What Your Body’s Telling You About ADHD with Jules Galloway
When you live with ADHD, you might be used to the mental whirlwind — the dopamine chases, the deadline surges, the exhaustion that follows. But for many, there’s a deeper and more insidious battle happening in the background: chronic illness. This week, Pete and Nikki welcome clinical naturopath and passionate advocate Jules Galloway to unpack the tangled web between ADHD, adrenal fatigue, autoimmune conditions, and the gut-brain connection.
Drawing from her own experiences with late-diagnosed ADHD and years of working with neurodivergent clients, Jules explains how chronic stress and inflammation can alter the architecture of the brain, and how burnout isn’t just a buzzword — it’s often a physiological crisis. From cortisol testing and histamine intolerance to why so many ADHDers feel like they’re constantly “wired but tired,” this episode brings clarity and compassion to a deeply misunderstood intersection of mental and physical health.
Jules also shares practical, empowering strategies for healing — from stabilizing blood sugar with protein-rich meals to reducing inflammation through gut health and sustainable lifestyle changes. It’s a conversation full of insight, empathy, and real-world tools for anyone struggling to understand the full-body impact of living with ADHD.
Links & Notes
Jules Galloway’s website: julesgalloway.com
🌿 Get 1 month FREE access to ADHD Naturally (no credit card required): julesgalloway.com/adhd-naturally-freebie
Follow Jules on social: @julesgallowayhealth
Join the Taking Control ADHD community on Discord: takecontroladhd.com/discord
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh, Nikki, last week I think we unlocked something. We leveled up with a whole new conversation about ADHD and aging. This week we're continuing our conversation about ADHD and the bod, and we've got a good one. Oh, it's a doozy and I'm really excited to get into that. Before we do head over to takecontroladhd.com to get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to the mailing list and you will get an email each time a new episode is released.
Connect with us on Blue Sky or Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at TakeControlADHD. But to really connect with us, join us in the ADHD Discord community. Super easy to jump in there at TakeControlADHD.com/Discord and you'll be whisked over to the general invitation page and log in. But see it coming train, coming down the tracks. If you are looking for a little more, particularly if this show has ever touched you or helped you understand your relationship with ADHD in a new way, we invite you to support the show directly through Patreon. Patreon is listener supported podcasting. With a few of your dollars each month, you can help guarantee that we continue to grow the show and add new features and invest more heavily in our community. Visit patreon.com/TheADHDPodcast to learn more.
When we think of ADHD, we often picture the fast mind, the whirlwind of creativity, distraction, and drive. But what happens when that whirlwind hits a wall of exhaustion, when the body can't rise to meet the ambition of the brain? For many, this is not a hypothetical. This is life with chronic illness and ADHD, two conditions that intertwine in complex, often misunderstood ways. Enter Jules Galloway. She's a clinical naturopath and a fierce advocate for women who find themselves caught in the tangle of burnout, fatigue and neurodivergence. From her own journey through adrenal fatigue and chronic illness to her work, supporting others with trauma, histamine intolerance, and late diagnosed ADHD, Jules is here with a healthy dose of expert teeth. Expert teeth? I like that. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
She has great teeth.
Pete Wright:
Expertise. You have your expert teeth on? A healthy dose of expertise.
Jules Galloway:
I'm trying not to say anything here.
Pete Wright:
No, you're ruining my fantastic intro, Jules. Jules is here. Jules is here with a healthy dose of expertise and empathy. Jules, welcome to The ADHD Podcast.
Jules Galloway:
Thank you so much for having me. And hello all the way from Melbourne, Australia.
Pete Wright:
So good to have you here. Really, seven o'clock in the morning podcasting is, in my mind, intolerable anyway. I don't make sense before 9:00. So we are so grateful that you are here and let's dig in.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Let's start with this adrenal fatigue and late ADHD diagnosis and things that are clearly in your personal experience. Give us your superhero origin story on this topic.
Jules Galloway:
Yeah. Like any late diagnosed ADHDer, it's a bit of a long and convoluted story because we take a really long and winding road to figure out what our brains are made of. So I had a background where I passed school. I was straight A's most of the way through school until I got rebellious in the later part of high school where those grades dropped because I was doing very naughty things. Because I was passing school, no one suspected a thing. But I was the kid who got all their schoolwork done really quickly and then distracted the kid next to them and was... All my school reports, when you look back now, it's like, "Oh my God, it was so obvious."
It was like, "Julie talks too much in class. Julie distracts the person next to her." I'm like, "Well, actually I was the distracted one, but okay." And then I went through life and I started my own business when I was in my 30s because I sucked at working for other people. And I became very, very interested in natural health, became a naturopath, scraped through uni to get that done. Still no one suspected anything. Tried to hold down a few jobs, sucked at working for other people, still no one suspected anything. And then I hit burnout and everyone just said...
Because in our profession when someone's been stressed or under the pump for a long time and they're fatigued and broken and inflamed, we will call it either adrenal fatigue or burnout. And so I just thought I had adrenal fatigue and I needed a whole bunch of adrenal herbs. And then I was really inflamed, so I thought I'll just take a bunch of anti-inflammatory herbs and if I was tired, I thought, "Well, I just need to dial up my B vitamins or figure out what my magical nutritional concoction is that I need."
