The Diary of a CEOVitamin D Expert: The Supplement World Is Giving The WRONG Advice!
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
105 min read · 20,804 words- 0:00 – 2:40
Intro
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
The vitamin world is giving the wrong advice. For instance, if you do not know what you're doing with them, they're just as dangerous as any drug you could put in your mouth. The next thing, that supplementing with vitamin D is not the same as being outdoors because we absorb it through our skin. But what we've been told is, "Don't ever let the sun touch your skin." And another example is when we're deficient in this vitamin, our brain actually forgets how to sleep. And I know that because I'm a neurologist, and I wanted to tell the world about what my patients and I had discovered together about making sleep better. And billions around the world have a sleep problem, but no one's treating it, and the usual sleep treatment is behavioral, like blackout curtains, go to bed at the same time. But that is not something that's helped the people who wind up with me. They've tried all that already, and I've taken care of twenty-eight-year-olds who just had a stroke.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Twenty-eight. Sorry?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Twenty-eight-year-olds. We associate stroke with being old and having diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. No. So then I did a whole bunch of sleep studies because we found some exciting things by accident that turn out to have to do with vitamin deficiencies and deficiencies that have developed from being indoors too much, and we're starting to feel the effects of that, like obesity. But there are no obese squirrels in my backyard. The only obese animals are cats and dogs that we keep inside. And then we found out most of the sleep disorders are really linked to the gut, the microbiome, and we could go into that. But one of the interesting thing I learned was vitamin D is a hormone. There was a mistake made in calling it a vitamin.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Well, I'm very curious to learn about all of this. And also, you've come up with this protocol called The Right Sleep Protocol. Can you walk me through it?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Absolutely. Here's the first part of it. So...
- SBSteven Bartlett
This is super interesting to me. My team give me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe, and some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the Subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that Subscribe button and to double-check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you wanna hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of The Diary of a CEO, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. [upbeat music] Dr. Stasha Gominak. For the people that have just
- 2:40 – 3:42
Why So Many People Are Suddenly Struggling With Sleep
- SBSteven Bartlett
clicked on this conversation because they like the title, they're interested in the subject matter, what are, what are they gonna get from sitting with us and listening to us? How is their life gonna improve?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
A completely unique and new way to look at why they are not sleeping well or why they have medical problems. I hope they will come away with the impression that I wanna find out if my brain chemistry is normal or not normal for sleep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And you were a clinical assistant professor of neurology at Stanford University Hospital, and also you did a neurology residency at Harvard Medical School.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes. I grew up in California. I became a biochemist, and then I wound up being interested in medicine because biochemistry is being applied to humans in medicine. So I became a physician, and then I went into neurology, and I'm a neurologist. And then by accident, somebody insisted that they wanted a sleep study, and this was in two thousand and four now.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So you became-- You were a neurologist, you became a doctor, and then you fell in love with sleep.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- 3:42 – 8:15
Why Healthy Young People Are Waking Up Exhausted With Headaches
- SBSteven Bartlett
How many patients have you worked with on the subject matter of sleep? What's the wide range of symptoms that they were experiencing and problems that they had, just to get a sort of context on the variety and broadness of your experience?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Probably two thousand. Since leaving neurology practice, I started a online business where I became a sleep coach. I'm estimating that I have affected another five to six thousand people, and that's because I have a, a workbook that we're gonna talk about. I have set out a series of steps that you should do, and that those steps are based on brain chemistry-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... not on you do it wrong-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... which is what is all over the Internet. You are just doing it wrong. The usual sleep treatment is behavioral. Blackout curtains, white noise, go to bed at the same time, recognize your bedroom as a quiet place for sleep, et cetera. That is not something that's helped the people who wind up with me. They've tried all that. They've tried everything. So what are the range of symptoms? The first experience was with women who had headache. One of my patients said, "These drugs you're giving me haven't worked. I want a sleep study." She had sleep apnea. She was young and thin. She did not look like a fat, older male with a fat tongue, which is what we were being sold at that time. The people with sleep apnea have a fat tongue. It gets in the a- airway, and they need to wear one of these things over their face at night that blows air up their nose. She put on the CPAP device. She came back two months later. Her headaches were gone. She'd had a daily headache for, like, five years.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So it worked?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes. And I was like, "Well, no. There's no way," because headaches are really a brain stem function problem. I have this whole construct in my mind, and it's a biochemical problem. So I think maybe it's allowing her to stay in deep sleep longer, and she's making the chemicals that I'm focusing on that allow her head pain switch to go into the off position, which is where it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be off until somebody hits you in the head, and then it turns on. Hers is just turning on spontaneously all the time. So then I did a whole bunch of sleep studies in young, healthy females who had daily headache. They would frequently say something like, "I wake up at 3:00 AM and I can't go back to sleep." "I wake up at 3:00 AM and my sleep is lighter after that." "I wake up at 3:00 AM with a headache." And then I have, let's say as an example, a little Mexican lady who comes in from Northern Mexico. She's now living in Texas with her kids. She had never had headaches until she moved up and she's living with one of her grown kids, and she's coming to see me for headaches. We happened to have a, a beach house in Mexico for a period of about 14 years. So I would go down there and I would think, "What's gonna happen to these people that have sleep apnoea who don't have any electricity?" And they're living in palapas that are made of sticks with a thatched roof. They're still doing the same thing that they were doing 2,000, 4,000 years ago, and you can't tell if the little viejecitos, the little old people, are 60 years old or 80. They might be 90. They're not fat. They're not tired. They're great-grandfathers. I begin to realize this is about living outside. Humans were meant to live outdoors like every other animal. We have decided that we are special, but we're not special. We're, our biochemistry is like every other animal. Okay, so these two, these inputs are coming all at the same time, and I'm puzzling over these sleep studies. That first gal had sleep apnoea. But most of the women that I sent for those studies, they did not have sleep apnoea, or it'd come back, on the front page it would say, "No significant apnoea." There was a significant score, how many times you stop breathing during the night. And then the next part is, what do they have that's wrong with them? That came about a year and a half later when the pulmonologist says, "I don't know if you've noticed this, but your population has a really unusual finding." Most of them have delayed rapid eye movement sleep, no rapid eye movement sleep, or they have rapid eye movement sleep apnoea, meaning they only stop breathing in rapid eye movement sleep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What's rapid eye movement
- 8:15 – 15:35
How Your Brain Secretly Controls Every Stage Of Sleep
- SBSteven Bartlett
sleep?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
So this is called a hypnogram, and on this bottom axis is time. On this axis is a representation of what phase of sleep you are in. And it turns out that when we enter sleep, we go through what we call two lighter stages of sleep. The first phase that we enter is here, it's wake. Couple times this person woke. May not even be aware that they woke up, went back to sleep. But we enter sleep in light st- sleep one and light sleep two. These are called that because when the sleep experts started studying this in 1970, that's relatively recently, you could easily awaken someone out of these phases. Okay? And it has a certain brainwave pattern generates. And then they go into a phase that's called deep sleep or slow wave sleep. Everyone who has a sleep tracker device, which is very common these days, is now becoming familiar with, "I have this much deep sleep. I have this much rapid eye movement sleep." Deep sleep is really in the sleep industry called slow wave sleep because the brainwaves are these slow, big pattern. We always go through a couple of light sleep phases, and then we go into rapid eye movement sleep, and then we go through light sleep phases, and then we go to deep sleep. Now, the pivotal question that I asked the pulmonologist, "Why would my patient have stopped breathing?" That's what apnoea means. "Why would they stop breathing only in REM sleep? I thought this was an anatomic problem." And he said, "Well, we get the most paralyzed of all in REM sleep." And I went, "Paralyzed? Holy crap. Do you mean I'm, I'm paralyzed while I'm in bed? What if I stop breathing? What if my brain doesn't ever not, like, unparalyze me? That's terrifying." And it turns out every animal, including fruit flies, who we're doing sleep studies on, get paralyzed in sleep. We get the most paralyzed in rapid eye movement sleep. When this part needs to get repaired, it gets paralyzed too. That means you have to have an anatomy that stays where the tube that you're trying to breathe through stays open while you are unconscious and trying to repair everything in this area. And I want to pull out the brain to let you know where this is happening and why it's so important. This part that's white is called the brain stem. This part is actually fully in control when you are asleep. There's a little switch up here that goes, "Boop. Steven, you're not conscious anymore." The brain is still extremely active. In fact, the waveforms that they record from up here look the same in rapid eye movement sleep as they do in wake, suggesting that all sorts of things are happening, like you wake up abruptly 'cause some, a noise happens, and you're in the middle of a dream. You're traveling, you're flying, you've, you've got huge colors going on. Your brain is extremely active during this time, but you're not aware of it, and this part right here, it is running your heart rate, your blood pressure. It has paralyzed you. This is where the autonomic nervous system comes in. The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are centered right here. They are meant to be the automatic driver of all the processes that you use during the day, and they run sleep. This process that we're talking about here is fully run by the brain stem
- SBSteven Bartlett
So the sort of sleep-wake cycles?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Exactly. The sympathetic is called fight-flight. The other one, the parasympathetic, is called rest and digest. It also is experienced as a state of calm. Okay? It is also what happens when we have an orgasm.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Hmm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
There are things that are happening in the brain stem that feed back to, why do they fall asleep? Why do the guys fall asleep on top of her? Probably because it actually might increase the likelihood of fertilization. Maybe it has a survival risk. These are all unconscious things that we don't-- we aren't trained to connect together, but once you get into the parasympathetic nervous system, it turns out that the parasympathetic and the sympathetic are also very involved in what's happening here. And the basic idea is the first half of the night, and you'll see that we've also broken it into one, two, three, four, five cycles, usually of about an hour and a half. The first half of the night till about three AM is mostly run by the sympathetic side.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Which is the fight or flight side.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes. So when you're well-balanced and you have a completely normally operating brain stem, you will have a couple of branches of REM sleep. But my patients did not have any REM sleep at all in the first half of the night, and in fact, they might have been lucky to a little, have a little half an hour here between four thirty and five, if at all. The second half of the night from three AM to seven AM is run by the parasympathetic side. That means if you look at it in a certain way, you could say, "Well, wait. Maybe they've lost the parasympathetic driver for the second half of their night." Seeing all these sleep studies that did not have this phase of sleep, they're actually one-sixth of the amount of REM sleep they should have. And as I go back through all the sleep studies, I realize, well, wait. Don't we kind of do mood in REM sleep?
