Episode 347: The Vagus Nerve Connection: Gut Health, Autoimmunity & Healing Explained with JP Errico
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In this episode, Erin Holt sits down with JP Errico—inventor, entrepreneur, and co-founder of electroCore—to explore the powerful role of the vagus nerve in whole-body health. If you’ve never heard of the vagus nerve before, you’re not alone—but this key player connects the brain, gut, immune system, and autonomic nervous system, impacting everything from inflammation and digestion to stress and chronic illness. Erin and JP dive into the explosion of autoimmune conditions, the mind-body connection, and how vagus nerve stimulation could be the missing link to better health. Tune in to discover how activating this vital nerve may help restore balance and unlock healing.
In this episode:
Vagus Nerve: The Brain-Body Connection [04:06]
Sympathetic vs. Parasympathetic States [11:52]
Understanding Heart Rate Variability [12:46]
Why Rest-Based Training Produces the Biggest Gains [16:29]
How the Brain’s Perception Influences the Immune Response [24:30]
The Potential Asthma Treatment You Haven’t Heard of Yet [36:42]
Vagus Nerve's Impact on Gut Health [47:43]
How the Vagus Nerve Device Boosts Learning & Cognition [49:55]
Vagus Nerve: Key to Aging [53:15]
Resources mentioned:
Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™ (Next cohort starts in April of 2025)
Kion Aminos (Get 20% off monthly orders and 10% off one time orders)
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
Bon Charge (Use code FUNK to save 15%)
Qualia Mind (get $100 off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Truvaga (Vagus Nerve Stimulator)
gammacore (Drug-Free Relief for Migraine and Cluster Headaches)
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Erin Holt [00:00:00]:
I'm Erin Holt and this is the Functional Nutrition Podcast where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience and because of that I've got a major bone to pick with diet, culture and the conventional healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the fantasy that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect, so I founded the Functional Nutrition Academy, a school in mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same.
Erin Holt [00:00:45]:
This show is for you. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show rate, review and share because you never know whose life you might change and of course keep coming back for more.
JP Errico [00:01:10]:
Hello my friends. Today is a good one. We're talking all things vagus nerve and autonomic nervous system. We're going to get into the gut, brain connection, eczema, asthma, what my guest refers to as the new fibromyalgia. We have JP Errico on the show.
Erin Holt [00:01:26]:
He's an inventor.
JP Errico [00:01:27]:
He's also the co founder of ElectroCore, which is a leading bioelectrical and wellness company specializing in non invasive vagus nerve stimulation. That is a mouthful to say. He also is the founder and charter member of the Vagus Nerve Society. He's the co host of the Health Upgrade podcast. He and he has over 250 US patents. So he's like a master inventor. He holds degrees from MIT and Duke University. He's obviously wicked smart.
JP Errico [00:01:56]:
As you'll hear on today's show, we get into a lot of the body and how the body works and how vagus nerve is kind of like command control for all of the systems in your body. So it's a really, really good listen. If you are somebody who wants to be healthy, who wants to reverse aging, who is locked into a chronic pattern, definitely listen when he talks about the brain getting stuck in the perception of pain, that is a really big takeaway from this show. And if you're interested in like how I Built this story, stay to the End because he gets into how he got into all of this, which is really fascinating for me as an entrepreneur. I just love hearing about how people get into their line of work and how they build things and how their passions become their passions for practitioners. Really, really good episode for you. If you have any clients struggling with any chronic health conditions, any issues with the gut brain access, any issues with autoimmunity. In fact, the reason why I invited JP on the show is because a colleague of mine is using one of his inventions, the vagus nerve stimulator, in their practice with really, really good result.
JP Errico [00:03:04]:
So we're going to get into that in today's show as well. And, and just as a shout out to my practitioners, the Functional Nutrition Academy is going to open very, very soon. We've got early bird enrollment starting in just a week, just a week or two. So head to the Functional Nutrition Academy website. It's linked up in the show notes. Get on our practitioner list. You'll be invited into that early bird. But we are kicking things off.
JP Errico [00:03:28]:
And just as a little reminder, nothing that we say is medical advice on this show, just JP toward the end of the show, is going to share some of his personal experiences, and we are just never giving medical advice on the show. So with that, let's jump into the episode. Okay. Hi, jp. I'm so excited to talk to you.
JP Erico [00:03:46]:
I'm looking forward to it.
JP Errico [00:03:48]:
I've definitely listened to you on a lot of podcasts and you have a lot of great stuff to say. So I think our audience will be thrilled to hear from you. But I would really like to start pretty high level basic, and then we can get into the nitty gritty with everything. Well, let's just start off with a very basic question. What is the vagus nerve?
JP Erico [00:04:06]:
So the vagus nerve, which is also technically known as the 10th cranial nerve, is a nerve that connects really everything in your chest and abdomen up into your brainstem. And the purpose of it is to have the brainstem be able to coordinate a lot of things that are going on in the body. Everything from your heart rate and your breathing rate, your digestion, to understanding what's going on and bringing that information back up into the brain. In fact, what most people don't realize is about 80% of the information that's traveling in the vagus nerve is actually traveling upward into the brain. So you can think of it as sort of like the brain's sensory nerve for understanding what's happening in the chest and abdomen with your organs and digestion. It also has a lot of information, carries a lot of information about your immune state and your metabolic state. So it really is an all encompassing nerve.
JP Errico [00:05:01]:
Well, I think a lot of times, at least in my world, when we talk about the vagus nerve, we almost inevitably end up talking about the gut brain connection. But when I listen to you talk, you're really taking it even further than that. You're talking a lot about how the vagus nerve interfaces with the other systems of the body, the immune system and the metabolic system. Um, so I'm excited to get into that. I think now especially our problem with healthcare. I say now especially because people are becoming aware of this, you know. Yeah, it's a big awakening. But one of the issues is that we do have a tendency to focus on one area of the body.
