Transcription
Uh, the third in our series of talks tonight on discovering how your brain controls your energy and your appetite. Talking about organic acids testing, my favorite subject for the year. And so, let me uh, just read off the course description here so you can see what you guys are getting yourselves into.
And we are talking about overeating and how an actively overly active appetite can result from stress, inflammation, toxicity, even digestive problems. You wouldn't think that would happen. We're going to learn about how you can differentiate and unravel the mysteries of stress versus inflammation as it's infecting, affecting, not infecting, affecting your brain and how these imbalances can lead to eating even when you're full. How many of us have done that? I've done that most of my life. And how that can lead to night eating. Again, something I've been very fond of for most of my life. Um, eating at night even though you know you're not that hungry, but it just seems like such a great idea to get a bowl of cereal or something like that.
And um, let's see, we're going to look, bring some science to this whole issue of appetite, food cravings, etc. And I think what you're also going to find is that since we're talking about neurotransmitters, um, you'll also discover just a lot about your brain because the things that make our appetite and energy levels drop are the same things that make us depressed and anxious. The things that interfere with your appetite are the same kind of things that interfere and cause um, joint pain. So when we get patients in my clinic who have joint pain, fatigue, weight gain, anxiety, and depression, we know from a functional medicine perspective that all those problems could be coming from the exact same set of issues, right? And so that's what we're going to talk about.
This is me, Dan Kish. Been doing this for a while, 24 years, thousands of patients all over the world. It's been an exciting and invigorating career. I really love my work and uh, I had patients all day yesterday. Just appreciate the ability to do this job and be able to help people. We've also trained over a thousand practitioners at the Kish Institute in the Kish method of functional medicine, which is also exciting and work with doctors a lot. And I have a strong spiritual practice, a strong background and working with monks and living with monks in Asia and try to bring that spiritual element into the picture here.
So, we're talking about why functional medicine. It's our physical platform. We're trying to develop a physical platform for health so that people can go out and have the emotional and spiritual growth experiences that I believe are why we're here. So, it's not just physical health for its own sake.
And you know, I often talk about this patient of mine, Jonathan, who, he, you know, this is way back when, if you guys know this company called Qualcomm. This is a long time ago, right? And um, Qualcomm was really big in San Diego. Jonathan was a patient of mine. He cashes out. He's like 32 years old, gets eight, nine, 10 million dollars, you know, and all of a sudden it's like, woohoo, you know, things are good. And he quit his job. Uh, obviously he got all this money from being an early uh, investor and employee in Qualcomm. And all of a sudden he spent six months, this is a true story, he spent six months, I think, down in Mexico windsurfing. He's a windsurfer. And then came back, saw me one visit and then went to Hawaii, Maui. I guess there's some of the best windsurfing in the world. He's spent another six months on Maui windsurfing. Then he came back and saw me a year later. So he'd been out of work for a year. He had all these millions and millions of dollars. And we were working on his health, getting him really physically healthy. And you know what? He was one of the most spiritually disconnected and unhappy people I've ever met. And so, you know, for sure money and even the pursuit of perfect health isn't enough really to get people to the place where they want to be. It's very interesting. Over the years, I've learned that from my patients and really has helped me reorient my priorities in terms of, you know, why am I here? Certainly not uh, you know, going to be happy just because we all accumulate a ton of money.
So, in terms of that's the bigger picture, right? There there's a spiritual game at play here. And then in terms of the nitty-gritty in terms of functional medicine treatment models, we're always looking for the underlying cause. And tonight, we're going to be talking about the underlying cause for a lot of different brain problems. We're always going to look for the physiological damage. That is, how do these underlying causes trigger inflammation? How do these underlying causes trigger insulin resistance? How do these underlying causes trigger oxidative stress? And then ultimately, what impact does that have on body systems? Like tonight, we're talking about neuroendocrine or more specifically the brain. So, in other words, if you have a GI infection and that causes inflammation, that can impact your brain. So we have an underlying cause causing physiological damage and ultimately ending up with a brain that's damaged, which then can cause all these different symptoms, whether it's weight gain or fatigue or depression. So in functional medicine, we're looking all the way back here to say, wow, you have a lot of toxins in your system. Maybe that's causing inflammation that's causing a brain problem that's causing weight gain, fatigue, and depression. So, we're always looking for the underlying cause, but also, as we're going to talk about tonight, using these labs to track how all this is playing out in an individual person. And once you get all this information, it makes a huge difference. If you're depressed or overeating because you're inflamed, that's really important to know. But if you're inflamed because of a toxin versus inflamed because of a food, it completely changes the whole treatment. So understanding the lab work, tying that together, I think is mission critical for all of us in order to understand how we're going to get better.
