Vitamin D Expert: The Supplement World Is Giving The WRONG Advice!

Nearly 1 in 3 American adults now take vitamin D, but Dr. Stasha Gominak says many of them are taking it wrong, and that done carelessly, supplementing can leave you worse off than before. Dr. Stasha Gominak practiced neurology for over 20 years. She earned her MD from Baylor College of Medicine and completed her neurology residency at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. After working with her own patients, she believes that nearly everyone struggling to sleep shares the same hidden deficiency, a conclusion she published in 2 papers and built into RightSleep, the method she now teaches full time. She explains: ◼ Why she believes your skin is the best producer of vitamin D, and why she says no amount of pills or salmon can replace it ◼ Why she believes insomnia isn't a behavior problem but a chemical deficiency, and what she thinks changed when we moved indoors ◼ The role she says your gut bacteria play in producing your B vitamins ◼ Why she believes taking vitamin D on its own can burn through your B vitamins, and what she says happened when she tried it herself ◼ Why she connects the rise in conditions like ADHD, depression, fatty liver and diabetes to the same period, and what she thinks links them ◼ Why she considers supplements a form of biohacking, and just as risky as any drug if you get them wrong The views expressed are those of the guest, and this conversation is intended for general informational purposes only. This podcast and its associated materials should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician before making any changes to your diet, supplements or health regimen. Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:20 Why So Many People Are Suddenly Struggling With Sleep 00:03:22 Why Healthy Young People Are Waking Up Exhausted With Headaches 00:07:55 How Your Brain Secretly Controls Every Stage Of Sleep 00:15:15 How Vitamin D Could Be The Missing Piece For Better Sleep 00:20:42 Are Sleep Chronotypes Actually Real Or Just A Myth? 00:24:56 How Can You Prove Vitamin D Deficiency Causes Disease? 00:40:36 Why Vitamin D Isn't Actually A Vitamin 00:50:21 Ads 00:52:20 What Happened When I Started Treating Patients With Vitamin D 00:56:55 Does Vitamin D Deplete Your Body's B Vitamins? 01:00:26 Can Vitamin B Supplements Really Fix Your Gut? 01:14:38 Why Minerals Could Be The Overlooked Key To Better Health 01:15:25 Ads 01:16:34 Does Modern Medicine Accept This Vitamin D Theory? 01:19:43 What Your Gut Microbiome Reveals About Your Sleep 01:24:36 How To Build The Right Sleep Protocol For Better Rest 01:30:27 Is Sunlight And Nutrition Better Than Supplements? 01:34:37 Can Redheads Naturally Produce More Vitamin D? 01:36:44 Why Spending Too Much Time Indoors Is Hurting Your Health 01:39:47 Can You Still Make Vitamin D On Cloudy Days? 01:40:51 Can Vitamin D Lamps Replace Natural Sunlight? 01:42:43 The Best Diet To Boost Vitamin D And Improve Gut Health 01:48:47 What Actually Helps If You Have Sleep Apnoea Or Narcolepsy? 01:55:49 My Most Controversial Health Opinion Explained 01:57:50 The Best Day Of Your Life And Why It Matters Independent Fact Check: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/DOAC-Dr-Stasha-Gominak-Independent-Research-Further-Reading.pdf Dr. Stasha Gominak: ◼ RightSleep - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/Gmn0oAj ◼ YouTube - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/EqV6qH3 ◼ Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/20mY5VF ◼ Facebook - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/GTUovlV The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼ The 1% Diary is back - limited time only - https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼ The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards - https://linkly.link/2hm7r ◼ Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼ Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Linkedin Talent Solutions - http://linkedin.com/DOAC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The vitamin world is giving the wrong advice. For instance, if you do not know what you're doing with them, they're just as dangerous as any drug you could put in your mouth. The next thing to it, supplementing with vitamin D is not the same as being outdoors because we absorb it through our skin. But what we've been told is, don't ever let the sun touch your skin. And another example is when we're deficient in this vitamin, our brain actually forgets how to sleep. And I know that because I'm a neurologist and I wanted to tell the world about what my patients and I had discovered together about making sleep better. And billions around the world have a sleep problem, but no one's treating it. And the usual sleep treatment is behavioral, like blackout curtains, go to bed at the same time. But that is not something that's helped the people who wind up with me.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  They've tried all that already. And I've taken care of 28-year-olds who just had a stroke.

• 0:50Steven Bartlett?

  28, sorry?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  28-year-olds. We associate stroke with being old and having diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. No. So then I did a whole bunch of sleep studies because we found some exciting things by accident that turn out to have to do with vitamin deficiencies and deficiencies that have developed from being indoors too much. And we're starting to feel the effects of that, like obesity. But there are no obese squirrels in my backyard. The only obese animals are cats and dogs that we keep inside. And then we found out most of the sleep disorders are really linked to the gut microbiome. And we could go into that. But one of the interesting things I learned was vitamin D is a hormone. There was a mistake made in calling it a vitamin.

• 1:30Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I'm very curious to learn about all of this. And also, you've come up with this protocol called the Right Sleep Protocol. Can you walk me through it?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Here's the first part of it. So.

• 1:42Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:16Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Stashon Gomnack. For the people that have just clicked on this conversation because they like the title, they're interested in the subject matter, what are they going to get from sitting with us and listening to us? How is their life going to improve?

• 2:29Speaker 00

  A completely unique and new way to look at why they are not sleeping well or why they have medical problems. I hope they will come away with the impression that I want to find out if my brain chemistry is normal or not normal for sleep.

• 2:47Steven Bartlett?

  And you were a clinical assistant professor of neurology at Stanford University Hospital. And also, you did a neurology residency at Harvard Medical School.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Yes, I grew up in California. I became a biochemist. And then I wound up being interested in medicine because biochemistry is being applied to humans in medicine. So I became a physician and then I went into neurology and I'm a neurologist. And then by accident, somebody insisted that they wanted a sleep study. And this was in 2004 now.

• 3:17Steven Bartlett?

  So you became, you were a neurologist, you became a doctor, and then you fell in love with sleep.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:22Steven Bartlett?

  How many patients have you worked with on the subject matter of sleep? What's the wide range of symptoms that they were experiencing and problems that they had? Just to get a sort of context on the variety and broadness of your experience.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Probably 2,000. Since leaving neurology practice, I started an online business where I became a sleep coach. I'm estimating that I have affected another 5,000 to 6,000 people. And that's because I have a workbook that we're going to talk about. I have set out a series of steps that you should do. And that those steps are based on brain chemistry, not on you do it wrong, which is what is all over the internet. You are just doing it wrong. The usual sleep treatment is behavioral. Blackout curtains, white noise, go to bed at the same time, recognize your bedroom as a quiet place for sleep, et cetera.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  That is not something that's helped the people who wind up with me. They've tried all that. They've tried everything. So what are the range of symptoms?

• 4:33Speaker 00

  The first experience was with women who had headache. One of my patients said, these drugs you're giving me haven't worked. I want a sleep study. She had sleep apnea. She was young and thin. She did not look like a fat, older male with a fat tongue, which is what we were being sold at that time. The people with sleep apnea have a fat tongue. It gets in the airway and they need to wear one of these things over their face at night that blows air up their nose. She put on the CPAP device. She came back two months later, her headaches were gone. She'd had a daily headache for like five years.

• 5:13Steven Bartlett?

  So it worked?

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Yes. And I was like, well, no, there's no way. Because headaches are really a brainstem function problem. I have this whole construct in my mind and it's a biochemical problem. So I think maybe it's allowing her to stay in deep sleep longer and she's making the chemicals that I'm focusing on that allow her head pain switch to go into the off position, which is where it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be off until somebody hits you in the head and then it turns on. Hers is just turning on spontaneously all the time. So then I did a whole bunch of sleep studies in young, healthy females who had daily headache. They would frequently say something like, I wake up at 3:00 AM and I can't go back to sleep.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  I wake up at 3:00 AM and my sleep is lighter after that. I wake up at 3:00 AM with a headache. And then I have, let's say, as an example, a little Mexican lady who comes in from northern Mexico. She's now living in Texas with her kids. She had never had headaches until she moved up and she's living with one of her grown kids and she's coming to see me for headaches. We happen to have a beach house in Mexico for a period of about 14 years. So I would go down there and I would think, what's going to happen to these people that have sleep apnea, who don't have any electricity? And they're living in palapas that are made of sticks with a thatched roof. They're still doing the same thing that they were doing 2,000, 4,000 years ago.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  And you can't tell if the little viejecitos, the little old people are 60 years old or 80. They might be 90. They're not fat. They're not tired. They're great grandfathers. I begin to realize this is about living outside. Humans were meant to live outdoors like every other animal. We have decided that we are special, but we're not special. Our biochemistry is like every other animal. Okay, so these two, these inputs are coming all at the same time. And I'm puzzling over these sleep studies. That first gal had sleep apnea. But most of the women that I sent for those studies, they did not have sleep apnea. Or we'd come back and the front page would say, no significant apnea. There was a significant score.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  How many times do you stop breathing during the night? And then the next part is, what do they have that's wrong with them? That came about a year and a half later when the pulmonologist says, I don't know if you've noticed this, but your population has a really unusual finding. Most of them have delayed rapid eye movement sleep, no rapid eye movement sleep, or they have rapid eye movement sleep apnea, meaning they only stop breathing in rapid eye movement sleep.

• 7:54Steven Bartlett?

  What's rapid eye movement sleep?

• 7:56Speaker 00

  So this is called a hypnogram. And on this bottom axis is time. On this axis is a representation of what phase of sleep you are in. And it turns out that when we enter sleep, we go through what we call two lighter stages of sleep. The first phase that we enter is here it's wake.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Couple of times this person woke. May not even be aware that they woke up, went back to sleep. But we enter sleep in light sleep one and light sleep two. These are called that because when the sleep experts started studying this in 1970, that's relatively recently, you could easily awaken someone out of these phases. Okay, and it has a certain brainwave pattern generates. And then they go into a phase that's called deep sleep or slow wave sleep. Everyone who has a sleep tracker device, which is very common these days, is now becoming familiar with, I have this much deep sleep. I have this much rapid eye movement sleep.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Deep sleep is really in the sleep industry called slow wave sleep because the brainwaves are these slow, big pattern. We always go through a couple of light sleep phases. And then we go into rapid eye movement sleep. And then we go through light sleep phases and then we go to deep sleep. Now, the pivotal question that I asked the pulmonologist, why would my patient have stopped breathing? That's what apnea means. Why would they stop breathing only in REM sleep? I thought this was an anatomic problem. And he said, well, we get the most paralyzed of all in REM sleep.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  And I went, paralyzed? Holy crap.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Do you mean I'm paralyzed while I'm in bed? What if I stop breathing? What if my brain doesn't ever not like unparalyze me? That's terrifying. And it turns out every animal, including fruit flies, who we're doing sleep studies on, get paralyzed in sleep. We get the most paralyzed in rapid eye movement sleep. When this part needs to get repaired, it gets paralyzed too. That means you have to have an anatomy that stays where the tube that you're trying to breathe through stays open while you are unconscious and trying to repair everything in this area.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  And I want to pull out the brain to let you know where this is happening and why it's so important. This part that's white is called the brainstem. This part is actually fully in control when you are asleep. There's a little switch up here that goes boop. Stephen, you're not conscious anymore. The brain is still extremely active. In fact, the waveforms that they record from up here look the same in rapid eye movement sleep as they do in wake, suggesting that all sorts of things are happening. Like you wake up abruptly because a noise happens and you're in the middle of a dream. You're traveling, you're flying, you've got huge colors going on.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Your brain is extremely active during this time, but you're not aware of it. And this part right here, it is running your heart rate, your blood pressure. It has paralyzed you. This is where the autonomic nervous system comes in. The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are centered right here. They are meant to be the automatic driver of all the processes that you use during the day. And they run sleep. This process that we're talking about here is fully run by the brainstem.

