Dr Robert Silverman
Episode Description:
In this enlightening podcast, the host speaks with Dr. Rob Silverman, a chiropractor who expanded into functional medicine after discovering the profound connection between gut health and overall wellness. Dr. Silverman shares how he initially focused on musculoskeletal issues but found that many patients’ chronic pain and inflammation stemmed from gut problems.
The conversation explores several key topics:
- The critical importance of gut health as “the epicenter of health” with 80% of immune cells located there
- How leaky gut (increased intestinal permeability) allows undigested food particles and pathogens to enter the bloodstream
- The role of zonulin and occludin proteins in regulating gut barrier function
- Why food sensitivities can cause symptoms up to 72 hours after consumption, making them difficult to identify
- The benefits of modern testing over traditional elimination diets for identifying food triggers
- How common substances like glyphosate, processed seed oils, and NSAIDs damage gut barrier integrity
- Practical advice for making better food choices, including eating organic when possible
Dr. Silverman emphasizes the importance of “testing, not guessing” to create personalized treatment protocols, particularly through food sensitivity tests and gut permeability panels that provide crucial baseline information for addressing chronic inflammation and health issues.
To take advantage of the special discount on the Gut Permeability and Food Sensitivity Testing mentioned by Dr Shojai- GO HERE and redeem it while supplies last.
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.
Podcast transcript:
Test- Don’t Guess
Dr Rob Silverman
[00:00:00] When it comes to getting, well, there’s a lot of theory out there, and there are a lot of people talking about a lot of things that they don’t have experience with. That’s why in medicine we call it a practice. Those that are in practice get the feedback from individuals every single day. I. That worked.
That didn’t work. That made me worse. And so when you’ve been in practice for a while, you get humbled. A lot of things sound great. Research comes out, you’re like, oh man, I’m gonna do this for everybody. Everyone’s gonna be better. I’m so good at this. Nope. Reality has something else to say. And so. I love talking to practitioners, people who’ve been in the trenches, people who’ve worked with the squishy things called humans, , and not everything works out the way we anticipate in our practice.
Today we’re gonna talk about gut health with a seasoned pro who’s been seeing lots of people for a very long time, talking about how we look at testing, how we look at getting things right so [00:01:00] that you can get on with your life faster and feel better sooner. Enjoy.
My friend, it is certainly good to see you and I love the fact that you’re on the show hanging out with me. I’m happy to be here. I’m excited to share some knowledge bombs and I really love the give and take. I always have with my esteemed colleague right over here. I. So by, by way of intro, you’ve been at this for a long time, right?
And you’ve been dealing with gut health issues more than most. But you came about it in a circuitous way as a chiropractor originally. Yeah, because it was, inflammation. What’s wrong with this guy’s back? I’d love to get a little backstory about how you followed the breadcrumbs, if you will to the gut.
You’re right there. There’s a backstory I’m gonna take you behind the curtain of my life. So I went to chiropractic school ’cause I have, as you guys can all see, congenital TOIs. So I wanted to fix the world of musculoskeletal ails just like I was fixed by another chiropractor. So we fast forward and again into [00:02:00] practice and interestingly enough, in practice.
People’s lower back pain did not resolve as quick as I was told. So you initially question your chiropractic skill, then you learn something called functional medicine, which has a credo of root cause resolution. And then you realize through, learning from Dr. Jeff Bland and other luminaries in the field of functional medicine, that the gut is the epicenter of your health.
There’s a gut. To lower back tie-in, there’s a gut to everywhere tie-in. It is without question the bullseye of health. So several patients came in that, we’re not getting the resolution. And once you started to test for the gut, treat the gut. Make changes in their diet and their lifestyle. Hey, guess what?
Their lower back pain went away and it totally changed the trajectory in how I practice, and I believe it should change its trajectory on how any kind of practitioner practices, we should all start looking at the gut and again, really hone in on what it can [00:03:00] do. Remember 80% of your immune cells are in your gut through your macro micronutrients are absorbed, and it is the gateway to your health and or your failing health.
Yeah. Amen to that. We. It started doing things around the gut. Look, you go back to Li dond Yuan and traditional Chinese medicine and this stuff goes back. Avicena was talking about the gut. Obviously, all the old Greeks all the old dudes were like, fix the gut. And we’ve come full circle.