And then from a patient perspective, you guys have pains, gains, life goals, right? Maybe there's uh, weight gain or fatigue. There's gains you want to make. In other words, if you lost that weight, if you weren't tired anymore, what would you gain? You know, are you going to be like Jonathan and just windsurf, you know, and be unsatisfied? Or are you going to move into something more like life goals where you get your $10 million? I mean, that would be nice, right? And then you get your perfect health and then you decide to uh, you know, become a spiritual teacher, or you decide to write a children's book, or you decide to start uh, teaching elderly people how to exercise, whatever it is you're going to do, that's a life goal that's going to make your life meaningful. And um, that's really what we're moving towards is trying to figure out not only how to get people healthy, but what's going to happen once they are healthy.
So, in the first couple of sessions, we talked about carb metabolism in part one. We talked about mitochondrial energy in part two. And now we're in part three of the series looking at how the brain controls your energy and appetite. We're then in subsequent series going to talk in part four about sugar cravings and yeast overgrowth. Really important. And we're going to wrap up the s uh, five series looking at environmental toxins and how toxins play a role. Okay, so that's, we're in the middle of all this. And I appreciate you all taking the time out to join us.
So overeating and an overly active appetite can result from stress, inflammation, toxicity, GI problems. We're going to learn more about this and figure out how to differentiate and understand the mysteries of is the problem. This is what tonight's lab section is about. Is the problem stress-induced or is the problem inflammation-induced? And how can we even tell based on the labs? And it's a really important distinction to make because if it's stress-induced, we want to talk about stress reduction. If it's inflammation-induced, we want to figure out where the inflammation is coming from. And of course, there's overlap there. But organic acid testing can give us some insight into which direction we want to go. And then ultimately, where does this lead in terms of benefit? Reducing the confusion around the ways to address your appetite with supplements. Learning how to differentiate stress eating versus an inflammation-triggered overeating pattern. And then starting to open up a new understanding of why you might not be able to eat the right amount of food and feel satisfied as you should.
Okay, so three different common types of brain issues. There's a deficiency type, meaning that you're missing key nutrients. The brain just doesn't have the raw ingredients it needs to run. So that would be like if you were uh, building a house. Like there's a construction site near my house now where they're building a new house. And if they're trying to build that house, which they are, and if one day they're trying to pour concrete, but the rebar guys didn't show up and they didn't have any rebar, they're not going to be able to pour the concrete. The whole thing is going to fall apart, you know. So if you're missing a key nutrient, you can't assemble these brain chemicals that we're talking about. Just like on a construction project, if you're missing a key ingredient in building a structure like a concrete wall, you can't build the wall.
So, and these are not like uh, nice to haves, right? These are you have to have these things or this other thing not going to happen type of nutrients. So, we're not talking about nutrients that it would be nice if you had tonight. We're talking about nutrients that if you don't have these, this stuff just isn't going to get made. It'd be like building a house without the wood showing up. And when we look at nutrients like vitamin B6 that are co-factors, you're it'd be like building a house with all the wood that you needed, but somebody forgot to drop off the nails. You're not going to be able to just put the wood together and hope it stays, right? You need the nails to make it stick. So, there's really, really key nutrients. We'll talk about each one of those in regards to the brain later.