• 12:00Steven Bartlett?

  So the sort of sleep-wake cycles.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Exactly. The sympathetic is called fight-flight. The other one, the parasympathetic, is called rest and digest. It also is experienced as a state of calm. Okay, it is also what happens when we have an orgasm. There are things that are happening in the brainstem that feed back to, why do they fall asleep? Why do the guys fall asleep on top of her? Probably because it actually might increase the likelihood of fertilization. Maybe it has a survival risk. These are all unconscious things that we don't, we aren't trained to connect together. But once you get into the parasympathetic nervous system,

• 12:45Speaker 00

  it turns out that the parasympathetic and the sympathetic are also very involved in what's happening here. And the basic idea is the first half of the night, and you'll see that we've also broken it into one, two, three, four, five cycles, usually of about an hour and a half. The first half of the night till about 3:00 AM is mostly run by the sympathetic side.

• 13:05Steven Bartlett?

  Which is the fight or flight side?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Yes. So when you're well-balanced and you have a completely normally operating brainstem, you will have a couple of branches of REM sleep. But my patients did not have any REM sleep at all in the first half of the night. And in fact, they might have been lucky to have a little half an hour here between 4:30 and 5:00, if at all.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  The second half of the night, from 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM, is run by the parasympathetic side. That means if you look at it in a certain way, you could say, well, wait, maybe they've lost the parasympathetic driver for the second half of their night. Seeing all these sleep studies that did not have this phase of sleep, they're actually one-sixth of the amount of REM sleep they should have. And as I go back through all the sleep studies, I realize, well, wait, don't we kind of do mood in REM sleep?

• 14:01Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean, do we do mood?

• 14:03Speaker 00

  When trying to link the comments that my patients have made and the drugs that I give them, I realize I've been giving out antidepressants to this group of young, healthy women with headaches because they frequently say I'm in a terrible mood. So they can't remember, isn't there a body of literature about memory being made permanent during REM? Yes, memory is linked and mood is linked. If I'm allowed to go back to sleep, if I have the proper brain chemistry to allow me to fall back into REM sleep, I will wake in a better mood. Those are the sorts of things that the patients will tell you if you ask about it

• 14:45Speaker 00

  and if they're able to fall back to sleep. Because my group did not have sleep apnea and could not wear CPAP masks, what's wrong with them? Why aren't they in this phase of sleep? This is a neurology problem. This is not a pulmonologist. This is not about breathing. This is about this brainstem and what is the chemistry of this? So then I go to the anatomy and then I find out, what are the cells in this brainstem area that make us paralyzed?

• 15:15Steven Bartlett?

  Just to make sure I'm with you, you're asking that question because you figured out that the women who are struggling with sleeping, getting headaches have less of this REM sleep, which is associated with being paralyzed. So the question you then asked is, what are the chemicals that help us become paralyzed?

• 15:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:32Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  What are the cells that take us into these? What is the chemistry of that, since I'm so focused on biochemistry? There's actually a deficiency in a neurotransmitter that our move indoors means that we've lost a neurotransmitter that we must have to be normal humans. And the reason why they don't know it is because there are no drugs that duplicate acetylcholine. There are no drugs. But ultimately, what we found out together was that vitamin D makes the enzyme or the protein that makes a certain reaction happen that makes acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter, the chemical that the autonomic, parasympathetic side uses.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  We hear all the time about epinephrine and norepinephrine or adrenaline and noradrenaline. That's what happens when somebody rear ends you. Your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up. That's all dominant here. If you're wearing a sleep tracker, you'll see that there's a measure of what's called heart rate variability that goes up as the parasympathetic becomes dominant.

• 16:36Steven Bartlett?

  As the rest and digest.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 16:39Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  So all of the messages that we have to increase the heart rate or decrease the heart rate or to have a bowel movement or be constipated or to digest our food, those are all eventually run by a chemical. And our body and our brain use these chemicals to send messages. This is actually a chemical deficiency state that happens when you move indoors. Sunscreen, computers and air conditioning all started in the 1980s. And the reason why it's not as evident to you as it is to me is that I was alive before the 1980s. There were two kids in my class of 300 that were overweight.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  They didn't go on diets. They didn't have any trouble sleeping. They weren't on antidepressants. The things that weren't common when I was a teenager that are common now are striking for those of us who are this age because we know it wasn't like that. What we've been told is it's toxins in the food. It's that we aren't doing it right. I don't think those are things, when you say, I'm not doing it right, then you should be able to tell me how to do it right. And that's what a lot of these podcasts are about. How do I change what I do so I can feel rested and be at the peak performance of my life? That interests a lot of people. I would claim that there's a deficiency state in the background that you can actually fix.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  And you can fix it, but it's through vitamins. And our ideas about vitamins are wrong, completely wrong. We've been taught that vitamins are not important or vitamins are very important, but they're easy to use. They'll never hurt us. You just take a certain, like who's your recommendation? What's the vitamin D recommendation dose that this guy's giving out? We've been told things that are actually not true. And medicine hasn't taken responsibility for the fact that this is the core of biochemistry. It was done by physicians. These original research articles in the 40s and 50s

• 18:49Speaker 00

  that the word vitamin was used was done by medical experts. It's unfortunately been given to the government to give recommendations. It should never be in the hands of the government. The government doesn't know anything about our biochemistry. So the supplement industry at the moment is a mess. And I say that only because I have seen dramatic things happen to my patients that are not what I expected. And vitamins are a form of biohacking. They're just as dangerous as any drug you could put in your mouth. If you do not know what you're doing with them, bad things will happen to you. And unfortunately, frequently those bad things are the same thing you had before you took the vitamin.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Therefore, you should pay attention to what you're feeling. So the pathway that I've built, that's on my website now, has a second half that's a journal. You have to keep notes of what's happening to you.

• 19:46Steven Bartlett?

  How many people are experiencing sleep problems in your point of view?

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Billions. It's around the world. There are sleep study centers in every country that has electricity, in Germany, in Japan, in Brazil. And they're all publishing how abnormal the studies are. This is not what it looks like.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  They rarely send out an article saying that we have less REM because they don't have an answer for why. I just happen to be the only one currently on the internet that has a different way of looking at it.

• 20:28Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I'm very curious to learn about all of this. I've never heard someone say to me before that vitamins are linked to sleep issues.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 20:37Steven Bartlett?

  It's typically, you know, put on the sleep mask and close the blinds and make sure it's cold in the room. So this is incredibly interesting to me.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Let me add one more thing so I don't forget. You and Matt Walker talked about chronotypes. There are many dogmatic statements that are being made about genetics and sleep that are not necessarily wrong, but they're also not necessarily right. And I had the same training that you that you get from Matt Walker. He's doing animal training. We say dogmatic things based on certain studies that we do. And then my patients don't behave that way. My patients turn out to, you know, this person has been working to take this to an extreme. So the chronotype story is you're either an early bird or a night owl.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  And you had shared that you're a night owl and that your girlfriend is an early bird. Okay. And what is being taught is that that is your genetic makeup. Although there are genetic mutations that lead to certain timing of sleep, it turns out everybody I was doing this vitamin stuff with would revert back to fall asleep at 10 and wake up at 6:00. Even the people who were working nights their whole life. This woman that I'm seeing who is on disability now because she got a terrible disease that I believe is because she worked nights. When she is at home on disability for several years and I'm still caring for her for that disease,

• 22:09Speaker 00

  she's still sleeping during the day. Well, why would she sleep during the day? And now I have a whole run of patients who say, I guess it's because I always work nights. It turns out that humans really can't work nights if they have normal brain chemistry. Why? Because we're day hunters. We are supposed to be asleep in the night and that is our biochemistry. There are lots of animals that are designed to be awake at night, owls. That's why they use that as a symbol. And if you do the right thing with their chemistry and if you insist they spend more time outside, then they actually revert to falling asleep at 10:00 PM and waking up at 6:00 AM. It's very difficult to operate,

• 22:53Speaker 00

  unless you're international like you are, to be falling asleep. There are people who fall asleep at 4:00 AM and wake up at noon. That is a very difficult problem to operate within the normal population because the rest of the world doesn't operate that way. And when you think about it a little bit, we actually have certain standards of when we start work and when we end work. And that's the same all over the globe. So there were things that happened to me that surprised me and they became consistent. Okay. And those are some of the things that we're going to talk about. And that's what made me think, you know, this is around the world and it happened at a specific time. There are many diseases that started to be reported in the middle 80s.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  You guys aren't aware of it because you think it's normal now, but ADD, ADHD, depression, things that are affecting childhood development, which we could discuss at a different time, fatty liver, certain things like, oh, increase in diabetes. The things that were diseases that had been described, they're all, some of them are old diseases that have increased in incidence, but some of them, for the first time, fatty liver was first described, non-alcoholic fatty liver, first described in the 80s. ADHD is similar. So during the time that I don't know why we have this epidemic, I'm still thinking toxins because that's what we've been told,

• 24:20Speaker 00

  pesticides, glyphosate. And then we get into the area of vitamin D. And how did I find out about the vitamin D? Why was I sort of forced against my will to step into the vitamin D politics, which is a horrible morass?

• 24:38Steven Bartlett?

  There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribe, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. So explain to me, your assertion is that vitamin D is fundamentally linked to a lot of the sleep disorders and deficiencies that we see. How can you prove that to me?

• 25:05Speaker 00

  I think I would prefer to give you these two examples.

• 25:08Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Because the people who are listening, these are at the two extremes, but it'll cover a lot of the people that are listening.

• 25:14Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  The first is, let's call her Madeline.

• 25:18Steven Bartlett?

  Madeline.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  She's 32 years old. She's a redhead. That turns out to be important. She's 100 pounds overweight. She just had her first pregnancy three years ago and she had been told that because she had endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, that she would never get pregnant. But she got pregnant. She's very happy about that. She had gestational diabetes, which means she had diabetes during the time that she was pregnant with her son. And now she is pretty much a wreck. She has daily headache, which is why she's seeing me. She's on about nine drugs. She has several kinds of pain. She has a terrible pain down the front of her leg that she's been told is endometriosis,

• 26:02Speaker 00

  growing on one of her nerves. She has terrible burning in her feet. She has terrible reflux. She poops once a week. She feels like she has to get up and go to the bathroom several times a night. She thinks that's why her sleep is so interrupted. So I'm treating her for her daily headaches and her pain. And then I start to think about sleep. And because we've been trained that fat people are fat because they're fat slobs, because they eat wrong, because they don't exercise. It's their own fault. I don't even think about the fact that many of these things might have a common source and that she's been tortured by this her whole life.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  So I send her for a sleep study. She gets on CPAP. Over the time she's on CPAP, she gets a little bit better. Her sleep is better. She feels better. And then I stumble into vitamin D. Okay. Now, we're going to set that as an example of the most horrible set of things you could have, perhaps. And another example, and we're going to watch what happens to these two women over time. The second one, we'll call Natalie. And Natalie is tall, statuesque. She's a triathlete. She is also seeing me for daily headache. She grew up in a family that is of Italian origin. She has dark tan. She swims. She's athletic.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  She's outside all the time in the summer. Five years ago, she had her first child, her daughter. She did well, no problems with her sleep. Two years ago, she has her son. And since her son was born, she has not been able to go back to sleep. Even when her son goes back to sleep, she can't. She feels tired. She has postpartum depression. She had gestational diabetes. Like, she's doing everything perfectly. She knows everything there is to know. She's done paleo and keto. She is very well informed by the things that doctors tell her to do. And now her sleep is also abnormal. And she had a few headaches in high school, but now she has daily headache too. So there's a five-year span here

• 28:14Speaker 00

  where I'm doing CPAP masks and sleeping pills. And those are some of the stories. And it's not just limited to women, but I especially want to point out that women are more effective because they have the babies. So the next thing that happens is, five years into it, I've got this beautiful 18-year-old who's about to go to college. She comes to see me for daily headache. She has a sleep study that shows none of these phases of deep sleep.

