Transcription
Hello people, and welcome to the new year. And we're gonna talk about some new testing. If someone, anyone, could randomly raise their hand, just so I know that my sound is working, that'd be great. Because sometimes I talk for about, thanks they call, sometimes I talk for about five minutes before I realize I'm not working. So, oh gosh, where do we even start? I'm trying to keep this thing short, so like a half an hour. So if you have kids that are screaming in the background or you need to run and do something else, I'm gonna try to cover all the really important stuff in the first half hour. Then we're going to look at a bunch of cases, and I'm going to show you how to actually apply this stuff that I'm talking about to a bunch of real cases in the second half of an hour. And then I'm gonna stop and take a break and go use my new steam room and then watch Netflix. If you really want to know what happens behind the scenes at the Kaylee's Institute, I built this really cool steam room. It's just amazing, and I highly recommend saunas and steam rooms as a way to resolve your, you know, stress levels. So that'd be a little bit of background.
So I've been doing this since 1992, which is 28 years, if you want to add it up. I've been heavily involved in looking at gut testing, and muscle testing, and lab testing, and PCR testing, and stool testing, and every kind of test you can imagine for the gut for a really long time. About three years ago, I thought I kind of knew what I was doing, and then I met a man named Dr. Richard Lord. And Richard, for those of you that don't know, was the, or is, the preeminent science and functional medicine. And he's the scientist that developed what we now call organic acids testing, amino acids testing. He was strongly influential in the lab company called Metagenics, which is now run by Genova. And one of his pet projects throughout his career, in addition to bringing us the, everything from the Ion Panel to the Nutri-Eval, one of his pet projects that he started about 15 years ago was, like, how are we gonna understand the microbiome? Richard's always a little bit ahead of his time, maybe 20 years ahead. And he developed a test, which is now still in use by Genova, really the standard test in our industry, called the GI Effects. And so Richard was the guy that was at the bench in the science room figuring all this stuff out. And, and about three years ago, he and I decided to partner together, and he decided to try to train me in the depth of understanding and how he looks at the gut specifically. And so it's been about three years. Every week, every Monday, Richard and I are going at it, and he's trying to educate me, you know, about how all this stuff works. And so we don't have, we like, and we got an hour, right, to try to cover hundreds of hours of my education with Richard and thousands of hours and decades of his time. So what my response to, you know, extreme complexity is to simplify things. And because those of us that are clinicians that are in practice, and I still practice two days a week, you know, if you walk into the treatment room and you're thinking, man, what's the difference between a C. diff and a C. difficile, or M. smithii, and I'm not sure what that deep hide your marker means versus the gallbladder problem? Is it SIBO or LIBO or Crypto? Or, you know, you just have, it's confusing, right? And you gotta be able to distill this stuff down to something that you can just look a patient in the eye and say, "The lab shows you have this. We're gonna do this." You know, and then imply that you're gonna get better, right? Probably not say that, but just, you're like, their confidence shows them that you're gonna get better. So after all these years of studying with Richard, this is what it's been boiled down to, you know.
So anyways, three stages, and I'm gonna try to explain this in 20 minutes, and then we're gonna look at a bunch of labs. All right. And then before we get to that, we, I need to mention that we are starting a mentorship training program in the next week or two. And that if you are interested and inspired by this work, as I am, that you should think about signing up for the class. And so the class covers a six-month or 12-month curriculum, depending on how you want to do it. It has an amazing set of resources that come with it, literally thousands of study case studies and hundreds and hundreds of hours of material. We're offering a thousand dollars off if you sign up in the next couple of days. And the class is going to start next week, okay? And we have folks standing by if you want to talk to somebody like myself or one of my staff about the class. Highly encourage you to attend. And if you can't attend or don't want to attend, tell a friend because we need some more students to sign up so that I can keep doing all these things that I do, basically self-funded, right? I'm kind of like the NPR of functional medicine, is brought to you by your donations. All right.
