Transcription
Hi everyone, and welcome! I hope you are all doing well. I hope you can all, I hope you can all hear me. I'm not using my usual equipment right now, so if someone could just raise their hand to make noise that you can actually hear my voice, then I will know I can launch into things here. Oh, great! That sounds good. Thank you, Molly.
Alright, so we have a lot to talk about, and I gotta try to stay on topic. So let's talk about the topic first. Well, now, let's talk about what's really interesting first, okay? So we're gonna talk in a moment about pain and inflammation and how all that stuff happens. And I'll tell you some stories about antioxidants. And, you know, I think the big take-home message for this whole talk is that oxidative stress and inflammation contribute to all chronic pain syndromes. And that if you can prevent or reverse oxidative stress and prevent and reverse inflammation, then you can get the pain to go away, right? Along with all the other things that are just common sense, like acupuncture for pain relief, and chiropractic care, and massage for pain relief, and stretching, and exercise, and all that kind of stuff, right? So we're not saying that that stuff's not important, but for tonight, we're just talking about sort of this focus on the nutritional underpinnings of the problem.
And then I've got this really complicated lab up here because I want to mention this in the beginning of the talk. It has nothing to do with today's talk at all, but it has everything to do with everything. So I want to show you. So this is a pre and post set of labs on one of my patients. And you can see it's a little complicated, right? I've been doing this for 28 years, and I still find it to be quite complicated. Um, but I want to show you something that I learned on Monday. And this is something that I've been studying for almost 30 years. I talk about every day. I teach this to doctors. I talk to patients all the time. And on Monday, it finally sunk in. You know how it is when you, you kind of learning about something for decades, and then all of a sudden, you finally get it? Well, that just happened to me. So let me just show you what I just got. And I want to use this as an example for the big picture of your health.
So you can see there's one marker on this many, multi-complicated tests. You see that one? That's that symbol there is a Greek symbol alpha. So they call this alpha-ketoglutarate. And here's the follow-up test: alpha-ketoglutarate. Just the benign marker. And, you know, scattered in this 10 or 15-page report. And you can see on the initial test that alpha-ketoglutarate was high. And on the follow-up test, it has a little UL by it. You see the UL there? UL means above the upper limit. So it turns out the upper limit for this particular test marker is around a thousand. So on the first test, elevated is anything over about a 20%. This was at a 30-something. On the second test, it went up to over a thousand. So imagine that. You'd say that's an increase of like 30-fold, right? So imagine you went to a regular doctor and you had your cholesterol checked, and it was 200. And then you had it checked again six months later, and it was 30 times that, right? It was, what would that be like? Six thousand? We had a cholesterol of six thousand? Oh, you would, that would be like impossible, right? It couldn't happen.
And so when you see these impossible numbers, what you're looking at is a genetic defect. And I didn't notice it on the first test because it was just kind of regularly high. But on the follow-up, follow-up test, we can see here this person has a problem that's very specific. It's a genetic disorder called ketoglutarate dehydrogenase deficiency. So there's an enzyme that helps you break down alpha-ketoglutarate, and that enzyme is missing in this person. And so this person has anxiety and depression as a direct result of that enzyme defect. And there's a solution that the geneticists have figured out. This is not an integrative medicine or alternative medicine idea. In children that have this condition, they use thiamine, which is vitamin B1. They use riboflavin, vitamin B2. They use biotin and carnitine. And lo and behold, that gets this enzyme working.
So I just want to take this from a conceptual framework. When you're looking at labs, you're thinking about your own health. There's the most important concept that you can follow, which is that you eat well most of the time. You know, the 80/20 rule. 80% of the time, you eat really well. 20% of the time, have some fun. You exercise hard every day for at least an hour. You have really great relationships, people around you to care about you, that you care about. You get meditation done. You know, you get plenty of sleep. You do, we're doing all these things, right? And assuming all that's happening, what can conspire to undermine your health? And would be a genetic defect like we're looking at here. And so we can use nutritional therapy, like we're going to talk about tonight, in a more mundane manner to just deal with big-picture problems like inflammation. But you can also use nutritional therapy at a much higher level, which I'm just learning about now, the later part of my career, for things like these genetic disorders. And we all have dozens, if not hundreds, of these little glitches in our genes. And whether that's going to express as a problem or not is really dependent on your lifestyle. And to a certain extent, even if your lifestyle is dialed in, and there's a few of these genetic issues that can sort of, you know, undermine the best of us.