- SBSteven Bartlett
What do you mean do we, we do mood?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
When trying to link the comments that my patients have made and the drugs that I give them, I realize I've been giving out antidepressants to this group of young, healthy women with headaches because they frequently say, "I'm in a terrible mood." So they can't remember. Isn't there a body of literature about memory being made permanent during REM? Yes. Memory is linked and mood is linked. If I'm allowed to go back to sleep, if I have the proper brain chemistry to allow me to fall back into REM sleep, I will wake in a better mood. Those are the sorts of things that the patients will tell you if you ask about it and if they're able to fall back to sleep. Because my group did not have sleep apnea and could not wear CPAP masks, what's wrong with them? Why aren't they in this phase of sleep? This is a neurology problem. This is not a pulmonology. This is not about breathing. This is about this brain stem and what is the chemistry of this. So then I go to the anatomy, and then I find out what are the cells in this brain stem area that make us paralyzed.
- 15:35 – 21:02
How Vitamin D Could Be The Missing Piece For Better Sleep
- SBSteven Bartlett
Just to make sure I'm with you, you're, you're asking that question because you figured out that the women who are struggling with sleep and getting headaches have less of this REM sleep, which is associated with being paralyzed. So the question you've then asked is, what are the chemicals that help us become paralyzed?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
What are the cells that take us into these? What, what is the chemistry of that since I'm so focused on biochemistry? There's actually a deficiency in a neurotransmitter that our move indoors means that we've lost a neurotransmitter that we must have to be normal humans. And the reason why they don't know it is because there are no drugs that duplicate acetylcholine. There are no drugs. But ultimately, what we found out together was that vitamin D makes the enzyme or the protein that makes a certain reaction happen that makes acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter, the chemical that the autonomic parasympathetic side uses. We hear all the time about epinephrine and norepinephrine or adrenaline and noradrenaline. That's what happens when somebody rear-ends you. Your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up. That's all dominant here. If you're wearing a sleep tracker, you'll, you'll see that there's a measure of what's called heart rate variability that goes up as the parasympathetic becomes dominant. So-
- SBSteven Bartlett
As the rest, the rest and digest.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Exactly.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
So all of the messages that we have to increase the heart rate or decrease the heart rate or to have a bowel movement or be constipated or to digest our food, those are all eventually run by a chemical, and our body and our brain use these chemicals to send messages. This is actually a chemical deficiency state that happens when you move indoors. Sunscreen, computers, and air conditioning all started in the nineteen eighties. And the reason why it's not as evident to you as it is to me is that I was alive before the nineteen eighties. There were two kids in my class of three hundred that were overweight. They didn't go on diets. They didn't have any trouble sleeping. They weren't on antidepressants. The things that weren't common when I was a teenager that are common now are striking for those of us who are this age because we know it wasn't like that. What we've been told is it's toxins in the food. It's that we aren't doing it right. I don't think those are things-- when you say I'm not doing it right, then you should be able to tell me how to do it right. And that's what a lot of these podcasts are about. How do I change what I do so I can feel rested and be at the peak performance of my life? That interests a lot of people. I would claim that there's a deficiency state in the background that you can actually fix, and you can fix it, but it's through vitamins. And the, our ideas about vitamins are wrong, completely wrong. We've been taught that vitamins are not important or vitamins are very important, but they're easy to use. They'll never hurt us. Uh, you just take a certain, like, who's your recommendation? What's the vitamin D recommendation dose that this guy's giving out? We've been told things that are actually not true, and medicine hasn't taken responsibility for the fact that this is the, the core of biochemistry. It was done by physicians. These original research articles in the '40s and '50s that the word vitamin was used was done by medical experts. It's unfortunately been given to the government to give recommendations. It should never be in the hands of the government. The government doesn't know anything about our biochemistry. So the supplement industry at the moment is a mess, and I say that only because I have seen dramatic things happen to my patients that are not what I expected, and vitamins are a form of biohacking. They're just as dangerous as any drug you can put in your mouth. If you do not know what you're doing with them, bad things will happen to you, and unfortunately, frequently those bad things are the same thing you had before you took the vitamin. Therefore, you should pay attention to what you're feeling. So the pathway that I've built that's on my website now has a, a second half that's a journal. You have to keep notes of what's happening to you.
- SBSteven Bartlett
How many people are, are experiencing sleep problems in your point of view?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Billions. It's around the world. There are sleep study centers in every country that has electricity. In Germany, in Japan, in Brazil, and they're all publishing how abnormal the studies are. This is not what it looks like. They rarely send out an article saying that we have less REM because they don't have an answer for why. I just happen to be the only one currently on the internet that has a different way of looking at it.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Well, I'm very curious to learn about all of this. I've never heard someone say to me before that vitamins are linked to sleep issues.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Absolutely.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Um, it's typically, you know, put on the sleep mask and close the blinds and make sure-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yeah, yeah, yeah
- SBSteven Bartlett
... it's cold in the room. So this is incredibly
- 21:02 – 25:16
Are Sleep Chronotypes Actually Real Or Just A Myth?
- SBSteven Bartlett
interesting to me.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Let me add one more thing so I don't forget. M- you and Matt Walker talked about chronotypes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
There are many dogmatic statements that are being made about genetics and sleep that are not necessarily wrong, but they're also not necessarily right. And I had the same training that you, that you get from Matt Walker. He's doing animal training. We say dogmatic things based on certain studies that we do, and then my patients don't behave that way. My patients turn out to-- You know, this person has been working-- To, to take this to an extreme, so the chronotype story is you're either an early bird or a night owl, and you had shared that you're a night owl and that your girlfriend is an early bird, okay? And what is being taught is that that is your genetic makeup. Although there are genetic mutations that lead to certain timing of sleep, it turns out everybody I was doing this vitamin stuff wi-with would revert back to fall asleep at ten and wake up at six, even the people who were working nights their whole life. This woman that I'm seeing who is on disability now because she got a terrible disease that I believe is because she worked nights. When she is at home on disability for several years, and I'm still caring for her for that disease, she's still sleeping during the day. Well, why would she sleep during the day? And now I have a whole run of patients who say, "I guess it's because I always work nights." It turns out that humans really can't work nights if they have normal brain chemistry. Why? Because we're day hunters. We are supposed to be asleep in the night, and that is our biochemistry. There are lots of animals that are designed to be awake at night. Owls, that's why they use that as a symbol. And if you do the right thing with their chemistry and if you insist they spend more time outside, then they actually revert to falling asleep at 10:00 p.m. and waking up at 6:00 a.m. It's very difficult to operate, unless you're international like you are, to be falling asleep. There are people who fall asleep at 4:00 a.m. and wake up at noon. That is a very difficult problem to operate within the normal population because the rest of the world doesn't operate that way. And when you think about it a little bit, we actually have certain standards on when we start work and when we end work, and that's the same all over the globe. So there were things that happened to me that surprised me, and they became consistent, okay? And those are some of the things that we're gonna talk about, and that's what made me think, "You know, this is around the world," and it happened at a specific time. There are many diseases that started to be reported in the middle '80s. You guys aren't aware of it because you think it's normal now, but ADD, ADHD, depression, things that are affecting chil- childhood development, which we could discuss at a different time, fatty liver, certain things like, oh, increase in diabetes. The things that were diseases that had been described, they're all-- Some of them are old diseases that have increased in incidence, but some of them for the first time, fatty liver was first described, non-alcoholic fatty liver, first described in the '80s. ADHD is similar. So during the time that I don't know why we have this epidemic, I'm still thinking toxins because that's what we've been told. Pesticides, glyphosate. And then we get into the area of vitamin D, and how did I find out about the vitamin D? Why was I sort of forced against my will to step into the vitamin D politics, which is a horrible morass?
- SBSteven Bartlett
There should be a button just down below here, and if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know, and according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much.
- 25:16 – 52:40
How Can You Prove Vitamin D Deficiency Causes Disease?