JP Errico [00:05:37]:
So there's a specialist for the gut, there's a specialist for the endocrine system.
JP Erico [00:05:41]:
I learned that from the head of the GPs, the general practitioners, the Royal College of GPs over in the UK. I was referring to saying I was so frustrated because I go to talk to gastroenterologists and they don't realize that their patients have headaches and the neurologists don't realize that their patients have mental health issues. And she said, you mean the partialists, what do you mean by that? And she said, they know one organ, they don't know the whole patient.
JP Errico [00:06:06]:
Yeah, it's a bit of a frustration point for a lot of people now. It's, we see like the body part versus the whole human behind that body part. And I think what we all have to understand, and it's a lot more complex, but disease is really loss of communication, but interplay between all of those areas. And I think we need a new model that really recognizes that all systems are in fact interconnected. I've always been fascinated with psychoneuroimmunology, like the PNI super system and just thinking about the body as that way. But this is when I talk to clients or I talk to the average person, this is when it can start to feel really, really overwhelming because it's like, well, where's the entry point? At which point do I start? And I kind of think of like, there's so many entry points, it's all on ramps, it's all on roads. Like where you choose to start your healing journey doesn't really much matter as long you choose to start it somewhere. But if there were a shortcut, if there was a way to impact all systems at once, would the vagus nerve be part of that Absolutely.
JP Erico [00:07:13]:
And I kudos to you for using the word psychoneuroimmunology, because I use that term and people look at me like, what the heck is that? I think there's something really to it, because what I view, the life itself is really supported by four systems. Everything else that you think about is important, but they're really subsets of these four systems. The first is your immune system. In fact, your immune system literally builds every organ in your body and then stays around to protect them and support them and maintain them and even do their job sometimes when the organ itself isn't functioning properly. Even your brain is literally built by your immune system. So the immune system is number one. Number two is your cellular metabolism. It's your mitochondria.
JP Erico [00:08:00]:
It's how your cells are generating energy, how they're using nutrients, how they're sensing nutrients. All of that is your second most important system, or second of the four important systems. The third is your microbiome. And I'm not just talking about your gut microbiome. I'm talking about your skin. I'm talking about what's in your airways. I mean, there's 80 square meters of airway that's open to the outside. So it has the same microbiome as your gut.
JP Erico [00:08:26]:
In fact, they're right next to one another. I mean, all of those bacteria are communicating with one another. And so how we interact with the literally trillions of cells that are in your microbiome is critically important. And we all know there's a great interface between the immune system and that microbiome that's communicating all the time. And the final piece of it is your autonomic nervous system. And that's where when you said, you know, is there one entry point, one on ramp into this system? It's your autonomic nervous system. It's the greatest hack of all time. It's literally, I view it as like it's God's hack.
JP Erico [00:09:00]:
This is God's way of controlling all of it. And so when we talk about the brain gut axis, yes, the vagus nerve does control digestion, but it also controls your immune system. It also controls at the subcellular level, how your mitochondria are functioning. And so understanding how your autonomic nervous system can affect those things really controls everything. And so, yeah, it's the perfect on ramp. So I think it's where the road starts.
JP Errico [00:09:32]:
Can you explain, just in case somebody's not familiar with the autonomic nervous system or that term? I think this point we're all pretty. We all know about the nervous system, you know, especially if you spend any time on Instagram, everybody's talking about it, so that's pro column. But autonomic nervous system might be a term that somebody has not heard before. So can you explain more about what it is? And then also, what does that have to do with the vagus nerve? Or what does the vagus nerve have to do with that?
JP Erico [00:09:54]:
Absolutely. So we all think we're brilliant as a species because we can buy things on Amazon and fly to Disney World and all that kind of stuff. About 99.9% of what's actually going on in your life, from how you're functioning to your aging to all of it, is really controlled without you having to think about it. You don't have to think about your heart beating. You don't have to think about breathing. You don't have to think about digestion. You may choose to hold your breath, but at the end of the day, if you pass out from holding your breath, you're going to start breathing again because you've got this autonomic nervous system that's controlling everything. It affects everything from your mood to when you're tired, how you perceive pain.
JP Erico [00:10:33]:
All of it is controlled through your autonomic nervous system. And there's two major components of it. One is your. What's called the sympathetic nerve chain. And it literally runs parallel to your spinal cord on the anterior. So, so the front side of where your spinal cord is on the front of the bones, there's. It runs all the way down from your brain stem all the way down to the bottom of your spine. The vagus nerve is the other side of the autonomic nervous system.
JP Erico [00:11:00]:
The front side of the spinal cord is called the sympathetic side. The vagus nerve is your parasympathetic side. And we can think about that as the sympathetic nervous system is driving your fight or flight response. So when you're feeling stressed, when you're feeling like you have to run away from a lion or run away from a boss or run to save your kid from falling down the stairs, that's your fight or flight response. When you're chilled, relaxed, sitting in a chair, daydreaming, resting, digesting your food, you're in rest, digest and restore mode. And that's controlled by your vagus nerve. And so the more time you can spend in that rest, digest and restore state, not all the time, but at least getting back to it regularly, the healthier you can be.
JP Errico [00:11:45]:
And you talk about enhancing parasympathetic tone. So what does that mean?
JP Erico [00:11:52]:
So it means if you can think about it as sort of a scale, sometimes you spend, like when you're at work and you're under a deadline, you have lots of sympathetic tone. So that's you're stressed out, you're focused, you're working really hard, you're feeling the pressure of the deadline. That's when your sympathetic tone or the activity in your sympathetic side of the nervous system is stronger. It's dominating how your brain stem is controlling every aspect of your body. When you're in parasympathetic activation, which is that rest, digest, and restore state, you've taken a deep breath, you're releasing all that tension. That is when you're allowing that vagus nerve, that parasympathetic tone, to get stronger. And it's driving all of that restoration and recovery that your body needs after being stressed out.
