Dr. Amy Nett: A side note here, if one of your patients is sleeping worse since starting the Paleo reset diet, I would ask them about their carbohydrate intake because a lot of people mistake the Paleo reset diet for a low-carbohydrate diet, but importantly it’s not. Their carbohydrates shouldn’t drop significantly. They’re just going to be coming from different sources. Carbs are going to be coming from sweet potatoes, yams, plantains, taro, yucca winter squash, and parsnips. A lot of other sources of carbohydrates. It’s just that we want to remove the grains. But if people get too low carbohydrates, it seems to be especially women, then they can end up with difficulty sleeping. We see further disruptions in HPA. Again, just pay attention. Sleep difficulties since starting Paleo reset diet, ask about carbohydrate intake, and if that seems to be an issue, I generally encourage eating most of the carbohydrates around dinner time. That seems to be helpful.
Second part of the question, Dr. Amy Nett: Okay. I would absolutely want to look at HPA axis, so I would order either a DUTCH complete hormone profile depending on their hormone picture or just the DUTCH advanced adrenal assessment. Again, we’ll be covering those in more detail, and then I would also order a BioHealth cortisol awakening response test. You could definitely look into blood sugar regulation. That’s probably for an underweight person that’s going to tie in more to cortisol. I think by looking at the cortisol picture, you’re probably going to get a better understanding of where the blood sugar regulation is. I think if you focus on HPA axis, but again really, with all of our patients, we’re still going to be starting with the gut testing, the comprehensive blood panel, so I don’t think I would necessarily skip SIBO breath test, Doctor’s Data stool test, comprehensive blood panel, maybe a urine organic acids test and ideally doing those along with the DUTCH adrenal assessment and the BioHealth cortisol awakening response.
Because, of course, the picture that I have here with early morning waking, I’m definitely wondering what is happening to their cortisol level, and is it a cortisol spike? You might also ask them about hygiene, meditation practice, how much are they, you know, working on strengthening that parasympathetic nervous system. So again, it’ll tie them back to the HPA axis, but I would definitely focus on HPA axis. If you are limited in terms of the tests that they’re able to do, that’s where I would start, but otherwise, I would still want to see what’s gut health because I have patients who have pretty significant improvements in mood and sleep just by improving the gut health.
Spartan Dad clarified, “Just as a side note, I wasn’t taking the vitamin C and collagen for allergies. It just happened to be since I started taking them.”
Oh, interesting. I don’t know if you made any other changes around that time in terms of diet or something else that may have sort of brought the immune system in into better balance. I don’t know, kind of interesting but great outcome.