- SBSteven Bartlett
So explain to me, your, your assertion is that vitamin D is fundamentally linked to a lot of the sleep disorders and deficiencies that we see. How, how can you prove that to me?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
I think I would prefer to give you these two examples.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Because the people who are listening, these are at the two extremes, but it'll cover a lot of the people that are listening.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
The first is, let, let's call her Madeline.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Madeline.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
She's thirty-two years old. She's a redhead. That turns out to be important. She's a hundred pounds overweight. She just had her first pregnancy three years ago, and she had been told that because she had endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, that she would never get pregnant. But she got pregnant. She's very happy about that. She had, uh, gestational diabetes, which means she had diabetes during the time that she was pregnant with her son. And now she is pretty much a wreck. She has daily headache, which is why she's seeing me. She's on about nine drugs. She has several kinds of pain. She has a terrible pain down the front of her leg that she's been told is endometriosis growing on one of her nerves. She has terrible burning in her feet. She has terrible reflux. She poops once a week. She feels like she has to get up and go to the bathroom several times a night. She thinks that's why her sleep is so interrupted. So I'm treating her for her daily headaches and her pain, and then I start to think about sleep. And because we've been trained that fat people are fat because they're fat slobs, because they eat wrong, because they don't exercise, it's their own fault. I don't even think about the fact that s- many of these things might have a common source, and that she's been tortured by this her whole life. So I send her for a sleep study. She gets on CPAP. Over the time she's on CPAP, she gets a little bit better. Her sleep is better. She feels better. And then I stumble into vitamin D, okay? Now, we're gonna set that as an example of the most horrible set of things you could have, perhaps. And another example, and we're gonna watch what happens to these two women over time. The second one we'll call Natalie. And Natalie is tall, statuesque. She's a triathlete. She is also seeing me for daily headache. She grew up in a family that is of Italian origin. She is dark tan. She swims. She's athletic. She's outside all the time in the summer. Five years ago, she had her first child, her daughter. She did well, no problems with her sleep. Two years ago, she has her son, and since her son was born, she has not been able to go back to sleep. Even when her son goes back to sleep, she can't. She feels tired. She has postpartum depression. She had gestational diabetes. Like, she's doing everything perfectly. She knows everything there is to know. She's done paleo and keto. She is very well informed by the things that doctors tell her to do. And now her sleep is also abnormal, and she had a few headaches in high school, but now she has daily headache too. So there's a five-year span here where I'm doing CPAP masks and sleeping pills, and those are some of the stories. And it's not just limited to women, but I especially want to point out that women are more affected because they have the babies. So the next thing that happens is five years into it, I've got this beautiful eighteen-year-old who's about to go to college. She comes to see me for daily headache. She has a sleep study that shows none of these phases of deep sleep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So she's having no deep sleep?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
No deep sleep. And every fifteen minutes or so, my interpretation is her brain is trying to get into these-- one of these deep sleep phases, and she wakes up to light sleep again. So every time the brain tries to do this, it breaks to light sleep, light sleep, light sleep, light sleep. She thinks that she's asleep the whole night. This shows that she's asleep the whole night. But her sleep study over my five years of experience is horrifying because it's not just, oh, she's missing a little REM. She has no deep sleep at all. This is a brain stem disorder of chemistry that's going to mean she might meet me ten years from now with a stroke. I've taken care of twenty-eight-year-olds who just had a stroke.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Twenty-eight, sorry?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Twenty-eight-year-olds. We associate stroke with being old and having diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. That means I'm looking at this, and for the very first time, I have actually started to see the diseases that my neurology patients come in with and their relationship to sleep. By the end of the five years, I'm doing sleep studies on anybody who will let me. So I'm doing little kids, I'm doing moms, I'm doing dads, I'm doing every single neurologic illness that comes in. They're all abnormal, all of them. This implies that the reason why you get a disease is because your sleep is not restorative. That implies that I should think about the body as Golly, I know people who live to be 75 years old and don't have a doctor. They were my grandparents, and then they started to get medical problems about age 75, and then they died at 85. Why aren't we looking at it that way? Why aren't we saying, "Oh, this means your repair system that's designed to completely repair everything in your body every night," and you talked with, um, Tara Swart about glymphatic drainage, these things that happen while we're sleeping. It is what makes us last. Like, we're not made of Teflon. We're made of these biologic materials, and they repair themselves every night. That's a miracle.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
If you view it through that lens, then you start to question, why is medicine doing what it is? I'm trained to ask questions for the thing the person walks in for, let's say burning in the feet.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
And I'm trained to make a little list of the diseases that have resulted in that and then give a drug for it, and if we don't find a drug that reverses it, which we haven't for burning, but I'm gonna tell you why, then we give a drug that numbs the pain a little bit.
- SBSteven Bartlett
We just kind of plaster it over cracks.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
We're putting Band-Aids on these things instead of saying, "Well, what do you think led to this?"
- SBSteven Bartlett
And this glymphatic drainage point I think is a really important one because wh- when I understood this glymphatic drainage idea, it had a profound impact on my relationship with sleep, I would argue more so than anything else. There's actually a colleague of mine who's currently sat out there, right? And I have an emoji that I send to her. She's called Georgia Gibson. I have an em- She, she likes to work very hard, and I send her this particular emoji of this, this s- I can't even remember. She told me what the cartoon was, but it's these little fish that come out and clean the big whale.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What's, what's that called?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
I don't remember, but I know what you're talking about.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay, I'll put it on the screen. It's from, like, a movie, so everyone in the comments is probably gonna know what I'm talking about. But I send her this emoji just to remind her that she needs to sleep 'cause, like, she needs to wash her brain. That's what I say. Sh- I say to her, "You need to wash your brain," which means go to bed. When you go to sleep at night, these cleaners, you can wa- you know, again, again, I'm, I'm animating this in a way that's not scientifically accurate, but these cleaners come out and clean up your brain, and they wash it all, and they clean it, and they scrub it, and they make it all back to normal again. So if you're not sleeping, then you're gonna get some kind of buildup, a crack, and that could lead to disease or, you know, other th- worse things down, down the line.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes. Uh, that, that's a perfect description of it, actually, and that's about the level of what we know. So the 18-year-old with no deep sleep, she comes back and say, "Hey, this drug you gave me for my headaches made my headaches better, but I'm so tired." And I'm looking at her sleep study going, "Holy crap. No wonder she's tired." Okay? This is really, really bad, and this is invisible, absolutely invisible to the rest of the physicians 'cause she looks perfect. So I do a B12 level and a thyroid test because I have no idea what to do, and the B12 is profoundly low, low enough that it shows up as abnormal and a little red, okay? Now, the, the weird part about this is I've never done a B12 level in a headache patient since I've been doing headaches as a part of neurology, which is a large part of neurology. I then start to give B12 recommendations, and I do B12 blood tests on all the patients who I have in my little stable of I've done these sleep studies in them. They still are not sleeping well unless the sleeping pill works. So for about a month, I'm doing B12 tests, and then one of my patients says to me, "My doctor said my diamond D was low. She gave me vitamin D, and my wrist pain went away." And I had no clue, and I thought, "You know, I'm just doing blood tests anyway," which I never did in my headache patients. "I'm just gonna throw that in." I was completely naive, and because I was naive, I was not afraid to do this, but I did vitamin D levels and B12 levels in a group of about 500 patients between September and December of 2009. And I gave you the background because I had all these thoughts buzzing around in my head. What are we looking for? We're looking b- for something that c- controls the brain stem. Now, they're going from August or September to December. That's in the fall. So if you're gonna make D in the summer, which is when we're supposed to make it 'cause we're out in the sun, that's all I knew about D is you make it from the sun. It's about bones. They were all low. All of them are low. Two of these guys that are on CPAP come back. They both have headaches. They both say the same thing to me in the same week. "You know, I've been wearing this CPAP mask for a whole year. My headaches hadn't gone away. But that little note you sent me last time I was in here when you did my vitamin D level and you told me to get vitamin D, I took that for about a month. My sleep got better, and my headaches went away." Now, I happen to know that all the Ds were low. But D's about bone. Why would it have anything to do with sleep? So I go to the PubMed. That's my resource now. I hang out with PubMed all the time.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Which is?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
That's where you register all your articles that we publish. 2009, I put in two search terms, vitamin D and sleep, and there are no hits. And then I put in vitamin D and the brain, and I wind up going to articles by a guy named Walter Stumpf, S-T-U-M-P-F, who's been writing about vitamin D for 30 years, who has actually published that there are vitamin D receptors in this little stripe along the back of the brain stem that paralyzes us. Like, he knows the name of this nucleus. He has shown articles where the vitamin D receptors are in this nucleus that paralyzes us and in the nuclei that are the clock nuclei that determine what time it is, what time we go to sleep, when we make these transitions. Uh, the brain always knows exactly what time it is. Those areas have vitamin D receptors That means vitamin D is doing something. That means I'm very interested in thinking if this vitamin D is low, like if they say thirty to one hundred is normal, and my patients with sleep disorders and neurologic problems have vitamin D levels in the low thirties and below, is there a vitamin D level, not a dose, but a brain or a blood level that I can measure that might make them sleep better? That would be phenomenal. Should we go down this vitamin D road? I know nothing about it. I start sending people for vitamin D levels and giving them vitamin D, and I start reading. Walter Stumpf has already put together a beautiful belief system around vitamin D as the hibernation hormone. It allows animals to adapt their body to tolerate winter when there's no food. It tells their body to do things, like the thyroid hormone lowers the metabolic rate of all the cells in the body. The weird part is, this is written about beautifully by Walter Stumpf, and because he has a whole belief system that tells what you should expect, he's also published many articles. The first article's in 1982 about brain stem. He publishes articles about postpartum depression, about infertility, about obesity. He's telling us what epidemics are gonna happen, but it's before it happens, because the sunscreen's coming out in '85 and the middle of the air conditioning computer. And when I'm talking about this during COVID, it becomes much more exaggerated, okay? COVID has brought us all indoors, and we're starting to feel the effects of that even more exaggerated. So Walter has this idea set. I call him up. Luckily, he's retired, and he takes my phone call. And I say, "Hey, you don't know me, but I'm this clinician in Texas, and I have this clinical observation that I've done all these sleep studies on people. Their brain that should be sending them through these particular steps is not. You have shown that there are vitamin D receptors all over the nuclei that should be running this. Has anybody written about sleep and vitamin D?" And he says, "No, but it makes perfect sense. It's the hibernation hormone. What else would you do? You sleep longer." And it turns out that when our D goes very low, our brain actually forgets how to sleep. That's the easiest way to describe it. That gal that I showed you, she had not only vitamin D deficiency as the primary deficiency, and with secondary deficiency we're gonna talk about, but your, your brain just becomes completely scattered in what it's supposed to do because the, the D is doing a specific thing. It took me a while to figure out. There are articles that actually took Walter's articles and said, "Hey, there are these D receptors." What hormones do that's unique is the hormone goes inside the nucleus of the cell, and the nucleus has the DNA, and it binds the DNA, and it has a special vitamin D receptor. That's what Walter was measuring. When it hits that receptor, there's a specific protein that that DNA expresses. That means that little piece of DNA comes out, it makes this protein. The protein that it makes is an enzyme that makes acetylcholine. So that means I can trace through the scientific literature all the way from the receptor to the articles that use that, that show that it was an, an enzyme called choline acetyltransferase. Now, the next part is really important because what I want out of this is that Madeline and Natalie both get better, okay? This, this biochemistry is my thrill, but what the listener wants is, how do I get better? Now, since I started this, and the first time I started giving vitamin D was in 2010, s- this is now sixteen years later. Is vitamin D any better understood or given out? No. The science is phenomenal. The recommendations for the doctors don't go there. The Endocrine Society are supposed to be the experts in hormones. D is a hormone.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I think that's an important point, which is a lot of people think of vitamin D as some kind of, well, we think of it as a vitamin-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes
- SBSteven Bartlett
... but you're telling me it's, it's a hormone.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
It's the most bizarre thing I've ever run into in medicine. It's really bizarre.