So, talk about skill acquisition. Over you. So this is an admittedly massive oversimplification of an incredibly complicated area. However, what we want to talk about now is, this is basically the patient education, communication stuff that we never really learned. So you can attend, you know, conferences and, you know, listen to online stuff from all the different lab companies about the complexity of this. But when you're in that patient treatment room, these are the kinds of things that you can say so that you can get your customer, your patient, to actually do a program, okay? And so as much as I appreciate the complexity, if we can't communicate to patients, then what's the point of knowing any of this stuff? All right. So I want to talk about skill acquisition so that you can see how to interpret this tool test, none of the detail level, at the high level, right? And assign a patient to being a different stage, three stages, either their stage one, stage two, stage three. I'll go over what that means. Then I want to interpret some dives. We'll do that in the second half. And then you also need to learn how to implement the lifestyle changes and all that kind of stuff based on the labs. So you should have a lab result that tells you a clinical program in terms of supplement design, program design, and coupled with that, what you're going to tell them about lifestyle. As I'm sure you all know, I can't have somebody make a million lifestyle changes at once. One per session is fine. If you can get one major lifestyle change accomplished each time you talk to a patient, that's like huge. You're, you know, at the high skill level if you can pull that off.
So before we get into all that, a quick little analysis. Well, why would you do a GI test in the first place? What's the point? Why is the GI like the centerpiece of all functional medicine? And now the rest of the scientific community is kind of catching up with the roles of the microbiome. So what's difficult to understand is that GI dysfunction occurs with or without GI symptoms. And that's probably the most profound one-liner you could ever get. The majority of our patients that have GI dysfunction have no GI symptoms. They have GI dysfunction and they're tired. They have GI dysfunction and their hair is falling out. They have GI dysfunction and they have a neurological condition. They have GI dysfunction and they're depressed. They have GI dysfunction and they're anxious, right? So the majority of people that we work with that have GI dysfunction have no GI symptoms. So if we're really truly treating the underlying cause, then why does everybody just run GI tests on patients who are experiencing GI symptoms? It doesn't make any sense. So if you're really going to drink the functional medicine Kool-Aid, you have to run a GI test on every new patient as part of a basic functional medicine workup. My original teacher, 25, 30 years ago, Dr. Bill Timmons, some of you may be old enough to remember Bill. The way he had his practice set up is, before you could talk to him, you had to do an adrenal panel and a stool test. Then you could become a patient. He never treated a patient unless he had a stool test done first before you could do your initial consult. You had to run the test. Now, that may be a little extreme, but the way that I grew up in this industry was, every single patient, and it didn't matter if they were depressed, anxious, had Parkinson's, or toenail fungus, every single patient had a GI panel, okay? So that's just sort of setting the stage. And I want to talk about these three different stages of GI dysfunction. This is based on Rich Lord's work. It's a massive oversimplification of a brilliant scientist's understanding. There are three different stages, and they are progressive. The first stage of your gut falling apart, remember what we're talking here is patient education stuff. This is a tool you can use to educate your patients. So in the first stage of the gut falling apart, because of stress, poor diet, having this accumulative effect, there's a weakening of the adrenals, and there's a falling apart of the microbiome. That's the key word here, right? The intestinal bacteria, normal situation collapses. Just collapses. It's like, if you've ever seen a World War II movie where they're dropping all the bombs over London, or they're dropping all the bombs over Berlin, and then you see this landscape of bombed-out buildings, it's like that, but it's the microbiome, okay? That's the first problem that sets the stage, the second, the stage for the next problem. The second stage is that there's some kind of compromise with an intestinal, with a digestive tract organ. So your stomach's not making enough HCl, there's not enough enzymes being produced by the, of the pancreas, the gallbladder is kind of not really doing its thing for bile production. You start to get damage to the gut lining, weakening of the gut immunity. There's actually now not just a microbiome imbalance, but it's progressed to the point where there's organ involvement. It's things are getting worse. And then eventually, if one and two are happening in the background, inevitably people are going to pick up pathogens, parasites, bacteria, yeast. We all have these organisms all the time. We're all exposed to these organisms all the time. And if you have, this is Richard Lord's central argument, if you have a parasite, and you have a beautiful microbiome and perfectly functioning GI tract organs, it doesn't matter that you have a parasite. The reason why the parasite becomes a problem, the reason why the yeast becomes a problem, the reason that SIBO becomes a problem, all these things become a problem when the microbiome diversity is falling apart and GI organs aren't functioning well, okay? So these stages are progressive, and most of the patients that we're working with have, if they're sick, have all three of these stages all at the same time.