Some ways, I just want to be clear because a lot of patients I work with are doing everything right from a lifestyle standpoint, but they're still not feeling good, and they're wondering why. And that's the point of the labs. Okay, so that is a little bit of an introduction. Think about the genetics of all this. International phone practice. That's me. I work with people all over the world. We're taking new patients now. If you're interested, you should sign up. I am on the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine. In fact, I'll be going off to a conference next month in Charleston to teach. I've done research studies working with Dr. Lord, who's the person that's really training me on how to understand these labs from a genetic standpoint. And today, we're going to kind of step back a little bit from the brink of looking at the genetic underpinnings for chronic disease and talk a little bit more about, like, the basic stuff, the bread and butter, core stuff. And looking at lab-based treatments for pain and inflammation. How can you modify and test the inflammatory process and reduce pain using a lab-based functional medicine approach? So you're not guessing.
It could be an autoimmune-related inflammatory issue. It could be joint pain. It could be anything from digestive inflammation. And when you, when you look at all the inflammatory disorders, they all have "itis" after them, right? So if it's a word with "itis," you know the person's inflamed. So bursitis, you're versus inflamed. Tendonitis, your tendons are inflamed. Hepatitis, your liver is inflamed. Gastritis, your stomach isn't flamed. Colitis, your intestine is inflamed. Neuritis, your nerves are inflamed. So if you think about, there's a lot of "itis" out there, right? Because it's really common to have an inflammatory problem. Just about anything can get inflamed. Your thumb can get inflamed, and your pancreas can get inflamed. Okay, so we want to address inflammation. We want to address antioxidants. And we want to look a little bit at, so your cell energy, how that works. And these are just things you should know about, just as a general sort of self-help kind of things, so you'll understand that your body works. I think, too, we're not gonna get too complicated. So any kind of "itis," you name it, right? From hepatitis to colitis. There is no brain "itis." That is my joke. But, uh, there should be, because some people have inflamed brains, and that can be, you know, an underlying cause for depression and anxiety and those kinds of problems. Or that patient I just showed you with the high, astronomically high alpha-ketoglutarate. Alpha-ketoglutarate means your brain is sick. It's an acid. It makes you very acidic, and that can cause major problems with your neurological system, with your nerves, in your brain, and whatnot. So, so I want to talk about with the labs and also diet, how lab results exist on a spectrum. You know, when you're looking at these tests, and from easy-to-understand to prep spectrum to kind of a harder-to-understand spectrum.
So lots of people know, if you've read anything about nutrition, that if you're low in omega-3s, flaxseed oil, fish oils, those kinds of things, you can become inflamed just because of the lack of omega-3s. You can, and usually omega-6s, those fats are considered to be pro-inflammatory. However, you can have too much omega-3. That is possible. If you take large dosages of omega-3s for a long time, it inhibits the omega-6s, okay? And large doses of omega-3 end up causing more problems than they solve. So it's with the body, if it's always, it's give and take, right? There's never like one thing and then the more the better. So, so always want to keep that in mind. And we're looking at markers like for energy production, it's the exact same thing. There's a range that we want to be in. And you can have high levels of oxidative stress if you don't eat enough fruits and vegetables, and you can see that on the labs when you look at the labs. You can see, is this person eating enough fruits or vegetables to keep healthy? But you can also have a lack of oxidative stress simply because you're inactive, because you're depressed, and you don't move around a lot, okay? So there's lots of reasons why these markers can show up. And so, in other words, the lack of antioxidants in your diet, the lack of fruits and vegetables, the way that shows up in a lab, that can be at the other end of that spectrum, basically, is if you're not making enough energy and you don't have enough oxidative stress for all the things that are good. There's, you know, sort of a flip side that can be potentially bad.
And so when we're thinking about these treatment options, and I have some protocols. I think this is one of the first times I've done this in a few years, but I'm gonna have some protocols that we're going to post: anti-inflammatory protocol, oxidative load protocol, mitochondrial protocol. So we'll send out links to the protocols. So if you guys want to take some of these supplements, and the way that I created supplement protocols is to make them safe to take if you're not doing labs. So if you can't afford the labs or you don't want to do the labs for some reason, but you have so these problems, you want to try something. If you try one of these protocols and try it for three months or four months, and if you don't get a benefit, probably you should schedule a consult and do some labs, okay? But you can do supplements safely without labs if you're careful.
