I recently contracted a parasite while traveling in Brazil. In today’s episode I talk about how to naturally balance your internal ecosystem without destroying the good stuff. I share my perspective on having a mindset that is not in constant battle with the body.
We all have parasites, but not all of them actively cause symptoms. I’ve experienced several bouts of parasites that have caused unwanted and destructive symptoms. I’ve been reflecting on how we can naturally balance our internal ecosystems harmoniously versus the conventional model.
Parasites don’t always go away when the immediate symptoms end, and in fact, there are many long-term health outcomes if you don’t seek proper treatment. When something enters your bloodstream that's not meant to be there, your immune system activates and attacks the foreign pathogen. Just because symptoms subside, you cannot be guaranteed that the parasite is gone. This is what I experienced when I contracted a parasite in 2019, while traveling to Morocco.
Unfortunately, our traditional healthcare system is at war with our physiology. The collective bacteria that resides in all of us needs to be protected and healed, not automatically destroyed by antibiotics. In this episode, I share the restorative protocol that’s been working for me and what this experience has shown me about feeling younger while growing older.
Listen in as I explore an alternative solution for recovering from parasites and other potential pathogens.
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Dana Frost 00:07
Welcome to Vitally You, a podcast created to introduce you to the tools that will be your roadmap for feeling younger while growing older. I'm your host, Dana Frost, a wellness expert, life coach and energy medicine practitioner. Here's what you can expect conversations about vitality from the inside out with guest experts in the field of health, culture and spirituality, and solo episodes along the way from me where I do deep dives into the topics of aging, heart intelligence, energy, medicine, and your innate capacity to heal. If you want to feel younger, while growing older, this is the place for you.
Dana Frost 00:52
Hey, everyone, I'm Dana Frost, host of the Vitally You podcast and I am coming to you this week solo to talk about parasites. Now it might seem like an unusual conversation relative to feeling younger while growing older. But I hope I can make those connections for you today. So stay until the very end to learn about the working protocol that I've been using. So when you hear the word parasite, what comes to mind? Worms, diarrhea, foreign travel, nausea, exciting stuff, right? Well, the truth is, we all have parasites. I know that's so hard to believe, but we all have parasites. But not all of us have parasites that actively cause symptoms. A healthy immune system and the community of bacteria that populate your gut can successfully calm problematic parasite exposures.
Dana Frost 01:49
But the reality is that even a healthy gut community is impacted by many variables, and sometimes a pesky parasite hijacks hijacks the community of bacteria in your body. And we know that this happens because we have acute symptoms like stomach cramping and diarrhea. So I want to tell you the story in 2019, I traveled to Morocco with my daughter, I dropped my bags off in the boutique hotel. We were staying in Medina, and my daughter had not arrived yet. And I knew that I wanted to explore the markets. So I went out exploring the markets and I could not resist. They're all over these beautiful oranges. freshly squeezed orange juice, and I could not resist and it was so delicious. It went down great. And I have to say hours later, I had intense cramping and full scale diarrhea.
Dana Frost 02:46
And after a while the diarrhea subsided. And then it came back and it subsided. And then in the middle of the night it was full scale, I will tell you water faucet for hours. And if my memory is right, it stopped the next morning and it didn't ever returned. And so I naively thought that my risk was over and I had gotten rid of the parasite or food poisoning I didn't really know it was I knew that it was one of those things. So fast forward, and I'm back home. And several months later, it dawns on me that the digestive symptoms that I had had years ago,we're returning ik super uncomfortable
Dana Frost 03:26
bloating, like the kind of bloating maybe you've experienced this where you feel like you're pregnant, and it looks like you're pregnant and really bad gas. It's just so uncomfortable if you have this after every time that you eat. Now that same year was my oldest daughter's wedding. And there was a lot going on. So I basically just managed it. I did what I could do, I implemented the daily strategies in terms of food and healing herbs and targeted fiber. I didn't do any testing, I was just managing it. But I'd have to say the bloating and gas went up and down. It was like the seesaw alternating between mildly annoying and absolutely severe. So in January, I made it one of my New Year's resolutions in January of 2020.
