sulfur

The Dark Side of Garlic and Onions

Dr. Trevor Cates : Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I am Dr. Trevor Cates. Today, we’re talking about how garlic onions, kale, and other sulfur containing foods can actually create issues with your health, including your skin. My guest is Dr. Greg Nigh who is a Naturopathic physician and licensed acupuncturist practicing at Immersion Health in Portland, Oregon.

He’s a graduate of the national university of natural medicine with a dual degree in Naturopathic Medicine, and a Masters of Science in Oriental medicine. Dr. Nigh is author of The Devil in the Garlic and has spoken around the world on topics related to sulfur metabolism and its associated problems.

He has a clinical focus in Naturopathic oncology, but treats a wide variety of conditions, including Lyme disease, mold related illness, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease and of course the wide range of symptoms and diseases associated with impaired sulfur metabolism.

Dr. Trevor Cates : In today’s interview Dr. Nigh explains how dietary sulfur is essential. But there can be issues with how it’s metabolized and this leads to certain health issues like in some of those cases, skin problems. This really does answer some questions that I had about why some of my patients had problems with some of these seemingly healthy foods like garlic and onions and kale. Dr. Nigh Explains why certain people have this problem and how to know if you’re one of the people that has this sulfur metabolism issue. And he also shares his two week protocol to overcome issues with sulfur metabolism. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Greg, it’s so great to have you on my podcast. Welcome.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I’m so psyched to be here. Thanks for asking me.

Dr. Trevor Cates : We went to school together. And I just haven’t seen you in so long. You have a new book that came out. I wanted to have you on the podcast to talk about sulfur because it’s something that I need to learn more about too, apparently. I’m excited to have you on and how it impacts our health and we get it in our diet all the time, but it’s not always easy for everyone.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. It’s a weird thing. Of course we have to have sulfur all the time. Sulfur is constantly needed by the body in order to make sulfate, which sulfate is doing all kinds of important things. The problem is that the pathways that sulfur moves through in order to become what it needs to be so we are not eating sulfate. Our body has to generate it from the sulfur that we eat. And those pathways can get blocked for various reasons.

Dr. Greg Nigh: When that happens, we still need to have the sulfate. And so our bodies go through some changes to work around the blockage and it’s those changes that cause the symptoms that are associated with the sulfur foods. It is not that sulfur is bad for people. It is only a matter of whether or not somebody has an issue processing sulfur. There is really not a great way to find that out other than to go through this process of reducing sulfur intake and doing some therapies to get sulfur processing right again, and then we reintroduce and find out how people do.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay, great. So let’s back up for a moment and talk about where sulfur comes from in the diet. There are a lot of different sulfur ish words that are around. So we want to make sure we are focusing on the specific one that is in our food.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Right. All the sulfur in our body has come in dietarily. There is some small amount in water, not all water, but especially people drinking well water, can sometimes have lots of sulfate actually in their water that they are drinking, but for the most part sulfur. Sulfur is just an atom. Sulfur is embedded in food. It is in protein. Anytime we’re eating protein, there is going to be some sulfur compounds in the protein. It is in various vegetables.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The title of the book is The Devil In The Garlic because there’s sulfur compounds in garlic that we just have found to be quite highly reactive for a lot of people. Onions and broccoli and all the foods. All of the foods that we typically think of as very healthy foods. We are eating the sulfur compounds and then they just have to be transformed.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Part of that happens through enzymes in our own body and part of it by the bugs that are growing in our intestine. The way that sulfur becomes a wreck for people has to do with how that transformation takes place from the dietary, just eating those nice healthy things. Then some people just have a lot of symptoms eating what they think is supposed to be a healthy meal.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. I talk a lot about onions and garlic and the benefits of that in my book and encourage people to get that. Because there are so many benefits of it. How do people know if it’s a problem for them?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. It is kind of a drag about it because there is not a great test to do. There is not a blood test that you can do. We do these antibody tests to find out if somebody is reactive to this or that food, and it’s possible to see reactivity to onions or broccoli or something, not all that common, I don’t think. What we are talking about is not that kind of reaction. We are talking about a metabolic reaction.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The only way that I have figured out to successfully identify the people that have the problem is to go through this protocol. A decent number of times, I have people that go through this two week protocol and they are nothing but just annoyed with me that I had them do that because it didn’t really change anything and that’s okay, you don’t have to solve a problem.