JP Errico [00:12:39]:
Is there a way to measure whether your body is in parasympathetic tone? Would this be tracking heart rate variability?
JP Erico [00:12:46]:
Yeah, heart rate variability is a really great way to do it. Heart rate variability is a sign of which side of your autonomic nervous system is active because your heart is innervated by both sides by the sympathetic side and the parasympathetic side. And so whichever one is controlling at any given time, your heart rate, you're going to know which side is dominant. Now, what's really happening with heart rate variability is not is your heart rate running faster or slower? It's the amount of time between your beats, which is interesting because it was a movie called Gattaca. I don't know if anybody saw it. It was sort of a obscure science fiction story. But in it they had this guy who was pretending to be somebody else, and he was wearing a EKG that would read like a metronome. It was, like, perfectly timed.
JP Erico [00:13:34]:
Every beat was exactly the same, different. That's incredibly unhealthy. They made it seem like that was healthy, but that's incredibly unhealthy. In fact, if your heart rate is very, very, very constant, the distance between those beats is exactly the same. That is a sign that you're about to have a heart attack. You're in a bad way. What you need is a lot of variability. That's why we call it heart rate variability.
JP Erico [00:13:57]:
You want a lot of variability between your beats based on whether you're inhaling or exhaling. That's a respiratory sinus rhythm. That is really healthy. I often talk about the fact that race car drivers, especially Formula one Drivers are fantastic at controlling their heart rate variability. When they're going through hairpin turns, their heart rate variability drops like a stone. They're in total sympathetic, they're hyper focused, they're stressed, but they're managing it. And then when they get on a straightaway, their heart rate variability shoots up and it's back up to like 50. And the reason for that is because they have gotten their bodies so used to switching back and forth between those two states that they're just super healthy.
JP Errico [00:14:42]:
And you think that would be like a hallmark of resiliency? I think trying to reduce our exposure to all stress is a pretty futile goal, particularly now. But we can't be, you know, the parasympathetic place is where we should be the majority of the time. Would you say that? Or at least to restore the body?
JP Erico [00:14:59]:
Yeah, I wouldn't say we necessarily have to be there the majority of the time. But what we do need to do is get back into that state, even if it's just for five minutes. It's sort of like just touch the stone just for five minutes. In fact, I often talk about the fact that I used to do marathons. I'm a runner. I love running. I run 10 miles every day. Marathons are a little bit long for me right now.
JP Errico [00:15:21]:
You do 10 miles a day now?
JP Erico [00:15:23]:
Yeah, I run 10 to 13 miles every day.
JP Errico [00:15:25]:
Do you ever test your degree of permeability, intestinal permeability?
JP Erico [00:15:30]:
I don't, but there's a whole story behind like I do intermittent fasting and I run before I eat, so before I break my fast. And then I do my resistance training after that. Because I want to be in a really super low insulin state. I want high ketones. I want to be mobilizing fat really well. I want super flexible mitochondria for my endurance training and then my resistance training. I want to be in an mTOR. I want mTOR active.
JP Erico [00:15:59]:
I want to be building muscle. I want to be in an anabolic state for that. So I do that in the afternoons after I've broken my fast. But I was training for this marathon and I remember I went out and I was training with somebody else and we went out and we did the 13 mile run. That's like, you know, sort of you're about still about two or three months away from doing the marathon, but you got to get to the point where you can do 13 miles. And we had had a 10 mile run like a week or so before that. It was great 13 mile. We completely bonked I mean, that last three miles took us like 45 minutes.
JP Erico [00:16:29]:
And I was thinking to myself, this is terrible because we're like not that far away from having to do the marathon and we only went halfway. And so I was. We had to think outside the box as to how we were going to fix this. And I read about this guy who's Galloway, who is a marathon runner, and what he did was he trained himself by running for 9 minutes and walking for 1 minute, running for 9 minutes and walking for one minute. And he said that one minute of walking, A, you're still moving and B, it gives your body a chance to just recover just enough that the next nine minutes are going to be easier and you're going to feel like, oh, my God, I'm going to lose so much time. I'm going to do this like 12 times during the race or more. And what I found was I went out a week later and I did the 16 mile run and I did it faster than I did the 13 mile run. And when I got back from the 16 mile run, I was like, I could do another 10, I could go another 10 doing this.
JP Erico [00:17:25]:
And so what I say to people is, we need to take that technique, I actually call it the Galloway Technique for life, which is you want to, I say, at the bottom of every hour, for the last five minutes of every hour, end your hour long conversation five minutes early. Just get up from your desk, stretch, take some deep breaths. Doesn't have to be box breathing or 4, 7, 8 breathing. Just take a few really deep breaths. If you have to go to the bathroom, we're not in kindergarten, go to the bathroom. You don't have to ask anybody's permission, just go do it. If you're hungry, get a little snack, hopefully low carb, low sugar, and if you're thirsty, get a drink. Because all of those things that I've just mentioned, all of those things will activate your parasympathetic and deactivate your sympathetic.
JP Erico [00:18:14]:
Just for five minutes, pick up the phone, make a call to your spouse or to a friend and make plans, something away from work. Just take those five minutes. And you will find that even though, oh my God, I'm going to do this eight times during the day, that's 40 minutes. You are going to have so much more energy at the end of the day that it's totally worth it.
Erin Holt [00:18:34]:
Yeah. And I can echo that sentiment.
JP Errico [00:18:36]:
First of all, this is feels so much more approachable than other things that we've been taught about our stress response. I Just want to say that. So I appreciate you bringing a very approachable approach to the table.
JP Errico [00:20:03]:
This past year A little over a year ago, I started lifting heavy for the first time. My body type has not historically been one that puts on muscle mass very easily. I just don't have those genes, so I have to really work for it. And I started lifting heavy, but in a totally different way where it's more rest based training. So it's almost like there's more rest than actual heavy lifting.
