Expert Shares Weight Loss Myths & Secrets to Optimize Metabolism, Gut Health and Energy with Alexis Cowan, PhD

This episode explores weight loss myths, metabolic optimization, and the significant role gut health plays in overall energy and well-being.

1. Myth-Busting Weight Management: Traditional calorie counting overlooks crucial factors like gut microbiota and their impact on metabolic health.
2. Gut Microbiome's Role: A healthy gut microbiome, enriched with certain bacteria like Ackermansia, is vital for proper metabolism and weight regulation.
3. Importance of Light Exposure: Sunlight and specific light therapies can significantly influence physiological processes and energy expenditure.
4. Holistic Health Approach: Combining diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes is essential for long-term health and sustainable weight loss.
5. Scientific and Personal Insights: Dr. Cowan blends scientific research with personal experiences to discuss comprehensive strategies for health optimization.

1: Introduction to the Episode

Yasmin Nouri introduces the episode, focusing on gut health and metabolic optimization.
Yasmin Nouri: "If you're interested in Gut health, this episode is for you."

2: Debunking Weight Loss Myths

Dr. Cowan challenges the "calories in, calories out" model, advocating for a deeper understanding of metabolic processes.
Alexis Cowan: "The reason that it's not entirely helpful to think about this when we're considering weight loss is because there are so many variables."

3: Personal Journey and Scientific Insights

The discussion shifts to Dr. Cowan's personal health journey and scientific insights into gut health's role in overall well-being.
Alexis Cowan: "I personally had IB's... I ended up healing it fully myself, just through lifestyle means."

1. Evaluate Your Light Exposure: Incorporate natural sunlight into your daily routine to improve your circadian rhythm and metabolic health.
2. Consider Gut Health Testing: Use stool testing to understand your microbiome composition and track changes over time.
3. Incorporate Fermented Foods: Add fermented foods to your diet to improve gut health through their postbiotic effects.
4. Focus on Prebiotics and Probiotics: Enhance your diet with foods rich in prebiotics and probiotics to support gut health.
5. Mindful Eating and Quality Sleep: Prioritize high-quality, nutrient-rich foods and ensure adequate sleep for optimal health.

Do you struggle to lose weight, have low energy, poor digestion or sleep troubles? These can all be signs that you're out of sync with your biology, which is designed to work on nature's clock. In this episode, we dive into science-based practices and ancestral wisdom for feeling our best in modern times.

In this episode you’ll learn:

* Effective strategies for lasting weight loss
* Alternative ways to energize without caffeine
* How to support your circadian rhythm with light
* Top red light panel recommendations
* Why everyone needs to build muscle
* The best color to eat for better gut health
* And more…

Alexis Cowan, PhD, embarked on her path to health following a childhood marked by recurring illnesses and significant weight struggles. Through her personal battles with an eating disorder and subsequent development of ulcerative colitis, these early experiences sparked her interest in the scientific underpinnings of nutrition, exercise and other lifestyle interventions. Alexis pursued her education fervently, earning a B.S. in Biochemistry and Math from Moravian College, followed by a PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton University in 2021. She now works with individuals in her practice, and educates on metabolism and circadian optimization through her online courses.

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Alexis Cowan, Yasmin Nouri

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Guest Name(s):

Alexis Cowan

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Yasmin Knouri

Hey, everyone. We're back this week with our health series called Hormone Happy Hour that I do with Kaya Perowit, my co host and co founder. In our business, be a wellness. We interview the top experts in women's health, hormones, mindset, sexual health and so much more. Health is a huge part of running a successful business and having a fulfilling life.

So it's my honor to share these interviews that show us how to eat, think, move and live in a way that is designed to help us feel great so we can build our own empire. Now, let's jump into this week's episode. If you're interested in Gut health, this episode is for you. Today we have Doctor Alexis Cohen and. She gives us a step by step.

Guide on how to optimize and heal the gut based on her own experience. She also talks about her own journey with weight loss and what she did to create sustainable weight loss and the role of exercise, different types of foods and even sunlight in her weight loss journey. It's so fascinating. After this, we really got into light therapy. Both Yasmin and I got really excited to incorporate different types of light therapy into our lives.

And it's just a very fascinating episode, especially if anybody is interested in body composition or supporting their gut health. Doctor Alexis Cohen is a Princeton trained PhD specializing in the metabolic physiology of nutritional and exercise interventions. She supports clients on their journey to better health, from diet and nutraceuticals to exercise and lifestyle. So excited to have her here with us this week. So let's get into it.

Yasmin Knouri

You've had such an interesting journey when it comes to health and nutrition and weight. What are some of the most pervasive myths in the world of health, nutrition and weight loss that you've seen in your journey and that you see others do? That actually might not be the greatest for us. Yeah, it's a great and also loaded question. In a lot of ways.

Alexis Cohen

I think probably the biggest one that comes to the forefront of my mind when I'm asked a question like this is the whole calories in, calories out model, which let's just dive into, like, what that means, and then, like, why it's not necessarily helpful. So all the calories in calories out model indicates is that the amount of energy that you're taking in is balanced with the amount of energy that you're expending. And that balance between those two results in some sort of stable body weight. If they're, you know, if they're equal, your body weight's not going to be changing. If calories in is greater than calories out, your body weight is going to be going up.

And if calories out is bigger than calories in, then body weight can go down. The reason that it's not entirely helpful to think about this when we're considering weight loss is because there are so many variables that impact both calories in and calories outside of the equation. So, as an example, with regards to calories in, there's a group of bacteria that resides in the gut called Ackermansia mucinophila. It lives in the mucus lining of the gut, and it actually helps to mitigate the amount of gut permeability that we have. And the more Ackermansia that individuals have, I'm not saying necessarily more is always better, but we see observationally, that when an individual or a group of individuals has more Ackermansia, they have healthier body composition and better glucose metabolism, and it becomes easier for them to maintain a stable weight, or even to potentially lose weight compared to somebody who has low levels of ackermansia.

We can see that low levels of ackermannsia are highly associated with the incidence of obesity and diabetes. And so this is an example of something like just counting calories alone isn't accounting for the presence or absence of this bug in the gut. That's a major player when it comes to the calories inside of the equation. Now, for the calories outside of the equation, as an example of the complexities there, there is a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It controls, it's the master clock for the body.