Dr. Greg Nigh: But I would say significantly more than half of the people who do the protocol will report anywhere from modestly feeling better to there have been those occasional people whose life is totally changed by doing it.
Dr. Greg Nigh: The treatment is the same as the test essentially, you go through the protocol and if you find that, Oh yeah, this person is definitely reactive to sulfur. You just continue with the same protocol until you get things restored and you can start to bring those sulfury foods back in.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Right. Lets use skin as an example of a reaction that some health issue that somebody might be having that could be related to a problem with metabolizing sulfur.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. Skin is actually a good one to start with because it is one of the most keynote symptoms that I associate with sulfur issues. When people have any kind of dermatitis, I mean, lots of patients that will come in with periorbital, they have eczema around their eyes or dermatitis or around their mouth or any kind of eczema rashes, or even just itchy, without any lesions.

Dr. Greg Nigh: They just feel like they are itchy. If someone has those issues, even if they have nothing else, I’m probably going to have them do the protocol because skin is so reliably responsive to changes in sulfur in the diet. There have just been so many people who not only have the improvement about their specific lesion, dermatitis or whatever, but who will say that their friends are commenting about how healthy their skin looks and how they have this new, you know, whatever.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Skin is definitely a primary symptom that flags me that this is going to be a sulfur issue. And then there are just a few other questions that we want to ask to make sure it all lines up.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay. What would those questions be?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Well, the most common things that show up with sulfur would be, brain fog is huge because ultimately, actually just to go back a little bit to what is happening physically, when people with the problem are eating sulfur, what ends up happening is that instead of generating sulfate, which the body needs a lot of, so4, is the chemical.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The work around is that the body generates this gas called hydrogen sulfide. In generating that, that is what causes the symptoms. It can cause irritable bowel and all kinds of inflammatory gut things. It is a gas, so it will go directly into the bloodstream. It just crosses the lining and goes into the bloodstream. And once it is in the bloodstream, hydrogen sulfide is needed for the formation of memory.

Dr. Greg Nigh: But if we have too much of it, it just causes brain fog. It can cause all kinds of inflammatory joint pain. It lowers the heart rate. People often have low heart rate or low blood pressure, because it lowers blood pressure. That is the constellation of things that I’m asking people about. Then also there’s this interesting crossover with alcohol metabolism. I am very commonly asking people how they do with alcohol.

Dr. Greg Nigh: My point is not to wonder how much they’re drinking. My point is that often when people have a sulfur issue, they are going to have an alcohol issue. Commonly you go through the sulfur questions and they have checked off most of the boxes, and then you ask them how they do with alcohol. Very commonly, they say, Oh, I can’t touch it.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I have one drink and I’ve got a headache or they have a very severe reaction. That is because there is a crossover point, the enzyme that is needed for sulfur processing and the enzyme needed for alcohol processing share a cofactor. If this cofactor is not available, it will shut down both processes. Alcohol is another question that I am always asking.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Is there genetic testing, any kind of snips or anything that can help identify this issue?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yes. I have people run genetic testing all the time and I run it through. There are various databases that we can run those things through. Generally, I think that too much emphasis is put on the role of various polymorphisms, which are what is really being looked at with, 23andme, and ancestry.com and all that.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I think that knowing what is happening with genetics can inform how I’m thinking about why somebody feels the way they feel. But it’s not uncommon at all that someone comes into me and they have essentially diagnosed themselves as having the disease like a MTHFR problem. There is no such thing. There is simply the status of a gene and that may or may not play itself out, depending on how we live and how we eat and how we think.

