544: From Dad Bod to Fit Doc: Dr. Kyle Gillett’s Biohacks

In this powerful episode of the Learn True Health podcast, Dr. Kyle Gillett dives deep into the foundational pillars of true wellness—covering everything from nutrition, sleep, and exercise to stress management, gut health, and parenting for long-term vitality. With practical insights and evidence-based guidance, Dr. Gillett shares how small, consistent changes can lead to transformative results—whether you're looking to optimize your labs, support your children’s health naturally, or build a sustainable lifestyle that supports your body, mind, and spirit.

Highlights:

• Dr. Kyle Gillett emphasized the seven pillars of health—diet, exercise, sleep, stress, sunlight, social connection, and spirituality—as foundational to achieving long-term well-being.
• He shared how lifestyle changes alone helped him lose excess weight after the birth of his first child, without the use of pharmacological aids.
• He recommended at least 30 grams of fiber per day, ideally from diverse whole food sources, to support metabolic and cardiovascular health.
• Dr. Gillett discussed niacin's downside, including its potential to worsen insulin resistance, and noted safer alternatives like NMN and NR.
• He highlighted how even minor daily habits, like consuming liquid calories or processed snacks, can significantly affect body composition and health.
• Dr. Gillett explained that a robust gut microbiome is crucial for immune health because it provides essential training grounds for the immune system.
• He strongly advocated for limiting antibiotics, especially in children, to prevent disruption of the microbiome and long-term gut issues.
• To manage stress, he recommended building a strong support system, planning for challenging seasons, and using analogies like “spotters at the gym” for life stressors.
• For children, he stressed the importance of modeling healthy eating, shared meals, and ample outdoor time in natural environments to support development and health.
• He advised testing and filtering drinking water, limiting exposure to pesticides, and being cautious with over-the-counter supplements and medications for both kids and adults.

Intro:  

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I'm thrilled for you to tune in today to Dr. Kyle Gillett, as we cover so many interesting topics about functional medicine. I learned a lot from him in today's interview and I'm excited for you to learn as well.

I want to make sure that you are connected and tuned in to everything that I offer at learntruehealth.com. Go to learntruehealth.com and scroll to the bottom and make sure you get on my brand new newsletter. I've spent months building out this wonderful email series where I created articles and built out something that will lay down the foundations of health. As you go through the email series—and I send out maybe two emails a week—I'm not going to spam you, I promise. What I want to do is support your body's ability to heal itself, to support you, and to answer those questions that have been going through your mind as you try to figure out the missing pieces to your health.

Now, a lot of people who tune in are health nuts like me. Maybe you've been on a health journey for a really long time and then there's people who are tuning in because they're just sick of suffering, and I was like that. About 14 years ago, I discovered the answers to my missing pieces of my health journey and I was able to reverse type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility. I was so sick every day and I was so young. In my 20s and early 30s I should have been vibrant. That's the years that you should be the most vibrant, and I was the most sick.

Now, in my 40s, I'm 45 and I feel healthier and more vibrant than I did when I was 25. It's wild. So for the last 14 years, I've been on this amazing journey using holistic medicine—the same protocols, actually, that TakeYourSupplements.com provides you—and you can go and get a free consultation. They will help you to discover exactly which protocols are going to support your body's ability to heal yourself and the nutrients that you're missing, those micronutrients you're missing, and they're wonderful. So go to TakeYourSupplements.com. Highly recommend it.

Make sure you do go to LearnTrueHealth.com. Get on my newsletter and you might not know this about me because you may be a new listener, but since 2005, I have been helping people to end anxiety.

I'm a master practitioner and trainer of neurolinguistic programming, which is a type of cognitive therapy and behavioral psychology, and also timeline therapy, created by Tad James. I’m not related to him. It just so happens. It was quite a funny story. I was trained by Tad and he hired me to work for him and help run his office and help with his training for several years. Then I met my husband—my now husband—who has the same last name, so that was kind of funny.

With timeline therapy and the reason why this is important that you know it is that timeline therapy is the process of how the mind resolves unresolved negative emotions. So if you have anything stuck inside you from your past—anger, sadness, fear, hurt, guilt—if you are struggling with memories in your past that are hurting today, still, that when you think about something in your past you are still hurting now, the process of timeline therapy is the process of how the mind and how the body and how the spirit—how we—resolve the unresolvable that is unresolved inside of us.

The reason why I ended up studying NLP and timeline therapy is I was stuck in grief after losing my mom when I was 22 years old. I was stuck in grief and I wanted to grieve healthfully. So I went out and I took all kinds of courses and I went to all kinds of therapists. I was actively looking for it. I read books. I was looking through all the personal growth books. I did all the personal growth you could possibly imagine and what I discovered is that most modalities don't teach us how to resolve these unresolved negative emotions, that most modalities don't teach us how to be in optimal emotional and mental health.

God guided me to timeline therapy and I walked into the woman's office. I did what's called a breakthrough session. It's a six to eight hour session, just depending on the person. I walked in, I did an eight hour session with her and I walked out and the weight was lifted off my shoulders. That grief that I'd been holding on to—that was, I was not holding it, it was holding me—it was stuck inside me. It was gone.

That day I ended my grieving. Now, I love my mom, I miss my mom, but that deep wound, that deep sadness that wouldn't leave me, left me that day. And that's the day that I began to pursue studying timeline therapy. That's back in 2004. Since then, I've worked with thousands of clients, teaching them and showing them how to do it.

So the process of resolving these unconscious, unresolved negative emotions takes around 15 to 45 minutes per emotion, just depending on the person. So within a few sessions—just a few sessions in one month—we could together resolve all of the anger, sadness, fear, hurt, and guilt from your past.

What that looks like is that you can access in your mind past memories, but you have no experience of the negative emotion because it is gone. In fact, people end up experiencing love and joy on memories that used to house sadness or fear or anger. When we resolve them, we gain the positive learnings. What's beneath that is gratitude and love—even for unpleasant memories, even for unpleasant circumstances that we've been through. When we access those memories again, once we've resolved the negative emotions that were stuck, we get to experience gratitude, love, and even joy for having been through that and the lessons and the learnings we got from it.

If you want to feel totally complete with your past, if you want to feel resolved and complete, and you have been struggling to do that and you haven't been able to do that yet, reach out to me. I would love to work with you. It's such a joy to be able to help people along this journey, as I've been doing it for so many years. I remember having that sense of completion, and it's so beautiful.

The reason why this works a hundred percent of the time is because it's how the mind actually resolves. Timeline therapy is how the mind resolves the unresolved.

I walk you through the process. Another really interesting thing about this process that I walk you through is I don't need to know the content of your memory. If you're worried about being vulnerable or sharing some incredibly intimate or vulnerable past traumas, you do not need to share the content of the memory for me to guide you through and for it to be successful. You don't need to tell me about the vulnerability. I will guide you through it, and you will gain the resolution.

It's really fun, it's light, it's beautiful, and what's really cool is you have a conscious experience of your unconscious mind resolving it. You're conscious the whole time, but you gain and you get to that. It's a very beautiful and healing experience. I'd love to guide you through it.

If that's something that you're called to do, please go to my website, LearnTrueHealth.com, and in the menu you'll see—it says “Work with Ashley James.” You can go down there. You could sign up for one session with me if you just want to try it out, and we can resolve a negative emotion, and you can gain an experience of it. You can sign up for the whole package. If you want to dive in right now, or if you want to talk with me more and see if this is something that's for you, sign up for a free consultation with me.

I'd love to chat with you, and I have other tools as well that I'd love to share with you

If all you want to do is get rid of some chronic pain or increase your energy, you're like, oh man, I can't believe she resolved chronic adrenal fatigue. I'm always so tired. I wake up tired, I go to bed wired and tired. I'd love to have energy again.

Listen, I'm 45 and I can energetically keep up with my 10-year-old. I have the energy now that I didn't even have two years ago. I discovered something in the last two years that has given me more energy than I did even two years ago. I'm constantly learning things and adapting those things to better my health, and I feel like I'm getting healthier and younger the older I get, and I would love to share that with you.

So if you want to work with me one-on-one, that would be awesome. If you want to just join my newsletter and learn from me that way, that would be awesome as well. Just go to LearnTrueHealth.com and either scroll down to the bottom to sign up for the newsletter, or you can go to the top, to the menu, and click “Work with Ashley James” and sign up for a free consultation, or dive right in and hire me as your coach. I'd love to help you.

Thank you so much for being a listener and sharing this podcast with those you care about.

As you're listening to this episode, if anyone comes to mind—sometimes that is God asking us to answer other people's prayers. So if anyone pops in your head as you listen to this episode or others, please share that episode with them. Even if you're like, geez, I don't know. I don't know how they're going to receive this. I don't know why I'd share it with them. God works through us. If you ever have just that moment where a thought pops in your head that doesn't make sense, follow it. That’s the intuition. It's sometimes God's voice, and it is so rewarding to follow that.

My friend says it's goosebumps. If you ever get goosebumps, follow the goosebumps. That's God talking to you too.

If you ever want to reach out to me and give me feedback or share a positive thing that happened—a lesson that you learned that has improved your health as a result of my podcast—I’d love to hear from you. Jump into the listener community. Go to LearnTrueHealth.com/group, which takes you to our Facebook group, or just go to Facebook and type in Learn True Health and join our Facebook group. I would absolutely love to hear your testimonial.

I get great emails all the time. You can write to Support@LearnTrueHealth.com if you want to share with me personally about a testimonial, about something that happened to you. I'm brought to tears all the time listening to and reading your testimonials. So please feel it. It feeds my soul to hear from you guys, and I love that what I do is helping you.

Please keep sharing the podcast so we can help others. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you share the podcast, and then someone turns around and says, “This made such a huge difference in my life. Thank you for sharing it.” I get great feedback from the listeners thanking me for what I do. When you share this podcast with others, those people are going to turn around and thank you for the impact that you've had on them—for sharing it. Awesome.