But it’s gone beyond grandma’s wisdom, ? The advice of just eat yogurt, I think falls very short. And it has for, a generation now of people thinking that’s the only solution. It’s complicated, right? It’s complicated and a lot of where the rubber hits the road proverbially and probably literally is the gut lining and gut permeability issues where the immune system hits.
So you’d alluded to the fact that the immune system is lining the gut. Let’s talk about the gut barrier and why we now know how important it is and why that’s the [00:04:00] root. Source of a lot of these problems. Really well said about, the root source of a lot of our ailments. The bottom line is the gut is considered, or I should say the digestive tract in the gut actually protects the outside world from the inside world.
So I’m actually gonna move. I don’t usually move on podcasts. Point to your patients right here and says, your gut protects all the stuff going out on here. Getting into your whole body. So what do most patients think? I hate to say it, they think that poop is coming out. That’s not necessarily the case, but the fact is it’s a very evocative idea for the patients.
That aside, remember the gut allows the protection of the outside world from the inside world. It’s a single layer epithelial cell, your gut that has the thickness of a wet paper towel. It has the length of a tennis court, or I should say the surface area of a tennis court. It’s a, that single layer epithelial cell is a one layer wall of your [00:05:00] human sewer.
When you use terms like that, people say how do I keep the sewer intact? Or how do I keep my gut in pristine condition? Because they understand that they don’t want things to get through the gut to get into your bloodstream, and that’s essentially it. The outside world versus the inside world . , it’s hard for folks to visualize, right from router to tooter, what’s inside, what’s outside and what crawls over the castle walls and.
What tears, right? It’s, we have this little barrier, zonulin, occludin and all sorts of things that help things get in and out like gatekeepers. And one of the areas I looked at a lot when I developed insomnia a couple years ago was LPS and how this lipopolysaccharide could jump the wall and set off alarm signals.
In my body that raise arousal and were keeping me up at night. Here I’m a seasoned meditator being like, what the hell is this? And so LPS is now the smoking gun. And you’re looking downstream at pretty much every [00:06:00] chronic disease has some sort of tie in with endotoxemia and LPS. How much of that are you seeing in your practice?
How much of that is first order stuff to deal with before you can fix folks? I’m so happy you mentioned LPS because I think sometimes it’s the forgotten evil. Lipopolysaccharide is an endotoxin, which inherently in the word says that it’s a toxin from inside. LPS is attributed to its expression of damaging the brain because there’s a gut to brain axis. It damages the thyroid. It damages different parts of your joint. testes these ovaries. Believe it or not, the expression of LPS has increased the incidence of cardiovascular disease by three times.
Now, why we’re talking about the ability of LPS to attach to something called toll-like receptor four. Toll-like receptor four stimulates NF kappa B and the NLRP three inflammasome. Inflammation. LPS also stimulates toll-like receptor four and toll-like receptor two, which is your plaqueing [00:07:00] receptor.
So now you’ve got inflammation, you’ve got plaqueing. There’s no surprise that cardiovascular disease increases. I would have to say, and I don’t think I’m going on a limb here that. The resolution of the expression of LPS in the bloodstream may be one of the best finds in functional medicine. In addition to that, LPS is implicated in increased incidences of Alzheimer’s disease since Alzheimer’s disease is truly a gut to brain axis problem.
It’s bidirectional and there’s an autoimmune component to that. I just had an esteemed. Autoimmune doctor rheumatologists come in and we’re talking, he’s about 80 years old, and we were talking about LPS and he said, you know what? I wish I could test for that 20 to 30 years ago ’cause I would’ve been able to make an indelible mark on other people’s health profiles.
That’s just it is you don’t know what you don’t know, and you can’t see what you can’t test, and things have changed a lot. I [00:08:00] remember, I don’t know, sometime around 2018, I started doing content on the microbiome. I was like, oh, the microbiome. Microbiome, revolutionizing medicine, all this stuff that’s coming from genetic expression of these bugs is gonna change everything.
Still true. But , when we first got really excited about this, we started testing the microbiomes on everyone. We’re like, here it is. Let’s just look at what’s going on and what, RNA is expressing and we’ll be able to fix everything. And you could probably attest to this, every single patient off the street was an absolute dumpster fire.
