotransmitters into LSD and amphetamine-like substances. And that could be the basis of psychosis. And this is why psychiatrists in the past, like Abram Hoffer, like Carl Pfeiffer, have had fantastic success treating psychosis with ketogenic diets. Stop feeding the microbes. Stop feeding them in the brain, cure the psychosis. And I read recently that in Russia, a common starting point to treat any patients with psychosis or severe depression or anxiety is to fast them. And they fast them for up to a month at a time. Now, a month's fast seems like an awful long time, but no, if you've got some reserves, some fat reserves, then no, if it's done properly, then it's a very healthy intervention.

So it just illustrates the point that all these pathologies are driven by the upper fermenting gut. It illustrates the point that diet and gut function are the starting point to treat absolutely everything. So, you know, don't you know, because people want, and we've been conditioned to want this by the doctors. They want, "I've got a symptom, give me a drug," and that's the end of the story. It just ain't like that anymore. Well, it's never been like that, but it's now like that more than ever before. So that's why I said earlier, we, for whatever we've got, whatever warning symptom we have, that should be an incentive, a red flag to say, guess what? We've all got to do it all. And it starts with the diet and sorting out the fermenting gut. It continues with, we all need a basic package of nutritional supplements because our foods are deficient, and we are all poisoned. And, you know, I could speak for hours. In fact, I just was out in Poland in October talking about "We Are All Poisoned." It took, I think it was about four hours of lectures to really.

Tell the whole story in detail, in a way that satisfied the intellectual curiosity of my wonderful audience and gave everybody the tools of the trade that they needed in order to do it themselves, because that is the important thing. We can all do it ourselves, and and we must. I think I have to have you back to talk about why we all poison.

But getting back to the gut function, which is going to be part of that conversation anyway. So, step one, the diet. What do people have to do? Step one, everyone watching to start fixing and eradicating that upper fermented gut. Get rid of your addictions. And number one is sugar. And number two is ultra-processed foods. And as I say, I know I'm an addict. I'm a natural addict. I know I could happily become an alcohol addict. And I do it by saying no to the first bit.

Now I have a personal addiction test, a food test. Um, which is if I can have one of something but not finish the whole packet. Fine. So, so if you gave me a packet of cashew nuts, I would have one cashew nut and guess what? The whole packet would disappear. Why? Because cashew nuts are quite high carbohydrate. If you gave me one square of 60% chocolate, the whole bar would disappear because it would switch on my carbohydrate addiction and the whole thing would disappear. So, I don't have those foods in my house. I can have 90% chocolate 'cause I'll have a square and I don't want anymore. I can have Brazil nuts because I'll have a couple and I don't want anymore. I can have olives because I have a a small handful and I don't want anymore. So that personal addiction test I find very helpful. And um uh and that's, you know, a good starting point. But yes, we essentially we need to eat a low carbohydrate, high-fat, normal protein, uh, with some plant foods thrown in as well, diet. To say some of my patients do pure carnivore. I have tried pure carnivore. I can manage it fine, but I actually I'm a gardener. I have I've got a garden full of vegetables and berries and I'm greedy. I love my food. And I can find I can have some green vegetables. I can have maybe a small potato, couple of bits of parsnip. Um, they pass my um carbohydrate addiction test. I can have a couple and I don't want anymore. And um, stay in ketosis. And if I monitor my blood sugars, then my blood sugars stay um between four and six. So often people want to know, have I done it well enough? And um uh and and by me doing tests tells you if you've done the diet well enough.

