Episode 18: Evaluating Your Risk And Preventing Autoimmune Disease

Every day, more and more people are getting diagnosed with autoimmune diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s, Crohn’s and celiac. What gives? These diseases were largely extinct for most of human history, and yet, they’re growing in epic proportions year after year.   

In fact, shocking estimates by the American Autoimmune Related Disease Association now say that 20 percent of Americans - that’s 1 in 5 - have an autoimmune disease. The number is only expected to grow exponentially. Twenty-five percent of people who’ve been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease are also at risk for developing additional autoimmune diseases.   

On today’s episode, Andrea sits down with clinical nutritionist Josh Gitalis to talk about what autoimmune disease is, why we’re seeing increases across the board, and how we can prevent autoimmune disease before it takes hold.   

To learn more from Josh, head to his website at joshgitalis.com. As a special offer for listeners, Josh is also offering 5% off his Functional Nutrition Certification program or the stand alone course Therapeutic Nutrition and Supplements in Practice. Use coupon code microbiomefnc2019 to redeem before August 22, 2019.  

On this show, you’ll learn:   

• The most common autoimmune diseases (2:52)
• Why has there been an increase in autoimmune disease? (4:04)
• Contributing factors to autoimmune disease (9:01)
• How the microbiome influences these diseases (10:46)
• Organisms that are protective against leaky gut (17:36)
• How long it takes an autoimmune disease to develop (21:08)
• Options available to fast track the healing process (25:42)
• Where to get tested and what tests to ask for (29:22)

Transcript:

Andrea Wien: Welcome to the Microbiome Report, powered by BIOHM Health, a wellness and probiotic company aimed at helping you optimize your gut. I'm Andrea Wien, and my guest today is clinical nutritionist Josh Gitalis, a recognized expert in the fields of clinical detoxification and therapeutic supplementation. He runs a Toronto based private practice that sees clients from all over the world. In today's episode, we're talking about the rise of autoimmune disease and the root causes of why autoimmune diseases take hold.

Even if you think you're not at risk, this is an episode you definitely want to listen to. One in five Americans is currently estimated to have an autoimmune disease, and the numbers keep growing every year. It's scary stuff. On this show, Josh tells us the warning signs to look out for, and even outline some blood tests that can help identify if you're developing an autoimmune disease, sometimes 25 years in advance before a diagnosis. Enjoy the show.

Josh, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Josh Gitalis: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

Andrea Wien: So to start, can you give our listeners a little bit of background about who you are and how you got involved in functional medicine?

Josh Gitalis: Sure thing. I'm a clinical nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner, and I've always been interested in health. I remember way back in biology class when we first learned about the cell and the organelles and all the little parts, and it just fascinated me. So after university, I worked a little bit as a health coach and a personal trainer, and then I learned about holistic nutrition at a conference, and my mind was just blown. So I knew I had to do something in that department, and I got my nutrition diploma and then began working with clients, and was always seeking clinically relevant information. How I can work with people better, quicker, get closer to the root cause, get changes quicker. And I ended up discovering the world of functional medicine and functional nutrition and ended up getting certified there, and I haven't looked back. And I sort of split my time now between my clinical practice and my functional nutrition certification program. So I love working with people one on one and I also love teaching people.

Andrea Wien: Great. And just for our listeners, I actually took Josh's program, and it was unbelievable and amazing, he's a great teacher, so highly recommended. And now you've kind of built your whole life around functional health, because you also married a nutritionist. So you're very entrenched.

Josh Gitalis: Yeah, I did, yeah. Absolutely. There's no turning back now.

Andrea Wien: So we're talking today about autoimmune disease, and I wanted to talk about this topic because more and more people are starting to get diagnosed with autoimmune diseases. I think a lot of people don't know or understand sometimes when they get a diagnosis that it is autoimmune. So maybe to start, we can just talk about what is an autoimmune disease, and what are some of the common ones.

Josh Gitalis: Okay. Well, essentially, an autoimmune disease is when your body creates antibodies to your own body. And so we have an immune system, and it's supposed to detect what is, in my case Josh, versus something else, if it's a pathogen, a virus, bacteria, fungus, mold, and attack what is not Josh, so that it doesn't infiltrate me and cause issues in my body. But some people, it comes to a point, and which I'm sure we'll discuss why, where they're not just making antibodies to foreign items, they're making antibodies to their own tissues, and obviously that becomes a problem because we start breaking down our own body.