Dr. Greg Nigh: All kinds of factors determine how the genes express. In answer to your question, yes, there are certainly genes that are associated with sulfur pathways. I am very commonly doing a review if we see it line up, that oh yeah, this person has some polymorphisms that I would expect to lead to sulfur issues. Sometimes we see that and sometimes we don’t. I find genetics to be helpful, but certainly they don’t determine anything about how I am going to treat.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay. So that doesn’t change the protocol. I want you to explain the protocol that you recommend, but before you do that, I want to mention supplements because there are certainly supplements that a lot of people take that have sulfur components to it. They may also be taking those supplements and having problems.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is such a great point that you bring up because I have had a half dozen people who show up and they are feeling crappy for about three years. They tell me that it is because they are detoxing. Because they are taking lipoic acid and glutathione and thiamine, all these heavy sulfur compounds. Once I understood what sulfur problems look like, it was like, they are not detoxing.

Dr. Greg Nigh: They are toxifying themselves with this stuff. Essentially doing nothing more than getting them to stop all that stuff. And their health improves by 80%. So yes, there are many compounds, many of the supplements that contain sulfur for a good reason, because it is part of the way our bodies detoxify. We have to have adequate amounts of sulfur in order to run those sulfation pathways that are completely necessary for detoxification.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The problem is that sulfur is also used for other things in the body besides detoxification. When the sulfur that is used in those other areas of the body gets messed up by environmental things that we are exposed to, all kinds of chemicals will impact things in addition to dietary issues or whatever. That is when everything gets messed up.

Dr. Greg Nigh: So I kind of lost the central point that yes, there’s supplements that absolutely we have to get people to stop taking while they are going through this low sulfur protocol.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Okay. Just to clarify, these supplements are not a problem for everyone, but there are certain people that are having a problem with them. We want people to be able to take them, because there are a lot of benefits to it. You just have to address the metabolism issue so that they can take them.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is absolutely it. Glutathione is so important. Everyone should take it unless you have a really bad sulfur problem. In which case you have to fix that and then start taking Glutathione, because we all need it.

Dr. Trevor Cates : I am so glad we are talking about this because it answers this question. Why some people are taking these supplements and they are having a problem. It has been a little bit of a mystery to me why some people cannot tolerate them. Let’s talk about your protocol. What exactly do you recommend to help address this issue?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. Keep in mind that I work with a nutrition therapist, Maria, and she wrote the dietary protocol. There is a list of the usual suspects of foods that people are most likely to be reactive to. The list of the top 10 or 12 are in the book. They are garlic by far and away. It is crazy how many people have resolution of their symptoms through the protocol.

Dr. Greg Nigh: As soon as they reintroduce garlic, all their symptoms are back. It is clearly the most reactive sulfur source. Garlic and onion and kale. Kale is another shocker, many people will be symptomatic, reintroducing kale. Eggs, and then the cruciferous. Broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, that’s not cruciferous, but it’s another one of the sulfurs, and brussels sprouts. We also have people at least for the first week, it’s vegetarian because the biggest source of sulfur coming in is with meat products.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Now it’s odd to me that very few people become symptomatic when they reintroduce things like chicken or turkey, even though they are a very dense sulfur source. There is something unique about the sulfur as it is packaged in meat, that it doesn’t seem to be nearly as reactive as the reactions we see with the other vegetables.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Those are the main foods and they go out of the diet for two weeks. Then there are various kinds of supplements that support the process. I use crazy amounts of molybdenum. I mean I am not using a lot with each person, but I am giving everybody molybdenum, because that is this funky little trace mineral. It is the one that crosses over with alcohol.

Dr. Greg Nigh: You have to have it in order to properly generate sulfate. Molybdenum, and there is a particular form of vitamin B12, hydroxocobalamin which lowers hydrogen sulfide levels. Because many people that I’m working with have gut issues in addition to whatever else they might have. Often part of this process is that you have to get their gut working again, or else they are never going to be able to have their sulfur.

