Skip to content

Subscribe Now to CRW Podcast

Click Here

Speaker 1: Hey guys welcome to this week’s episode and I’m so excited. Today’s guest is Doctor Marisol. She’s a naturopathic doctor. She’s the queen of thrones, she’s a world leader in natural medicine and we’re so excited that you’re here, welcome.
Dr. Marisol: Thank you so much, I am super thrilled to be joining this podcast today.
Speaker 1: Well, I know your first book is about to drop, pun intended, and it’s called “Oh S-H-I-T” I love that name, it’s hysterical.
Dr. Marisol: It is, it’s meant to really be a shocker, right? Because so many of us out there are living with IBS or problems with our digestive tract, and so many of us don’t want to talk about it, but I just really want to bring it out there in the open.
Speaker 1: That’s awesome. I know the book’s just about reducing anxiety and stress that irritate your bowels, so you can get that natural rhythm. I will tell you, I literally love your show and I don’t think enough people talk about it. I don’t think they’re open enough about poop. It’s taboo and they don’t want to talk about it, and for me, literally I have friends … I go to a bible study and I have friends that remember that I would literally pray for me to poop. They’re like, “Oh yeah, I remember. Remember we used to pray that you would poop because you hadn’t pooped in two days?”
Dr. Marisol: It’s so true. It’s so common. I can’t believe how common I see that in practice. People, they complain. They’re like, “Oh my God. Why can’t I go? Why can’t I go?” We don’t understand how important it is for our overall health. You know how everyone calls it your number two product? I actually, and my whole team, we call it your number one product because it says everything about you. It really, really does. There’s problems in your system whether it’s anxiety, or stress, or low magnesium, low nutrients. You can discover a variety of different things just from learning how to analyze your stools, and we need to talk about it. Everyone needs to talk about it, and I always say, “Acquaintances talk about sex but best friends, they talk about poop.”
Speaker 1: That’s so true, and you know what’s funny? I literally look at my poop every single time I go. I get up, I look at it, I analyze it, so I do it all the time. Now, tell us about how did your passion for gut health begin? Is this something that you struggle with yourself personally?
Dr. Marisol: Yeah. Most people who’ve gone down the realm of really focusing on something have had a personal experience with it. For me, it started so early on with my mother actually being severely constipated, and myself being constipated, not really knowing it was constipation because a lot of people just aren’t aware of what actually is constipation. I just remember us going on travels to Florida, being on vacations and she’d always be like, “I need to go to the grocery store because I need to go get prunes, and apricots, and peaches.” She wanted plums to make her [Spanish 00:03:01], right? I’m Spanish and in Spanish that’s the verb to go to the bathroom, right?
Sorry, my little Lola is making a little barking. Hold on …
The key to it was this, was that I was living that same life. I didn’t feel well, I was overweight as a child. I had, you know, I was probably about 160-180 pounds by the time I was 12. I was severely depressed, unhappy, anxious, I had anxiety to the point where they classified it was asthma, but it wasn’t asthma. It was just anxiety. Then, you know, nothing was done about it. Later on in my life I finally started to adopt a few good eating habits. I started cutting out things and I started getting into my own body and my own life. As I got older I switched from constipation to extreme diarrhea. It was like a back and forth. I’d either be constipated or then diarrhea.
It started really affecting my social life. Everything about my life was restricted because I would be where is the nearest bathroom? Should I carry a spare pair of underwear everywhere I go? It was really impactful to my overall life and not the way that I wanted to live. I went to specialist after specialist like most people do. You know, they ended up concluding that I had an irritable bowel. They said sorry about that. You know, you could try removing foods, and I had already been doing those things. I had seen lots of naturopaths. I just felt like you know, I just think I have to go to school in order to really, I think I’ve got to figure out the formula for myself.
That’s what I did. It motivated me, the pain motivated me to change my life. The dreams that I wanted when I was a child where I wanted to be Liza Minnelli and I wanted to be a doctor, right? This package is perfect. What ended up happening is that I realized that I loved talking about poop because it is my pain point in my life and it’s one of those topics that you either have to be incredibly serious about it or incredibly funny about it. [crosstalk 00:04:59] personality it’s perfect. I can joke about it, we’re Spanish, we’re very open about it in my family, so it’s a perfect fit.
In my clinical practice is incredible. Maybe only 20% of people out there are diagnosable with an IBS, but that’s only the people that go to the doctors for it. Right? Because most of us go for a single complaint. Most people, any condition that they have there’s problems with their gut as well, too, and they’re just not expressing it because they don’t think of that as the main problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well I was looking at your website and you wrote a post called Hyper Wiper, which is a hilarious name. You were talking about the hidden issue that hyper wiping reveals. I thought that was really interesting, so tell us more about that.
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, ironically hyper wiping is the very first question that I use to bridge the topic of pooing in my practice and my patients. I always go, “Are you a hyper wiper?” They’re like, what? What is this lady talking about? I say, “You know, do you wipe more than once when you go to the bathroom?” They go, “Oh, I don’t know. I think more than once for sure.” I go, “Well, that hyper wiping is actually a sign of mucus because it’s a sticky poo. It’s also a sign of potential food sensitivities, allergies, possible inflammation in your gut, and dysbiosis which is where you have a bad mix of bad bugs over the good bugs in our gut bacteria.