• 28:43Steven Bartlett?

  So she's having no deep sleep?

• 28:45Speaker 00

  No deep sleep. And every 15 minutes or so, my interpretation is her brain is trying to get into these, one of these deep sleep phases, and she wakes up to light sleep again. So every time the brain tries to do this, it breaks to white sleep, light sleep, light sleep, light sleep. She thinks that she's asleep the whole night. This shows that she's asleep the whole night. But her sleep study, over my five years of experience, is horrifying because it's not just, oh, she's missing a little REM. She has no deep sleep at all. This is a brainstem disorder of chemistry that's going to mean she might meet me 10 years from now with a stroke.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  I've taken care of 28-year-olds who just had a stroke.

• 29:32Steven Bartlett?

  28, sorry?

• 29:33Speaker 00

  28-year-olds. We associate stroke with being old and having diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. That means, I'm looking at this and for the very first time, I have actually started to see the diseases that my neurology patients come in with and their relationship to sleep. By the end of the five years, I'm doing sleep studies on anybody who will let me. So I'm doing little kids. I'm doing moms. I'm doing dads. I'm doing every single neurologic illness that comes in. They're all abnormal, all of them. This implies that the reason why you get a disease is because your sleep is not restorative. That implies that I should think about the body as, golly, I know people who live to be 75 years old

• 30:18Speaker 00

  and don't have a doctor. They were my grandparents. And then they started to get medical problems about age 75 and then they died at 85. Why aren't we looking at it that way? Why aren't we saying, oh, this means your repair system that's designed to completely repair everything in your body every night, and you talked with Tara Swat about glymphatic drainage, these things that happen while we're sleeping? It is what makes us last. Like, we're not made of Teflon. We're made of these biologic materials and they repair themselves every night. That's a miracle. If you view it through that lens,

• 30:59Speaker 00

  then you start to question, why is medicine doing what it is? I'm trained to ask questions for the thing the person walks in for. Let's say burning in the feet.

• 31:11Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  And I'm trained to make a little list of the diseases that have resulted in that and then give a drug for it. And if we don't find a drug that reverses it, which we haven't for burning, but I'm going to tell you why, then we give a drug that numbs the pain a little bit.

• 31:31Steven Bartlett?

  We just kind of plaster it over cracks.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  We're putting Band-Aids on these things instead of saying, well, what do you think led to this?

• 31:39Steven Bartlett?

  And this glymphatic drainage point, I think, is a really important one because when I understood this glymphatic drainage idea, it had a profound impact on my relationship with sleep. I would argue, more so than anything else, there's actually a colleague of mine who's currently sat out there, right? And I have an emoji that I send to her. She's called Georgia Gibson. I have an emoji. She likes to work very hard. And I sent her this particular emoji of this, I can't even remember. She told me what the cartoon was, but it's these little fish that come out and clean the big whale.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:11Steven Bartlett?

  What's that called?

• 32:12Speaker 00

  I don't remember, but I know what you're talking about.

• 32:14Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, I'll put it on the screen. It's from like a movie. So everyone in the comments is probably going to know what I'm talking about. But I sent her this emoji just to remind her that she needs to sleep because she needs to wash her brain. That's why I say, I say to her, you need to wash your brain, which means go to bed. When you go to sleep at night, these cleaners, you want, you know, again, I'm animating this in a way that's not scientifically accurate, but these cleaners come out and clean up your brain. And they wash it all and they clean it and they scrub it and they make it all back to normal again. So if you're not sleeping, then you're going to get some kind of buildup of crack. And that could lead to disease or, you know, other worse things down the line.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Yes. That's a perfect description of it, actually. And that's about the level of what we know. So the 18-year-old with no deep sleep, she comes back and say, hey, this drug you gave me for my headaches made my headaches better, but I'm so tired. And I'm looking at our sleep study going, holy crap, no wonder she's tired. Okay. This is really, really bad. And this is invisible, absolutely invisible to the rest of the physicians because she looks perfect. So I do a B12 level and a thyroid test because I have no idea what to do. And the B12 is profoundly low, low enough that it shows up as abnormal and a little red. Okay. Now, the weird part about this is I've never done a B12 level in a headache patient

• 33:30Speaker 00

  since I've been doing headaches as a part of neurology, which is a large part of neurology. I then start to give B12 recommendations and I do B12 blood tests on all the patients who I have in my little stable of, I've done these sleep studies in them. They still are not sleeping well unless the sleeping pill works. So for about a month, I'm doing B12 tests. And then one of my patients says to me, my doctor said my vitamin D was low. She gave me vitamin D and my wrist pain went away. And I had no clue. And I thought, you know, I'm just doing blood tests anyway, which I never did in my headache patients. I'm just going to throw that in. I was completely naive. And because I was naive, I was not afraid to do this. But I did vitamin D levels and B12 levels

• 34:15Speaker 00

  in a group of about 500 patients between September and December of 2009. And I gave you the background because I had all these thoughts buzzing around in my head. What are we looking for? We're looking for something that controls the brainstem. Now, they're going from August or September to December. That's in the fall. So if you're going to make D in the summer, which is when we're supposed to make it because we're out in the sun. That's all I knew about D is you make it from the sun. It's about bones. They were all low. All of them are low. Two of these guys that are on CPAP come back. They both have headaches. They both say the same thing to me in the same week. You know, I've been wearing this CPAP mask for a whole year. My headaches hadn't gone away.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  But that little note you sent me last time I was in here when you did my vitamin D level and you told me to get vitamin D, I took that for about a month. My sleep got better and my headaches went away. Now, I happen to know that all the Ds were low. But D's about bone. Why would it have anything to do with sleep? So I go to PubMed. That's my resource now. I hang out with PubMed all the time.

• 35:22Steven Bartlett?

  Which is...

• 35:23Speaker 00

  That's where you register all your articles that we publish. 2009, I put in two search terms, vitamin D and sleep, and there are no hits. And then I put in vitamin D in the brain and I wind up going to articles by a guy named Walter Stumpf, S-T-U-M-P-F, who's been writing about vitamin D for 30 years, who has actually published that there are vitamin D receptors in this little stripe along the back of the brainstem that paralyzes us. Like, he knows the name of this nucleus. He has shown articles where the vitamin D receptors are in this nucleus that paralyzes us and in the nuclei that are the clock nuclei that determine what time it is,

• 36:08Speaker 00

  what time we go to sleep, when we make these transitions. The brain always knows exactly what time it is. Those areas have vitamin D receptors. That means vitamin D is doing something. That means I'm very interested in thinking, if this vitamin D is low, like, if they say 30 to 100 is normal and my patients with sleep disorders and neurologic problems have vitamin D levels in the low 30s and below, is there a vitamin D level, not a dose, but a brain or a blood level that I can measure that might make them sleep better? That would be phenomenal. Should we go down this vitamin D road? I know nothing about it.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  I start sending people for vitamin D levels and giving them vitamin D and I start reading. Walter Stumpf has already put together a beautiful belief system around vitamin D is the hibernation hormone. It allows animals to adapt their body to tolerate winter when there's no food. It tells their body to do things. Like, the thyroid hormone lowers the metabolic rate of all the cells in the body. The weird part is, this is written about beautifully by Walter Stumpf. And because he has a whole belief system that tells what you should expect, he's also published many articles. The first article's in 1982 about brainstem.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  He publishes articles about postpartum depression, about infertility, about obesity. He's telling us what epidemics are going to happen, but it's before it happens because the sunscreen's coming out in 85 and the middle of the air conditioning computer. And when I'm talking about this during COVID, it becomes much more exaggerated. Okay. COVID has brought us all indoors and we're starting to feel the effects of that even more exaggerated. So Walter has this idea set. I call him up. Luckily, he's retired and he takes my phone call. And I say, hey, you don't know me, but I'm this clinician in Texas and I have this clinical observation that I've done all these sleep studies on people.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Their brain that should be sending them through these particular steps is not. You have shown that there are vitamin D receptors all over the nuclei that should be running this. Has anybody written about sleep and vitamin D? And he says, no, but it makes perfect sense. It's the hibernation hormone. What else would you do? You sleep longer. And it turns out that when our D goes very low, our brain actually forgets how to sleep. That's the easiest way to describe it. That gal that I showed you, she had not only vitamin D deficiency as the primary deficiency and with secondary deficiency, we're going to talk about, but your brain just becomes completely scattered and it's what it's supposed to do because the D is doing a specific thing.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  It took me a while to figure out. There are articles that actually took Walter's articles and said, hey, there are these D receptors. What hormones do that's unique is the hormone goes inside the nucleus of the cell and the nucleus has the DNA and it binds the DNA. And it has a special vitamin D receptor. That's what Walter was measuring. When it hits that receptor, there's a specific protein that that DNA expresses. That means that little piece of DNA comes out. It makes this protein. The protein that it makes is an enzyme that makes acetylcholine. So that means I can trace through the scientific literature all the way from the receptor to the articles that use that

• 39:50Speaker 00

  that showed that it was an enzyme called choline acetyltransferase. Now, the next part is really important because what I want out of this is that Madeline and Natalie both get better. Okay. This biochemistry is my thrill. But what the listener wants is, how do I get better? Now, since I started this, and the first time I started giving vitamin D was in 2010, this is now 16 years later. Is vitamin D any better understood or given out? No. The science is phenomenal.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  The recommendations for the doctors don't go there. The Endocrine Society are supposed to be the experts in hormones. D is a hormone.

• 40:42Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's an important point, which is a lot of people think of vitamin D as some kind of, well, we think of it as a vitamin, but you're telling me it's a hormone.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  It's the most bizarre thing I've ever run into in medicine. It's really bizarre.

• 40:53Steven Bartlett?

  Which, which part?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  There was a mistake. There was a mistake made in calling it a vitamin. It is made on our skin.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Now, it turns out animals frequently lick their fur. And they get their vitamin D that's made in their fur from licking their fur. Some of it's absorbed, but the thing that's unique about us and pigs, domesticated pigs, is we're bald. That means most of the time, we're making it on our skin. It's never supposed to be from the food. It was not ever about the food for us. We don't lick our skin. Therefore, we absorb it through our skin. And we can actually have salmon. The salmon has vitamin D in it. That's the salmon's vitamin D. It's not our vitamin D. It's like saying you eat salmon, you get salmon estrogen.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  That should be enough estrogen for you to have a normal period. That's crazy. If your ovaries are not making enough estrogen, you won't have a normal period. Okay? They called it a vitamin. And in the night, early eighties, medicine decided vitamins were for lesser humans. Therefore, D got pushed into that pile. And it got given over the counter. Now, the fascinating part about that is it turns out to be a good thing that it's over the counter because the lay public, once they hear that their whole health is actually tied to this and that they've been doing what their doctor recommended, which is to use sunscreen and stay out of the sun.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  And the original recommendation, because I was there in the early eighties, was don't sunburn. Every sunburn, that's a bad sunburn that you peel from, will age your skin, even if you're 10.

• 42:42Steven Bartlett?

  Which is, is that true or not?

• 42:43Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 42:44Steven Bartlett?

  It's true, yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  That piece is true. Now, the weird thing is, that has been morphed over the last 40 years into, don't ever let the sun touch your skin. People are smart. If you tell them that they can use sunscreen wisely and it blocks the ability to make vitamin D, and it has turned into the combination of sunscreen plus being inside, much more than we ever were before. When you had air conditioning, people slept out on the roof in Saudi Arabia. That means you spend much more time outdoors. And it also turns out, there's a particular move in health and wellness, which is about

• 43:24Speaker 00

  the many forms of wavelengths of energy that we absorb that are given to us by the sun that are not UVB. UVB is the wavelength that makes D. There are, your podcasts about infrared, very, very important. That means there are many wavelengths of energy. And the more time we spend outdoors, the more our body actually uses those wavelengths in our biology. Because medicine is so conservative and so slow to change, they basically poo poo any new ideas. So, hyperbaric oxygen laughed at, infrared laughed at, made, made fun of.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  And therefore, you could actually have your license taken away. Since COVID, since doctors are now doing things across video, I am safer in my little place, making my comments, making my statements. They're made up stories.