Dr. Greg Nigh: In addition to whatever it might be doing to support sulfur metabolism, there is also butyrate or glutamine or the various things that we do to get guts healed up. We have been doing all that stuff at the same time that we are working on lowering the sulfur intake because that lowers the inflammation level. And while the inflammation is low, we can get the gut rebuilt and then hopefully it can all come back together to expand the diet out.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Because, one point I do want to make for sure is that it is not a good thing to eat a restricted diet for a long time. People get stuck in an alley where they can’t get out of it because they have willed away all these foods that they have been reacting to. I just had a conversation yesterday with somebody who is eating three foods, that’s it. Nothing else.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is a nightmare for our digestive tract, because the diversity of our gut bugs goes down, down, down. Once that diversity is lost, you can’t digest the foods that you used to be able to digest because the bugs aren’t there. Punchline is, we bring the diet down by limiting those sulfur foods for a period of time. Then we have to move the diet back out. Our goal is to not have people eating that restricted diet for a long time.

Dr. Greg Nigh: In that sense, it is a very different kind of a diet. The low sulfur diet is a therapeutic diet. It’s like a prescription, you do this for this period of time, and then you are done. As opposed to something like a paleo diet or ketogenic diet, which people do for years. They do fine on that. That is not the intention with the low sulfur diet.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Right. I think what you are talking about is so important too. Because I also have seen people with these very restrictive diets, and most people can’t live like that, but there are certain people that are like me, I’m just fine with this really restrictive diet.

Dr. Trevor Cates : I try to remind them, it is not a healthy way to live because you have to get to the root cause. There is a reason why you can’t eat all these foods and we have to figure out why that is. We have to heal your gut. And now, I’m learning from you about the sulfur metabolism. It makes a lot of sense.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah, I think that is one of the most important lost messages in this. There are so many different diets out there that people are doing now. It is so common that a patient is doing like four different kinds of restrictive diets, all overlapped with each other, which is like, yeah, that doesn’t work. I mean, it doesn’t work for people, but they don’t know what else to do because they feel miserable if they don’t eat that way, which I get.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The imperative is on us, I think, as practitioners to educate people about the fact that that’s not going to be sustainable. Our job then is to do that work of helping people get their gut in a place where they can eat what they used to be able to eat. We don’t come into the world reacting to all these foods. We acquire those reactions. And so it is unraveling that.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Absolutely. Okay. With your protocol, then you are adding in some nutrients and then also taking out the sulfur foods for two weeks, you are supporting gut health. What am I missing anything? That is the protocol really.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. That is the main thing. We have to lower the intake and we have to speed up the outflow of these sulfur compounds that get generated keeping in mind that we can eat a low sulfur diet, but unless we are fasting, we are not eating any sulfur, where there is always sulfur coming in.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Besides the sulfur that we are taking in, the mucus membranes that are always flowing and getting part of the digestive process, it is all loaded with sulfur. There are bugs specifically that will harvest the sulfur out of the sulfomucin that end up in our gut. There is always going to be a supply of sulfur to the body. It will just keep recycling.

Dr. Greg Nigh: What we are trying to do is lower, sometimes there is this deluge, because people are cramming their morning smoothie full of kale and putting garlic in everything year round. These foods used to be seasonal, but now they are not seasonal, they are year round. There is one enzyme that will convert so3, sulfite, which our bodies make to so4.

Dr. Greg Nigh: There is only one. All of that sulfate comes in has to go through this tiny little enzyme, not all of it, some goes to do other things, but lots of it has to get converted to sulfate. There is only that one enzyme to do it. There are many things that we do to slow down the function of that enzyme. If we are loading our diet with all these sulfur compounds, I think it just overwhelms the system and it just backs up and up and up until it spills and spills just means symptoms start.

Dr. Greg Nigh: What we are trying to do is dramatically lower the amount coming into the bucket and also speed up the amount draining out of the bucket. That allows the overall level of those sulfur compounds to just reduce in the body in general.