People right then are like, “Oh my I really have to start looking more and more,” because it really is a huge problem. As a society, as people what we should be doing is we should actually, literally poo, wipe and the paper should be completely clean and there should be no problem.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, yeah. Indigenous cultures they’re eating the right foods for themselves, they’re living in the right environment and so when they go to the bathroom they squat, they pop and they walk away. That should be what we’re doing. You can actually really assess the good and bad foods in your life by that one measure, hyper wiping, especially for many people. I’ve always said, look at what you ate 24 hours before and there could be a correlation. Then we can know slowly maybe start to modify not eat those foods as often and see what happens with your stools.
By the second patient visit with me, most patients actually have no more hyper wiping because we’ve done the first steps to really get their gut to start to reset.
Speaker 1: Do you recommend any kind of supplements? Do you take any supplements yourself each day that kind of this really helps you?
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, absolutely. For me it’s a combination of life practices, diet, you know, timing of my meals. I know you’re a huge fan of intermittent fasting, right? Yeah, I love it. I started that about three to four years ago and it’s just been a wonderful thing for my life and for so many of my patients lives. Now pretty much every patient who walks in, they’re on an intermittent fasting protocol. In terms of supplements, there’s a few very important basics that I do all the time and it’s also an optional recommendation to my patients is I start people off with probiotics and an alkalizing formula in the AM and PM when they first wake up in the morning.
Sometimes, if these patients are having really, really, really … Or myself, if I’m having problems going to the bathroom I’ll add an extra fiber supplement because I might not be getting it in my diet. Especially when you’re traveling a lot, right? Along those lines. I really love to recommend probiotics on an empty stomach for the purpose that I really want people to [crosstalk 00:08:33]
Speaker 1: Do you have one that you really love?
Dr. Marisol: I actually created my own supplements in my practice so I tend to work with those ones. Mine is called Gut Toned. It’s actually a formula that we’ve created and it’s specific to the gut. What you’re looking for in a really good probiotic formula that I could recommend is that you really, especially if you have gut problems, avoiding things that have what’s called FOS’s. Fructo-oligosaccharides. Fructo-oligosaccharides, those are actually called prebiotics, but for many people with an irritable bowel syndrome, if you take too much of them, for example, you already get them in your food and if you take a concentrated dose of them or get too many of them then what can happen is it actually starts to overgrow bad bacteria and yeast and cause more fermentation and more problems for your gut.
I always say look for a probiotic that is free of fructo-oligosaccharides. It will typically say on the label like FOS’s, they won’t be there on the label. That’s really important. Certain strains, especially if you have an irritable bowel problems with constipation, diarrhea, bifidobacterium infantis is very important on your probiotic because that is the initial populating probiotic. If you have that, it’ll help to improve your population and your initializing of the gut bacteria. I can tell you how important it is to combine it with an alkalizing formula.
Alkalizing formula, calcium, magnesium, potassium [inaudible 00:09:57] those things ideally has a little bit of Vitamin C. DFH has a really good formula called Electrolyte Synergy which I use quite a bit in my practice, or [Alkapractice 00:10:09] is our version of it. I’ve just got a couple more different things in it. It’s got Vitamin C in it, it’ll have calcium, magnesium, potassium, so it helps to alkalize the body, improve your electrolyte mix, which is excellent, which is what you want because you know the gut is based on electrolyte balance. Then, it’ll also calm you down because the magnesium will help you go to the bathroom, too.
When you take probiotics with an alkalizing supplement on an empty stomach, you improve your intake of the actual probiotic and the sticky factor, I like to say, of getting those good gut bugs.
Speaker 1: Gotcha. I went on your website and I was looking and I went to the store and it said our online store is currently under construction. Please send an email to and then it has another website that’s sanis.ca. Is that where you kind of partner with Sanis to create those different things that you love?
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, so Sanis is my clinical practice. Over my 10 years of practice I basically refine the formulas for our supplements because I’ve seen so much, right? It’s ironic, what happened in my supplements I actually created them initially for children. Because so many children are cesarean born, right, and so when you’re cesarean born you lack the initial inoculation of good gut bacteria. A lot of cesarean born children will have allergy problems with their digestive tract, they’ll have constipation.
I was a cesarean born child, same thing, right? You see that pattern and so from the patterns I saw in practice I started to develop the supplements. We actually have our online part starting very shortly so it’ll be up and running very soon and people will see the different things that we recommend. The most ironic thing is most often than not, I don’t go to supplements first. I often actually go to something called the caster oil pack. A lot of issue is that for me, myself, like how I was is that I was taking the right supplements, I was doing the exercise, I was eating the right diet but there was something that was missing that wasn’t letting me have that good balance in my gut.
What I realized was for me, and for so many of my patients, it was our imbalance in stress. It was that we are constantly, right, we’re running on octane, high octane, gasoline, 24/7. It’s like we’re living in Jurassic Park, you know, running away from the Tyrannosaurus Rex all the time. The thing with that is that when your system in overdrive consistently and you don’t have good balance of moving it into the relaxed state, you actually end up not being able to go to the bathroom because all your blood flow is going out to your extremities, out up to your brain because you’re trying to run away from a predator.
The blood flow is not going to the digestive tract to help your body be able to do the job it’s supposed to do, to package and eliminate. That is the [crosstalk 00:13:00]
Speaker 1: Explain how the caster oil pack works.
Dr. Marisol: Yes, yeah. You’re actually from Virginia Beach, which is awesome. Virginia Beach is the origination of the Caster Oil Pack here in North America, which is amazing. The Caster Oil Pack, caster oil, first of all, is one of the most unique vegetable oils that exist. It falls out of fame for many reasons because of course it’s a little bit messy and it’s a little bit sticky. The Caster Oil Packs were exactly that, messy and sticky before. But we made it really easy to do.