So how do you miss this? That's the central, I think, most confusing part that we probably should spend the most time on. How do you identify a stage one? How do you even know that there is a disturbed microbiome? And the different lab companies that we use have a couple of different approaches to solving this problem, okay? Number one, looking at short-chain fatty acids, and number two, looking at the commensal bacteria imbalance. And I'll show you in the second part of the talk a bunch of labs. I'll show you a GI Effects test from Genova, a GI 360 from Doctor's Data, a GI Map from Diagnostic Solutions. Three great lab companies, all attempting to show us these problems, okay? But the key point is that unless you have time to get a PhD in microbiology, you're not gonna be able to understand the ramifications of every commensal bacteria being high or low. In fact, after three years of studying with Richard, I would say I know nothing about that subject. It's so complicated. If you're not reading hundreds of scientific articles every month, you're behind. So it's impossible for any clinician to do that. So we have to have a system where you can just say, "Dude, you're your microbiome is imbalanced. That's what the lab shows. You don't have enough short-chain fatty acids. That's what the lab shows. Here's what the potential solution is," and have a preset protocol for that particular, particular situation. So that's stage one.
Now, what's very interesting about the stages, and again, I'll get to the labs in a minute. What's really interesting about these stages is that they kind of parallel the stages of career development with practitioners, too. How crazy does that? So like, when you're a brand-new practitioner and you're running your first 10 stool tests, you probably want to stick with treating the earlier stages. You're much less likely to have side effects. It's gonna be an easier go of it. And then when you get to the 10-year mark or 15-year mark, I am sure all of you, if you're there, you know what I mean. You know, you're gonna be like, "Killing stuff!" because it's fun to kill stuff. You're gonna be doing anti-Candida programs, you're gonna be killing Histo, namely getting rid of H. pylori, and you're gonna see patients getting better by the hundreds from chronic conditions that are just, you know, amazing that they even recover from, simply from treating GI pathogens, right? But what's interesting is you look at the career arc, when the practitioners and when doctors get to that, like, the 40-year, 50-year in creating my career mark, they come back around. This is what Richard Lord is doing. And then they look at the basics, which is that the microbiome is disturbed. So you may have a patient with H. pylori and Giardia that has a lot of GI problems, and skin rashes, or whatever, an autoimmune problem. And you may think, "I don't know. I've been doing this 40 years. I know I could kill all that stuff, but maybe I'm just gonna treat their microbiome, and they're gonna get better." So you see brand-new practitioners who can do the earlier stage one treatments, and then you see the super-advanced people, ironically, coming back to the basics, you know, in the twilight years of their career, because there's some deep truth to the fact that if you treat the underlying cause, you're gonna get somewhere. And remember, there's three different stages: microbiome falls apart, stress and diet, the adrenals are shot, then the organs and the GI tract fail, then the person picks up pathogens. So within the context of functional medicine, if we're saying treat the original cause of the digestive problem, stage one is it. It's stress, poor diet, weak, any of the adrenals, and then the microbiome falling apart. It could be someone, you know, their mother-in-law moved in, and they're eating horrible quality food, and that's why all these things happen, right? Stress and, and, and diet. So we always want to come back to those basics.
There's also, I'm just gonna mention a new supplement on the market that if you're listening to a GI lecture, you just have to know about this. And full disclosure, I am involved with this company. I'm involved with three different supplement companies pretty heavily, and I work with them on a regular basis: Metagenics, Pure Encapsulations, and Designs for Health. And one of these companies, Pure Encapsulations, came out with a product that you should know about because it's kind of a remarkable product, and we don't see things like this very often. It's called Sunbutyrate, okay? And it's a very potent, excuse me, a very potent product. Here it is, Sunbutyrate. For your really severe GI people, dosage is one teaspoon three times a day. It's actual real butyrate that's in a liquid form that's absorbed really well and doesn't taste bad. So if you have chronic GI people, this is like going to become the number one go-to product for all of us as the years roll by, okay? It's a pretty unusual product. If you've used butyrate in the past, you know, don't freak out, try the new one, and you'll see what I mean. We put three or four patients on that, you know, you'll be convinced. Okay.