And then, um, always focused on damage type. You know, what's a damage type? That means there's either chemicals, heavy metals, or some level of physical trauma that's damaging the brain. And then of course, there are genetic types. That would be a group of people in a family that are born with a tendency towards these problems. Now, just because you have the genes for a problem does not mean those genes will express. You have to have certain conditions of course for genes to express. But it's one strike against you to have the genetic issue. It just puts you at a little bit greater risk.
When we look at the labs, we're going to divide things between stress-induced problems and inflammatory-induced problems. When we talk about inflammation in in functional medicine, in my mind, it's a code word for GI problems or toxins. GI problems include inflammatory foods or GI pathogens. That would be infections in your gut like bacteria, yeast, or parasites. And toxins include oxidative stress and inflammation from chemicals or heavy metals. So, in general, if there's inflammation, we're worried about, is it coming from the GI tract? Is it coming from toxins? Figuring that out is an essential element because it determines what you want to do, right? If the first thing is happening, you want to clean up your diet and you want to get rid of any bugs in your gut. If the second problem is happening, you need to detoxify and get rid of toxins. So, there's some overlap, but two generally distinct issues.
Now, you could also have a stress-induced brain problem, and you can see that really clearly on the labs. Stress-induced means that you're under pressure. And that stress is going to drive the inflammatory process and generate all these different problems. So, I don't know if you guys have seen this film. If you haven't yet, I highly recommend it. It was called American Sniper. And uh, it's a great action movie. It's a great kind of drama and it's got Bradley Cooper. And who doesn't like Bradley Cooper? I mean, he's like the most gorgeous man in the world. So, women love him and then I just like him because he's a great actor. And um, it's a, it's really one of his better films, I think. But anyways, there's a, there's a couple of scenes, you know, the movie works like this where he's a sniper. It's a true story. He's the human being in the United States military who is shot and killed more other people than any sniper in our history. So, he's like the best sniper of all time and at least in in the United States. And he, the movie alternates between him being in Iraq shooting people in the head and being back at home in Texas interacting with his wife and kids and trying to pretend like he's a normal guy. And and there's a couple of scenes, one in particular, where Bradley Cooper is sitting in this easy boy chair. He's back at home. He's just watching a football game on TV, but you can just see the stress. You can see and he's doing flashbacks. You know, obviously, he's living this war trauma out. So, he's not yelling and screaming and and beating up his wife and uh, trying to shoot people in America or robbing grocery stores. He's just sitting in his chair in a suburban neighborhood in a Texas town, but he's seething with anger, resentment, fear, guilt, violence, just everything you can imagine that's bad. So sometimes stress is, you know, people arguing and throwing plates at each other in the kitchen. Sometimes stress is like Bradley Cooper kind of stress where you're just sitting in a chair, but things are not okay internally. A lot of times people think stress is just, you know, when we're acting out. Doesn't have to be.
So, we've got deficiency types, damage types, which we'll talk about more as well, and then genetic types. And this pathway planner was produced by a good friend and colleague of mine, one of the smartest doctors around, Dr. Ben Lynch. If you don't know about him, you should definitely look him up and follow his work. But one of the things Dr. Lynch has put together is this document, which shows us how the genes are related to the various brain chemicals. And he is just brilliant, beyond brilliant. Uh, I really love him. If again, if you don't know Dr. Lynch's work, check it out. But here's what we're going to talk about tonight. Tyrosine, L-dopa, 5HTP. Here's all the different genetic pathways and ID1 and all this kind of complicated stuff. But, you know, you don't have to memorize this or really understand it to be honest. But the idea is that our genes are playing a role along with nutrients and environmental input to create these problems. But the genes are not the determining factor here. It's what happens to the genes that matters.
Now, three types of brain issues: deficiency, damage, and genetic types. You could have all three. You could be deficient. You could have some damage, and you could have a genetic tendency. Once this gets rolling and there's one or two or three of these problems, there's a neuroendocrine system crash. The system starts to fall apart. Our immune system starts to weaken. Immune system gets weak. And then the GI system starts to falter. We pick up intestinal tract bugs. The gut lining gets shredded and damaged. We call that leaky gut. Eventually, toxins build up and the detox systems become overwhelmed. Okay.