And as I ate better, I felt better. If I increased my protein or balanced my blood sugar, I would always feel better and I'd be like, "Okay, well this is what I need to teach other people." So then I started marketing myself, this is like 10, 12 years ago, as a naturopath for adrenal fatigue and burnout. And so all the tired women came. It was like, "Send me all your tired mums," right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh boy.
Jules Galloway:
All the time-
Nikki Kinzer:
You had a wait list, I'm sure.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I was going to say, lined up out the door.
Jules Galloway:
Right? I was like, "Oh, here we go. This is what I do." Okay? This is a good market. I love these women. They were my people. I always felt like I vibed with so many of my clients because they were intelligent and burning the candle at both ends and ambitious and they were fun-loving and they were funny on... I was doing telehealth calls way before COVID. And so we would sit on telehealth and I'd be like, "Oh, this is wonderful. I love my job." But what I didn't realize is that they were my people more than I even realized because as I then went into my 40s and got my own diagnosis of ADHD, they were still my people. And they started coming out of the woodwork at the same time that I came out of the woodwork and I was like, "Oh, I think I'm an ADHDer. I'll go get an assessment." And of course I talked about that on Instagram. And then of course all those people came.
Pete Wright:
Let's get into what is happening and the connection between the constant state of fight or flight that we live in with ADHD and how it hurts our adrenals or how we're living with chronic pain and those kinds of things. What is the ADHD impact? Because I think there are a lot of people who are living with these physical physiological, somatic conditions and don't understand how ADHD, neurodivergence intertwines and in some cases can fuel these conditions. Can we go there?
Jules Galloway:
Have you got four hours?
Pete Wright:
I do. I have exactly four hours, our lucky day.
Jules Galloway:
So ADHD can literally physically change the brain over time because stress changes the architecture of the brain. So your amygdala can grow when you are exposed to chronic stress or trauma over and over again. So the amygdala is like the fire alarm part of the brain that will let you know when there's danger and then that will start a cascade of chemicals that gets the body ready for some sort of impending stress and danger.
Pete Wright:
I like to think of it like I'm working out a muscle, is that not the right way? My amygdala is super buff. I mean, shredded.
Jules Galloway:
Yeah. But is that a good thing? So that's the thing, if you only worked out one muscle at the gym, your body would start to become out of balance. Right?
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Jules Galloway:
So you have to work all the muscles. And if you work a muscle that goes that way, you have to work a muscle that goes that way. So if you do a pushing motion, you have to then counteract it with a pulling motion to make sure that your body stays in balance. And the brain's a little bit like that as well. If you only work out the amygdala but you're not working out the other parts of the brain that do the opposite and other things and integrative things, then you are going to end up kind of lopsided.
So, yes. So stress and trauma can change the architecture of the brain and it changes the chemicals and the messengers that are actually being produced in the brain. Stress can also cause an uptick in inflammation. So inflammation in the body can cross the blood-brain barrier and then cause neuroinflammation in the brain. And even teeny tiny little amounts of neuroinflammation can cause a very significant change in moods, mental health symptoms and other stuff that's related to brain inflammation, things like insomnia, migraines, that sort of stuff as well. So when you think about ADHD, we are actually more prone to making inflammatory cytokines than neurotypical folk. There is a study on this. We make more interleukin 6. There's other things we make as well. So we make more inflammation sooner and better than neurotypicals. Like, "Go us," right?
Pete Wright:
Right, yeah. We're very proud people. But we've got to talk about inflammation then. Talking about chronic illness, it always seems to come back in some way, shape or form to inflammation.
Jules Galloway:
It does. It does. And in this case, when it crosses the blood-brain barrier and causes neuroinflammation, that's when some of the problems are going to kick off. And so we know that anyone who's got a history of trauma is going to make more inflammation. We know that ADHD is a neurodivergent effect. We're already going to make more inflammation. Find me a neurodivergent person who hasn't had some sort of trauma in their backstory as well, okay? Because a lot of us come from dysfunctional families, or we come from dysfunctional situations, or we come from bullying, or we come from some sort of trauma in the workplace because we felt like we were failing. There's all of these points along an ADHDer's life where we are going to be more likely to hit upon hard times.
And so that gets stacked in the inflammation bank. And then the fact that we are more likely to make that inflammation anyway gets stacked in the bank. And then let's talk about how neurodivergent folk are more likely to have gut issues. And if you've got a gut problem, if you've got an imbalance in the gut that causes an inflammatory cascade to kick off as well. So we are so behind the eight-ball on so many fronts on this topic that sometimes I feel like we're sitting ducks. And a lot of people when they come to me, they're not just coming to me with stress, burnout, fatigue, lack of focus, all of that sort of garden variety ADHD stuff, they're also coming to me with some sort of health issue that is driven by inflammation.
So ADHDers are more prone to autoimmune conditions, for example. So often we'll see it hand in hand. And I've started to realize that I can reverse it as well. And if someone comes to me with an autoimmune disease, I should be considering that they might be an ADHD or they might be autistic as well because it's so highly co-occurring.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
Jules Galloway:
So when you think about all of that, it becomes the perfect storm. And when the brain's inflamed, we're more likely to have an increased response to stress. So when the brain is inflamed we're more likely to have mood issues, we're more likely to have anxiety, we're more likely to have insomnia. And what's the thing that ADHD's need the most in order to literally reset their nervous system? It's sleep. So it becomes a snowball effect as well. And once that inflammatory switch gets switched to on a lot of us, our bodies can't find the off switch. We can't figure out how to flick it off again. And that's one of the things that I do with a lot of my clients is just get them to flick that switch to off through diet and supplements and lifestyle modifications, et cetera, so that we can reset the body because that helps to reset the mind.