So for the mitochondrial section and how that relates to chronic pain and inflammation, you can use things like freeform amino acids, CoQ10, and magnesium. Oxidative stress, obviously, we use water-soluble and fat-soluble antioxidants. And for inflammation, you can use omega-3s and omega-6s. And so the thing about this, sort of insidious about all this, is that you can get these problems all happening simultaneously, right? So you can have chronic pain, which means you're inflamed, which leads to or increases your oxidative stress. And then those two problems conspire and start to damage your mitochondria, which furthers this whole problem. All right? And so people end up in these cycles where all these things are going on simultaneously. And that is a not great place to be.
And then there's different places that can get inflamed that we see in functional medicine, you know, super commonly. And so these are ones that sort of make are worthy of special mention just because we see them all the time. And they are sources of inflammation: right brain inflammation, that can happen because of stress, that can happen because of a head injury, emotional distress makes us inflamed, believe it or not. If you're sitting there stressed out, you're gonna get inflamed. Physical injury, you know, you break a bone, get a car accident, hit your head, you know, crash on a bicycle, whatever it is that can happen. Physical injury. Why is you lift something really heavy, hurt your back? That's obviously going to be a potential chronic source of inflammation. A lot of people have chronic physical pain. And then one day, you wouldn't think of on the upper right-hand side there, is environmental toxin exposure. So many people have chronic pain because of environmental toxins, and they get into your body, and they cause all kinds of damage to the neurons, and all kinds of damage to your detox pathways, and they build up and trigger all kinds of pain syndromes. So environmental toxin exposure is a common one. You might not think of hormone imbalances. There's some hormones like cortisol that really strong anti-inflammatory role, and when those get out of balance, you could get inflamed. And then, of course, the classic in functional medicine, on the lower right-hand side there, would be GI infections. And so one of the few things you can get most functional medicine doctors to agree on is that you got to check the GI tract. Because if the GI tract isn't inflamed, you know, you're gonna have a chronic inflammatory problem. And so I know it sounds strange, but I've probably had no more than 50 patients in the last 30 years who have had chronic low back pain just because they had an infection in their intestinal tract. And when we got rid of that infection, their back pain went away like within a week. 20 years of back pain gone because we treated a parasite. I know that sounds a little crazy. In fact, when the first time it happened to me, I so remember this guy, Cameron, his name. I don't know, something like Paul's. That older gentleman who's probably in his mid to late 60s. He'd had back pain for ever, for like 30 years. And he came in. I still remember this. And he had Blastocystis hominis. And I was like, I don't know. I really didn't know what to do because I'm, I'm thinking this guy's only complaint is chronic low back pain, and the only thing I can find wrong is a parasite. I really was on the verge of telling him there was nothing I could do and just send him out because he didn't have any digestive problems. But, you know, just out of desperation, you know, I was like, why do you have a parasite? When we treat that, as soon as he started there, herbs for parasite, all his back pain went away. And we're both looking at each other. That's one of those moments when, and this happens a lot in functional medicine, when I just have to try to keep a straight face and pretend like I expected that to happen, when I'm thinking, what I'm really thinking is, I can't believe that worked. And what I'm saying to the patient, "Wow, that's so great. I'm glad you're feeling better, Paul. You know, your pain is all gone." So anyway, that happens. The first time, I think it happens to any level of us, you know, if you're a patient or a doctor, you can be shocked. But it's a pretty common kind of scenario. Okay, so, oh, this is a promotional moment for me to say we have, we have this new thing at my clinic now. We have these free 15-minute consultations with one of my team members, and she's amazing, and people love her. And if you're just interested in being a patient or you just want to know more about what we do at my clinic, just set up a free 15-minute thing. Just go to KaylasWellness.com and, and you can get in touch with our amazing health coach. And then if you're just like dying to become a patient, you can just schedule as a patient too. Okay. Alright.
So in terms of interventions, when you're thinking in the big picture about chronic pain and inflammation, and if you're not doing the lab testing, you can just try each one of these protocols and see if they work. And if they don't, but if they do work, then great, you know, solved problem solved. If they don't, then you probably need some lab work. But the obvious things for this situation would be for mitochondrial treatments. The mitochondria need three things, and the mitochondria are often involved in chronic pain and inflammatory problems. They'll give them to little details there, but mitochondria need CoQ10 and magnesium. Together, though, both of those. And interestingly enough, the mitochondria need a lot of oxygen. So breathing exercises, CoQ10, and magnesium will help if the pain and discomfort and inflammation has a mitochondrial basis, okay?