It controls the circadian rhythm, tells all of the clocks in all of the cells of the body what time of day it is. Now, if that SCN, that suprachismatic nucleus, is being given the proper information from sun, let's say we evolved under the sunlight. Sun is supposed to be the major source of light in our environments. We end up inciting this cascade that leads to the production of palm C in the brain. Palm C stands for propio melanocortin.

Palm C is a major pro hormone. It's cleaved into ten distinct hormones, and one of those is alpha msh. Now, alpha MsH, and there's also a beta MsH, both of which come from palm C, are a major, major regulator of energy expenditure, but also appetite, and also fat mobilization and muscle metabolism. So what that basically means is, for the case of palm C, it's actually controlling both calories in by modulating appetite, and also calories out by modulating whole body energy expenditure through modulation of the basal metabolic rate or the bmR. And so that's one reason why sun is so important.

I mean, there's multitude of reasons why, but the palm C story is a really important testament to the power of the sun in modulating and optimizing our physiology. And so if we're talking about calories in, calories out, and all we're doing is just counting the number of calories we're eating and then measuring how many calories we're burning through exercise, we're totally missing the vast majority of inputs and variables that are actually affecting both of those channels. So those are just a couple examples of how the calories in, calories out or c co model is just very flawed in the way that it's implemented. Yeah, it's so interesting. You know, there's so many people that we talk to and so many people that I personally know who are like, I don't actually eat that much, but I can't lose weight.

Yasmin Knouri

And so what you're saying is so important because there could be so many factors at play. There's the gut microbiome, as you mentioned. There's our sun in asleep. There's are thyroid. There's so many other factors that could be contributing to the fact that somebody is not able to lose weight, and all they can see is this calorie picture.

Like, I'm eating less, therefore I should weigh less than I do right now. And I'm just curious, and I know we'll definitely dig into this a little bit later, but how does somebody know if their gut is kind of messed up or if their acromansia is on the lower end? How is, how does someone diagnose that for themselves? So there is stool testing available. I personally feel like we're kind of at the infancy of what it means to assess the microbiome.

Alexis Cohen

I really don't think we have a grasp on, like, what that data actually indicates in the body, though. I will say if you do some sort of stool testing or microbiome analysis as like a baseline, and then you do some intervention and then you test again, that could be a way to actually get some useful information. Let's say you get a baseline test and then you implement some strategies that we can talk about for microbiome optimization, which would include, like, an emphasis on prebiotics and postbiotics. We can talk about what those are. And then you see, okay, now I have an increased level of Ackermans and bifidobacteria and I'm also feeling better digestion wise.

Like, I'm getting less bloating and gas. I just feel like, you know, not bloated and, like, puffy in my abdomen. And those would all be indications. Also, like, food sensitivities and allergies are another indication that there's issues with gut permeability. So those would be things that people can look out for just overall, you know, I think everybody knows when their digestion feels good and when it doesn't.

So, for me, I personally had IB's. This was a while ago. I ended up healing it fully myself, just through lifestyle means. In that case, I was having, like, blood and mucus in my stool daily. I couldn't eat anything without having intense gas pains in my stomach.

It didn't matter what the food was, it was just a really bad state. My microbiome was really messed up. I could tell this is gross, but, like, my gas literally smelled like gasoline. Like, my microbiome was messed up. So there's lots of ways that people can tell.

I think if you're having very foul odors coming out of you, that is a very good sign that your microbiome is imbalanced. You have dysbiosis in addition to just, like, the GI symptoms that people would associate with having poor digestion. Those would all be signs that there's work to do in that department. Yeah, no, that's super helpful. And you kind of touched upon your journey, which I am so fascinated about, your own personal health journey.

Yasmin Knouri

So maybe you can kind of share more about what you kind of went through and what has gotten you to where you are today and the passion around everything that you talk about. Sure. It's a long story. I'll do my best to distill it down. So I had a multitude of very negative experiences with regards to the standard medical model as a child.

Alexis Cohen

And in first grade, I was getting recurring strep throat, and I was on antibiotics for, like, months at a time. And it was to the point where my mom ended up just pulling me out of school and homeschooling me for, like, the second half of first grade and all of second grade because I just kept getting sick. And we thought, you know, maybe it was just because I was constantly exposed to something in school, but looking back on it now, I really believe that I had quite a bit of mold in my house growing up that was contributing to some immune suppression and was impairing my ability to, like, just not get these infections, because at the end of the day, all infections are opportunistic. It's not like just because you're exposed, you're going to get infected. We know that very well now.

And like, that's why I think the germ theory perspective is just not that helpful in some cases. Because we all know, like, somebody in the house could be sick, but doesn't mean everybody in the house is going to get sick with the same, you know, cold, flu or whatever it is. And so there's a lot of complexity to be had there with regards to how our bodies are interacting with our environments, to shape how we are responding to our environments and how healthy we are. But during that year and a half that I was homeschooled, my weight just blew up. And by the time I went back to third grade, I weighed about double my classmates.

And that just kept spiraling up through around junior year, like the summer before junior year of high school, where I maxed out at about 270 pounds, I was also getting a lot of respiratory infections and skin infections and just having a really bad time. Terrible acne, irregular periods and like hormonal issues. So I was kind of fed up by that point. I wanted to be able to like fit in literally and figuratively. I am like very much a Taurus and like love aesthetics and dressing nicely and.

But also love really good food. And so I just felt like it wasn't fun for me to not be able to wear the clothes I wanted because I couldn't fit in them and then just also having all the health issues on top of that. And so I decided to changed my life. And I went to the gym every day for a year straight for about 2 hours every day. I would do an hour of cardio, an hour of resistance training.

And at the end of that year, I had lost between 91 hundred pounds and continued to kind of lose a little bit more over the course of the following year. And it was life changing in a lot of ways. But I will say, looking back on that, I mean, I could have done things a lot better if I had the knowledge I had now because in that post weight loss period, I suffered with a really terrible eating disorder, bulimia. And on top of that, I developed IB's during this period of time as well. And so with regards to the disordered eating, it's super common if you're really focused on just focusing on calories, that you develop a very unhealthy relationship with food.