Pete Wright:
You work with not exclusively with women. Do you practice exclusively with women?
Jules Galloway:
No, it's just that that's who always used to come for [inaudible 00:13:01]
Pete Wright:
Who shows up. Totally. My understanding is that ADHD and chronic illness are... We already know they're historically underdiagnosed in women. But as is chronic illness, these kinds of issues that we're dealing, with historically underdiagnosed in women. You've already said here's how it shows up in your practice. They're showing up in droves, in the lines of people looking to figure that out. And I'm wondering how you see the not very fine line between burnout that we use as a buzzword and burnout as a clinical sort of physiological condition that is showing up in your patients? How do you characterize that difference for people who legitimately don't know what they're experiencing?
Jules Galloway:
It's really cool because nowadays compared to... Because I've been a naturopath for 20 years and so I've seen this evolution of practice where we keep getting more toys and tools to play with, so we can now do blood testing and it's not just a helpful tool in my practice, it's an essential tool in my practice. And it's becoming easier to do this blood testing because naturopaths are actually able to order it now rather than we used to have to try and write a referral to the GP and then the GP, which is the physician, and they would then... We would hope that they would order the test. Now we can just order it ourselves, which is great.
So, for example, if someone came to me with a hefty dose of fatigue and I spoke to them and I'd be like, "Okay, so there's been a lot of chronic stress. There's a lot going on." I would sit there, the first thing I do as a practitioner, and most people who work from a functional medicine perspective do this, they draw a timeline. And I call it the what went wrong when story. And everything the person tells me in that initial consultation goes into a timeline and we shuffle that timeline around, a little bit like the old Price Is Right, where we're like, "Okay, that one goes above that one and below that one," until we go, "Okay, cool. So in 1997 you had glandular fever/Epstein-Barr. Okay, we put that there. Okay, in 2001 you went to Bali and you got some sort of tummy bug and you've never been well since in the tummy. Okay, cool."
Everything goes in that timeline and then we find the burnout point, we put that in the timeline as well. And we're like, "But that's not the point where things went wrong." That's the point where they realized things had gone wrong because they hit rock bottom. So it's like, "Okay, well, this is the point where you became really exhausted, but how long do you think this was going on for prior?" "Three years." "Okay, cool. What happened three years ago? What happened in 2022?" "Ah, yeah, I got divorced." "Okay, cool." So everything goes in there.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Jules Galloway:
And once we've established that there's a level of stress feeding into this story that's like some things have happened that are a big deal, that would cause burnout. Then we go, "Okay, cool. We're very justified in then doing some cortisol testing," for example. But also we have to realize that sometimes neurodivergent folk are more sensitive than other folk. So it might not even be some huge event like death or divorce or some sort of university exams or something that tipped them over the edge. It might just be accumulation of a lot of little stresses over a lot of time, because we are different in the way that we experience the world compared to neurotypical folk.
Pete Wright:
A lot of the lowercase T traumas compound into effectively physiologically a capital T trauma, whether or not we've experienced something like that.
Jules Galloway:
Absolutely, which makes that timeline harder to reach. So cortisol is a stress hormone that is produced by the adrenals when we are exposed to chronic or ongoing stress. So not just a quick stressor, something that's rolling over a long period of time. So say if you're driving along the road and a dog runs in front of your car and you have to slam on the brakes and you're full of stress hormones, that's adrenaline. Adrenaline is like short, sharp, fast, and it's over very quickly. So it has a very short half-life. So you'd get that rush, get through that danger, get yourself sorted, you might run or take flight.
I was in Australia, in a place called Byron Bay, and I was walking down a track and I heard a hissing noise next to my ankle-
Pete Wright:
Oh god.
Jules Galloway:
... on a bush track.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, jeez.
Pete Wright:
[inaudible 00:17:50].
Jules Galloway:
And I looked down and there was a brown snake, about a meter and a half long. So what's that? Like four foot long in-
Pete Wright:
Four and a half feet.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh my god, that's really long.
Jules Galloway:
And it was doing this at my ankle, so it was reared up at my ankle. And that's when I found out what adrenaline does because you will either fight or take flight. And I was running down that track towards the beach without even realizing I was doing it. And my husband, Mr. Steve Irwin, was back up the track, still next to the snake. And I'm like, "What are you doing?" There might've been some F-words in there, right? "What are you doing?" He goes, "No, no, you don't want to make any sudden movements." And I'm like, "It's a bit too late for that."
Pete Wright:
[inaudible 00:18:37].
Jules Galloway:
So that's what adrenaline does, folks, right? You might not even know what it's doing. It takes over and you will then find out whether you'll fight or flight. I'm flight. Okay?
Pete Wright:
What I love about this is you-
Jules Galloway:
I stand by that.
Pete Wright:
... you called your husband Mr. Steve Irwin, and I want to be sure you're not actually married to Steve Irwin.
Jules Galloway:
No.
Pete Wright:
Mostly because when I think of Australian men, they're all Steve Irwin. It feels like a necessity.
Jules Galloway:
They are not. They are not. But I stand-
Pete Wright:
Okay. All right.