Well, enjoy today’s interview with Dr. Kyle Gillette. I know you will.

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 544.

Ashley James (0:12:15.567)

I'm so excited for today's guest. We have Dr. Kyle Gillette here on the show. His website is GilletteHealth.com. You also have a website, SageBio.com. Of course, the links to everything that Dr. Kyle does are going to be in the show notes for today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com.

I'm really excited to have you on the show because I actually found you in a Facebook reel, of all places. I love the content you're putting out. It was really, really interesting. You were discussing the remarkable benefits of soft tissue repair when utilizing BPC 157 peptide. I think peptide therapy is super interesting. I love looking at how we can sort of biohack, walk away from, or enhance the standard of care and go—how can we support the body nutritionally, or what's the body missing?

There’s epigenetics and there’s the understanding of the genetic expressions of our microbiome, and there’s are all kinds of things we can dig down into to optimize. But if we don't have the foundations of health, then there's no point in trying to optimize something without first laying those foundations. You discuss the foundations of health, so I'm really excited to talk to you today.

My hope is that our listeners who are struggling, that they want to get a leg up and they want to start feeling their best, that they're going to learn something really awesome from you today.

So welcome to the show.

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:13:38.512)

Thank you for having me, my pleasure.

Ashley James (0:13:40.448)

Absolutely. So you started out as a regular—I don't say regular—but you started out as an MD. You went to the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

What happened that had you get interested in helping people, helping your patients and clients get so healthy—just helping them take their health to the next level? Because a lot of doctors don't go beyond drugs, and they don't go deep into diet and lifestyle medicine.

So what happened that you saw this as a necessity?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:14:13.854)

I think that I have a very deep intrinsic motivation to help people in multiple ways, in ways other than just going by a cookie-cutter algorithm, which eventually robot doctors or large language models will partly take over.

I grew up in Kansas, and I've seen my dad practice. He was also a family practice doctor. Being in the Midwest, a lot of the family physicians here do full-scope medicine. They see pediatrics, they deliver babies, the hospital, they do prenatal care, they do end-of-life care, and they do specialty medicine-type things as well. There's a larger scope of practice in areas like Kansas in general.

I knew that I wanted to take care of people and practice full-scope type of medicine. Many of my colleagues and peers throughout college and medical school and residency, I really enjoyed the small amount of nutrition or the small amount of exercise-as-medicine activities or food-as-medicine activities. These interest groups were actually wildly popular in medical school and residency.

But as residency progresses, and as practice gets busy, there's simply not much time to do this. It's not a heavily billable service, so there's no incentive to achieve those things. I know with what's called value-based care, which is basically paying people for outcomes, they're trying to change that, but frankly, the change has not been enough.

I was really lucky that I was in a colleague group and had a lot of friends and acquaintances that were very similarly motivated. I was able to join groups where I did have time to care for the patient holistically—for their body, mind, and soul. Some patients, maybe you pray for them and encourage them and listen to them. Some patients, maybe you very aggressively detect or treat something.

I think that, given that I always knew that I wanted to be a family medicine physician—and specifically a concierge medicine physician that strives for optimal physical, mental, and spiritual health—with that end in mind, I did not get lost in the sea of busyness where most of my friends and colleagues that were in these exact same interest groups as me, they're practicing very cookie-cutter conventional medicine practices these days.

Ashley James (0:16:59.190)

Did you have any health issues that you had to resolve, or have you always been super healthy? Did you get to experience holistic medicine in your personal life?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:17:12.126)

That's a great question. It's one that I talk about on our podcast very often. We give health updates—both myself and James O'Hara, my nurse practitioner, co-host, and friend.

My wife always calls me the world's biggest hypochondriac. I have three children—yes, with three children under the age of five—and with a very busy life otherwise, I certainly feel fulfilled. But I am hyper-aggressive when it comes to my own health, whether that means looking at some skin lesion or an episode of something as simple as hemorrhoid bleeding, or if that's something that I see in my labs with my cholesterol. I am more acutely aware of that, and it actually brings me great peace of mind to have an appropriate workup, think about the negatives and the positives of doing that workup, and then seeing what it is—regardless of if it's pathology or completely normal or somewhere in between.

I always tell people, if you're looking for something and you feel something might be off, you can always dig deeper. If you dig deep enough, you will find something. It might be incidental, but you can also do a lot of damage from digging.

With my personal health, I do not doctor myself. I go to my colleagues, actually, and I seek their advice, and I try to be as much of a patient as I reasonably could. But over time, I've come up with anything from what I call a postpartum dad stack to various nootropic stacks for focus and cognitive health.

Ashley James (0:18:55.862)

Nice. I have a few episodes on nootropics and what a difference they can make.

Can you explain what nootropics are for those who don't know yet?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:19:08.538)

It's any substance, whether it's prescribed or not, that can have a benefit on a specific cognitive outcome or cognition in someone.

You can have some nootropics that are “smooth and calming”. You can also have some nootropics that are stimulants. You can also have some nootropics to improve memory or retention, or even the speed at which you think about things.

Ashley James (0:19:34.674)

The guy I had on my show, the nootropics guy—I'm not remembering his name. It's on the tip of my brain. I think I need to take my nootropics this morning.

He had raging ADHD so bad, and he ended up taking—I think it was Ritalin—and it caused him to have hypothyroidism so bad that he couldn't even remember his name. So he basically wasn't a candidate for the standard drugs at the time for ADHD, and that's what led him to seek out nootropics. Now he says he has even more mental clarity and doesn't have any negative impact from ADHD symptoms. It's even better than the drugs—that he's achieved that balance—which is really exciting, knowing that you can make your own stack, you can make your own formula, and play with it.

I made one change. I started doing my blood work every three months with a functional medicine doctor, and I did one change. So I got my blood work, and then I just did it again. It's been three months, but I made one change, and I cut my triglycerides in half. I was so excited. That's just that one metric. Other metrics changed for the better, but that one metric was such a huge shift.

I changed one habit. That’s really exciting. My habit was eating out maybe between one and two times a week. If life got really busy, three times a week. I would always ask for no oil, but even if I just got steamed vegetables, most of the time they’d sneak in some kind of oil. I tried to order things that were the healthiest I could find—lots of vegetables.

But yes, that was it. Eating out one to three times a week was causing my triglycerides to be twice as high. I cut it, but now it’s down in healthy ranges. I just stopped eating out and I found ways to cook for my family for every single meal. That was my goal—which I have done in the past—but I don't want to say I got lazy, but life got busy and I let that be the excuse.

I see in my blood work—100% home-cooked meals in three months. Huge difference to my blood panels. How exciting is that? Of course, I’m always wanting to take my health to the next level. That’s the fun thing. Firstly, the foundations, and then tweak.

It's great that you're on top of it, but you're also not being your own doctor. Because, like you said, we can end up becoming hypochondriacs.

Can you share what are the pillars that are the most important that you practice every day—the pillars of health that you implement every day—and how do you personally implement them?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:22:29.162)

The three most important pillars of health, of course, are diet, exercise, and sleep. The secondary pillars are stress, sunlight, social situation, and spirituality, which is just where you are on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Everyone has a metaphysical need.

As far as diet, exercise, and sleep—given that I have a three-week-old, and again, three under the age of five—sleep is something that I do my best to optimize and continue to have my sleep architecture and sleep quality good when I can get it, because there's inevitably going to be interruptions. Perhaps I'm getting a few more gray hairs, and yes, new parents do actually lose brain cells and brain volume when they go through what's normal sleep deprivation stages of having a newborn.

Occasionally if I have shift work and I have not slept at all, I'm not against taking something—50 milligrams of Modafinil, which is a prescription, also known as Provigil. Occasionally I do that if I want to be at 100%. But of course, that's not going to take you over 100%. You want to be careful because if you take too many stimulants or even too much caffeine, you're going to affect your sleep.

Past that, with diet and exercise, I try to consume about 90% good—and by good, I mean mostly whole foods or minimally processed foods. There's certainly a difference between minimally processed and ultra-processed foods. Then I have flexible dieting the other period of the time.

When it comes to exercise, that is certainly one of my main hobbies. I do a lot of CrossFit competitions. I do a lot of Hyrox and running and weightlifting competitions and things like that. I enjoy doing it for social reasons, and so do my wife and my friends in the area.

You can ego anything. You can ego podcast. You can ego practice medicine outside of your scope. You can ego lift. You can ego CrossFit. You can ego anything. You can ego run. You want to stay within your capabilities. Yes, learn new things and stimulate your brain, as Dr. Tommy Wood says, but I do my best to maintain what I'm able to do now in my mid-30s so that 40, 50, 60 years from now, I'm still going to be able to do these same types of things.

Ashley James (0:25:01.504)

I've also heard you say that the seventh pillar is sunlight, which I love—that idea of getting outside. When I did 75 Hard, one of those workouts every day is outside, so you're getting the sunlight.

How much sunlight do you think we should get? Do you have any advice for getting out in the sunlight every day? Even if it's cloudy, get out there, right?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:25:23.980)

Definitely, at least 10 minutes outside every day is a bare minimum. The Sunlight Pillar of Health is just indicative that it is natural to be outside. It is unnatural to be indoors in an artificial environment.

Cold exposure, heat exposure, feeling the wind, being in the elements—even seeing the green of shrubberies and trees—is part of the Sunlight Pillar of Health.

Ashley James (0:25:48.116)

Being in nature has a profound calming effect. Love that they actually prescribe nature bathing in Japan. There are studies that show that just being in nature and inhaling that fresh air, seeing the shrubbery, like you said—seeing the trees, seeing the green.

Also, if you can get your feet on bare grass or touch plants, touch a tree, touch the ground with your bare skin, you're earthing as well.