- 52:40 – 57:15
What Happened When I Started Treating Patients With Vitamin D
- SBSteven Bartlett
I'm very curious about Madeline and Natalie still.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Great. Okay.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What happened to Madeline and Natalie?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Okay. For two years, I'm talking to H- Walter on the phone, and I start giving vitamin D to my, my patients, and I learn that every single person needs a unique amount. Very scary. That means everybody else is saying, "Oh, take five thousand, take ten thousand, take twenty thousand." I take a hundred thousand once a month, okay? And I find out also that if you get past about a level of sixty, that's when they come back and say, "You know what? My sleep is better." Now, importantly, I still was operating under the th- false belief that there's only one variable, okay? I came up in medicine using drugs. That means you match the drug to the complaint. "Oh, that one didn't work," and then we do this one, and then we do this one, okay? I'm ashamed that I looked at it that way, but that was my training, so I thought vitamin D was gonna fix everything. Within the next six months, my patients start to come back and say horrible things like, "My joints ache all over, and my doctor's about to send me to the rheumatologist who does autoimmune diseases."
- SBSteven Bartlett
Like arthritis.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Exactly. Then the next person comes in and says, "I've got this terrible burning in my hands and feet." And another woman comes in the same month with burning in her hands and feet. Two women, same month, they have nothing in common except they both have headaches, and they've been doing vitamin D with me for two years. And they say-- they wanna know, "Is this related to that vitamin D that I've been taking with you?" And now I'm very freaked out because I'm afraid that what I've been doing, even though their sleep is better and we're all happy about that, headaches were better, now they're a little worse again, is I've put them in a situation where they are now using more of whatever these building blocks are, and I've, I've actually forced them into another deficiency state. I'm making them make more repairs, and now they're deficient in something else, and I don't know what. Now, a patient walks in with a book. This is why I'm telling you that my patients are the ones that taught me all this stuff, and I'm telling you these embarrassing stories because they come in and they say, "Did you do this to me?" That's very uncomfortable. And I don't know, but I feel a commitment that I better find out. And a woman walks in with a book that's called The Pain-Free Promise of Pantothenic Acid. God forbid, it's another vitamin. So I happen to have developed, over the same time period, this weird buttock pain. I can't sit down to talk to my patients at the end of the day because my butt hurts. So I feel like I have the same thing. So I read this book. It says pantothenic acid is a chemical that makes this thing called coenzyme A. Coenzyme A is responsible for making cortisol. And I think, "I don't think that's causing this burning, but this is something I need to know about." And cortisol is big in sleep. We talk about cortisol all the time, the timing of it, and it's huge in inflammation. I go to the vitamin store, I find pantothenic acid. The book says four hundred milligrams is the right dose. So I pick up the four hundred milligrams, and I go to the B complex. I find something called B which means there's, each one has got a hundred milligrams or a hundred micrograms. I go home with these two things, I start taking them, and I give recommendations to the, anyone who comes in in that one week where I have a sleep study, they have a new complaint, I give a recommendation of B and B What the book did was it sent me to the references. The articles that she references are from the 1950s in this creepy lab next to the Iowa State Prison, where they're doing these creepy experiments on prisoners before it becomes illegal. They published this article saying, "If you block pantothenic acid for two weeks, you see four things. They can't sleep, they have belly complaints, bloating, and all sorts of things. They have a funny puppet-like gait, and they have burning in their hands and feet." And I go, "This is wonderful." So that was one of the motivations. So the cortisol link to pain and the burning in the hands and feet. Now I've got it in my head that I've made them use more of the B vitamins.
- 57:15 – 1:00:46
Does Vitamin D Deplete Your Body's B Vitamins?
- SBSteven Bartlett
So let's just pause there. So you're saying that by asking your patients to take more vitamin D, you're saying that the body has also started to use more B vitamins, which means that by taking more vitamin D, they're now deficient in B vitamins?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And so when you use vitamin D, you also use more B vitamins.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
There's another point that I'm about to make-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... but you summarized it perfectly.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
So the next question would be, okay, I'm taking four hundred milligrams because that's what it says in the book, and that's the only dose that was on the shelf in the vitamin store. I get to the end of the week, and I realize I have restless legs, and my restless legs has been much worse this week. This is probably too big a dose, and I stop the four hundred milligrams, and everything goes away. My butt pain goes away, like, in a day.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Four hundred milligrams of?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
B .
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
So pantothenic acid is called B . All the patients who come back say, "Were you trying to kill me? This four hundred milligrams here, I got so agitated, I stopped it after two days. I felt like I was crawling out of my skin, and I couldn't sleep at all." If you block B , you get insomnia. That means it has power in sleep. D has power in sleep. But it turns out if it has power in sleep, your body has a very specific amount that it wants. If you give it too much, it's not happy. If you give it too little, it's not happy. And it turns out that instead of giving you one thing when it's low and another thing when it's high, which is what I would have anticipated, it goes back to the same thing. When it's not happy, it just stops sleeping. Now, a couple of them come back and say, "You know, I stopped the four hundred milligrams because I was so agitated I couldn't sleep at all, but I stayed on B . I feel great. My sleep is perfect. My pain is gone." And I said, "That's what happened to me." It's just, like, too weird. This chemical is doing something, and it's acting-- What I would say to my patients is, "Be very careful with this because I don't really know what dose you'll need. If it's too much, it'll act like caffeine. It'll keep you up at night, okay?" Then the next thing that happens is a gal comes in and says, "You know, you gave me that B , and I s- I ached all over. I would get up in the morning, and I'd go, 'Oh, oh, oh, ah, ah, ah." And she said, "You know, I broke it in half, and I'm taking that, and I feel great." What you'll see here is B , which is fifty milligrams of each, but all eight Bs, has fifty milligrams of, of B in it. It turns out if you've been taking D for two years, you've actually worked your way into a place where your body has been using more Bs, and you are now very profoundly deficient. But she did not take two years. She was a new patient to me. She had not been on D for that period of time. The reason why this discussion is important is there are millions of people who started taking D in COVID, who by the fourth year after taking it, started to have burning in their hands and feet. They're not even taking it anymore. They took it from twenty-twenty to twenty-twenty-three. Their levels got into the sixties. Their doctor said, "Hey, sixty is enough. Stop taking the vitamin D." But they still show up with the B vitamin diagnoses, and they go to their doctor, and they say, "Oh, well, you've developed lupus." "Oh, well, you have this." "Oh, well, you have that." These are all diseases that have been described already, but they haven't been described as B vitamin deficiency states, which is bizarre, but that's
- 1:00:46 – 1:14:58
Can Vitamin B Supplements Really Fix Your Gut?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
the historical point. All of the literature says B deficiency doesn't exist because it's in every food. Now, I'm reading that literature, and it says thiamine, which is B , has a poop bacteria source and a food source. B2, poop bacteria and a food source. All of them come from the poop
- SBSteven Bartlett
What do you mean come from the poop?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
These eight chemicals called B, all of them are made by bacteria, and we absorb them. Everybody knows that we have the wrong microbiome, and we've all been told that it's toxins, antibiotics are the major thing that are blamed, but we now have a huge body of literature about the microbiome being abnormal. Here's-
- SBSteven Bartlett
The gut microbiome?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes. The other weird part about it is there are these guys in Oklahoma, GI surgeons, who are giving poop transplants.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Give me context on what that is.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
They take poop from one person, and they push it up the other person's butt. Like, we've spent 100 years saying, "Stay away from the poop. It's bad for you. Don't go from the poop to your mouth," okay? We've made this idea that the bacteria, we're fighting against them. They're trying to take us over, and they're bad, and we're fighting against them. But as people are dying of things like Clostridium difficile, which C. diff is the way it's shortened, they're dying of C. diff infection, and they're doing poop transplants, and they live. It turns out that the eight B vitamins were first described as bacterial growth factors. They are chemicals that one bacteria is able to make, and it pushes it out of its cell into the environment, and this one next to it, it's a different one, goes, "Oh, goody. Give me that." And those guys live together as a group, a commensal, meaning each one of them derive benefit from having the other one there. So there are four big groups of bacteria that is the normal human microbiome. Well, why are there four? Why is it always this four? And how come we only know about 2% of them? If we're saying all these things that the microbiome is wrong, turns out we only know 2% of 200 bacteria that are normal occupants from the mouth, from the lips all the way to the anus. We only know 2%. But we have the genetic footprint of every single one. We are able to take them out of the poop or out of the small intestine or out of the mouth, and we can say these are the genetics, and we've named all of them, so we know there are 200.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