Now I stumbled across a fascinating paper. Well, I didn't stumble across it 'cause the old boy had had recently died. Dr. Richard Cunnane, who published in 1976, and he then was a great advocate of the ketogenic diet. And what he found is many people did well on it, but a few didn't. Well, I say a few, about 60% found they didn't have their full levels of energy when they were in a pure um carnivore or pure ketogenic diet. And he devised the concept of optimum carbohydrate levels. So just a tiny little bit of carbohydrate, not enough to knock you out of ketosis or maybe to go in and out of ketosis. Uh, not enough to spike your blood sugars with a continuous glucose monitor. But patients felt much better with it. So the way he would do this is say, first of all, get into ketosis and test your urine with a keto stick to make sure that you are in ketosis. They're ever so cheap. You can get 100 for about eight quid. So um, and the little pink box should go slightly purple. So he said, when you like that, then bring in five grams of carbohydrate for a meal. So that would be a rice cake, maybe an oat cake, a small potato, uh, something like that, you know, a small portion of carrots and test your urine again. And if you're still in ketosis, then maybe increase by five grams uh per meal. So that instead of honey, so a little bit of carbohydrate included with your meal, they he found those people function much better. They were in and out of ketosis, and that's fine, so long as you're in ketosis once a day, I'll settle for that. And they function at a much higher level. It's called optimal carbohydrate levels. I've just put a page about that on my website, so if anybody wants to look at that, then there's um more information there, or I'll send you the chapter. Reena, and then you can send it round anybody who who who would like to employ that technique. I think that's really interesting because I was about to ask, can you have this food, this food like dairy? Can you have bread? Can you have? But the test is, are you in ketosis? And the other test is, where a CGM and see what happens to your blood sugar there. You know, what food you can have. And that's why like you can have that 90% dark chocolate, but you know, I can't have it. I have all the whole block. Like that's my addiction. Like, oh, you're as good an addict as I am then. Congratulations. Well, I can't have the whole thing. I can't even have like, I can't moderate. I just can't moderate. And that's why ketogenic carnivore works really good for me.

So, but getting back to what works for people. So, it's not about have this food, don't have this food. Test, test, don't guess. Test your ketones, test your blood sugar. Now, as Dr. Mahill mentions, many people suffer from fatigue or feeling tired every day. But eating right is definitely the biggest fix. But for many, this simply isn't enough because your everyday products like your body soap, your shampoo, or even your toothpaste contain chemicals that can disrupt your hormones. These are ingredients like parabens, phthalates, and even fluoride. And they have been shown to interfere with how your body uses insulin and can even lead to metabolic disease because these toxins soak through your skin and even your gums and they trick your body and make it harder to fix your metabolism. And that's why we created the Primal Tallow balms, soaps, and now our new shampoo bars. Everything that we make is chemical-free. It's made from 100% grass-fed tallow and packed with vitamins A, D, E, and K2. There's no preservatives. There's no fake fragrances. There's just stuff that your body actually recognizes. And I've been using this soap and shampoo bar every single day. And they're super gentle without shipping anything. And if you're in the US, our USA store is now open for faster shipping and cheaper prices. And for the next 14 days, get up to 30% off our new shampoo bars and body wash. Just head to theprimal.com/shampoo or use code shampoo at checkout. There's also a link in the description.

I want to ask about fiber. Do you think again, to fix the microbiome and the gut, do you have to have fiber? Well, that's a very, very, very good question, and it's something I worried about hugely when I was thinking about the carnivore diet. But um uh I had a few clues as to why it's okay on on the carnivore diet. Um, one clue came from Professor Nick Lane. I was rereading his book on um mitochondria, power, sex and suicide, and there he makes the point that meat fiber um is actually a very rich source of food for bacteria, and meat fiber, you know, is not well digested in the upper gut. It does get through to the colon, and there, you know, a microbe will digest that, and then the microbe will produce uh um a waste product that other microbes will feed on, and then they will produce a waste product that other microbes will feed on. It's like that rhyme, big fleas have little fleas on their backs to bite 'em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on, ad infinitum. Now, that's the only poetry I know, you'll be relieved to hear. But um, the point is, meat fiber is a very useful um prebiotic. And um, and uh when you look at the microbiome of carnivores, and there are several papers about this, um, they are as diverse as that of omnivores. So, I'm not too worried about that.