There's been over 80 autoimmune diseases identified, with a little bit of a gray area where for certain things. So there's some theories that things like cardiovascular disease can be related to autoimmune reactions, where we're attacking our own blood vessels. But you know, some examples, some of the more common ones are lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, Hashimoto's, Crohn's. Hashimoto's is actually the number one autoimmune disease in the world. And there's many others.

Andrea Wien: Why do you think we are seeing an increase in these autoimmune diseases?

Josh Gitalis: Well, the reasons, I think, are many. We sort of have created this perfect storm for all chronic disease, and one of the manifestations of that is autoimmunity. So there's many factors that play into it. One example would be our food supply, how it's decreasing in nutrient density. An apple today is very different from an apple a hundred years ago. I would get my Apple now from all sorts of places versus a hundred years ago, I would have gone in my backyard and picked my own Apple, or gone to my neighbor and done a little trade with them and got an Apple from them, and it would've been a lot more nutritious. So our food has gone downhill, we have tons of processed foods that have entered our grocery stores, what Michael Pollan calls frankenfoods, which barely even resemble food.

And those, first of all, are nutrient depleted, but they also have the added chemicals that are involved in actually creating those foods and then making them shelf stable over a long period of time. So our immune system really gets confused when it sees all these different chemicals. There's a book written on auto immune disease called The Autoimmune Epidemic by Donna Jackson Nakazawa, and she called these things autogens, she gave them a name of autogens, where our body sees these chemicals and doesn't really recognize them as you, obviously, they recognize them as foreign, and then has an immune reaction. And we can get to a point where we have a loss of tolerance to these onslaught of thousands and thousands of chemicals. We've introduced over 80,000 chemicals into our environment over the past hundred years, and a couple of thousand and are brought in every single year. And unfortunately they're not vetted for safety. They only really get taken off the market once X amount of people have been injured and can prove that they've been injured.

So we have a big problem there with chemicals. Everyone is going to have some sort of body burden from these chemicals, and different people are going to react in different ways, depending on the amount of exposure, and depending on their genetic susceptibility. So chemical exposure has greatly increased over the years. We have the depletion of the foods. We have an increase of stress as well. Our body can't really tell the difference between different stressors, so it's going to take physical stress and chemical stress and electromagnetical stress and any types of factors that challenge the body all into this system and react all the same way, activating the fight or flight response or the sympathetic nervous system.

And that puts us, our body, in survival mode, where we start to shunt resources to try to deal with that stressor as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Now, traditionally, that was a valuable system, and actually it still is, but traditionally it would've just been something quick, a saber tooth tiger's going to attack you, so you either kill it or you run away, and we did one of those two more often than not, or else humans wouldn't be here today. But then the threat would be gone, so we would be able to recover and restore and have sort of the flip side where we turn on the parasympathetic nervous system and get those tissues back up and running again.

So stressors have greatly increased over the years as well, and that's just another layer to it as well. Gluten is, is another big factor in this whole equation because it causes leaky gut syndrome, and leaky gut is an important factor with the manifestation of autoimmune disease. And we bred and changed our glutinous grains and glutinous crops, especially wheat, to have more and more gluten and to have more and more chemicals like glyphosate, and to be less digestible, which can cause issues in the gut as well, which I think quite a bit about.

Andrea Wien: Yeah. So listeners of the show obviously know that I have celiac disease. I was diagnosed when I was 12, so well over 20 years ago. And then I've just continued to see so many more people that I know get diagnosed or have issues with gluten intolerance or develop other autoimmune diseases that when they remove gluten, they start to feel better. I had a friend recently in his early thirties who was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and it's just, it's one of the biggest reasons that I got into this field, because I was starting to see so many of my close friends getting really sick.

So I love what you said about the body burden, and I love that you have an analogy of our bodies are kind of like a bucket, and maybe you can have a few stressors or a few chemicals, but eventually if those things keep piling up, that bucket overflows, and then we really start to see states of disease. I think visualizing it in that way and understanding that we can't have it all, we can't eat the frankenfoods and the gluten and be stressed at work and never calm down or meditate or sleep well, these are all things that are contributing to this increase in autoimmune disease.

Josh Gitalis: Absolutely. And I think an important thing for people to understand is oftentimes when someone gets diagnosed with something like a disease or condition, it's given a name, they kind of freak out and they're like, "My body is not behaving properly. It's doing something wrong." And it's actually quite the opposite. Your body is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing, it's just that something's either moving too fast or too slow, or it's a bit out of order.