• 44:24Steven Bartlett?

  What is a made up story?

• 44:25Speaker 00

  My telling you, my belief system is a made up story. This is really an important idea. I thought that everything written in a book is true. Soon as the publications come out, soon as I can go to PubMed, I thought those things written down were true, absolutes. And then you stay in medicine for 30 years and you realize the things that you were taught are not truth anymore. Well, that means they made up those stories. They do a scientific experiment. You and I are looking at the data, but there's always a conclusory, my conclusions from this data are.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Those are always made up stories. And in fact, there are always humans making up stories. You and I are not listening to stories that ants make up or that cats make up. We're very human centric. We're studying things that are stories that humans make up.

• 45:31Steven Bartlett?

  And we're arriving at a conclusion based on some factors that we can see, which is often causation, correlation, sorry, and not necessarily causation.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Correlation, very important. We all have a belief system. You and I are building a belief system here. I told you that Walter Stumpf had a belief system. The reason why I'm using those terms is I was really pissed off at the pulmonologist when I realized that woman with the sleep apnea, she wasn't a fat, middle aged male with a fat tongue. How dare they? Here are these women, they have headaches, they're suffering. How dare they make up this story? And then I began to realize, they made up those stories. That was their best guess. That is, every single person who sits on this side of the table, it's their best guess.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  All of us are, or you wouldn't have us on here, very enthusiastic about our guests. But it's very important to realize that every belief system means, you see the world through that, but it always has blinders. There are things that you won't be able to see because of it as well. Then you must move into a point of view, which is, I need to stay flexible. What if new information comes?

• 46:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  Okay? So, the D belief system at the moment is that it's a vitamin. And there's a huge political fight within the medical literature. It's very weird.

• 47:02Steven Bartlett?

  The D belief system, what do you mean?

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Medicine has decided that the only way you can get any important information is to have a control group, a study group. The study group gets X, a drug, in this case, vitamin D. And you compare the outcome of both groups.

• 47:21Steven Bartlett?

  And what does the other group get? A placebo. Basically, they think it's a drug, but there's nothing.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then you compare the outcome. The problem is, in no biologic pathway is there only one variable. There's never one variable. And that means when you give one a hormone, you also need to know that hormones are always in, done by blood levels and that the normal state for the human body in every biologic animal, including plants, is that hormones stay in a tight little narrow band. Too much and too little are both not good. It always goes towards the middle. In the lay experience, this is why we do blood levels of testosterone.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  If we give you testosterone supplement, if we give you estrogen. In thyroid, even lay people know, my aunt would get crazy when her thyroid was off and it could be too high or too low. D is exactly the same. Yet, they do these studies based on a fixed dose. So, it doesn't matter what the level is, what time of the year, how much sun they're getting, they're all getting 4,000 IU's.

• 48:36Steven Bartlett?

  So, they could be having too much or too little?

• 48:39Speaker 00

  No blood levels are taken.

• 48:40Steven Bartlett?

  So, you're saying that it should be personalized, the amount of vitamin D?

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Any hormone that you take, if you compare, that's why the endocrine society is so important. They know, in 2004, when they gave the final recommendation for the doctors and practice, they know that the studies that have been done so far are rarely done in the way a hormone should be studied. And they say that in their report. They spent a whole year looking at this chemical, all the research that's done. And they say, you know, we don't really have any good studies. We don't have any clinical studies like mine, for instance, where we're relating the dose that we give the person to the blood level that's achieved. Therefore, you would think they would say, we need more studies. No, here's what they said.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Therefore, you should not do vitamin D levels and you should not give recommendations about vitamin D, taking it or not taking it. You should just avoid the whole conversation because what's going to happen when you do a vitamin D levels, you're going to call me up and you're going to say, what dose should I give? The D level is this and we don't know. So, they've said, don't be curious, don't do it. That's insane. Now, that means the lay public is coming to me and other people on the internet, and they're coming to podcasts like this to learn about it. And there are a lot of conflicting attitudes. I may be one of the biggest recorder in my brain, which is not in a data dump that

• 50:10Speaker 00

  I can put into an article, of how to manage vitamin D levels, what you should do, what you should do with dosing. And that's one of the things I have in this workbook that we're going to talk about.

• 50:20Steven Bartlett?

  Whenever I talk to new founders, they all carry the same belief that the biggest threat to their small business is having a bad product. It's not. The biggest threat they face is hiring the wrong person for their small team because bad hires put the handbrake on growth and rapidly infect company culture. And I get it. When you're starting out, you need A players to grow your company, but you don't have 40 spare hours to spend sifting through interviews. So, you hire fast to fill the seat, but this ends up costing you even more in the long term. What any small business actually needs is a reliable and efficient way to find the right talent without stalling momentum. That's where our long term sponsor, LinkedIn and LinkedIn Hiring Pro can help you. It streamlines the entire hiring process from drafting a job description to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI powered interviews for initial screenings.

• 51:03Steven Bartlett?

  Nearly 60% of hirers who've used this tool have found a candidate to interview within a week. Hire right the first time around and get started by posting your first job for free at LinkedIn.com/DOAC. That's LinkedIn.com/DOAC. Terms and conditions apply. If you're thinking about starting a business, one of the first decisions you'll have to make is actually one of the most important, which is where do you build that business? Our product team, who manages everything we do, from our conversation cards to our diaries, has always used our sponsor, Shopify. There are a few reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that when you're running a business, you really need your own store and your own customer data. And Shopify gives you exactly that. You aren't renting space from someone else's platform, hoping the rules don't suddenly change.

• 51:47Steven Bartlett?

  And you avoid the classic founder challenges that inevitably come, like sorting out payments and logistics and storefronts, because it's already built into Shopify. Those early days are messy enough without the infrastructure challenge to create extra problems for you. And Shopify's distribution piece is underrated too, because your products automatically get in front of people on Google, TikTok, YouTube, ChatGPT, which again, isn't something you have to figure out yourself, it's just already built into their platform. If you are serious about starting your own thing, start your free trial at Shopify.com/Bartlett. I'm very curious about Madeleine and Natalie still.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Great.

• 52:23Steven Bartlett?

  What happened to Madeleine and Natalie?

• 52:25Speaker 00

  For two years, I'm talking to Walter on the phone and I start giving vitamin D to my, my patients. And I learned that every single person needs a unique amount, very scary. That means everybody else is saying, oh, take 5,000, take 10,000, take 20,000. I take 100,000 once a month. Okay? And I find out also that if you get past about a level of 60, that's when they come back and say, you know what? My sleep is better. Now, importantly, I still was operating under the false belief that there's only one variable. Okay? I came up in medicine using drugs. That means you match the drug to the complaint. Oh, and that one didn't work. And then we do this one, and then we do this one. Okay?

• 53:09Speaker 00

  I'm ashamed that I looked at it that way, but that was my training. So, I thought vitamin D was going to fix everything. Within the next six months, my patients start to come back and say horrible things like, my joints ache all over and my doctor's about to send me to the rheumatologist who does autoimmune diseases.

• 53:28Steven Bartlett?

  Like arthritis.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Exactly. Then the next person comes in and says, I've got this terrible burning in my hands and feet. And another woman comes in the same month with burning in her hands and feet. Two women, same month, they have nothing in common, except they both have headaches and they've been doing vitamin D with me for two years. And they say, they want to know, is this related to that vitamin D that I've been taking with you? And now I'm very freaked out because I'm afraid that what I've been doing, even though their sleep is better, and we're all happy about that, headaches were better, now they're a little worse again, is I've put them in a situation where they are now using more of whatever these building blocks are.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  And I've, I've actually forced them into another deficiency state. I'm making them make more repairs and now they're deficient in something else and I don't know what. Now, a patient walks in with a book. This is why I'm telling you that my patients are the ones that taught me all this stuff. And I'm telling you these embarrassing stories because they come in and they say, did you do this to me? That's very uncomfortable. And I don't know, but I feel a commitment that I better find out. And a woman walks in with a book that's called, The Pain Free Promise of Pantethinic Acid. God forbid, it's another vitamin.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  So, I happen to have developed over the same time period, this weird buttock pain. I can't sit down to talk to my patients at the end of the day because my butt hurts. So, I feel like I have the same thing. So, I read this book. It says, Pantethinic Acid is a chemical that makes this thing called coenzymes. Coenzymes is responsible for making cortisol. I think, I don't think that's causing this burning, but this is something I need to know about. And cortisol is big in sleep. We talk about cortisol all the time, the timing of it. And it's huge in inflammation. I go to the vitamin store, I find pantethinic acid.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  The book says 400 milligrams is the right dose. So, I pick up the 400 milligrams and I go to the B complex. I find something called B100, which means there's, each one has got 100 milligrams or 100 micrograms. I go home with these two things. I start taking them. And I give recommendations to anyone who comes in in that one week where I have a sleep study, they have a new complaint. I give a recommendation of B100 and B5. What the book did was it sent me to the references. The articles that she references are from the 1950s in this creepy lab next to the

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Iowa State Prison, where they're doing these creepy experiments on prisoners before it becomes illegal. They published this article saying, if you block pantethinic acid for two weeks, you see four things. They can't sleep, they have belly complaints, bloating and all sorts of things. They have a funny puppet like gait and they have burning in their hands and feet. And I go, this is wonderful. So, that was one of the motivations. So, the cortisol link to pain and the burning in the hands and feet. Now, I've got it in my head that I've made them use more of the B vitamins.

• 56:55Steven Bartlett?

  So, let's just pause that. So, you're saying that by asking your patients to take more vitamin D, you're saying that the body has also started to use more B vitamins, which means that by taking more vitamin D, they're now deficient in B vitamins?

• 57:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:09Steven Bartlett?

  And so, when you use vitamin D, you also use more B vitamins?

• 57:14Speaker 00

  There's another point that I'm about to make, but you summarized it perfectly. So, the next question would be, okay, I'm taking 400 milligrams because that's what it says in the book, and that's the only dose that was on the shelf in the vitamin store. I get to the end of the week and I realize I have restless legs and my restless legs has been much worse this week. This is probably too big a dose. And I stopped the 400 milligrams and everything goes away. My butt pain goes away like in a day.

• 57:42Steven Bartlett?

  400 milligrams off?