Jules Galloway:
Mr. Bravery was like, "No, no, everything's fine." I'm like, "Things are not fine, dude." So that's adrenaline, okay? But that's over fast. A few minutes later, mostly, heartbeat was back to normal, fingers stopped tingling, it wasn't running anymore. Everything's okay. I've got on with my day, right? Didn't walk down that bush track again ever. But things return to normal quite quickly.
Cortisol is more like your... If adrenaline's rocket fuel, cortisol is like your diesel engine. So cortisol will turn up and keep you going at a moderate pace, but it will just keep you a little bit stressed and functioning over a long period of time. So say if you're super busy at work, it helps you to tick off your to-do list and get everything done. It turns up... So you're not getting that fight or flight where you're like... But you're just smashing your way through the day. I smashed my goals. I did this. I called my mom-in-law. I spoke to my boss. I got that errand done. Everything's fine. I'm managing everything. I'm spinning all the plates.
We call it wired but tired because over time it starts to eat away at you until you are exhausted. But the earlier stages you will be anxious or you'll just be buzzing or you'll have trouble sleeping or you'll feel a little bit tired. But then as you go through that over time you can't keep doing that. So then you just go into depletion and exhaustion. And that I find is when people start to sink into chronic disease. So when you're in that wired but tired but still functioning stage, you're probably going to be quite inflamed because high cortisol, it actually feeds into all of those inflammatory cycles and it turns the heat up.
But then as that cortisol drops away, when you get super depleted and super burned out, you will find that the person is probably already in some sort of chronic illness state, and then the immune system decides to just take a hike and leave the party as well, and it leaves you open to more issues. So short-term, I feel like high cortisol will cause a lot of inflammation, anxiety. But in the initial stages people will actually think it's their friend because it allowed them to get things done. And ADHDers is love to run on cortisol. It's kind of addictive, that feeling of getting it all done.
Pete Wright:
Is this the characterization of the dopamine productivity? Is that what we're talking about, where we wait until the very last minute when dopamine kicks in and then we're hyperproductive and we do something right before a deadline?
Jules Galloway:
Yeah, it's not just dopamine. That's cortisol too.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. That's cortisol too. Okay.
Jules Galloway:
Yeah. That rush that you get where you're like, "Okay, let's go. I don't need to eat or don't need to drink, come on." Because dopamine is your reward chemical, so that comes when you're getting it done, when you're starting to achieve your goal. But it's that-
Pete Wright:
Cortisol is what fuels you into that maladaptive productivity.
Jules Galloway:
Yeah, we all know.
Pete Wright:
Okay, yeah.
Jules Galloway:
It's maladaptive, but it's highly effective and quite addictive, and so we just keep going back there. We don't mean to, but we all end up back there at some point and we go... And that's the thing about my ADHDer clients, they go through these cycles where they burn out and come good, and then they burn out and then they come good. And when they come good, they seem to forget how bad it was when they were burned out. And we get, "Let's go again. Let's take on lots of things. Let's like overbook myself."
Pete Wright:
Yeah, totally.
Jules Galloway:
We are optimists. We're the original optimists and we pile more on our plate than we should because we just think we can get it done. Now, that's not all ADHDers. Some ADHDers is don't operate like that. We're not all the same. But the driven ones, the optimistic driven ones, we will pile things on. And over time, we are running on cortisol now to get that done. And in the short term, we'll feel superhuman, in the long term we're going to get sick. And so that's why I often, when I'm trying to work out where someone is in all of this, I will test their cortisol.
Now it becomes tricky. And by the way, I don't just do blood cortisol, I do saliva cortisol, and we do six different... We actually do six samples throughout the day, because I'm looking for what's called a cortisol awakening response. So we actually do three samples in the first hour of waking. Waking, waking plus 30 minutes, waking plus 60 minutes, then 12:00 PM, 3:00 PM, 9:00 PM. Because we want to see what it's doing at all the different points throughout the day because you might only have dysfunctional cortisol at night or it might only be dysfunctional in the morning and a blood test that's done at 10:00 in the morning isn't going to show either of those things.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it's not going to be helpful.
Jules Galloway:
So yeah, I do salivary testing at all different points. And that's available in the US as well. So that's why I will often do it. But it becomes tricky because guess what else raises cortisol? Stimulant meds.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, sure. Right.
Jules Galloway:
So if you're on a ADHD stimulant medication and it's more than 10 milligrams a day in total, chances are your cortisol is going to be elevated compared to if you weren't taking that medication. So imagine if you then do that-
Pete Wright:
Can you just rationalize that and say, "Okay, you're on meds, so your baseline cortisol is going to be higher. Now we can at least see what it's doing"? Or is it like an order of multiplication?
Jules Galloway:
I often will just get them to take a day off from the meds and we'll test on a day off.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Jules Galloway:
Yeah, or sometimes we need to take it into account. But, yeah, it definitely can raise cortisol. And we see the symptoms of that. When people say... Because you know how delicate it is to find the right dose of the right medication, the right amount of milligrams. You you might take a top-up at midday. It's like there's all these different ways to take stimulant medication to get the balance right. And so everybody's going to be different in the effect that has on them as well. But it does make it really tricky to test because it is going to potentially... I mean, you're not even meant to have coffee on a day that you test cortisol. It reacts to caffeine as well.
Pete Wright:
Very sensitive. Okay.