So if we think about all of these layers that we're piling up, all these things that we're filling our barrel with, the immune system is programmed and should be responding to them. But when we reach our tipping point, and everyone has a different tipping point, that immune system is so overstimulated that it's like, "Oh my God, I'm just going to attack everything that I see. Not just those chemicals, not just those frankenfoods, but I'm going to also attack the person that I live in, because I can't really tell the difference between it, I'm just putting out a full on attack of chemicals here, and antibodies, to deal with it." So it's an overreaction of the body, it's like trying to put out, when someone gets to the point of autoimmune, it's like trying to put out a candle with a fire extinguisher.

Andrea Wien: Yeah. It's not going to work out very well.

Josh Gitalis: Well, it's going to work, [crosstalk] too well.

Andrea Wien: It's going to work, but it's going to, that's true.

Josh Gitalis: It's going to create a big mess. Yeah.

Andrea Wien: Create a huge mess all around it, yeah. Absolutely. So you mentioned a little bit about leaky gut, and obviously this show is all about the microbiome and gut health. So can you talk a little bit more in detail about how the microbiome or perhaps imbalance in the microbiome can contribute to the development of autoimmune diseases?

Josh Gitalis: Well, we can think about the small intestine as a wall around a city, right? Back in the day where we used to create these walls around cities to avoid other tribes or other people attacking our city, that's what was the barrier that kept us safe, and there was guards stationed around that city wall. That's what our small intestine is like. So we don't really consider the inside of the digestive tract in the body yet. When we get into the bloodstream, that we consider it in the body, and it's that wall that protects us. So those guards are like the probiotics or the bacteria and organisms, we're learning that it's not just bacteria, but it's a whole bunch of different organisms that live along that wall and can help protect it. They can say, "Hey, you can come in, you're a friend," or "You need to stay out, you're not supposed to be here."

When that microbiome gets disrupted from basically all the reasons we've already covered affects the microbiome as well, that wall gets compromised. And then, hey, there's some looters coming and they see, "Oh, there's a spot on the wall where there's no protection, we're going to infiltrate, and we're going to get in and we're going to wreak some havoc in this city." And that's what happens with our gut. And that wall gets damaged. It gets broken. And that's what we call leaky gut syndrome, which was something, many years ago, was barely even recognized as a real thing, and now you can find thousands of papers on it. And once that barrier has been compromised, then we open up issues with our whole immune system.

Andrea Wien: So it sounds like leaky gut is necessary for the development of autoimmune disease. Is it one of the true root causes? You have to have leaky gut in order to develop one of these conditions?

Josh Gitalis: Yes. That's the current theory, that one factor is leaky gut. Another factor is genetic susceptibility. So it's not just enough to have leaky gut to develop an autoimmune, you need some sort of genetic susceptibility that exacerbates that environment or that messaging.

And then another factor needed or necessary is an environmental trigger. And that can be a number of things. It can be many of the things we spoke about, it could be a toxin, it could be a food. So for example, with celiac, it's not really an issue if that person doesn't consume gluten, right? Because it doesn't cause the leaky gut and that environmental trigger isn't there to damage the gut. And of course that person's genetically susceptible, so if they create the right conditions again, if they eat that gluten, if they have that leaky gut, then the disease of celiac, that we call celiac, is going to manifest once again.

Andrea Wien: Yeah. This is something, I'm pregnant at the moment, and we're having a baby, and this is something I've been thinking about a lot, because there is obviously the genetic component. My mom and my sisters all have celiac. Obviously I have it. And so just not even going there with our baby, it will be a gluten-free household through and through. And I think people think that that's taking an extreme step, but if you can remove really one of the major root causes that contributed to this condition, then to me, it's a no brainer.

Josh Gitalis: Well what we know with gluten is that no one can digest it properly. We just don't have the enzymes to do so. And we also know that gluten causes leaky gut in every single person. So there's been a couple studies that have been done where they look at people who are celiac, diagnosed celiacs, people who are non-celiac gluten sensitive, so they're not full blown celiac with villous atrophy, but they do get reactions to eating gluten, and then a control group. And what they do is they gave them all gliadins, which is just one of the proteins in the umbrella of gluten, and they looked in their gut, and what they found was that all three groups got leaky gut, so it damaged their guidance some way. Now what would make the difference between someone who manifests the full blown celiac or even non celiac gluten sensitivity versus someone who is completely fine is how quickly they can repair that gut and what, again, their genetic susceptibility is.