So, um, when, and we're looking at each one of the labs, how to identify a stage one. But they can either have low short-chain fatty acids, butyrate, right, is going to be measured on the test, and you can now buy butyrate as a supplement, or you're gonna have microbiome assessment related problems, okay? So we'll look at the examples of that in a minute. Now, on the stage two part, so now stress, diet, and the microbiome being messed up have now led to GI organs being impacted. This is the next phase of the problem. You've got the stomach, the pancreas, the gallbladder, the small intestine, large intestine, they're just starting to break down. You've got poor digestion, poor absorption. You've got weakening of the immune response. That's the next stage, okay? And how do you find out if they're in a stage two? Well, we have all these things like the fat stain marker, or the elastase, or fat stain again, sorry, I didn't do the slide very good there, I was rushing. Pancreatic enzyme markers of all kinds. My gallbladder function markers of all time. Secretory IgA, and all these other things, right, for immune function. Lactoferrin, calprotectin, lysozyme, secretory IgA, okay? These names get really fancy, but when you're explaining it to a patient, they're not going to remember what lactoferrin is. What you want to talk about is the big picture. You want to say, "Hey, there's these markers for digestion. Your gallbladder is not working very well. That's a problem. Hey, there's these markers for the immune response in the gut. Your secretory IgA is really low. That's a problem." So you're talking about the microbiome and you're talking about the organs that are impacted, right? That's the second phase.
Now, the third stage is that there's pathogens. I find great pleasure in doing programs that kill pathogens. Dr. Timmons, my original teacher, was like the king of finding pathogens, and he just instilled in me an absolute love of using really potent antimicrobial herbal programs, and in many cases, really potent antibiotic programs to nuke digestive tract infections. And I spent a decade side by side with Timmons killing thousands and thousands of microorganism infections and had a lot of fun doing it. So I'm from this old-school world where the pathogens rule, and if you're in a stage three, you got Giardia, we're gonna take it out, okay? But I've been in practice for 28 years. I'm sure when I get to like the 40-year mark, I'm gonna be just like Dr. Richard Lord, and I'm gonna be like, "I don't know. You got to, you already have H. pylori, but maybe we should work on your microbiome first." I'm not saying I'm quite there yet, but I want to present this as an option for all of us to think more fundamentally and to not just treat infections, you know, constantly. Anyhow, if they do have a stage three, they have some pathogens. It means it happened because of the weakened microbiome and weakened organ, just organs, right? Sometimes people have a pre-existing infection that flares up was there all this time. Sometimes they pick up something new because they're stressed, their minds, and the immune system's not working. And in this case, we have bacterial, parasitic, or yeast overgrowth, and you just nuke them. And it's a satisfying and wonderful thing to do because people get better really quickly. And I'm sure you guys have all done that a bunch of times. So the markers of dysbiosis and infection, pretty obvious. We'll look at each one of the labs to say that.
So here's a summary of the three stages. You got this first stage where the commensal bacteria are out of balance. This second stage where the organs are starting to suffer. And this third stage where there's infection, right? In the first stage, with defective microbiome, microbiota, whatever you want to call it, and low short-chain fatty acids, you can give short-chain fatty acids, you can give prebiotics, probiotics, and try to get that microbiome back on track. And change the stress variables, change the diet. In fact, you know, when, when Richard was, was in the lab years ago, and they ran, no, they were just doing GI Effects tests left and right, just for fun, they found that if they put a person on a healthy diet for three days, you know, vegetables, fruit, beans, grains, a little animal protein, whatever, a healthy diet for three or four days was enough time to completely shift the entire microbiome. And similarly, if they took a person with a healthy microbiome and pulled out all the healthy foods and put them on a junk food diet for three or four days, entirely different microbiome a few days later. So it doesn't take forever for food to affect the microbiome. In three or four days of eating healthy vegetables and beans and things that have a lot of prebiotics and, and I, you know, antimicrobial effects and the anti-inflammatory effects, you know, three or four days of a healthy diet can really change your microbiome. So it doesn't have to go on, you know, last forever. The second stage, if there's digestive problems with the gallbladder, you support the gallbladder. That's the one that I see that's missed the most. Massive gallbladder problems, and they're just being ignored. So gallbladder issues, insufficient bile, is gonna result in all kinds of massive bacterial and yeast overgrowth problems in the small intestine. So always be on the lookout for gallbladder. You also may have pancreatic enzyme problems, damage to the immune response, and the gut lining, right? We're now talking about treating the organs, anti-inflammatory programs, etc. HCl, pancreatic enzymes, gallbladder support for the organs that are secreting stuff. And then intestinal lining, you know, leaky gut repair, immune site or stimulating stuff when the intestines are inflamed and damaged. Okay? And then the third stage is killing. And you may run all three of these together at the same time. You may do one at a time. And then again, for findings that you're going to see, stage one, low butyrate, low short-chain fatty acids, and abnormal markers with a microbiome. Look at those in the second. Stage two, you're going to see these inflammatory markers or immune markers. And then stage three, you're going to see that the other stuff here.
