Dr. Carrie Jones rejoins the Evolution of Medicine podcast to discuss the functional medicine approach to depression, anxiety and attention issues. She is an avid educator who specializes in stress and endocrine health.
A recent systematic review found that the serotonin theory of depression is scientifically unsupported, which raises the question: What does this mean for patients who use either SSRIs or SNRIs? Dr. Jones explains how she answers this for concerned patients and discusses her approach to resolving mood issues by looking for root causes.
Other topics discussed in this conversation include rising mental health issues amongst teenagers in particular, group care, and mental health lifestyle factors, such as balancing neurotransmitters, stress management, social connection, nutrition, gut health and physical activity.
Tune in and listen to the whole conversation to learn about the following from Dr. Jones:
- Examples of how blood sugar dysregulation can harm sleep quality and mental health
- Problems that can arise when supporting only one neurotransmitter
- Specific nutrients she uses for patients with mood dysregulation
- The potential for technology, especially continuous glucose monitors, to empower patients in their health journeys
- And much, much more!
Carrie Jones: And so, by working through, as you’re going through your sort of functional, personalized approach, people would start to feel better, and they would start to thrive. And then they would go, “Gosh, maybe I don’t need an SSRI. This is great. I’m feeling so much better.”
So, to go back to your question, what do we keep? I keep the people who say, “This is really working for me. I don’t want to give it up. I’m too scared to give it up.” I’m like, “Don’t. Don’t. It’s working for you. That’s fantastic.” But it’s that other huge group where I’m like, “All right, we have to completely change our whole mindset.” I think those of us in the functional community did a long time ago, but even in the conventional medicine, if you can’t hang your entire depression hat on serotonin, we have to… And that serotonin in the brain, per se. We have to expand out from there. It’s a whole system. It’s not just the brain. It’s the whole system is depressed, in a sense. A lot goes into that and gets that snowball going. And so, that’s the part that I’m like, let’s build off that. How do we address the system as a whole that’s causing you to feel depressed or causing you to feel anxious? What’s triggering that in the rest of your body?
James Maskell: Welcome to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, the place health professionals come to hear from innovators and agitators leading the charge. We cover the latest clinical breakthroughs and health technology as well as practical tools to help you transform your practice and the health of your community. This podcast is brought to you by the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center, who provide a range of options to help you deliver successful, effective functional and integrative medicine. To find out more and to get started, go to goevomed.com/lmrc. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in this week. We are speaking to Dr. Carrie Jones. She’s been on the podcast a number of times before. We’re going to be talking about mood, stress, sleep and the epidemic of mental health issues. We’re going to talk about serotonin, SSRIs, some of the new science that’s come out there and what we can bet on for the future of functional medicine. As ever, Dr. Jones is a wealth of information and getting really specific with some of her nutrient recommendations as well as lifestyle stuff. It was a really great half an hour. Enjoy.
So, a warm welcome back to the show, Dr. Carrie Jones. Great to have you back, doc. Thanks for making time.
Carrie Jones: Oh, thanks, James. It’s always fun to be on your podcast and hang out with you.
James Maskell: Well, I am interested in getting into something that’s such a hot topic right now. I think the prevalence of focus, mood disorders, both children and adults, teens was growing steadily and then, I guess, went up significantly during lockdowns and over the last three years. So, I guess I just wanted to start there and just think, what’s driving this overall upward trend? And what do you think was driving the exacerbation?
Carrie Jones: Oh my gosh. Honestly, I think it’s a multi-prong approach to the drivers. It’s a combination of things that have always been there. Poor diet, poor sleep, blood sugar dysregulation, chemicals, inflammation, et cetera, et cetera. And then on top of that, I think when you add in lockdowns, you add in a lot of fear, you add in illness, a lot of people now with long COVID, it just perpetuates, worsens anxiety, insomnia, sleep disorders, focus issues.