So with this knowledge, me working in the clinic with clients with all sorts of health issues, I always look at their food, their lifestyle, any input into their body, as something that's moving them up as, as you know, this slope of health, it's [inaudible] a model that I use, or towards health, or away from health. And if there's any question, then we take it out.

So you mentioned you're about to have a baby, and my son is two years old. We don't have celiac in the family, but he hasn't eaten any gluten in the two years that he's been alive so far. Now that's not to say I'm going to restrict him 100% and be very strict about it for the rest of his life. But myself and my wife as nutritionists and knowing the information we know and the studies that have been done on this, there's no necessary nutritional reason to consume that, so why take the chance with it, or why would we put it in the diet if it wasn't going to be nourishing in some way? So we've chosen that route. Again, some people might find that that's extreme, but it's just the path we've taken with the knowledge that we have.

Andrea Wien: Absolutely. Do you know, do we know from the research or just from your anecdotal evidence, working with clients, the percentage of people who have some type of genetic susceptibility to any autoimmune disease?

Josh Gitalis: Any autoimmune disease, that's a good question. I know specifically for celiac, it's about one in 33. And every 15 years, it doubles in terms of how susceptible people are. But for any autoimmune, I'm not sure about that number.

Andrea Wien: I would have to think that it's growing, and it's one of those things that why even take the chance if you could be genetically susceptible to one of these conditions, lupus or Crohn's or rheumatoid arthritis. It seems like there's a high percentage chance that you probably have susceptibility to one or multiple of those.

Josh Gitalis: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that.

Andrea Wien: Microbiome Report is brought to you by BIOHM Health. Want to take action to improve your gut, but don't know where to start? Take the first step with BIOHM's Gut Report. You'll receive a full measurement of the bacteria and fungi in your gut, as well as actionable recommendations on exactly how to optimize your gut health from BIOHM's team of microbiome trained nutritionists.

So going back to the guards around the wall of the small intestine, do we know if there are certain bacteria or fungi or other organisms that are protective against leaky gut or autoimmune disease?

Josh Gitalis: Yes. We actually know that there are some that are protective, and we know that there are some that are troublesome as well. So first I'll start with the troublesome. We know that there's some that have been tied to certain autoimmune disease. So Klebsiella has been linked to autoimmune disease with the spine. We also know that other organisms can have what's called cellular mimicry with some of the tissues in our body, and they look like certain tissues in the body. So these are called stealth organisms, where they're not like full blown infections where we have symptoms, but they're kind of like under the radar. Now, in terms of the protective effect, we know that the good bacteria, or what are known as the commensal bacteria help to communicate with our immune system on a regular basis. We have 70% of our lymphatic tissue in our gut. This is called the gut associated lymphatic tissue or the GALT. And it stays educated in part by the organisms that are living in the gut.

So we want a really good, robust population of the good guys, kind of like the Amazon rainforest. There's lots of different organisms there, and it makes that ecosystem really robust. And it can be disrupted, but can come right back online very quickly versus something like a monoculture. Like we see a whole field of corn, if one bug comes along and kills one husk of corn, it could take out the whole field. So we know that, yeah, there's a lot of good guys that are definitely going to play an important role in keeping that environment safe.

Andrea Wien: That would lead me to think, too, that antibiotics or other types of medications that are disrupting that microbiome balance or disrupting diversity and killing off both the good and the bad guys would increase the risk of potentially getting leaky gut, and then, by default, down the line getting an autoimmune disease.

Josh Gitalis: Yeah, for sure. Antibiotics is another layer we can pile on top of that. So when I do history with my clients, we're looking at all the different factors that could possibly have been what we call contributing factors. And we know that antibiotics definitely put people at higher risk for autoimmune disease, specifically Crohn's and colitis. I've done a lot of work with people with inflammatory bowel diseases, so this is something I come across quite often.

We know that vaginal birth affords someone more protection than a C-section. Of course, now we know that there's some really fantastic ways like seeding to mimic that bacterial exposure during the birthing process. We also know that breastfeeding is really important for developing a healthy and robust microbiome, because there's certain sugars in the breast milk that feed the good bacteria, and there's also bacteria from the mother's nipple and her skin and that whole interaction that is really fantastic for the microbiome.

So all of these different things aren't necessarily causes. Like if someone was born C-section I wouldn't say, "Oh my God, that's the reason they have an autoimmune disease," but again, it's not moving them towards health, it's moving them away, so we call them contributing factors. And again, it's the layer upon layer upon layer that eventually causes loss of immune tolerance for that individual and moves them into a place where they're asymptomatic to symptomatic, where they're actually experiencing physical problems, based on how their immune system is operating in their body.