So hang on, let me pull up some labs, and let's just look at some tests. So I'm going to show you first of all, the way that we do the course. So in the class, talk about three body systems: neuroendocrine, GI, and detox. And so when we're doing lab review in the course, and every week you guys will do a curriculum, and you study from the lectures, and we do a Q&A call. So the Q&A calls kind of look like this, where the doctors will present a case. And here's the actual case. I think this is from last night. It is. Yeah. So Rob, one of the docs in the class, has a 60-year-old female patient. So the financial fund owner. She's got extreme fatigue, poor memory and focus problems, and right knee, right back pain. And he's asking, you know, adrenals, what should I do? So here's her lab on the adrenals. This is a cortisol DHEA test. Her total cortisol is below 20. DHEA is a 2. So she's what we would call a stage three for adrenal exhaustion. So we want to fix her adrenals and upregulate her secretory IgA. Here's your GI test. In this case, the doctor did a GI Map. You can see there's this Enterohemorrhagic E. coli. That doesn't sound good. Anything with the prequel of enterohemorrhagic, it's not gonna be good. And again, here's the normal bacterial flora. Okay, these are the microbiome tests. You can see these high markers on Clostridia, high markers on Akkermansia. What does that mean? Right back to that's a stage one, right? Are you gonna treat the Clostridia specifically? I don't think so. It's high. We're gonna, to credit, kill a commensal or normal bacteria? Are you gonna treat Akkermansia? Yes, specifically? You try to kill the good guys? I don't think so. So with the microbiome, with all these tests, you have to start to think more globally. How are you going to work on the microbiome, right? So it's prebiotics, probiotics, and those kinds of things to fix it. Here's a, it's the dysbiotic bacteria. These are ones we can kill. So there's some killing to be done here. And then after, and then these are the digestive markers, right? So if we're gonna see a stage two, it's gonna show up here. Elastase, okay? If that was abnormal, it would be a gallbladder problem. The lipase is low, that's a pancreatic problem, right? Secretory IgA is low, that's an intestinal tract lining problem. So now we know we've got a stage two. We've got major organ involvement, right, with the pancreas and the intestinal tract, and those things need to be treated as part of the stage two, okay? As part of the stage three would be eliminating those bad bacteria that we saw. And then the third test that we do on all the patients in the class, once people get more advanced, is an organic acid test. So you do adrenals, GI, and organic acids. And in this particular case, there's a bunch of mitochondrial problems. So this person's fatigue is related to the adrenals and the mitochondria. Oh, I remember this from last night. You know, the brain is as bad as you would think, you know? And then the worst thing that can happen on this test shows up, which is the sulfate marker is low. Okay? So right, according to Richard Lord, who's the man that developed this test, this is a single worst thing that can happen on this entire panel is sulfate is low because that means that glutathione has collapsed. And is that related to your gut? Absolutely directly related to your gut because sulfate plays an incredibly important role in the gut. And if you get the glutathione levels up by fixing sulfate, you're gonna go a long ways towards improving that person's gut function. You're gonna reduce their food allergies. You're gonna really make a big difference for the whole gut-liver connection. Okay? So anyways, that's that. What we do in the class, we do all three of these tests. And let me show you some other examples here.