And the article that they write is, you know, it looks to us like the reason why this foursome of groups hang out together is because they all at least need one B vitamin, and they produce at least one. So they all have a relationship to the B vitamins, and we should start thinking about the microbiome as the production system that supplies the B vitamins to the body. I didn't find that article until after. But here I am back again with one big question. These two women with the burning in their hands and feet, why did they get B vitamin deficient? If the Bs come from the food, they've had the same diet all along, and I don't, I haven't controlled their diet. I haven't made them change their diet. Why did all of these people come back with these complaints? The one thing we know is many of them have IBS symptoms, which are a signal that the bacteria isn't right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
IBS? What's that?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Irritable bowel syndrome.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Diarrhea, constipation, bloating, my belly isn't right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Because I had assumed that D was gonna fix everything-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Vitamin D. Mm-hmm
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... that vitamin D was gonna fix their belly, and it didn't. There were several things that did not get better. One, their IBS didn't get better. Two, they didn't lose weight. That was really weird because they were out exercising more. They were out exercising in the middle of the day, but they didn't lose weight. That means there's still something wrong in the background where they didn't lose weight. So I'm stuck with, okay, why didn't the D fix the B thing? Oh, oh, these were all described as bacterial growth factors. I have assumed that vitamin D was a bacterial growth factor because Walter wa- talked about the GI tract having all sorts of receptors for vitamin D. And so I assumed that the bacteria that lived inside us needed vitamin D to be normal, and therefore, I assumed that IBS showed up in the 1980s because we g- went into D deficiency, and that D deficiency caused this IBS. There were no articles about that in humans until 2020 when COVID came, and they actually started to realize that the people who were D deficient died in COVID, and they started to actually look at, oh, is the microbiome playing a role in our immune system? Yes. If I give vitamin D, will the bacterial makeup of my stool change in a positive way since we-
- SBSteven Bartlett
My poop.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Exactly. Does the poop bacteria makeup change in a positive way? We know we've seen people who don't have inflammatory disorders, and they have these, this bacterial makeup. Will giving vitamin D change the population? And yes, that's the answer. Now, I realized now I'm giving two bacterial growth fa- factors, D, and now I'm giving B100, and I'm giving a large dose of all eight Bs. Remember that give all eight?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
That means by accident, I have actually given eight bacterial growth factors that are necessary for bringing the poop bacteria back to the n- normal human makeup that it's supposed to be, that it has always come to be spontaneously. That's a really important point. All the other animals in the world, they're not obese. There are no obese squirrels in my backyard. The only obese animals are, are cats and dogs that we keep inside.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So to summarize for me, what is the link between vitamin D and the B vitamins?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
It turns out that all the Bs come from the microbiome.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yes. Okay. I understood that.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
In order to have the correct microbiome, we are actually commensal organisms With our microbiome, that means we have to provide D, they in turn provide us with Bs
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay. So isn't that a good thing that you gave them D then, 'cause then their body makes B?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes, but it didn't make B on its own. Otherwise, those side effects-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Wouldn't have been there
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... like my butt pain wouldn't have been there.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So it-
- 1:14:58 – 1:15:45
Why Minerals Could Be The Overlooked Key To Better Health
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
in the blood system in our bone marrow or in our brain. And if you do not have a specific bacteria called Lactobacillus reuteri, you will be missing a brand-new metabolite or chemical that was named after that bacteria just in the last three years that's called reuteri that is one of the chemical messengers that our body uses. So that means many of the deficiency states that the naturopaths and the functional medicine people are studying are all linked to the fact that this bacterial tube has been doing all these things for us all along, and when you lost them, each individual person has its own set of specific deficiency states that must be addressed for their sleep
- 1:15:45 – 1:16:54
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- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
to get better.
- SBSteven Bartlett
This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that The Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps, and we call this in our team the one percent. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these One Percent Diaries, and we released these last year, and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.
- 1:16:54 – 1:20:03
Does Modern Medicine Accept This Vitamin D Theory?
- SBSteven Bartlett
I want to go back to Madeline. So m- my question was-- Because the research that I'm reading says that vitamin D does not cause, trigger, or create a B vitamin deficiency.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
No, it's not in the literature except my article.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Taking vitamin D supplements-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
You have it there
- SBSteven Bartlett
... will not drain your b- your body's B vitamins.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Let me read my pu- my title. "Vitamin D deficiency changes the intestinal microbiome, reducing B vitamin production in the gut. The resulting lack of pantothenic acid adversely affects the immune system, producing a pro-inflammatory state associated with atherosclerosis and, and autoimmunity." This is a brand-new discovery made by someone who's not a scientist, who's not working in the primary lab, who is a clinician, and the impact of this is only as strong as I can get the s- the ideas out there and talk about what happened to my patients. Now, but-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Is it, is it plausible that there's a sort of a intermediary link, um, between the two? I'm reading some things here that say people are very frequently both low in vitamin D and vitamin B12 at the same time, and this is because they share the same root cause, like a poor gut absorption, aging, or a restrictive diet, not because one vitamin is destroying the other.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
That's what we've been told. We've also been told that old people don't need as much sleep and that old people get a bad gut as they get old. It is my belief now that it is-- there is an absolute link between the production of D, and I don't have the articles for this, even though this is dogma at the moment, that our production of vitamin D goes down as we get older.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
So if you look back to that person who was seventy-five, who didn't get sick until they were seventy-five, their skin production, even though they're still out there with their truck farm and still raising their own food, their skin production rate of vitamin D goes down, and this is probably true for every animal, and then as their D goes low, they lose their microbiome, and then they die of one of the multiple diseases that are linked to this multiple deficiency state. It's a different lens to look through that says there is actually a system that allowed us to live without medical problems that weren't either related to epidemics of childhood illness or starving to death And as long as we had good diets, you can actually look at 1945 to about 1985 and say, "What was the ideal for the humans that lived rurally in the United States? Did they live to be 75 years old and then get diseases?" So it's my claim that those people didn't go to the doctor 'cause there weren't any around them, and then things started to happen to them. Then instead of looking at it through the lens of this disease means this drug, that instead we say we should pre- preventing this by paying attention to what vitamin D does in the body and what the Bs do in the body, and ultimately, that is linked to most of our diseases.
- 1:20:03 – 1:24:56
What Your Gut Microbiome Reveals About Your Sleep
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay, so I'll read the conclusion of your study here-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Okay
- SBSteven Bartlett
... which was published in 2016. "I hypothesize," and it's important to say this is a hypothesis, "that the parallel epidemics of abnormal sleep and abnormal intestinal microbiome are linked to one another through vitamin D deficiency. Proper supplementation doses of vitamin D plus all eight B vitamins appears to return the intestinal microbiome to normal in three months. Reinstating the normal microbiome not only treats IBS symptoms, it returns the supply of vitamin Bs to their natural daily doses. The B vitamins are neither good for us, nor unnecessary. They are good for the person who needs them, and only until the normal source picks up again. Both sleep disruption and pain can be caused by large doses of B vitamins once the intestinal microbiome has returned to normal. The B vitamins are very biologically intertwined, both in their intestinal production and celluluse, cellular use. This suggests that B vitamins, aside from B12, were not meant to be used individually, and returning to restorative sleep with normal supply of the building blocks of cellular repair has the potential to repair the p- pro-inflammatory state seen in association with atheroclerosis?"
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Atherosclerosis.