And you’re like, why does everyone have so much dysbiosis? Fast forward a few years. I switched it. I, at first I started doing elimination provocation diets, and then looking 30 days later to see, okay, once I take all this inflammation away, what does it look like? And then we started to get much better with these gut permeability tests, food sensitivity tests, and it was like, wow, we could save six months of agony here.
Get to the answer, help this person. So did you have a similar [00:09:00] experience when it came to early testing versus what you do now? Yeah, without question. I think the early testing was trying to hit a bullseye in the dark without a sniper lens. It was difficult. We knew we had the concepts, as I said, the luminaries in, the father functional medicine, Dr.
Jeff Bland without question set the table for us. But, as we evolve and progress, we have much more accurate testing. Just to turn it back a little bit, it was. Horrific to try and figure out what to do with a patient. It was like guesswork. So now we have the ability to have accurate tests and get to the concept of testing and not guessing.
And I think that being there and being able to be much more pinpoint accurate has really increased outcomes I’ve seen in my practice and with colleagues that have adapted this test to increase the outcomes exponentially. I have an example of a patient that was having a really bad reaction. They said what’d you have last night?
And one [00:10:00] of the things was cherry pie. Okay. So gluten, dairy, first, usual suspects line, those suckers up. And let’s eliminate the gluten in the dairy and let’s see how you feel in 30 days. And a couple weeks after that they come back and they’re all lit up.
I’m like, did you eat gluten and dairy? They’re like, no. What’d you eat? Like a bowl of cherries. I’m like, son of a , you’re allergic to cherries. There you go. And so even when you’re going after the usual suspects it could have just been the cherries, right? And so people have all sorts of weird sensitivities, right?
And it could take months and months to place Sherlock Holmes and trial and error and just eliminate this and add this. And so that’s how we used to have to do it in a lot of ways. Agreed. Agreed. So with those elimination diets were interesting because look at the vastness of the foods and we got the usual suspects.
So for me, everybody’s in gluten-free and dairy-free. I give a few acronyms that I share with everybody before we get into the food sensitivities. GPS, no gluten, no ultra [00:11:00] processed foods. You know why 53% of American adults consume their calories and ultra processed foods? Boom. No bueno. jack lallane once said, if man makes it, I won’t eat it.
Simple diet and S no added sugar, DNA. No dairy. We’re the only species that drinks another species milk. Come on guys, give it a break. Let’s be real. And no nicotine and a no artificial sweeteners. However, when you talk about the idea of food sensitivities, to me, the whole conversation gets real sexy. Here is a real gem about food sensitivities, I believe.
That food sensitivities and one of the main reasons for chronic hidden inflammation and the American population, and the reason is they are IgG mediated, which allows for a 72 hour span from the time to ingestion to symptomology coming out. So how on Wednesday? Thursday, Friday, Saturday, would you know that Saturday have inflammation from Wednesday’s?
Cherries you wouldn’t. It would be impossible. Whereas if you had a [00:12:00] food allergy within an hour, you would know. You may be choking, you may need some benadryls, things of that nature. So I think food sensitivities really allow you to test and not guess, but open up the windows and allow the light into the room.
As opposed to what you knew referred to before, which was, just taking a lot of foods out and then trying to put one in at a time and it’s much more expeditious. So again, I believe in testing and not guessing. You mix that with a leaky gut panel. Now you’ve got your baseline test and you’re testing not guesses.
I’ve said a few times, however, now by adding the leaky gut, you also got those blind spots. You fill them in. And I think that’s critical and it’s exciting in functional medicine now to be really able to ascertain what food creates inflammation, what organism is or organisms are damaging your gut, and to be able to address them individually so you have a personalized and individualized [00:13:00] diet and treatment protocol.
I wanna talk about this tragedy of modern America because this patient right now who you. So aptly alluded to, had cherries four days ago, wakes up on a Saturday, everything’s stiff. It would, it’s almost impossible to have a correlation to be like, it could have been the cherries four days ago. So you’re like, ah, man, I’m getting old.
I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it is. But if you cannot, I attribute the problem that you’re having with the root cause of it, then you go do what everyone else does, which is pop Advil and say I’m just stiff. And so let’s talk about what popping Advil does. You have inflammation from some immunoglobulin mediated issues that are happening at the gut lining that are now setting your system off four days later and four days later, now you’re taking Advil to mask the symptoms.