They do five very specific things. Number one, they get your bowels moving. This I because caster oil actually mimics the human body’s little messenger called PGE3. This messenger …[crosstalk 00:13:49]
Speaker 1: Hold on. Explain to me, so like when I was pregnant I actually gave birth to my son three weeks early because I was like this is so, I threw up, when I was pregnant I threw up every single day I was pregnant. I was the worst pregnant woman. I threw up like six times a day, every day, even to the time that I gave birth. I was like I am so done with this. I did like cross-fit that morning. I literally did. I took caster oil, you know, how you find all these things? I literally took spoonfuls of caster oil and the my water broke and I ended up having him.
When you say a Caster Oil Pack, is this … Explain what it looks like.
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, so a Caster Oil Pack, as an example I’ll show you what we’ve got here. This is my Caster Oil Pack, which is a cotton flannel, layers of cotton flannel that you’re going to be placing on top of the liver area of your body. What this does, caster oil, it being the most unique oil, you place the oil on the cotton flannel and then you attach it onto the body.
Speaker 1: Caster oil?
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, it’s really neat because you can take caster oil orally like you did, and what that does is that’s a strong mover of the bowels and of the uterus. Any of the smooth muscle in the body. A Caster Oil Pack is more regulatory for the system. It starts getting the bowels moving, or if you have the other opposite extreme where you’re going too much it starts to calm them down and relax them.
Caster oil is the only oil that can go underneath of the dermis, which is the first level of skin. You can’t achieve this with coconut oil, sesame oil, none of the other oils because they don’t have the right molecular weight. One of the components of caster oil really helps to bring it down deep into the tissues so it gets into the circulation and it gets into the gut from the outside in. That helps you avoid, because as you know, caster oil isn’t the most delicious flavor. Although you probably [crosstalk 00:15:37]
Speaker 1: What is your opinion on getting caster oil and massaging it on your stomach? Like literally, if you got a massage. One of the things I’m kind of, you know, everyone spends money on different things and for me, mine is massage. I would rather spend it, if I had my choice, like one of my best friends, she’d rather go buy a shirt. I’m like, I’d rather wear the same shirt I’m wearing but give me a massage.
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: What do you think about taking caster oil and actually massaging it on your liver? On your gallbladder? On your stomach?
Dr. Marisol: I love it. It’s also one of the ways that it works. It works a little bit better with the actual pack because you have an entire stimulation of the nervous system effect. Because you’re getting a strong massage, that’ll help to play a role in that. It’s beneficial because it goes deep into the skin, right? The pack, the change of the packs does about 50% of the treatment is that because it’s localized in one area, it keeps the nervous system in that area in the relaxed state because it’s stimulating all this skin. You get a similar effect if you’re having a deep massage, right? You’d want to [crosstalk 00:16:54]
Speaker 1: Show everyone, if you’re listening to this on podcast, we will have this on YouTube, as well, so if you search this go to our show and subscribe to Chantell Ray Way, you’ll be able to show it. Show everyone one more time that pack and what that looks like.
Dr. Marisol: It’s basically a piece of cotton flannel, right? It’s actually quite large. It’s shaped in an infinity sign because this you can use all over your body. For women, they can use it on their breasts. Men can use it on their chests. You can use it on your hips. Caster oil is such a great anti-inflammatory so if you have hip pain or you hurt yourself … [crosstalk 00:17:28]
Speaker 1: If you hurt your neck, you could literally put that caster oil on there and then wrap that around.
Dr. Marisol: You got it, or if you’re really tense in your shoulders consistently. I remember being in naturopathic college and just hunching over my work all the time. People at desks do this all the time. I would put it on my shoulders and I would wear the pack while I was watching TV at night just kind of relaxing. [crosstalk 00:17:52]
Speaker 1: Are you putting the caster oil on the outside of that pack and how much caster oil are you using?
Dr. Marisol: Not very much. I’m actually using about two to four tablespoons. More the first times that you use the pack because you actually keep on reusing the pack. I would pour caster oil, two to four tablespoons, I would basically blot it and then what I would do is I would take it and place it straight on my liver, which is on your right side of your body. Then I would attach it and then I would just go to sleep. Some patients, I say, “Go make your dinner and wear your pack while you’re eating your dinner.”
When I travel I wear them at night. When I’m at home I often wear them during the day time, because they’re very relaxing so then I tend to be more effected at my work and what I’m doing and creativity and such. Caster oil packs, really, they’re easy to do now because before they used to be about 12 steps. What I did is I saw that patients wouldn’t do the packs with the old recommendation of how to do a Caster Oil Pack, so I created this to help patients do it and for myself to be able to do it. [crosstalk 00:18:53]
Speaker 1: Why would someone use this Caster Oil Pack versus just taking the caster oil, putting it on a piece of cloth and putting it on there? What are the benefits?
Dr. Marisol: Less messiness, right? And two steps, because you often want to add heat, as well, too with this pack. It’s almost like an insulating pack so you don’t need to add heat. You can walk around with it. A lot of us don’t, like, when I first started doing my Caster Oil Packs and I first created the Caster Oil Pack was I realized was that I wasn’t the type of person who had time to lie down there and sit for an hour and relax and meditate. It wasn’t my practice back then. This actually ended up becoming my gateway to, you know, putting it on my body. When I put it on my body you actually feel a sensation of relaxation.