Dana Frost 04:14
I did all the necessary stool samples and labs and I discovered that I did have an over abundance of a couple of bad parasites and the bacteria in my system was just not in harmony. With this information. I started a treatment plan and I started a treatment plan with a naturopath it didn't really work. So I went back and went back to everything that I learned through my functional nutrition training and one of the companies that I knew liked and trust bio Seaton and another company microbiome, and I started doing a different protocol. So from this story, what I want you to learn is that parasites do not necessarily go away after you've had I had an acute symptoms subside. So that's what happened in in Morocco, I had these acute symptoms for 24 hours they went away, that doesn't mean that I actually got rid of that exposure. So many of you know that we lived in South America for 10 years.
Dana Frost 05:17
And during that time, our pediatrician treated our kids for parasites as a yearly protocol. And I don't remember the specifics, except that there was a pill that they took, I don't remember the dosing or exactly what it was. But my impression was that parasites are that common in Brazil that a pediatrician would do yearly, I have a yearly protocol for children in her practice, and that they must be potentially harming or she wouldn't do this protocol. Without testing. She didn't test them. She just did the protocol. So this was before I had my functional nutrition training. And it really was when I implicitly trusted the doctors that I went to. Fast forward to my recent travel to Brazil. And at the end of that trip I had, it was the my last day of my trip, I was having intense cramping, and then the diarrhea started. And I was just okay, I knew I had a parasite, I just I knew it.
Dana Frost 06:18
So when I came home, I knew that I needed to start a protocol as soon as I got home, even though those acute symptoms had lessened. I didn't have stomach cramping. I actually didn't have diarrhea. But I knew that I needed to start a protocol. So I started protocol already had in my home, it actually after five days, I'm like this isn't moving anything, it's not working. So let me just say that with an effective protocol. These are the things that you should feel moving along, you should have increased bowel movements, you should see eggs in your stools, and those are little white, like they look like little white seeds, you should maybe have nausea from die off symptoms, you should probably feel fatigue from die off symptoms. And I was tired, I have to say I did have that symptom. But it really just felt like everything was stuck. I just knew intuitively I knew that this was still going on.
Dana Frost 07:17
So I turned to a dear friend, who's also a health practitioner, Heather Houseman, because I knew that she had a lot of experience successfully treating parasites. And she turned me on to a different protocol. So I want you to stay tuned to the end to learn exactly what I implemented. And the good news it is working. Okay, how do I know that it's working, I'll go back to these die off symptoms. Eggs in the stool, you want your bowels to be increasing to three times a day, I really want to highlight this idea of pooping, you have to eliminate and I mean, you need a full elimination if you're treating parasites. And so for me, my normal full elimination is one bowel movement a day. So I knew I needed to be moving, I needed to be moving those parasites out of the system.
Dana Frost 08:08
And I needed to be getting to three bowel movements a day on this protocol. And I started to move towards one bowel movement to bowel movements. And now I'm still on three bowel movements a day. And you want to continue just to say you want to continue that protocol for at least a month. And that's going to be very individual, you know, I'm not diagnosing or, you know, I can't tell you how much time that's going to be for you. I'll be watching it for myself. I'll monitor and I will probably test maybe two months down the road. But honestly, that's sort of opening a whole nother can of worms, if you will, pun intended. And I'm not going to be able to like specifically treat you but I do want to walk you through my situation. So the die off symptoms.