So, what we're looking at here is when we're healing the brain, we want to address anything that's present, whether it's neuroendocrine, GI, detox, because as I mentioned earlier, inflammation in the gut feeds back and causes problems with the brain. Toxins directly impact the brain. So, it's impossible to look at this in an isolated way. We have to look at it from an integrated systems approach.
You know, when I first learned about functional medicine, it seemed so overwhelming and complicated and um, I studied and I studied and I read books and I went to seminar after seminar after seminar. I spent years and years and years learning about this and and in my mind, it was complicated. And so the way I explained it to patients was really complicated and no one understood what I was saying. The first five years in practice, if you had come to see me, it would have been a total waste of time because I would have just gone, blah, blah, blah, cytochrome P450 enzyme, blah, blah, blah. And you would have just gone, oh, I don't know what this guy's talking about, but I think he knows what he's doing and I'll do what he says, you know. But you know, once you actually understand how all this works, you can see that there's a very simple elegance to it. And it's not any more complicated than building a house. And the struggles that a carpenter or contractor has to go through with a plumbing system, some electrical wiring, and the walls. Okay, this doesn't have to be overwhelming at all. And in fact, when you see it in its simplicity, it makes a lot of sense. So hopefully tonight's talk will help kind of bring this down to a level that you can see is not that complicated.
We're going to talk about the GI tract generating inflammation. And we're going to look at these labs that show whether there's an inflammatory process damaging the brain or not. There's a lot of research now about the gut-brain and brain-gut connection or gut-brain and gut-brain and brain-gut axis. And then we also want to focus on that other body system, the toxin detoxification system and see whether that is causing inflammation. So when the gut is inflamed, it directly impacts the brain negatively. And I'll show you the pathways by which that works. When a toxin is present, it not only generates inflammation, but many of these toxins are neurotoxins and they get directly into the brain cells themselves, into the brain tissue and start to destroy brain cells. Okay? So toxins are dangerous to your brain for a variety of different reasons.
Now, just wanted to mention that these chemicals we're going to talk about, serotonin and dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, they exist inside the brain, obviously, that's what we're talking about, but they also exist outside the brain. And in fact, the largest amounts of serotonin are produced in the gut. So these chemicals do things besides control your brain. For example, serotonin controls the peristaltic action of the digestive tract. So when people are really low in serotonin, it can cause chronic constipation. Serotonin, it's named for what it does. Also, when they first discovered this chemical, sero, I mean serum or blood, tonin, it's a tonifier. It's a tonifier of blood vessels. So serotonin has a role in vasoconstriction and vasodilation and can play a role in migraine headaches as well. Again, it has many functions outside the actual brain chemical functions that we're talking about. And so does dopamine. I just wanted to mention that so you don't think it's all about the brain. When we fix serotonin or dopamine levels, it can have an impact on all kinds of different organs outside the brain as well.
So, typical causes of brain or GI combination problems, we already reviewed. Just a quick look at this again to do a little deeper layer. We're talking about emotional stress, dietary stress, and inflammatory stress creating these alterations in brain chemistry, alterations in gut function, and ultimately generating toxins. But the confusing part is the digestive problems come back and hit the brain, and the toxins come back and hit the brain. And so in functional medicine, you can just draw arrows forever because everything causes everything. And oftentimes that leads to a general sense of panic and anxiety among doctors because they just don't know where to start. Understandably so.
There, oh, by the way, where do we start? Well, the diagram gives it away. Okay, we start with stress and hormone and brain chemistry issues. Then we fix the gut, then we detox you. So, there's a sequence. The sequence treatment is in the same order as what we're looking at here. Okay, neuroendocrine, GI, and detox. Try to follow that treatment sequence as much as possible. Can't always do that, but usually we can.