Erin Holt [00:20:22]:
But I gained so much more strength.
JP Errico [00:20:24]:
And so much more muscle mass this past year with that approach than I ever have before, like working without rest. So it's just pretty fascinating what the body can do when given the right support. I do want to talk about different other strategies to enhance that parasympathetic tone, but I want to go back to what you were talking about or you mentioned the immune system, because this is something that's near and dear to my heart. I was diagnosed 10 years ago with an autoimmune condition. We have a lot of autoimmune clients in our clinic and we are just seeing this huge explosion of autoimmunity. Obviously we know there's many, many factors that go into that, but I like to think about the stages of autoimmunity as three stages where it actually starts pretty silent. There might be the presence of auto antibodies, there might be the presence of symptoms, but we don't really get diagnosed as a true autoimmune condition until there's tissue damage and tissue destruction. And unfortunately it's really hard to unravel that web when we've gotten so far down that path.
JP Errico [00:21:23]:
So I like to bring this to people's attention, like, hey, if you've got like mystery syndromes like, or mystery health symptoms or syndromes, like, we should probably be doing something about that now. I would love for you to talking about this stress response and knowing that a lot of us are locked into a stress response a lot of the time in modern day. Can you talk about how that might influence or impact the immune system and just overall inflammation.
JP Erico [00:23:13]:
That's a really great insight to recognize that there's a connection. I think we all know that if you don't get a lot of sleep, you know, you're more prone to getting colds or getting sick. But people don't realize that the immune system responds to stress. And it doesn't care whether that stress is physical, chemical, or emotional or even mental. So your immune system just will respond to any kind of stress by becoming activated. And short periods of activation are really healthy. I mean, you want to have a strong immune system. You want to be able to, you know, if you're exposed to a virus, you want it to be able to wipe it out really quickly.
JP Erico [00:23:52]:
So you never get clinical symptoms. So you Just basically didn't even know you had it. But at the same time, when it stays active for a long period of time, a surprisingly broad array of symptoms will arise. And the autoimmunity is absolutely one of them. You can become that immune system is being active for a prolonged period of time. It's looking for something to attack. Sooner or later, it's going to find something within your own body that's self that it's going to attack. And I realize that that's not a very technical way of saying it, but we don't have to go into the gory details of MHC compatibility and all the rest of that.
JP Erico [00:24:30]:
But what you find is that when the immune system is activated for a prolonged period of time, what it's sending up to your brain is a signal that there's a problem. And your brain has to figure out how to perceive that information. I mean, literally every cubic millimeter of your body is constantly sending information up into your brain stem that your brainstem has to decode. And at the highest level, it's going to extract information. Well, do I have to go to the bathroom? Am I hungry? Am I tired? Does my leg hurt? You know, all of those things have to be ultimately result in perceptions. One of the things that the brain is programmed to do is to program itself to feel sick. That's why a respiratory virus can make your stomach hurt, can make your lower back hurt, can make you moody, can make you tired. I mean, how is a respiratory virus that's affecting somewhere in your lungs impacting serotonin levels in your brain? It's doing that through the inflammatory process and through your brain's perception of how its behavior is supposed to be programmed.
JP Erico [00:25:34]:
And it does that so that we do the things that mother nature is trying to change our behavior. It says, okay, this problem has hung around for a long enough period of time that I need you to go lie down, I need you to feel sick. I need you to want to stay away from other people. I need you to not eat. I need you to do all of those things that I need as an immune system and as a body to heal. And so we have this program that's in our brain, and prolonged inflammation will drive that. And I learned this back in probably 2014, 2015, when we did a really interesting study over in the UK. We gathered information from about 150,000 patients on their diagnostic histories.
JP Erico [00:26:19]:
And what we found was that about 30% of those people had been diagnosed. We had narrowed it down to six different medical conditions. It was Mental health, it was insomnia, it was headaches, it was widespread pain, it was asthma and allergy, and it was gut health. And what we found was that when a person was diagnosed with one of a condition within one of those six areas, they were very, very likely to simultaneously have been diagnosed in multiple other conditions. And the doctors would say those things aren't related. But the gps had a sense that they probably were because they happened at the same time. And if you talk to the patients, the patients would say something happened to them during their lives, that change in their health status and now they are in this doom loop that they can't get out of. They've got these chronic symptoms that won't break.
JP Erico [00:27:09]:
And so what we did was we said, well we think we understand what the underlying problem is that links all of these things together, which is this brain program, this sick program that's being run and it's controlled by your autonomic nervous system. And what we found was that if people started stimulating their vagus nerves and were doing this parasympathetic activation thing, that they got better, that their symptoms got better. And the number one message we got back from people was, you gave me my life back. This was the thing I was looking for. I want to get out of this loop. I want to get back into being healthy. And it's just a function of the fact that the brain gets stuck in that loop. It feels like everything coming up into the brainstem is this triggering the sick program.
JP Erico [00:27:52]:
It doesn't know how to get out.
JP Errico [00:27:53]:
We see that so much with chronic conditions of any type. Sometimes we have to interrupt the pattern and sometimes that's like at the thought belief level. And sometimes it's more at the physical level. Usually it's a combination of all of it. So is activating the vagus nerve the same thing as activating the parasympathetic?
JP Erico [00:28:10]:
Exactly the same.
JP Errico [00:28:12]:
Okay, so how do we activate the vagus nerve?