And that's because we're not even thinking about the quality of food, we're just thinking about the quantity. The other problem with the counting calories aspect in this context is that it's really easy to focus on consuming packaged and processed foods if you're trying to lose weight, because the calories and the macros are right there on the, on the label. So it's not like you have to do any fancy weighing or anything like that to just know how much you're going to eat, which I think sets people up for de emphasizing the importance of food quality. And so after I lost the weight, this disordered eating really kind of was spurred on out of a fear ultimately, of putting that weight back on because I just worked so hard to get that off. And like, the last thing I would ever want, that thing that would terrify me most, would be to put that weight back on.

That kind of initiated a journey, let's say, into discovering the importance of food quality and understanding the nutrition aspects, and understanding why my body was responding the way that it was with regards to my GI health as well, because this was kind of the early stages of me developing the IB's that I mentioned earlier. Another thing that was a major catalyst for that issue was my consumption of caffeine, which kind of got out of control early on. In college, I was drinking a lot of these sugar free rock star drinks. They're absolutely terrible. But a lot of people are overconsuming caffeine.

And caffeine is obviously a stimulant and it's highly addictive. It's also the most subsidized or legalized or just normalized drug in our society that nobody considers as a drug. And it's very powerful. And a lot of people don't know that. It's underlying their GI issues, their nervous system, dysregulation, their anxiety, conflict within their relationships.

Like, so much can change when you get really honest about your relationship with caffeine instead of just consuming it unconsciously, like so many people do. And so basically, at the time, when I started developing the pretty serious symptoms of IB's, I went to the doctor and they said, you know, you'll probably grow out of it. You're pretty young, we could give you like some immunotherapies. That's the best we can do. And I was like, well, I know I didn't always have this, so there must be something that I'm doing that's causing this.

And so I ended up kind of just really going through my lifestyle, my diet with a fine tooth comb home, cut out the energy drinks, and also did an elimination diet and found out that dairy was a major trigger for me. And when I removed dairy from my diet, all of my symptoms went away, like completely. And so I kept dairy out of my diet for five years and was totally in remission, like no ib's whatsoever. And when I reintroduced dairy, I kind of got like a more intense response than I initially was getting. So it was more like an allergic response.

I think during that period of restriction, I had sensitized my immune cells to become more reactive to dairy proteins or whatever the reactive antigen was in the food. And I would get a pretty intense inflammatory response. Even if I had a small amount of dairy. I would put five pounds of water weight on overnight and it would take over a week for that to come off. And I would get this hot tingling sensation through my body and my throat would feel like it was swelling.

That was an important wake up for me just to try to understand what is going on here, but then also how can I navigate this so that I can eventually have food freedom again and don't have to restrict this the rest of my life? And that's when I really went down the rabbit hole on microbiome modulation. And I found Joel Green's work in the immunity code and he outlined a protocol for gut optimization and microbiome optimization that was centered around a prebiotic approach. Prebiotics are molecules that feed the good bacteria in our guts. And I stayed on that for about six months.

I felt positive changes almost immediately, but I wanted to make sure I stayed on it long enough. I was kind of just, you know, guinea pigging myself. So I didn't know how long it would take to kind of reverse my issues with dairy. But after that six months period, I reintroduced dairy and I didn't have an issue with it. And ever since then, I also haven't had an issue with it.

I will say I also don't abuse dairy like, I treat it. Kind of like as a treat. I don't have it every day. But that's mostly because, like, the, most of the dairy that we're having access to is like not the best quality anyways. And I think if we're going to eat dairy, it should probably be in the raw, unpasteurized form and cheeses and just very fresh.

And a lot of the dairy that's found in most supermarkets isn't necessarily going to be compatible with our bodies because the protein structures change. When you're doing the pasteurization process under high heat, we don't know what aspect or impact that can have on immune protein interactions that could increase the chance of developing a sensitivity, for example, or an allergy. So anyways, that was really a very eye opening experience for me. Just to show me how one, how important the gut is and the microbiome is for just allowing us to have freedom and sovereignty around our food and not having to worry or be scared about what we're eating and being able to feel good regardless of what we're eating. Assuming we're eating like a whole foods based diet and like a relatively clean diet, quote unquote.

And then also just really, that whole journey showed me just how important food quality is and irrespective of food quality, and that when we focus on food quality, that we can have trust over our intuition around our appetites and that we feel satiated more quickly and that we don't have to, like, second guess what our cravings are, because our cravings are naturally going to be for things that our body actually wants, versus eating highly processed foods hijacks those reward systems that prevents us from actually. It kind of breaks the connection between our body's intuition around food and what we're actually desiring. And so we end up just craving more of the highly processed foods because they're giving us that initial dopamine hit, but they end up actually creating a decline in neurochemistry and aberrations in the gut microbiome over time. Hey, everyone, it's Yasmin here. In 2020, I was struggling with some debilitating health stuff.

Yasmin Knouri

I just got off birth control, and suddenly I had acne, mood swings, breast tenderness, and really painful periods. I tried so many things, but the one thing that worked was something called seed cycling. I know you're probably thinking, seed cycling. What the heck is that? It's a natural way to support your hormones using four specific seeds throughout your cycle.

The challenge is that seed cycling can be a little complicated to do and kind of time consuming. So I decided to make an organic seed cycling product that is so easy to use, we make it effortless for anyone to get started. Today, it's called bea, and it's a super easy way to add something powerful to your diet to support your hormones, regulate your cycle, and bring back balance. To learn more about Bea and join our community with thousands of incredible women all over the world, go to beawellness.com. And that's spelled Beeya wellness.com and check out the show notes for our promo code to get $10 off your first purchase.

Thanks so much for listening. And now let's get back to today's episode. Wow. There's so much to unpack with everything that you said. And I can relate to your story, actually.

Me and my brother were put on antibiotics quite frequently for recurrent strep infections when we were kids. We both have very sensitive guts. To this day, you know, it's a work in progress. I've come a long way, have definitely gone through so many different diets myself. A kind of modified keto diet, orthorexia.

At some point, you know, when you're desperate, a lot of things happen, and then finally, you can get to a good place. But for anybody who's listening to this, and they're new to the world of the gut microbiome and gut healing, what are some of these foods that you incorporated or things that we can bring into our diet? I know there's so much that we need to remove, but I would love to talk about what foods we should be bringing in to support our guts. Great question. And maybe I'll preface it by saying that maybe something provocative, and that is that I truly believe that the reason that food is such an important shaper of the microbiome in the modern lifestyle is because we're living in an environment that's detached from nature.