• 57:43Speaker 00

  B5. So, pantethinic acid is called B5. All the patients who come back say, were you trying to kill me? This 400 milligrams here, I got so agitated, I stopped it after two days. I felt like I was crawling out of my skin and I couldn't sleep at all. If you block B5, you get insomnia. That means it has power in sleep. D has power in sleep. But it turns out, if it has power in sleep, your body has a very specific amount that it wants. If you give it too much, it's not happy. If you give it too little, it's not happy.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  And it turns out that instead of giving you one thing when it's low and another thing when it's high, which is what I would have anticipated, it goes back to the same thing. When it's not happy, it just stops sleeping. Now, a couple of them come back and say, you know, I stopped the 400 milligrams because I was so agitated, I couldn't sleep at all, but I stayed on B100, I feel great. My sleep is perfect. My pain is gone. And I said, that's what happened to me. It's just like too weird. This chemical is doing something and it's acting, what I would say to my patients is, be very careful with this because I don't really know what dose you'll need. If it's too much, it'll act like caffeine, it'll keep you up at night. Okay? Then, the next thing that happens is a gal comes in and says, you know, you gave me

• 59:08Speaker 00

  that B100 and I ached all over. I would get up in the morning and I'd go, oh, ah, ah. And she said, you know, I broke it in half and I'm taking that and I feel great. What you'll see here is B50, which is 50 milligrams of each, but all eight Bs, has 50 milligrams of B5 in it. It turns out, if you've been taking D for two years, you've actually worked your way into a place where your body has been using more Bs and you are now very profoundly deficient. But she did not take two years. She was a new patient to me. She had not been on D for that period of time. The reason why this discussion is important is, there are millions of people who started

• 59:50Speaker 00

  taking D in COVID, who by the fourth year after taking it, started to have burning in their hands and feet. They're not even taking it anymore. They took it from 2020 to 2023. Their levels got into the 60s. Their doctor said, hey, 60 is enough, stop taking the vitamin D. But they still show up with the B vitamin diagnoses and they go to their doctor and they say, oh, well, you've developed lupus. Oh, or you have this, oh, or you have that. These are all diseases that have been described already, but they haven't been described as B vitamin deficiency states, which is bizarre, but that's the historical point. All of the literature says, B5 deficiency doesn't exist because it's in every food.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Now, I'm reading that literature and it says, thiamine, which is B1, has a poop bacteria source and a food source. B2, poop bacteria and a food source. All of them come from the poop.

• 1:00:48Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean come from the poop?

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  These eight chemicals called B, all of them are made by bacteria. And we absorb them. Everybody knows that we have the wrong microbiome. And we've all been told that it's toxins, antibiotics are the major thing that are blamed. But we now have a huge body of literature about the microbiome being abnormal.

• 1:01:11Steven Bartlett?

  The gut microbiome?

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Yes. The other weird part about it is there are these guys in Oklahoma, GI surgeons, who are giving poop transplants.

• 1:01:20Steven Bartlett?

  Give me context on what that is.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  They take poop from one person and they push it up the other person's butt. Like, we've spent 100 years saying, stay away from the poop. It's bad for you. Don't go from the poop to your mouth, okay? We've made this idea that the bacteria, we're fighting against them. They're trying to take us over and they're bad and we're fighting against them. But as people are dying of things like Clostridium difficile, which C. diff is the way it's shortened, they're dying of C. diff infection. And they're doing poop transplants and they live. It turns out that the eight B vitamins were first described as bacterial growth factors. They are chemicals that one bacteria is able to make.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  And it pushes it out of itself into the environment. And this one next to it, it's a different one, goes, oh, goodie, give me that. And those guys live together as a group, a commensal, meaning each one of them derive benefit from having the other one there. So there are four big groups of bacteria that is the normal human microbiome. Well, why are there four? Why is it always this four? And how come we only know about 2% of them? We're saying all these things that the microbiome is wrong. Turns out, we only know 2% of 200 bacteria that are normal occupants from the mouth,

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  from the lips all the way to the anus. We only know 2%. But we have the genetic footprint of every single one. We are able to take them out of the poop or out of the small intestine or out of the mouth. And we can say, these are the genetics and we've named all of them. So we know there are 200.

• 1:03:08Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  And the article that they write is, you know, it looks to us like the reason why this foursome of groups hang out together is because they all at least need one B vitamin and they produce at least one. So they all have a relationship to the B vitamins. And we should start thinking about the microbiome as the production system that supplies the B vitamins to the body. I didn't find that article until after. But here I am back again with one big question. These two women with the burning in their hands and feet, why did they get B vitamin deficient? If the Bs come from the food, they've had the same diet all along. And I haven't controlled their diet. I haven't made them change their diet.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  Why did all of these people come back with these complaints? The one thing we know is many of them have IBS symptoms, which are a signal that the bacteria isn't right.

• 1:04:03Steven Bartlett?

  IBS, what's that?

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  Irritable bowel syndrome.

• 1:04:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Diarrhea, constipation, bloating, my belly isn't right.

• 1:04:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Because I had assumed that D was going to fix everything.

• 1:04:13Steven Bartlett?

  Vitamin D.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  That vitamin D was going to fix their belly and it didn't. There were several things that did not get better. One, their IBS didn't get better. Two, they didn't lose weight. That was really weird because they were out exercising more. They were out exercising in the middle of the day, but they didn't lose weight. That means there's still something wrong in the background where they didn't lose weight. So I'm stuck with, okay, why didn't the D fix the B thing? Oh, oh, these were all described as bacterial growth factors. I have assumed that vitamin D was a bacterial growth factor because Walter talked about the GI tract having all sorts of receptors for vitamin D.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  And so I assumed that the bacteria that lived inside us needed vitamin D to be normal. And therefore I assumed that IBS showed up in the 1980s because we went into D deficiency and that D deficiency caused this IBS. There were no articles about that in humans until 2020, when COVID came. And they actually started to realize that the people who were D deficient died in COVID. And they started to actually look at, oh, is the microbiome playing a role in our immune system? Yes. If I give vitamin D, will the bacterial makeup of my stool change in a positive way?

• 1:05:36Steven Bartlett?

  My poop.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. Does the poop bacteria makeup change in a positive way? We know we've seen people who don't have inflammatory disorders and they have these, this bacterial makeup. Will giving vitamin D change the population? And yes, that's the answer. Now, I realized, now I'm giving two bacterial growth factors, D. And now I'm giving B100. And I'm giving a large dose of all eight Bs. Remember that, give all eight? That means by accident, I have actually given eight bacterial growth factors that are necessary for bringing the poop bacteria back to the normal human makeup that it's supposed to be, that it has always come to be spontaneously. That's a really important point.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  All the other animals in the world, they're not obese. There are no obese squirrels in my backyard. The only obese animals are cats and dogs that we keep inside.

• 1:06:32Steven Bartlett?

  So to summarize for me, what is the link between vitamin D and the B vitamins?

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  It turns out that all the Bs come from the microbiome.

• 1:06:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, okay, I understood that.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  In order to have the correct microbiome, we are actually commensal organisms with our microbiome. That means we have to provide D, they in turn provide us with Bs.

• 1:06:55Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so isn't that a good thing that you gave them D then? Because then their body makes B.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Yes, but it didn't make B on its own. Otherwise those side effects like my butt pain wouldn't have been there. Okay, so let's bring that, let's bring that into focus. The D by itself did not correct the microbiome.

• 1:07:13Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  So when I took 5,000 of D between 2020 and 2023, and I took it for three years because my doctor told me it was okay. But in 2025, I started to have rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. The D did not correct my microbiome. It actually made me deficient. I'm going to give you the drug for rheumatoid arthritis. I'm not going to picture it as, oh, you need B50.

• 1:07:41Steven Bartlett?

  So you gave B50, but then didn't they have another problem?

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Most of the time, what happens after the B50 is everything comes back to normal. The GI tract corrects. You have to take it only for three months. I was taking it for four and a half months. And I started to wake up and feel old.

• 1:07:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  And everything I just parenthetically told you about the GI tract was percolating around in my brain. And what I had told my patients was, you know, I think we've stumbled on the growth factor that the right microbiome needs. And I think the reason you became B vitamin deficient was because it was the wrong microbiome. But when we give them what they need, they're going to grow back.

• 1:08:20Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, fine.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  They're going to grow back and they're going to do their job.

• 1:08:25Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  They're going to produce B50. They're going to make that.

• 1:08:29Steven Bartlett?

  Let me summarize that. So by giving them B50 for a short period of time, you're kind of jump starting the gut microbiome. And then you don't want to keep giving it to them or else they're going to become like dependent or not do their job properly. So you want to give it to them for three months, let them jump start, and then they'll do their job and then you leave them alone.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  Yes, and I want to add one more thing. The way you think about it is probiotics are bacteria. You dump the bacteria down and you swallow it, it goes into your small intestine. But if it does not have the growth factors that it needs, which every bacteria has its little set of growth helpers it needs to be able to absorb from the actual juice that's down there. If it doesn't have that, it can't reproduce. Every bacteria that's sitting in my small intestine right now, 12 hours from now is going to be in a different place. A day from now, I'm going to poop it out. Who's up here now?

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  The great, great granddaughters of the bacteria that are sitting there while you're, I are talking. They reproduce rapidly. You have to picture them like a river. Like, we're sitting in, we're looking at the river and the water looks like this. And 10 minutes later, the water looks the same. But that's not the same water that we were looking at 10 minutes ago. That water is downstream. That means the level of reproduction that they are expected to do requires constant production of these growth factors. Now, it turns out that you don't have to think about that. All you have to do is have the normal bacteria that was generated spontaneously when you were born

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  because mom was giving you D in her breast milk. And it also had eight Bs. Those eight Bs came from her normal microbiome in the breast milk. That means you had everything you needed and then you were out in the sun. You were born in June or July in the summer. And then you got D on your skin. And that process has replicated for 300,000 years, for 250 million years. The dinosaurs had a microbiome in their intestines. This is so old, it's unimaginable.

• 1:10:45Steven Bartlett?

  So what is the conclusion here then? Because I do want to bring this back to Natalie and Madeline.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:10:49Steven Bartlett?

  I still haven't figured out what you told them to do.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  Stephen, you are so smart and it's so, such a pleasure to talk to you. These are difficult points. Madeline is struggling with all these things. She's slowly getting better. Then we do the D, she's slowly getting better. Then we do the B100. And then it's friggin' awesome. She starts to lose the pain that she had down her leg. The burning in her hands and feet goes away. Her sleep gets much better. Now, she's into year three and four of what becomes the right sleep program. And she's still on 30,000 IUs of D a day. That's an immense dose. Most people are taking five to 10. She's been taking 30,000 a day for four years.

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Her D level has stayed the same. It's in the 60s. She's doing a great job of keeping everything the same. That really means that her body is using 30,000 IUs of vitamin D a day for four years. That's a very important concept because it means she is using so much more than anybody else is using in my practice. Most people are on 10,000. But she's making these amazing repairs. Her depression is gone. She's stopped three medicines that we've been using for pain control. She now gets up in the morning and she feels energetic. She's starting a program that the Texas state has for going back to work. I was like, this gal's never going back. She wants to go back to work.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  She is a totally different person. Now, importantly, she is not 100 pounds thinner. She's still 100 pounds overweight. And that is one of the things that happen in most of my patients and clients. The body will not lose that weight until it's really made every repair it thinks is necessary. And then it decides that it's not going to need this fat anymore.

• 1:12:43Steven Bartlett?

  So with her, did you take her off the B vitamins?

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  The routine is that, one, they have to do D. And this, this will become the right sleep program.

• 1:12:54Steven Bartlett?

  But they have to do D because they're not getting sunlight?

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:12:57Steven Bartlett?

  None of us really get enough sunlight.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Correct. So, and we can talk about supplement versus sun. But the D is pivotal to the entire program and it has to continue. And if you have a sleep problem or medical problems, you will do better if you get your D above 60 and keep it around there. That is not the same as saying, what is the ideal D level for a human who wants to overachieve? It is not the same, okay? So she's on D, she stays on D the rest of her life, as long as she needs it. And she's always checking her D levels. Then she goes on B100. She happened to be one of the ones that was on D by itself for two years. If you have been on D for two or three or five years in the past

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  and have developed B vitamin deficiency states, then you will have to go back on D with the B50. And you will do that for three months. And then you will stop and you will go down to a much lower dose. That's a multivitamin. One of the things in the background that we haven't talked about yet is there are actually hundreds of things that the bacteria are doing for us that are just starting to be reported. But they have been pivotal all along in all the minerals, all the minerals that show up in a multivitamin, all the magnesium, calcium, selenium, manganese, all these things that nobody's really interested in. And they all are on list on their multivitamin. All through the same timeframe, people are developing iron deficiency and iron overload.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  And it turns out that the bacteria have been a pivotal part in our intestine, speaking to our body about whether or not our iron level is low or high in the liver or in the blood system, in our bone marrow or in our brain. And if you do not have a specific bacteria called lactobacillus ruteri, you will be missing a brand new metabolite or chemical that was named after that bacteria just in the last three years. It's called ruteri. That is one of the chemical messengers that our body uses. So that means many of the deficiency states that the naturopaths and the functional medicine people are studying are all linked to the fact that this bacterial tube

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  has been doing all these things for us all along. And when you lost them, each individual person has its own set of specific deficiency states that must be addressed for their sleep to get better.