Terms of oxidative stress, you can take targeted antioxidants, either fat-soluble or water-soluble. So the fat-soluble ones are kind of, you know, vitamin E, vitamin A. Water-soluble ones are like CoQ10. I'm sorry, CoQ10, um, like vitamin C, okay? Would you take if you're not sure because you didn't do labs? Bobby, just take one of each. Maybe take a vitamin E or a vitamin A or beta-carotene type thing along with like some vitamin C or some N-acetylcysteine or something that's a little bit more on the water-soluble side. Because when, when we're getting it, when we're under a lot of oxidative stress, what's happening is your body tissues are getting damaged, right? So you think about oxidative stress, oxidation is like when you cut an apple in half and it starts to turn brown. And what's happening is the tissues are being damaged or destroyed. And this happens on the inside of the human body. The same thing is when you see a nail that's rusting, it's getting oxidized. And so antioxidants make nails don't eat vegetables, right? Antioxidants in our diet help prevent oxidative stress from happening inside our bodies. And so you get primarily your antioxidants mostly from fruits or vegetables. And there's a hidden source of the most potent form of antioxidants that most people don't usually think about. And if we were in a regular class, I would ask you to raise your hand and guess, but you guys are not a bunch of doctors, so I'll just say, oh, and by the way, to answer Tracy's questions, yeah, I have protocols on all these products. So I do have my favorite brands and the protocols you guys will get later on, okay? We'll send you a link to the protocols so you can buy stuff if you want.
So the hidden source of antioxidants you're not really thinking about, they're super potent, have the highest like per gram value for antioxidants, are things like spices and herbs. So turmeric, cumin, we're using, you know, rosemary. These are things you just put on your food, right? Oh, you know what's super high in antioxidants? Cinnamon. Go figure. So you can Google if you want, this thing called ORAC value, ORAC, ORAC values, or how they measure the strength of the antioxidant potential of the food. The other foods that are super high in antioxidants are blueberries, cranberries, and pomegranate. I do cranberry juice every morning. Shoot, just at least a good shot of cranberry juice. Cranberry is just amazing antioxidant potential. And you can get unsweetened cranberry juice. There's no sugar in it or anything, and it doesn't taste great. It's not sweet or anything, but it's like injecting antioxidants into your bloodstream, okay? So pomegranate, blueberry, cranberry juices or the fruit itself. And then spices again, you can look up ORAC value, ORAC, and you'll see what's the ORAC, what are high ORAC value spices. You'll see lists and they rank them. There's a number on a scale that they have. And so if you eat like a bowl of oatmeal in the morning with, I don't know, some blueberries and a bunch of cinnamon, you're gonna get an antioxidant punch just like taking a supplement. So you don't have to buy supplements to do this. You can do this with food. However, the essential premise of functional medicine, if you're already doing it with food, it's not working, it's probably because you've got too much oxidative stress. So then supplements are appropriate, right? Change the diet first. That's not enough, then you do supplements. And changing the diet and doing supplements isn't enough, and just bite the bullet and pay somebody like me to figure it out, run some labs. Don't torture yourself for years and years. Anyway, I have a lot of patients who just try to, most of my patients, to be honest, that are new, have been trying to eat well for decades, and they're just not feeling great, and it's so frustrating for them. And so that's where the labs come in.
So oxidative stress, targeted antioxidants. Talked a lot about the foods there. And the way that antioxidants actually work is kind of interesting. Is that there's plants, right? And plants, by and large, live outside. And so because plants are outside their whole lives, they develop pigments, which we see as colors. And these pigments help prevent plants from dying from the ionizing radiation of the sun. So you've got a plant sitting outside, it could be a, you know, stalk of asparagus or a blueberry plant or whatever, strawberry. And it's getting hit by the ionizing radiation of the sun. And so in order to protect itself, plants has have evolved these complex antioxidant systems. And we see them as color again. Strawberries are red, mangoes are orange, you know, blueberries are blue, broccoli is green. What you're seeing there in the pigment is the actual antioxidant potential of the food. And plants aren't doing this to be nice. Plants are doing this to survive. So all we have to do is come along, grab the mango, cut it in half, and eat it, and you get in your body all the antioxidants that that plant grew to protect itself. Because human beings can't make, we don't make our own antioxidants, right? We're not walking around making vitamin C. We're not capable of doing that. So if you eat a kiwi or a mango or, you know, some spinach or some kale, you're getting the antioxidants that that plant produced to protect itself. So basically, plants are little antioxidant factories. And this is one of the main, if not the main strategies for preventing inflammation and pain, is to fill your body with a ton of antioxidants, either in the form of food or supplement.