That is what happens because of the packing of it. It’s no different than when you have an injury you pack an area. You pack an area so that the body can bring blood flow, can you know, do the activity in the area. That’s the big reason why to do it and to be able to have the mobility, and to be able to set yourself up in baby steps to learn how to relax. We don’t. As a society we are out of the practice of relaxation. We don’t know how to do it, and so for us to get into it, a Caster Oil Pack like this that attaches onto your body is super great.
We actually use this in practice to teach people how to meditate. To just sit there in calm.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, and I think that’s why, like I said, why I feel like that massage that I get it two times a week is truly because of that. People say to me all the time, “Chantell, you don’t know how to relax you just go, go, go.” That is the time that I truly do kind of really relax, so I love that.
I know that you offer a Fit For A Queen course, and people can sign up for that. Give us one hint, give us one tip that you share in the Fit For A Queen course that listeners can come to expect.
Dr. Marisol: Absolutely. The one tip in Fit For A Queen, I’d probably have to say that Caster Oil Packs, you want to do them as a practice. Daily if possible. I travel with it, I go everywhere with it. Caster Oil packs in my practice was the missing link for the majority of my patients. I would put them in a cleanse, you know, they’d be spending thousands of dollars getting IV therapy, colon hydrotherapy, taking a boatload of supplements, they’d be doing all those things. I wouldn’t see the results at the end of the month. I would ask them, and the one question I would always ask them was, “Did you do your Caster Oil Pack?” They’re like, “No. I thought it was irrelevant.” I go, well we’re going to have to do the cleanse again.
We actually did a study in our clinic comparing two groups of patients in a cleanse and we took laboratory measures to see the difference pre and post. Liver enzymes will go down, cholesterol will go down, a bunch of markers for the digestive tract will go down. The group that did the Caster Oil Packs with the cleanse compared to the group that didn’t do the Caster Oil Packs had a much bigger improvement over all. I’ve seen that time and time again in my practice.
What I’ve realized is that you know, Caster Oil Packs, they help you absorb your food better, they help you absorb your supplements better, they get your gut to not be so leaky so the foods that you’re eating, you’re not as allergic to them. It has such a massive widespread effect that to do a pack every single day is probably the best recommendation I could give any single patient. That’s why it’s part of my mission.
Speaker 1: That’s awesome.
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, yeah, they’re legendary. They’ve been around forever. There’s practices of them being used in Ancient China, in Ayurvedic medicine, Egyptian use caster oil, Mediterranean Basin, anyone who’s Indian, any of the islands, they all use caster oil. The reason for it is because it just does so much good stuff.
Speaker 1: That’s awesome.
Dr. Marisol: And … [crosstalk 00:22:42]
Speaker 1: Yeah, go ahead.
Dr. Marisol: This is the, I think you’ll love this. It’s actually one of the anointing oils in the Bible. Caster oil, also it’s other name is Palm Of Christ. Yeah, it’s a very, very healing oil. The plant itself, the neatest thing about it is that the bean actually has the potential to kill. It can heal you, but it can kill you. The bean, which is the protein part, which is not in the oil so people don’t have to be worried about this if they’re using the oil, is actually used as biological warfare. I think it’s the most perfect example of yin and yang, the balance that we have in nature, you know, light and darkness, all those things. It really is, and they say that caster oil, like frankincense oil, one of the oils that was brought from the three Kings, is an oil that is very connecting to the source to God.
Speaker 1: That is awesome. Before we start with listener questions, you know, we talk a lot about intermittent fasting diet on this podcast and I always like to ask my guests about a day in their life of like when do you eat? What kind of foods do you eat? When do you eat them? Are there any foods that you avoid? Is there anything that you go everyday I make sure I eat x, y, z? Talk to us about the day and the life of your eating.
Dr. Marisol: Awesome, awesome. I wake up, I typically go to Yoga in the morning between 6:00 to 7:00. Hot Yoga because I like to sweat all the stuff out of my body.
Speaker 1: I think people don’t realize, you know, the days that I do that kind of sweating. I don’t love Hot Yoga, but I do it because I know how good it is for my body. I do, also, like to get in a sauna. The days that I get in the sauna and sweat it out I just feel like 10 million times better. I think that makes you, I think that sweating helps you poop, too, don’t you?
Dr. Marisol: It sure does because when you sweat you move the fluids around in your body you’re actually, you’re doing good flood which is what your system needs. The biggest problem is people don’t have good flow between the different compartments of their system like their gut and then the outside tissues and the cells. Sweating gets things moving and gets things like out of the body. Caster Oil Packs during saunas are excellent. There’s many detox retreats and centers that actually do that, so that’s something that you can add into your little practice.
I often times will take the Caster Oil Pack and go run for a little bit. If I don’t go to Yoga, I’ll do a 10 minute intensive interval, like running, break, running, break, running, break kind of like a [inaudible 00:25:11] base or intensity interval training. I’ll wear my Caster Oil Pack because I’m at home and I want to just enhance everything.
I start my morning, again like I said, those supplements that I take plus green tea. Green tea is a major component of helping to improve the gut lining over coffee. Plus, green tea before exercise actually helps to improve your exercise effect, so that’s what we want. I fast til about I’d say 11:00 or 12:00, depends on the day, and then I’ll eat over an eight hour period. Before that I was having green tea, water, sometimes I’ll do a little bit of lemon water just for a little bit of a change up and that’s very good for the bowels, as well, too.