JP Erico [00:28:15]:
So we've known about this for thousands of years. We were pretty keen observing species, so we observed what other animals did and what worked for us, which was things like deep breathing, social connectivity, being connected to other people in a positive way. We found that things like yoga, movement, I mean there's really no better signal for the body and the brain that you're healthy and just walking, getting up and moving tells your brain, hey, I'm not that bad off because I can walk. And that's a really good one. Now a lot of those things like deep breathing, cold water, chanting, and things like that all of them are really designed to activate the vagus nerve. So deep breathing techniques, for example, there are stretch receptors in the lungs. And these receptors, when they stretch, they send a signal up through the vagus nerve to the brain saying, hey, I'm breathing. You know, when you walk, your muscles, the activity of your muscles, you're sending information up to your brain saying, hey, we're walking.
JP Erico [00:29:14]:
Where it can't be that bad off. We're walking. When you're engaged in a relationship, when there's emotional things going on that are positive, you get a release of all sorts of hormones in your brain, oxytocin, and other things that are telling your brain, hey, no reason to be sick. I'm around other people, and other people are happy to be around me, and that's a good thing. So all of those things are really positives. Now, I know that all of those things are really, unfortunately, under assault in Western culture. I mean, positive food, positive exercise, positive sleep, all of those things are under assault. We're losing our social connectivity in the way that we really should be having it, which is directly face to face, as opposed to texting one another and phone calls and things like that.
JP Erico [00:30:01]:
So what we're trying to do is get people to get back to that, to. To activate their parasympathetic nervous systems. It's one of the reasons why I think getting back into the office and back to work is going to be an incredibly positive thing for people's mental health across the country. I know people are like, but I like being home. You know what? You're going to like being back in the office. You're going to like being around your colleagues. It's going to be really positive for your health. Now we developed a device that will stimulate the vagus nerve very rapidly and very effectively, which is a handheld vagus nerve stimulator.
JP Erico [00:30:33]:
And vagus nerve stimulation has been around for almost 40 years at this point, being used to treat some medical conditions like epilepsy and depression. But there's so many other things that it has benefits for. So using a vagus nerve stimulator is a really great way to activate that parasympathetic nervous system.
JP Errico [00:30:50]:
Before we talk about that, two questions. Gargling and like, gag reflex. Why does that activate the vagus nerve? Is that just proximity to the nerve itself largely?
JP Erico [00:31:01]:
Yeah. Humming and chanting and those things, you're vibrating your vocal cords, and your vocal cords are pretty close to the vagus nerve, which actually sits inside the same sheath that contains your jugular vein. And Your carotid artery. So you can imagine those two things are pretty important. And having that vagus nerve in that same area is really great.
JP Errico [00:31:20]:
Okay, so this device that you helped to create, the Truvega, that you hold that up to that area on your neck. Correct. Use it.
JP Erico [00:31:30]:
I have one here.
JP Errico [00:31:31]:
Okay, show me how you do it. Where does it go?
JP Erico [00:31:34]:
Put a little bit of electrically conductive gel that we provide on the heads, and you place it here. Right. Right where you would feel for your pulse. You know, you go out and running and you want to feel your pulse. You put your finger there. Well, that's where you're going to put these two heads sort of vertically aligned right there. And that when you turn on the device, it will begin to provide an electric signal that's tuned to the right frequency so that you're activating the vagus nerve. So it's right there, and you want to turn it up to the point where you feel it.
JP Erico [00:32:00]:
You know it's going to tingle at the skin because you're delivering electricity in there. And, you know, within two minutes, you've delivered a strong enough signal that you're activating all of the various different areas of the brainstem that are important to deliver that signal and to the rest of the body for reducing inflammation and restoring healthy mitochondria and having an effect on your gastrointestinal tract. It's really quite a broad number of effects that it has.
JP Errico [00:32:25]:
Do you notice effect when you're using it or like right after you use it personally?
JP Erico [00:32:29]:
So I do. I notice one thing that I would say happens 90% of the time that I use it, which is that I will have an urge to take a deep breath. Like, it just sort of automatically happens, like 10 seconds in. I'm just like, no, that doesn't happen for everyone now. But I'm fortunate enough and we talk about this. I do a lot of running, and so I don't actually experience. I don't get headaches. I mean, you'd have to probably hit me in the head with a brick to get me to have a headache.
JP Erico [00:32:56]:
And I don't have asthma and I don't have depression and I don't have other things. Occasionally, if I'm really stressed and I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm feeling anxious and I can't get back to sleep. This is a lifesaver. We use this, and within five minutes, I'm back to sleep. If I didn't, I'd be up for hours obsessing. About something instantly takes that away. I've seen it work for people who've had asthma attacks. Instantly resolves the asthma attack when I've seen people in a panic attack.
JP Erico [00:33:24]:
Instantly resolves the panic attack when people who have headaches. I mean, the device actually has a prescription twin called gammaCore and that actually has five different FDA clearances for treating things like migraine, cluster headache, both preventatively and acutely. So it has that effect and that can be really profound for people who are suffering with severe headache conditions.
JP Errico [00:33:49]:
So obviously I'm going to order one right after I get off with you. So I just want listeners to know I have not used this device. But the reason that I wanted JP to come on the show and talk to everybody is because a colleague of mine has been using it clinically with her patients with really, really good success. So now I want to transition into a few questions from practitioners in terms of like clinical use in utility.
JP Erico [00:35:32]:
When we're done with that, I'm going to tell you one of the other effects that this has. That's not a medical or clinical thing. It will blow your mind When I tell you this. You're going to go, that's Star Trek stuff. You know, defense advanced Research Projects Agency funded the research around it because it's that cool.
JP Errico [00:35:49]:
Is it going to send me up to the astral field?
JP Erico [00:35:51]:
Oh, you're going to be.
JP Errico [00:35:52]:
I'll be zooming around this time next week. Okay. What conditions do you see respond best to vagus stimulation? You just listed off, like, quite a few migraines, cluster headaches, panic attacks, some insomnia, potentially eczema.