And then you layer all of that with social media. You layer all of that with very quick attention span, five second clips, ten second clips, 30 second clips. I mean, it’s to the point now… And they know this, Instagram, TikTok, they know that even if they allow longer videos, longer reels, longer TikToks, people scroll. That’s why YouTube now has the short videos, used to be long. Every one was like an hour or two hours. People don’t have that attention span anymore. You can see it in your very own YouTube analytics where people just die out and walk away. So, now, they’ve got the YouTube Shorts to keep our attention span. We’re a society that just can’t focus anymore.
James Maskell: Yeah, so interesting. Having done the Functional Forum and started with hour and a half shows and then obviously creating something that’s for physicians as well. You’d hope it’s not quite the same, but I think you even in that way just was so accustomed to the way that media has been delivered. I definitely think that’s still happening.
Well, I want to dive into what we can do about it and empower. One of the things that had come up that I wanted to ask you about—earlier this year and over the last little while—there’s been this rug pulled out from underneath psychiatry, should we say, with these studies really taking the monoamine hypothesis and looking at it objectively and saying there’s not really a lot of science to back that up. This is something that people like Kelly Brogan were talking about right at the very beginning of the Functional Forum 2014, but it was a fringe idea at that point. Ultimately, it got to a point where it’s being really backed up by science.
Now, It’s interesting because in as much as most of the SSRI medication was based on that—and certainly there are examples of SSRI medication helping people, and we can get into that—but also there were functional medicine things that were really built on this same theory. I remember when I first came into the industry, there were things like the neuroscience tests, where you do the glutamate test and then the neuroscience supplements, or Sanesco and all these different brands.
Those things have fallen away a little bit, but there was quite a lot of functional medicine ideas that were built on the same foundation, which was it’s all about serotonin when it comes to your mood. And so, I guess I just wanted to get from someone who’s right in the middle of it and understands this world really well, what out of what came before could we build on for the future and is a part of real physiology? What part do we need to throw away with this new study and these studies that have come out?
Carrie Jones: The part that I would like to keep is the part where, and you and I were talking a little bit off camera about this, when I talk to my colleagues is that absolutely that for the SSRIs or SNRI kind of medication, for a small subset they changed their life for some people. It’s saved their life maybe in many instances. And so, we know in that case that… I mean, SSRIs have several approaches to how they work, serotonin being the big one, but they do also can lower some of the inflammatory cytokines.
Serotonin got all the big press when it came to, well, all depression as for lack of serotonin, therefore take an SSRI or this SNRI. I do want to alleviate the anxiety, since a lot of this talk is going to be about anxiety, to the people who did freak out and say, “Well, I’m on an SSRI. Does it mean it’s not working?” I’m like, “Well, do you feel like it’s working? Are you less depressed?” And they’re like, “I’m way less depressed. I feel so much better.” “Then it’s working for you.”
But as you mentioned, it’s the other big group, it’s the other big subset of people who tried different SSRIs, SNRIs, and they’re like, “It’s not working. I’m still depressed.” Or, “I went from a two to a four.” And that’s not thriving in life. So, they would increase their dose, or they were changed to a different brand, or they were changed from generic to brand name, or they were changed from an SRRI to an SNRI. And they just kept saying, “This isn’t working. This isn’t working. This isn’t working.” I’d heard that for decades in my clinical experience of people coming in and having failed their medication.
Of course, the literature wasn’t available then because it just came out recently. I’m like, we need to take a functional approach. “What’s causing your depression? What is the reason you have all this anxiety and low mood?” And a lot of it, as you know and I know, a lot of serotonin, most of it is actually made in our GI tract, in our gut. As a just automatic, how do we address functional medicine?
Gut health was often a first place we went. Gut health symptoms are often coincide with depression stuff: heartburn, gas, bloating, constipation, whatever it is. And so, by working through, as you’re going through your sort of functional, personalized approach, people would start to feel better, and they would start to thrive. And then they would go, “Gosh, maybe I don’t need an SSRI. This is great. I’m feeling so much better.”