• 1:15:26Steven Bartlett?

  This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that the diary of this here audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries. And we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back,

• 1:16:11Steven Bartlett?

  but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. I want to go back to Madeline. So my question was, because the research that I'm reading says that vitamin D does not cause, trigger or create a B vitamin deficiency.

• 1:16:43Speaker 00

  No, it's not in the literature, except my article.

• 1:16:46Steven Bartlett?

  Taking vitamin D supplements will not drain your, your body's B vitamins?

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  Let me read my, my title. Vitamin D deficiency changes the intestinal microbiome, reducing B vitamin production in the gut. The resulting lack of panthenic acid adversely affects the immune system, producing a pro-inflammatory state associated with atherosclerosis and autoimmunity. This is a brand new discovery made by someone who's not a scientist, who's not working in the primary lab, who is a clinician. And the impact of this is only as strong as I can get the, the ideas out there and talk about what happened to my patients. Now.

• 1:17:29Steven Bartlett?

  Is it plausible that there's a sort of an intermediary link between the two? I'm reading some things here that say people are very frequently both low in vitamin D and vitamin B12 at the same time. And this is because they share the same root cause, like a poor gut absorption, aging or a restrictive diet, not because one vitamin is destroying the other?

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  That's what we've been told. We've also been told that old people don't need as much sleep and that old people get a bad gut as they get old. It is my belief now that it is, there is an absolute link between the production of D. And I don't have the articles for this, even though this is dogma at the moment, that our production of vitamin D goes down as we get older. So if you look back to that person who was 75, who didn't get sick until they were 75, their skin production, even though they're still out there with their truck farm and still raising their own food, their skin production rate of vitamin D goes down. And this is probably true for every animal. And then as their D goes low, they lose their microbiome.

• 1:18:36Speaker 00

  And then they die of one of the multiple diseases that are linked to this multiple deficiency state. It's a different lens to look through that says there is actually a system that allowed us to live without medical problems that weren't either related to epidemics of childhood illness or starving to death. And as long as we had good diets, you can actually look at 1945 to about 1985 and say, what was the ideal for the humans that lived rurally in the United States? Did they live to be 75 years old and then get diseases? So it's my claim that those people didn't go to the doctor because there weren't any around them. And then things started to happen to them.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  And instead of looking at it through the lens of this disease means this drug, then instead we say, we should be preventing this by paying attention to what vitamin D does in the body and what the Bs do in the body. And ultimately.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  That is linked to most of our diseases.

• 1:19:43Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so I'll read the conclusion of your study here, which was published in 2016. I hypothesize, and it's important to say this as a hypothesis, that the parallel epidemics of abnormal sleep and abnormal intestinal microbiome are linked to one another through vitamin D deficiency. Proper supplementation doses of vitamin D plus all eight B vitamins appears to return the intestinal microbiome to normal in three months. Reinstiting the normal microbiome not only treats IBS symptoms, it returns the supply of vitamin Bs to their natural daily doses. The B vitamins are either good for us, not unnecessary. They are good for the person who needs them and only until the normal source picks up again. Both sleep disruption and pain can be caused by large doses of B vitamins once the intestinal microbiome has returned to normal.

• 1:20:29Steven Bartlett?

  The B vitamins are very biologically intertwined, both in their intestinal production and cellular use. This suggests that B vitamins, aside from B12, were not meant to be used individually, and returning to restorative sleep with normal supply of the building blocks of cellular repair has the potential to repair the pro-inflammatory state seen in association with atherosclerosis.

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  Atherosclerosis.

• 1:20:54Steven Bartlett?

  As well as the hyperadrogenic state of associated with hypertension, heart disease and stroke. It appears that, given the proper essential elements for normal sleep, the body is designed to repair every physical injury that occurs during normal daily use and may even retain a memory of long deferred repairs. So essentially, you're saying that if you can return the body's vitamin D and B levels to normal, then the body will kick back up and start producing everything it needs.

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:21:26Steven Bartlett?

  But I guess the scientific consensus at the moment is saying that there's not a link between vitamin D and a vitamin B. Well, it's saying that vitamin D does not cause a vitamin B deficiency.

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:21:38Steven Bartlett?

  And you disagree with that?

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:21:40Steven Bartlett?

  And could it be the case that there's some intermediary link? I.e. if I take lots of vitamin D, it disrupts my magnesium production, and the magnesium production is having an impact on vitamin B? And could it be the case that it's something else?

• 1:21:56Speaker 00

  Yes, of course.

• 1:21:58Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  And in fact, it's way more complicated than you and I have talked about. And where you finally arrive is actually at coenzyme A deficiency. And that is a very important chemical. It runs our mitochondrial health and our ability to make energy, and it's linked to all the degenerative diseases, et cetera. So it's not that I don't understand the idea that once you're a hammer, everything's a nail, because that's what I was told by all of my colleagues, that you're trying to explain everything. It's that I saw Madeline go back to work, and we haven't even talked about what happened to Natalie.

• 1:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  What happened to Natalie?

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  Natalie got better and actually.

• 1:22:49Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  She, first with the D, like most of the patients, she started to sleep better, but at the end of two years, she stopped sleeping better. She actually lost weight, which was the case with several of the women that were postpartum, who had complained about that. So my interpretation was, and someone who's less affected than Madeline was, the D/B50 combination, especially in the setting of being after the pregnancy, is really all somebody who was relatively normal with the start of their life needs. And then she got better. Her antidepressant went away. Her postpartum depression cleared. Her high heart rate. So the other thing that we didn't mention is

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  many of these women who are very interested in exercise and doing exercise had high heart rates of 110 or above, sitting quietly, and had not been like that before. Their high heart rates come down. So she came back to being her normal self again.

• 1:23:51Steven Bartlett?

  And did she have to come off the vitamin B?

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  She only took it for three months.

• 1:23:55Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:23:55Speaker 00

  And then she did a multivitamin. And then eventually, almost everybody needs to be off the multivitamin completely. It is my belief that if all of this happens spontaneously in every other animal on the planet, then we shouldn't have to take supplements either. The squirrels are not going to GNC to buy supplements. That means if there's a mistake made, like we move indoors and we give back what is needed to get the normal microbiome, then you should assume that your body will go back to supporting itself.

• 1:24:31Steven Bartlett?

  And Natalie, she's good again?

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  Natalie's back to being a triathlete and doing great.

• 1:24:36Steven Bartlett?

  If we zoom out for a second, what is the advice you'll give to all of my listeners now? There might be millions of them all over the world, some of which are struggling with sleep. Some of them just want to optimize their sleep a little bit. What is their overarching advice? The thing that all of them could do to make sure they sleep better, in your view?

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  One, do the behavioral cognitive stuff first. Make the bike out curtains, do the whole thing. If you haven't done that with the eye cover, then go ahead and do that. And if that's all you need, do not mess around with supplements. Two, if you've already done the behavioral changes, then go to my website, read about the ideas, or listen to this podcast and see whether or not the ideas there feel like they apply to you.

• 1:25:23Steven Bartlett?

  You've come up with this protocol called the Right Sleep Protocol. What is that? And can you walk me through it?

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  Sure. So the Right Sleep Program is a process of taking your D to a certain level, supplementing B12 if your B12 is at a certain level, below a certain level, taking B50 for three months, and then taking a multivitamin. And that is until your body says, gee, I might need more Bs. This is a diagram, and you have a beautiful stepwise visual assist here. The first three months, if your B12 is low, you will take B12 as a separate supplement. And keep in mind, there's a lot to be learned about multivitamins. For instance, many multivitamins say multivitamin on the front,

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  but they actually have the equivalent of B50 in them. They have 50mg of all these B vitamins. In fact, if you go to an expensive vitamin store, they put up the doses of Bs. The doses of these vitamins are extremely important for the way you feel every day. If you get it right, you feel energetic, perky and wonderful all day. If you get it wrong, you feel awful, in the same way you did before. You have to look at the back. You have to learn some of the name of these vitamins. Most people are not that interested in that. If you want to get better, that's what you have to do. So the first step is you're taking all four of these. Then, in the second step, for a period of usually three to four months,

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  you're still taking B12 if you were B12 deficient. You're still taking vitamin D, and you're adjusting your vitamin D dosing based on recommendations, based on your D levels that you're doing every month. And I show you how to get them done properly, because the vitamin D levels that your doctor is doing are not accurate, unfortunately, nor do they know that or care. And you're still taking a multivitamin. Then, after the three months that are depicted here, it turns out if your sleep is much better, you will actually get to a place where your body will stop sleeping well again.

• 1:27:42Speaker 00

  And it turns out that your brain is asking for more additional Bs. The basic bottom line is the sleep is a thing that, once you learn how to use it, and once you learn the concept that if in the third or fourth month of this program, my sleep gets much better, and then in the sixth month it gets worse again, what you should take from that is my brain really knows how to do this. It was able to get me to sleep from 10 to 6 with one brief wake up, went back to sleep, didn't get up to pee, and I have no pain when I wake up and I feel energetic all day long. It knows how to do that. When it doesn't do it again, two months later,

• 1:28:27Speaker 00

  the message is not, oh, man, I knew it wouldn't work, because everything else I've tried didn't work. Instead, it means what my brain is asking for is something else. Then you address that. On my website, I also have multiple videos of Q and As addressing questions like, I'm in the fifth month and this happened to me, et cetera. So what I would give as advice is, one, supplementation is only good for you if there's something wrong with you that you're trying to correct. Two, keep a log of what happens to that thing, because we tend to forget.

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  All my headache patients forget that they had headaches when they go away. That's challenging to a clinician, because they come back and they say, yeah, I still have headaches. And then their husband says, wait, we were in Vegas two weeks ago, and you said you didn't have any headaches at all. And she says, oh, I know, but they're back now. We view it as, it should have fixed me, and now it hasn't. This is a different belief system where the answer is, your brain is asking you for something. Interpreting what it's asking for is difficult, but possible.

• 1:29:42Steven Bartlett?

  So number one was?

• 1:29:44Speaker 00

  If you do not have something wrong with you, do not mess with supplements, especially D.

• 1:29:49Steven Bartlett?

  Number two is keep a log.

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Read more, think about it. Think about it a little bit. Think about whether or not there are things that are bothering you.

• 1:29:57Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, number three?

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  Number three is, if there's something bothering you, then decide you're actually going to take some time and you're going to learn about a system which allows you to give supplements that lets your body be fully replete, which means fills up all the deficiencies, and that your final outcome will be great sleep, great repair, and you will be doing things that will allow your body to prevent degenerative illness.

• 1:30:26Steven Bartlett?

  Why don't you just, you know, why don't I just, instead of taking supplements, or be this, be that, be the other, D, whatever, why don't I just go outside in the sun and have a better diet?

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  I think that's a great question, and here's the problem.

• 1:30:42Steven Bartlett?

  So I've got, you know, I've got all these things, these wonderful things here. I've got some kimchi, which is good for the gut microbiome, I've heard. I've got kombucha. I've got some yogurt thing here. I've got, I can't even pronounce that.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  Sargento.

• 1:30:56Steven Bartlett?

  Sargento. And I've got some cathia. Why don't I just have all this stuff, which is great for my gut microbiome, and then go outside and spend the morning in the sunshine, getting up, improving my vitamin D levels? Because maybe this is going to help my gut, and the sunshine is going to help my vitamin D, voila.