Dr. Greg Nigh: We have done that with the diet, we have done it with some specific nutrients that either lower hydrogen sulfide out in the body or that speed up the function of that enzyme that is doing the conversion or other kinds of supplements that are addressing other enzymes that function within the sulfur pathways. We do those things and then for home therapies, one of the most, and just crazy when I realized how helpful it can be, is Epsom salt baths.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Who knew? There are some people whose guts improve like 80% just by doing Epsom salt baths. I mean, you have to do it in a pretty serious way, which is to say four cups of Epsom salt dissolved in a bath, hot bath, soak for 20 minutes, seven nights in a row to start with. Then after the initial seven nights, and for some people I have them do 10 nights or even two weeks. But then, periodically, you have to do maybe two or three of those at night.

Dr. Greg Nigh: The reason is because that is magnesium sulfate. That sulfate goes into the blood transdermally we know because somebody did a study on that. Epsom salt baths in that high concentration will build up the sulfate levels in the blood, which is great because it doesn’t have to go down the tube and run into the bugs that cause the problems.

Dr. Greg Nigh: You get the sulfate that way. And the thing is, if you can increase your sulfate level in that way, you don’t need the bugs anymore. The bugs are there to fulfill a purpose. We have this idea that we have, you know, the kill, the bugs thing. Like in gastroenterology in general, when you get bugs that you don’t want, you kill them somehow whether with herbs or with antibiotics or whatever. What I think is those bugs are there because they are trying to do something that we are not doing otherwise.

Dr. Greg Nigh: If we can fix the problem, which is to get sulfate into our system, with things like Epsom salt baths, we don’t need the bugs anymore. That is the only thing that makes sense to me, for why somebody would Epsom salt baths in the way that I just described and tell me that they have dramatic improvement in their digestion. And not doing anything else.

Dr. Greg Nigh: These are people that just send me emails because they heard a podcast or something like this, and they try it because they can just do it at home. And they have an improvement.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. Very amazing. Okay.

Dr. Greg Nigh: And another thing that, but I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t learn about it. I knew about it, but grounding, which is the whole idea of just putting your feet on the earth and this is a more boring kind of biology that I will go into. Part of the importance of the sulfur compounds is that they supply negative charge in the body.

Dr. Greg Nigh: One of the effects of having your body on the earth, touching the earth, is that electrons flow into you giving you this big bunch of negative charge. There are lots of studies that will show all these beneficial effects of just standing on the earth for a while every day. It is another thing, I think it’s just good for people to do grounding.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Those are two things that everyone is doing along with the rest of the protocol.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Ok. What do you notice in two weeks or do you continue it longer for people? Because you mentioned two weeks out in the diet.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. Sometimes we will go longer. The typical, let’s say we have somebody who definitely, needs to solve a problem, but we don’t know that. So we put them on the protocol. One of the first signs that we know and this really is a solver problem, is that they feel like hell for about the first three days of that protocol.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Whatever they had, they feel worse and they really don’t like us. Their skin is worse and their fatigue and headache and we are saying, yes, that is awesome. They stay with it. And usually what happens around day four or five, it is like the clouds part and the sunlight shines in and everything is awesome. They feel like their brain clears up and their skin starts clearing up. And everything transforms. That is a common pattern for things.

Dr. Greg Nigh: And then by the end of two weeks, we start the introductions and we just watch for symptoms to show up. Typically it is very rare that somebody is reactive to all the foods that they eliminated. Usually they are reactive to one or maybe two. We can identify that food and then you can bring all the rest in and hold that one out or keep it minimal.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Another pattern would be that people are on it and it is much more gradual. They don’t really go through what Maria and I called the sulfur dump, because I don’t know what else to call it. But it is something that causes that exacerbation. I think it is just mobilizing a bunch of compounds that we are not getting mobilized.

Dr. Greg Nigh:Other people, they don’t have that, but it is a more gradual process, but can definitely say that by the end of the two weeks, if they came in with gas and bloating, and what are the most common symptoms that are associated with it and very common by the end of two weeks, people don’t have that at all. Or brain fog or whatever their symptom was.