So, to go back to your question, what do we keep? I keep the people who say, “This is really working for me. I don’t want to give it up. I’m too scared to give it up.” I’m like, “Don’t. Don’t. It’s working for you. That’s fantastic.” But it’s that other huge group where I’m like, “All right, we have to completely change our whole mindset.” I think those of us in the functional community did a long time ago, but even in the conventional medicine, if you can’t hang your entire depression hat on serotonin, we have to… And that serotonin in the brain, per se. We have to expand out from there. It’s a whole system. It’s not just the brain. It’s the whole system is depressed, in a sense. A lot goes into that and gets that snowball going. And so, that’s the part that I’m like, let’s build off that. How do we address the system as a whole that’s causing you to feel depressed or causing you to feel anxious? What’s triggering that in the rest of your body?
James Maskell: Yeah, I love that perspective. It’s really interesting because I can see those. I would say, the last couple years, there’s been quite a few books and major movements. I think about Ellen Vora’s book on anxiety, and Robin Berzin had a book on really what are the physiological things that are driving either good mental health or poor mental health? I think is really what you’re talking about there.
Carrie Jones: Yeah. Look, we saw it in the pandemic, right? You mentioned that earlier. Everything just from… I would have patients who would reach out and they would say, “I went from going to work every day to laying at home on the couch, eating like crap, addicted to Netflix, not sleeping well, and scared. As a result, my mental health has taken a complete plunge.” We can’t hang that whole hat on, “Oh, it’s serotonin. Let’s give you more serotonin.”
It’s like, okay, first and foremost, let’s work on the gut. Let’s work on the diet. Let’s get those blood sugar swings. Let’s get you to bed, get off Netflix. And, oh, by the way, what are you watching on Netflix? Well, everybody was watching murder mystery documentaries back then. Let’s not do that. These little things, people forget, contribute. I’m not saying they’re the be all end all, but boy do they sure contribute.
James Maskell: Absolutely. And the news even worse probably than—
Carrie Jones: And the news. Yes.
James Maskell: Well, you mentioned serotonin in the gut, but I know that there’s other neurotransmitters that are playing a role in mood and get some attention. Do you want to just jump into that a little bit?
Carrie Jones: Yeah. The other big one—and we all talk about especially with regards to focus—is dopamine. Dopamine’s that anticipation. We often think of dopamine as reward, but it’s the anticipation of getting the reward. Even in happy things, when you’re about to take that bite of chocolate and you’re so excited, when you’re going to go do that exercise class you’re so excited about. Of course, it can be the sinful things, too, gambling or drugs or online shopping, addictions, things like that, or worse. It’s that dopamine that helps that.
The problem is, we are such a society on instant gratification that as soon as the ping goes off on our phone, as soon as our phone face lights up, we’re scrolling three, five, seven second videos so we’re completely depleting in a sense our dopamine, and we’re training our bodies that the anticipation for reward should come faster and faster and faster. That’s why partly we are losing a lot of that focus, so we need that dopamine. Not only is dopamine affected by our gut, it’s affected by our hormones. So, if you’re also going through hormonal changes, maybe changes into perimenopause or menopause, you’re pregnant, you just had a baby, your testosterone’s low, your stress is high, cortisol, whatever it is, plays a role in dopamine.
Now, the calming hormone is called GABA. It’s our major inhibitory neurotransmitter we have in our body. It’s the calming, soothing, relaxing, everything’s going to be okay. But to get there requires certain nutrients, like vitamin B6, and a lot of people are pretty deficient in B6. They either don’t eat it or they don’t absorb it. And so, now they’re struggling, or they’re stuck in a cycle, where they can’t make enough GABA, so now they have this other excitatory neurotransmitter called glutamate, which is causing brain on fire.
They can’t move into the anti-anxiety, and they’re stuck in the brain on fire. And, oh, by the way, they’re flipping three, five, seven second videos all day long because they’re bored and have no focus. It just is a huge recipe for disaster. Now, there are other neurotransmitters, but those are really some big ones people have probably heard about, seen in the news, seen in social media, just to give them an idea, a taste of really how cool and comprehensive the body is when it comes to mood, focus, things like that.
