Highlights from Jonathan Otto's interview with Dr. John Gray, for the Depression & Anxiety Series. John explains how to use caprylic acid and coconut oil to combat candida. He also discusses the impact of stress on digestion.
John Gray - Interview 1
Dr. Gray: There’s caprylic acid, which is a supplement you can take which will get rid of candida. It’s pretty tough though, because as soon as you kill candida it’s like a wasp. It stings you. It puts out a toxicity when it dies. It’s a fungus that puts out toxicity, so you get toxic side effects. “Die-off”, it’s often called. Whatever your symptoms are, they’ll get worse for a little while. If you take too much of caprylic acid, you get stomach aches; you get diarrhea; you get constipation; you can get headaches; you can get anxiousness. If you have too much die-off of candida.
So you do it slow. You give yourself several months to build up caprylic acid. You can take a capsule of caprylic acid. You can do something more naturally. You can take coconut oil; you can take MCT oil. It also has the caprylic acid in it. When you drink your MCT oil, you start with maybe a quarter of a teaspoon. This is an extract of coconut oil. Now, your stressful thoughts - your worries, your anger, your frustration, your anxieties, your disappointments - holding onto those negative emotions is a major cause of a stress response inside of us. When that stress response happens, that’s cortisol.
What happens in the body is your body stops making hydrochloric acid. HCL. HCL is what you need to digest your foods in the stomach. So a lot of food, a lot of stuff, just doesn’t get ... it just putrifies in your stomach and never gets digested because we’re experiencing chronic stress. You don’t have enough hydrochloric acid.
So, I highly recommend to everybody: Start your day with a hydrochloric acid enzyme supplement, even before your meals. Just get the hydrochloric acid in your body for awhile. Otherwise, you have no hydrochloric acid. You put proteins in your stomach; there’s no acid to break them down and digest them. Then what happens, it just putrifies, and now your stomach becomes acid. So when your stomach becomes so acidic, then your body can’t release more hydrochloric acid, even if you were relaxed, because it would burn the lining. So now what you have to do is take things to alkalize your stomach so that you don’t have so much acid in there. Once you add things to alkalize your stomach, you have no acid in order to digest your food. You just killed your acid in your stomach, if you had any.
We have to get down to the bottom of things, get down to the original causes. You look at the cortisol, chronic cortisol levels. That’s lifestyles choices. Also, brain function. If you’ve got improper brain function, then what happens is that your cortisol levels will be elevated. For example, what if your dopamine levels are higher than your serotonin. Serotonin relaxes you; dopamine excites you. So if I’m excited and I don’t have enough serration, then I worry. And if I worry or I’m angry or whatever, then serration calms us when we get excited. If I’m just too calm without any dopamine, then I have no energy. That also produces a stress response. Basically, you can be too relaxed. You’ve got to have a balance of these two things. You see some people who are depressed; they’re just sitting around like this. If you measure his or her body, his or her body is pumping cortisol. It’s imbalance. So your stress response is directly related to how you perceive the world. How you perceive the world is directly related to our conditioning, our training, and the support we have, the support we create in our lives. But that’s the behavioral side of it. You’ve got to have the biological support; you’ve got to have the nutrition necessary to make the dopamine, to make the serotonin. And you have to be aware of how you inhibit the brain from making those things. Sitting on a phone, Everybody’s now addicted to their phones and their computers; and that produces more dopamine than the human interaction. So what happens is: It desensitizes the brain to dopamine. So your dopamine function goes down the more you depend on electronic stimulation for well-being and happiness. We are really messed up today. Knowledge of how the brain works, how the gut works, and how food affects us is of paramount importance if we want to be healthy.
Women come into my room. They’re all unhappy. I get them to talk about their feelings. I talk about what’s going on, and then I go, “How’s that feel inside?” Then I bring them to the emotions of those feelings that are causing the stress of those feelings.