Here is a GI Effects test. So again, remember, we're looking, is this person in stage one, two, or three? So right off the bat, with the GI Effects, they do this sort of cheat sheet for you here where they attempt to make a graphic image to show you if the commensal bacteria are in balance or not. So off the bat, to determine if there's stage one, you can just look at that and see an imbalance is red, right? So every company will do that. Green is good, red is bad. Then you can also look at, I'm just gonna cut forward for here. Here we go. To, I'm gonna move around a little bit on this test. You can see because we're trying to look for a stage one, now for the microbiome itself. So the GI FX test, again, this is Richard Lord's baby. Here, let's look and see. These are the commensal bacteria. So you could spend the next 15 or 20 years studying the difference between Prevotella species, right, and Fecalibacterium prausnitzii, or you could take the Dan approach, which is like, "Hey, this is just big picture. What's going on here?" This was not too hard to see, right? All these high markers here. Now, do you want to kill these guys? Are they bad? No, they're commensal bacteria. He said, the normal healthy bacteria, but they're overgrowing. So if they overgrow to a certain extent, you might consider that this is sort of a semi-dysbiotic situation, right? And then, but what you can do, you're gonna try to kill these guys? You could, for a short period of time, try to knock some of these organisms down, or you could take the more broad approach and try to balance them out, right, with prebiotics, diet, stress reduction, etc., right? And try to get the microbiome into balance through the lifestyle changes. And one of the things that we see with 100% of our patients is that if the person is not chewing their food well, and not taking three or four minutes after a meal to relax, you're gonna have microbiome imbalances just because of that. Chewing your food, taking three or four minutes after a meal to just sit there and look around and relax before you rush back to work, allows your body to make enough saliva to break down your food. It allows your body to start to produce the bile and the pancreatic enzymes and the HCl, and all the things that you need to get the digestive tract working. We don't produce HCl, digestive enzymes, and bile very well when we're stressed and rushing around and eating. So again, chewing your food well and taking three minutes after a meal to just sit there and look around and relax before you rush back to work. So for the microbiome, again, you have a bunch of different treatment options. You can use prebiotics. If there's an overgrowth of bacteria like this, you probably don't want to dump a bunch of probiotics in, and you might do a little tune-up, maybe for a sort of a baby version of a dysbiosis program. But a lot of this rebalancing, you can do with things like prebiotics when the, when the numbers are high like this, okay? Now, there's probably going to be something else to do, which is leading to the overgrowth of those commensals. And you'll see on this other portion of the test, now we're getting into some things that we could potentially kill, right? So on this patient, you don't see it, but you might see a yeast or fungal overgrowth that you could go after on culture. You might see some of these more potentially harmful bacteria. And this particular case, there's no parasites present, right? So then also, just so you can quickly look at again, I'm not sure what lab company you guys are using, but I want to kind of look at them all. If you're looking at the digestive markers here, and you're thinking, "Is this person at stage two?" I don't know. Well, if their pancreatic elastase is low, they have a pancreatic problem. There's organ involvement, right? There. If their fecal fat is high, then they have a problem with their gallbladder, and they're not, you know, processing fat very well. If these inflammatory markers are high, you know that there's intestinal tract tissue damage going on. So whether they need enzymes, or gallbladder support, or some kind of relief for the inflammation in their gut, or some kind of strengthening of the immune system in their gut, that's kind of what you're looking at for these various markers here, right? So you're making a quick determination, do they need a microbiome balance? Yes, this person did. Do they need organ help? Yes, they do. And then here's again, short-chain fatty acids. So these I associate with stage one because these are made by the intestinal bacteria. And if you see low short-chain fatty acids, then you can give the person butyrate, or you can have them eat foods that are going to stimulate the growth of the good bacteria. That would be things like beans. And the fiber in beans is the best source for these intestinal bacteria to grow. And it would be other foods that have prebiotics in them. And then you can get a list on the internet in three seconds, just type in prebiotic containing foods, and they'll pop up. But don't forget that beans are the essential component in, in getting the microbiome back on track. Beans, beans, beans. So you can treat with beans here, beans and greens, and, and maybe some other fiber-containing foods, or you can use something like butyrate, right, to get these back on track. But the short-chain fatty acid problems, I believe, should be considered categorized with the microbiome imbalance because it's the good bacteria that should be producing these short-chain fatty acids. That's the argument there, right?