So let’s kick this can down the road a little bit and talk about what’s happening inside this body and why [00:14:00] this ends up becoming such a major problem. In our healthcare system in our world Advil and nsaid, non-steroid anti-inflammatories do kick the can down the road, especially every leaky gut.
NSAIDs do decrease pain, but they impair healing. I. Nutraceuticals, decrease pain and promote healing. Which do you prefer? Just as a start point. But the NSAIDs break down your gut barrier. They also break down your blood brain barrier, so they’re perpetuating that vicious cycle. So without the healing of the barriers, you’re never gonna get to optimum outcome.
It’s an interesting thing that people go by feel, but, it really brings me to a little bit of a personal story, so I’ve always tested out really good. I did I test my leaky gut, or I should say I test my gut. It’s leaky now three to every three to six months, and my food sensitivities are very limited, though it’s fluid, I.
And I had to get a tooth pulled and I chose to take the antibiotics because, in the risk reward, he said you [00:15:00] could have a bacterial infection in your brain and your heart and I may have lost my mind. So I want to keep what I have intact, and obviously I don’t want to inflame my heart lining.
So I took some antibiotics and now I’ve lost my abs and I began to bloat. Now I’m too stubborn to think there’s anything wrong with me. My energy level went down. I looked differently. My wife said maybe you’re getting old. I speak to a friend of mine, he says, why don’t you take a gut para panel test?
And I did. And it had an increased incidence of zonulin, so my kite junctions were now loose junctions. So I’ve since. Address that, taking out my food sensitivities and I’m starting to get the hardness to my abs back. That’s an aesthetic thing, but my energy level is increased. And I very easily could have attributed to getting old, getting a little ring around the tire, that kind of thing.
And just losing energy and all that kind of stuff. And we know that there’s a change, but it doesn’t, it was a dramatic change. So sometimes things have to happen to the [00:16:00] practitioner and I strongly recommend all practitioners test yourself, see where you are. As my mentor once said, and I have a few good ones.
He said, if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re not allowed to elicit healthcare advice to others. He didn’t work for the AMA, did he? That’s a good one. I like that. I guess not. I can’t tell you how many really out of shape, miserable looking cardiologists I’ve encountered on my path. It’s you don’t run, you don’t.
Like you give this advice and this thing You mentioned this zonulin. This is, yeah. I’m gonna, I’m gonna interrupt you and I apologize for this, but one thing I love about this concept of functional medicine or alternative practitioners is the bulk of them walk the walk to speak exactly to you.
And really to echo what you said, be, when I try to pick on somebody, if they’re a little heavy or stuff like that, there may be a reason for that. Don’t ask me to do something that you won’t do. Amen. Amen. Yeah. And listen, everyone’s [00:17:00] got their challenges, but if you’re not living that lifestyle, you are not coming from a place of authority because you don’t even know what it feels like to feel good.
So the new normal for you is not that normal, it’s just, America’s normal. . Nulin. Alessio Fasano groundbreaking work back in Har Harvard and UMass and, he’s been at this for a while. How is this such a breakthrough in our understanding of gut health, leaky gut permeability and all of that?
I think people, hear this, but I don’t think anyone’s really helped them understand why. That’s such a tasty question. A Hippocrates said about 2,500 years ago, all disease begins in the gut. Alessio about 25 years ago, said, all disease begins in the leaky gut. Clearly they both were right.
So Alessio is, no pun intended, a without question, a breakthrough. So zonulin is a protein enzyme that increases the functional pull of the tight junctions. Now, here we go. Here’s my epithelial cell, here’s my epithelial cell. Together. They make a tight junctions. You refer to them as a gate. [00:18:00] You are correct.
So everybody can see. I can’t see you. My junction is tight. Zonulin causes a functional pull on these tight junctions to allow these tight junctions to become loose, allowing large undigestible food particles, bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens to slip through the gut. The outside world and get into the inside world.
It was a breakthrough that he was able to isolate this protein enzyme because once we found out about zonulin, we found out about Occludin. And Occludin is if we can go back to zonulin pull, occludin is the structural breaking apart of that and or that tight junction. So . Hopefully that was, evocative enough for everybody to see what zonulin does at the junction level. Now, if you wanna get into the inner workings of zonulin, it does raise during the day. So when you have a leaky gut barrier panel test, you should not be [00:19:00] testing just for zonulin. You should be testing for the zonulin antibody.
