Transcription
All right, welcome and hello and happy July! Yes, this is Dr. Dan Kish. Haven't done one of these talks for a while. I'm super glad that you guys are here. We had 2,000 people register for this talk, for which I'm very excited. We will record this. If you have friends and family you want to send it to, please do, because this is some groundbreaking good stuff I'm involved in now. And I'll give you a little bit of an intro, a little bit about myself for those of you that are new to me, and then we're going to jump into a whole new topic in a way, um, that is pretty profound.
So, who am I? I am Dan. Who is this? This is my son, Asa. He's going to college, you guys, in the fall. So after all these years of being a dad, I'm gonna be an empty nester. He's gonna cruise off into the sunset, hopefully not in my Alfa Romeo there when he's driving, but he's, uh, going to Washington University. Very excited about him and his future he has ahead of him. He's a math guy, super smart. His last semester of high school, he took discrete math at one of the local universities. I don't even know what discrete math is. It's something that you take once you're done with linear algebra, anyways. He's got a good future ahead of him, and I've got a bunch of stuff going on here.
A little bit about me. I've been a busy guy. You know, looking back, I just turned 53 a few days ago. Um, in my early 50s, middle 50s, I've been doing this work for a long time. And when I was 22, I was at Cambridge University working with Dr. Monroe. You know, published a book with him about yoga research and biomedical stuff. I've spent a couple years in these monasteries in Asia, which I, I miss quite a bit. The monastic life, it's sort of suited me quite well. I spent, uh, six months in a Japanese monastery, a Zen monastery, year and a half in a monastery in, uh, Thailand. Really formative, uh, phase of my life in my, in my 20s. These days, I'm training doctors left and right. Mayo Clinic doctors, we got doctors from everywhere in the world coming out here. Um, this is back in the '90s. For those of you that were around in the '90s, Jeffrey Bland, the founder of functional medicine, going to his seminars in my little Honda. And now here we are. I've got a Kish Institute. I got a mission and a vision. And the vision really here, the mission here is to build a physician community focused on social change. You know, and I'm busy doing that. I spend the majority of my time training doctors in how to do functional medicine.
And I have a new theory I came up with today, um, you know, which is that really the revolutions, you know, we're training doctors as fast as we can, okay? There's clearly never going to be, uh, the number of doctors that we need. And it's really a patient-centered revolution, you know, which is why I do these kind of talks. Um, if you think about any really good revolution, it's not going to come from the establishment. The pharmaceutical companies aren't going to just all of a sudden help us all out and get us healthy. And certainly not happening in the hospital and insurance-based systems. So it's really going to have to come, you know, from the work that we're doing together, uh, you and your doctor, you know, as a patient-led revolution. That's really what we're seeing, I think.
So anyways, um, let's take a look at the Kish Method treatment model. And I put a bunch of slides in here that we're going to skip through because I want to get to the good stuff. But just as reference slides for you all, if you come back and listen to this later, or you get a copy of the slides later and you want to, we'll look through them. Um, usually we'll post a PDF of the slide somewhere. Underlying cause is what we're always interested in with functional medicine. What is the underlying cause? Is it spiritual? Is it dietary? Is it a GI infection? Is it a toxin? Going to talk a lot about toxins today. And what is that damage that's being, being triggered? Is it an inflammatory process? Is it a catabolic process? It means a breaking down process. Are you generating insulin resistance? Oxidative stress? And basically, the theme of today is that our metabolism, the way that we control our weight, the way that we control our energy production, the way that we control our fat burning, can be damaged by these four categories: inflammation damages your fat burning, catabolic physiology being in a stress response damages your fat burning, insulin resistance is kind of the damage of your fat burning, right? That's kind of like the same thing. And oxidative stress damages your fat burning, okay? We're going to talk about all the different ways that this is happening and why everyone is so fat. Part of it is obviously that we don't exercise and we don't eat enough, you know, healthy food, and we overeat unhealthy food. I'm kind of assuming that we're all in the understanding that, you know, the American diet is horrible. But beyond that, assuming that you've cleaned up your diet, your diet is decent, you've taken those steps already, you know, why aren't you losing the weight? Well, it's because of the physiological damage that's occurring in the systems.