Alexis Cohen

So there is really compelling research today that uvb light is a major shaper of the gut microbiome and that obviously, we get from the sun, and that our natural environments are a major source of healthy microbes that would colonize our gut to begin with. However, because we're living in these, like, mostly kind of sterile and artificially lit environments, we're no longer getting those primary inputs that shape our gut and make the gut microbiome resilient to whatever insults come its way. And so now in the modern environment, we're really relying on food to shape our microbiome because those other inputs are now missing. Having said that, there are important prebiotics that do help to shape the microbiome in specific ways. So I mentioned bifidobacteria earlier.

Bifidobacteria is extremely important for immune regulation and the cultivation of an anti inflammatory environment in the body. And bifidobacteria is largely introduced into the gut in infancy. So right after we're born in a vaginal birth, the microbiome is being inoculated. That's why also c section babies have a hard time with a lot of inflammatory issues, potentially later in life, because they're not getting that initial inoculum. But assuming that there's a normal vaginal birth, then afterwards, the baby starts breastfeeding and breast milk becomes the major food source for that child for the next six months to a year, to two years, or however long.

And breast milk contains these molecules called human milk oligosaccharides. And these HMo's, which is the acronym that stands for hemolygosaccharides, are the major food source for bifidobacteria in the infant gut, to the point where the infant microbiome is upwards of 90% or more bifidobacteria. Now, if a child isn't breastfed and if they were given formula, let's say in the nineties or early two thousands when HMO's weren't even really discovered yet, that input was totally missing. So bifidobacteria levels were just not great in this population. More recently, in like the 2010s, since then, some HMo's have been added into formula, but even still, it's only like one or maybe two.

Tuficosal lactose is the major HMO in breast milk that's also often added to formula these days. Another one is called lnnt. It's another HMO found in breast milk. It's also in formula, but there's actually upwards of 100 different HMO's present in breast milk. And we're really starting to understand now that each one kind of has a specific affinity for a subtype of bifidobacteria in the gut.

In the case of consuming HMO's through breast milk, you're getting a really broad shaping of bifidobacteria communities that's going to help create a healthy immune environment from day one, because those bifidobacteria are essentially training immune cells about what is self and what is other, helping the immune cells to be able to understand what should be attacked and what should be considered as healthy or safe or self. And so without that initial training process, we become much more vulnerable to issues like autoimmunity, asthma, any sort of inflammatory conditions. And so that's one of the major groups of bacteria that's shaped early on in life. Ackermansia comes along not too long afterwards. HMO's can also feed ackermancia to a certain extent.

There's also evidence that ackermansia can be directly provided from breast milk through the milk ducts. Like there appears to be a direct inoculation from breastfeeding for children. So early on in life, we're really setting the stage for the health of the microbiome throughout the rest of one's life. Having said that, now there's been more research around the effects of HMO's and as adults we can now harness HMO's to help improve our bifidobacteria and ackeromancia levels. Even if we did have a pretty rough childhood with regards to antibiotic exposure or lack of breastfeeding or c section birthday, we can still begin to cultivate bifidobacteria in our guts by using HmO in supplement form.

So I personally like layer origins. They were kind of the first on the scene with regards to HMO's in supplement form and the initial one was just the two fucosal lactose, the two fl. But more recently they've developed a product that has like five different HMO's in it. So that helps to broadly shape the bifidobacteria communities more thoroughly. And there's a couple really interesting ones in there that actually help to increased levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.

Because we also know that there's a very tight connection between the gut and the brain and the gut brain axis. It's a two way street, first of all, but that the microbiome is a major input that's influencing the way that we're feeling in our moods and our just felt sense of well being. That's a little bit of a tangent, but the HMO's are one really great way to shape the microbiome in adulthood. Another would be red polyphenols. So red polyphenols are things found, are these pigment molecules found in beets and dark red fruits and vegetables.

And these are both a direct food source for bifidobacteria, but also can help to create an anti inflammatory environment in the gut by directly serving as antioxidants as well. So in an inflamed gut, red polyphenols are really great because they're not going to necessarily create the gas and bloating that you would get from something like fibers or even hmO's if your gut is inflamed. This is maybe a little bit of an aside, but it's relevant here, and that is that there's these important molecules called short chain fatty acids that bifidobacteria incites the production of by feeding other bacteria that make butyrate and other short chain fatty acids, which are really important for the health of the colon and also the maintenance of like colon cell energy production. Butyrate is the major fuel source for colon cells in a healthy colon. But when these short chain fatty acids too low of a level, then the colon cells start to shift to burning more glucose, and that weakens the tight junctions, and it results in a higher oxygen environment within the gut, which is actually a bad thing.

So the colon is supposed to be hypoxic or low oxygen conditions, and it's supposed to be acidic. I know people think acidic is bad. Alkaline is good. That's not the case. There's different parts of our body that have ideal phs, and they're not all going to be the same.

In the unhealthy colon, we have a more alkaline environment. We have weaker tight junctions, increased gut permeability. In that setting, we're basically not going to be able to transport the short chain fatty acids that we produce, because as inflammation in a gut lining goes up, the transporters get inhibited for these molecules. And that's what actually creates that gassiness and bloating in response to eating fodmaps, for example, or even taking HMO's. If you have gut inflammation that's like that discomfort and that gas buildup that people can get.

And that's why a lot of people end up going on low FODMAP diets. But what ends up happening is that creates a feed forward loop where we're actually lowering our bifidobacteria populations even more, because bifidobacteria actually consume these fodmaps, and it helps to bolster their populations. So that's all to say that red polyphenols are a nice gateway to getting into a more healthy gut, because they're not going to be extremely bifidogenic and producing that many short chain fatty acids, but they do produce some, and in addition, they help to quench inflammation within the gut. The last thing I'll mention here is fermented foods. So, fermented foods, people think of them as a source of probiotics.