- SBSteven Bartlett
"As well as the hyperandrogenic state of associated with hypertension, heart disease, and stroke. It appears that given the proper essential elements for normal sleep, the body is designed to repair every physical injury that occurs during normal daily use, and may even retain a memory of long deferred repairs." So essentially you're saying that, um, if you can return the body's vitamin D and, and B levels to normal, then the body will kick back up and start producing the, um, everything it needs.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
But I guess the scientific consensus at the moment is saying that there's not a link between vitamin D and a vitamin B-- Well, it's saying that vitamin D does not cause a, a vitamin B deficiency.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Correct.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And you disagree with that?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Absolutely.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And now could it be the case that there's some intermediary link, i.e., if I take, if I take lots of vitamin D, it disrupts my magnesium production, and the magnesium production is having an impact on vitamin B, and could it be the case that it's something else?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes, of course.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
And in fact, it's way more complicated than you and I have talked about, and where you finally arrive is actually at coenzyme A deficiency, and that is a very important chemical. It runs our mitochondrial health and our ability to make energy, and it's linked to all the degenerative diseases, et cetera. So it's not that I don't understand the idea that once you're a hammer, everything's a nail-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... because that's what I was told by all of my colleagues, that you're trying to explain everything. It's that I saw Madeline go back to work, and we haven't even talked about what happened to Natalie. But-
- SBSteven Bartlett
What happened to Natalie?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Natalie got better, and actually-
- SBSteven Bartlett
How?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
She, first with the D, like most of the patients, she started to sleep better, but at the end of two years she stopped sleeping better. She actually lost weight, which was the case with several of the women that were postpartum who had complained about that. So in some-- My interpretation was, and someone who is less affected than Madeline was, the D-B50 combination, especially in the setting of being after the pregnancy, is really all somebody who was relatively normal at the start of their life needs. And then she got better. Her antidepressant went away. Her postpartum depression cleared. Her high heart rate-- So the other thing that we didn't mention is many of these women who are very interested in exercise and doing exercise had high heart rates of 110 or above sitting quietly, and had not been like that before. Their high heart rates come down. So she came back to being her normal self again.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And did she have to come off the vitamin B?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
She only took it for three months.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay. And she, back to normal-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
And then she did a multivitamin, and then eventually, almost everybody needs to be off the multivitamin completely. It is my belief that if all of this happens spontaneously in every other animal on the planet, then we shouldn't have to take supplements either. The squirrels are not going to GNC to buy supplements. That means if there's a mistake made, like we move indoors, and we give back what is needed to get the normal microbiome, then you should assume that your body will go back to supporting itself.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And Natalie's, she's good again?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Natalie's back to being-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Natalie
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... a triathlete and
- 1:24:56 – 1:30:47
How To Build The Right Sleep Protocol For Better Rest
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
doing great.
- SBSteven Bartlett
If we zoom out for a second, what is the advice you'll give to all of my listeners now? There might be millions of them all over the world, some of which are struggling with sleep. Some of them just want to, you know, optimize their sleep a little bit. What is the, the, their over- overarching advice, the thing that all of them could, could do to make sure they sleep better, in your view?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
One, do the behavioral cognitive stuff first. Make the blackout curtains. Do the whole thing. If you haven't done that with the eye cover, then go ahead and do that, and if that's all you need, do not mess around with supplements. Two, if you've already done the behavioral changes, then go to my website, read about the ideas, or listen to this podcast and see whether or not the ideas there feel like they apply to you.
- SBSteven Bartlett
You've come up with this protocol called The RightSleep Protocol. What is that?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
It is-
- SBSteven Bartlett
And can you walk me through it?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Sure. So The RightSleep Program is a process of taking your D to a certain level, supplementing B12 if your B12 is at a certain level, below a certain level, taking B50 for three months, and then taking a multivitamin. And that is until your body says, "Gee, I might need more Bs." This is a diagram, and you have a beautiful stepwise, a visual assist here. The first three months, if your B12 is low, you will take B12 as a separate supplement. And keep in mind, there's a lot to be learned about multivitamins. For instance, many multivitamins say multivitamin on the front, but they actually have the equivalent of B50 in them. They have 50 milligrams of all these B vitamins. In fact, if you go to an expensive vitamin store, they put up the doses of Bs. The doses of these vitamins are extremely important for the way you feel every day. If you get it right, you feel energetic, perky, and wonderful all day. If you get it wrong, you feel awful in the same way you did before. You have to look at the back. You have to learn some of the name of these vitamins. Most people are not, uh, that interested in that. If you want to get better, that's what you have to do. So the first step is you're taking all four of these. Then in the second step, for a period of usually three to four months, you're still taking B12 if you were B12 deficient. You're still taking vitamin D, and you're adjusting your vitamin D dosing based on recommendations, based on your D levels that you're doing every month, and I show you how to get them done properly because the vitamin D levels that your doctor is doing are not accurate, unfortunately, nor do they know that or care, and you're still taking a multivitamin. Then, after the three months that are depicted here, it turns out if your sleep is much better, you will actually get to a place where your body will stop sleeping well again, and it turns out that your brain is asking for more additional Bs. The basic bottom line is the sleep is a thing that once you learn how to use it and once you learn the concept that if in the third or fourth month of this program my sleep gets much better, and then in the sixth month it gets worse again, what you should take from that is, my brain really knows how to do this. It was able to get me to sleep from 10:00 to 6:00 with one brief wake-up, went back to sleep, didn't get up to pee, and I have no pain when I wake up, and I feel energetic all day long. It knows how to do that. When it doesn't do it again two months later, the message is not, "Oh, man, I knew it wouldn't work 'cause everything else I've tried didn't work." Instead, it means, "What my brain is asking for is something else." Then you address that. On my website, I also have multiple v-videos of Q&As addressing questions like, "I'm in the fifth month, and this happened to me," et cetera. So what I would give as advice is, one, supplementation is only good for you if there's something wrong with you that you're trying to correct. Two, keep a log of what happens to that thing because we tend to forget. All my headache f-patients forget that they had headaches when they go away. That's challenging to a clinician because they come back, and they say, "Yeah, I still have headaches." And then their husband says, "Wait, we were in Vegas two weeks ago, and you said we didn't-- you didn't have any headaches at all." And she says, "Oh, I know, but they're back now." We view it as, "It should have fixed me, and now it hasn't." This is a different belief system where the answer is your brain is asking you for something. Interpreting what it's asking for is difficult but possible.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So number one was-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
If you do not have something wrong with you, do not mess with supplements, especially D.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay. Number two-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Number two
- SBSteven Bartlett
... is keep a log.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Read more. Think about it. Think about it a little bit. Think about whether or not there are things that are bothering you.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay. Number three?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Number three is if there's something bothering you, then decide you're actually gonna take some time, and you're gonna learn about a system which allows you to give supplements that lets your body be fully replete, which means fills up all the deficiencies, and that your final outcome will be great sleep, great repair, and you will be doing things that will allow your body to prevent-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Why-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... degenerative illness.
- 1:30:47 – 1:34:57
Is Sunlight And Nutrition Better Than Supplements?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Why don't you just, you know, why don't I just, instead of taking supplements, well, be this, be that, be the other, D whatever, why don't I just go outside in the sun and have a better diet?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
I think that's a, a great question, and here's the problem.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So I've got, you know, I've got all these things, these wonderful things here. I've got, I've got some kimchi, which is good for the gut microbiome, I've heard. I've got kombucha. I've got, uh, some yogurt thing here. I've got, I can't even pronounce that.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Sauerkraut.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Sauerkraut. And I've got some kefir. Why don't I just have all this stuff which is great for my gut microbiome, and then go outside and spend, spend the morning in the sunshine, getting up, improving my vitamin D levels? Presumably, this is gonna help my gut, and the sunshine is gonna help my vitamin D. Voila
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
I think you could actually do that.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
If there's not much wrong with you, I think that's the better path, frankly. Supplementing with vitamin D is not the same as being outdoors.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay. Explain that to me.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
It is not the same.
- SBSteven Bartlett
What do you mean it's not the same? How is it different? 'Cause my doctor did a blood test recently, and, uh, I did two blood tests, one at Nico Health, #ad, #investor, um, Nico Health. And the, the Nico Health test that I did said I was vitamin D deficient, which doesn't surprise me 'cause I live in this dark bunker. I d- I never leave The Diary of a CEO studio. People just walk in, and I live in here, and I eat in here, and I... But I am v- vitamin D deficient, it said. So I went to the store, and I just started taking vitamin D. I assume that's fixed it. Why is vitamin D supplementation different from being out in the sun?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
There is a lot of literature about, by a gal named Stephanie Seneff, who says that the vitamin D that we make on our ski- skin is sulfated, which is different than the vitamin D we're taking as supplemented, and it has a different behavior in the body. Number two, it turns out there's a lot of literature that shows that vitamin D is not the only thing made by UVB hitting your li- your skin, and what it's hitting is cholesterol, and that cholesterol is changed in this chemical called D3. But there are probably 15, 20 other chemicals that are being made at the same time.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Oh, okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
They are not being taken with that pill of vitamin D3. That is a separate literature that's just gotten really some attention in the last 10 years. There are all these other things that prevent inflammation, that do things to your skin, that were actually being made by the sunlight that you're being exposed to that protects you from the damaging effects.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So why can't someone who is really struggling with their sleep, why can't the prescription just be improve your, your diet?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
It can.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Have you tried that with patients? But you said-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
No
- SBSteven Bartlett
... you've not.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
One of the reasons why these are effective-
- SBSteven Bartlett
The, the, the-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
The fermented foods, okay? Fermented food means you're eating rotting food. That's not the way we call it because it sounds disgusting, okay? But bacteria are growing in here-
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... and they're secreting things like B vitamins and reuteri. They're making a yeast bacterial mixture, so there's fungus growing in there. There are viruses in there. There are many microbiomes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Microbes.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Microbes, thank you.
- SBSteven Bartlett
[chuckles] Look at me. [chuckles] Look at me.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
You're awesome. That means you're eating bacteria. You're basically eating a food that has B50 in it.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Which is great.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yeah. So-
- 1:34:57 – 1:37:04
Can Redheads Naturally Produce More Vitamin D?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
foods.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Now, on this point of being outside much more, some people live in cloudy places. You know?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I spent a lot of my life living in places like London in the UK.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Exactly.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And there's not much sunlight.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Right.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So what do I do about that?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Remember how I said that Madeline was a redhead?