James Maskell: Yeah. It’s super interesting. I’m glad you mentioned those two because I think obviously serotonin is obviously the most thought about one, but I know these are pieces to look at that. How do you go about measuring that sort of thing now in your practice? Obviously, you’ve done so much with lab testing. Are you doing that from history? Are you doing that from actually running tests? What kind of tests do you think are the most valuable and reliable to get into getting a baseline on someone who’s having mental health things that you want to try and address with them?
Carrie Jones: So, there are obviously tests available. You mentioned some of the neurotransmitter tests, like neurotransmitter itself, neuroscience and Sanesco. Back in the day in my practice, I would use those. I did. The argument is they’re urinary neurotransmitters, therefore they are not neurotransmitters in the central nervous system because it’s what’s in the periphery, not what’s in the brain. And I understand that, except, as I said earlier, if you have depression you have depression everywhere in a sense. I did find that they correlated, although research is really shaky and a lot of people don’t like those kind of testing.
Honestly, for budgetary purposes, I switched more into history from the patient and more of questionnaires because we knew at the time with serotonin and depression—lack of serotonin is also you see the negative in everything. When you’ve got somebody who constantly is… Maybe their significant other, they’re constantly pointing out the negative, the little tiny negative things their significant other does. They’re constantly leaving the drawers open, they’re constantly leaving their clothes on the floor. And then they can’t unsee it. Low serotonin can be a reason for that. Whereas low dopamine is more that constantly seeking for the reward, anticipatory reward. And then you’ve got anxiety with GABA, can’t feel calm, you’re restless, can’t sleep very well.
There’s different questionnaires out there that can be really, really helpful and really hone in on maybe what neurotransmitter might be the issue. The problem with that, though, is that your pathways to make neurotransmitters can use the same nutrients and use the same enzyme. To make dopamine and to make serotonin you use the same enzyme, so you can deplete one over the other. If you’re going to only focus on, which is what a lot of practitioners would say, “Well, I won’t use an SSRI, but I’ll use 5HTP because 5HTP will help raise serotonin.” But they can do it at the expense of dopamine.
Or the opposite, they’re using supplements to support dopamine at the expense of somebody’s serotonin. So, really your best bet, even if you’d hone in on which one may be more depleted than the other, be careful on how long you treat for, or support all the neurotransmitters are about the same time so that you get this rising tide lifts all boats type of thing.
James Maskell: Yeah. Are any strategies that you could take from lifestyle focus that have more of a adapted effect where it will just optimize? Because the body does seem to know how to do that. That’s a lot of times we get into a dance of supplements and one going above another. I’ve always seen that… Or many times seeing that if you do it… The more of a congruent way that you fix it, the more adaptable it is.
Carrie Jones: Honestly, I find because a lot of these are made in the gut, in the GI, the more we can address the GI, reduce the inflammation in the GI, reduce the infection, strengthen the barriers in the GI tract, you get the most bang for your buck because you don’t even necessarily have to supplement. You’re just trying to reduce that inflammation that is in the gut itself causing problems with creation of neurotransmitters and signaling up to the brain. So, now you have brain inflammation, which we don’t want. Anything we can do to help the gut will only benefit the neurotransmitters 360, it’s the best.
People will say, “Well, exercise or eating healthier or getting good sleep.” All of those are absolutely wonderful, but what if you can’t sleep? It’s one of the things we’re talking about. You have anxiety, you’ve got high stress, you can’t sleep. Exercise, you may get great endorphins, but what if you’re super exhausted and depressed and that’s just not going to happen? You don’t have the oomph to get up and exercise. Eating healthy. Let’s say you switch your diet, which is a great thing to do. Healthy fats, colorful veggies, get enough protein. A lot of people are missing out on their protein. But what if you can’t absorb it? Now you’re just missing out on all those nutrients. So, really it’s this whole well-rounded approach in the GI tract I find is, like I said, your biggest bang for your buck to start initially.
James Maskell: What would you say with these patients that come in that are struggling and have multiple of these things going on? I’ve heard from so many practitioners that it’s all about getting early momentum, seeing when you’re making progress. Out of all the things that you’ve mentioned, when you’re in practice, when you meet that patient that is unmotivated and that’s part of their case, where do you start to try and build momentum towards doing all the things?