Dana Frost 08:59
Brain fog fatigue, I mentioned bloating, starting with decreasing actually bloating decreasing in intensity. And I have to say that happened with me I was bloating, bloating. And after day five on this second protocol, my my bloating began to decrease as I started eliminating more. So I want to talk about what happens long term if you don't treat. And this is what happened sort of like in the long short term of that year after I went to Morocco when I didn't treat it and I was just doing some you know some of my casual strategies that you know that community of bacteria in your gut they it will remain your gut community is going to remain compromised with these unwanted guests. Your digestive system is going to begin to act up again. You could see that was happening for me your intestinal wall. If it's not already permeable, then it is going to become permeable.
Dana Frost 09:56
And what I mean by that is that in your digestive system, you have a very So your digestive system, it's like a doughnut, and your body should be shielded from your digestive system. And that wall in your small intestine should be it, you have these things called tight gap junctures. And it's like shag carpeting. And that is protected from foreign pathogens coming into your digestive system and entering into your bloodstream, anything you've ingested. Ideally, your digestive system is so strongly protected by the acid in your stomach and by the community of bacteria in your, in your gut, that when something foreign comes in, you are protected by the community by the acid by this shag carpeting, that lines your gut. Okay, so what happens when you have unwanted guests, if your digestive system will act up if they stay long term, if something enters your bloodstream, that's not meant to be there, your immune system will become activated and it goes on the attack.
Dana Frost 11:02
This is really interesting, because when your immune system goes on attack, and there's something in your bloodstream, your immune system is activated. And if it's not able to take care and get rid of that, which is a foreign pathogen. This is when we have an activated immune system, a compromised digestive system. And actually, this is the root of our auto immune disorders. And I'm not really going to totally focus on that today. But I just want to say that if you have a rogue parasite that is left unchecked, you end up having these things happen where your digestive system is compromised, your good bacteria, your good bacteria is crowded out, the bloodstream is compromised, because this immune system is activated. And parasites, they find way into other parts of your body into your fat tissue, you begin to have achy joints, you be maybe begin to have compromised mental processing, this chronic stimulation of the immune system causes inflammation across the system, resulting in these health complexities.
Dana Frost 12:11
So I've given you a little bit of an overview of my parasite story. And now and then what happens in the body. And again, this is just I'm using just lay person's terms. But this is actually the fun part. This is actually what I really want to get to, I want to share something that's a little deeper about how I view this community, in our gut, in my gut in your gut and the collective bacteria that resides in all of our guts, because actually, this is how we are all connected. And this is a very different view way to view a different perspective on viewing your health and these potential pathogens that we are exposed to. Let me start with this parallel scenario. So I was traveling with one of my longest dearest friends. And she also got the parasite that resulted in intense cramping and diarrhea. We just dealt with it differently.
Dana Frost 13:07
She went with the conventional model when she got home, which is totally normal. We all have a different perspective. I'm just presenting you my perspective, she went to the doctor shared her symptoms, her doctor made a judgment call based on the information and prescribed an antibiotic. And she took that antibiotic and her symptoms were solved, her symptoms were solved. But we know that antibiotics are like dropping the atomic bomb on the community of hosts in your gut. So the conventional model goes to war and kills all the civilians, not just the problematic ones, wipes out everything. And what I see is that this war, our current model, has in dealing with physiological and mental health issues by bombing the system with pharmaceuticals is not solving any problems.
Dana Frost 13:57
Rather, it's creating unnecessary complexities further down the road. Just talk to anyone talk to anyone who's assisting an older loved one, you will learn that these we know what our conventional model does with our older population is that they put them on a cocktail of pharmaceuticals. One specialty doctor isn't communicating with the other specialty doctor, there's interaction of these different pharmaceuticals. And they're all these complexities for older population and their bodies are responding and having side effects from these different this cocktail of pharmaceuticals that they have. Are the older population. Are they becoming more functional on these pharmaceuticals? Actually, no, their functionality is decreasing. Their symptoms are intermingled and more complex. Okay, another example is I have one client who's been on psychotropic medication for many years.