I want to talk today about some of the breakthroughs I've made in the last year as to understanding why this is such a big problem and how to treat it potentially. Um, so this, I'm going to skip through some of these slides. And again, they're kind of there more for reference. Point of this whole section is that there are a lot of toxins in the environment, more than we can even count now. Was 80,000 and growing the last time I looked at the numbers. And that's enough to pretty much distress anybody. Um, every baby born in the United States now has 50 to 70 toxins the day they're born. So this is like the entire US population now. There is, there's no longer a person living in the mountains of Colorado who's toxin-free because she's eating organic produce. You know, if you're breathing and living in the United States, by definition, you're, you know, toxic because of herbicides, pesticides, heavy metals, the things that we breathe. It's more than just the things that we eat. And that, you know, this all accumulates and develops, you know, turns into what we call a body burden. This is total load of toxic chemicals. And then what do they do? They cause inflammation, tissue damage, insulin resistance. You know, toxins are, in my opinion, at this point, after all I've studied, the number one reason why our fat burning metabolism gets damaged. Now, the problem is, you can't just detoxify and fix your fat burning metabolism because there's other systems that are damaged at that point that you have to fix. But it's worth knowing a little bit about toxins so you can wrap your mind around this.
So a lot of the toxins that we confront that are really the big problems are what they call lipophilic. And that means that they are fat-soluble. The water-soluble toxins, you can flush out of your body just by drinking water and by avoiding them. I'm going to get my water here so I can kind of punctuate this point. The fat-soluble toxins, you know, a big thing of water like this is not going to get rid of. I drink, I don't know, at least five or six quarts of water a day. I mean, if I don't do that much, I'm pretty dehydrated. And I weigh about 160, 150 something, 160. Um, oxidative stress, right? It's generated from these fat-soluble toxins that are in our bodies. And the process of oxidation is a destructive process, right? It's like an apple turning brown when you cut it in half. And what we're worried about today is, um, this sort of profound implication as to what structures these toxins are destroying. And we should be very, very concerned about our mitochondria and what's happening to our mitochondria. And in a parallel track, we're going to talk about in the second part of the class, we should be very concerned about oxidative stress that's damaging the thyroid and inflammation that's damaging the thyroid, okay? Okay, these are the two areas where if they get hit together at the same time and damaged, you got a problem. You're not going to burn fat.
Now, the interesting thing about, about me, you know, is that when I was trained, you know, 25 years ago, I was trained on this kind of adrenal path, adrenal, adrenal, adrenal, cortisol, cortisol. I still very much believe in that. I still do adrenal testing on every patient. However, you know, something I've observed over the last 20 years is that there's an increasing large, increasingly large number of people that I work with that don't lose weight on a well-designed adrenal program. We take them on a gluten, we put them on a gluten-free diet, we fix their adrenals, and they're still overweight, and they're still not burning fat. So, you know, through investigating and through learning from my new teacher, uh, I think I've kind of pieced this together. So I've, you know, I thought my career was kind of dwindling in that, you know, I kind of felt like I knew a lot of stuff and, you know, like what else is there new out there? I've kind of heard it all before. I kind of had a phase like that. And then about a year ago, I started working with a man named Dr. Richard Lord. Who, and Richard is one of the leader, leading professionals in, you know, leading scientists in the field of functional medicine. And, you know, the first hour that I studied with Dr. Lord, I realized, uh oh, like I thought I was like at a 95 out of 100 in terms of functional medicine knowledge, and I just kicked myself down to like a two or three. So Richard's been teaching me every Monday. We get together and he's training me. And I, I really started to absorb all this information. I've, I've learned more in the last year with Richard than I, than I, I think than I probably could synthesize in the previous 20. It's really been this learning curve that's like phenomenal. And part of it is because I know a fair amount already, and he's a, and he's such a good teacher that I'm just able to absorb information at a huge rate.