Carrie Jones: I’m not going to lie. Then I think supplements. I love supplements. I think in that case, where I mentioned earlier, being careful with supplements. Don’t over supplement. When you need to use supplement as a band aid while you’re waiting for test results to come back, while you’re waiting to gather test results that they’ve recently had done, then in that case, having supplemental support that does help support neurotransmitters, sleep, relaxation, focus, things like that, is a great tool in your toolbox because swallowing a supplement is generally pretty easy.
Generally, you can get good compliance on it. You can get better compliance on, “hey, take this pill in the morning,” than you can get like, I need you to go exercise. If they’re too unmotivated, too tired, to go exercise, but they’re not too tired to swallow the pill. And so, I am way okay implementing the supplements that have a combination of the ingredients I’m looking for to support all this, to get them that umph.
The other thing that is really helpful from a lifestyle standpoint is blood sugar balance. Especially if you can start, if it fits in their budget, if you can get that instant feedback for people. Whatever trackable they’re going to use, whether it’s a ring, a watch, or even a continuous glucose monitor. If they can see them in their real life and then make those adjustments, I think something like a continuous glucose monitor is huge. Because those big swings between hyper and hypoglycemia just wrecks your mood. It wrecks your energy. It wakes you up in the middle of the night.
If we can even those out just by timing of meals, the amount of protein in meals, the amount of carbs in meals. Maybe it’d just be simple switches like, “Hey, you haven’t been eating breakfast, let’s eat breakfast.” Or, “Hey, actually you eat breakfast, but it’s a bowl of instant oatmeal. Let’s get some protein in there.” Maybe some easy switches to help with the blood sugar, massive. And they can watch it in real time on their phone. It’s so rewarding. They get the dopamine. I won a game, but their body is the game.
James Maskell: That’s really cool. I’d like to just get your thoughts on this teen situation because, obviously, it’s probably the most harrowing. I know the kids were most affected by the lockdowns. And also, everything that you said about social media is multiplied by 100 for that age group. I’m interested in some of the ideas around groups for teens, but it’s not that simple because I think a teen that has mental health issues has to meet with their parents, so there’s some complications for running group medicine for teens. Although, I do think it would be super healthy. I’m just wondering, do you see those kind of patients? Or when you speak to practitioners who are working with those side of patients, do you have any specific recommendations that working with that age group and how we can support that age group?
Carrie Jones: Prior to COVID, I definitely had psychologists and psychiatrists who were running teen groups. They would get the permission of parents and having… Even schools, I would have school counselors that would run small, focused teen groups just to help as an outlet, as a way for people to be like, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, with COVID—and it may have changed more in 2023—but through COVID, obviously, a lot of that got shut down or they tried to move it online to Zoom. But it wasn’t as successful as it is in person where you can actually be there, feel the vibe and be part of the community. And so, I do think that is a viable option.
However, as we all know teenagers, being in a group—and if you already don’t feel well or have depression and anxiety—being in a group and talking about what’s going on can be really intimidating. And I think that’s why, especially through COVID, we saw the explosion of counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists who focus on teen health. We saw a lot of schools that were providing as many resources as possible for teens because they needed that more one-on-one since they couldn’t be in a group situation.
And so, honestly, personalized medicine. It’s the teen in front of you. Are they not going to talk in a group, but they’ll talk one-to-one is somebody they trust? Fantastic. Let’s go that route. If you have a teen who’s on the more extroverted side, does want to be in a group that would help them feel more community oriented around other people, let’s try to find that route. What have you heard? You interview everybody. What are you finding?
James Maskell: I’m also having my own life experience. I have a two year old and a 10 year old. We’ve chosen a path where there’s no social media at school. I’m on the phone because I work from home, and I have phone addiction. I recognize that is an issue for me. I’m definitely working out how to deal with it with the kids because I don’t want to bestow that on them. And even though they get no technology at school, which is part of our plan, I’ve started to realize some of the reasons why kids do give their kids phones because I get messages on my phone from some other kids and I can’t really text my wife things that I want to text her all the time because I don’t know who’s going to end up reading these messages, right?