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  I think you could actually do that. If there's not much wrong with you, I think that's the better path, frankly. Supplementing with vitamin D is not the same as being outdoors.

• 1:31:24Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, explain that to me. What do you mean it's not the same? How is it different? Because my doctor did a blood test recently, and I did two blood tests. One at NICO Health, hashtag investor, NICO Health. And the NICO Health test that I did said I was vitamin D deficient. Which doesn't surprise me, because I live in this dark bunker. I never leave the diarrhea studio. People just walk in, and I live in here, and I eat in here, and I... But I am vitamin D deficient, it said. So I went to the store and I just started taking vitamin D. I assume that's fixed it. Why is vitamin D supplementation different from being out in the sun?

• 1:31:57Speaker 00

  There is a lot of literature by a gal named Stephanie Seneff, who says that the vitamin D that we make on our skin is sulfated, which is different than the vitamin D we're taking is supplemented, and it has a different behavior in the body. Number two, it turns out there's a lot of literature that shows that vitamin D is not the only thing made by UVB hitting your skin. And what it's hitting is cholesterol. And that cholesterol is changed into this chemical called D3. But there are probably 15, 20 other chemicals that are being made at the same time.

• 1:32:32Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  They are not being taken with that pill of vitamin D3. That is a separate literature that's just gotten really some attention in the last 10 years. There are all these other things that prevent inflammation, that do things to your skin, that were actually being made by the sunlight that you're being exposed to, that protects you from the damaging effects.

• 1:32:56Steven Bartlett?

  So why can't someone who is really struggling with their sleep, why can't the prescription just be, improve your diet? Have you tried that with patients? But you said you've not.

• 1:33:06Speaker 00

  One of the reasons why these are effective, the fermented foods, okay? Fermented food means you're eating rotting food. That's not the way we call it, because it sounds disgusting, okay? But bacteria are growing in here.

• 1:33:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Speaker 00

  And they're secreting things like B vitamins and ruderi. They're making a yeast bacterial mixture. So there's fungus growing in there, there are viruses in there. There are many microbiomes.

• 1:33:36Steven Bartlett?

  Microbes.

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  Microbes, thank you.

• 1:33:38Steven Bartlett?

  Look at me.

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  You're awesome. That means you're eating bacteria. You're basically eating a food that has B50 in it.

• 1:33:47Steven Bartlett?

  Which is great.

• 1:33:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Steven Bartlett?

  So why don't you give that to your patients?

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  Because I have no idea what the timeframe will be for this having that success for you. This is the easy way. This is the fast way. This is the way I can tell you that I've had more experience with my clients over time. And if you want to fix something that's really badly off, by the time you get a sleep disorder.

• 1:34:10Steven Bartlett?

  For those that can't see, because they're just listening on audio, you're pointing out the vitamins.

• 1:34:14Speaker 00

  I'm pointing at the vitamins and the stepwise approach, which is right sleep.

• 1:34:17Steven Bartlett?

  The fast and easy approach.

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  Exactly. And if you don't want to use supplements, I would support you all the way.

• 1:34:23Steven Bartlett?

  In doing what?

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  In going outside, just what you've described. I think the healthier approach to all of our diseases is to be outside much more and to include these fermented foods.

• 1:34:37Steven Bartlett?

  Now, on this point of being outside much more, some people live in cloudy places. You know, I spent a lot of my life living in places like London in the UK. And there's not much sunlight.

• 1:34:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:46Steven Bartlett?

  So what do I do about that?

• 1:34:47Speaker 00

  Remember how I said that Madeline was a redhead?

• 1:34:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  That turns out to be important. So melanin is the pigment that humans have in their skin. You have more than I do. I put more melanin as I stay out in the sun more and I tan. That melanin is absorbing energy. It's there to protect you from overexposure to sunlight and damaging effects on the DNA of your skin. The redhead gene usually comes with freckles, which means that there's only little tiny parts of the skin that have melanin. And the redhead gene came about in the far north Viking Scotland. And those places don't get much sunlight.

• 1:35:31Speaker 00

  That means it cleared out the blocker of the thing that collected that energy and allowed people who lived in very overcast environments to make D, because the melanin didn't block the conversion to vitamin D and all these other things that it does.

• 1:35:48Steven Bartlett?

  So redheads actually have a bit of a superpower when it comes to their relationship with the sunshine. They can make significantly more.

• 1:35:55Speaker 00

  That depends. Now, if you pick up all the Scotsmen and you put them in Texas and Oklahoma, which is where I live, and many of the people there have red hair and they came from Scotsmen. The problem is, they're now in an environment with very high sun levels. It's very hot in the summer. And they cannot tolerate the level of sun. That means if you get to a point on the world where you pick up big populations and you move them into another weather type, they have not had enough time to adapt. There are things about melanin amounts and our survival that make a difference. So I still recommend that supplementing with D is not the whole answer.

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  Supplementation in and of itself is not what we want. What we want is our kids to be outside much more. There are now new learning environments for kids, where they're out in the forest, where they're not enclosed in schoolrooms.

• 1:36:52Steven Bartlett?

  There's some interesting stats I found, which says that 90% of Americans spend close to 22 hours inside every day. That was from USA Today. And roughly 20% of Americans never go outside, regularly spending 24 hours indoors. And downstream from vitamin D, there's not just sleep disruption, there's lots of problems, isn't there?

• 1:37:13Speaker 00

  Yes. I can start listing them, and they're all related in the background to what we've talked about. But diabetes, even though you've had lots of really interesting shows about that, diabetes is happening in parallel with the sleep disorder. It's not caused by the sleep disorder. It has similar chemical in the background. There are many types, but diabetes just means there's a mismatch between the amount of insulin from the amount of sugar. Let me say that I'm not trying to say that America doesn't eat badly. America eats badly. I was just in Europe, and the eating patterns in the US are terrible.

• 1:37:54Speaker 00

  But there are other things that are playing a role, and diabetes shows up. Remember how Madeline had gestational diabetes? And so did this wonderful Natalie, who did everything we told her to. Why would Natalie show up with gestational diabetes when she's not fat? Her supply of this thing called coenzyme A is not enough to keep up with supplying the child and herself. So for a while, she really has a deficiency state, and you start to see it. We've learned to measure the sugar. And measuring the sugar is one of the signs of a deficiency state that's in the background, that actually affects 100 things in the body.

• 1:38:38Speaker 00

  It makes acetylcholine, which allows our whole autonomic nervous system to sleep, to react normally. So it affects all of those things that we do when we're training. It also affects cortisol levels. You must have coenzyme A to make cortisol. You must have coenzyme A to make melatonin.

• 1:38:56Steven Bartlett?

  So the things linked to vitamin D are everything from bone disorders, autoimmune diseases, mental health, brain disorders, cardiovascular, metabolic issues, immune infections, and then certain cancers. I imagine at this stage in the conversation, the audience are very much looking for actionable advice. So we've talked about the Right Sleep Protocol, which is this sort of vitamin approach. And then the other approach is to get outside in the sunshine more.

• 1:39:22Speaker 00

  And you don't have to be in direct sunlight. You have to be in direct sunlight to make vitamin D on your skin.

• 1:39:27Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:39:28Speaker 00

  But you should limit the amount that you do, so you do not burn your skin. And it's important that UVA, if you're going to go to a tanning salon, if they're using UVA, you are not making vitamin D from that. So there are different kinds of beds. UVA will still tan you, but it will not make D.

• 1:39:47Steven Bartlett?

  So you don't have to be in direct sunlight. So if I'm at a window and I can't see the sun and it's overcast, am I still making vitamin D?

• 1:39:55Speaker 00

  No, you can't make anything through the window.

• 1:39:57Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so I go outside, I can't see the sun, because there's clouds. I'm still making vitamin D?

• 1:40:02Speaker 00

  Maybe. It can be that you will actually still get a burn, okay, that is from UVA and UVB penetrating that cloud.

• 1:40:12Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:40:13Speaker 00

  So that does mean that you can make some vitamin D on a day that it's cloudy. And the only way to know how much vitamin D you are actually making is to do your vitamin D levels over time.

• 1:40:25Steven Bartlett?

  Looking at some data here, it says that you can make a little bit of vitamin D during overcast times. Up to 80% of UV radiation still penetrates light cloud cover. So you can absolutely still make vitamin D, though it might take a few minutes longer than it would on a completely clear day. When it's thick, dark and overcast, or dense storms or clouds, that can block up to 70 to 90% of UVB rays. On these days, it's incredibly difficult for your skin to produce any meaningful amount of vitamin D. You know these lamps that they put on desks and stuff? Can you get vitamin D from that?

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  No, but let me make you a point here that's not in my field, but in the infrared field.

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  There are so many other wavelengths of energy that you receive when you're outside. So you can be sitting on a porch where you're not in direct sunlight and you are still receiving infrared. And infrared is one of the most important wavelengths that we know about that penetrates the body several centimeters and actually gives energy to the mitochondria. Our bodies are like little batteries that we receive energy from sunlight and we can do that sitting on the porch without being in direct sunlight. And fire, also, the reason why it looks red is because it has infrared. And incandescent bulbs, which we've now stopped using.

• 1:41:42Steven Bartlett?

  So what's the advice here?

• 1:41:44Speaker 00

  Some people believe that you should use incandescent bulbs on a lamp that's on your desk.

• 1:41:49Steven Bartlett?

  What's an incandescent bulb?

• 1:41:50Speaker 00

  It gives you rays of light. Like LED is an electron-producing light source, which the government has suggested that is better than incandescent light. It's very difficult to buy incandescent bulbs, like the bulbs that we used to use. Now you'll get halogen or LEDs and they do not give off infrared light, energy.

• 1:42:17Steven Bartlett?

  So an incandescent bulb is the old-school glass light bulbs, the kind Thomas Edison used to use. It creates light by running an electrical current through a metal filament until it gets so hot that it glows. Because it relies on raw heat, an incandescent bulb behaves exactly like a miniature fire or a tiny piece of the sun. Hmm. So yeah, those incandescent bulbs are harder to come by these days, but yeah, my fiance, she's a big fan of them.

• 1:42:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:41Steven Bartlett?

  And she's trying to fill our house with them.

• 1:42:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, she's right.

• 1:42:43Steven Bartlett?

  So is there anything else? You know, also, I've got these prebiotics here, prebiotics, probiotics. A lot of people say that you should take prebiotics, probiotics. Have you tried giving them to your patients?

• 1:42:52Speaker 00

  I was on probiotics and so were my patients when we started and it had not corrected the microbiome. It was just a try. We're going to dump the bacteria down there and maybe they'll get back to normal. Okay? That is what a probiotic is considered. They have the actual bacteria freeze-dried and you eat the bacteria. Kind of gross when you think about it as being poop bacteria, but that's what it is. Okay? Now, what prebiotic has that's different is that you feed the bacteria and they feed you. That's really what happens. What I love about this is there are different things that they're feeding the bacteria. We're kind of interested in what they think. How do we know what they think?

• 1:43:35Speaker 00

  Well, what if I changed to carnivore? And all of a sudden, my belly gas goes away.

• 1:43:43Steven Bartlett?

  The carnivore diet where you just eat meat?

• 1:43:44Speaker 00

  Carnivore, where you eat mostly meat, let's say 90% meat. And most of my belly complaints go away and I poop regularly, then you've just been very successful at making your bacteria very happy. What if the next client who I have is a mostly plant-based? Then I have to change the way I think and the way I help them and encourage them to recognize that when we're feeding mostly plant-based, we have a different set of bacteria. Now, let me propose something to you. Humans cover the globe like cockroaches. We are very successful and we have a hugely varied diet.