So let's look at one more kind of lab. This is Doctor's Data. Some of you may use them. Not a great company, and they have a new stool test that came out last year, it's called the GI 360. So it includes the same things that we've been looking at with these other companies. So you've got a microbiome sort of analysis here. They give you a little cheat sheet with this spiderweb looking thing. They give you a dysbiosis index. Again, green is good, red or pink is bad. So right off the bat, you can see, is there an imbalance with the microbiome, okay? Now, if you want to actually look at the markers, here they are. These are all the commensal bacteria, but there's pages of them. Most of us can't even pronounce most of these, right, let alone understand what they mean. All right, pages of commensal bacteria, page after page. But that's all summarized, thank goodness, in the dysbiosis index and in the microbiome abundance and diversity summary. So again, you're doing patient education, you're saying, "Hey, I think you're at stage one because your microbiome diversity is not great. You've got some dysbiosis as well." So we're worried about overgrowth or potentially harmful bacteria. And get into the actual stage one treatments, right, right off the bat. And then the way this lab is set up, down towards the bottom here, you'll see again the pathogens, right, like the parasites. So that would be for your stage three. These are pretty easy. If it's positive, you treat it. If it's not, you leave it alone. So there's not a lot of analysis in those usually. But there's a whole other section of this test, like all the other companies have, and that's, find it here. It's way at the end. They have by bacterial pathogenic bacteria. So these are all the bad guys. Here we go. Still chemistry. So here we have, you're wondering, "Hang, does this person have a stage two problem?" Or there's your organ involvement. If elastase is out of balance, then yes, there's a pancreatic problem. If the fat stain is out of balance, does something wrong with the gallbladder. If lactoferrin or calprotectin are high, you got an inflammatory problem in the intestinal tract. If secretory IgA is low or high, you got a big problem. Again, short-chain fatty acids, I would associate with the microbiome itself, okay? So you're looking for organ involvement, you're looking for microbiome problems, you're looking for pathogens on any of these three tests. And that's plenty to talk about when you're doing a, a patient consult, you know, for half an hour, whatever it is that you may, that you may want to do.
I'll just show you one more. This came in from Rich. It's just a right one. No, sorry, it wasn't Rich, it was Mel. So Mel sent this in, I think was this week or last week. When was this? Well, I don't know. It was within the last week. And, um, let's see. 62-year-old female, heartburn, constipation, anxiety. I just want, this was a good example because we have a pre and post-test. So in February of 2019, this test was done. In December, it was redone. That's kind of cool to see them side-by-side. And we do this in class a lot, especially in my more advanced classes. So here we have the normal bacterial pre and post, and then some dysbiotic bacterial pre and post. And I want to show you the, a really cool part about this is on the first test, the patient had Blastocystis hominis. Then Mel treated them and got rid of the Blastocystis. Cool. However, this is a pretty big however. On the retest, the H. pylori marker started to creep up. So Mel was deciding that she was probably gonna treat H. pylori after the second test. So it's just a highlight that was stool testing, you always want to do a follow-up test because you'll often that you did some good work. In this case, you know, you got rid of one bug, but you may find that something else shows up that you need to treat, okay? Let's, so that is super important. All right.
So let's take a look here. And this, I'm gonna, let's see where we're right on time. Look at me. So let me go back and do a quick review. And I maybe I'm talking faster or something. I feel like I'm a little hyper tonight. So quick review. Don't forget, I have a class starting in a week. You save a thousand bucks if you sign up for the one-year mentorship. We also have a six-month version if you can't handle a year-long commitment. If you're into short-term relationships, six months is all we ask. You can do that or the year, okay? Depending on how much you want to sign your life away. So don't forget about that. Sign up for class. Tell your friends. And then let me go back and review the stages. And then I'll answer questions. Okay.