JP Erico [00:36:09]:
Eczema. Eczema. Eczema's. Asthma of the skin, maybe. The best way to describe is sort of how I got into this. I read an article. They had talked about how if you sensitized animals to an allergen to basically make them have anaphylactic reactions and you exposed an animal to what would be a lethal dose of that allergen, that if you cut the vagus nerve, the animal could survive. And somewhere back in my history, somebody had said to me, anytime anybody's ever cut a nerve and gained a benefit, maybe you could stimulate the nerve and get the same benefit without destroying the nerve.
JP Erico [00:36:42]:
And So I put two and two together, and we went to Columbia University back in 2006, and we did the study. And what we showed was that we could actually take a person, or not a person, but an animal that had been sensitized to have an anaphylactic reaction and treat the animal with the device. And the anaphylactic reaction would be blunted, would be stopped, and the animal would survive. And we literally keep an animal from dying from an anaphylactic reaction with this. So that was really exciting. But one of the things that the research anesthesiologist that we were working with said was, hey, we're seeing the airways stay open. You know, where we would normally see the airways, you know, get filled with fluid and bronchospasm, and the rest of it, we're not seeing that. And I said, well, then maybe it would work in asthma.
JP Erico [00:37:26]:
And they sort of went, yeah, you're right, that probably would work. And so we went off and we did asthma work. We did that in humans, and we got amazing results. We did studies in the emergency department with patients who had used their albuterol at home. It wasn't working anymore because the more you use albuterol, the less it's going to be effective. It will abort the asthma attack you're having now, but it will make you more susceptible to a future one. So they would be failing that. They'd get to the emergency room, they'd be on nebulized medications, steroids.
JP Erico [00:37:56]:
90 minutes in, they're still suffering. I mean, these are people who are potentially going to be admitted to the hospital. And we said, that's the group of people we want to work on the worst of the worst, the ones that were literally facing getting intubated in the hospital. And we did our study and the patients, it was amazing. The moment that stimulator got to the right frequency, right amplitude, they would sit back and go, what did you do? Like, my lungs feel 10ft wide. I can breathe. I've never felt this open. And it was truly amazing.
JP Erico [00:38:25]:
And the results were phenomenal. And we were going to go after that as our primary indication. And along the way, at that point, it was percutaneous in the neck. So we hadn't developed a non invasive device.
JP Errico [00:38:36]:
What does that mean?
JP Erico [00:38:37]:
It was a deep brain lead and we put it in the neck. We'd have to break the skin and put it into the neck right by the. So they were doing in the emergency room, obviously not a long term solution. And I kept pounding on everybody, we got to make this non invasive. We got to figure out how to do this non invasively. And we did that. And that was the point at which everybody wanted to try it. It's amazing, nobody in the office wanted to try it when it meant a stick right next to your carotid artery.
JP Erico [00:39:00]:
But once it was non invasive, everybody wanted to try it. Our investors wanted to try it, our friends wanted to try it, family. So over a period of about five weeks, we got literally hundreds and hundreds of experiences. And one of them that stuck out was that headaches were getting better. Person would say, I had this headache. It was sitting right there over my eye all day and I used it and it just walked to the side of my head and was gone. Or I had this sitting right here in the center of my right above my nose. It was just there, pressure.
JP Erico [00:39:28]:
And it just dissipated. It went to the back of my head and was gone. And so we said, well, there's something here. So I picked up the phone and I called the top 10 headache neurologists in the world. And what they said was, yeah, vagus nerve stimulation, it's been tried in headache. We know it works, but nobody's going to have a $30,000 implant put in to treat their headaches. And that was the point where I said, no, no, no, no, we've got a non invasive handheld device. And everyone went, wait a minute, that's a billion dollar idea.
JP Erico [00:39:55]:
You need to do the research on this. And that was the point at which Merck, the Pharmaceutical company came in and, and brought in tens of millions of dollars to do research on this. And they wanted me to abandon the whole asthma thing. And I was like, I'm not going to abandon that. So we had figured out that it worked for asthma, it worked for anaphylaxis. We were working now in the clinical studies to get it approved for headache. But I was also aware that it was working for, in with the implantable devices for depression, it was working for epilepsy, People were studying in fibromyalgia, people were studying it in other areas like autoimmune diseases and rheumatoid arthritis and other things. And I said, either we're selling, we're all selling snake oil, or there's something exceedingly fundamental that we're doing.
JP Erico [00:40:39]:
And I want to figure out what that is. And so I really dug into what is the autonomic nervous system controlling? And there was work done by Kevin Tracy that showed that it worked on inflammation. There was other work that was done over in East Germany showing that, or Eastern Europe, it was actually Poland showing that it had an effect on mitochondria. And I said, I think there's even more going on here. I think it's affecting what's going on up in the central nervous system with the expression of neurotransmitters. I think we're controlling what's happening in the brainstem. And we did work with various different colleagues in academia looking at various different things, and we found a whole bunch of stuff that is really interesting about what its effects on glutamate are, what its effects on serotonin are, what its effects on norepinephrine are, dopamine. Really, all of the major neurotransmitters in the brain are affected when you stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system.
JP Erico [00:41:32]:
The work I'm doing now is even taking it further, looking at can we prevent autism and schizophrenia with it by blunting the inflammation that appears to be the driver of neurodevelopmental issues. So I'm doing research with people up in, in Canada with respect to that. So there's really a lot of stuff. It's not going to cure a broken leg, it's not going to fix a common cold. There's a lot of stuff that this.
JP Errico [00:41:55]:
Does, but, I mean, it kind of harkens back to the. One of the first questions I asked you is like, if there was one on ramp to affect every system in your body, this is kind of it in no way, shape or form have I Ever heard you say in the past 38 minutes of speaking with you, like, oh, there's actually this shortcut or you have to get to skip steps. Like you're still advocating for all of the facts. Foundational health building blocks. The issue is so many people are already doing all of those things and they're still suffering. So we have to start thinking outside the box and bring in tools for people to try. And this is one of those tools. And also thinking, I don't know if you're seeing this a lot, but we're seeing a lot of dysautonomia, especially post Covid.