See, I can feel like I’m all alone and be quite happy. But, really, if I’m unhappy and I feel like I’m all alone, it’s because there’s an emotion under it. Emotion is your brain saying you’re holding onto a limited belief. You’re believing something that’s not true. “I feel like I’m all alone.” Well, that’s good. “I can just stretch out and wear whatever I want to wear.” But what makes that feeling of aloneness or that feeling of “I’ve been betrayed”? These are upsetting things for people, but just feeling betrayed doesn’t do anything to let it go. You’ve got to actually feel the emotion that’s in your body. That’s what your body’s holding onto: “I feel angry I’ve been betrayed. I feel sad I’ve been betrayed. I feel hurt I’ve been betrayed. I feel ashamed. I got myself in this situation. I was such a fool to let somebody betray me this way.” These are emotions, and most people in our society don’t know how to go into their emotions. They can be emotional, but they don’t know how to feel an emotion and let it go, and that’s what a good therapist will do. That’s what my books train people to do: To do things for themselves, to learn how to process their emotions, a very important skill that people need today.
The ADD, ADHD problem is much bigger than people even imagine. It’s hypersensitivity, hyper-compulsive, hyperactive, hyper-sensitive, hyper-shy, hyper-aggressive. All these things become hyper when we have inhibited dopamine function in the brain. When we can normalize brain function, then those problems become dramatically less. Instead of being big problems, they become little problems. Little neuroses that we work throughout our life to manage and be effective.
There’s a YouTube video of a man who says, “I was diagnosed with ADHD. And they wanted to put me on these drugs, and the drugs made me feel awful. I just started taking ballet.” And now he’s a famous ballet guy. All his symptoms went away because every day, he did his ballet. He needed physical exercise. He needed to be disciplining himself, training himself. That produced the dopamine that he needed. It’s a matter of finding the natural ways to treat this condition. That would be A.
B, another study that was done was just simply singing. Actually being in a choir and singing a lot will restore normal dopamine function. You get art classes. There are double-blind studies in that proving to be just as effective as ADHD drugs and with no side effects. In order to perform, if you have to shoot your dopamine really high, then your dopamine levels have to come back down for a while. What happens is to restore balance in the brain - when you start coming down to rest - you have an empty moment. You seek out that stimulation again. That’s called addiction.
The higher you go, the more dependent you are on high dopamine stimulation; and the further down you would go if you went. You don’t let yourself go there; it’s a place of distress; it’s place of emptiness; it’s a place of no aliveness. No pleasure, pain - so you don’t want to go there. After high dopamine stimulation, it feels boring; it feels empty; it feels meaningless; it feels purposeless. “Why am I doing this? What’s life giving me?” Unfortunately, at that time that’s what you need: To back off from the high dopamine stimulation.
I mentioned a few things that natural studies have done, I’ll do a few more that are documented ADHD remedies. Take away high stimulation, and take Omega-3, vitamin C, and grapeseed extract. Those three things taken together in the right doses, the normal doses, are suddenly just as good as taking Ritalin but with no side effects. They are just as good as watching video games but with no side effects.
One protocol: Grapeseed extract, you would take 300 mg twice a day. These are approximate always; you don’t have to get real anal about being exact. Take grapeseed extract, then twice as much vitamin C. Just taking those two things alone will give you better focus. For example, if I go to write, I’ll take that. I want my brain to be super, extra sharp. It will just sharpen your brain, like that. They are super antioxidants; they allow your brain to function better. Do those two things; then the next is Omega-3. You’ve got to have regular Omega-3 in your body.
What you do is make yourself chia pudding with Stevia. You’ll love it. Just go online and make the mixture of chia pudding. Chia seeds are rich in Omega-3. You soak them over night, and they turn into this nice pudding.
It’s delicious. I have it, Put blueberries in it, a little Stevia in it, and water in it. It turns into a pudding. You can give this to your kids; my kids had it every day. It’s Omega-3 brain food; it’s just basic brain food. Also, mothers after pregnancy are deficient in Omega-3. You should be doing chia seeds every day, or lots of salmon, or Omega-3 supplements. Those are powerful for the brain.
Next, you need to have a good vitamin supplement. Everybody needs a good vitamin supplement these days. I recommend Potential Vitamins, which are given to kids at school. No matter what your gut health is, anybody with ADD, depression, anxiety, all that stuff, has messy gut. These days, all sickness is always associated now with the brain function along with the gut function, which means you can’t really get your proteins. If you’re stressed, you can’t digest your proteins either.