So if you have a bell, it’s time to ring the bell, and it’s not time to eat. It’s a big takeaway. I’m trying to put a little of my New York humor in there. Let, is there an evolutionary reason, like why zonulin? Why does biology have zonulin? Like why do you even want these barriers pulled apart? I’ve had patients ask me this in the past, right?
And it’s great question. Yeah, it’s appropriate question. So we’d love to hear your answer on this. You know what our immune system is soldiers and soldiers get better when soldiers practice. So during the day, your body’s functioning to practice when something gets past the immune system. To accurately assess it, and that’s the biggest problem.
That inaccurate assessment or the override of pathogens lead us down to immune dysfunction, ultimately systemic inflammation and possibly autoimmunity. So the ability for the immune system to function well is a critical add to our health outcomes. [00:20:00] I like that. And every army has its scouts and yeah.
A lot of the sentinels or the sensing of what’s happening in the world around us happens at the gut level. And I’ve had this explained to me in some ways where it’s you got a sample who’s out, who’s on the other side of the wall to know what’s coming and know what the d the dangers are.
But that is a very limited opening and closing of a gate. Correct. Not open up and let all the, let all the orcs in. So my friend said, it’s like opening the door to the jail, let the visitors out, but keep the inmates in. Same kind of idea. Keep the bad guys in, if you will, and let what’s supposed to get out.
Get out you. And it’s interesting again, that people don’t realize the gates do open somewhat. It’s, but zonulin antibodies prove that as an antibody response. But a high elevation over a duration of time of zonulin isn’t good. ’cause it’s also implying that the gut. Junction is open or leaky. Hence the idea of leaky gut.
How much in your clinical experience have you witnessed [00:21:00] glyphosate, these kind of, these nasty chemicals that have such, wonderful reputations at this point. What are they doing to the, these junctions? What are they doing to gut permeability? Is it not here? Is it somewhere else? What have you seen?
It’s funny you mentioned glyphosate. ’cause without question, it is deleterious to one’s overall gut structural health. Glyphosate, we all know as part of Roundup World Health Organization is called Roundup a Cancer causing chemical glyphosate is an herbicide, interestingly enough. I think that glyphosate, and you could add another one, which we’ll touch upon atrazine, is a major issue.
Glyphosate mimics IBS, which does damage the gut barrier in, in general. And it’s a great reason for us to want to eat organic foods just for the, not expression or exposure to glyphosate. Yeah. So you live in New York, obviously. Accent gives it away. [00:22:00] This is something I’ve noticed you’ve never noticed.
Yeah. Never, ever, never heard it before either. This is something with my folks, right? I know all these, well-to-do people in the health and wellness space and everyone’s, getting food delivery from Whole Foods and eating organic this and organic that. But three nights a week you’re meeting people out for dinner at some place because the chef is cool.
And very few of these places are using organic produce. So how much exposure is too much? ’cause the flip side of that argument is, come on man, live a little. And you know where’s the danger? Where can you cheat a little? And I know that’s case dependent, but what do you advise your patients on?
Again, that’s a leading, intellectually leading question in that what do you do now? Obviously at home, I eat all organic produce and I try and recommend organic places. That’s not the reality of life. And so let’s cut it. So I have this thing called good, better, best. It’s good that you’re eating produce.[00:23:00]
It’s better that you’re eating organic produce. It’s best if you’re eating a hundred percent organic produce. So I always teach my patients and my friends and colleagues alike try and make the best decision that you possibly can. And I think worse than whether it’s organic or non-organic produce because you can wash it and if they clean it, here’s what I do.
I actually, and I know you guys will think I’m nuts, I actually bring a spray and say, Hey, the salad that you’re gonna give me, can you spray this with it? So to clean off all the organic. So that’s a step that may not be reasonable, but the other thing you gotta worry about when you eat out is. Processed seed oils, canola oil, corn oils, and the like.
How many places do you go in? I’m not asking you, but in general, I’m asking you out there in Instagram, webinar world, how many places do you go the way you ask, what do you cook it with? Are you cooking with extra virgin olive oil? Are you cooking it with avocado oil? Are you cooking it with coconut oil?
Are you cooking it with. Process seed oils. ’cause I [00:24:00] think that’s extraordinarily ruinous one’s overall health outcomes and very damaging to the gut lining as well. I think that’s even bigger than the organic and non-organic. What do we know about what the processed seed oils are doing to the gut barrier?