Dana Frost 14:54
During her full functional health intake that I did the full history review, we set down and I was able to show her on her labs and what one doctor was saying about elevated liver enzymes and the interaction and all the symptoms she was having that the majority were actually the result of side effects from these different medications. So what's my point with this? Our conventional model is at war with our physiology. And we have been led to believe that we need to be at war with our physiology. And I want to propose that instead, we become acquainted with our symptoms as red flags to do the cleanup work. And we start that cleanup work in the gut.
Dana Frost 15:40
So when we have a parasite, that is evident that we go to the gut to do the cleanup work, maybe when we have other symptoms, it's not so evident. But we always always start with what's happening in the gut, whether it's a mental health issue, a skin issue, or even a heart issue, or a blood sugar issue or hormone issue, we're going to do the cleanup work first in the gut in this community, the microbiome, that is the community of bacteria in our gut. So how do we end the war with our physiology? We don't bomb that whole community? No, we don't do that we work towards balancing the ecosystem of our inner terrain. And how do we do that? Well, I believe we start with nature. And this is why as human beings, we are organic, our human biology is organic material.
Dana Frost 16:33
We come from nature and like, recognizes, like, in my case, both my protocols were herbal and plant based, because that's what recognizes, although I did make sure I was getting clean protein just as the building block, but clean actually, for me, it's animal and fish protein, and plant based protein. But we are made of bacteria, we are made of bacteria. So we need to start with the premise that bacteria is not the enemy. Even a parasite, it's not actually an enemy. It's an unwanted guest. So we have these symptoms, and it's simply, our system needs to be ushered back into balance, not detonated with an atomic bomb. On a higher level note, we can compare this to the macro level, don't we see that globally, that global influence, we cannot escape war, we know that on a micro level, none of us want to be at war, not one of us, no one says let's go to war. on a macro level, the leaders globally are continually when one war ends and another war begins.
Dana Frost 17:42
So we see that the powers that be there war is the solution on a macro level. And that's led to this micro level always being at war, even with ourselves. So my word to you is to end the war first with your self on a micro level with your body. Because when you do that, you're going to be able to see this large scale mission to be for ever, in a war between family members, between neighbors, between unions and executives between country to country, and it's not working. You know why war is not natural. Being at war is not a natural state. So let's come back to my parasite. Okay, I was not going to go to war with my parasite. And this may just sound crazy to you guys. But I would not allow it to control my community, my inner terrain, and thus compromise my long term health.
Dana Frost 18:40
So it was an I had an attitude. I'm not going to be at war with this parasite. Because we all have parasites, we're all exposed to parasites, we have bacteria, it's only when the bad ones come in and overrule the good ones that we have a problem. So my goal was to crowd out the bad ones that I contracted in Brazil. So they didn't upset or harm my existing community because it's accumulative. I spent a decade over a decade healing my inner terrain. That was the first place that I started in 2011. And that community in my gut, I don't want to destroy what I've done. Okay, so the work I've accomplished so far, so it's all about bringing homeostasis. If you go in and bomb it with antibiotics, you are moving backwards, not forwards. And you're gonna love the name of the herbal blend I used and are you ready?
Dana Frost 19:32
As I said, it's from David Wolf. Or maybe I said that I don't know. And I'll put the link to his website in the show notes but the acronym is Brugg. And it stands for this removed on wanted guests. Not remove the enemy, not bomb the enemy, not destroy the enemy simply remove the unwanted guests. ushered them out. Remove the unwanted guest not enemy but guest What is the definition of a parasite? An organism that lives in or on an organism of another species, its hosts and benefits from deriving nutrients at the other's expense. For thing it cannot a parasite cannot live on its own, it is dependent and vulnerable. It's not evil, it's only destructive if our community isn't strong enough to usher it out on their own. So when that's the case, we don't go to war, we simply remove unwanted guest with help from nature, a community of herbs that the parasite consumes.