With implementing the pillars of health, do you have any specific examples of patient stories of success, where patients have, just by implementing this balance, overcome major obstacles?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:26:40.392)

There's certainly a lot of stories of success. Perhaps a very granular one would be seeing someone who's previously on a large number of medications. They implement significant lifestyle interventions and then, ideally, get off those medications as appropriate. Maybe not all of them, but most of them. It is extremely rewarding to see.

I would even make a case that getting off a huge list of supplements is nearly equally satisfying as that. Because if someone's on four dozen supplements because of a far suboptimal diet, and they're able to really pare that down to a pithy half dozen supplements—or even 10 supplements—I think is reasonable. Most people would think more than two or three is ridiculous. But I'm also rewarded when I see specific examples of that.

With my own life, probably the most striking time is right after I had my first son, who is four years old now, almost five. I was probably 25 to 30 pounds overweight—too much body fat. I'm naturally very tall and lean—or tall with long arms—so it's kind of hard to tell, but I was certainly overweight. Without use of any pharmacology, just changing up my diet and my exercise pattern, I was able to pretty significantly recomp despite having a newborn.

So each time I've had a newborn, I'm kind of reminded of that time and re-incentivized to improve my metabolic health.

Ashley James (0:28:26.940)

What do you do and what do you recommend people do to manage stress?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:28:34.216)

With stress, there's a couple ways to look at it. You definitely do not want too much stress. Just like if you're lifting a weight in the gym, you don't want to lift too heavy of a weight. It will injure you, and it can crush you.

But you can learn to take what I would call stressors of life—which is not too much stress—something that requires a response and adaptation and coping mechanisms to improve. You can build that up almost like a progressive overload if you're lifting a weight in a gym. So by managing stress, you can learn to adapt to higher levels of stress.

Yes, some people are bored, and there's just a different neuroplasticity continuum, or they have different strengths and weaknesses. Some people are certainly born to manage stress easier. Perhaps it's nature, perhaps it's nurture. Adverse childhood events certainly take a role in that as well.

But I do like to encourage people not to avoid something just because it might induce a period of stress, because a lot of times, some of the most rewarding activities that you do will bring about a lot of stress when you start them.

Ashley James (0:29:50.952)

That's such a good point. I can only speak for what it's like to be a woman. I understand a lot of women and mothers who have this baseline level of stress that is slowly killing them. They're not really doing anything to lower it. The activities they're doing that they think are lowering it—for example, drinking alcohol at the end of the night—I'm not talking about getting wasted.

Having one glass of alcohol actually negatively impacts your stress levels for 24 hours. We can see that it negatively impacts your sleep, your metabolism, and your heart rate variability. We can see that it hurts you and it actually causes more stress. But you come home and you just want to have this mental break. So it's become habitual to have one glass of alcohol.

Even one glass of alcohol has a negative impact. Or so many moms will stay up past an appropriate bedtime. We should really be following a sleep schedule around 10, 10:30. They're staying up well upwards of 2 a.m., scrolling on TikTok or whatever, because that's their only time that they have—because they are the executive function of their husband, and of their children, and of themselves, and possibly their aging parents.

For husbands listening, I know that might sound like a bit of an insult, but I can't tell you how many husbands rely on their wives to cook for them, clean for them. And both parents have jobs, and the mom often takes on more of a responsibility for the well-being of the whole family. So she's not really taking care of herself to lower that stress. Maybe she exercises a little bit. Maybe she's trying to eat clean. But if you're maybe having some alcohol or having some sugar to self-pacify, you're doing more damage.

So for those who just have this baseline constant stress level—and because stress isn't an emotion, they're not aware of it—what do you recommend that they implement every day to make sure that they are managing the stress, they're lowering their stress, and that the activities are most important to not increase it?

I love what you said. Don't not do something because you think it could be stressful.

For example, I just finished a nine-day raw vegan cleanse. I don't like the word “cleanse”—it's more of a reset. But for me, it was really a challenge. Yes, it was stressful in that I had to reorganize how I cooked—not cooked, but how I prepared food. I still was cooking for my family, but the benefits far outweigh that initial stressor.

If I had gone, oh wow, I can't do this for nine days, this is going to be too hard, I would have never taken it on. But I see that it's kind of fun to take on stressful challenges. Worst case scenario, I could have stopped. So it's always good to try.

If you're taking on something like, I'm going to go for a hike, yes, do it at your own pace, but don't avoid it because you're afraid it's going to be stressful. You can always stop.

But in terms of those women who just have this constant baseline stress that is unhealthy, what do you recommend for them?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:33:18.688)

That's a great question because there's multiple ways to approach this and this has a lot of interplay with the social pillar of health. When I did the podcast with Rich Roll– I have to give him credit—he was the one that suggested that I add the social pillar of health. We were talking about stress and family situations and we were talking about homeschooling because I was homeschooled all the way through versus unschooling, which his kids do.

It's kind of a type of homeschooling. But anyway, not to rabbit trail too much. The communication within the, really the family and friend unit—some people call it the tribal unit. I have a lot of close family members that live here and a lot of very close friends that I actually consider just brothers. They're family to me. When you're anticipating a stressful event, the analogy in the gym would be you're anticipating a very heavy squat or a bench press that would otherwise crush you.

It is not illegal in life to use spotters or equipment to help lift that. So you go ahead and you put on your lifting belt and your knee sleeves and your wrist wraps and you get a few family and friends and hopefully talk with your spouse or your parents or whatever other support structure that you have. You have them help lift that weight.

Just going into this third child in pregnancy, we kind of knew what to expect with the first two. But we certainly had a lot of our tribe, family, and friends spotting. I switched my schedule to be —what I call—my paternity schedule. My wife and I had lots of very frank conversations about how we want to split up different tasks or chores and what some of the positives or negatives would be.

Making a smart, logical decision before that stressor event comes up—because by the time that you're doing that, again, in this analogy, that barbell is crushing you down—that's just life. There's going to be times when it is heavier than you can lift. Then your spiritual support or church can pray for you and help you, and your family and friends can help you and be there for you.

A lot of times they actually help lift a lot of that weight itself.

Ashley James (0:35:49.275)

So really the sunlight, social, and spirit pillars are all for helping stress. I mean, of course, sleep, diet, and exercise. Really, all the other pillars are to keep stress in healthy levels, in check.

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:36:04.681)

Yes, some of the sayings go that the thoughts that there's just too much to do, the overwhelming feeling perhaps is just part of the human experience itself, given that for thousands and thousands of years, humans have had a lot of trouble and, frankly, imminent danger, whether it's from wild animals or other humans or just situations that are going to greatly negatively affect a social situation. I do think that it's part of being human.

But yes, I guess what I'm trying to imply is now that we're inside all the time, we don't have the benefit of walking outside in our town, and we don't have the benefit of often living with very close family members that you really depend on, have an intricate level of trust of, and you don't have the same community as humans usually have for thousands and thousands of years. I think that these things are partly culpable for the increased incidence of anxiety and mood disorders.

Ashley James (0:37:19.369)

I read a really fascinating true story, about this one part of Italy that had the lowest rates of disease—especially stress-related disease—cardiovascular disease was almost nonexistent in this one town. This wasn’t a wealthy town, but this whole town, everyone knew each other and everyone worked for this one factory. You’d walk home from the factory and you'd stop at your friend's house, then you'd stop at your cousin's house, and then you'd go to your house.

Because it wasn’t a wealthy area, there would be three to four generations living under each roof. Your kids were being raised by the community. It wasn’t just you—everyone took care of each other. A team of researchers came, I believe it was a cardiologist super interested in figuring out: What is it? Could it be the Italian diet? What are they eating differently?

He got there and he was appalled. He was like, they're eating fried meatballs and drinking tons of wine. They’re all sloshed and there's cheese everywhere. He couldn’t figure it out. It took him a while to realize that they ate just like everyone else in Italy. Of course, they walked like everyone else in Italy walks so much. But their rates of heart disease were so low because of the unique situation: the whole community supported each other so much that the stress was low.

So if, God forbid, a house burned down, the whole community would come together to help. Or if there was an illness, everyone would be around that person's bedside, taking turns. They just took the load of many. Everyone was a spotter for each other. Then what happened is, within a generation, it became transient. The area changed.

And within one generation, now that area—because that supportive community disappeared—has the same heart disease rates as the rest of Italy. I thought, man, it's so important that we do this.

I also homeschool my son, and in 2020, I ended up starting a homeschool group so that we could continue to go out and play and continue to be social. It’s the connection with the moms—and I can't believe how much that saved me mentally, my mental health—to have that social pillar that you talk about.

We really do not give it enough credit. In our society, we do not give enough credit to making those social connections and leaning on each other. But because we did, and we still do—it’s now a very robust homeschooling group—we feel emotionally supported, and that lowers our stress levels and thus lowers cardiovascular disease risk.

The daylight savings time—which I thought was really interesting—the University of Michigan in 2014 did a study and found that the day after springing forward, when we lose an hour, there’s a 24% increased risk in heart attacks. A Finnish study found 8% increased risk in strokes. A 2018 study found AFib levels go up. That’s just losing one hour of sleep. That’s just the stress of one hour of sleep lost.

It’s really wild how we’re constantly just on the edge. This is how important it is to lower stress—because we’re all kind of revving at 9,000 RPM and we don’t realize it.

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:41:15.429)

Yes, it's similar to the video games that you see in the arcade. There's a whole line of coins on the edge and you think if there's just one more placed in there, a whole bunch of them are going to fall off. That sometimes does happen. That’s the phenomenon that does explain the daylight saving shift in cardiovascular events.

It explains a lot of other things as well. For example, even seizure risk. If you have a very poor night of sleep, the incidence of seizure is going to increase significantly.

So it's important to remember, yes, try to prevent the spark or the earthquake that shakes off the whole line of coins at the arcade. But you're also trying to prevent from getting into a situation similar to that in the first place. Perhaps the little speed bumps delay things, but at the end of the day, you want to be on the road to as long of a health span as possible.