Have we, have you seen this pre and post on tests? What people are what, is it the zonulin that’s going out? What, what breaks? So I shared two acronyms before, but probably my most a. Popular acronym now is IRS, inflammation Reduction Strategies. And in that I say no fried foods because if you fry a food, you have to fry a food with some sort of oil, and it’s typically canola oil.
And the other one is no processed seed oils. And I can tell you that gluten and dairy without question make a mark quickly, but nothing makes the mark. And I will argue this with all the Instagram. Influencers that say, oh, you know what, now processed seed oils, I’ve got data for this, that, and the other thing.
Good. Consume it. [00:25:00] Knock yourself out. Just stop telling my friends and family to do the same. There’s a tremendous change in outcomes of the gut barrier panel, and believe it or not, food sensitivities. ’cause if you have a leaky gut, you have food sensitivities. If you have food sensitivities, you’re gonna have leaky gut.
It is the chicken or the egg. You’ll see a dramatic change if you take out these processed seed oils on your gut barrier. Panel tests and overall gut barrier panel health across all the, so it could be occluded, it could be, it’s just, you don’t know where this person breaks, but you will see all the numbers start to shift.
Gut barrier panel, you’re looking at candida, you’re looking at Zolin, and you’re looking at Occludin, and of course you’re looking at L Diablo, LPS. Yeah. Yeah. That, that’s an inconvenient truth to say the very least. Because our lifestyle has really been built on, going out and socializing around meals and all that.
But, if you can’t trust the food, that’s a very tenuous way to live. Because you don’t know how you’re getting poisoned, how often you’re getting [00:26:00] poisoned, and you know why you’re so damn tired that day. It’s not a lack of caffeine. I I live right outside New York City.
And New York City is without question Restaurant Haven. And I would say less than 5% of the restaurants that are listed are organic or vegan. And that you could also add farm to table and that’s amazing. And Westchester, I live in, which is the first suburb to New York City. I have a list of about six or seven out of a bevy.
Of restaurants. So it’s just not that easy. And I get it. Listen, I like to carry my food. I like to bring the stuff. I was bringing oil into a restaurant, my wife and I, because they were using 51% olive oil and 49% canola oil and calling it olive oil. And that’s because of price. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, that’s a tragedy.
I understand rising costs. I understand everyone’s I can’t believe that [00:27:00] salad costs 35 bucks. Those are real concerns. Yeah, sure. There’s also, there’s just a lot of middlemen in this game. It, there’s no salad that costs 35 bucks at the farmer’s market. And getting involved in, where your right food comes from and getting closer to the source I find to be very useful Food.
Good food is health information, bad food. Is inflammation. Choose wisely. It’s a great investment. There’s no lottery ticket for health. There just isn’t. Jim Rome said, take care of your body. It’s the only place to have to live on and on. And anything you say, I’m echoing without question.
My colleague, my friend. Amen. My padre, without question. Amen. I have all these folks that used to come in, we’d do all this microbiome analysis and be like, oh man, look at this. And now I’ve been using a particular lab that I like a lot and it’s just been working great. We look at gut permeability.
We test the 22 most common food sensitivities. [00:28:00] And for people who you know, are more questionable, we test all 1 77 and the results that come back. Give us a very good starting point. And from there it’s if I suspect sibo Yeah, sure. We’ll send you a breath test. And there’s also, you can always spend more money on tests, right?
The old model in functional medicine, which was so challenging, was, yeah, come in, I’ll throw 12 grand worth of tests at you. We’ll figure out what’s wrong with you. You’ll be broke. But we’ll have a solution, hopefully. That’s right. And now I think everyone’s doing this tiptoe strategy and just getting, incremental data and escalating.
That has proven to be useful in my clinical practice. Just curious how you see that. I whole-heartedly agree with you. I use the 1 76 test myself because I really believe that food are creators of inflammation, like I said earlier. So I always look at things that are baseline and I think a food sensitivity test combined with a leaky gut panel.
And a proper blood serum test are without [00:29:00] question baseline, and it’ll be quite a reveal. And I agree with you. The recommendations 10, 15 years ago for a plethora of tests that were, like you said, 12,000 bucks the patient’s broke. They have no time, and they’re also frustrated. The doctor’s not gonna make any money because.