- SBSteven Bartlett
Yeah.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
That turns out to be important. So melanin is the pigment that humans have in their skin.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
You have more than I do. I put more melanin in as I stay out in the sun more and I tan.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
That melanin is absorbing energy. It's there to protect you from overexposure to sunlight and damaging effects on the DNA of your skin. The redhead gene usually comes with freckles, which means that there's only little tiny parts of the skin that have melanin, and the redhead gene came about in the far North Viking Scotland, and those places don't get much sunlight. That means it cleared out the blocker of the thing that collected that energy and allowed people who lived in very overcast environments to make D because the melanin didn't block the conversion to vitamin D and all these other things that it does.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So redheads actually have a bit of a superpower when it comes to their relationship with the sunshine. They can make significantly more.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
That depends. Now, if you pick up all the Scotsmen and you put them in Texas and Oklahoma, which is where I live, and many of the people there have red hair, and they came from Scotsmen. The problem is they're now in an environment with very high sun levels. It's very hot in the summer, and they cannot tolerate the level of sun. That means if you get to a point on the world where you pick up big populations and you move them into another weather type, they have not had enough time to adapt. There are things about melanin amounts and our survival that make a difference. So I still recommend that supplementing with D is not the whole answer. Supplementation in and of itself is not what we want. What we want is our kids to be outside much more.
- 1:37:04 – 1:40:07
Why Spending Too Much Time Indoors Is Hurting Your Health
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
There are now new learning environments for kids where they're out in the forest, where they're not enclosed in schoolrooms.
- SBSteven Bartlett
There's some interesting stats I found which says that 90% of Americans spend close to 22 hours inside every day. That was from USA Today. And roughly 20% of Americans never go outside, regularly spending 24 hours indoors. And downstream from vitamin D, there's not just sleep disruption. There's lots of problems, isn't there?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes. I can start listing them, and they're all related in the background to what we've talked about. But Diabetes, even though you've had lots of really interesting shows about that, diabetes is happening in parallel with the sleep disorder. It's not caused by the sleep disorder. It has similar chemical in the background. There are many types, but diabetes just means there's a mismatch between the amount of insulin from the amount of sugar. Let me say that I'm not trying to say that America doesn't eat badly. America eats badly. I was just in Europe, and the eating patterns in the US are terrible. But there are other things that are playing a role, and diabetes shows up. Remember how Madeline had gestational diabetes, and so did this wonderful Natalie, who did everything we told her to. Why would Natalie show up with gestational diabetes when she's not fat? Her supply of this thing called coenzyme A is not enough to keep up with supplying the child and herself. So for a while, she really has a deficiency state, and you start to see it. We've learned to measure the sugar, and the m- measuring the sugar is one of the signs of a deficiency state that's in the background that actually affects a hundred things in the body. It makes acetylcholine, which allows our whole autonomic nervous system to sleep nor-- to react normally. So it affects all of those things that we do is, when we're training, and it also affects cortisol levels. You must have coenzyme A to make cortisol. You must have coenzyme A to make melatonin.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So the things linked to vitamin D are everything from bone disorders, autoimmune diseases, mental health, brain disorders, cardiovascular, metabolic issues, immune infections, and then certain cancers. I, I imagine at this stage in the conversation, the audience are very much looking for, like, actionable advice. So we've talked about the, the right sleep protocol, which is this sort of vitamin approach, and then the other approach is to get outside in the sunshine more.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
And you don't have to be in direct sunlight.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
You have to be in direct sunlight to make vitamin D on your skin.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
But you should limit the amount that you do, so you do not burn your skin.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
And it's important that UVA, if you're gonna use a s- um, um, go to a tanning salon, if they're using UVA, you are not making vitamin D from that. So there are different kinds of beds. UVA will still tan you, but it will not
- 1:40:07 – 1:41:11
Can You Still Make Vitamin D On Cloudy Days?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
make D.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So you don't have to be in direct sunlight. So if I'm at a window and I can't see the sun and it's overcast, am I still making-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
No
- SBSteven Bartlett
... vitamin D?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
No. You can't make anything through the window.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay. So what-- I go outside, I can't see the sun 'cause there's clouds. I'm still making vitamin D.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Maybe. It can be that you will actually still get a burn, okay, that is from UVA and UVB penetrating that cloud.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Okay.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
So that does mean that you can make some vitamin D on a day that it's cloudy, and the only way to know how much vitamin D you are actually making is to do your vitamin D levels over time.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Looking at some data here, it says that, um, you can make a little bit of vitamin D during overcast times. Um, up to eighty percent of U- UV radiation still penetrates light cloud cover. So you can absolutely still make vitamin D, though it might take a few minutes longer than it would on a completely clear day. When it's thick, dark, and overcast, uh, or dense storms or clouds, that can block up to seventy to ninety percent of UVB rays. On these days, it's incredibly difficult for your skin to produce any
- 1:41:11 – 1:43:03
Can Vitamin D Lamps Replace Natural Sunlight?
- SBSteven Bartlett
meaningful amount of vitamin D. You know these like lamps that they put on desks and stuff? Can you get vitamin D from that?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
No, but make, let me make you a point here that's not in my field, but in the infrared field. There are so many other wavelengths of energy that you receive when you're outside. So you can be sitting on a porch where you're not in direct sunlight, and you are still receiving infrared, and infrared is one of the most important, uh, wavelengths that we know about that penetrates the body several centimeters and actually gives energy to the mitochondria. Our bodies are like little batteries, that we receive energy from sunlight, and we can do that sitting on the porch without being in direct sunlight. And fire also, the reason why it looks red is because it has infrared, and incandescent bulbs, which we've now stopped using.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So what's the advice here?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Some people believe that you should use incandescent bulbs on a lamp that's on your desk. The problem is-
- SBSteven Bartlett
What's an incandescent bulb?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
It gives you rays of light. Like, LED is an electron, um, producing light source, which the government has suggested that is better than incandescent lights. It's very difficult to buy incandescent bulbs, like the bulbs that we used to use. Now you'll get halogen or LEDs, and they do not give off infrared light, uh, energy.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So an incandescent bulb is the old school glass light bulbs, um, the kind Thomas Edison used to use.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It creates light by running an electrical current through a metal filament until it gets so hot that it glows. Because it relies on raw heat, an incandescent bulb, bulb behaves exactly like a miniature fire or a tiny piece of the sun. Hmm. So yeah, those incandescent bulbs, they're hard, harder to come by these days, but yeah, my fiancée, she's a big fan of them.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yeah.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And she's trying to fill our house with them. Um-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yeah. She's right.
- 1:43:03 – 1:49:07
The Best Diet To Boost Vitamin D And Improve Gut Health
- SBSteven Bartlett
So is there anything else? You know, uh, also, I've got these prebiotics here, prebiotics, probiotics. A lot of people say that you should take prebiotics, probiotics. Have you tried giving them to your patients?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
I was on probiotics, and so were my patients when we started, and it had not corrected the microbiome. It was just a try. We're gonna dump the bacteria down there, and maybe they'll get back to normal, okay? That is what a probiotic is considered. They have the actual bacteria freeze-dried, and you eat the bacteria. Kind of gross when you think about it as being poop bacteria, but that's what it is, okay? Now, what prebiotic has that's different is that you feed the bacteria, and they feed you That's really what happens. What I love about this is there are different things that they're feeding the bacteria. We're kind of interested in what they think. How do we know what they think? Well, what if I change to carnivore, and all of a sudden my belly gas goes away-
- SBSteven Bartlett
The carnivore diet where you just eat meat
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
... carn- well, you eat mostly meat, let's say ninety percent meat, and most of my belly complaints go away, and I poop regularly, then you've just been very successful at making your bacteria very happy. What if the next client who I have is a mostly plant-based? Then I have to change the way I think and the way I help them and encourage them to recognize that when we're feeding mostly plant-based, we have a different set of bacteria. Now, let me propose something to you. Humans cover the globe like cockroaches. We are very successful, and we have a hugely varied diet. I would claim that that means you should eat the diet that works for you. The place where you see something that is really important for the US is the original articles about vitamin deficiency states were in two groups that ate a pure carbohydrate diet. So the claim right now for most of the people that are interested in healthy diets is if you eat a fully carbohydrate diet, you're set up for failure in a million different ways, and then they talk about the diet you should eat. There are two incidences from the 1940s where the first vitamin deficiency states were described, and both of them turn out to be purely carbohydrate diets. One of them was in the Japanese prisoner of war camps and the Bataan Death March in World War II, where they had rice, rice, rice. That's it. And they're outside all the time. They're not vitamin D deficient. They're discovered to have beriberi, and beriberi is an old disease described in Japan when you take off the rice casing. So ultimately, they gave back meat and vegetables, and beriberi is described as heart failure, non-healing ulcers of the legs, bright, shiny red skin and burning in the feet that we see in the elderly in the US all the time in the hospital. That is now ignored, but you can actually get to a state where you're feeding only carbohydrates, but now the lens you're looking through is, "I was feeding my bacteria a purely carbohydrate diet. I therefore selected for bacterial populations that were not producing the B vitamins that I needed." It's seeing it through a slightly different lens. The same thing about pellagra, which is actually a niacin deficiency in adults and children that were institutionalized in the South of the United States in the '30s and '40s and fed corn gruel as their only food. So there's still a piece of information there that is your diet absolutely affects who lives inside you. And once you have a purely carbohydrate diet for many years and you're D deficient, it is very likely you're gonna have to do something more aggressive, either change your diet and do fermented foods and change to a meat and plant diet, and you're gonna have to watch what your body does. And if you're not able-- and, and my claim would still be the sleep that you have should still be your best measure of whether you succeeded in what you'd like to do.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And again, to track your sleep, there's lots of different ways to do that. Obviously, none of them are perfect, um, but you can buy sleep trackers and those kinds of things and see how you're doing.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes. And I would also say use your sleep tracker. I don't use mine regularly because I get obsessed by it. I, I start to think, "Oh, I only had an hour and a half of REM. I'm dying," and I just get spiraled downward. Okay? So what your body is saying to you is still very important. I didn't have sleep trackers when I was seeing all these things that were happening to M- Madeline and, and Natalie. I would listen to what they said about their sleep.