So there's, I guess, a good takeaway: that consistency over a long period of time is much more important than going all out 100% perfect for a year and then having years that are essentially completely lost to health.

Ashley James (0:42:35.705)

What do you do to help ensure your longevity?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:42:42.181)

So quite a few things. The first things, of course, are the pillars of health and the lifestyle things that I already talked about—diet, exercise, sleep. I try to be at least 80% dialed in and on top of it.

Past that, I, of course, do my own lab tests. You already mentioned the websites at the start of the podcast, but I post all my lab panels online. So even if somebody lives in a different country and they can't just click buttons to order it, they can take that to any doctor or lab service that's able to order those biomarkers.

I trend things pretty closely. I want to make sure that I'm setting myself up for success in a long period of time. Each patient, including myself, can talk with their healthcare provider about if they should do more aggressive health tests. For example, genetic tests like an Invitae proactive screening for things like cardiovascular disease or cancer risk genetics. People can also talk about advanced preventive imaging depending on what they're predisposed to or depending on what their history has been or symptoms have been in the past.

In general, I think that there's a few things that you can add in past lifestyle that are benefiting toward your health span. I think that creatine supplementation is certainly one of them. I think that vitamin or mineral supplementation, if you don't get it in the diet, is another very reasonable one. I am not completely against vitamin D supplementation, but I did recently do a podcast just on vitamin D supplementation and both the upsides and downsides of it pretty recently, if people want to check out the Gillette Health podcast on that.

If somebody has a genetic predisposition toward something like a high homocysteine or even something like a very high ApoB or lipoprotein little a, which are different lipid particles, I think it's reasonable to consider supplementation for things like that.

Ashley James (0:44:56.057)

What kind of supplements help that?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:44:59.193)

When it comes to ApoB, the number one thing that helps is increasing the amount of fiber, either through the diet or supplementation, to at least 30 grams per day. So a lot of people, I'll have them track their fiber for seven days, divided by seven. If it's less than 30 grams, you can either add more to the diet or you can consider supplementation with a broad-spectrum fiber supplement, ideally a lot of dietary fiber, both soluble and insoluble dietary fiber, and also prebiotic fiber in a decent variety.

Past that, I do consider azetamib a supplement. It's basically just a cholesterol absorption inhibitor. If you consume a vegetarian or vegan diet, it's not going to help you particularly well. But if you don't, it does give you a lot of the benefits if you choose to continue to consume a lot of animal products as well. It helps people in particular that are called hyperabsorbers of cholesterol.

I don't think everybody needs genetically tested to see if they have even PIC-protein, to where they absorb a lot of cholesterol. I generally don't test desmostral levels, which is basically a type of cholesterol precursor that is due to synthesis instead of absorption. So it comes from inside the body. Obviously, people who do not consume any cholesterol whatsoever, they synthesize their cholesterol and they're able to.

I do think that acetamin is reasonable for some people. In terms of lipoprotein little a, anything that increases testosterone or estrogen tends to decrease lipoprotein little a. Niacin and niacin derivatives also tend to decrease lipoprotein little a, but niacin itself has downsides if you take it.

A DHEA supplement, which is actually a bioidentical hormone, is also an androgen that in some cases does decrease lipoprotein little a. Willow bark extract or aspirin, as I call it, for some people helps decrease lipoprotein little a.

ApoB and Lp little a, those are just two different lipid particles that are blocks in plaque wall. We don't really go by LDL as much anymore. That doesn't have that good of a correlation with cardiovascular endpoints, but ApoB and Lp little a certainly do.

Ashley James (0:47:19.599)

There's a difference though between willow bark extract and aspirin because aspirin has removed a lot of the constituents. Whereas willow bark extract contains the willow bark. It's the whole thing. So you're getting all the flavonoids, which helps with pain, but also decreases inflammation.

So would you recommend people take willow bark tincture?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:47:47.675)

Yes, generally no, not because of the extra compounds that are still going to be active on cyclooxygenase. But generally the reason why I don't recommend it is it does have more salicylic acid. So aspirin is ASA or acetylsalicylic acid, which is salicylic acid with an acetyl group. Salicylic acid itself tends to be more irritating on the gastric mucosa.

There's of course a wide variation of response and I know that some people are able to tolerate it, but generally if I recommend an aspirin, I recommend something called Vazalore, V-A-Z-A-L-O-R-E, and it's actually liquid acetylsalicylic acid that is in a capsule. The capsule passes all the way through the esophagus and stomach without releasing, so it's just released in the intestines. So it's essentially impossible to get gastritis, which is stomach irritation, given that it passes through the stomach. So it's very gentle.

I usually recommend it at very low doses. Sometimes I do test people to see if they are going to be a genetic responder to aspirin for a lipoprotein little a. There's a gene that will tell that. So yes, that's generally the way that I like. Dose also matters. I try to look at the total stickiness of the platelet. One easy way to look at this is thromboxane A2 activity or how much androgen each individual has.

If somebody tends to have either more platelets or stickier platelets or they tend to be in a hypercoagulable state for any reason, then I'm more likely to at least temporarily, if not permanently, have someone consider an antiplatelet medication like aspirin, which essentially doesn't decrease your platelets, it just makes the platelets you have less sticky.

It's not uncommon for people to have slightly more or slightly less clotting or bleeding predisposition than is optimal.

Ashley James (0:49:52.894)

What were the downsides of niacin supplementation besides the flush?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:49:59.189)

If you look at large studies of people who have taken prescription niacin called NiASPAN, and yes, in some varieties of NiASPAN there is DI in there, but if you look at the large placebo-controlled studies, people that did not take niacin or NiASPAN actually had less cardiovascular events and also less diabetes. So similar to growth hormone or growth hormone-releasing peptides like simoralin or MK677, which is avetamorin, niacin does appear to increase the speed at which you develop insulin resistance and high blood glucose.

Ashley James (0:50:40.601)

Is that just for all niacin or is that just for that prescription?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:50:46.013)

I believe all niacin does it. I do not believe that nicotinamide riboside does it, which is NR, and nicotinamide mononucleotide, which is NMN, certainly does not cause insulin resistance. It actually helps improve insulin sensitivity. The downside of that is if you take more than about 500 milligrams, it does appear to upregulate cell turnover, similar to taking high amounts of growth hormone. So high amounts of growth hormone or high amounts of growth hormone-releasing peptides, or high amounts of NMN or NAD plus, do likely turn over cells enough to where they would at least theoretically increase the risk of tumor growth or even things like cancer metastases. We know it's true from animal studies, but we don't necessarily know that's true from human studies, besides with growth hormone. It very likely is true if too high of a dose is prescribed.

Ashley James (0:51:41.149)

You see, this is why it's so important to work with a holistic doctor, functional medicine doctor, a naturopathic doctor, an MD that specializes in holistic medicine. It's so important because there's all these little details that you just need a tweak. Just, okay, don't do this, do this. Your genetics say do this instead. These little tweaks make such a big difference instead of just going to Walmart and buying or going to Costco and buying whatever supplements are on the shelf. We just don't know. You just don't know how your body's going to respond to it.

The same with diet. I don't believe in diet dogma, but I do believe that in general, the best diet is unprocessed. The best diet is don't eat processed food, eat whole food. I mean, for me, I love a whole food plant-based diet. That's where my body thrives. But I don't believe in diet dogma because I also see, for example, the GAPS diet, which is a medicinal diet, utilizes meat and animal products in the form of making bone broths. They have seen children go from nonverbal to verbal because that diet was designed to help children on the spectrum or children who have been vaccine injured.

So we see we can use a diet medicinally for specific times in our life. We can use food as medicine. You'd mentioned increasing fiber. I think 30 grams of fiber should be at minimum for everyone. I think everyone should aim for 50 or more from your food. I like that you mentioned supplementing with a prebiotic because they found that Metamucil, although it can make you feel full, it creates bulk, it doesn't ferment. Because it doesn't ferment, it doesn't feed your gut microbiome. In the studies they conducted, it didn't have positive outcomes compared to increasing just fiber from food. So eat more beans and lentils, for example.

In terms of healthy cholesterol levels, they didn't see as much of a difference from increasing fiber from supplements—the supplements that didn't ferment. So I love that you mentioned, if you're going to supplement, supplement with a prebiotic fiber because at least we know we're feeding the good microbiome as well.

I actually love that metric. If you just picked one thing in your diet to change, figure out what you're doing now. Most people are eating between 15 and 20 grams of fiber a day, and then slowly every week increase by 5 to 10 grams. Get yourself up to in the 40 to 50 gram range of fiber from food and from a variety of foods. There's so much that changes, so much changes with health if we do that. Your bowel movements become great, your energy becomes great. It helps so many things. Mental clarity becomes great. So many things shift just by focusing on that one metric of where am I getting my fiber today?

I'm not asking you necessarily to cut anything out because you're so full from all the fiber. You're not going to go eat all that processed crap because you're so full from the wonderful fiber.

In terms of the diet that you love for yourself, what are the biggest things you make sure that you get in every day or every week to just make sure you're feeding yourselves and your cells are just singing with nutrition?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:55:20.885)

I have a lot of favorite foods that I enjoy both from a taste and health perspective. Some of the most rewarding meals that I have are meals that are growing mostly, if not completely, in our home garden or our home farm. So, we have a lot of chickens. One of my favorites is eggs. They're widely available, maybe a little bit less when it gets cold because in the winter it does get relatively cold in Kansas.

That's one of my favorites. A lot of our patients also have various farms or homesteads in the area. So it's always fun to eat some of the things that they've grown or made. When I lost the kind of extra body fat, really—from the first of my children, I gave myself a list of about half a dozen foods. I could eat as many of these as I could possibly want. They happen to be things that I love. I love spinach. It doesn't have to be the same type of spinach. It could be arugula or a variety of greens. I let myself eat an unlimited amount of these. Fortunately, I ate a decent amount of this at baseline. If you tell the average person that—that has not eaten a leafy vegetable in quite some time—they might go into a lot of distress. I have certainly seen that.