Andrea Wien: Yeah, let's talk about that. How long does it take for an auto immune disease to develop? Are there warning signs in advance?

Josh Gitalis: There are, and we can see these things up to 25 years before there's an actual diagnosis of the disease. So they've looked at blood of ex military personnel, because in the military, they keep blood samples for years and years and years. So researchers have gotten access to these, and they've looked at people who were diagnosed at whatever age, and then they look back in history to see were any antibodies present in their blood before they'd gotten to a place where they were experiencing symptomatology. And they found different sort of time spans for different diseases. So they found antibodies related to Crohn's disease, for example, up to three years. Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which again, as I mentioned, is the most common autoimmune disease, up to 10 years. And even as far back as 25 years, for things like primary biliary cirrhosis, looking at, they found anti mitochondrial antibodies for that disease.

So we can see these things way ahead of time. I've even had clients who have showed up with positive antinuclear antibody, which is ANA, in their bloodstream, yet they're not really presenting with any symptoms, right? So these things can show up years before, right? We're starting to have some sort of biochemical alteration in the body and a reaction from the immune system, but we really haven't gotten to a point where there's physical damage, where the body has attacked itself so much that we're experiencing physical symptoms.

So for those individuals, it's happened a handful of times, we're really on the warning tracks, right? It's like, you're not headed in the right direction, we have to look at all the possible contributing factors, start to address those and make sure that you're not being exposed to things that have been linked to autoimmune disease and that you're putting your best foot forward to try to prevent those types of things. So yeah, these things can happen years in advance.

Andrea Wien: And similarly, we know that people who have been diagnosed with one autoimmune disease are more susceptible to acquiring others. Is that because the body hasn't been healed of the root causes?

Josh Gitalis: That's exactly it. Right? Again, we've named over 80 different autoimmune diseases. I mean, that's what we really like to do as, as humans, is classify things and put things in little boxes, but they all have similar things in common. We have one immune system, but it kind of chooses different tissues to attack based on what information it's been given. So gluten, for example, looks very similar to the outside of the thyroid. So people can, if they start to react to gluten and attack gluten when they consume it, they have this, again, this process called cellular mimicry, where the body attacks anything that looks like gluten as well. It can't really tell the difference, it's smart, but it's not that smart. So if there's certain proteins on that thyroid that look like the gluten, then it goes and attacks those.

As we know, proteins are made up of amino acids, so they have a certain sequence. Say we just gave a letter to each amino acid. So say in gluten, there was a sequence of letters, AABBCC, and that ended up in the bloodstream through leaky gut and through not digesting it properly. But you are what you eat, so you make your tissues out of the food you eat. And what if the outside of the thyroid also had a protein sequence in it that was AABBCC? Well, again, the immune system is going to attack those proteins, no matter if they're from the gluten or they're from the thyroid. And that's why we attack different tissues in the body, but it's all the very similar process that's happening with the immune system in terms of it turning on ourself.

Andrea Wien: And unfortunately the immune system doesn't really forget, right? Because when I was diagnosed, they used to tell me and my sisters that kids could have a reversal of celiac disease, but now we know autoimmune disease can't really be reversed or cured in the traditional sense where I could go back to eating gluten, correct?

Josh Gitalis: Correct. Yeah, because that is your environment trigger.

Andrea Wien: So what other treatment options, say someone does get diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, what other options do they have to kind of fast track the healing process and get themselves back into a state of health and back up the slope of health?

Josh Gitalis: Right. Well, they you need to work with a practitioner or find resources that helps to chip away at all these contributing factors. So we need to kind of go in reverse. Get rid of as many toxins as possible. Clean up your home, clean up your skincare products, clean up your food, which takes care of a big amount of ingested toxins. My wife and I put together this course called Healthy at Home, where we go through every single room in the home and talk about where toxins can be lurking and how to switch those out and do it in a healthier way. So that's really important, we spend most of our time in a room. Most people don't even understand that their mattresses that they sleep on for a third of their life are off gassing if they're not made of organic materials.

So it's a bit of an education process. Some of this stuff I'm saying is going to be very new to people, some stuff people are already going to know. But we have to do our best at chipping away at all these different things. We definitely 100% need to clean up the diet. It's such a foundational item. We need enough sleep. We need to move the body and drink enough water. And these are some things that I call the fundamentals. You have to address the key fundamentals to health before you go off and start to get fancy supplements and other treatments, which don't even really work unless you have those fundamentals nailed.