But research out of the Sonnenberg lab shows that basically the benefit of fermented foods is actually the postbiotic content, not the probiotic content, and that the gut bugs that you see increase in response to fermented food consumption aren't the bacteria used to ferment the cabbage, let's say, but it's actually the bacteria that are consuming molecules made by those. Those fermenting bugs in the sauerkraut, as an example. Those molecules that the microbes within sauerkraut are producing in response to them eating the cabbage like fibers are feeding other bacteria in the gut. And those bacteria are increasing in response to consuming fermented foods. So fermented foods are a source of postbiotics.

Postbiotic meaning that when a probiotic bug, when a beneficial bug eats a prebiotic, which is like a fiber or whatever it is, it makes a postbiotic. And so those postbiotics are also major allies when we're thinking about shaping the microbiome. I have so many things to unpack there. I mean, you mentioned so many amazing recommendations, and one thing that really stands out. I used to, and I love what you mentioned about the correlation between the sun and the microbiome.

Yasmin Knouri

I've never known that. But kind of looking at my life, I was like, wow, there was a time in my life where I was living in New York working a lot. We were inside for, like, 12 hours a day, at least. And so many people were dealing with gut issues. And I remember at the time, we'd go to our doctors and they'd say, go on the low FODMap diet.

I remember all of us googling it, like, all right, what? Avoid this food. Avoid that food. So I'm curious, because you mentioned, I don't know if this is still something common that doctors recommend. I've kind of healed on my own journey.

But you mentioned if someone's on the low fat, low fodmap diet and then wants to introduce food back, like, it's kind of like a double edged sword, right? Because they won't necessarily feel, well, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but what would you recommend someone who might be having gut issues and is on a low fat FODMAP diet? They're like, I just want to get back to the basics. Like, what are the top three things this person can do if they're dealing with some kind of gut issue? Yeah.

Alexis Cohen

So low FODMAP diets can be beneficial in the very short to medium term when you're dealing with acute symptoms from eating these types of foods. But the long term plan needs to be to be able to reincorporate these things and regain freedom around your food and not having to avoid every single thing and not be able to enjoy going out to eat and enjoying meals with friends and family. Like, I think that's a really important social aspect to that and also just a major source of anxiety when you can't eat so many different things, it's causing a lot of stress in the body. So that exacerbates issues because we want to get the body more parasympathetic which it's getting rest and digest, and allowing our pancreas to produce enzymes and our stomach to produce acid and peristalsis to occur, so that we can healthily digest our food. But so the important thing is to be able to come up with a strategy that allows you to digest those foods more effectively.

And so the first step that I use in my practice, and I use with myself, is to implement an anti inflammatory protocol so that at least in the short term, you can bring inflammation levels down enough to get those transporters uninhibited, so that the short chain fatty acids can get taken up. And once you can start to get those short chain fatty acids taken up, that will help keep inflammation down, because once that butyrate, for example, is being taken up by colon cells, that's going to increase tight junction integrity, that's going to reduce gut permeability. And so that will beget less inflammation. And it creates a feed forward loop in the positive direction compared to the other way. Like once you get a little bit of inflammation, it also can easily spiral and create a feed forward loop in the opposite direction.

So in an anti inflammatory protocol, one might use things like high dha, omega three s, one might use things like hesperidin, which is a citrus bioflavonoid that helps to reduce inflammation in the colon. Specifically. There's also things like molecular hydrogen. There are things like doing an elimination diet in general. So, like, if you're still having symptoms and you're on a low FODMAp diet, food journaling is going to be key, because you just want to find out any trigger foods that you might have and just, you know, we're going to remove them temporarily.

It's not going to be a forever thing. We just need to get inflammation down and triggers away so that we can get that inflammation to a minimum point, so that we can introduce something like the HMO's and the polyphenols, and then start titrating in fibers and more plant foods, so that we can then optimize our short chain fatty acid production in a productive way that allows those short chain fatty acids to get taken up and to promote an anti inflammatory environment. And then also to, of course, cultivate bifidobacteria, which also helps to tune immune cells to a more anti inflammatory state. So those would be some tools that you would use. Obviously, I mentioned earlier how important the sun is and uvb light is for shaping the microbiome.

Getting sun on your gut in particular, like the skin of your gut, there's nerves underneath it that are particularly big producers of that palm C molecule I mentioned before. So, palm C is not only produced in the brain, it's also produced in the skin. And when it's produced in the skin, there's actually something interesting that happens, and that is that I mentioned before, palm C is a pro hormone. It's cleaved into ten different products in the skin. That's true in the brain.

In certain parts of the brain, it's only cleaved like a less number of times. So only like four to six products occur. But if we want to get the full spectrum capabilities of Pom C and harnessing that, we really need to get it in our skin and then also in our eyes, because the light in our eyes is what initiates that cascade in the brain. And if you just think about it evolutionarily, we're meant, when we're going outside, where our eyes are exposed to sunlight, our skin is exposed to sunlight. This is just really about getting back to the basics and back to our evolutionary history.

As a species, we're meant to live a certain way. We've deviated a lot from that way, and just introducing those ancestral axioms or those ancestral behaviors more into our lives can pay back dividends. So, getting that uvb light on your gut. So I personally, this time of year, the sunlight is basically without uv light here in New Jersey. So I have like a spurty lamp that I use in combination with a Mito red panel, which is red and infrared light.

So during the summer, sunlight is over 50% red and infrared light, and then there's about 10% uv light. So were really meant to get uv light with red and infrared light. And so I personally combine them in my phototherapy sessions around middle of the day. Like after this podcast, I'll be going and doing mine. I basically just expose all of my skin, but I focus on the abdomen for the uv light and also the red and infrared light, and then I'll also do my back.

And depending on your skin type, you might need more or less to get the intended effect. So I'm personally mixed so I can tolerate a bit more sun, and I don't get burned very easily. Somebody who has, like, much paler skin or atrophic skin and has a very, like, low Fitzpatrick number. If you look at the Fitzpatrick scale, you can kind of determine how much sunlight you need to get your intended effect. And I actually really like the Dminder app for this, which tells you roughly, like, how much vitamin D you'll produce from the sun.

Given your latitude, your location, and the weather. That's a good app to have, especially during the summer, because around now, at least, this, in this area of the world, we basically don't get any uv light. But it's going to be starting to creep in pretty soon. So the more we can get outside and get, and get this light is ideal. But this time of year, we have to do what we can.