• 1:44:28Speaker 00

  I would claim that that means you should eat the diet that works for you. The place where you see something that is really important for the US is the original articles about vitamin deficiency states were in two groups that ate a pure carbohydrate diet. So the claim right now for most of the people that are interested in healthy diets is if you eat a fully carbohydrate diet, you're set up for failure in a million different ways. And then they talk about the diet you should eat. There are two incidences from the 1940s where the first vitamin deficiency states were described, and both of them turned out to be purely carbohydrate diets.

• 1:45:10Speaker 00

  One of them was in the Japanese prisoner of war camps and the Bataan Death March in World War II, where they had rice, rice, rice. That's it. And they're outside all the time. They're not vitamin D deficient. They're discovered to have berry berry. And berry berry is an old disease described in Japan when you take off the rice casing. So ultimately, they gave back meat and vegetables and berry berry is described as heart failure, non-healing ulcers of the legs, bright shiny red skin and burning in the feet that we see in the elderly in the US all the time in the hospital.

• 1:45:53Speaker 00

  That is now ignored, but you can actually get to a state where you're feeding only carbohydrates. But now the lens you're looking through is, I was feeding my bacteria a purely carbohydrate diet. I therefore selected for bacterial populations that were not producing the B vitamins that I needed. It's seeing it through a slightly different lens. The same thing about pellagra, which is actually a niacin deficiency, in adults and children that were institutionalized in the South of the United States in the 30s and 40s and fed corn gruel as their only food. So there's still a piece of information there that is, your diet absolutely affects

• 1:46:37Speaker 00

  who lives inside you. And once you have a purely carbohydrate diet for many years and you're D deficient, it is very likely you're going to have to do something more aggressive. Either change your diet and do fermented foods and change to a meat and plant diet, and you're going to have to watch what your body does. And if you're not able, and my claim would still be, the sleep that you have should still be your best measure of whether you succeeded in what you'd like to do.

• 1:47:09Steven Bartlett?

  And again, to track your sleep, there's lots of different ways to do that. Obviously, none of them are perfect, but you can buy sleep trackers and those kinds of things and see how you're doing.

• 1:47:19Speaker 00

  Yes. And I would also say, use your sleep tracker. I don't use mine regularly because I get obsessed by it. I start to think, oh, I only had an hour and a half of REM, I'm dying. And I just get spiraled downward. Okay? So what your body is saying to you is still very important. I didn't have sleep trackers when I was seeing all these things that were happening to Madeline and Natalie. I would listen to what they said about their sleep.

• 1:47:44Steven Bartlett?

  I imagine a lot of people collect on this conversation because they are struggling with sleep, or they have a partner or friend, or maybe just because they want to optimize their sleep a little bit. And what I've really taken away is that a lot of sleep-related issues start in the gut microbiome.

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:47:59Steven Bartlett?

  So we want to try and fix the gut microbiome. And how we fix the gut microbiome is, can be dietary. It can be through supplementation, but we want to try and do it through diet first and fermented foods. And then the other thing is sunlight plays a big role. You're smirking again.

• 1:48:13Speaker 00

  You're doing a fabulous job.

• 1:48:16Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, you're so sweet. The other thing is sunlight plays a big role because it produces vitamin D and amongst other things, which also can improve that balance and help us sleep better.

• 1:48:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:48:26Steven Bartlett?

  And we also want to try the stuff that everybody talks about. Matthew Walker, he talks about temperature and

• 1:48:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:48:31Steven Bartlett?

  eye masks and all that kind of stuff. I guess the big insight here is that vitamins play a really important role in sleep.

• 1:48:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:48:38Steven Bartlett?

  As you've seen through the thousands of patients that you've spent time with and helped to restore to a healthy sleep state.

• 1:48:45Speaker 00

  Yes, that's a beautiful summary.

• 1:48:47Steven Bartlett?

  What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? Is there anything at all?

• 1:48:52Speaker 00

  We have skipped the people who have been told they have a disease, narcolepsy or sleep apnea, where they're told there's a specific, this is a genetic thing and you have to do these specific things. For instance, for narcolepsy, this is an attack of sleep that takes you out and you become, I'm sitting here talking to you and I fall asleep. That turns out to be treatable in the same way.

• 1:49:24Steven Bartlett?

  You're saying a lot of it can be about vitamins?

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  Yes, you can sleep deprive anyone to the point of falling asleep when I talk to you. All you have to do is, you know, two or three nights that you miss and you can still become taken down by an attack of sleep. That really is what narcolepsy means. That means medicine, in its attempt to classify things, have said, this is a disease. And the idea that they are all about our body falling out of its normal state. What's different about people who have that, a specific diagnosis like sleep apnea and narcolepsy is, they are unlikely to be able to cure that with going outside and kimchi. They are at an end stage.

• 1:50:10Speaker 00

  Your body was really set up to be able to deal with different diets, getting up in the middle of the night, take care of your baby, traveling long periods of time, all these stressors that we've had for the last 300,000 years. It was set up to do that and to get back to sleeping again. And people live for long periods of time. That wasn't the average, but there were people that lived to be 75 years old 20,000 years ago. That means that's the best we can do. If you have a disease of your sleep switches, you are really severely affected. And my experience would say that that person is not going to be able to approach it by just going outside and doing kimchi.

• 1:50:55Speaker 00

  That person is going to need some extra help and they're going to need sometimes professional help with someone who's seeing it through this lens. Because they go through changes. They, for instance, when you get them a little bit better so that they're sleeping at night, they actually start to have nightmares. What that means in a setting like that is, they've actually gotten into REM sleep, but they haven't gotten perfect chemistry so that they sleep through the REM phase, finish up, go into light sleep, and then go to the next. They've awakened, so they can't keep themselves in REM. There are transition states where they actually feel like they're getting worse.

• 1:51:38Speaker 00

  So there are all sorts of things that I've been able to see that are not talked about at the sleep meetings, that are totally fascinating, that are halfway better and that people can cure their narcolepsy. I have one gal right now who just called me to become a client. She has narcolepsy and she has completely cured herself by using nicotine patches around the clock. Why? Because there is only one drug that duplicates acetylcholine completely, and it's nicotine. So she stopped smoking and she uses nicotine patches. Nicotine is the duplicate of acetylcholine.

• 1:52:20Speaker 00

  Acetylcholine allows us to focus, pay attention, be distracted and come right back during the day. It is in control of our ability to concentrate. At night, it allows us to get into REM sleep. That one chemical does wake and sleep, doesn't in different parts of the brain. That means she is using something that has been terribly vilified. Tobacco is considered to be the cause of all evil. It turns out, oddly enough, the guys with Parkinson's disease who smoked throughout the last 30 years have been shown to do better because Parkinson's disease is an acetylcholine deficiency state first.

• 1:52:59Steven Bartlett?

  To give a bit of background on, I guess, the problem we've really talked about, I have this little paragraph here, which I thought summarizes the nature of the problem and the sleep epidemic. It says, "While industrialization first disrupted our natural rhythms by moving society indoors, the true explosion of sleep disorders occurred in two modern phases: a medical boom in the 1980s and a digital epidemic in the 2000s. In the 1980s, the formal recognition of sleep medicine and the intervention of the CPAP machine diagnosed millions with obstructive sleep apnea, sparking a surge in clinical treatments. The medicalization transformed into a cultural crisis by the 2000s as sedentary indoor lifestyles starved us of natural daytime sunlight.

• 1:53:43Steven Bartlett?

  Sunlight exposure is vital because its high-intensity brightness resets the brain's master internal clock and suppresses daytime melatonin, which establishes a definitive biological countdown for deep sleep at night. Deprived of this anchoring queue and bombarded by 24/7 hustle culture and smartphones pumping blue light into our bedrooms, society succumbed to a devastating double-edged sword: too little sun by day to synchronize the brain and too much artificial light by night to allow it to rest. The modern circadian mismatch culminated in an acute spike during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, solidifying an era where our indoor environments are fundamentally at war with our evolutionary sleep biology."

• 1:54:25Speaker 00

  I love that. Who wrote that? Is that AI?

• 1:54:29Steven Bartlett?

  It was AI that wrote that.

• 1:54:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Now, that's the fascinating part of this. AI doesn't care whether or not my colleagues think I'm crazy. AI is not affected by what the Endocrine Society says about D. AI has just given us the raw data, okay? Then if you put in there something like, what does Dr. Gomanak think about whether or not sun exposure is the whole story for sleep? You'll start to see my stuff leaking through there, saying, yes, it's true that the pineal gland makes melatonin and that that's part of how we get to the 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM, but it's also true that vitamin D has receptors in the brainstem.

• 1:55:12Speaker 00

  That means that we are at the edge of about a big change where some of these ideas that we talked about today that are very deep and very wide are going to be there, available in a beautifully written way by AI. And I think in this particular case, we've jumped around medicine and its craziness and its conservative feeling. It's been taken over by an electronic thing that's not affected by our cultural ideals of who's smart and who's not.

• 1:55:49Steven Bartlett?

  What is the central idea that you believe that most of the mainstream industry don't believe? I will do as you say and I will ask the AI.

• 1:55:56Speaker 00

  Most of the sleep disorders, including sleep apnea, narcolepsy, all the ones that the neurologists have described, are really related at basis by D and multiple things that are made by the microbiome, that the microbiome and the D deficiency are very much linked and that there are hundreds of things that are playing a role in our sleep switches that are supplied by the microbiome.

• 1:56:19Steven Bartlett?

  So I'll summarize that as, are many of the sleep disorders caused by the microbiome? I'm using Gemini Pro, which is the most advanced model. I always use it for fact-checking and stuff. So it says, "You are completely wrong." I'm joking, I didn't say that. It says, "Yes, the connection is massive. While we can't say the microbiome is the sole cause of every sleep disorder, scientists now know that a damaged gut is a major hidden driver of poor sleep." Because both the melatonin pipeline starts in the gut, manufacturing the calm-down chemical

• 1:57:03Steven Bartlett?

  is in the gut, and the cortisol alarm system is linked to the gut. The trickiest part of the microbiome's sleep connection is that it is a bidirectional loop. A bad microbiome causes poor sleep, poor sleep alters the microbiome. So while anatomical issues, like a narrow airway causes sleep apnea, or light mismatch, like the lack of near-infrared light, play huge roles, fixing chronic insomnia often requires healing the gut just as much as fixing your bedtime routine.

• 1:57:32Speaker 00

  The lack of near-infrared light, that's amazing. Medicine will not be talking about that anytime soon. It's too wacky. It's too woo-woo. And yet, that means those ideas are available to us.

• 1:57:49Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is more, yeah, I guess it is a question. It says, "Describe the best day of your life."

• 1:58:04Speaker 00

  Hmm. I'm going to have to stick with what pops into my mind first, which is relatively recently. We were in Sevigny, I think, and it was very hot. And my husband and I had been traveling for three or four weeks together, which is the longest time we've spent together in a long time. And we were sitting, playing canasta outside underneath an umbrella that had little misters. And we were just sitting there playing canasta together.

• 1:58:44Speaker 00

  And it's not about, it was not about accomplishment, it was about having this marvelous circumstance where we're just hanging out together and having a very pleasant time together. That was my best day in recent memory.

• 1:59:04Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Stasha, where should people go to learn more from you?

• 1:59:10Speaker 00

  Dr. Gomanak, no period after dr.com. And I have a YouTube channel where I have lots of, I have a whole series of 50 things called sleep chats, where I talk about, if I have carpal tunnel syndrome, will right sleep program help me? If I have this, will right, and why?

• 1:59:29Steven Bartlett?

  I'll link all of that for you below, so everybody can go to those resources. They'll be linked in the description below of this episode. Thank you so much.

• 1:59:38Speaker 00

  Thank you, Stephen.

• 1:59:39Steven Bartlett?

  It's been wonderful to talk about it.

• 1:59:40Speaker 00

  It's been wonderful.

• 1:59:41Steven Bartlett?

  Fantastic.