JP Errico [00:42:36]:
Oh, it's the new fibromyalgia. Yes, that is a very, very good way.
JP Erico [00:42:40]:
Well, it's exactly the same thing.
JP Errico [00:42:41]:
Yeah.
JP Erico [00:42:42]:
Fibromyalgia is actually a consequence of mitochondrial and inflammatory damage that's done and your brain gets stuck in that perception of pain. I mean, I liken it. I mean, why do you have all of those symptoms when you have a respiratory virus? You have it because you've gone through the stages of inflammation. Well, that's what Covid did. Covid put people into an inflammatory state for an extended period of time. That's why the rate of post Covid or long hauler syndrome is highest among the people who were hospitalized for an extended period of time. Those people who weren't hospitalized have a lower odds of having that response. In fact, if you had an asymptomatic version of COVID where you have the antibodies but you didn't actually ever feel very sick.
JP Erico [00:43:31]:
But I will tell people that I had Covid for about three hours. I never missed a day of running 10 miles. But I remember one Sunday I was really, really tired. In the afternoon, I took a three hour nap. And I never do that. But I know people who have had long Covid and when they use vagus nerve stimulation, it breaks that cycle. I mean, people who have been flat on their back for months can't go to work, can't do anything. Two days after starting it, they've cleaned their house, they've gone to play tennis with their friends, and they're going to work the next day.
JP Erico [00:44:00]:
It can be a remarkable change.
JP Errico [00:44:03]:
So how often are you using this device and for how long to get these results?
JP Erico [00:44:08]:
So generally we tell people two minutes in the morning and two minutes in the evening. The device is programmed to deliver two minutes of stimulation. It's, I liken it to the lights in a room. You walk over, you flip the switch on, the lights go on. And if they're timed, they're going to turn off at some point. You can sit there and hit the switch a hundred times in the first 20 minutes you're there. It's not going to change anything. The lights are on until you leave the room and the time goes.
JP Erico [00:44:34]:
So it takes about six to eight hours for the effects to sort of dissipate. For what's going on in the central nervous system with respect to your immune system, it can last for 24 to 48 hours. So what we'd suggest to people to do is to use it in the morning and then use it in the evening. You know, my wife keeps hers by the bed, I keep mine by the toothbrush, typically.
JP Errico [00:44:55]:
So one question that I was thinking about, one of my colleagues asked is, if so we know you said this earlier, that we have the. There's bidirectional communication, body up, brain down. Vagus nerve is a huge channel of that. But most of the message, 80% are coming from the body up. And we know that if there is dysbiosis in the gut microbiome, if there's pathogens present, if there's just an imbalance of the good, bad, that can sometimes impact the messages or oftentimes impact the messages that are going up. If we see somebody with like extreme dysbiosis, would that impact their results? Is that how I want to say it? Would that prevent them from having positive results with this device?
JP Erico [00:45:37]:
There are those people who believe that's true. I haven't seen convincing evidence on either side. So I'm going to go with the people who are teen observers and say that I do think that having your gut microbiome in good shape is probably something that you do need to have in order for this to be as effective as it can be. I do think that some of the things that it does in the central nervous system are independent of what's going on in your gut, some of them. But I do think it's always a good idea to get your gut microbiome in place. And one of the pathways of how vagus nerve stimulation peripherally reduces inflammation is actually in the gut mucosa itself.
JP Erico [00:47:43]:
So there are fibers of the vagus nerve that are innervating that tissue that's part of the brain gut axis when those fibers were releasing acetylcholine and they've been triggered to do so by stimulating the vagus nerve. There's a separate cholinergic anti inflammatory pathway that's the cap is sort of the abbreviation for that that happens in the gut that changes how certain immune cells differentiate, how they grow and it induces a tolerance. So it doesn't necessarily fix leaky gut, but it will induce a tolerance which is reduces the symptomatology. So I do think that in the long run vagus nerve stimulation is helped by having a good microbiome and it helps you to, to restore your gut microbiome because part of that leaky gut problem is inflammation. Inflammation tends to break down those adhering molecule, those adherens that help keep those cells together and keep that barrier integral for.
JP Errico [00:48:45]:
And it becomes a vicious cycle because it gets more inflammation which is just going to like wear down those tight junction and kind of just around and around and around we go. So if we have something to interrupt that pattern, it's always a good thing. Okay, you have to close the loop for us. What is the thing that's going to blow us away?
JP Erico [00:49:01]:
Okay, so back in 2016, DARPA, which again is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, think of it as like Tony Stark's lab, a real world version of Tony Stark's lab. These guys, I mean they invented hypersonic flight, they invented night vision goggles. I mean these are like, you know, they're inventing cool stuff. They decided that they wanted to dig into whether or not any of the neuromodulation technologies out there could actually make somebody smarter. And so they did what was called, it was called the TNT program Targeted Neuroplasticity Training Study. They put a hundred million dollars in, they brought in 20 different devices and they wanted to see whether or not in their independent studies, whether any of them could make people learn faster, focus better and remember things better. So literally making memories better. And the one technology that came out of there not just better than everybody else, but really significantly improving cognitive function was vagus nerve stimulation.
JP Erico [00:49:55]:
And they picked our device and they've done now, you know, literally dozens of studies, some of which I'm not privy to because it's top secret, and other stuff that they've shared with us that I'm not supposed to share because it's sort of confidential. But then there's other things where they've actually published it. And in Nature Scientific Communications, just this past year they published the results of a study that they did at the Defense Language Institute. So this is sort of like the CIA foreign language school for the military. People go there, these are high performing individuals, go there to learn a new language. And what they found was that when people use this device twice a day during that training period, they were able to focus, maintain their focus 30% better, they were able to learn 40% faster and they were able to retain the information 50% more. Now this is just one of literally at least a dozen studies that I'm aware of that show that vagus nerve stimulation literally makes adults learn faster and be smarter and retain that information for longer and more accurately. Now I can tell you, I can go into the details of how literally that's an immune function in your brain.