And I mean, I'll personally say I really got into this, the light story and the impact of sun over the past year. And I've seen the biggest effects on my, like, gi health since. Just basically optimizing my light environment, optimizing my circadian health, and making sure that I'm getting sun and or like, uv and red light onto my gut directly, like on the stomach, over my abdomen. And literally, since I started doing that over the summer, I haven't. I've maybe had one day where I felt any gas, bloating or anything.

Like, I can literally, I feel like I can literally eat anything and I have zero symptoms. And I also use this approach with many of my clients as well. And it's just very well tolerated. It's extremely beneficial, and it's, it's a really great way to shape the microbiome and improve gut health independent of food, so that you don't have to worry about, like, I'm going to bloat from this food or that. Instead, harnessing the light to help tamp down inflammation, optimize the microbiome, and then introducing foods becomes much easier.

Yasmin Knouri

Can you mention what those two lights were one more time? Yeah. So, sperdy, it's spelled S P E R T I. They're a brand of uv lights. So they have a vitamin D light.

Alexis Cohen

The vitamin D light is about 75% uvb and 25% uva. They also have a Fiji sun lamp, which mine's coming this week. I'm super excited about it. That one's 75% uva and 25% uvb. And during the, like, the summertime, the sun composition is about 10% uv light and about 3% of that is uvb and 7% is uva.

So we're technically meant to get more uva than uvb, but uvb is the impetus, is the stimulus for vitamin D production and palm C production. So it is extremely important. But I would just say that we're really meant to also balance that with Uva and red and infrared. And so that's why I just ordered the Fiji sun lamp to get that balance and then the mito red panel is the brand of red light panels that I use. That the mito Pro panel, specifically, they have a combination of two different red wavelengths and two different infrared wavelengths in the NIR range, the near infrared range, and those are the two most abundant light sources in the sun.

And honestly, those light panels are just incredible. It feels like a warm hug just standing in front of them. And it just makes a huge difference with regards to mood and with regards to just like, overall well being and also your skin health and skin elasticity, and wound healing and anti inflammation. Red light can basically go directly into mitochondria. It can penetrate into the body, and it stimulates mitochondrial metabolism to work better, to work more efficiently, and to produce more energy.

Contrast that with blue light, which we're exposed to a lot of blue light in the modern environment due to energy efficient lighting, led lighting and fluorescent lighting. Those bulbs are highly enriched in blue wavelength light. And in addition to that, obviously our devices, anything that's led backlit, like our tvs, computers, phones, they're all enriched in blue wavelength light. And blue light actually inhibits mitochondrial function and impairs energy production in mitochondria. And so if you think about it, you know, ancestrally in the sun, like, if we're out in the sun, we're getting blue light, but it's always balanced with red and infrared light and uv light.

We're never getting blue light in isolation or in like this big bolus like we do in the modern environment. And there's just so many easy ways to mitigate that, too. So, for example, right now we're recording this podcast, and I have like a red or amber filter on my computer, so I'm not getting blasted with blue light from the screen. I have the same thing on my phone. I just keep it on all the time.

Unless I need to turn it off quickly, I have like a hotkey that I can just turn it off quick if I need to see something in its actual color, and then I put it back to the filter. I also have blue light blocking glasses that I carry around with me. If I'm out, you know, out and about at nighttime or around sundown, I'm going to pop them on so that I'm not exposed to just like a lot of artificial lighting at night. It's a major disturber of the circadian rhythm. Blue light is basically the signal that tells the brain what time of day it is.

So if we're exposed to blue light at night, we're telling our brains that it's the middle of the day. And so all of the rhythms around hormone production, around metabolism, around just all of our systems of our body are orchestrated by certain temporal signals, or like, based on the time of day, the body's going to do this thing or it's going to do this other activity. But if we're always sending the stimulus, that's the middle of the day, we're never getting into that resting phase, we're never going to get good recovery, we're not going to produce enough melatonin, we're not going to release enough melatonin. And that's going to impact sleep quality sleep duration, which obviously has a lot of knock on effects with regards to recovery and just overall health of the entire body. We know that, you know, sleep is absolutely essential and quality sleep is absolutely essential for achieving optimal health.

And even a very low level of light in the bedroom while you're sleeping, there's really quite compelling studies showing that if you have a low level of ambient light in your sleeping environment, you wake up, you have a higher or lower hrV, you have more insulin resistance, you have higher levels of circulating insulin and higher levels of circulating glucose. And by just removing that light and making sure that your bedroom is pitch black, all of those biomarkers become optimized. Your HRV goes up, your glucose tolerance goes up, your ability to clear glucose throughout that day increases. So really important, but also very actionable things that people can do to just improve their health at just like a baseline level without even having to think about diet or anything else. Yet we can just build that foundation by optimizing the light environment, and that makes everything else easier.

Yasmin Knouri

So interesting. Everything that you're saying is painting this picture for me, for no wonder. We are in an epidemic of things like depression and chronic disease and metabolic disease, especially for our kids, right? Because they are exposed to blue light all day long, they're on devices all night, and more and more kids are struggling with things like anxiety and depression. And of course, it's obvious in some ways, but when you're talking, I'm like, aha.

No wonder. Like, all these kids are struggling right now. They're living in a way that is just not in the way that we were meant to, or not in a way that's not conducive to what nature designed. And I want to talk a little. Bit more about mitochondria, since you mentioned it and your journey with using caffeine and how that affected your gut health.

So do you have caffeine anymore? And what are some more sustainable ways that we can support our energy? Great question. I love this question. I have lots of thoughts and practices that people can take away for this.

Alexis Cohen

So with regards to caffeine, I was probably having at least one cup of coffee a day starting in maybe freshman year of high school. And, you know, it was at least a decade before I ever came off of it. So I came off of caffeine for the first time since starting to drink it in. It was about three, it was like four summers ago now, actually. And I felt like crap for an entire month.

Like, I withdrawed like, it was crazy. And that was. I wasn't going crazy with caffeine. I would have one to two cups of coffee a day, and I even weaned onto decaf and matcha and then weaned off of that. And still I had, like, very low energy levels for a month.

I just gave myself permission to feel like crap. Sometimes you have to do that to just, like, detox and withdraw and, like, you just got to get through that period, and then everything starts going up from there. I stayed off of it for about six months. And then when I reintroduced some, now I just drink, like, oolong tea, which is also balanced with l theanine. That helps to balance out the stimulating effects of caffeine and just make it a little bit smoother and less like of the big peaks and valleys and energy levels that a lot of people will experience drinking coffee, for example, I think even cough, even decaf coffee is stimulating.