My first meal typically consists of a protein whether it’s salmon, chicken, beef. I try to stay away from pork. Pork is very similar to human tissue, and so for many people it can cause a reactivity to it but it’s also the meat that actually takes the longest to actually digest. Fish and fowl, fish [inaudible 00:26:14] about an hour and a half, two hours. Fowl is typically around three hours and beef is about four to five. Pork is actually about seven to eight hours to digest. It’s really heavy on the intestinal tract. Lots and lots of vegetables whether raw or cooked. I love my salads. They’re easy to do. I premake them often times on the weekend. Or cooked vegetables, depending on how I feel.
I’m in Canada, so it’s cold now so we’re like, it might be cold in Virginia Beach, too. I’m not sure how you’re doing there, but I love to do a little bit more warming food when it’s Winter time. Then the eight hours I give myself leeway. I either will snack or eat, depending on how hungry I am. I know I’m a metabolite quickly because my gut is working so well. I am truly in and out, it’s fantastic. I’ve gotten my system to be very finely tweaked at this point in my life. Unless I go off of tract like all of us. [crosstalk 00:27:12]
Speaker 1: Do you do any like food combining where you’re kind of eating vegetables with meats and not eating any carbs with … That makes the biggest difference when you are doing food combining.
Dr. Marisol: It’s so huge. I always tell my patients the number one thing with food combining is stay away from fruit and protein, especially if you have gut problems. Fruit and protein, protein requires stomach acid, and fruit requires alkalinized environment. What ends up happening is that you end up taking the protein for fruit, so say like a Mango Chicken salad, extra mango. You eat that mango with the chicken and what ends up happening is that you’ll start to ferment the fruit in your gut and that fermentation byproduct makes me feel bad, makes me feel foggy or fuzzy in your brain, and it also creates bad bacteria overgrowth.
I always say my biggest thing with food combining is try to keep away, always keep away as much as possible, you know, on occasion but from the fruit and the protein. I tend to recommend if you’re going to be eating starches, especially if you’re working towards weight loss you have those starches on their own, like between your meals. If you’re doing intermittent fasting and you’re really craving a baked potato, have a baked potato but on its own. Whenever you combine carbohydrates with fats you actually increase your fat intake in terms of fat storage. Always try to avoid doing the carbohydrates, like pastas, with a lot of fat.
The reason why obesity is an epidemic is because a lot of our common foods are all that. They’re all heavy carbohydrates and starches with fats and then we eat that all day long and we forget about our vegetables, right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so how much, is there anything vegetable wise that you say, you know, every day I eat this, this and this. I mean, my husband and I just got back from a trip and we were in Miami. There was this restaurant that had this fresh baby kale salad. It was to die for. I was eating that every day I was there. Even twice a meal I was eating kale salad. I literally, I felt like a million bucks. I almost felt like that kale was cleaning my system out. I mean, between the sun, you know, he was like, “Gosh, Chantell, you are just like tons of energy.” Yes.
Dr. Marisol: That’s something, you know, when you’re loaded in your gut you’re loaded in your mind and you’re fuzzy, foggy and not feeling well. Overall, just not good, right? It’s exactly that group of the family of vegetables that I make sure that I eat every single day which is the brassica family of vegetables. The broccoli, cabbage, the kale, the brussel sprouts, I love brussel sprouts. Those are my staples because those, especially for women, whatever stage you’re in whether it’s transitioning to menopause, whether you’re in the prime of your life, whatever it may be. These foods are so good to help balance out our hormones, to help provide amazing fiber to our systems. I make sure I always eat those.
I often, I always try to get as much as I can at the grocery store, arugula because arugula is a bitter vegetable and bitter vegetables are the best to get your bile moving, which stimulates your bowels moving. Then beets. I can’t tell you, for a starchy vegetable, how important beets are in our diets. Every weekend, I make a massive cauldron, I’m I’m not around my husband makes it for me. He’s very well trained. He’s a great husband. He’ll make a massive pot of beets for me, and he’ll eat them, as well. I always put them in my salads, I put them on meals. Beets are amazing soluble fibers so they really keep the gut regular. They’re healing for the gut and they have a bunch of detoxification components that’ll help your livers keep you clean and keep your hormones all in balance, as well, too, which for us is, you know, as women, our hormones really are out of whack for many of us. It’s because of our diets and us not going to the bathroom properly, so this really helps to rebalance all those things out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the thing is is that I’ve heard people say, “Well, I don’t like beets.” I would have told you several years ago that I didn’t like beets because I was thinking of canned beets. But then I went to like a [crosstalk 00:31:31]
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, they’re not good at all.
Speaker 1: They’re disgusting. I went to a restaurant and had this amazing beet salad that I tasted. I was like oh my gosh, this is out of this world. It’s something, you’ve got to have fresh roasted beets otherwise it is disgusting. If you’ve kind of like me had in your mindset oh, I don’t like beets, well you’re probably talking about canned beets, which I think are disgusting, as well.
Dr. Marisol: Absolutely. Try just boiling beets. Take off the skin, boil the beets, cut them up, put them in a delicious, one of your favorite salads and I find that’s a really easy gateway to kind of start to eat salads. We use beets a lot actually to test people’s transit time. How long it takes them to go to the bathroom. [crosstalk 00:32:15]
Speaker 1: Let’s talk about that for just a second.
Dr. Marisol: Let’s talk about it? Yeah. [crosstalk 00:32:20]
Speaker 1: With beets, because, so honestly, when I eat beets that is one thing that is a little bit disturbing is when I have beets my urine ends up being pink and my poop is bright red. Is it the same for you? Is that okay?