So, a couple of just aides that you should know about just for general information. Uh, one is that the metabolism of these compounds is really important. And metabolism, kind of, if you're going to translate that into English, kind of means how you break it down, you know? So, like, I don't know, say you were, um, if you were, uh, if you bought a brand new bicycle and then you decided to just strip out all the parts and and take it down to the frame, you'd be metabolizing the bike, right? You'd be breaking it down into its component parts. So, if you increase serotonin, for example, taking a supplement like 5HTP, you're going to increase the enzymes that help you break down or metabolize that serotonin. And guess what? They're the same enzymes that help you break down the other brain chemicals. So, long-term use of supplements like 5HTP over the course of many, many years could actually end up interfering with dopamine production. Okay.
Now, the same is true in terms of how um, we actually produce these chemicals. So the production, for example, of serotonin occurs when we use, we get 5HTP from the diet or from supplements and we use this or aromatic amino acid decarboxylase enzyme to assemble the serotonin. Okay? So we take the 5HTP, we use this enzyme to put it together into serotonin. It's the same enzyme that we use to make dopamine. So if you increase your serotonin by taking 5HTP, you're going to put a strain on dopamine production at the same time. So you can actually, and this takes a long time, but it can happen. But if you're on 5HTP by itself for a bunch of years, you could deplete dopamine and just be on the lookout for that. You don't want to take a single amino acid year after year. Want to be a little bit careful with how you administer these. Now, in my practice, every single, 100% of what I design program-wise is based on lab testing. So we don't run into these problems. But I just want to mention that as an aside. Okay.
So, we're going to talk about these various nutrients. We define them. I already mentioned them a few times. 5HTP is an amino acid. We use that amino acid to make serotonin. Tyrosine also an amino acid. We use that to make dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. So dopamine, most people have heard of the chemical of reward. It's the reason why we gamble. It's the reason why we drink alcohol. It's the reason why human beings take cocaine, Adderall, Ritalin, speed, all kinds of amphetamines. It's the reason why we like to drive fast. Dopamine is what they call a chemical reward. It just makes us feel so, so, so good. That whatever we're doing that brings more dopamine is hard to stop. I just read this article recently where every time you get that little ding, you know, and you get a little text message, your body, your brain squirts out a little dopamine. So, it's pretty hard if your phone is like five feet away and you hear that ding like you got a text message. Pretty hard to resist that. Next time you hear your text message ding happen, just think, "Oh, that was dopamine that made me go pick up my phone in an obsessive manner."
Vitamin C is very critical for producing these chemicals. Vitamin B6 is one of the mission-critical nutrients in production of serotonin. If you don't have enough B6, this all falls apart. And then there's a series of sulfur compounds that are required too. These have names like methionine, cysteine, and N-acetylcysteine. So there's, you know, half a dozen, maybe a dozen at the most nutrients that are required to make all this happen. And in a perfect world, we would get them all from our food.
So now, this is a little complicated, but let's try to break this one apart because this gets important. This becomes important in a minute. Okay. So what we're going to look at when we see the tests, we're going to look at this thing called kynurenate and quinolinate. And this one here, the 5-hydroxyindoleacetate. Okay, these are what we actually see on the lab. But what I want to show you with this slide is that we take serotonin and we make these various chemicals from serotonin like 5-hydroxyindoleacetate. If we're inflamed, if we're inflamed, if we're inflamed, we make kynurenate and quinolinate. So, let's just do a little math here. Let's make up some numbers because in all honesty, I'm not that great at math. Let's say we have a thousand units of tryptophan and then we have a thousand units of 5HTP. All right? And then in a healthy brain, you would make 1,000 units of serotonin from all this. And if that happened, you would also make, I don't know, let's say 500 units of melatonin. So what does that mean? You're happy. You have a normal appetite. You're not eating at night. You're sleeping really well. Everything's working great.