- SBSteven Bartlett
I imagine a lot of people clicked on this conversation because they are struggling with sleep, or they have a partner or friend, or maybe just because they want to optimize their sleep a little bit. And what I've really taken away is that, um, a lot of sleep-related issues start in the gut microbiome.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So we want to try and fix the gut microbiome, and how we fix the gut microbiome is, can be dietary.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It can be through supplementation, but we want to try and do it through diet first and fermented foods. Um, and then the other thing is sunlight plays a big role. You're smirking again.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
You're doing a fabulous job.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Oh, you're so sweet. Um, the other, the other thing is sunlight plays a big role because it produces vitamin D and amongst other things, which also can improve that balance and help us sleep better.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes.
- SBSteven Bartlett
And we also want to try the stuff that everybody talks about. Matthew Walker, he talks about temperature and-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes
- SBSteven Bartlett
... eye masks and all that kind of stuff. I guess the big insight here is that vitamins play a, a really important role in sleep-
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes
- SBSteven Bartlett
... as you've seen through the thousands of patients that you've spent time with and helped to, uh, restore to a healthy sleep state.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes. That's a beautiful summary.
- 1:49:07 – 1:56:09
What Actually Helps If You Have Sleep Apnoea Or Narcolepsy?
- SBSteven Bartlett
What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? Is there anything at all?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
We have skipped the people who have been told they have a disease, narcolepsy or sleep apnoea, um, where they're told there's a specific, "This is a genetic thing, and you have to do these specific things." For instance, for narcolepsy, this is an attack of sleep that takes you out, and you become, "I'm sitting here talking to you, [snorts] and I fall asleep." That turns out to be, uh, treatable in the same way
- SBSteven Bartlett
You're saying a lot of it can be about vitamins, essentially
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yes, you can sleep deprive anyone to the point of falling asleep when I talk to you.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
All you have to do is, you know, two or three nights that you miss, and you can still become taken down by an attack of sleep. That really is what narcolepsy means. That means medicine, in its attempt to classify things, have said this is a disease, and the idea that they are all about our f- body falling out of its normal state. What's different about people who have that, a, a, a specific diagnosis like sleep apnea narcolepsy is they are unlikely to be able to cure that with going outside and kimchi. They are at an end stage. Your body was really set up to be able to deal with different diets, getting up in the middle of the night, take care of your baby, traveling long periods of time, all these stressors that we've had for the last three hundred thousand years. It was set up to do that and to get back to sleeping again. And people lived for long periods of time. That wasn't the average, but there were people that lived to be seventy-five years old twenty thousand years ago. That means that's the best we can do. If you have a disease of your sleep switches, you are really severely affected, and my experience would say that that person is not gonna be able to approach it by just going outside and doing kimchi. That person's gonna need some extra help, and they're gonna need sometimes professional help with someone who's seeing it through this lens. Because they go through changes. They-- for instance, when, when you get them a little bit better so that they're sleeping at night, they actually start to have nightmares. What that means in a setting like that is they've actually gotten into REM sleep, but they haven't gotten perfect chemistry so that they sleep through the REM phase, finish up, go into light sleep, and then go to the next. They've awakened, so they can't keep themselves in REM. There are transition states where they actually feel like they're getting worse. So there are all sorts of things that I've been able to see that are not talked about at the sleep meetings that are totally fascinating, that are halfway better, and that people can cure their narcolepsy. I have one gal right now who just called me to become a client. She has narcolepsy, and she has completely cured herself by using nicotine patches around the clock. Why? Because there is only one drug that duplicates acetylcholine completely, and it's nicotine. So she stopped smoking, and she uses nicotine patches. Nicotine is the duplicate of acetylcholine. Acetylcholine allows us to focus, pay attention, be distracted, and come right back during the day. It is in control of our ability to concentrate. At night, it allows us to get into REM sleep. That one chemical does wake and sleep. Does it in different parts of the brain. That means she is using something that has been terribly vilified. Tobacco is considered to be the cause of all evil. It turns out, oddly enough, the guys with Parkinson's disease who smoked throughout the last thirty years have been shown to do better because Parkinson's disease is an acetylcholine deficiency state first.
- SBSteven Bartlett
To give a bit of background on, I guess, the, the problem we've really talked about, um, I have this little paragraph here which I thought summarizes the nature of the problem and the sleep epidemic. It says, "While, while industrialization first disrupted our natural rhythms by moving society indoors, the true explosion of sleep disorders occurred in two modern phases, a medical boom in the 1980s and a digital epidemic in the 2000s. In the 1980s, the formal recognition of sleep medicine and the intervention of the CPAP machine diagnosed millions with obstructive sleep apnea, sparking a surge in clinical treatments. The medicalization transformed into c- into a cultural crisis by the 2000s as sedentary indoor lifestyles starved us of natural daytime sunlight. Sunlight exposure is vital because its high-intensity brightness resets the brain's master internal clock and suppresses daytime melatonin, which establishes a definitive biological countdown for deep sleep at night. Deprived of this anchoring cue and bombarded by a twenty-four-seven hustle culture and smartphones pump- pumping blue light into our bedrooms, society succumbed to a devastating double-edged sword, too little sun by day to synchronize the brain and too much artificial light by night to allow it to rest. The modern circadian mismatch culminated in an acute spike during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, solidifying an era where our indoor environments are fundamentally at war with our evolutionary sleep biology."
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
I love that. Who wrote that? Was that AI?
- SBSteven Bartlett
It was AI that wrote that.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Yeah. Now, that's the fascinating part of this.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Mm.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
AI doesn't care whether or not my colleagues think I'm crazy. AI is not affected by what the Endocrine Society says about D. AI is just giving us the raw data, okay? Then if you put in there something like, "What does Dr. Gominak think about whether or not, um, sun exposure is the whole story for sleep?" You'll start to see my stuff leaking through there saying, "Yes, it's true that the pineal gland makes melatonin and that that's part of how we get to the ten PM to six AM, but it's also true that vitamin D has receptors in the brain stem." That means that we are at the edge of about, mm, a big change where some of these ideas that we talked about today that are very deep and very wide are gonna be there available in a beautifully written way by AI. And I think in this particular case, we've jumped around medicine and its craziness and its conservative feeling, it's been taken over by an electronic thing that's not affected by our cultural ideals of who's smart and who's not.
- 1:56:09 – 1:58:10
My Most Controversial Health Opinion Explained
- SBSteven Bartlett
What is the central idea that you believe that most of the mainstream industry don't believe? I will do as you say, and I will ask the AI.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Most of the sleep disorders, including sleep apnea, narcolepsy, all the ones that the neurologists have described, are really related at basis by D and multiple things that are made by the microbiome, that the microbiome and the D deficiency are very much linked, and that there are hundreds of things that are playing a role in our sleep switches that are supplied by the microbiome.
- SBSteven Bartlett
So I'll summarize that as, are many of the sleep disorders caused by the microbiome? I'm using Gemini Pro, which is the most advanced model. I always use it for fact-checking and stuff. So it says, you are completely wrong. I'm joking. It didn't say that. It says, yes, the connection is massive. While we can't say the microbiome is the sole cause of every sleep disorder, scientists now know that a damaged gut is a major hidden driver of poor sleep because both the melatonin pipeline starts in the gut, manufacturing the calm down chemical is in the gut, and the cortisol alarm system is linked to the gut. The trickiest part of the microbiome sleep connection is that it is a bidirectional loop. A bad microbiome causes poor sleep. Poor sleep alters the microbiome. So while anatomical issues like a narrow airway causes sleep apnea or light mismatch like the lack of near infrared light play huge roles, fixing chronic insomnia often requires healing the gut just as much as fixing your bedtime routine.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
The lack of near infrared light. That's amazing. Medicine will not be talking about that anytime soon. It's too wacky. It's too woo-woo. And yet, that means those ideas are available to us.
- 1:58:10 – 2:00:18
The Best Day Of Your Life And Why It Matters
- SBSteven Bartlett
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is more, yeah, I guess it is a question. It says, describe the best day of your life.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Hmm. I'm going to have to stick with what pops into my mind first, which is relatively recently. We were in Sevilla, I think, and it was very hot. And my husband and I have been traveling for three or four weeks together, which is the longest time we've spent together in a long time. And we were sitting playing Canasta outside underneath an umbrella that had little misters. And we were just sitting there playing Canasta together. And it's not about, it was not about accomplishment. It was about having this marvelous circumstance where we're just hanging out together and having a very pleasant time together. That was my best day in recent memory.
- SBSteven Bartlett
Dr. Stasha, where should people go to learn more from you?
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Dr. Gominak, no period after dr.com. And I have a YouTube channel where I have lots of, I have a whole series of 50 things called sleep chats, where I talk about if I have carpal tunnel syndrome, will RightSleep program help me? If I have this, will Right, and why?
- SBSteven Bartlett
I'll link all of that for you below. So everybody can go to those resources. They'll be linked in the description below of this episode. Thank you so much.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
Thank you, Steven.
- SBSteven Bartlett
It's been wonderful to talk about.
- SGDr. Stasha Gominak
It's been wonderful.
- SBSteven Bartlett
YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out. I bet you, you might love it.
Episode duration: 2:00:19
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Transcript of episode BbGv7GTbRN8