Dr. Marisol: That’s awesome, that’s actually what we’re looking for. The bright red color of foods typically means that it’s cleaning the blood and it’s healing, right? Red is a healing color. That’s doing that within the gut. We actually want all those because those are also polyphenols, they’re antioxidants so they’re good for the gut. We use it as a transit test to see how long it takes your food to come in and out of your body. We always warn patients about their pee going red because everyone gets worried that I’m bleeding, it’s a problem, and I’m bleeding from my intestines.
As long as you know you’ve eaten beets, you’re good. It depends on your transit time whether it’s a 24 hour period or a 36 hour period. [crosstalk 00:33:13]
Speaker 1: What is that time? From the time that I eat those beets, when should I be peeing red or pooping red? Would it be right away or it takes a while?
Dr. Marisol: Peeing can be right away, yeah, it can be within two to three hours. It’s really rapid because you absorb it and it goes straight to the kidneys. But the stool, that’s where you want to see because that’ll tell you whether you’re more on the line of constipation or diarrhea or you’re right in the middle and you’re perfect.
The ideal is 24 hours. All the food fiber and fluid that you at the day before within a 24 hour period and it’s typically a pretty long [crosstalk 00:33:46]
Speaker 1: Within 24 hours or at the 24 hour mark?
Dr. Marisol: Ideally within, I mean nothing in medicine is ever like perfect, but it’s somewhere within the 24 hours, give or take a little bit. If it’s under six hours or 12 hours that’s a very fast transit time so your body is super fast metabolizing and getting things out. As long as you don’t have diarrhea symptoms and that could be okay for you. Some people just have really [crosstalk 00:34:11]
Speaker 1: The key is when you do the food combining it goes through your system so much faster.
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, and the reason is you’re not making glue, right? Like dairy and wheat. You could make a kids school glue by combining wheat, dairy, vinegar and baking soda. Vinegar and baking soda are like stomach acid vinegar, baking soda comes from the pancreas, you make actual glue in your gut. Oh, it’s super cool. I just did a segment on a national TV show here in Canada on glue in the gut. It’s just like it’s incredible. It’s nontoxic school glue because it’s made of flour, you know, milk, vinegar and baking soda.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, so that’s what you create in your gut. The principle of it is that it just slows things down and then you don’t go to the bathroom well. If you food combine put those separately, right? The dairy separately, you know, I’m not a huge component of dairy. I often tell people to avoid dairy. I don’t feel we should be consuming dairy.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately I love dairy, but the two things I completely take out of my diet is dairy and wheat. Those are the two pieces. The thing is you’ve got to get excited about what you, I always say this, you’ve got to get excited about what you can have instead of … I went on this trip to Miami that I just got back from. I didn’t eat an ounce of dairy or an ounce of wheat. I had the most amazing food ever. It was delicious to die for.
All right, well let’s jump right into the questions. This first one is Joann in Virginia Beach. My friend got something called the Squatty Potty. It’s a stool that sits around your toilet and lifts up your knees so you’re sitting like a caveman when you poop. She said this is the way nature intended us to poop, lol. I have never heard of this before and what is the truth behind it? Do you agree with it? Joann in Virginia Beach.
Dr. Marisol: That is true. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1: I have one.
Dr. Marisol: The thing is you don’t even really need a squatty potty. You actually can do it in a couple of different ways. I always teach patients. What happens is this; our toilets are on a 90 degree angle. The problem with a 90 degree angle, you guys should test this out by doing a squat against the wall where you keep your body and put yourself into a chair. When you put yourself into a chair like that you’re lower pelvic floor is all tight. How on earth are you going to be able to squeeze poo out?
The other thing is that the sphincter closes up, right, because you’re completely tight. When you go like this, what happens, so from here to here, this opens up the lower sphincter and then everything can come out of the body, so this is your knees up here, right? The three ways that I tell people to do it, to position for success is this; you can get a squatty potty or a stool, any stool will do, a little small children’s stool. I really, you can use your reading material that you have in the bathroom, right, that’s one way to do it. Or, what I like to call poo pumps, so your favorite high heel shoes that are the higher the better. You put them underneath of you and that actually works perfectly to just put you in the right position, so you can use poo pumps, too.
Speaker 1: Self [inaudible 00:37:14]. Right?
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, yeah. It’s actually part of my, I love tools to teach people about their poop. Poo pumps are a great way to do it, that’s an awesome way. One last thing you can do, too, if you’re out nowhere and you don’t have the option is to just lean forward a much as you can onto your knees and you know, people, I used to do this as a kid naturally because I always felt constipated and I couldn’t go to the bathroom. If you’re having problems going to the bathroom you’ll find like when you’re having a belly ache and you feel you got to go you’ll lean forward, right, because your body is trying to get it out. It’s just a natural instinct in our system.
Speaker 1: Awesome. This next one is from Natalie in Alabama. I’ve tried everything natural to help me go, and it seems like everything works for a short amount of time and then all of the sudden it stops working. I’ve tried Senna Tea, Aloe Lax, Smooth Move just to name a few. Why is it that they seem to work and then all of the sudden stop? Do you have any recommendations for something else to either drink or take as a supplement to help me go?
Dr. Marisol: Awesome. This is the most common thing that I see in my clinical practice. I don’t know about her specific chase, but for most people this is how it goes. They’re taking, she’s taking the right things and each times that she takes a supplement she introduces something new. The body has a period that it has to adjust and it’ll work. Over time, you know, like her levels of things change and the balance in her body isn’t working as optimal. The key to this is this is where the Caster Oil Packs come in play or role in.