For me, this was fantastic before I went to a potluck or a Kansas City Chiefs party or this or that, where there's just this huge wide variety of ultra-palatable, hyper-ultra-processed foods. I would eat a lot of that along with as many eggs as I liked. I did egg whites back then. Now I do more so the whole eggs, but I'm at a very healthy body fat percentage at this point.

I also allowed myself to consume as much Greek yogurt or Icelandic yogurt, also known as skyr. For people that have trouble with this, I do like to have a little bit of kefir or similar with it for tolerability. Yes, you can slowly work your way up. I really enjoy doing that.

I'm not against things that are mildly to moderately processed. Lately, while I consume my skyr, I have enjoyed putting some alulose—some organic alulose—in it, which is kind of natural, but kind of not. I think something as little as two grams or three grams actually makes a pretty big difference and is no more of a downside than a little bit of sugar would be.

Ashley James (0:58:01.486)

The allulose is such an interesting topic because doesn't it increase GHP-1 production in the gut?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:58:10.822)

It does slightly. Almost anything that causes what's called a gustatory response will do that. So the response that you have when you really like something in general will increase glucagon-like peptide 1 production endogenously in your own body, in your gut naturally or semi-naturally if it's a semi-natural substance.

I guess the thing that's somewhat unique with allulose is it abides very similar receptors to fructose, but it blocks those receptors. So it's a five-carbon ring, which doesn't matter as much. But basically, if you are going to be consuming a lot of calories, or if you're going to be “bulking”—which occasionally I do bulk—my wife is an extremely strong individual. She's actually a world record holder for a rowing erg, if people know what that is.

Occasionally I do have to bulk so I can keep up with her for the coed competitions that we do. If I'm going to do that, then I certainly want to consume a whole bunch of fruit. I love blueberries. I say that probably once every other podcast. But blueberries have a lot of fructose, but I am not scared of the fructose in blueberries.

If I am bulking pretty aggressively trying to get my lean body mass to a higher amount, then I do consume a little bit of allulose with it. I think it's actually a great balance to make sure that the metabolic change is secondary to what is actually very high amounts of fructose. It's not going to have a deleterious effect.

Ashley James (0:59:45.628)

Have you ever tried switching to wild blueberries instead of regular blueberries?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (0:59:51.409)

I have consumed wild blueberries. We do have blueberries out back. We have a huge garden. I don't know if those are considered wild, but they seem wild and they're not as large as other even organic blueberries that we consume, but yet they are very tasty.

Ashley James (1:00:08.345)

Do you get your organic blueberries from Costco?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:00:11.351)

If I had to guess, I’m pretty sure my wife shops at Whole Foods most of the time. So some people might judge me for that. I do shopping from Costco, and I actually really like Aldi. Aldi, I think, is multitudes better when it comes to produce.

I know very few people who shop at Aldi for produce because they've been burned. I remember back in med school or college, Aldi was certainly not known for their produce.

But at least in the Kansas area, I think they're quite good for that now. We also go to a lot of farmers markets. Blueberries, of course, are only in season for a relatively short period of time. There’s a farm called Garingers that we love going to for picking in the summer.

Ashley James (1:00:59.903)

Nice. We do frozen. I do frozen wild organic blueberries. At Costco, Costco has the best price and they're always delicious. Their frozen organic blueberries are phenomenal. I've recently switched to wild blueberries because it's more than two times the antioxidant. There's other benefits too. I'm loving them. I love blueberries. I love the leafy greens. That's so important.

What did you do to drop the baby weight?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:01:33.379)

Of those half a dozen or slightly more things that I could just eat as much as I could possibly like, I would consume those things before I would usually hyper-consume other ultra-palatable foods. Also around that time, I limited myself to no more than two adult beverages every couple months, which now that I've been a parent for longer is just a relatively natural thing, but I'm not against enjoying the social benefit of an alcoholic beverage or two. I don't even think it has to be tequila. I don't even think it has to be hard alcohol. But in the last year, I've probably drank two or three beverages, two or three times. Maybe this year will be slightly more because my wife was pregnant for most of all this last year.

That was one thing that I did to limit calories. I cut out all other liquid calories with the exception of a protein shake if I did want to consume one for

convenience purposes.

Ashley James (1:02:41.715)

Nice. I think it's so important to stay on top of those little things—drinking a latte with sugar in it every day and then cutting that out. I met a woman who lost 80 pounds. I'm like, what did you do? She goes, all I did was I just switched. I just switched to water. So literally 80 pounds dropped off her because she was drinking orange juice, lattes, alcohol, Coca-Cola—just all of it. She just drank water.

And it adds up. I had a friend who gained 10 pounds. She started a new job and there were chocolates available for them. Every time you walk by the front desk—and she's very fit. She's actually out hiking now. She's very, very fit, not an ounce of fat on her. She's never gained weight. She starts showing me her tummy. She goes, look at this. And she had this little bulge and she goes, she looks pregnant.

Just think of a woman who's very athletic, not an ounce of fat, and then she's got this little pooch and she goes, I realized that every time I walked by the front desk, I ate a little chocolate. It was maybe four chocolates a day for a whole month that added up to this pooch. So she just had to stop. Had to say no. But we think it's just a tiny little thing, and it adds up. It really does. Those baby steps add up. So making that one change can make a huge difference.

Do you have a specific diet or way of using food as medicine with your patients?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:04:14.591)

I have several things that I consider semi cookie cutter. I also have a couple different excellent sports dietitians I work with. Diana and Adrian both have a lot of experience and they do great with their clients coming up with an individualized plan. But I do like to send my protocol that has each person pick half a dozen things or 10 things that have good sources of fiber, high in protein.

They like consuming them, or they can learn to like consuming them. That is also okay. They pick those things to emphasize. Then figuring out how they can decrease the amount of liquid calories. Like you mentioned, even if it's a nice, healthy creamer and honey, if someone's metabolically unhealthy, then I'd love to get them to, eating more amounts of honey or more amounts of good sources of creamer or whatnot, whatever the case may be.

Macadamia nut milk or oil, the things that people like to put in their drinks, MCT oil. But initially, doing things that are going to set in habits to avoid those liquid calories, you're probably going to have more benefits than detriments. So I send people a few paragraphs of things that they can implement and customize. I used to use the Food is Medicine prescriptions from the American Board of Obesity Medicine and Obesity Medicine Association, and they are quite good, and they are a great step forward that I think is becoming more and more popular each year. I see the number of board certified obesity medicine providers. I think when I did mine five or so years ago, there were probably a thousand, and now there's probably 8,000 or even 9,000. It's just crazy. So some of these things that seem cookie cutter that aren't very individualized, are still quite good because not everybody is going to end up seeing a sports dietitian or someone who can really emphasize quality nutrition and quality food and body composition over a number on a scale.

Ashley James (1:06:25.073)

Childhood obesity is at an all time high. Younger and younger children are even getting diagXnosed with heart disease and type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. What are you doing as a parent to prevent your children from that same fate, from being a statistic? What are you teaching your children? What is the most important thing as a parent that you're guarding your children from?

You're saying, no, you can't have this. You can't have that. This is what you can have. What are you teaching them to do? I know they're young, but I bet you've already started teaching them how to be healthy and how to also have a healthy relationship with healthy foods.

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:07:07.279)

Certainly. So they get to consume a wide variety of foods. One of the things that we do that I think is very important, there's ways to not do this, but I do think it's very important to eat a similar diet to your kids. I eat with them at the table as much as possible. Maybe they have something that's slightly different, but I decide, well, my wife and I decide what they eat and when they eat, and they decide how much of it they will eat.

If we're going to have something sweet, if we make some, say, sourdough cinnamon rolls, then we will usually just take that and then add that directly to everyone's plate, just like it's another food. There's nothing special. We're not gatekeeping. There's not this deal. Not that deals are always wrong, but I love that we don't have to incentivize people to eat certain things.

From the time they're very young, even before they were one year old, both of them loved eating very good nutritious sources of food. So things that are high in fat, high in protein, they get to try a lot of different things. One day they will love something, one day they will not. And that's somewhat infuriating as someone who considers himself a conservationist, and I'm trying not to waste anything.

But fortunately, we have wolfhounds and we have chickens and we have compost. So we have ways to, I guess, it's not about eliminating food waste, but it's using food waste, if that makes sense. So we do our best to do all those other things.

Of course, past that, keeping them active and healthy, they're outside almost all the time. They do go to a wilderness play area and I know a lot of these cities are having more and more of these outdoor wilderness play areas. When they go there they will be outside rain or shine. If it's really, really far below freezing then they'll postpone it, but if it's snowing or if it's raining, they're outside in their muddies.

Out on the couple acres that we live on, it's the same way. So if there's something that needs done, then they'll be outside helping me and dragging limbs around and blazing trails.

It seems like almost all the time, parents will say, well, my child does seem very active, but there is a difference in kids who have to live inside all the time. I think it's important, if I was a parent and we lived in the inner city, maybe on one of the top floors of an apartment building, that figuring out how to get into a non-artificial environment would be a very high priority.

Fortunately, we have the benefit of living outside city limits.

Ashley James (1:10:05.015)

What do you absolutely make sure that your children are not exposed to?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:10:10.891)

Several things. Outside of social things that are not appropriate for young kids to be exposed to, I try my best to avoid any hearing damage. I certainly think that there's a strong genetic component to hearing damage. Gilletts have been Kansas residents and farmers for quite some time. For better or for worse, a lot of Gilletts tend to get this.

Young children have very, very sensitive ears. I think that they can hear something that is half the decibel range that adults can't hear when they're newborn. So I do my best to protect those.