Andrea Wien: Yeah, and I know that my clients have seen a lot of success in reduction of their symptoms almost as triage with the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol. So that's a diet that removes a lot of the inflammatory foods that people might be eating, and is really geared towards specifically helping people with autoimmune disease.

Josh Gitalis: Yeah, I love that diet. It's a great place for people to start, because it is so restrictive in terms of taking out all those possible things that could be stimulating the immune system. Now, it's not perfect, because everyone is different. Doctor [Detice Kreazien 00:27:43] did a really cool study looking at antigens and their relationship to different thyroid substances in the body, like T3 and T4, different enzymes like thyroid peroxidase, and matching those up with a whole bunch of different foods to see if there was any cellular mimicry and antibodies created.

And there were things on there that were actually on the autoimmune paleo diet, like spinach, for example. I'm not saying this to really confuse the heck out of people, because I feel like that does a great disservice. We're just, people are just so confused with all the information out there these days, but it's to understand that if you go on something like the Autoimmune Paleo Diet and you see some benefit, but not major benefit, then further investigation needs to take place. And it's not the end of the road, it might just actually be the beginning of the road. What I find with my clients is the ones that are committed to really finding the answers eventually get more and more and more and more answers until they get to a point where they want to be in terms of their health.

Andrea Wien: Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like when people start making these changes and start feeling better, they're more incentivized and excited to keep going, because they feel better than perhaps they have in a long time.

Josh Gitalis: Oh, for sure.

Andrea Wien: In terms of the testing that you talked about, and then we'll wrap up, what kinds of, you mentioned getting tested for antibodies and finding out years in advance, potentially, that your body is starting to have some dysfunction, is that something that a functional practitioner would do, can I go to my regular doctor, what should I ask for?

Josh Gitalis: Right. So there are some basic antibodies we can look at like, ANA, antinuclear antibody, which is very nonspecific. You can't really determine exactly which specific tissue that antibody is targeted for. So it's fairly general, but it's a good place to start. And then of course there's more specific antibodies that we can look at related to specific tissues. So one of the most common ones that are looked at are anti thyroglobulin and anti thyroid peroxidase antibodies, which are related to thyroid autoimmunity. And then you can look at a whole bunch of other tissues as well.

Some of them are going to be available from a conventional medical doctor, some are not. So I know there's a lab called Cyrex Labs, we've done this with a number of clients, where they have a full, comprehensive autoimmunity panel, which they look at antibodies, to, I think there's maybe like 30 different tissues that they check on that test, so that's a pretty comprehensive panel to kind of do a screen, to see if there is any autoimmunity present. And those are sort of the two options that are available at the moment.

Andrea Wien: Great. Josh, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about this. I know you write a lot on your blog and have videos and things, and obviously your courses, that get into more detail on this. If people want to find you and keep up with you and read what you have to say, where can they do that?

Josh Gitalis: They can find all the information out at joshgitalis.com. I'm also on Instagram, which is Josh Gitalis, so they can find me there, and all my information is on my website.

Andrea Wien: And you just started a podcast as well. Can you tell everyone about that

Josh Gitalis: I did! Thanks for asking. Yeah. So me and my wife, who's also a nutritionist, just started the Today is The Day Podcast. It's an 11 episode series at the time of our recording, we've released three episodes. And we just really cover some of the most confusing topics for people these days. So we've done an episode on detoxification, and is it a myth or is it something real, we just released an episode on eating on a budget, eating healthy on a budget, is it even possible, and we have a lot of really good practical tools and episodes coming out.

Andrea Wien: That's great. Yeah. I love how you are able to take these complex topics and really break them down and make them so, so easy to understand for everyone. So, highly recommended that people come check you out, and I appreciate the time today. Thank you so much.

Josh Gitalis: Oh, thank you for having me.

Andrea Wien: Thanks for listening to today's episode. As a special offer to our listeners, Josh is offering 5% off his Functional Nutrition Certification Course, or his standalone course on Therapeutic Nutrition and Supplements in Practice. Just use coupon code microbiomeFNC2019 on his website. The code expires August 22nd, so if you're interested, head to our show notes page at biohmblog.com, and click on podcast for details and links. That's B-I-O-H-M blog.com. The Microbiome Report is powered by BIOHM Health, and we're back every other Thursday with new episodes. I'm Andrea Wien, and I'll catch you next time.

 

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