Her issue, more than anything, not that she needs more supplement is that she needs to command her stress more than anything. Her balance of rest and stress is heavy duty into the stress space so then her bathroom time is always going to be trouble. She needs to do retraining of her stress system and using the Caster Oil Pack will help, plus the Caster Oil Pack will help with getting those bowels to move on a regular basis. [crosstalk 00:39:14]
Speaker 1: A lot of our guests do one thing that they’d like to give away and we post it on our Facebook page if they share and like it. Do you want to give away one of those Caster Oil Packs?
Dr. Marisol: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Okay, that would be great.
Dr. Marisol: I would totally love to do that, yeah. I’ll give away two. Let’s do two. Actually, three because that’s a good number. The Holy Trinity.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we’re going to give away three to the lucky people. Share, like and comment on the post and that would be awesome. All right, next question. This is from anonymous. It’s funny that all of our poop questions are anonymous, right? She said I listened to your podcast about floating poop and I went to my doctor and he said that floating poop isn’t that big of a deal. It was thought to be for a little while but that’s a less popular idea now. He said it has to do with the amount of fat that you are eating, but I shouldn’t be concerned. By the way, this was a general doctor, not a specialist. I feel like I’m just getting mixed messages about this because after your podcast I got the idea that it was a bad thing.
I’ve been reading online a lot of stuff that talks about the foods that we eat that cause gas that makes the floating poop. I was surprised because some healthy things that were listed were apples, honey and prunes. What is the deal? Is it good or bad or doesn’t matter? Anonymous.
Dr. Marisol: Awesome, awesome. Great question. Good and bad is probably the words we’ve got to watch there, because you know, our body is a system and systems aren’t perfect or not perfect, right? There’s a flow. The doctor is correct. There’s partly a component that it does have to do with the fat that you’re consuming. The reason why, and there is also a component of different foods that contain high fructins that will cause gas and will make the poo also float.
The fat is the main one you want to watch because fat is so absolutely important to our lives. In the food little conversation that we had earlier about the things I eat every single day it’s a lot of oil. A lot of olive oil, a lot of avocado oil, coconut oil. I would add that to the mix. [crosstalk 00:41:20]
Speaker 1: What about hemseed oil? What is your thoughts on this?
Dr. Marisol: I love hemseed oil, too. Yeah, that’s another one that I’ll eat. I always find those are little harder to find something, but I love hemseed oil. I love changing out my oils. I’m definitely a big fan of olive oil every single day and most often a lot of times coconut oil, too. Then avocado and I’ll do walnut, I’ll do hemp oil, I’ll do a little bit of flax oil. I’m good with all of those oils. Oils are what brings things into our body and takes things out of our body. That’s why caster oil works for what it’s doing, it’s helping you to absorb things and it’s helping you to eliminate things out of your system and it just has so many more activities.
Oil keeps us young. Oil is the base product of our hormones. We need oils and we need to be absorbing them properly. If you’re having those floating poos what you want to do is you actually want to start watching and tracking. When are your stools floating? Because women, usually age 35-55, white women, this is like a [inaudible 00:42:16] and it’s done in the medical literature, tends to have a lot or problems with their gallbladder. They’re in the most common population that end up getting their gallbladders removed. The gallbladder is what helps you absorb your fats on a daily basis.
Plus, you also need fats to have beautiful skin, so this is very important. Especially as we age, right? We want to keep our youth and our vitality as long as we possibly can. If you’re consistently having floating stools then there could potentially be an issue with your ability to absorb the fat in your diet. Especially if you’re not consuming a lot of fat in your diet. If you’re having the occasional floating stools but you know, one day I over poured olive oil or I just ate oil all day long, every single meal and it was just really, really heavy duty in fats and oil, and then I had floating stools, okay, then that you would think, obviously. You were eating a quantity that’s outside of your normal. You want to watch and track what is happening over time.
Are you consistently having those floating stools? If you are, then what you want to be doing is typically Caster Oil Packs to help you absorb things better and then also you can do a digestive enzyme in combination and you want to be looking for a digestive enzyme that contains bile. Bile salts, that is what helps you to absorb your fats and so then you would be combining those two treatments. Yeah, great questions. [crosstalk 00:43:36] There will always be controversy, too.
Speaker 1: Talk about bile for just a little bit and talk about those bile salts that you were talking about. Is that all through a supplement that you suggest or do you feel like that’s something that people, you know, they should take a bile builder? What is your opinion on that?
Dr. Marisol: Great question. We actually create our own bile through having a healthy diet. There’s two types of bile. There’s healthy bile and sick bile. When you’re eating processed foods, all the bad foods, sugar, alcohol all the time and that’s your consistent diet. McDonald’s or what have you, like you got eat you’re a fast food junky, you tend to have bad unhealthy bile and the bile doesn’t serve a healthy purpose in your body. It actually helps to promote bad gut bacteria.
If you’re eating really healthy vegetable oils, all the good stuff, you actually have healthy bile. Healthy bile actually stimulates your gut movements and also helps you to absorb your fats and it also heals the gut lining like nothing else does. Bile is super important for the human system. The reason why we like Caster Oil Packs is Caster Oil Packs help you to stimulate and increase your bile production naturally, which is great, right? Whatever you do you want to try to do it naturally. You don’t always want to have to be taking a supplement. Bile salt in the supplement will help to give you added bile salts while you’re trying, you’re working on improving your natural abilities to create more bile and to be able to add that to your system.