As far as foods, within reason, I try to avoid exposure to pesticides. With our own garden, that can be somewhat difficult. Occasionally we'll use things like neem oil. I know there's benefits and detriments to even that. We also do test our water. So people may have seen the podcast I've done with Johnny Pujols, who is associated with My Tap Score and talks about microplastics and PFAS and glyphosate and heavy metals and this and that, which is generally more concerning for people on lake water.

But there's a lot to learn about exposure to water. I do use a Berkey filter for most of their water sources. But even in a Berkey filter, little bits of silver can leach out into the water. So there's always something to keep in mind. I try not to think too much about it. In general, I try to avoid too much exposure to things like that.

I also try to avoid exposure to antibiotics. Antibiotic stewardship is tough, especially in a time where you don't want your children to have a fever. It seems like they're always sick when they're one, three, and four, and two. Either you don't or you feel like you literally don't have the bandwidth to take another off day or sick day when you have to be at home with your child who is sick who might not even get over being sick. So you're just waiting to start that antibiotic prescription. You don't want to.

What if they end up needing it anyway? So it's a tough conversation that I have with lots of families. We have a lot of pediatric patients at our practice. The same thing is true with our children, but I certainly do my best in time to kind of weigh the benefits and detriments.

In general, a good rule of thumb is everything else being equal: antibiotic prescriptions are good for infections that are not going to get better otherwise, which are not all that common, or to prevent a hospital admission or a risk of hospital admission.

Ashley James (1:13:09.567)

Yes, I had to give my kid antibiotics once and I felt so bad about it, but it was one of those things where we tried everything and it was that call we had to make because it was getting worse, not better. I believe it was strep throat. Strep throat can end up affecting the heart, negatively impacting the heart.

That's why it's so important. It's so important to stay on top of their immune health. There are things we can actually do to avoid, protect their sleep, and avoid processed sugar in their diet that can make a huge impact. A lot of people don't realize that, I mean, there's sugar in all the foods, all the processed foods that kids get, there's sugar in it. Sugar, even a teaspoon of it, turns the I can't remember which white blood cell at the top of my head. You probably know it, but it makes you become lazy, kind of go to sleep. It creates this four to six hour window where the immune system is more vulnerable to infection. Especially during what they call flu season. I just call it sugar season because from Halloween all the way through to Valentine's Day, kids have more access to sugar and they have access to sugar all year round because of processed food, especially if they're eating cafeteria food or drinking chocolate milk. There's so much in their diet that is lowering their body's ability to fight off infection.

I'm just a real stickler for that, but I see it in my own son. If we go, because we homeschool, we don't necessarily have to be up for the school bus. There are times where he goes to bed later and later, and if I don't catch it, then I see his immune health impacted pretty quickly. I also see his cognition impacted. I'm more aware of it. If you guard your children's sleep really well and you guard them from as much processed food as you can, especially sugar, you will see a significant improvement. Of course, let them go outside, be in the sunlight, be in the fresh air. You'll see their immune health improve. That's what I saw.

Yes, we don't want to jump to antibiotics first. We want to have other things we can go to. What are the things that you do? Do you have certain herbs? Do you do nano silver? Do you do elderberry or homeopathy? Are there certain things that you make sure you go to for your children when you first start to see the little inklings of maybe a cold coming on?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:15:59.491)

This is relatively different for children and adults. For adults, I have what I call a metabolic activator stack. I think I've done a podcast on it. I told my friend Andrew Huberman about it. I know he's made supplements for cold and flu podcasts as well.

For children, I really like xylitol, both the nasal spray—which there's some natural xylitol nasal sprays for people that might be chronic strep carriers. Then you can also have various formulations or orally dissolving therapies that also have xylitol in it. But basically, it is a semi-artificial or semi-natural sweetener molecule, but the strep bacteria will take it up and not be able to use it or incorporate it. So it can help with the kind of chronic strep carriers that have a little bit in the pharynx or the nares.

That's something that I like quite a bit. Another thing for the child is immune therapies. Some people really like the colostrum, but I think that introducing the gut microbiome to little amounts of microbiota from kefir or from kimchi—a good probiotic kimchi—or a kombucha is reasonable to do so. I do that with my own kids as well.

For some kids, I do have them on Transfer Factor, which is a colostrum-derived product. Other than that, I'm usually not too heavy on natural or conventional cough therapies or cold therapies, et cetera, et cetera.

Ashley James (1:17:47.367)

I've had such great success using different herbs, appropriate for children and adults. For a decongestant, making a thyme tea—taking actual thyme. I'm sure you guys, you might grow it. If you don't—yes, you grow it—yes, just take a whole handful, put it in four cups of water. You boiled it, but then you take it off the stove, dump the thyme in, make sure it's immersed, and then put the lid on for 10 minutes. Then add honey to that and sip it.

Don't do it at night though, because it is such a great decongestant that then everything's draining and you're lying down. So then it's like you're going to cough. I could not believe how well this worked as a decongestant. Sipping thyme tea is great, great for kids too. Oregano as well—you could throw in some oregano leaves in there. This is wonderfully anti-microbial.

I love that you're talking about protecting the gut and building the gut microbiome, especially with fermented foods—a wide variety of fermented foods. There's definitely that relationship between the gut microbiome and the immune system.

Have you dug deeper into that?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:19:05.503)

Yes. So there's a lot of what I consider mostly preclinical data on the gut microbiome in the immune system. But a takeaway that the layman can have is your immune system is a military, and all good militaries will run military drills. That's just ubiquitous. The gut microbiome is what our immune system self-defense military is going to run drills against.

Lymphatic tissue is military bases. So some people try to debate whether or not Piers patches or the appendix or tonsil tissue has a purpose. All military bases have a purpose. If you lose one or two of them, it's probably not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. But you can look at interesting correlation data between people who have and don't have an appendix. People who have an appendix very well seem to have a higher incidence of things like Crohn's or ulcerative colitis, but people who don't have an appendix—and I wouldn't quote myself exactly on this—but there are other certain health outcomes. I believe colon cancer is one of them, and is modulated.

So basically there's benefits and detriments to having or not having an appendix from a correlation standpoint. But certainly if your gut microbiome is routinely wiped out, then your military will continue to run a drill against something, which is why you can look at these big correlation studies. Usually they're retrospective cohort studies, which basically just mean you take big groups of people, maybe one group's similar, but has recently taken an antibiotic like Cipro or a fluoroquinolone, and one group hasn't.

Then it gets something called an odds ratio, which is basically for every one person in the baseline group, how many people in the intervention group—or how many people that did the other thing like take the antibiotic—how many ended up getting an inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's? And often it's three or four, which means three or four times as many people who took the antibiotic ended up getting the inflammatory bowel disease, especially when it's these huge broad-spectrum “big gun antibiotics.”

But the caveat there is the people who got those really strong antibiotics, perhaps they were sicker or more immunosuppressed or more inflamed at baseline. So there may have been something else that is just correlated with this that means that they're more likely to get the disease. They do their best to equalize both groups. But I certainly have concerns with essentially wiping out the bacteria that your immune system is supposed to practice against.

Ashley James (1:21:59.315)

Really interesting. We've seen a rise in autoimmune even in children. This idea—I had Dr. Paul Thomas on the show, and he's a pediatrician. He talks about how especially with the increase in the CDC schedule, when I was a kid, there were five, six vaccines. We got nine doses. Now it's upwards of 70, 80 doses.

They really haven't done any safety studies on combining them. I mean, the safety studies are lacking, which is really concerning, especially combining them, especially giving them all on the same day. So there's many questions that really need to be answered without sort of bias—just let's go in and really dive in. He says, look, we give the immune system this, we artificially ramp up the immune system.

Then these children are developing or young adults are developing these autoimmune. So the immune system is artificially ramped up. Then we give them a suppressor, bring it down, and then they develop cancer. We have this cycle where it's like the pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry get to triple dip. That oftentimes when we go and do intervention, more intervention is needed.

That's the problem. We need to figure out a way of supporting the body's ability to be healthy, stay healthy, and come back into health when it falls out of health without doing more damage down the road. Bringing up this point of constantly working on building and rebuilding the microbiome, especially by protecting it with eating fermented foods, is really important.

I had a guest on my show he has had HIV, I think, since the 80s or late 80s, early 90s. He is a big advocate for using fermented foods. He says it's really been because of this that he is so healthy and that he sees all his friends dying. He's been so healthy, constantly eating every day, eating a different fermented food.

I've never heard that concept—that the immune system practices, does drills. So the more robust the microbiome, then the more robust our immune system because it has been challenged, so it stays robust?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:24:37.721)

That seems to be the case. Another analogy I make is in every aquarium, there's good fish, there's bad fish, and there's also fish that are neither good nor bad, but all of them can overgrow. There's only so much ecological niche, which is basically space in our gut, and our gut is a long combined aquarium terrarium. So you don't want to feed it just one type of food. That's why you don't want to feed your microbiome just psyllium.

That's like having an aquarium of thousands of species of fish, and then you just hope to feed them with just one type of fish food. You also want to avoid feeding the bad fish as well. But depending on which microbiota there is, and some people get into very granular specifics, but I think the takeaway for the average person and even for the clinician is, certainly, if you have that ecological space filled by more good species, your Acromansias or even your Oxalobacter famagines, then you're going to have less mostly bad species—Prevoteles or Citrobacter or whatever the case may be, excess staph or strep. Less of those is going to fill the space just because they're crowded out.

With the question that you arose regarding immunizations, what I encourage people to do with that is look at them just like they would a medication or a peptide or even a supplement. Think about all the upsides of each specific one and all the downsides. They each have unique pharmacologic activity, which is just pharmacodynamics—the drug's effect on the body or the substance's effect on the body—and how the body reacts to it.

So some people's bodies do not react well at all to even supplements or peptides, let alone medications or immunizations. There's certainly some that are associated with stronger immune responses. Certainly if you have a stronger immune response, whether it's cell mediated or natural killer cell mediated or humoral mediated, which is antibody mediated, then you should be more careful with any medication, including immunizations that can induce this effect or worsen this effect, which is more common than most people realize.