And you'll notice that if you ever come off of caffeine and then just drink a decaf cup of coffee, like, you'll still feel it. And so I think there's still low levels of caffeine in decaf, but then there's also probably other molecules in coffee that have a stimulating effect that we just don't fully understand yet or haven't characterized yet. So with regards to caffeine, good rule of thumb is not to drink it after one or 02:00 p.m. Just because depending on your, like, your metabolic rates for caffeine in particular, the breakdown of caffeine can vary from person to person. The half life can be anywhere from, like six to ten or even more hours depending on how quickly you metabolize it.

There are specific mutations in genes that are responsible for breaking caffeine down that vary across the population. So somebody who has a very slow rate of metabolizing caffeine will probably experience more anxiety and negative effects from drinking it because it basically bioaccumulates if they're drinking it every day. And that's creating a very strong signal for sympathetic nervous system activation in the body. The one thing that I'll say for people who maybe want to get off of caffeine and, like, choose other things is that what is our ultimate goal of consuming caffeine? It's to experience more energy and more focus.

Well, what are other ways that we can do that? So this actually ties in with the mitochondrial story, because mitochondria are responsible for making all the energy in almost every cell of the body. And our bodies are, like, cumulatively sensing the energy status. And that's going to be reflected in our mental faculties, our ability to focus, our just subjective feelings of energy or low energy. So anything that's supporting our mitochondrial function is going to boost, basically our felt sense of energy.

So that would include things like the sun, of course. That red and infrared light is really stimulating to mitochondria. Uv light. I like to also think about light in the sense of, like, essential nutrients. So we can consider red, infrared, and uv light all to be essential nutrients.

And if we're lacking any one of them, then we're deficient versus we have, like, excess or toxicity of blue light because we're getting too much of that. So everything needs to be balanced in that way. So getting exposed to those light sources that are going to provide uv and red and infrared light super important and very energizing. Something like methylene blue as well. So, like, I have a glass here, I'll probably drink it sometime soon.

But methylene blue is essentially, it was the first synthetic drug that was used in medicine, but it also was initially used as a dye in, like, textile production. It's still used as a dye in biology labs. But what it does is that it can basically interact with mitochondria to help make energy production more effortless. And so, in addition to that, it's also an Maoi or monoamine oxidase inhibitor. So it helps to boost levels of dopamine in the brain, also helps to increase levels of serotonin.

So it helps just make you feel a little bit brighter and more energetic. It's not going to have the same, like, stimulating effects as coffee. It's more well rounded and just a little bit more subtle, I would say. And so that's a really good one. I also really like.

I have these here to show you guys. So there's this drink company called Breeze that I recently found. This is their lines mane version. So it's lion's mane, and there's also limonene in it, which is a terpene that's also found in cannabis and also in hops. But limonene is a terpene that's actually very energizing and stimulating.

So that's a good. A good way to also get a little boost without having to reach for caffeine, other than that movement. So moving our bodies also activates our mitochondria, which helps to produce energy, which helps us to feel more energized. So something like going for a walk, especially if it's outside, that's a great way to feel more energized. Another one that I would be amiss, not to mention, is cold exposure.

So cold exposure is more potent than Adderall at boosting norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain, by far. And whether that means we're, like, taking a cold shower or even dunking our face into ice water or putting an ice pack on our abdomen, any way that we can just introduce some cold, if we're ever feeling an energy slump, it's a really quick way that you can just get those feel good hormones up and you can get, you know, into the zone for whatever you need to do. So those are some tools that I personally use a lot of. And depending on what somebody's goals are or what somebody has access to doing, the easiest ones to harness are going to be to get outside and move your body, and maybe to get some cold on you. And those will take you a long way.

And it's also very consistent, if you think about it, with the way we would just live ancestrally, we're not meant to live indoors at 70 degrees year round. We're meant to experience some temperature extremes. Even if it's for a small period of time, it's going to help immensely. And actually, on the front of cold exposure, I want to mention something you might find interesting that you mentioned thyroid health earlier, or the thyroid hormone is really important for managing energy expenditure and regulating the production of energy in the mitochondria as well. Well, something a lot of people don't know, is that brown fat, which is this fat depot that produces heat in our bodies, we're born with a lot of brown fat.

It dwindles over time because most of us are not being exposed to cold, like any sort of temperature, extremely, especially cold, throughout our lifetime. So those brown fat depots shrink, but they can grow back, and they can also. You can also build more brown fat, but it's actually, it's called beige fat, which is the type of fat that you produce in Response to cold exposure. But at any rate, brown fat is a major Endocrine Organ, and there's a brown fat thyroid axis that's extremely important. Essentially what Happens is the thyroid produces t four, which is the inactive form of thyroid hormone.

And brown fat can take up t four and spit out t three, which is the active form of the thyroid hormone. And so if somebody has hypothyroidism, they usually experience pretty strong cold aversion. And their doctors will tell them, like, just bundle up, avoid the cold. And that actually makes the problem worse, because now you're further impairing your ability for you to activate that brown fat in those depots, to actually further convert your t four into your t three. So something that somebody can do is, like, just slowly cold acclimate.

Some people will be able to do it more easily than others. If your maternal genetic line hails from areas in the northern regions, then you will naturally be able to get cold and adapt to cold more quickly, versus if your maternal genetic lines come from equatorial regions, you're more so meant to get sun versus cold, though. Anybody could still become cold adapted. But it will just tend to come a bit easier to people who have ancestors from more northern regions. And during the acclimation process, you will build brown fat.

You'll also build those feel good neurochemicals that will acutely make you feel good. And then the brown fat, over time, will also help to improve your metabolism and glucose clearance as well. Not only your thyroid, but brown fat is also a major sink for circulating glucose. So if you're experiencing issues with glucose metabolism or insulin resistance and glucose clearance, then harnessing cold is going to be a great way for you to manage your glucose levels. There's so much there that you mentioned, and I love it.

Yasmin Knouri

I always was curious about dunking your head in ice, because I'm not someone that can, like, go into ice bucket water, but I always wondered. I seen so many people on social media do it. I'm like, is that for real? Is it going to really do something? So I love it.

