Recently I got a chance to interview Dr. Peter Kozlowski (Doc Koz) who was a guest on my show. As a newly published author, he wrote a book called “Unfunc Your Gut“, which offers some incredible insights into how you can “Boost your immune system, heal your gut, and unlock your mental, emotional and spiritual health.
You can watch the full interview below or follow this link to view on my YouTube Channel.
Doc Koz specialized in a newer, growing field of medicine called “Functional Medicine,” which I’m incredibly grateful that I now know about. He describes Functional Medicine as “a type of integrative or holistic medicine”.
Other practitioners in this field include: chiropractors, nurses, acupuncturists, nutritionists, health coaches, cardiologists, and family medicine MD’s like he is, among others. Anyone that’s in the health world can become certified to work in Functional Medicine.
Functional medicine is all about getting to the root cause of your symptoms and then treating the cause, versus a traditional medical practice in which you get diagnosed, and then are usually prescribed a pill to make you feel better as quickly as possible.
Functional medicine looks at health issues from the perspective of what may be causing the issue in the first place. Potential causes can be: food, gut health, hormone imbalances, toxins such as: lead, mercury and mold and mental, emotional and spiritual health.
And out of all these potential causes, he says we need to be aware of the fact that our mental, emotional and spiritual health is the most important health issue.
He’s found that a lot of people have trauma around food. Especially when it comes to very restrictive diets. So the perfect diet is actually worse for you IF you are stress out about that diet. If the diet is causing you stress, then that stress is working against your health, making the diet itself not helpful.
So for example, he’d rather have you eating processed foods if you’re meditation, practicing gratitude, exercising, etc., if that makes you more relaxed and not stressed. Of course this isn’t ideal, ideally you’d have a good diet as well. But this comes second to your your mental, emotional and spiritual health.
Ideally, he says the best time to see a functional medicine doctor is actually when your healthy. Functional medicine should be preventative medicine. But 99% of the patients he works with are not preventative. If you feel healthy or don’t have symptoms yet, there could be an underlying fire brewing that may not present until sometime later down the road.
How he would tell you to look at your diet and would test you on your gut health and your level of toxins. But if he had to pick just one test to run on a healthy individual, it would be to test for heavy metals.
The two most common metals are lead and mercury. Lead is in airplane exhaust, paint, pipes, our water, basically everywhere. Mercury can be found in fish, dental filling and vaccines, among other things.
Two other metals called cesium and thallium are radio active compounds found in oil fracking and drilling. They use these compounds to create radio active water and that water creates earthquakes that then help release the oil. That water that is left over…guess who’s buying that water? Farms that are going through drought conditions, such as regions like California. And the truly shocking thing is that this produce can still be labeled as “organic” while using this re-purposed water from the fracking operations.
So the patients he is finding with the highest levels of cesium and thallium are the ones that are eating the most fruits and vegetables. Ugh! It almost seems like there aren’t any safe foods anymore! This makes me want to start my own vegetable garden and plant my own fruit trees….or at least make sure I buy my fruits and veggies from my local farmers market where I can find out more information about how the farms grow their produce.
Dr. Kozlowski treats everything from autism and childhood disorders, to adults and even elderly with dementia.
One staggering statistic that he mentions in his book is how the rates of autism have increase from 1 in 2,500 people in 1980 to less than 1 in 40 people today. Why is that? What’s the biggest thing that’s changed in the past 30 years? It’s our environment, it’s the food that we are eating, the air that we’re breathing, the toxins that we’re ingesting.
Of course there’s not an exact study that proves that, but there’s a strong correlation. And his practice has had a 100% success rate when it comes to improving the symptoms with his autistic patients through focusing on their food intake, their gut health and the levels of toxins in their bodies. In some of his most successful cases, he’s seen kids start talking that have never talked before. And not just talking, but having full conversations! These are massive improvements.
During the interview, I asked him about foods that are labeled as “vegan”, especially as it relates to the vegan meats that are now all the rage. I personally love the taste of some of those fake meats that taste almost like the real thing such as: Beyond Burger, Impossible Burger and Quorn, to name a few.
But the problem is, just because they are vegan-friendly, doesn’t mean they are actually heathy for you. Anything that is a highly-processed, packaged food is not good for you. Plus we just don’t have enough long-term evidence as to how these foods will affect our bodies and our health over time. They should still be considered an “indulgence”, no different than the real thing, which exactly what I do.
There’s a lot more insightful and enlighten information that Doc Koz shares with us in this episode, so tune in and subscribe to my channel to stay posted when new episodes are released.