The other concern that many people have about um doing a carnivore diet is that they'll get constipated. Oh, don't I need lots of fiber to um, you know, to stop me getting constipated? But I don't think constipation is a fiber problem. As the carnivore books show, you've probably read that lovely book um uh why vegans have small brains. It's all about the carnivore diet, or smaller brains rather. Um, they make the point that adding fiber for somebody who is constipated is like putting more cars into a traffic jam. You know, it's going to make the situation worse. And I think carnivore, uh, constipation is a friction issue. I think constipation arrives when there is friction between the lining of the gut wall and the contents of the gut. And um, friction is all about exclusion zone water. Now, I'm mindful that I've yapped on for an hour and you might say be too bored for to listen to me any longer, but I'll I'll very, very quick. Exclusion zone water usually takes a whole hour to explain, but I will try and explain this in two minutes. If you count up all the molecules in our body, we are 99% water. If those water molecules were in a liquid form, we would just dissolve onto the ground into a puddle, you know, in in fractions of a second. Gerald Pollack wrote a fantastic paper called Exclusion Zone Water or Fourth Phase Water, illustrating the point that water can exist in three forms. It can exist as a liquid. It's what I drink. It can ex it can exist as a solid, which we call ice, and as a vapor, which is water vapor. There's also a fourth form, which is what water molecules do against a surface. And that surface can be any surface in the body. Mitochondrial membrane, cell membranes, red cell coverings, white cells, coverings of lysosomes, you know, every cell. And in that form, and I'm not talking about the physics because it doesn't take, but essentially it forms a gel structure. It's got quite a solid structure, and more interestingly, that it means that um, with background heat, that surface is charged. It's negatively charged. So what this means in practice is every surface in the body is negatively charged. What happens if you hold two magnets together? You know that you can't press them together. They repel and they glide over each other in a frictionless way. Look at that railway system in China called Maglev. The train hovers. It's negatively charged, hovers on a negatively charged track, and so it moves in a frictionless way. It can go at 600 kilometers an hour, and the ride is completely smooth. It's frictionless. And so it is with surfaces in the body. So if the if we've got good exclusion zone water in the body, then the contents of the gut will slide through the gut in a frictionless way. And what massively improves the quality of exclusion zone water are sulfur groups. And again, back to good old Stephanie S.F., fantastic scientist, always worth listening to her YouTube videos. She's always got something interesting to say. Stephanie Sanders points out, we are all sulfur deficient. Guess what? Meat is rich in sulfur. And with those sulfur um containing groups in that, that will get through into uh into the gut, it's going to make for frictionless movement of gut contents, and therefore our carnivores don't get constipated.

Is that why you also like MSM? Mhm. Correct. MSM is fast uh turning into one of my favorite multitasking tools because it does so much good. It improves exclusion zone water, and and I think that I believe that exclusion zone water and inflammation are inextricably linked. They are the same thing. Again, I have a whole lecture on this subject. They um, as we speak, um, I'm doing a study on detoxification of heavy metals, and MSM is very useful for pulling out heavy metals, in particular aluminum, which I'm so excited about because we are all aluminum poisoned, and it's very difficult to get rid of aluminum from the body. So, uh, and we're all sulfur deficient, so it's going to help with detoxification for other reasons. So, yes, MSM fast becoming one of my favorite multitasking tools.

So, let's talk about the final thing, which is if somebody has fixed their diet, gone paleo, ketogenic, which you love, or carnivore, dropping the carbohydrates, then they still have chronic fatigue, they're still their mitochondria is still not fixed. You talk about the big five mitochondrial rescues. What are those and how is it going to help someone? Well, we've we've touched on them, haven't we? It's the it's the it's the paleogenic dart. It's oxygen. Um, uh, it's mitochondrial engine, the thyroid accelerator pedal, and the adrenal gearbox. But what we mustn't forget is we can all have an immunological hole in that energy bucket. Now, the immune system is vastly demanding of energy. How do we know that? You know, if you get flu, you're bedbound. Why? Because your immune system is really busy fighting that flu virus, and you've got nothing left for you to have a life with. So having an immunological hole in your energy bucket will also drive a chronic fatigue syndrome and poor energy delivery mechanisms. Plus an immunological hole, we call ME, myalgic encephalomyelitis. So what causes those immunological holes? Well, a major driver is allergy. This is how I got interested in the whole shooting match. Allergy um um uh drives inflammatory um uh symptoms. Um, and so, and allergy is the great mimic. It can produce any symptom from headache, gut pain, arthritis, muscle pain, etc. The second possibility is autoimmunity, and we're seeing epidemics of that because the immune system is inappropriately switched on by pollutants again. And thirdly, chronic infection. So always think chronic infection um may be a possibility. But the starting point to treat chronic infection is always to improve energy delivery mechanisms because if you give the immune system the energy to fight, it will fight effectively. If you've got rubbish energy delivery mechanisms, then the immune system doesn't have the energy to fight effectively. So life starts to get much more complicated when we've got inflammation there. And you know, the treatment of energy delivery mechanisms is pretty well worked out. You know, I'm fairly confident um of of those mechanisms, and I see many patients who are improved simply by that. Reducing inflammation is much more difficult because the immune system, like our brain, is intelligent and it remembers things. And what that means is once you've switched inflammation on, and it's easy to switch it on, it's much more difficult to switch it off. And you, the approach, again, this is another whole lecture, is put in place all things anti-inflammatory, everything that we know to put in place. Yes, ketogenic diet, vitamin C, iodine, vitamin D, um, um, good quality sleep, you know, be happy and jolly. All these things down inflammation. But once you've turned on immune memory, it's difficult to turn it off. And once you've switched on dairy allergy, it's very difficult to switch it off. So I know I've been dairy allergic all my life. Um, this is how I got interested in the whole um business of ecological medicine in the early 1980s when my daughter had terrible colic, and I had snotty nose and asthma. All cleared up on a um um dairy-free diet. About a year ago, and I've been strict dairy-free since about a year ago, I thought, oh, I think I can get away with a bit of butter. And for some time I did. And now I know I can't. I get, you know, I get aching backside and and hips and thighs as soon as I bring in butter. So I had to. So, you know, so there was a dairy allergy switched on as a child, and I'm still dairy allergic here at the age of whatever I am, 67 or something. Um, um, you know, having been completely dairy-free for about 40 years. So, you know, so that's the tricky bit is is is is is de-educating the immune system to switch off allergy um and autoimmunity. And we don't have any easy tools. We have some tools, but no easy ones.