Carrie Jones: Right.
James Maskell: So, I see that. Certainly, also we have family dinner every night and cook and shop and work together. We have grandma that lives on the property and try and keep her a steady structure in that. And so, I hope we are providing the right infrastructure for healthy growth and trying to keep it as normal as possible and as few hyper novel inventions or interventions as possible. It can be a bit… It’s not easy for anyone. I think I’ve got a lot more options because of my life circumstance. I feel sorry for parents having to deal with teenagers in this exact moment because there’s a lot of new and novel things in society that we never had to deal with before.
Carrie Jones: My goddaughter is 14. My other best friend’s son is 17. My stepkids are 21 and almost 24. It’s just as you said, I’m like, wow. Us parents would get together. We have never had to deal with some of this stuff. Some of it’s just awful on social media and really concerning. I applaud you for keeping social media off of your kids.
James Maskell: Any of those stories. Whenever I hear the word stories, the first part of the story is the kid had the phone.
Carrie Jones: The kid had the… It’s always—
James Maskell: And did whatever they want, and we’re in there doing this. I’m like, yeah. That’s always the beginning of the story, so we’re just not doing that.
Carrie Jones: Yeah. No, it’s true. I would have patients all the time that would tell me about apps. Recently, I was having a conversation with a mom and I said, “What family app do you have on your phone to track your kid?” Oh, I know. We were somewhere and we were having a… That’s what it was. We were picking up her daughter. She said, “Well, let me call her and find out where she is.” I’m just used to every parent has a family app on their phone, so I said, “Well, just track her. Pull up the map, track your kid.” She’s like, “We haven’t done that yet.” I’m like, “You don’t have a family app on your phone to watch the movement of your child?” She’s like, “No, we’re really bad. We need to do that.” I was like, “Man, even I know that and my kids are in their 20s.”
Yeah, we get it. Some of these things. But again, I don’t fault her, blame her. I’m laughing, but also you and I and her, we never had to do that. We were allowed to run feral. I was allowed to run feral. We had a neighbor, when the streetlights turned on, Mr. Isaacs would go on his back deck, and he would whistle for his kids. And you could hear his whistle through the whole neighborhood. So, it was well known when Mr. Isaacs’ whistle, when you heard it, you had to come home. My mom had no idea where I was, but nowadays that’s unheard of. You track your kid.
James Maskell: Yeah. It’s interesting. For us, I don’t know if you found this, but I’m grateful every day that I never had to deal with online dating.
Carrie Jones: It sounds horrible. Yes. My friends who are going through it, their experiences are not all usually pleasant. I couldn’t imagine. You have to be 18 to join the app, so 18 year olds are joining online dating. I thought, oof, the catfishing and the preying. It’s just scary, unfortunately.
James Maskell: Well, let’s go back to something that we were talking a bit earlier because you were talking about some of the supplements that you like and you recommend support children, adults, mood, focus, sleep. What are some of your go-tos? What are particularly the ones that you’ll like to do early on to get the significant change, to get the momentum?
Carrie Jones: Well, yeah. I can tell you ingredients that I look for. This might be helpful for people. So, I look for blends. Unless you are a very sensitive person, your patient’s very sensitive, or your child is very sensitive and you need one thing at a time. You can do these one thing at a time, but because we’re trying to support the whole system, I’m looking for things that have… We’ll take the top two. I’m looking for things that have dopamine support. So, that’s Mucuna, which is M-U-C-U-N-A, Mucuna. That helps with the building of dopamine. But with it, I do add 5HTP because I said earlier that dopamine and 5HTP, you can deplete the pathways, and we don’t want to do that.