And so you can also want a wide, wide variety of colors of foods, like red peppers and yellow peppers, and green things like, you know, broccoli, and white things like cauliflower, because, because different antioxidants in the different plants that are different colors, okay? And it's a pretty straightforward system. And it's a beautiful thing that we can just acquire these antioxidants simply by killing a vegetable and eating it, or killing a piece of fruit. We don't kill fruit, but grabbing a piece of fruit and eating it. Okay? Then the omega-3s. You can get from fish oil. If you're a vegan or you don't particularly like fish, flax oil is a classic, classic anti-inflammatory source of omega-3s. And the best way to do flax is to get whole flax seeds and grind them up. And I have a coffee grinder on my counter. I don't drink coffee. I've never, you can put coffee in it my whole life, but I just put flax seeds in there, just grind it up, you know, and then I have a day or two's worth of fresh ground flaxseed. I'll become buy flaxseed oil too. It's hard to get it fresh, but if you can get fresh flaxseed oil, you can do it that way. It's a little better to usually just grind the seeds at home or use flax seeds at home. They're inexpensive. And if you really want to just like antioxidant the heck out of yourself and just stimulate every pathway you can imagine, simply do a tablespoon or two of flax seeds every day, ground up. And as much turmeric as you can shove down your throat, right? This is Kai. This is really cool. Healer guy. I don't recommend going to the island of Molokai. My family's from Hawaii, right? And my group, my mom grew up on a sugar cane plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii. And so I go back every year there, and I have great deep roots in the islands. My great-great-grandparents are buried in my Auntie Alice's backyard. I mean, we go back to like the 1860s and 70s, long, long history with Hawaii. But, um, the Molokai, anyways, it's, it's a weird island. But name is, I ended up on Molokai one time, and and there was a native healer there, was a pretty interesting guy. And his main treatment for every "itis," for my "itis," for tendonitis, and any kind of chronic pain, he would just literally give people bags of turmeric and have them just shove as much of it down their throat as they could. I don't know if there's a turmeric toxicity level, but you know, you can use these herbs like turmeric, and you can use plants like flax seeds to, you know, have a really strong anti-inflammatory effect. For most people, you do it gradually. So a tablespoon or two of flax a day, maybe you get some turmeric in capsules, or you use turmeric in your cooking. Or what I've done, I don't do it right now, but I have in the past, is I'll put like maybe like a quarter or a half of a teaspoon of turmeric in hot water in the morning, just drink it down. And that's a great, powerful antioxidant formula and anti-inflammatory formula. And it's inexpensive. You don't have to buy a bunch of stuff. It's not complicated, you know? And those kind of daily tasks and really make a big difference.
So the ways that we can measure all this stuff, you want to get into the labs, is you can measure the distribution of antioxidants. So this is again, what do the antioxidants do? They are protecting your body against oxidative stress. So I always think about Star Wars or Star Trek or one of those movies. And then inevitably, in every one of those films, there's a battle. And you've got the good starship people and the bad starship people. And they're shooting their photon torpedoes, whatever, at each other, right? And at least in the old Star Trek TV show, they had this whole idea of shields, right? And the shields would go up, and then you couldn't hit the starship, you know? And so Captain Kirk would say, "Shields up!" And then, you know, they were safe until the shields were yellow, weak. So antioxidants are like our shield against free radicals coming in and damaging our tissue. So if you have antioxidant protection, your body literally puts up the shield. Free radicals that are coming at you from environmental toxins, from bad food, from alcohol, whatever you're doing in your life that's generating these bad free radicals, that's going to be extinguished or quenched by the antioxidant system. Now, if you don't have enough antioxidants, then three things are going to get damaged: either your mitochondria, or your DNA, or the lining of your cells, okay? So the mitochondria, or the DNA, or the cell membranes are going to be damaged from excessive oxidative stress or excessive damage from free radicals. So these antioxidants are designed to protect our DNA, to protect, well, in protecting DNA means helping prevent cancer, right? That's what we try to there. Protect our mitochondria, which prevents all kinds of fatigue disorders and pain syndromes. And to protect our cell membranes or lipids, which helps prevent cardiovascular disease.