Dana Frost 20:35
So the things that were in this blend, the parasite consumes them, and guess what they self destruct, and they are eliminated, they are eliminated with our elimination, they move out of the system. This is how you have dominion over your health and the community of bacteria that makes up your physiology. So you might be wondering, what's the connection to feeling younger while growing older? First of all, the energy of being at war with anything downregulates, immunity and peace of mind. Secondly, if you allow unwanted guests to take over your home, you will have problems. The physical is simply a mirror for the energy that emanates from you. So if a parasite is trying to overrun my internal community, where else in my life do I have parasites, and I have to be honest with you and share that, I knew I had to evaluate potential parasitic forces in my own life, because one showed up in my gut.
Dana Frost 21:38
And so they're interconnected. Where something shows up physically, you want to look in the energetic world. And if you're feeling something energetically, you might be curious about what's going on in the physical world. And this might sound crazy to you. But after a decade of playing around with these principles, it rings very true to my experience, personally and as a practitioner. So I don't know what do you think about all this? Are these concepts totally new to you? I'd love to hear from you. What is your perspective? I'm really super curious, because this might sound wacko to me. Now. It sounds totally normal. Are you ready to in the war with yourself and the communities that inhabit you? Are you ready to usher unwanted guests out the front door? Well, let me see.
Dana Frost 22:25
I think you'd be ushering out the backdoor. Let me know I would love to hear from you. Because when then it feels like I'm not having this conversation with myself and speaking into the void, but I'm actually in a conversation with you people listening. So I'm sure you want to know what is the rest of my protocol. Okay. I want to place a disclaimer, I kind of mentioned this earlier that I'm not making medical claims rather, I'm just sharing the protocol that is working for me to restore balance in my microbiome. So it started with this rug. It's David Wolf's remove unwanted guest and another one of his products. Carbon Wolf's carbon detox. This contains Akropolis olive oil and a proprietary blend of activated charcoal, C 60 and other naturally occurring fullerenes. I also use bio Sweden's gi detox that contains zeolite, charcoal and an herbal formula. I use something I have always available. It's a recipe that's from my nutrition school but functional nutrition Alliance and it is called intestinal broom powder.
Dana Frost 23:31
It's a concoction of different seeds and fibers and roots and herbs. I also use things like grapefruit, oranges, pumpkin seeds, honey, daily greens, garlic, shallots, onion, cilantro, olive oil, avocados rather, I'm also wearing lightweight patches that I've talked about before that the patches that help with healing and daily detox process. So I've been patching with x 39, our stem cell patch, eon and anti inflammatory patch glutathione, which is our master antioxidant carnosine which is in it's a miracle molecule and all of your tissues really helps with healing of gut. It's in all of your organs. It's in your brain. So those and movements so getting some exercise, making sure again, I talked about eliminating I'm eliminating and lots and lots of water more water than normal. So that's it. That's how I am bringing balance to my community of bacteria in a spirit with clear boundaries and peaceful efforts.
Dana Frost 24:38
Okay, thank you for joining me on the vital your podcast this week. If you enjoy these episodes, hit subscribe, download and share with a friend. Please consider leaving a review on apple or a five stars on Spotify. To leave an apple review let me just go over you how you do that you go to the homepage and a vitally you podcast scroll down You'll see the reviews start to pop up. And when you go and you want to see all reviews, they're going to ask if you want to leave a review, you'll select the stars and then you'll be prompted to write a written review. And then you submit. It might take apple up to 24 hours to post your review. They monitor reviews, don't be afraid if it seems like it disappears, it will show up later. So here's a little review story from Amazon. I left a review of someone's product, and I had a word in it that was a cuss word and I had x out a couple of the letters. They rejected it because they monitor reviews so reviews this is a good thing they get you know they are monitored so I had to re they prompted me to rewrite a new review. Anyway, that's it for reviews. Thank you so much for joining me this week on the vital you podcast until next week. I am streaming love from my heart to yours