I look for other calming agents that support GABA. I look for things like inositol. Inositol gets a lot of literature around PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, because of its effect on glucose and insulin, but that only carries over to the person who’s having blood sugar issues and are not PCOS. You can use it as well, it’s fine to help you when you get those highs and low swings of glucose, but inositol is also quite calming. L-theanine is one of my other top favorites. L-theanine helps to lower that brain on fire. It helps to get you into a healthy brainwave state. It helps to increase GABA, so it’s calming and relaxing, but it doesn’t necessarily make you drowsy, which is nice. People are like, “When I feel anxious, but I don’t want to… It’s workday. It’s my children. And I can’t fall asleep.” I’m like, ugh, L-theanine is a good one. It kicks in about 30 minutes, and it just keeps you at a Zen state without making you outright sleepy. But when you need to fall asleep, you’re already in a Zen state, and so, your body just helps push you over the rest of it.
There’s a couple of great nutrients. I look for zinc. There’s literature. Zinc on its own, it’s usually the answer to every medical school test. What nutrient do you need for? It’s usually zinc. It’s good for the immune system, it’s good for hormones, all of them. It’s been studied in ADHD and depression. It’s often depleted. Kids and adults often don’t have enough zinc. It became more popular in the pandemic, thank goodness. Magnesium, humans, adult and child, are often depleted in magnesium for a variety of reasons. Magnesium like glycinate with a G, glycinate, is generally calming because you get that glycine aspect of it. Glycine is calming. I like some sort of blend of all of those together to be helpful when you are having depression, anxiety, can’t focus, can’t sleep, just neurotransmitter all over the place. It’s a nice balance when you look at those.
James Maskell: Beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing that. I know you’re always on the cutting edge with ingredients and tools, so I appreciate you on that end. I guess just to finish, is there anything you’re excited about that’s innovative in this space—mood, focus, sleep—that you think listeners should be aware of before we tap out here?
Carrie Jones: Yeah. Well, I mentioned it earlier. I know that continuous glucose monitors get a lot of… They’re a hot topic as well for those who are diabetic, type I or type II diabetic. There’s an argument around if you’re not diabetic, should you even be able to use a continuous glucose monitor? But I find in even instances like this, when you add in the supplements and you’re working on your lifestyle, to get that immediate feedback of, “Oh my gosh, I’m feeling really anxious. I’m feeling really panicky.” And then you can see, “Oh my gosh, my blood sugar has completely dropped. No wonder I feel the way that I do.” Or you wake up in the middle of the night, it’s 3:00 in the morning. You wake up and panic, wide awake, adrenaline pumping. You see your blood sugar’s crashed. Now you know immediately what you need to do as opposed to ruminating, wondering, why did I wake up? Was it a noise? Is it stress? Oh my gosh, what I have to do tomorrow? All the questions.
And so, I think, while it’s not so much innovative, the way that we use it in the future is going to be quite innovative to get this feedback for people because I just think the greater world doesn’t realize that our blood sugar really does have such an impact on our mood, on our focus, on our sleep. By combining that with the supplements, especially something that has a little inositol in it, it’s only going to help. It’s only going to help you thrive and I love that.
James Maskell: Beautiful. Well, I think those are great recommendations. I got a lot of joy from my continuous glucose monitor because I realized that whatever genetic situation I have, it doesn’t move that far from baseline no matter what I do. That was just a nice to know and to be able to feel like I could trust my body a little bit more than I had. So, that was it. But I know for other people it’s been super empowering. I’ve Interviewed Jeff Bland about it. Some of his insights were so interesting because he just had very quirky glucose moderation and that helped him understand himself a lot better.
Carrie, thank you so much for being part of the podcast. I’m really glad to clear up a few things. When that thing about the serotonin hypothesis came out I just didn’t really know, what was the solid foundation to build for the future on. I’m really grateful for you to come in and share some of that. I’m excited to follow your latest endeavors. I’m grateful to have you here on the Evolution of Medicine podcast.
Carrie Jones: Thanks, James. I appreciate it as always.
James Maskell: All right. This is the Evolution of Medicine podcast. We’ve been with Dr. Carrie Jones. We’ll have more details of some of the things that she talked about in the show notes. Thanks so much to our sponsor, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. Check out goevomed.com/lmrc to find out about their memberships for education. Dr. Jones is a key educator on the stress side and you can see why. They’ve got all kinds of resources there to aid in patient education and support. In the meantime, thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools like the Group Visit Toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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