But one of the side effects of working with Richard has been, he's really explained to me and taught to me what a damaged metabolism is from the viewpoint of the mitochondria. And then the doctors in my training program that work with every week have taught me the ramifications of a damaged metabolism in regards to the thyroid. And then what we've kind of seen as a community of physicians together in these past months is that those folks that we identify with what Dr. Lord calls a hypometabolism, that means damaged mitochondria, are the same people that have a damaged thyroid. And in fact, if you just fix the thyroid and you don't address the mitochondria, you get an inconsistent, a partial result. Similarly, if you just fix the adrenal hormones that are part of this whole cascade of problems, you don't get a very satisfactory result. And if you just fix a mitochondria by themselves without addressing the underlying thyroid problem, you don't get a good result either. So what we're finding now is this combination of treating the mitochondria with the thyroid dysfunction fires up metabolism and makes a really big difference in the patients that we're working with. And so, you know, for me, one of the most exciting breakthroughs of my career to really see this play out because it's these two concepts that have been around in my head, but I didn't understand. And seeing them tie together so clearly, it just makes so much sense.
So oxidative stress damages your mitochondria. We're looking at that now. Oxidative stress damages your thyroid. Inflammation damages your mitochondria. Inflammation damages your thyroid hormone production, okay? These things are overlapping. And the underlying cause that takes the mitochondria down to their knees also destroys your thyroid's ability to function properly. You can't fix just one. Fixing both makes a difference.
So what do the mitochondria do? They're making energy abundantly if they're healthy. And they're generating a few free radicals, not a big deal. Your body can deal with that. When the mitochondria are damaged because of inflammation, oxidative stress, environmental toxins, etc., free radical damage increases. The ATP or energy supply shrinks. That translates into you being tired and you not being able to burn fat. Think of this as like the fat burning engine for your body. And if your body is not producing enough ATP, you're going to be storing fat. And you could be on a 500 calorie a day diet and gaining weight. If these mitochondria and your thyroid aren't functioning well, again, we're going to blame it on toxins. You want a culprit. And then here's the thyroid side of the equation. So again, I grew up in this naturopathic community that was personally and professionally obsessed with adrenal hormone output. And it's all we ever talked about for years. And it takes a long time to wrap your mind around and understand how all these hormones work. So I am no stranger to adrenal hormone programs. I love them. I do them with every patient. However, there is a subset of people that we work with, which seems to be a growing subset, no pun intended, who are having pretty serious problems with their thyroid. And the inability to get the thyroid working well can really be a hindrance even in the best designed adrenal program. And the essence of the problem is right down here. And there's a little bit of physiology here. It's worth knowing. There's only really three things you need to remember. You have T4. That's one of the thyroid hormones. It gets converted into T3. That's the active form of thyroid. And then it goes out and it does stuff. You can get an inhibition of that conversion from cortisol. So the adrenal glands can mess, mess this up, given we understand that. However, as part of this whole scenario, you can also have an increase in reverse T3. Meaning if your T4 is not going down the way it should, it goes over this way. Your reverse T3 goes up. And that's the pattern that we see in these people with the mitochondrial damage of a hypometabolic state. Again, this to me is one of the biggest breakthroughs I've ever been aware of in my career. You know, we figured this out pretty recently. I want to talk about it, throw it out there, you know, for discussion. And so far, most of the doctors that I've run this by are like, whoa, you know, that actually makes sense. I think I've been seeing that in my practice too. So this is new, cutting-edge stuff. There's no, I've never seen a study published about this. This is just what we're observing as we're working with you guys, you know, all of us, including myself, who are getting, you know, fatter and, um, having more trouble burning fat, you know, because of this toxin-related problem. And this is a relatively new problem. I, when, in the history of the planet, have we had 82,000 chemical toxins is, you know, exposed to us? This is a new problem, okay? We're trying to stay abreast of it and understand how it's damaging us.