Jules Galloway:
Yeah. But imagine if you take a high cortisol person, give them some coffee each day and then give them stimulant medications five to seven days a week. Are you then going to have a person who's got... And this is what we see, you know when we see people who've got their balance of stimulant medications in terms of getting through the day focused and motivated, but they might have some trouble sleeping or they might have an uptick in anxiety symptoms. And so there are herbs and supplements that we can do that help to lower cortisol that we try and give as a bit of a buffer to help to smooth everything out. There are things we can do.
Pete Wright:
But you have to know. You have to know. And this is not something that... Nobody's ever offered to test my cortisol six times in a day.
Jules Galloway:
Let's go. Let's do it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. Let's do it.
Jules Galloway:
For science. Do it for science.
Pete Wright:
Well, actually, I'm really curious, but just in the interest of time I want to change gears because there are a couple more things I want to get in before our time is up today. And the first is when we drop terms autoimmune, and we do it casually, as a function of chronic illness, we got to explain what autoimmune is so that we can come back around the ADHD side. What do you mean when you say an autoimmune condition or an autoimmune disease?
Jules Galloway:
This is probably going to be oversimplified. So practitioners and scientists who are listening, please don't come at me. But we'll try and just boil it down a little bit.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Jules Galloway:
So basically, your immune system becomes dysfunctional and inflamed, and your immune system will start to attack certain parts of the body and cause damage and inflammation in those parts of the body. So for example, so autoimmune arthritis is called rheumatoid arthritis and it attacks the joints. So it's different to osteoarthritis, which is your older people or athlete kind of wear and tear arthritis where things have just ground away over time. Autoimmune arthritis causes things to become inflamed and very, very painful. So that's one example.
Autoimmune thyroiditis, if it causes hypothyroidism, it's called Hashimoto's, right? So Hashimoto's is where the immune system has attacked enough of the thyroid that the thyroid starts to struggle to pump out the right amount of thyroid hormones. Your thyroid levels drop, and then we have a person who is inflamed with hypothyroidism. Autoimmune psoriasis attacks the skin, causes plaques and itchiness and redness and inflammation on the skin. And so all of these things where the immune system has become dysfunctional and there'll be a certain area of the body that it goes to and causes havoc.
And so, ADHDers are more prone to autoimmunity. We don't know all the reasons why, but we think that it is a combination maybe of genetics, a combination of the fact that we get more... We have a heightened stress response, so we're more prone to stress. It could be that we are also more likely to have gut issues, because that will drive autoimmunity. And of course, like I said, we produce more inflammatory cytokines to begin with, which is-
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Jules Galloway:
It's switching the inflammation and the immune system on. So once that immune system is switched on and is attacking whatever part of the body it's decided to go to, it is very hard to switch it back off. And things like stress and gut issues will continue to drive that autoimmunity. So in terms of a naturopathic perspective, in terms of how we deal with autoimmunity, I want you to think of a Venn diagram with three circles. So there's three things that have to happen in order to develop an autoimmune disease. I'm talking, 99% of cases. One, genetics. So the genetics will load the gun, so to speak. So genetics, like someone in your family history will probably have an autoimmune disease. It might not be the same autoimmune disease as you. One person might have Crohn's disease and another person has MS.
But you'll see a family history, "Oh yeah, my grandma had a thyroid issue." Okay, cool. Or celiac disease is autoimmune. Okay, cool. Family history, tick. The next circle that has to move into the Venn diagram in order to kick this off is the gut. So some sort of gut dysfunction, whether you're eating foods that you're intolerant to, whether you've got increased intestinal permeability, aka leaky gut. Maybe you've had some rounds of antibiotics or some sort of tummy bug when you went overseas, or maybe you've got small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, large intestinal bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth in the gut that has caused what we love to call dysbiosis. So just not enough good bacteria, too many of the wrong guys. That slides into place.
So now you're ready to go. Okay, so you've got the genes, you've got the gut, but you've got one more thing that has to slide into place in order for that autoimmune disease to really kick off. Stress. So it can be emotional or environmental, so it can be garden variety stress at work or in life and death, divorce, all of those sorts of things. Or just ADHDers trying to get through life with a moderate to high amount of stress every single day of their lives with that cortisol kicking in. That can be enough or it can be an event, a stressful event.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Jules Galloway:
A lot of people will say, "Yes, my Hashimoto's kicked off when I was at University College and I was going through a time when it was really hard for me," or, "My parents divorced," or, "This happened or that happened," or, "I broke up with my partner." Some other people just be like, "It was after I had my second child and I was just always under the pump, just never got enough sleep." So stress. But that stress, it can also be environmental. So we also have to think about heavy metals, viruses, mold exposure. Mold's a huge one. I see a lot of autoimmune diseases kick off when there's been some sort of environmental component as well. So that's in the stress bucket as well.
So when that moves into place, that pulls the trigger. So you can have the genes and a gut issue for a decade or more or half your life and nothing will particularly happen in terms of autoimmunity. But then you'll have this trigger that comes along in the form of stress and, boom, everything takes off. And because we are more likely to have gut issues, because we are more likely to create inflammation in the body, we're going to be more likely to hit this one out of the ballpark.
Pete Wright:
Well, that's disappointing. All of that that you just said, that's a disappointing condition. One more, one more that I know is important, and then I want to try to change gears and do something maybe a little bit more positive. And that is histamine intolerance. Because I want to talk about food and histamine and healing around our general state of nutrition. What is it? What is the connection between histamine and neurodivergence?