Ashley James (1:27:07.257)

Exactly. It's much more common than people realize. This is the shame of it right now, that we are cookie cutter saying this one thing is good for everyone when it's not. It's clearly not good for everyone. We need to be more discerning.

The technology seems to be present, but I wish we genetically tested everyone before we just mass dose them with the same thing.

Is this something that you see coming about in medicine?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:27:43.663

Yes, precision medicine continues to be improved. So we certainly have some things that can be dosed according to, say, one of your liver enzymes, which classically are the cytochrome P450 enzymes. You may have heard of 3A4 or 2D6 or 1A2. I think 1A2 is what metabolizes caffeine, if I remember right. But anyway, over time, we can dose basically all hepatically metabolized substances according to this.

Then physicians already routinely renally dose things that are metabolized via the kidney. So if you have an altered kidney filtration rate, then you can actually change the dosing or protocol of whatever the substance is, even if it's a supplement.

Ashley James (1:28:34.139)

Precision medicine. I'm really excited. I have a feeling that, especially with AI and genetic testing, we're going to see more and more precision medicine come about.

For those who feel they're at least doing the seven pillars of health, 70%, 80% of the way or more, and they're looking to do more fine tuning—biohacking. I know that obviously we can't be cookie cutter in this, but maybe there are a few.

What's the next thing to look into in terms of taking your health to the next level?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:29:22.421)

The low hanging fruit would be, as we already mentioned, the fiber, the protein, and the creatine supplementation. Ensure that you're getting adequate omega-3s as well.

Past that, I think it's reasonable at some age to look at brain oxygenation. It doesn't have to be hyperbaric oxygen therapy pre-treated with ketones, which some of my patients, especially in very advanced ages or with early cognitive impairment of age, some of them certainly do that with success. That is one thing that I think is very interesting to look into.

My two favorite classes of medications, and if people want to consider these not medications, I'm okay with that. You can consider them peptides and bioidenticals. Two of my favorite classes of meds are hormone replacement therapy—combinations of estrogens, progestogens, and androgens for both males and females in the ratio that would benefit that individual patient the most with the least harm—and then insulin sensitizers: GLP-1s, which people know as Ozempic or semaglutidase, trisapatite.

I am the same person who coined the term Ozemp-sick many years ago. So, like anything else, there are upsides and downsides to everything, even my favorite medications.

Ashley James (1:30:48.957)

So is Ozempic one of your favorite medications?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:30:51.963)

Yes, hormone replacement therapy is my favorite medication. GLP-1s and insulin sensitizers in general are my second favorite. 

Ashley James (1:31:01.839)

Got it. But the downside is that they don't end up losing a lot of muscle mass and then the weight comes  back on when they stop the ozempic.

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:31:10.115)

If you take the dose as prescribed, that generally happens. But if you prescribe the correct dose, then you actually don't lose muscle mass any faster than you would with a calorically equal diet. The reason why people seem to not lose as much diet or as much muscle when they do just diet is because they actually eat more calories. So even if they're actually supposed to be eating 1,500 calories a day, they do eat more calories, which is actually good. It maintains muscle mass. That's one of the things that hunger is supposed to do.

So most of my patients who take a GLP-1 don't take it all the way up to the very max dose, which is generally pushed in conventional medicine. Frankly, most of my patients that are on a GLP-1, they gain lean body mass while on the GLP-1 because their diet and their training regimen have improved.

Ashley James (01:20:13.674)

I interviewed an OB GYN that prescribes low dose testosterone to women when they're on Ozempic, to protect their muscle from wasting or while they're, while they're on the diet and also encourages them to weight lift. Do you see that as necessary or is a a good thing?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:32:34.307)

About 50% of my patients that are females that are in perimenopause or postmenopause do benefit from an androgen. There's a pretty easy way to see if you would benefit significantly. It's by checking a total testosterone and a DHEA sulfate and an SHBG, which is a sex hormone binding globulin. You can actually go to my website or James O'Hara's website or just Google free androgen index calculator and you can calculate your FAI as a female and see what your baseline level is.

Females actually have more testosterone than estrogen. I don't know if there's such a thing as, I guess there is such a thing as a low dose, but hormone replacement is what I consider non-physiologic. In general, unless there's a specific reason why to use non-bioidenticals, I do prefer to use bioidentical hormones. About 50% of the time, testosterone itself is more of a benefit to a female than a detriment.

Occasionally, they are also on a GLP-1, but most of my female patients on testosterone are on it to have that same benefit, which is effort feeling good, improving libido, and also theoretically decreasing the risk of breast cancer. If you give a female that is after menopause just estrogen or just estrogen and progesterone, it will actually decrease their natural production of testosterone and other androgens by a significant amount, almost half.

I would argue that that is actually unnatural and unless a female has a naturally high level of testosterone, which many do that primarily produce it from the ovaries, if your DHEA sulfate is high, then you might produce 80% of your testosterone from your ovary. Whereas if your DHEA sulfate is low, you might only produce 20% of your testosterone from the ovary or from the adrenal.

After menopause, the ovary produces some testosterone for up to 10 years after your last period, oddly enough, but pretty insignificant in most females. But the adrenal glands can produce high levels of testosterone for many years. Usually females with higher DHEA sulfate, which comes from the adrenal gland on top of the kidney, have much less menopausal symptoms because it is the only source of estradiol after menopause unless that person takes estradiol exogenously.

So testosterone is a huge benefit for many females, not just for lean muscle mass, but also to preserve lean bone mass.

Ashley James (1:35:14.619)

Is there anything that women can do naturally to increase their testosterone?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:35:19.695)

Eating slightly more fat in the diet does likely increase testosterone to some degree. Past that, avoiding metabolic syndrome is the number one thing that will help. So if someone's SHBG, which is sex hormone binding globulin, that's just a protein that binds all androgens—testosterone—and all estrogens, if that is below about 40, then a female is a better candidate for a low carbohydrate diet.

If someone has a history of PCOS, which probably more than a third of females actually meet criteria for PCOS in Canada and the United States, then they probably have an SHBG of 40 or below. Maybe not. SHBG is heavily genetic, and testosterone production and adrenal production of androgens is also very heavily genetic. So sometimes there just isn't anything to do and they're better off using bioidenticals.

Ashley James (1:36:17.701)

You had mentioned that the adrenals create these. If someone has adrenal fatigue or adrenal burnout, thinking of the woman who burns the candle at both ends, raising multiple children and just sleep exhausted and running themselves ragged day and night and maybe not being on top of the best nutrition for years and years and years, you can see it on their labs, their cortisol levels are shot.

If the adrenals are burnt out—I know I'm using such a layman term—but do you also see that they have trouble producing these other sex hormones? If they are having problems producing healthy cortisol levels.

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:37:06.249)

Sometimes, but not necessarily. DHEA sulfate is the sulfated form of dehydroepiandrosterone, which at least 80% of it comes from the adrenal gland. So you can also check something called ketoandrogens, which are basically purely adrenal, to get a perfect assessment of how many androgens are actually adrenal. But cortisol, of course, is a glucocorticoid, along with cortisone, and DHEA is an androgen.

The adrenals are unique because in the adrenals there's actually three main areas: zona reticularis, which is where you make most of your sex hormones—17-hydroxyprogesterone and DHEA—where you also have zona glomerulosa and zona vasculata, which are responsible for mineralocorticoids and things like that. But the important thing is that ACTH, which is adrenocorticotrophic releasing hormone, or basically a pituitary hormone—you have the releasing hormone and then you have the actual ACTH hormone. So the analogy to this is you have GnRH from your hypothalamus, coming basically from the limbic system of your brain down to your pituitary that releases FSH and LH. LH is what usually spikes during ovulation. Then they go to the gonads, whereas this is the adrenals. However, ACTH makes both cortisol and DHEA. So, in this trinogenesis cascade, the two usually rise and fall together, and the ICD-10 code or the medical term that we can use for the decrease of this over age is called adrenopause. The increase, which usually happens around age 11 or so before menarche, is adrenarchy. 

So adrenarchy—the adrenals turn on—and then adrenopause is kind of similar to andropause, which is not yet really a medical term, but it's the slow decrease in production. Sometimes they decrease together. Sometimes cortisol decreases, DHEA remains high. And sometimes vice versa. Usually, what you see for adrenal fatigue or adrenal burnout is that someone has had lots of sympathetic nervous system or fight-or-flight nervous system activation, perhaps a history of something traumatic happening. A lot of times their sympathetic ganglion—the stellate ganglion in the neck—are very active, and they might also respond well to things like stellate blocks.

Ashley James (1:39:43.397)

That is fascinating. I loved having you today because what you show us is that we can really chunk down and get so detailed in understanding the metabolic processes of our body and how adding one thing or taking away one thing can make such a big difference.

Before we hit record, you were talking about fat a little bit and about removing, for example, certain types of oils. I'm not a fan of oil in general. There have just been so many doctors who have come on the show to say, really, you want to get your fat from a whole food source. The moment you remove fat from the fiber, if it's a plant-based fat, it begins to oxidize and cause inflammation. So if you want, for example, the medicinal benefits of olive oil, just eat the olives. Just eat—get the whole. Now you're getting the fiber, now you're getting the minerals, now you're getting the vitamins.

Get the whole plant or whole food source. But you'd mentioned possibly increasing healthy fats. Obviously, when you said increase fat, you didn't want women to go out there and start chugging canola oil.

I would like to finish today by talking about—what are the most beneficial fats, foods that contain healthy fats, and then what are the foods you really want to make sure people avoid—those unhealthy fats?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:41:09.133)

Some of my favorite healthy fats are from whole food sources. I'm not against ever using an oil, but just like with drinking water, the dose makes the poison. It's okay to have some processed foods or minimally processed foods.