If you're inflamed, kynurenate and quinolinate go up. So, let's say kynurenate goes from zero to 800. And now you're really inflamed. And then quinolinate goes up to like 100 units. Now, of course, I'm making these numbers up, okay? But just to show you the idea, now instead of that thousand units of tryptophan going this way, no, no, no, no. Now your body's taking that tryptophan and dumping it down these pathways. 800 units there, 100 units there. That only leaves us now 100 units of 5HTP. So we can only make 100 units of serotonin. Now you're getting totally robbed. And that only leaves you like 50 units of melatonin. And then what happens? You want to eat a lot at night. You're tired all the time. You don't sleep really well because when your body's inflamed, it's going to make kynurenate and quinolinate preferentially from the exact same raw ingredients that you make serotonin and melatonin from.
At first, like you, I thought this was a design flaw. I'm thinking, well, that's dumb. Who set this up? That's not I mean, just because I'm inflamed, I'm going to get depressed, tired, and hungry and overweight and can't not be able to sleep. Seems unfair. But really, if you think about it for a moment, the design team had their act together. What the design team sat down and decided was, "All right, well, if this body is going to be that inflamed, we don't really want this person feeling very good. It's way more important that they make these anti-inflammatory mediators to try to deal with the emergency situation than it is that they sleep well and eat healthy." So this, the basically the design team structured this so that if you're inflamed, your brain chemical levels drop. And you're able, in exchange for that, to make these anti-inflammatory cytokines. Okay? So it's a tradeoff, as with all things in life.
So now, once this whole process kicks in and your serotonin levels are low because you're inflamed, you're going to start to get hungry. The same exact process is going to happen with dopamine. Okay? Okay, the dopamine levels are going to get thrown off and you're going to get hungry with this combination of abnormal brain chemicals. Bummer, bummer, bummer.
Now, you can also, and this happens all the time by the millions, you can also deplete your brain chemicals by taking drugs. Anti-depressant drugs do it. Amphetamines do it. Cocaine does it. Even alcohol can deplete dopamine. You can also do it, as I mentioned, if you take high dosages of amino acids for many years. Now, in some cases, people have to take these medications. And I'm not against the whole, you know, wholesale against in every case, people using anti-depressants. But they're clearly have a ramification. And oftentimes we see patients that stay on these drugs for too long. They're just on them for too long. You know, they're designed really to use for six months or a year while the person's severely depressed. And then I, I try to get off of them. But often times we find patients that are just put on these medications and left on them. Either they're put on them for the wrong reason or they're left on them for too long. And over time, there's going to be depletion. Okay.
Now, I want to show you this other version of how all this works, which is, remember I mentioned before, inflammatory cytokines. Inflammatory cytokines, picolinate, quinolinate, there's another one, kynurenate. So when we're inflamed, picolinate, quinolinate, quinolin, I'm saying that wrong, quinolinate, quinolinate, and kynurenate elevate. When these chemicals go up, we talked about how serotonin levels drop. But the same exact thing happens with dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. Okay? So, let me just define those. So dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine together as a group are called catecholamines. The British call epinephrine adrenaline. They call norepinephrine noradrenaline. So, mo, in in in English in America, when we say, "Oh, I got an adrenaline rush or I'm having an adrenaline rush." We kind of know what that means. Um, but the scientists in our country decided to to switch and use epinephrine as the term. It means the exact same thing. Epi is above, nephrine is kidneys. Adrenaline, ad is above, renal is kidneys. One is Greek, one is Latin, but they mean the exact same thing because the adrenal glands where we make adrenaline or above the um, kidneys. So there just really, someone saw the adrenal glands, they're like, "Wow, they're above the kidneys." And in Greek or Latin, they just named them. So anyways, these three chemicals all together are called catecholamines. And as a group, when we get that adrenaline rush, they're released. Okay? That becomes really important. They're excitatory neurotransmitters. They perk us up. They get us to do things. And we make all these chemicals from L-dopa and ultimately from this amino acid called tyrosine.
Now, before you rush out and buy a bottle of tyrosine, remember tyrosine does a lot of other things. It makes thyroid hormones. It makes melanin that gives us color to our skin. And remember, if you take too much tyrosine for too long, you're going to mess up your serotonin. So, you don't want to just chug bottles of tyrosine just because you saw this lecture. Okay? That's a little dangerous. That would be as dangerous as just taking an anti-depressant because you saw an ad on TV for an anti-depressant. It's just not what. But I want you guys to be educated so you can run the tests so you can make intelligent decisions with your doctor. Right?