Oh, state-specific recommendation. Again, the stage one is the microbiome is messed up. Either one of those commensal microbiome chart, graph, red to green things is going to be screwed up, or you're gonna see low short-chain fatty acids. Again, the short-chain fatty acids are made by the commensal bacteria. So if those are low, you know automatically that the microbiome is not good. Now, I showed you that one example of a GI Effects test with super-high commensal bacterial markers. I could have shown you 10 more that have super low. The point is that it's a disturbed microbiome, right? And that we're gonna fix it with stress management, super healthy foods, maybe some prebiotic supplements, maybe some butyrate, maybe some probiotics, right? Chewing your food well, and all these things that are the origin of these health problems in the first place. The number one of which would be stress, right? If you're stressed out of your mind, your microbiome is gonna fall apart as soon as you're stressed. So we got to address the adrenals and stress. Stage two, things are really bad. It's been going on for a while. Your pancreas isn't working well, your stomach's not working well, your gallbladder is not working well, something like that. So some of these tests have a marker for protein assimilation, which will give you a clue about HCl. And there's also another way. This is answering Cindy's question here. There's another way to tell about HCl if you're clever and you do the organic acids test. How does it say, raise your hand if you know the answer to this one. But in the, when it's abnormal, if it's high, is an indicator of insufficient hydrochloric acid. Who would have known that? Just sitting right there on the test. So this is organic acids. So if you're doing organic acids and stool testing, you get a lot of data. You can kind of cross-correlate and make all this stuff work. And let's see, I have another question that came in. Let me see if I can find this answer here. We go. I think I have it on this PowerPoint. So the question is, what are the strains that benefit from being fiber? So, and this is a very interesting thing, and we should all know this. This is pretty basic. This is not so complicated that you can just blow it off, all right? So this is from a different lecture I did last year. So the question is from Adriana, "What are the main strains that feed the from bean fiber?" Can say, I'm going to answer that in a bigger picture way. So there's three general categories of organisms, and you want to think about them in terms of function, okay? And these are just some examples on the board here. High abundance commensal bacteria, that means ones that are growing in large amounts. Large amounts of these commensal bacteria that are going to respond to fiber from beans, and also respond to polyphenols in our diet or fiber supplements and polyphenol supplements, right? So the prebiotic supplements that are available, usually, you know, the good ones are going to have polyphenols in them. So Fecalibacterium prausnitzii, Lactobacillus, Ruminococcus. These are examples of organisms that convert dietary fibers into short-chain fatty acids and sugars, okay? So what's interesting about that is that, here's a little note on it. This class functions at the top of the gut microbiome food chain, degrading a wide variety of dietary complex carbohydrates into simple sugars that stimulate the growth of hydrogenic and hydrogenotrophic classes. And I'll show you what that means. So that's kind of a mouthful, science-y stuff. But basically, we eat the dietary fiber, the stuff from beans, it's the best source. These bacteria make short-chain fatty acids, right? They stimulate the production of hydrogen. And there's hydrogen-producing bacteria in there. There's other groups of bacteria that consume the hydrogen that these bacteria make, okay? So the fiber starts the short-chain fatty acids in play. The hydrogen producers go up. The hydrogen consumers live on the hydrogen that the hydrogen producers made. And then the hydrogen producers continue to grow, okay? So in other words, there's these mechanisms in the body where if you're cranking up the commensal bacteria that produce hydrogen, you got to be consuming that hydrogen with other organisms. That then allows the hydrogen producers to continue to grow, okay? And there's this balance in the body where we're making just the right amount of hydrogen if our microbiome isn't in perfect shape, okay? And so I'm just going to show you, there's another class here, the here the hydrogen-producing bacteria. It's just some of them. Clostridium, Roseburia, Eubacterium. Ruminococcus, Prevotella species. That's a good Prevotella, not a bad one, okay? So these are short-chain fatty acid producers, right? And they're also making hydrogen. And then where this gets super cool is there's ones that consume hydrogen. Who would have thought that? Here are the ones that are consuming hydrogen. Some of these are kind of famous. Methanobrevibacter smithii consumes hydrogen. If you want to get technical, it's not bacteria, it's an archaeon, but whatever. And Eubacterium rectale, again, is a hydrogen-consuming bacteria. So to get these guys to grow out properly, you have to have hydrogen. So you have to have the kind of bacteria that breaks down the short-chain fatty acids. You need the kind of bacteria that make the hydrogen. You need the kind of bacteria that produce the hydrogen. And each of these organisms is living off of other organisms, right? And so there's this sort of symphony of goodness that happens if we're doing the right kinds of things. All right. All right.
So let me see. I'm going to wrap up because we're a few minutes over time. But I appreciate your time. Hopefully, this is going to help stimulate some thinking, and you can start to use these tools for your patient communication purposes. If you guys have any interest in the class that's starting, get in touch with us, and we'll get you signed up for either the six-month or one-year mentorship. And we also have a couple of scholarships available if you're in some kind of financial hardship, you can't afford the whole class, you might have some potential scholarship opportunities for those of you that are in that position, okay? All right, take care, everyone. Have a wonderful evening.