I so appreciate all your hacks. I would love to be in your day, in the life, and see, like, what does your morning look like, your afternoon, your evening, like, I am so fascinated. I have a bunch of notes here, and I know we're coming up into time, so I'd love to kind of end on something. We. We dabbled on weight loss kind of, throughout this interview, and one thing we didn't talk about is kind of the importance of muscle.

You know, you mentioned that a lot of people think calorie in, calorie out, cardio is a way to lose weight. Maybe you kind of can touch upon how you think about muscle on your own weight loss journey. Yeah. So, I mean, reflecting back on my journey, I think that I really was setting myself up for success when I was resistance training daily in addition to my cardio. So I was able to not only potentially build some muscle, but at the very least maintain my muscle that I had while I was losing fat.

Alexis Cohen

And something that a lot of people don't do when they're trying to lose weight is they'll just kind of be cardio bunnies and they'll just, like, try to do as much cardio as possible, not realizing that the body adapts very quickly to the stimulus of cardiovascular exercise in that the basal metabolic rate begins to go down, because you get better at doing that exercise. And there's no form of, like, progressive overload, necessarily with, I mean, there is aerobic capacity. You can build that, and that's good. But with regards to lifting, like, you can keep putting more muscle on, and that muscle actually helps to build your basal metabolic rate so that it remains even higher, and especially during a weight loss period. That's extremely important because the higher your basal metabolic rate stays, the more calories you burn at rest and the easier it is to maintain a caloric deficit with regards to, you know, that calories in calories out model.

So that's extremely important. Also just the role of muscle in maintaining our metabolic health and serving as the major glucose sync in the body and obviously addition to brown fat, which is important. But volume wise, muscle takes up much more of the body than brown fat does. And so muscular contraction in itself serves as a major glucose sink. So even if you're insulin resistant, if you contract your muscle, insulin independent pathways kick in to allow that glucose to be taken up into muscle.

Even if the insulin signaling pathway is suboptimal, let's say. So, muscle is really important from that perspective, also just from understanding, like, the inflammation inflammatory perspective as well. And like the gut muscle axis and the gut immune axis and the muscle immune axis, they're all kind of interplaying with each other, where your muscular contraction releases these molecules called myokines that can directly interact with immune cells and help to tune them into a more anti inflammatory state. So that's just the power of movement. We're really meant to move our bodies.

And if we can do it outside, barefoot in the sun. Like, that's where we're really, like, getting all of the benefits at once. And it's really the way that we were meant to move as well. We weren't meant to be on a treadmill, indoors, under fluorescent or led lighting, doing our workouts. That's actually very counterproductive and can cause a lot of issues because the blue light from those sources are essentially inhibiting mitochondria function.

At the same time, we're asking our mitochondria to produce more energy for the movement. And so these conflicting signals are being sent to the body that can create harm over time with regards to cardiovascular health and just overall metabolic function and mitochondrial function. If we can get our workouts in under natural lighting, that's all the more better. And if we can do that in a place where we can ground, like, if we can be barefoot, let's say, on the grass or even on concrete, that is a source of grounding as well. And that grounding allows us to get free energy, essentially, from our environment, we can get electrons.

That earthing or grounding effect allows electrons to be taken up by our bodies and use electrons are the major source of energy production and cellular health. We can think about it that way. So our bodies have a net negative charge. And the more positive that charge becomes, the less healthy we become. So we really want to maintain that net negative charge through our grounding, through our sun exposure, through getting good quality foods.

Another thing may be worth mentioning here is that when we eat more fat and protein, we engage our mitochondria more so than we. If we eat a lot of carbohydrates. So if you're eating carbohydrates, you're really meant to get into the sun. If you think about it, carbohydrate rich foods are really only available either in the summer or late spring. Or if you live by the equator, you can get access to them year round.

So we're really meant to eat more carbohydrates if we're getting out into the sun more. Because then we can support our mitochondria from sunlight versus our diets. Because if you think about it also in more northern regions during the winter, we basically are restricted to fat and protein as our fuel sources. And those fuel sources directly can promote mitochondrial function. So if we're getting cold and we're not getting a lot of sun, then we're really meant to eat more fat and protein compared to if we're eating more carbohydrates, we're really designed to be able to consume those in a sun rich environment with higher quality sun.

So that was maybe a little bit of a tangent, but there's just a lot of consideration with regards to where you're located. And I honestly think the best rule of thumb for this is just to try to eat seasonally, like what is available in your immediate environment at a given time of year, and then try to eat those because then you're going to get better quality food because it's going to be local, it's not being transported halfway around the world. You're also going to be, obviously, supporting your local farmers and economy, which is great for, you know, your community. And then it's also going to be giving your body the information it needs to determine what time of year it is and how to best adapt to that environment. So it's really a win win for everybody involved.

Your health and, you know, everything, it's just way better. If you're able to consume more seasonally appropriate foods for your locale, then it's gonna play a major role in supporting your mitochondria. And just doing our best to reconnect with nature and our ancestral roots is gonna take us a long way with regards to how we're feeling and how we can live up to our potential. This was such an informative episode. I took so many notes for myself.

Yasmin Knouri

Oh, my gosh. I'm really excited for people to hear this. Our audience is gonna get a lot out of it. So thank you so much for sharing with us and especially all this information on sunlight. I'm like, I'm ready to go outside.

And same. I'm like, let me turn off the light. Yeah, totally. Yeah, no more blue light. We're gonna go outside.

Thank you so much for joining us today. This was amazing. Thank you. You're so welcome. I'm so excited to share with you and your listeners, and we should do it again sometime.

Alexis Cohen

I think it was a great chat and you guys asked great questions and I just thank you for having me.

Yasmin Knouri

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of behind her empire. If you enjoyed this conversation, it would mean the world to me. If you would consider leaving a review or even sharing this episode with someone who might be inspired to create their own empire. To stay updated on new episodes or join our private community, visit behindherempire.com to sign up. We send inspiration, inspiring, and short emails.

Every week to your inbox. I'll see you next week. And until then, remember, you're always in. Charge of your own destiny. And it's never too late to start your own empire.

And it's never too late to start your own empire.

And it's never too late to start your own empire.

And it's never too late to start your own empire.