So you mentioned, so the iodine, the vitamin C, and the MSM, but I've also heard that you mentioned magnesium, CoQ10, niacin, all these different things. Are they helpful as well? Of course. Well, they improve energy delivery mechanisms, and many of those tools multitask. So, for example, Co-enzyme Q10 um is a very good antioxidant, and and that's um so that that's and and therefore anti-inflammatory. So it's anti-inflammatory and good for energy delivery mechanisms. So many of these tools, many of these supplements multitask. They do more than one job. Um, so again, that's why I always say we all need to do it all. You know, people come and see me and they expect me to give you a herb to treat that symptom or a supplement to treat that symptom. And it's not like that. And um, things, you know, as I call it, people who come to me today, the clinical waters are muddy. They've got lots of symptoms and lots of problems. And sometimes I don't know if this is causing that or that is causing this. But we all have to do it all. And then the clinical waters become more clear. They become less muddy. And then it's easier to discern what is causing what. So getting well is a process which starts with the diet and the upper fermenting gut, and then moves on to look at mitochondrial, thyroid, and adrenal function. And in parallel with that, think of those immunological holes in the energy bucket. You know, am I um um you know, am I allergic? Do I have autoimmunity? You know, do I have chronic infection? And then there's always the brain because, as I say, I can't tell the difference between the brain and the immune system. Now, I don't pretend to be an expert in psychological or psychiatric medicine, but you know, if the brain is constantly busy with post-traumatic stress syndrome, with anxiety, with you know, depression, then, as as we've discussed, the brain is enormously demanding of energy, and that too kicks an emotional hole in the energy bucket. So all these have things have to be considered in the round. As I say, I don't pretend to be an expert at that side of things.

So if somebody was to start today to fix their fatigue, tiredness, get in better health, what will be step one, two, and three that they can just do right now? Do the paleo ketogenic diet, maybe the carnivore diet. Sort out the fermenting diet. And we do that with vitamin C and iodine. Why? Vitamin C contact kills all microbes. Iodine contact kills all microbes. Don't take them at the same time. One's a reducing agent, the other's an oxidizing agent. So I recommend we should all slowly build up to about five grams of vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is the cheapest and the best daily. Um, and then iodine, Lugol's iodine, 15%. Start low, build up slowly to about three drops a day. Potential for harm, zero. Potential for good, enormous. And as soon as you sort your upper fermenting gut out, you start to absorb all the nutrients that um uh will then be helpful for mitochondria and much more. Amazing. Why don't people do this? Well, my my patients do. Bless them. Um, and then we go on to more complicated things. Yes. Okay. Well, Dr. Mel, thank you so much. I hope that everyone takes that very simple. I think it's free, like costs like really, it's really, really cheap to fix your own health. Thank you so much for your time, and everyone can fix their health because of your advice. Thank you. If you love this episode with Dr. Myhill, check out this one. It's all about how to fix your gut and fix your microbiome, and where iodine is so important. See you next week.