#246 Gut Health Optimization with Dr Olli Sovijärvi and Teemu Arina

Teemu Arina (0:28)

Hi, everyone. My name is Teemu Arina. I'm from the Bikers Handbook, and today we will focus on the gut, the source of everything when it comes to energy levels and awesome brain function and so on. It's like your second brain. If your gut is not functioning well, probably your brain is not working either, and your energy levels will be diminished. So a lot of people nowadays have gut problems because of modern lifestyle, stress, different things that are affecting gut microbiome and reduces the microbial diversity and so on. Probiotics are extremely popular supplements and people are looking into solutions, both dietary interventions as well as supplementation to get their system back to the basics. Now I want to tell you a story, my own story of how I got into biohacking actually.

So I'm a serial technology entrepreneur and I was working really, really hard on everything related to my startups over 10 years ago. And one thing that I noticed after a while was that I started getting pain in the gut. Like when my stomach was empty, I felt a little bit of pain and when I ate something, it went away.

And so I didn't think too much about that. But then after a while, the pain was lingering even when I ate something and I had low energy levels and so on. And I did what many people do in that situation. I went to the doctor and I got prescribed some proton pump inhibitors. Proton pump inhibitors are reducing the production of stomach acid. And the idea is that it helps the wound in the stomach to heal. I got an ulcer basically. And with that diagnosis, I took the medication. I took the pain away, but it didn't restore my energy levels.

And so for a while, I just felt fine. But the pain came back. And I went to the doctor.

My medication had run out and I could prescribe more of those proton pump inhibitors. And at that point, when I got that, you know, the new medication I got was not as effective as the previous one. So I went online and I did what I'm good at, which is, you know, doing research and understanding what's going on in my system. So I had to look in the mirror and understand what's going on with my gut. And I first started looking at the medication itself, the proton pump inhibitors. And what I learned is that you're not supposed to take them all the time. At that point, I was taking it for months and you have stomach acids for a reason. And if you use this type of medication by reducing stomach acids in the long term, it will basically lead into bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine.

It can lead into fungal infections. There's many things related to it. And so what I did, I went really deep. I first started from the ulcers. I learned about inflammation. I learned inflammatory diseases and low-level inflammation and all these different things. And my hypothesis was basically that because of my lifestyle and stress and all that, what I was going through, my system was in an imbalance and a kind of a constant state of low-level inflammation and the inflammatory disease like a ulcer was just a manifestation of that long-term effect. And so I decided to balance things and I started learning how I can reduce inflammation and first restore the functioning of the whole system. And the research led me to designing this gut healing protocol.

And in this gut healing protocol, I had a very holistic approach. First, making sure that I sleep enough, seven and a half hours a night at least. You can see that this is done in 2012, so 10 years ago already.

And I was looking into breathing techniques. So that's what cardiac coherence is here, meditation as well. So different breathing techniques to increase heart rate variability and doing meditation on a regular basis to increase parasympathetic nervous system activation, which is important for gut function as well. So to reduce sympathetic tone and sympathetic nervous system activation, I was looking into hydration.

In terms of food, I basically designed an anti-inflammatory diet. So the building block was to take out foods that are pro-inflammatory, that increase inflammation, then add in foods that reduce inflammation, and then look at gut microbiome and look at restoring, you know, nutritional status and correcting nutritional deficiencies and so on. And I had certain supplements also that I was looking into on top of our proper diet.

So there are certain supplements that were key for gut functioning that I was getting in. And I mean, probiotics, prebiotics, selenium, zinc, vitamin D, B vitamins, omega 3 oils, etc. And when it comes to gut herbs, I was looking into a lot of, you know, cabbage and broccoli. And fermented sauerkraut and all that for the Kabakin.