Dr. Greg Nigh: They are just describing that it is reduced by some or usually a pretty significant amount. The way that I would go longer than two weeks is, if somebody really is not doing well until maybe day 10. And then they start to notice their skin is starting to clear up at that point. Well, okay then, I will extend it a little beyond, but I don’t like to go too far beyond that.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Then obviously there are the people that it doesn’t do anything for. And then, all right, let’s go to plan B. I certainly don’t think sulfur issues explain everything, but I do think it is one of the more overlooked ways that we can investigate why somebody feels the way they feel.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Absolutely. And it seems simple enough, like what you are describing doesn’t seem that hard, especially if you give it two weeks and within that two weeks, if you don’t notice a difference, then maybe that is not the issue. We want to look at something else, but if it is, and you can start eating these foods again, which is so great.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. Even the people who don’t really notice significant change by the end of the two weeks, I still always have them reintroduce one by one. Because often people will say, Oh yeah, there is that headache that I used to have and that they don’t really even think about. There are times when somebody will still notice a reaction once introducing a food, even if they didn’t really notice a bit of it. But there are others who it just doesn’t help at all and which is fine, you know? That’s awesome. It’s not a sulfur problem.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So let’s talk about this a little bit, this is great to know that it is an option for people to find that out, to address this issue. For people who aren’t necessarily having a sulfur issue, but you mentioned something that was interesting to me that I want to bring back up, and that is that we tend to overdo it with garlic and kale and certain things.

Dr. Trevor Cates : That is so typical of our culture that we find something that is good and we are like, let’s get more of it. Let’s put everything that we can. I want you to talk more about that. What is the right amount and how often should we be eating things like garlic and kale.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I would say there is no, like, I don’t think there is a general answer to that. I do think that if we were to get back to eating seasonally, I think it would dramatically lower the amount of sulfur that we are taking in generally. There are certainly people who can obviously have lots of it and have no negative effects.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I actually do fine with sulfur, I don’t personally have a sulfur issue and I have never discovered an amount of kale or garlic or whatever that causes me any kind of symptoms, but there are other people who even, I mean, if they get a whisper of garlic in their food in any way, they will have a headache or their neck pain comes back or rash, the variability is quite dramatic. I have my ideas about why that would be, but I don’t know of any guidelines really for people other than don’t be ridiculous.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Yeah. Moderation. Of course that is key. I am kind of a little bit embarrassed that I don’t know when kale is in season, is it a fall crop? I guess I need to do some research on that because we have gotten so far away from seasonal eating and I live in Park City, Utah. We really don’t have much in the way of certain seasons. We don’t have a long growing season. So we get so much of our produce just brought in.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah, it is universal. You know what another issue is actually, even with local eating. Maria pointed this out to me, I didn’t realize that the Pacific Northwest, where I am, is an area where the soil is depleted in molybdenum, that funky little mineral that is needed to process sulfur. Even if someone is eating nice local, organic grown stuff, we are not getting necessarily adequate amounts of molybdenum in our diet that way.

Dr. Greg Nigh: There are other reasons besides toxicity, of course. I mean, I have a whole chapter in the book about Roundup, glyphosate, which was scientifically designed to mess up sulfur metabolism. It’s just crazy what it does to sulfur. I have written about that, but clearly you have to look at toxicity issues, but also just local organic foods may not be enough to keep us processing all this stuff the way we need to anymore.

Dr. Greg Nigh: But I got away from your point about seasonality, which I agree I am tragically ignorant about exactly what the seasons are for the various kinds of foods. I know that there are great resources to be doing that. I think there are whole diet programs that are just about seasonal eating things. So yeah, I think that is an excellent way to focus a diet generally.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Right, and I agree. I think we live in a time now where we are exposed to more toxins than we were really designed to be exposed to so taking supplements and doing certain naturopathic treatments, functional medicine treatments can be helpful and an important part of healthy living. Most of us cannot just depend upon food alone today. Unfortunately.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. I’m sure, you know as well, there are many people who come in and they want to just do everything with their diet and not have to take supplements. I don’t want to take supplements. I want to get it all from my food, which is awesome.