Jules Galloway:
We make more of it. Aren't we overachievers when it comes to making more of all these things?
Pete Wright:
We're doing so much. Yeah.
Jules Galloway:
Don't worry folks. There's ways of dismantling all of this as well. If we fix up the gut, if we have our response to stress, there's all these... Don't worry, it's not a disaster. There's things that we can do, but it requires work and a little bit of understanding, vigilance.
Okay, the histamine, there's a couple of things going on here. So one of the main reasons that people create more histamine in the body is because you have these little mast cells in the gut that are like these little vesicles. They're these little bubbles that hold the histamine, little packages. And they are there as part of the immune system. So histamine is like Goldilocks, you do need it and you need some of it. And when there's sort of illness or infection, it needs to come out and play.
Anyone who's ever been bitten by a mosquito and had it come up in a little welt, that's histamine turning up to the party to help because your body has noticed you've been bitten by something and it's like, "I will send out the immune troops right now because you might get an infection, so we're going to try and stop that." And so there are times when histamine is really appropriate and it's also... It acts as a neurotransmitter. So there's times that we need histamine in our lives. But too much is a disaster. And so these little mast cells sit in the gut holding their little histamine bubbles waiting for a rainy day for when they're needed. But unfortunately, some people, their mast cells will degranulate and release the histamine contents at a time that's inappropriate.
So it's meant to release those histamine contents when something happens and the immune system goes, "Let's send out the troops." Sometimes they just degranulate and throw all the histamine out into the system anyway, even though they're not meant to.
Pete Wright:
So what happens?
Jules Galloway:
Gut issues.
Pete Wright:
Do we just break out in massive welts inside our gut? Is that how it happens?
Jules Galloway:
Not inside the gut, because it goes into the bloodstream and then it goes everywhere. So it's in the brain, it's in the body, it's everywhere. And so histamine can turn up as lots of different types of symptoms. And so yet people always think histamine, they think allergies, hay fever, welts. I get like, "Oh, sneezing, asthma. Yeah, I need an inhaler. I need antihistamines to get through the day. I'm all stuffed up."
People know about histamine and allergies. They usually also know about if you've got hives or welts or if you have a really pronounced response when you get bitten by mosquito where it's like too much of an inflammatory response. We know about this. What we don't realize a lot of the time that histamine is also affecting other systems in the body, and one of those systems is the brain. It affects mental health. A lot of my clients who have trouble getting to sleep have also got a histamine issue. And when we get the histamine under control, they can get off to sleep more easily.
A lot of my clients who are my high histamine people are also highly anxious. So histamine can drive anxiety, but who would have put that together? And your garden variety antihistamines that you go and buy at your local drugstore or pharmacy, they don't fix it. So it's not like you can go, "Oh, I'm anxious. I'm going to go and take an antihistamine." That doesn't necessarily work. But spoiler alert, if you go and have a look at the contents of your common sleep remedies that are at those stores, some of them are antihistamines, so there's the connection.
Pete Wright:
Wow, yeah.
Jules Galloway:
Yeah. So we don't want to have to rely on those sorts of medications though because they don't fix the problem. They're a band-aid for one day and then you go back to how you were. And you know if you're taking allergy medication and it's pollen season and there's pollen in the... you have to take that allergy medication every day. So you don't want to have to take an antihistamine every night to get to sleep. This is not good for the immune system either over time. The antihistamines are a nice place to visit, but you should not live there. You shouldn't have to live there. We need to fix the problem.
And often that problem is in the mast cell degranulation in the gut. They are over-responding, dropping their contents, and we need to tell them not to. And often the reason they're dropping their contents is because we've got a bacterial overgrowth or some sort of dysbiosis in the gut that needs to be fixed in order to stabilize those mast cells. And also while we are fixing up the gut, there are herbs and supplements we can use that are mast cell stabilizers that we can also employ in order to get short-term results in people as well. And what we notice is when we do that with people, not only do some of their physical allergy type symptoms get better, but they come back and say, "My mental health is a lot better this month as well."
Pete Wright:
Clearer head and... yeah.
Jules Galloway:
Brain fog.
Pete Wright:
Better energy. Yeah, brain fog, for sure.
Jules Galloway:
Don't even start me on brain fog. Brain fog is not normal. It is common. And I see people online talking about brain fog saying that it is a symptom of ADHD. And I would highly dispute that. It's a co-occurring condition, yes. But it doesn't have to be a symptom of ADHD. It just turns up in a lot of ADHDers because we've got so much of this going on. Brain fog can turn up if your blood sugar is not stable, if your gut has got a bacterial overgrowth, if you've got histamine going on. Brain fog can be a symptom of neuroinflammation, so we shouldn't have to live with it.
Pete Wright:
Which comes with all of the other things we've been talking about over the last hour.
Jules Galloway:
But it's all related. How much of this-
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Jules Galloway:
If I was in... you know when you're watching those shows on TV, those detective shows and they've got the war room and they've got all the photos with all the red ribbons going between everything, and they're trying to find the...