That’s a big problem for people and yeah, and like I said, women between the ages of 45-55, that white woman category, they really have problems with bile salts. Typically, they’ll have those gallbladder problems, right?
Speaker 1: Awesome. Okay, Angela in Myrtle Beach. I want to have a stool test done to see what’s going on and find out if my liver and gut are normal. What is the best kit I could buy to help me dive into those issues but won’t cost me an arm and a leg? Something that is reliable. Also, can you just do a blood test for this or is stool better? Angela in Myrtle Beach.
Dr. Marisol: Great, great question, Angela. I love that. Stool tests are not my first go-to. It is my finding, and I’m a digestive [crosstalk 00:45:49]. They’re actually the last thing on my list. Unfortunately, Angela, we’re not going to be able to get, there won’t be one that won’t cost an arm and a leg because they do run quite expensive. Anywhere, I think the least I’ve seen is $400 to $600, $700. Depending on how intensive you want to have it.
My recipe is if you are understanding your stools and you watch them and you look at them we’re launching shortly what’s called Know Your Poo. This Know Your Poo is basically a little e-book that tells you about all the different types of, the 11 measures of your poo and what’s a perfect poo and what’s a poo that you’ve got to work on. It’s more important, in my opinion, for you to understand what your poo is telling you than necessarily that stool test. I might get some backlash on that, but that’s my opinion.
There’s actually a conventional lab that will actually serve as a better way to understand what’s going on with your stools. You can look at things like urea is a sign of dysbiosis and uric acid. You know when you have people when they have gout they have elevated levels of uric acid. Gout is actually a very severe unbalance of the gut microbes in the body. That’s one way to look at what’s going on. There’s other measures in your labs, but the best ways to really see what’s coming out of your body is out of your stools. The exception to that would be like a hydrogen breath test for sibo. If you’ve got small intestine bacterial overgrowth, right? That is one test that can be done.
I would almost start to do things like get your food sensitivities tested because then you could start to take action on them right away, right? You can remove those foods out of your diet for a period of time and see what happens on your bowels. That’s a more beneficial, in my opinion, a beneficial lab to do when you’re having gut health issues because then you can take those foods out and you can act on it right away. The stool test is okay, but in my opinion I think you could do a lot better with understanding your stools in doing a food sensitivity test, instead.
Speaker 1: All right. This next one is from Courtney in Fluvana, which I have no idea where Fluvana is, but she says I have this problem where every time I’m in a car and airplane, somewhere that I know it’s really inconvenient to go to the bathroom I have to go. Even if I’m driving to church or work locally, I have to leave 15 minutes early just in case I have to stop at a gas station and go to the bathroom. What is my problem and how do I get back to living my life? Courtney in Fluvana.
Dr. Marisol: Yes, it sounds like Courtney may be suffering and this is the type of patient that would be suffering from like an irritable bowel, the diarrhea type, right, or probably, she might have some alternating back and forth. I don’t know her patient case specifically, but that’s what it sounds like. What’s interesting with this is I suffered from this quite a lot in my life as I got older. What I realized is that the main thing with this is that it is definitely based on your levels of stress.
You’re going into these new environments, you’re leaving your home, typically the balance between stress and relax isn’t well balanced. The most important thing is for her to learn how to do stress reduction techniques. This is a case where Caster Oil Packs help to regulate and improve your ability to get into a good relaxed state quickly. I would be doing exercise, so she’s going to have to look at her entire lifestyle practice to really get this tuned in and keyed in. Things that are going to help her relax are going to be the very best thing like creating mantras, having gratitudes practices before she leaves the house. Maybe doing a Caster Oil Pack before leaving the house. Trying that at home first and seeing the effect that it has with her.
This is, stress really affects our bowel function. Like there is no two ways about it. Patients like her typically might have anxiety or depression or alternating of those things, so that’s what you want to be watching for. Stress plays a huge role in our bowel health.
Speaker 1: All right, this is our last question. This is from Jennifer in New Hampshire. Do you think CBD oil helps with constipation? It’s been helping me with pain in joints, but does it help or hurt with constipation?
Dr. Marisol: The research is really lacking in this area and I don’t quite use it for constipation at all, or for gut health for that matter, just because there’s so many other tools that you can use before you go down that way. I don’t think there would be a problem with it hurting. I’m sure it’s a little bit both ways. There are, the thing with the gut is the gut is the hub for the hormonal system, the nervous system, and the immune system. What CBD oil stimulates is cofactors from the nervous system. They’re likely very high in the gut so there could be potential that it could help or it could not help. That I can’t comment on too much, but you know, with everything see what happens. You’ve got to try it out and see if she can relieve her pain and what’s going on with her bowels and start to watch her poo. Then she’ll get a good idea.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today and when can we expect your book to come out?
Dr. Marisol: Yeah, so Oh S-H-I-T is launching in the Fall, so we’ll be launching that in the first weeks of October. Yeah, we’re really excited.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can come back on the show. You’ll come back on the show right before it launches so we can have another one. This was absolutely amazing and thank you for being so generous in giving away those three Caster Oil Packs. I can not wait to get mine. I’m going to do it right away. I’m so excited.
If you have a question that you want answered go to questions@chantellrayway.com and if you want more information just on what we talked about today, go to Dr. Marisol.com. We will put all of these links in the show notes, and thanks again for being here. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Bye, bye.
Dr. Marisol: Awesome, awesome. My pleasure.