JP Erico [00:51:07]:
That's one of the things that the microglial cells that are in your brain are doing is helping to coordinate the creation of new memories. So we know why it works, but the fact that it does work is truly awesome. I mean, if you want to be better at your job, if you're going into a training at your job, or you're, or you're studying for the SATs, or you're studying, you need to get one of these because you're going to learn that material faster. Now the part that I'm telling you is like, if that's not Star Trek enough, to me that's sort of like Mission Impossible stuff. This is now Star Trek. What I'm about to tell you is I decided That I wanted to figure out whether or not it had an effect, maybe an even better effect on children. And we are now moving forward into a study to follow up on some anecdotal reports that we've gotten kids. And I know it's not approved for kids.
JP Erico [00:51:57]:
It's. The implants are approved down to 5 years old. I mean, so you can have a surgery and have one implanted down to five years old, but the prescription product is only approved for 18. I think it's actually 12 and above. But I've personally used it in my own house on my children. And I will tell you that it has had a ridiculously positive effect on cognitive development. It will make people smarter. Not just adults, but kids.
JP Erico [00:52:24]:
It makes them smarter at a fundamental level of actually optimizing the neurodevelopment of the brain. You're actually seeing structural improvement, if you will, in brain development. My one daughter who's been using it, she used it originally for eczema. Started at 7 years old. She's 14 now. She took 5 years of math. In 3 years, she's already taken multiple high school level science classes. And she's just, you know, she's halfway through her freshman year.
JP Erico [00:52:53]:
She's been selected for a half a dozen different things at her school. And it's. She picked this school because it's the most difficult school in the state. And she was the valedictorian of her class for all of middle school, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. She won the award every year. And she'll tell you it changed the way her brain worked.
JP Errico [00:53:10]:
This is why you have so many patents. You're getting high on your own supply. This is it. You're doing it.
JP Erico [00:53:15]:
I wish I had had it as a kid. You know, I developed it when I was in my 40s. I will tell you that. I'll come back and we'll talk about the next thing, which I'm hoping we get published in the Lancet, that it's actually fundamental to the process of aging. Until we get partial reprogramming up and running, which I know they've spent billions of dollars at Altos Labs and at Calico and the rest of them, they're going to figure it out, literally how to become younger. But until we have that slowing the process of aging, Vagus nerve stimulation, it controls every aspect of aging.
JP Errico [00:53:47]:
Okay, So I just turned 40 this year, so I'm like all of a sudden very interested in aging.
JP Erico [00:53:53]:
I'm 56. It creeps up on you pretty fast.
JP Errico [00:53:56]:
All right? And so I Do want to. Just because we do have parents, obviously that listen to this show is true. Or would you be able to use True Vega for children? I mean, obviously you've been using it with your own children.
JP Erico [00:54:06]:
The company and I'm not employed by the company. I'm not part of the company anymore. Consult for them occasionally, but I'm really independent. I used it on my daughter starting at age 7 and had I known the benefits that it was going to have for her for eczema and for the rest of the things.
JP Errico [00:54:21]:
Or asthma. A lot of children struggle with asthma.
JP Erico [00:54:23]:
I've used it on kids. I've used it on many, many people. In fact, this afternoon I'm going to use it on one of my son's teammates on his. Because he has asthma and he has to take albuterol before every game and he hates it. It's like, I'm going to try this instead. It is a remarkable tool. And again, it's not going to fix a common cold. It's not going to fix a bone, broken bone.
JP Erico [00:54:42]:
But what it is going to do is it's going to make you more capable of healing, growing, just being healthier on every level. It's a positive. And I think we've known that for 10,000 years. I think as a species we've known.
JP Errico [00:54:55]:
That, but we just haven't had this device.
JP Erico [00:54:57]:
Now we do on yoga, we've done meditation, we've done fasting. I mean, all of these things are things we've done for 10,000 years. And. And just because we didn't have somebody at, you know, Stanford University run a study on it to prove out the science, we discount it. That's not the right way to think. Let's figure out why it works. Let's use that tool that traditional medicine as a tool for figuring out what the science is that find it. Don't throw it out until you figured it out.
JP Errico [00:55:26]:
Where can people find more of you?
JP Erico [00:55:29]:
So I'm on Instagram a lot as the VNS guy, so if you want to check me out there, that's great. I have a website which is just JP Errico. That's E R R I C O jperrico.com I trying to get the word out. I like to describe it this way. I feel like I was like Isaac Newton under the apple tree. The apple hit him on the head and he figured out gravity from that. I was sitting there and like a wormhole from the future opened up and the instruction manual for human beings, like fell into my lap and it's like a million pages long, and I only had it for five minutes, so I got to look at like five pages. But what I saw through this work that I've been doing over the last 20 some odd years, it showed me a different perspective.
JP Erico [00:56:10]:
It's like being in the forest when all the trees around you, they all seem random. And then one, you look in one direction and all the trees line up and you realize, oh, my God, this is a tree farm. I got to look at this book for five minutes and I went, oh, my God, that's how it works. And now everything that people bring up, I'm like, yeah, if you look at it through this lens, the trees line up. So this is the message I'm trying to get out. I'm trying to proselytize, if you will.
JP Errico [00:56:35]:
Well, I appreciate you coming on the show and doing that because this is a fascinating episode and I know that listeners will definitely benefit. All right, so we'll link up all the links in the show notes so people have easy access to you, and I just appreciate your time, Erin.
JP Erico [00:56:47]:
It was great. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And to everybody out there, thank you for making it this far and we appreciate you listening.
Erin Holt [00:56:59]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Functional Nutrition Podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.