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Jules Galloway:
And then suddenly there'll be a central character and all the ribbons point to that central character and you're like, "That's the thing. We finally found out the thing." If we did this for the body and all the symptoms and all the ADHD co-occurring conditions, that central thing, the breakthrough moment would happen when all the ribbons point to the gut. And we'd be like, "Hang on a second. If we sort out what's going on in that gut, it brings down the inflammation, it clears the brain fog, it helps with neurotransmitter production." Your bugs in the gut are making serotonin and dopamine and GABA and all the good stuff.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Jules Galloway:
So if we can sort out what's happening in that gut, then there's this flow on effect where so many other things start to improve. And I had a lecturer 25 years ago at college and they said, "When you get a complex case, heal the gut and then wait and see what else is left." And it still stands today, but now we've got so much scientific evidence to show us why that is a thing.
Nikki Kinzer:
I have a daughter who has ADHD and has an autoimmune disease, and I have a husband who has an autoimmune disease. And I think because of that autoimmune disease has a lot of ADHD characteristics. I'm curious for all the people that are out there listening that fit into this, what can they do? We've talked a lot about the connections, we've talked a lot about the reasons, but I really want to know what kind of advice or what kind of guidance can I give to my young 19-year-old daughter who is not a typical 19-year-old daughter because she lives with this autoimmune disease. So I'm curious to know what hope do we have and what can we do to help?
Pete Wright:
Well, yeah, because we're looking for sustainable wellness in the face of these conditions. Right? What does a sustainable wellness look like for someone with ADHD and chronic illness?
Jules Galloway:
Yeah. So I think in naturopathy, it's really important to be very clear that we do not cure autoimmune diseases, but we can put them into remission. Okay? Not always, but that's the aim. It depends on the autoimmune disease and it depends how far advanced it is as well. I've got clients with MS, and the goal is just to keep them walking. But then I've got other clients with early stage Hashimoto's, and the goal is to get the inflammation down in the thyroid enough that the thyroid starts making its own thyroid hormones successfully again.
But then later stage Hashimoto's, like a more advanced case, it's been around for a good few years, they might've had some cell death going on. So the aim is not to get them producing their own thyroid hormone anymore. The aim is to just... They will keep taking their thyroxine, so their synthetic thyroid hormone, synthetic T4 forever. But my goal will be to support that and get the inflammation down so that they don't have joint pain, don't have fatigue, they don't have the mental health stuff that goes along with that.
Every single autoimmune person that I see, we have a different goal. And that goal really depends on what autoimmune issue it is, how long they've had it, how severe it is, and then also what's in that person's capacity to do. In a perfect world, I would change their diet because most people with autoimmunity, they're reacting to some foods that they're eating, okay? Gluten is always the number one suspect here. You'll always hear functional medicine practitioners talking about gluten triggering autoimmunity, sometimes all grains. If that gut is really unwell or has been for a long time, it might be reacting to all the grains. We might have to take them off all the grains for a while. We might have to look at other food intolerances or food allergies potentially that they have.
So some of my autoimmune people are also reacting to milk, cheese, dairy, et cetera. Some of them, it turns out their thing that they were reacting to was sesame seeds or kiwi fruit or that you just never know until you start digging. But gluten and dairy are the two biggest triggers that we see. But also before we even go there, is the person eating processed foods? Are they eating a lot of sugar? Are they eating a healthy wholefood diet that's nourishing their body and giving them enough nutrients and enough protein and everything to actually have a healthy functioning immune system? Because you need zinc, you need iron, you need all your good nutrients in order to have a healthy functioning immune system. So often, even just another step backwards, it starts there, is it a healthy wholefood diet? So the first thing I would do is try and get 30 grams of protein into each person at every meal. And then healthy [inaudible 00:44:19]
Pete Wright:
30 seems high, given what I'm already eating.
Jules Galloway:
30. Yes, 30.
Pete Wright:
30 in every meal?
Jules Galloway:
30 in every meal. It helps to stabilize the blood sugar. And when that blood sugar is stable, good things happen everywhere. Body, mind, immune system, everywhere.
Pete Wright:
We don't eat enough protein.
Jules Galloway:
That's where we start then. Yeah. And then we go, "Okay, can we get the processed food out? Can we get some wholefoods in? Can we, are you eating a rainbow of colors?" And look, again, we have to be very mindful of every individual's capacity. And we know a lot of neurodivergent people have got texture issues with food or they're not good with eating certain colorful veggies or they want the same foods over and over because they've got sensory stuff going on. As a naturopath, we have to work in with all of that. So we're not expecting perfection.
I'm not going to be like, "Here's your wholefood, gluten-free, dairy-free diet. This is what you have to do and if you don't do this, you're not going to get better." That's not going to work for neurodivergent people. It's going to spark rebellion. Their brain is going to be like, "No, you don't. You don't tell me what to do." But then also we have to think, "Does this person have the capacity to learn how to cook new things, to learn how to prepare new foods? Do they have these foods? Do they have gluten-free bread where they live?"
A lot of my clients are in remote areas and they're like, "I don't have access to other foods." So every single person, we have to assess what's in their capacity, what is realistic for them. But at the end of the day, if your body is having an inflammatory response to certain foods, we might have to remove those foods for a little while until you get better. If you were celiac, we would take you off gluten forever. There are people that obviously will never get it back in.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Jules Galloway:
But other people, once we heal up that gut and get good bacteria in there and everything's humming along nicely, we can often get a lot of these foods back in. So these restrictive diets, they're not forever, but they do help to get that inflammation down quickly if we get it right. So we have to consider that as one tool in our tool shed that we can offer before you even go and spend money on herbs and supplements. There is no point in taking anti-inflammatory herbs and spending hundreds of dollars on these products if you're eating something that is still turning that inflammatory switch back to on, back to on, back to on. What's the point?