So anyways, these catecholamines are made in the adrenal medulla. And these catecholamines are also made in the brain. And it's a little confusing because the adrenal medulla is part of your adrenal gland and the brain is in your brain. So when these chemicals are made in the brain, we call them neurotransmitters. The confusing thing is that they're also made in the adrenal glands themselves, which is the hormone-producing gland. The the confusion is around the adrenal medulla because the adrenal medulla is in the adrenal gland. It's the center inner part of the adrenal gland, but it's also considered part of the nervous system. So anyways, there's a lot of mishmash here. When these chemicals are produced in both places simultaneously. Okay? So when we're stressed, the adrenal medulla and the brain both make these chemicals at the same time. Sometimes you see them represented as hormones because they're made in a hormone-producing gland like the adrenals. Sometimes you see the same exact chemical that's produced in the brain called a neurotransmitter. Sometimes people just get confused and the scientists, they'll say it's a neurohormone. Okay? This is just to cover all your bases.
Okay, key point is that when you're inflamed, these chemical levels are going to drop. And why do they drop? Because remember our example. Let's say you have a thousand units of tyrosine. And in a perfect world from that, okay, I'm going to do the math here. So my son is 17 now and he's, this is true. This is true. He's, he's like, he's really good at math. He's taking college-level math now. He's in linear algebra. If you can believe that, like in the third year of calculus. And but I did not get that. He certainly didn't get the math skills from me. So I'm going to do it pretty simple. Let's say that from that thousand units of tyrosine, you make 333 units of dopamine, 333 units of norepinephrine, and another 300, and to make it work out, I think I have to do 334 units of epinephrine or adrenaline. And that's a happy brain. You're stressed. You can deal with it. You're not stressed. You relax.
If you're inflamed, guess what happens? Now all that tyrosine is coming down this way. So now let's say you have 900 units of tyrosine coming down to make these inflammatory mediators. Now all of a sudden you only have 30 units of dopamine, 30 units of norepinephrine. You get the idea? You're depleting your brain chemicals because you're inflamed. And this lab test measures this, you guys. That's the cool part. It measures picolinate, quinolinate, piccolinate. It also measures these guys way out here, homovanillate and vanillylmandelate. So when you make dopamine and you break it down or metabolize it, it ends up in the urine as homovanillate. When you make norepinephrine and epinephrine and you break them down and metabolize them, it turns into the urine as uh, goes into the urine as vanillylmandelate. So if you measure homovanillate and vanillylmandelate, you can reverse engineer what's happening with the primary chemical up here. Clever, isn't it? Because to actually measure dopamine levels in the brain is virtually impossible in a normal situation. You have to like, you know, somehow get into the cerebrospinal fluid. It's not, it's not realistic. It would be too painful and unpleasant and no one would do it. So with a urine test, and the blood testing is not very accurate at all, but a urine test can measure homovanillate and determine what's happening with dopamine. We can also measure vanillylmandelate to determine what's happening with these chemicals. Now, almost pretty much the entire anti-depressant market in the pharmaceutical industry operates on these chemicals here and serotonin. Okay. So these are really important chemicals and knowing what's happening with them is uh, essential.
Okay, so all that being said, let's take a deep breath for a minute here. Oh my gosh, and think about pulling it all together. Okay, this is where it gets a little confusing. And um, I could tell you a story about when, when I very first did this, when I, my um, this is true. When I, when I did my first organic acids test, this is so embarrassing. I did my first organic acids test and it came back and it was just an absolute mess. It had all kinds of markers all over the place and I completely panicked and freaked out and I didn't know what to do and I basically kind of blew the patient off and and just and I let it go maybe for five or six years. The problem here is that these tests are really complicated and doctors are never trained properly in how to interpret them, you know, and so you know that it's important, you want to run the lab, but it's really, really difficult to learn how to actually do all this. And and that's part of why I want to teach you all how to do it because I want you then to be able to, you know, take this information and convince your doctors to start to order these tests.