And it’s not all about the doctor making money, but there’s nothing left in consults and or some supplements and or some food suggestions and the whole thing just, it just literally fell apart. It was like a house of cards. So now with the advent of testing, not guessing, and the use of the 1 76 food inflammation test, adding the leaky gut panel, as I said that’s a baseline because if 80% of your immune cells are in your gut and your gut is the epicenter of your health.
Why wouldn’t you want to test for its permeability, whether it’s pristine or not? And the food, since we know foods are the number one source of toxins, that’s why our gut has 80% of our immune cells. [00:30:00] Why wouldn’t you wanna see which food? Increases inflammation. A food sensitivity test is vastly different than a food allergy test, than a food intolerance test.
A food allergy test, you probably in some instances may not need to take it because you pretty much know I. Because it’s an IgE mediated response and it’s quick. Has anyone ever eaten a heard about not eating a peanut on a flight because the flight attendant says somebody is very allergic to the peanut?
That’s a food allergy. A food intolerance is something like lactose where it’s a digestive enzyme issue. Whereas a food sensitivity test, I believe is also an immune issue, but it’s an IgG mediated response over a duration of time. So I think the key to this testing is a dual pathway test where you’re testing IgG.
I. And you’re also seeing if these antibodies, IgG are stimulating a complement cascade because if they are, they’re stimulating the innate immune system. And now you have a dual [00:31:00] technique, a dual purpose test that’s dramatically increases precipitously, if you will, increases the accuracy of the test. Can you elaborate that on that a little bit more?
So this. This double down on saying, okay, is it IgG or this other access to the immune system getting toggled? I’d love, I’d just love for folks to understand this fully because the implications are actually pretty deep. It’s funny about the IgG, I did not remember and I won’t ask you, we’ll not put you on the spot.
Did you know that an excessive amount of IgG stimulated inflammation? I guess I should have known that ’cause that makes sense. Antibody your sentinel as you used before, they’re quite stealthy, comes out. But if it comes out in abundance. Obviously there’s a very strong pathogen that is not being resolved.
So what do you need to do? You need to turn a temperature up. You need to create inflammation, so the antibodies, IgG, or if you will, IgG three. There’s four IgGs one through four, [00:32:00] IgG three. It’s only 7% of the IgGs are able to stimulate this complement cascade. Which is part of the innate immune system.
It’s an old pathway, and it does so by stimulating a very stable molecule called C3 D. And by doing so and testing for both, you really understand the idea of a production of antibody. Producing inflammation. This food is, should be removed for at least 90 days. So the concept of IgG is interesting and even more so when you think about it, which really speaks to some of the things that we like to analyze.
Anything that produces too many IgGs you may not want to take, be exposed to and or ingest. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. The hard part, again, where the rubber hits the road is not knowing and eating what you want and not realizing what it is that’s making you feel like crap. And I think that again [00:33:00] is, I’ve been, we used to do a lot of elimination, provocation diets and god bless ’em, like whoever, brought that to functional medicine really changed the game because we would see.
Tremendous results with people who would just avoid all the bigs and then start adding them back. And you would see results, but it was a long, arduous path. Compliance is tough. People get annoyed. It’s just frustrating, right? And so now for two, 300 bucks, you could just get all your answers and get your life back online.
It’s really made my job easier, right? As a physician to be like, you know what, here it is. Avoid these four things instead of every damn thing. Yeah. And in 90 days, you’re probably gonna feel better without question. And the elimination diet, as you just alluded to, has been replaced by the food sensitivity test.
Now, interestingly enough, after 90 days, you do have a choice. You can do a reintroduction. Which allows you to reintroduce a food for every three days. And if you do that’s great. It just [00:34:00] takes a period of time. So for instance, if you’ve got 12 food sensitivities, it’s gonna take you 36 days ’cause you can’t mix all the food or you can retest at that juncture.
But the elimination is out in that. You do eliminate it, but it’s based on a test. You do have the option on the reintroduction. I personally test. Because I find it easy and it’s easy because it’s a finger spot. You can send it to somebody’s house. The ability of the finger spot really changes the whole trajectory of the willingness of the patient to take the test.