Pete Wright:
Well, and that's such a great point because I think that's one of the... When we go back to some foundational understandings of ADHD, our attentional challenges mean we're not paying attention to what we eat when we eat it. We might get it right for a day or two, but we forget, we lose track. I'm just running some real-time calculations because I can't visualize what 30 grams of protein is. And so here we are for breakfast, three eggs plus two Turkey sausage links, and a slice of whole grain toast is about 30 grams. That's what it says.
Jules Galloway:
You know what the 30 grams will be in the three eggs nearly, right?
Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. Good.
Jules Galloway:
Nearly. And again, we are looking for progress, not perfection. You don't need all of that. If you can get three eggs into your morning, you're going to be okay. Okay?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Jules Galloway:
And three eggs and the turkey sausage and the wholegrain... the wholegrain toast probably has any protein in it. They're just giving you something to put the eggs on, right?
Pete Wright:
That's just something to... But grilled chicken. A grilled chicken breast, that's four to five ounces and a half cup of quinoa there we go.
Jules Galloway:
Do you know what I say to people?
Pete Wright:
What?
Jules Galloway:
Palm-sized portion of protein-rich food. So pick up your hand, turn it sideways and feel how thick it is. It's actually thicker than you think. Right?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Jules Galloway:
So this size of chicken, fish, meat or that's like a half a tin of chickpeas, beans, et cetera. So your palm-sized portion of protein can be some nuts, some seeds, some beans, some goats cheese, some eggs. This is three eggs. And I know that's not quite 30 grams of protein, but it's good enough. Okay?
Pete Wright:
Right.
Jules Galloway:
We don't have to aim for perfect. We just have to get it in, which is progress is great. So if you just think and see some people, their hands will be smaller or bigger than others and that usually correlates with how big or small a person is. A 6'4" person's going to have a different size palm to a 5'2" person.
Pete Wright:
Oh, that's so good.
Jules Galloway:
This is a really good measuring stick, and then we don't have to weigh anything, we don't have to count anything. We just turn up and go, "Is that on my plate?" And that is one third of your plate. The other two thirds of your plate need to be slow burning carbohydrate foods, so forget the bread so much. You can have wholegrain, good quality, slow burning grains, that's fine. Wholegrain bread is fine if you can tolerate it. But you could have rice or you could have sweet potato or you can have salad, you can have colorful veggies like quinoa, like you mentioned. Just slow burning, good quality carbohydrates, and preferably some color on there as well. And that makes up the other two thirds of the plate. And then you've got a meal and then you've got stable blood sugar. And once you've got stable blood sugar, magical things happen.
Pete Wright:
I'll take it. I'll take it. I love it. And I'm actually, I'm very optimistic. This last 10 minutes really gives me hope that I have a little bit more agency in this. We've got to wrap it up because I have this feeling we could listen to you for quite a bit longer. Thank you so much, Jules.
Nikki Kinzer:
[inaudible 00:50:29]
Pete Wright:
Tell us just where to go find out more about all of the good stuff that you're working on right now.
Jules Galloway:
Okay, so you can find me at julesgalloway.com or you can go and follow me on all the usual socials and I'm JulesGallowayHealth. And it's G-A-L-L-O-W-A-Y folks because sometimes people spell it wrong. But also can I offer your community a free month to my membership?
Pete Wright:
You certainly can.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Jules Galloway:
I would love to do that, because I feel like you are my people. And I can give you this link for your show notes and for wherever you want to put it.
Pete Wright:
Great.
Jules Galloway:
But it's julesgalloway.com, so J-U-L-E-S-G-A-L-L-O-W-A-Y.com/adhd-naturally-freebie, with an IE at the end. So julesgalloway.com/adhd-naturally-freebie. If you go there, you'll get one month free to ADHD Naturally. And we don't even take your credit card number at the start because we don't want to be those guys who take your number and then just keep taking your money. No, what we do is we just sign you up with your email address. You get full access to Adult ADHD Naturally, like the membership site, all the videos that are in there, the monthly Q&A with me and also the Facebook group. But then also when it comes towards the end of that membership, you will get reminder emails. When it comes to the end of that free month, you'll get reminder emails to actually join so that you can stay in. And I'm hoping you want to stay in because it's awesome in there.
Pete Wright:
Excellent. Excellent.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's great. Thank you so much.
Pete Wright:
We'll put that in the show notes. Thank you so much.
Nikki Kinzer:
Very generous.
Pete Wright:
We really appreciate that. And thank you everybody for downloading and listening to the show. Don't forget if you're a member of our program, you could stick around and get questions answered with Jules in just a second. Otherwise, we're going to let you go. This is the end of the show. We appreciate your time and your attention. And I'm very excited about all of this and now I'm for some reason very hungry. We usually do these shows in the morning, and right now all I can think about is a good tuna salad.
Nikki Kinzer:
A palm full of protein.
Pete Wright:
A palm full of tuna salad. I'm kind of losing gear. We're heading over to the Showtalk channel right now on our Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Jules Galloway, I'm Pete Wright. We'll see you next time right here on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