Dr. Greg Nigh: I think that is a great goal, but I think that we have created just such a wreck of a modern world within all the different ways that our health can be impacted in all the stuff that we have to detoxify. Just in the course of getting through our day, we do have to supplement along with that healthy diet. I think in order to keep all this stuff running the way it needs to.

Dr. Trevor Cates : A question that I have is, how can we grow food in a way that is free of pesticides or is organic and sustainable with nutrient rich soil? Is that possible?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. So wait a minute. What is the question?

Dr. Trevor Cates : It was more of a statement. I didn’t expect you to have the answer.

Dr. Greg Nigh: No, that is the challenge. That is the paradox of living in the modern world that we know what we are supposed to do, but it is impossible to do. Even people eating a predominantly organic meal still have glyphosate in their system. There are studies that show that even organic eaters, because it’s so prevalent in our environment. And there are just things that even if we don’t know that we are exposed to them, we are exposed to them.

Dr. Greg Nigh: We do our best. I think about naturopathic medicine as risk management and damage control. Those are the two things that we are trying to accomplish. So we manage our risks the best we can, we eat organic whenever we can and exercise and local foods and all that managing risks. Then there is going to be damage that we can’t even mitigate.

Dr. Greg Nigh: And so control the damage, take glutathione as long as it works for your system. There are various nutrients that you just do. Vitamin D, even people live in sunny places now we are not making enough vitamin D for all kinds of reasons. One of which is glyphosate because it interferes with the activation of the vitamin in our system. We have to mitigate those damages that are just part of being in this world.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. I don’t want it to sound like we are ending on a negative note here. What you are actually saying is a positive solution. There is a solution but it does require some, probably for most people anyway, taking some supplements and making sure you are taking the right ones in the right amounts. Working with a naturopathic physician or a well-trained functional medicine doctor, somebody like that can help you identify what your unique needs are.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. I agree, this is not ending on a downer because it is that kind of awareness that allows people to be proactive about their health. There are basic things that we can do to maintain a level of wellness that is much higher than we might be able to do just by what we think we should do, which is, just eat a lot of garlic and onions or the way we eat organic, exercise or whatever.

Dr. Greg Nigh: There are a lot of people doing everything that seems like it should be the right thing, but they still feel miserable. Part of that being proactive is simply to know what can be inhibitors of feeling fully vital, even in somebody who feels that they are doing all the right things.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is the whole role of working with a naturopath who kind of has a different way of assessing what it means to do things that are health supporting and getting those pathways unblocked and all that. With supplementation and other kinds of dietary things or whatever.

Dr. Trevor Cates : Awesome. Well Greg, it has been so fun having you on. Will you tell everyone where they can learn more about you and your new book?

Dr. Greg Nigh: Yeah. So the new book, you can get it on Amazon and all those places that you can get books. It is called The Devil And The Garlic. And about me, I am in Portland, Oregon, and at a clinic called Immersion Health. Which is immersionhealthpdx.com. My clinical focus is generally oncology. But I see all kinds of other stuff. I work digestive and all of that.

Dr. Greg Nigh: That is my main gig and there is all kinds of stuff on the web page about exactly what I am doing and the kinds of therapies I am amusing and all that. So yeah, that’s my deal. And thanks so much for having me on and getting to talk about this stuff.

Dr. Trevor Cates : This has been fascinating. Thank you so much, Greg.

Dr. Greg Nigh: Thank you.

Dr. Trevor Cates : I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Greg Nigh. To learn more about him and where you can get his book. You can go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. While you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and information, and you can find out what messages your skin is trying to tell you about your health, at theskinquiz.com. Find out your skin personality type and how that’s connected to the root causes behind skin issues, theskinquiz.com. I also invite you to join us on social media. The Spa Dr. is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. Join us there and I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.