So, stress markers, we talked a lot about these already. Vanillylmandelate, homovanillate, and 5-hydroxyindoleacetate. Okay. Now, if you remember, vanillylmandelate was related to um, epinephrine and norepinephrine. Epi, norepi. Homovanillate was dopamine. 5-hydroxyindoleacetate was serotonin. And these are markers that we're now going to look at on the labs. That tells you, is there a stress problem? Is there a production problem? Is there too much or too little of these chemicals being made? Okay. If you're really stressed, these levels are going to go up. If you've been really stressed for a long time, they're going to plummet. And you can just see it on the lab.
The inflammation markers that we've talked about already, kynurenate, quinolinate, and piccolinate. Same exact thing. If they're really high, it means the brain chemicals are depleted. If these markers up here, vanillylmandelate, homovanillate, or 5-hydroxyindoleacetate are really high, it means the brain chemicals are low. Okay? So, if you're making tons and tons and tons of dopamine, you're going to exhaust the production and eventually they're going to burn out. There's a process here in play. And if you have tons of these stress-related markers and you're making tons of these chemicals, you're going to need to support the body with amino acids to start to balance things out. If the brain or body is inflamed, you can see this. If the body is stressed, you know, emotionally stressed, you're going to see that.
We talked about this already. This is basically kind of a reiteration of the pathways. All right? And here's the kynurenate pathway, which we alluded to, but didn't show you the detail of. Remember, here's your serotonin made from tryptophan. It also can come down this way when you're inflamed. Here's the kynurenate pathway. Remember, if this goes up, it means your serotonin is dropping down. Okay? And here's the 5-hydroxyindoleacetate. If this number goes up, it means you're depleting the serotonin stores. If this number means is dropping or has dropped, it means that they're already quite low.
So now, why would you overeat? If your brain chemicals are really low, your body sends out these signals that you're just hired, that you're tired all the time. I'm tired all the time. That you're hungry all the time. If you're exhausted all the time, you're, that can also happen from this, the low brain chemicals. If your joints are sore and painful all the time everywhere throughout your body, that could also be these low chemicals. Okay? And this is a really tricky part is that you don't know what the low brain chemicals are going to trigger in an individual. And some people, it'll mean that they're hungry all the time. Some people will be tired all the time. Other people will be depressed or anxious from the same exact mechanisms.
So this is our next talk, May 9th, if you want to join us. We're going to talk about sugar cravings and yeast overgrowth. I hope you can join us and we'll send out emails so that you know more about that. Um, that's going to be an exciting and fun one as well. And we'll get into uh, testing for yeast and bacteria in the gut and how this intestinal tract relates to all this, etc. All right.
So, um, also, if you're interested in testing, I have appointments that are available. You can check us out at kishwellness.com. Talk to the office manager if you want. And now I want to show you some examples, uh, case studies so you can see how this actually plays out on the labs. All right, so let's take a look at this. So here's some tests and here's the neurotransmitter section that we've been focusing on. And this patient, you can see vanillylmandelate very low. That's the one that's related to epinephrine and norepinephrine. In case you forget, they tell you over here in the side column. Homovanillate very low. That's the one that's related to dopamine. 5-hydroxyindoleacetate low. That's the one that's related to serotonin. So this particular example, this patient of mine had low levels of all three of the stress-related neurotransmitter markers. So right off the bat, we know the brain chemicals are reduced due to some kind of chronic stress. Doesn't tell you what stress exactly, but here's a breakdown of the lab in a little more detail. This is like the whole graph thing they give you. Cell regulation markers, neurotransmitter metabolism markers. Now remember, it's not a test of the actual neurotransmitters. We're looking at the metabolites. So rather than looking at the whole bicycle, we're looking at the parts of the bicycle that are broken down. But let's say that you had a thousand bicycles in a warehouse somewhere and for some reason you couldn't.