Yeah, and a finger spot, just so for people who don’t know, what that means is just you poke the tip of the finger and then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, just five drops of blood on a piece of paper. Send it in. It’s done. It’s, I’ve had so many patients over the years freak out because of needle phobia and just, people don’t like the needle.
People don’t like giving blood, and so this is a significantly different deal. Just a couple drops of blood versus going in for the multiple vials. Sometimes that’s necessary. Not to say that we don’t need [00:35:00] those at other junctures, but I’ve found that the compliance with this goes up dramatically.
And also with, we used to do a lot of stool testing. Nobody wants to catch their poop. That’s tough. I agree. I agree stool testing has its place. But again, if we want to have a real moment, which I think everybody’s now in that era that everybody’s real, the compliance to the stool testing is quite low.
Most people don’t want to take a lot of blood or give a lot of blood, but a finger spot like a diabetic, just piercing the thumb. They have no problems with that. I haven’t had one person say that they were afraid to do that, and yet they are afraid of needles. So kumbaya. Yeah, no kidding. And listen, what I like as a front end measure is a high validity deal.
Yeah. And then we find stuff, we fix it, and then it’s okay, man, I think you got sibo, or we gotta dig deeper. It’s a data driven path that then allows you to have a really good reason to say, let’s do this other test if we need it. I just [00:36:00] find that it’s respectful to the patient. And I also find that it’s just it’s incremental compliance that allows for us to be on the same journey instead of just do all this stuff.
’cause I’m the doctor and I know better, right? Like it’s just it. It’s respectful way of doing it. Agreed. If I had a crystal ball or I like to do when I lecture, I call it a look to the future. I think the next test that I would want to have, and I’m looking forward to a accurate test for this would be mold and micotoxins.
We were talking before about mold, so I think that mold may be a hidden reason for leaky gut, and I think down the line when we get a test that both of us will be comfortable with, will be all over it. Like white on rice, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. And for those of you who don’t know the story of mold I have a six part series called homesick home.com.
We’ve looked at this for a long time. It’s everywhere. ’cause guess what? The building materials in America are just paper that feeds mold and the moisture and the crawl spaces. And it’s just a big story. Suffice it to [00:37:00] say it’s everywhere. And if you’re susceptible to it, it’s probably not helping this.
Here. Here, indeed. Yep. Yep. Doc, what a pleasure. I know you have a clinical practice in New York area. Yes. How else can people learn about you, figure out, how to engage with your material more? I know you’re big on Instagram. Big on Instagram, big on Facebook. Got a podcast. But if anybody’s interested in checking me out, it’s Dr.
Robert Silverman. Simple. Amazing. Just go to any social media, you’ll see me. I’ll be trying to smile and we’ll have Doc on sometime too. He’ll be smiling and we’ll put him on the grill. Love it. We won’t cook ’em too deep, but we’ll cook ’em a little bit. Medium rare. Love it. Medium rare. Medium rare.
That’s the temp. Great to see you, my friend. My pleasure. Thanks for having me and everybody. Remember, as Jim Rome said, I said it before, take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live. Boom. Love it.
I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Dr. Silverman’s a great guy. He’s been at this for a very long time, and we see eye to [00:38:00] eye on a lot of things because look, it’s only right if the person got better, it’s only right if their life improved. So that’s where we get humbled, that’s where we learn, that’s where we adapt, and that’s where we get better in practice.
Um, the testing I like, um, is now available to my audience. Uh, you gotta order it through your doctor. And the problem with that is you gotta go spend 3, 4, 5, $700 to see a functional medicine doctor. They order it and then you come back and then they read it for you, and so you’re, you’re 12, $1,500 into getting this answer.
I went to the lab and said, Hey man, can I find a way to scale this, run it under Dr. Pedram over here, and then, uh, have the results come under my roof and have my health coaches review with folks to keep the price down. And so he. Agreed. It’s actually a really, really screaming, uh, hot deal, if you will, uh, for a test you can’t get without a doctor, um, that you could get through Dr.
Me, and, uh, get the results, uh, very quickly. And I’ve seen [00:39:00] incredible results, incredible results with my patients, with my clients, with my audience. I advise you to check it out. Just go to the urban milk.com/podcast. Find this podcast. I’ll put a link in there. Um, it is by far the best pricing you’ll ever see for anything like this.
And I was able to negotiate that on your behalf, so go get it. Enjoy.
www.theurbanmonk.com