So we're talking about really important stuff here, right? The protection of lipids or fats, which are in the cell membranes, and the lipids that when they're damaged can cause cardiovascular disease. That's one category. Damage the DNA, that can lead to problems like tumor growth, so you know, cell division problems, tumor growth, or cancer. And then the damage that can occur to mitochondria that causes a lot of chronic pain syndromes and fatigue syndromes and weight gain and things like that. So if the mitochondria are damaged, we can't metabolize very well. We're gonna get fat. We can get tired and painful. Things are gonna get painful. If your DNA is getting damaged from oxidative stress or from free radicals, you're at higher risk for developing cancer. If your lipids or fats start getting damaged, you're at high risk for cardiovascular disease. So these things are really important, right? This is why we're supposed to be eating fruits and vegetables.
So the fat-soluble antioxidants I mentioned earlier, CoQ10, vitamin E, vitamin A, beta-carotene, they protect the lipids or fats. That's your cell membranes, that's the cardiovascular system. Measure these. There's like on a test, you can measure these. I'll show you that in a second. You can also measure the damage to lipids. That's called lipid peroxides, and that lets you know if your lipids are getting nuked or not. Then we can also measure water-soluble antioxidants. It's amazing that you can do this. You can measure vitamin C. You can measure this thing called 8-OHdG, which lets you know if you're having oxidative stress. It's amazing. This is all like on labs, and they're not even that expensive.
Here's a basic sample of the test. Can see this is from an Ion Panel. These tests now are $595. It's not that bad. You get about 12 or 13 pages of data. This is just a small section of the lab. CoQ10, alpha-tocopherol, gamma-tocopherol. It's a fancy way of saying vitamin E. And vitamin A. It's a fancy way of saying vitamin A. And beta-carotene is also, by the way, right? So these are the fat-soluble antioxidants you can measure. And look at this person. This happens every day in my clinic. Low in fat-soluble antioxidants. What are we going to do? Change your diet, get you to eat foods that have fat-soluble antioxidants, and supplement for six months or a year. Once the supplements are done, then the diet takes over.
Next slide. Oh, this is confusing. Let's not do that. Water-soluble antioxidants can also be measured. That marker number 28 is the marker for vitamin C. Marker 29 is that 8-OHdG. So these let you know if you're at risk for problems like diabetes, problems like potential cancer in the future. You want to keep your antioxidant levels really good. And this is sort of a referendum on whether the amount of food that you're eating is protecting your system or not. Can also measure free lipid peroxides, right? And this is a measure for whether the fats in your system are getting damaged or not. And then we do these really extensive labs that measure all the different aspects of mitochondrial function. And I've gotten obsessed by this in the last few years because this stuff really works for people that are overweight and really tired and have thyroid problems and just can't figure out what's going on with their brain that's depressed and their memory's not so great. A lot of this comes back to the mitochondria and oxidative stress and long periods of oxidative stress damage to mitochondria. We can measure every aspect of mitochondrial function on a lab, okay? And again, this entire panel I'm talking about costs five, six hundred bucks. It's not like a huge amount of money for the amount of data you get. You probably only have to do the test like once a year at the most.
So energy production, how we mobilize and make energy. These are really, really important in terms of neuropathic, that means nerve pain, or inflammatory pain. Super, super important. If your mitochondria are messed up, you can have a chronic pain syndrome. So mitochondria also help us make energy. And a lot of people that are extremely tired are gonna be having not only the pain syndromes, but also they're gonna have the fatigue syndromes that accompany that. Okay? And those are often paired together. And if you look at this graphic here, you'll see everything that's highlighted in blue is actually measured. So we're measuring all these different steps in the production of energy. And, you know, what's really interesting? I, this is like, I have, I don't know what idea that my last life to Jatin, to the warrant, what is happening in this life, but I have like the best luck of anyone on the planet. So, you know, I, you know, three years ago, I met Dr. Richard Lord, who's a man that developed all these tests. And he and I speak every Monday. He's kind of like my most important teacher of my life and my mentor. And we talk about everything from philosophy to spirituality, but 99% of the time, we talk about labs and science. And I just learned so much from this man. So anything, one of the things he pointed out to me the other day, and this is so obvious, but you never really thought about it, is that when you take a statin, when you take a statin medication, and sometimes people need these, I'm not saying these are bad, but you just need to be aware of this. When you take a statin, it depletes your CoQ10 levels, okay? And here's CoQ10 right here. This is very well known. And of course, most people don't take CoQ10. We take a statin. I would probably solve this whole problem. But if you take a statin and it lowers your CoQ10 levels, eventually what happens is it starts to damage your mitochondria because CoQ10 is a rate-limiting step in the production of ATP or energy. So you may get by for a few years or a few decades with this thing going on, but eventually, what ends up happening is your mitochondria just give up. And they're like, "People, you're taking a statin. We don't have enough CoQ10 down here in mitochondrial land. We're just gonna give up." And they give up. And so this is problem called mitochondrial retraction or a hypometabolism. Well, your mitochondria just kind of fade out. You would do the same thing too, if your main nutrient was like depleted for a long period of time, you would just give up. And so when the mitochondria fade out, it destroys our fat-burning mechanism. So over time, if you stay on a statin for too long, you don't take any CoQ10, your mitochondria are gonna go away, and you're gonna start to gain weight. Now, you know, all kinds of problems, which is not obviously the point of the drug, but it's a side effect or potential risk of the medication. So it's just something to keep in back. And if you have to take a statin for whatever reason, you just take CoQ10 every day, and they'll solve the problem.
