Sleep and Endotoxemia
[00:00:00] Are you tired of waking up in the middle of the night tossing and turning, waking up at three in the morning? Wide awake, unable to fall back asleep. It’s more common than you think, and there is a reason for it, but. It’s not a deficiency of sleeping pills. There are real things happening physiologically inside your body that would be leading to this type of behavior.
My name is Dr. Pedram Shojai. I’ve been studying sleep for a very long time. Uh, was a physician, owning a sleep lab and a brain lab. Have seen thousands of cases over the years. It got a lot more interesting when I couldn’t sleep. It all happened after, uh, summer in Europe where I kind of took the, took my foot off the gas and the brakes, actually, I took my foot off the brakes and kept it on the gas, um, and said, you know, gluten, smuin, dairy, whatever, and started eating old things and, um, drinking the wines and having a good time.
And, um, it was great until I got back. Couldn’t sleep. Why, [00:01:00] why is this guy who slept well his whole life suddenly not? Why is this guy who understands sleep medicine better than most and have been around, uh, the block on this suddenly unable to do the thing called sleep without my usual tricks. And so I dug deep in the literature, um, spent a fair amount of time experimenting with it.
And what came . To the forefront of my research was all of this information that’s come, uh, available in the last three years really on endotoxemia. What does that mean? Internal poisoning? I’m not talking about drinking arsenic. I’m not talking about poisoning yourself overtly, what I’m talking about. Is l p s lipopolysaccharides coming off of the wrong bacteria that live in our guts, the wrong bacteria that feed off the junk food and the sugars and the things that we know we shouldn’t be eating.
Uh, the real [00:02:00] interesting piece of all this has kind of shaken out with the butyrates and the l p s and the research on Endo toxemia that has come out saying, look, One thing to eat things that are fattening. It’s one thing that, you know, we eat things that, uh, create inflammation. We, we started following this down the, the road of leaky gut and saying, oh, you’re getting intestinal permeability.
You’re getting autoimmunity and you’re getting, uh, inflammation that’s starting in your gut. We knew this. 10 years ago. But what’s come of this is, you know, it’s the same research we’ve looked at over the years on, uh, probiotics, right? And saying, oh, well, you know, just take a probiotic. It, it doesn’t matter if you take a probiotic if you don’t feed your body.
The fibers that those bacteria eat. So you need to feed your body the spores and then feed your body the fibers that those bacteria thrive on so that in the ecology with the what [00:03:00] those guys poop. Frankly, I. Becomes the, the stuff that we need, right? Um, it helps us conjugate our hormones. It helps us modulate, uh, immunity.
It helps us bring down, um, our immunological kind of tri, uh, you know, hair triggers in that mucin tube barrier where the body and the outside world have interaction. And so we’ve learned that we need prebiotic fibers and things to help those. Bacteria thrive, but the flip side of that is the bacteria that are unwelcome guests.
Uh, they also poop. And what They poop, these lipopolysaccharides, many of them, right? So I’m not gonna get too far into the details, but I’ll always cite my references and put, you know, links to studies is those elements of what are now running rampant. I. In the gut and the mucin two layer, uh, end up sneaking through the permeable membranes and, you know, the broken, uh, the, the broken junctions, what we call [00:04:00] tight junctions in our digestive tract.
And when they get into our system, We start to see very, very ugly downstream effects. One of which is, you know, it’s, it’s called endotoxemia, internal tox toxicity. So the body goes uhoh, I’m under attack. So it starts mounting an immune response to these things kind of crawling over the city walls, if you will.
But on the flip side of that, um, it also, Impacts our liver in a way that we are now starting to understand where it comes into a second pass of the liver. So the first pass of the liver is, you know, the drugs and the, the overt toxin. Second pass is the endotoxins, and our liver is in charge of what’s called our clock genes.
Uh, a lot of our circadian rhythm, the rhythm of our wake sleep cycles happens through the liver. And if you start to burden your liver with , Exotoxins or endotoxins. Suddenly [00:05:00] you have disrupted the circadian rhythm of the body and you’ve disrupted your wake sleep cycles. So waking up at three in the morning, it’s a thing.
And so a lot of people will have this if they’ve had alcohol, right? So it’s, you know, liver toxicity, waking ’em up. A lot of this, a lot of this happens with people who have blood sugar issues, blood sugar, um, spiking and then coming down so that the insulin has to come up and match, and then the cortisol has to compensate for the spike in insulin.
Now you have something that is, uh, stimulatory in your system. And if your cortisol levels get too low, um, you have adrenaline running through your system and you’re not sleeping right, you’re not sleeping with adrenaline in your system. So the essence of sleep science over the last couple decades has really been about c n s central nervous system activation, right?
And how do we regulate that with the GABA pathways, with the serotonin pathways? How do we regulate that with [00:06:00] stuff? To bring you down, to allow you to have sleep. Um, but this recent body of work that is emergent and now starting to really become a tsunami of, of really good studies coming forth, um, are suggesting that this endotoxemia really is the root of
Most of these chronic diseases that we’re seeing, and what happens is this kind of slow cooking fire inside at our intestinal tract lining. Um, is activating her immune systems. We have, you know, anywhere from 50 to 70% of our immune system lining the intestinal tract, the gut associated lymphatic tissue, right?
And from there, as the stuff spills over into the bloodstream, the immune system is primed to attack it because now it’s technically sepsis, right? You’re, you have bacteria in your, in your blood, or you have [00:07:00] fragments or bacterial poop in your blood. Um, But then the liver has to get involved to say, man, I gotta get this out.
And once that happens, I’m starting to see hundreds, if not thousands of cases of people who are, you know, also complaining of not getting enough sleep. So when we start chasing this down, lo and behold, there’s a smoking gun. Look at this, a leaky gut. Look at this. An overburdened liver. Now . Are there other issues?
Are there adrenal issues or downstream hormonal issues? Of course there are, right? Um, but I. You start chasing the hormones, you get incremental progress. You start trying to treat the adrenals, you get incremental, if not marginal progress. At best clinically in my experience, and, you know, I consult with thousands of physicians, um, you know, I’ve been around the block, but you start going after the fire instead of the smoke, and you start treating [00:08:00] the
Intestinal lining. You start repairing the gut. You start replenishing that mucin two barrier, and then you really have a concerted effort to help the livers phase one, phase two, two and a half, three pathways, and clear the liver of the gunk, if you will. That’s backed up. You help the bile move, you help the bowels move, and so you get the liver out of this kind of burdened state.
Then you stop the flow of bad guys coming in, making the liver work so hard from the endotoxins and obviously the exotoxins. You don’t wanna expose yourself to crap in, in a world that’s increasingly toxic, those are the people that get better. Those are the people that start sleeping. Those are the people that.
Fix the solution and aren’t playing whack-a-mole with, you know, I talk Dr. Jones’s sleep tonic over here, and Dr. So-and-so said this, or I’m gonna wear this gadget and I’m gonna, you know, stand on my [00:09:00] head. There’s a lot of downstream tactics that help with central nervous system activation, but if you don’t swim upstream and get to the source of the problem.
You’re wasting time, you’re wasting money, you’re losing sleep, which means you’re losing heartbeats. So that’s my 2 cents on this. Um, I have a longer webinar on this. I’ll put the link in here that, um, you could watch. It’s about an hour, um, that gets a little deeper into it. And, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s a real thing.
And I am adamant about doing the medicine right, and not playing whack-a-mole, because that’s the model that got us into trouble in the first place. And if you really wanna start sleeping, do the things that actually fix your sleep. Don’t go chasing the smoke. Look for the fire.