I do tend to agree that if you're going to consume oils as a source of your fat, then cold expeller-pressed, hexane-free oils are the way to go. I might be somewhat biased because James and I are getting into the oil industry, partly just out of curiosity. But we'll have to send you more info about oil processing in the future. I'd love to make a documentary about this at some point.

Certainly, if you take the olive and you have the olive itself and you squeeze some oil out onto your salad, I don't think that it's going to be—and then you eat both the olive and you also eat the oil that you squeezed onto your salad—it's kind of hard to say if that's significantly different.

One thing that a lot of people don't think about when it comes to oil, even really high-quality oils—they're smelling their olive oil, which is super pungent, so they think it's particularly high quality—is compared to aqueous solutions like water or water-based beverages, oils do leach microplastics way more than water.

I don't want to be another alarmist because people are already scared of everything, but when it comes to oils, if you're going to have one, even if it's the best quality oil, I just recommend having it in a glass bottle. I think it takes something like 1 million water bottles to equal the amount of microplastics that you could have in one plastic bottle of olive oil. So that's one thing to keep in mind.

As you mentioned, I love eating my macadamia nuts. It does not always have to be macadamia nuts. I just happen to like the fatty acid profile, and my oldest son also likes them. So it's something that we kind of share. We have our macadamia nut snack.

There are lots of other good sources of nuts and fats. Lots of people like avocados. They're very high in calories, so if you're really trying to lean out or you have a lot of insulin resistance, you might not want to hyper-consume those either. A lot of health coaches or bodybuilding coaches will make fun of dietitians that just recommend avocados and walnuts for everyone.

Walnuts are also fantastic—lots of ALA. Yes, whole foods are nice. I'm certainly not against animals. I obviously raise chickens, so whenever we have a rooster, that is my job to harvest that chicken and make good use of the resources that God has given us. So I'm not against animal-based fats either.

Ashley James (1:44:03.139)

So wild-caught salmon, or what are your favorite animal-based fats in terms of superfoods or healing foods?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:44:14.615)

Yes, I eat a lot of SMASH foods. If I do it at the clinic over lunch hour, I try to do it outside so that the smell is not too significantly bad. But SMASH fish are salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring. So those are all—or you don't have to smash them together—but those are just kind of a good way, a good mnemonic to remember what fish tend to be smaller and what fish tend to be higher in omega-3s, especially DHA, and lower in mercury.

Smaller, fattier fish that are not super predatory, if that makes sense. They have less time to consume metals.

I do consume Brazil nuts from time to time. Not everybody does. It's just such an easy way to get selenium in the diet, and I happen to like them. But I also know that a lot of people do not like those, so I think that is fine to do. And of course, it's a good source of fat as well.

Ashley James (1:45:12.621)

Thank you so much for coming on the show, Dr. Kyle Gillette. This has been wonderful. Of course, everyone can check out GilletteHealth.com and SageBio.com. I am intrigued to learn more about what you've learned as you're diving into the oil industry, getting into the healthy oil industry. I'm curious. I'm actually going to have Udo—Dr. Udo's Oil—I'm going to have him on my show soon. So that's going to be really interesting.

Over 20 years ago, I would make the most delicious salad dressing using curry, different curries, and garlic, and then the Udo oil. And just remembering—it was such a different experience when I first was really getting into trying to take control of my health. Then I've bumped into so many doctors over the years that have said, “No oil. Oil is bad. Eat from the whole plant.”

So I look at both sides. I look at both sides, and I take in the information. But I'm interested to see what you uncover as you go into that industry. I definitely think that it is sage wisdom to avoid plastics, avoid any food that is stored in plastic, especially oil, and to go for the most natural thing possible.

Thank you for coming on the show and having this discussion. This was really interesting.

If there's anything you'd like to make sure to wrap up from today's interview—I know you've already said a lot—but what is the homework that you'd like to impart on the listener?

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:46:55.427)

Yes, thank you for having me on. It's my pleasure, and thank you for your advocacy for health in general as well.

One thing that I’d like to give people for homework is— I mentioned this a little bit earlier— to find a movement pastime to last a lifetime. It should be something that they can at least learn to love. Ideally, it would incorporate at least one other pillar of health, being outside or a social aspect.

It does not have to be a competition thing. It does not have to be something that you can flex about or brag about on social media. But this movement pastime to last a lifetime is different for everyone.

If you can at least learn to like it, whether it’s moving or a food, you are much more likely to be adherent to it in the long term.

Ashley James (1:47:44.713)

I love that. I always say, move your body in a way that brings you joy. But that's so great to incorporate at least one other pillar, especially if it's social, because then that's something that's going to support you. If you've got other people saying, “Hey, come on, let's go do this,” it's going to support you.

There are so many things you can do. If you think about it, there's swim teams. My father-in-law, up until his 80s, was participating in a swim team. When he stopped driving after his stroke, his swim mates—these are all guys in their 70s and 80s—would come by and pick him up, and they'd all go swimming together. How cool is that?

There are so many different things you can get into—hiking clubs and walking clubs. I'm sure you could probably find an adult dodgeball or start an adult dodgeball club. That'd be my thing. I'd want to do something fun like dodgeball.

So many people love tennis—there's the typical things. But then think about what brings you joy. What is it that you love?

There's even gardening in the summer. There are community gardens. I know that isn't necessarily cardiovascular, but dude, the amount of times you have to do a squat when you're gardening—that's moving your body, getting out there, being social with the other gardeners if you're doing a community garden.

So yes, get creative and think about plugging in. And now we're so connected, so it's easier to find. But if it doesn't exist, create it. It's like the Field of Dreams: if you create it, they will come.

Create that adult—if you do create an adult dodgeball team, please reach out to me and tell me, because I want to hear about it.

It's been wonderful. What do you do?

This is my last question, I promise. What’s the movement that is community-based that brings you joy every day or every week? That you do.

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:49:42.166)

This change is usually based upon the collective desires of my wife and I. We've always wanted to have lots of things in common together other than raising kids. Not necessarily because we think that we absolutely have to, but it's just so much easier to maintain our friendship and our marriage, et cetera. So other than raising our kids in common, we do like to be active in the local community for things like powerlifting competitions or CrossFit competitions or functional fitness or even doing something like running a 5K.

So we do a lot of functional fitness classes together at our gym, and we really enjoy participating in and even sponsoring these local competitions. Five years ago, ten years ago, we used to play in church basketball leagues and volleyball leagues, but it has just kind of morphed and changed into this, which we both really enjoy right now.

Ashley James (1:50:41.642)

That's awesome. Very cool. Dr. Kyle Gillette, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Please come back. We'd love to hear more from you.

Dr. Kyle Gillett (1:50:49.718)

Thank you, my pleasure.

Outro:

Hi, my name is Jennifer Saltzman, and I am the head coach at TakeYourSupplements.com. I wanted to share with you a testimonial that I received from a client of mine—one of the many success stories that I have—but this one was very close to my heart because she's young, has struggled so much to regain her health, and has had such a phenomenal, overcoming testimonial that I really wanted to share it today.

She writes:

My name is Angela. I am 25 years old. I have been on a health journey that consists of an autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, and other issues that left me feeling defeated and debilitated every day. For 15 years, I have seen eight different specialists and many doctors, and have been in and out of physical therapy, dealing with symptoms I thought would leave me wheelchair-bound and in diapers by the time I was 30.

Well, I am now 25, and after everything I've learned through Jennifer at TakeYourSupplements.com, that definitely won't happen.

Some things doctors have said to me have crushed my hopes. I was told to lose weight and that my pain would go away. So I lost 90 pounds—and the pain was still there. My days were short, and after a five-hour work shift or even a day of running an errand or two, I was left debilitated. So the doctors told me the pain was all in my head because I was previously diagnosed with fibromyalgia—the only diagnosis so many doctors agreed upon because they couldn't think of anything else. Despite me having some form of an immune disease, I felt hopeless and as if life was going to pass me by.

There were times when I tried hiking one or two miles and I was unable to walk or function for days after. I was missing out on trips and adventures, and as embarrassing as it sounds, I was having BM bathroom emergencies so frequently it was ruining my daily function. I could go on about the ways I was ill and what it kept me from, but honestly, after the progress I've made, a long list of symptoms I used to have has become a blur of the past.

When I finally decided to check out TakeYourSupplements.com, recommended through the Learn True Health podcast, I was immediately connected with Jennifer, who kept track of my overwhelmingly long list of complex symptoms and thoroughly created a personalized, step-by-step plan.

Her recommendations have changed my life, and the changes were practically instant. She put me on a complete digestive activation complex that has taken away all of my stomach pain, unnecessary bloating, and gas. She explained to me that the formula supports every stage of digestion—from breakdown to absorption—designed to optimize stomach acid, bile flow, and nutrient assimilation.

She recommended a cellular repair-focused diet, which not only has helped my stomach, but the food gives me energy and makes me feel really good. It reduces inflammation in my body—something no doctor ever told me about.

When I first started with Jennifer, I took the TakeYourSupplements.com health evaluation and scored a negative 32. I just retook it and scored a 69. That's 100 points better in five months.

Still room for progress, but my life nevertheless has been changed, and I am so happy. My days have been much longer and full of adventure. I have hiked the 4,000-footer mountains of New Hampshire—something I never thought I would be able to do. I have had successful days of workouts, errands, and work.

The Learn True Health podcast and Jennifer at TakeYourSupplements.com have done more for me than any doctor ever has, and it all started with validation.

I am now 25 and feel my life is just now starting. It's really hard to put into words just how much has changed for me, so I'll keep on living as actively as possible and learning as much as I can so I can finally take part in the beautiful things of life.

I can't wait for the adventures to come with the hope I've been given through this program. If anyone out there hears this and feels their doctors are taking more than they're giving, give this a try.

Thank you, Ashley and Jennifer. Your knowledge and expertise is a gift I cherish every day.

Learn more and book your free health consultation today by visiting TakeYourSupplements.com.

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