These are the mitochondrial markers. And again, mitochondria support. The key things are magnesium and CoQ10. Some of these supplements you can take without lab testing for sure. You can take magnesium for sure. You can take CoQ10. You don't have to have a fancy lab to tell you you need that. But these labs will show you, you know, if you have a desperate need for them or not. And again, I'll have protocols. We'll send out links to you guys can look at later. And let's see here. And then the omega-6s. You have to be a little careful about large dosages of omega-3s over long periods of time. If you're only taking a thousand or 2,000 milligrams a day, I really don't think you're going to get into trouble. But, you know, don't take higher than that with the omega-3s because they can interfere with the 6s over time. Gotta be a little careful. But most of the time, if you're inflamed, you're gonna need the omega-3s. And I think a conservative dose of them is gonna be okay. And again, if you do it for three or four months, it's not working, then you should get some lab work done, right? Just don't take it forever. It's the people that, you know, take these supplements forever without any testing and without getting better that are in trouble. So if you're inflamed and you try fish oils and the inflammation goes away, for just stop taking the fish oil. It's not a forever kind of thing. And if you're confused and overwhelmed, you can test. And here you can see this particular person is low in the omega-3s. That's EPA. This one down here, DHA. These three up here are low. And so this person needs omega-3s. Pretty straightforward. But again, you can guess at this stuff if you have to. But I want you to also be aware that there's tests. And then you can have this thing called arachidonic acid. Can be really high, and that can cause a lot of problems. It can also actually get to low, which can cause a problem with the pro-inflammatory. And again, we can measure arachidonic. It can be low. It can be high. The, it tends to be common that people have inflammation. You can measure lipid peroxides as well. And so, just a quick review here before I wrap things up. And I'll show you one lab before we're done here, okay? So you can see an example.
So oxidative stress, remember that's from a lack of fruits and vegetables in your diet, or from an excess of something bad: environmental toxins, gut infections, an excess of caffeine, an excess of alcohol, too many prescription drugs, too many recreational drugs, too much stress, something that's really pushed your system to the max. We can measure all this. You can measure your CoQ10 and E and A and beta-carotene. And water-soluble antioxidants, or you can just really focus your diet on the herbs and spices that I mentioned, on the things like turmeric and cinnamon and, you know, again, Google ORAC values, ORAC, and you'll see what I mean. And then, of course, vegetables and fruit are the definitive antioxidant providers. You can also look at mitochondrial function, and that has to do with how you burn fat and carbs and how you make energy. And oftentimes, the mitochondria are involved in chronic pain syndromes. So we look at those. If you want to do some guesswork around this, try some CoQ10 and magnesium and see if that starts to have an effect. And do some breathing exercises. And then the anti-inflammatory indicators for omega-3s. Again, if you don't do the testing, you're not sure if it's 3s or 6s, you can try a low dose for the 3s and see how your response is, right? You support. And I put this together in a protocol, which will send you a copy of, oxidative stress support, if you want to try those. And then there's some information on the website.
Alright, so again, you can do a free consult with our team. You can check out our website. Now, we have protocols available for the first time. If you want to just try something, and if you need to run and deal with your kid to do something important, go for it. I'm going to spend the next couple of minutes looking at a lab so you can just see how cool these are. And, hey, you know, your regular doctor is not going to talk to you about this. So, you know, it's incumbent upon all of us to learn a little bit about this so that you can either find someone like me or find another functional medicine doctor. No center for this stuff.
So this is a fancy test. It's from my lab called Genova, and it's called an Ion Panel. And in fact, I probably don't need to look at two of them, right? That's a little confusing. Just pick one. How's that? That'll probably be enough for purposes. And which kind of blow it up here. And I'm gonna scoot through the test kind of quickly and show you the different things that are directly related to what we talked about today. So we're gonna skip parts of it, but we've measured all these amino acids as well. You're not really talking about that tonight. So the whole first few pages aren't relevant. Oh, it also measures potassium, magnesium, zinc, copper. It's pretty important, right? But here's the stuff that we talked about. Here's a classic test. CoQ10, the fat-soluble vitamins, CoQ10, vitamin E, vitamin A. All right, there. The DNA oxidative stress marker, I mentioned 8-OHdG, right there. Measures vitamin D here. Here's your omega-3 and omega-6s on a lab. Shows up clear as day. They measure all these other things like saturated and unsaturated fats. You can learn a lot about the body from those. And your liver function. Your liver is producing fats. And then it measures the mitochondrial markers, fat metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism, energy production itself. And B vitamins. So B vitamins are used to make energy also in the body. B vitamins are very, very important. It measures methylation. So we may have heard of that term. And then things we're not talking about tonight, but on the lab, neurotransmitter function, there's liver detoxification capacity. And that measures a whole bunch of stuff about gut function and yeast overgrowth, okay? And then the very beginning section of the test is three or four pages on different amino acids that have to do with brain and muscle and cardiovascular conditions and all kind of stuff like that. It's a pretty comprehensive test. There's only like five, six hundred bucks, and you get a ton of information there.
If you want to do a program, if you're not ready for testing, then just look at the dietary stuff that I recommended. No, and start to think about basically every meal that you eat needs to have either fruit or vegetables. And every day, you should have something like flax or turmeric or both. So you have just a consistent daily exposure to antioxidants, right? To omega-3s, that's the flax. And to all the, you know, potential support that you need to deal with inflammation, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial function. So if the mitochondrial foods would be things that have magnesium in them. That would be your green leafy vegetables at least once or twice a day. That could be kale, collard greens, mustard greens, Swiss chard, any dark leafy green. Arugula has a ton of magnesium in it, okay? So greens at least once or twice a day, big portion of greens, either cooked or raw, however you want to do it. Spinach is good for you, but spinach doesn't have a ton of magnesium. And then so that would be for mitochondria. For antioxidants, you do your spices. They mentioned the cinnamons and turmeric of the world, and the rosemary and oregano. And then, of course, all the fruits and vegetables that talked about. They grow this antioxidant protection in their pigments. And you want to go crazy, then do blueberries, cranberries, and pomegranate. I do blueberries in my smoothie every morning. And then I do the cranberry juice every morning. So I do two of those. I'm going to call my Brenda. I don't know why. Just don't get around to it. And then for, so that's antioxidant protection, right? And then for the anti-inflammatory omega-3s, the easiest is just a flaxseed. If you want to do, you can do that too. And so those three strategies, right? Greens at least twice a day for the magnesium, the spices and antioxidant support from fruits or vegetables, and then the flaxseed or some equivalent. It may be fish oils if you're not a vegan or whatever for the anti-inflammatory effect of the omega-3s. And those things every day, done over and over and over and over again, add up and start to pull people out of pain syndromes. If that's not enough, then you, then you know, do some labs. Come see someone like me. But give the diet three or four months. You have a basic supplement protocol, three or four months. I'll give you guys copies of these basic protocols. Who's want to order stuff, you know? And that hopefully, I'll get you started on an understanding of the basis of all this, okay?
So I hope that's helpful. And we'll be doing a lot more of these talks coming up in the future. We'll have one a month, I'm sure, going forward. And I will take a couple of questions here. Hang on, sec. See, let's see. So the revenue are, yes, the revenue or, or we'll send you a copy of the recording if you have trouble with the hand or anything like that. King. [Music] So again, the test is like five, six hundred bucks for that panel. And if you're curious, you can set up a call with our health coach for free. Send out a copy of the recording. And for this, we'll send a copy of, of all the protocols you guys want to try some of this. And I'll catch up with you next time, okay? Bye for now. Thanks.