So again, oxidative stress from environmental toxins will cause inflammation and oxidative stress that's going to block the conversion of T4 to T3, increasing your reverse T3. Reverse T3 goes up, your metabolism gets sluggish and slows down, and you're just staring at the, you know, face of a thyroid problem. The other component that I mentioned earlier is mitochondria. Here's like a diagram of what the mitochondria are doing. They're taking fat and carbs primarily and burning them up for fuel, making fuel or ATP in the citric acid cycle, okay? That's what's supposed to be happening in the mitochondria. If there's damage to the mitochondria, this process is not happening. If you don't have enough mitochondria, this process won't even go forward. And I'll show you some lab work in a minute. But basically, most of the time when we're interpreting these labs, we see high levels of these organic acids as a problem. But what we're observing now as an even bigger problem is low levels, meaning the person is not even able to make adequate levels of energy anymore. What are the things that we're worried about? It could be anything from pesticides to air fresheners to lead paint. You know, we're again, super saturated with these. And if you, you know, want to go on a detox program, part of it is just cleaning up the environment that you live in. Making sure you get a good air filter for your home, a good water filter for your water, and you're doing all the basic, you know, detox things that you can. Avoiding the obviously bad things like genetically modified foods that are kind of scary. Wearing protective clothing and a mask if you're remodeling. We see a lot of patients that get sick with remodeling. Trying to eat organic as much as you can, although the latest research that I've seen shows that the air we breathe leads to our toxic burden more so than the food that we eat. So more important to get a good quality air filter for your home than it is to buy organic food if you're on a limited budget. Go get the air filter first.
The toxin cycle, which we kind of alluded to earlier, remember is that you've got this toxin exposure that screws up your hormones, your thyroid, kind of focusing on tonight, is damaged, of course, your GI tract, your immune system don't do that well either. And then we also have this damage that occurs to the mitochondria. So detoxing is super important. Getting these toxins out is obviously a first step to trying to fix this. Making sure your liver is working properly, getting plenty of fluids. Saunas are one of the best ways, probably, to get, uh, toxins out of your system. Infrared saunas. I just purchased one myself recently. Been using it almost every night for months now. It's one of the best things. I can't believe I lived without a sauna. You know, it's small, it's like the size of an old school telephone booth. You can fit it, I fit it in my spare room. Uh, doesn't take up much electricity. Cost, I don't know, two, three bucks. But I use it almost every night. It's totally worth it. So in there for 20 minutes, 40 minutes, let's just sweat all these toxins out. Um, trying to catch up with the world at large and make sure that I'm staying fresh and vitalized. So, um, that's probably in the long run, the cheapest, most efficient way to get rid of toxins is just to do saunas on a regular basis. You can invest a lot in supplements as well. Talk about that a little bit too. Um, but the idea is that you want to get these toxins out of the body and you make sure that you're binding them up and you don't reabsorb them. So be careful about some detox programs. It's easy to make yourself sick with, uh, you know, detox protocols. So just be a little bit careful about that.
All right. Um, usually best to work with a professional who's been doing this for a while. There's two different phases, phase one and phase two, and they're each dominated by certain nutrients. And you can make yourself sick pretty easily by cranking up phase one and not having phase two in place. So something seemingly benign as like a folate or some fancy methyl folate product can upregulate phase one and make you feel sicker. So be careful. You know, the safe way to always detox is to work with phase two initially. Even safer way to do it is to do the lab work. But be careful. Once you understand the two phases, and here they are represented again, you can focus always on phase two first. And here's nutrients that are related to phase two: glycine, taurine, N-acetyl cysteine, probably the most famous one, methionine. And then be careful with the phase one nutrients because if you use too much of the phase one nutrients too early, you'll generate all these intermediaries that are often times more toxic than the original toxin. And if phase two is not working well, these intermediaries will build up and you get sick. So be careful. If you find that you take, uh, anything like a B vitamin, folate, B12, you feel sick from that, it's probably because your phase two is not working real well. And in fact, you can use, um, lab testing to figure this out so you're not guessing. That's how I do it so you don't screw people up, right? And also be careful with antioxidants. You take antioxidants again, too early in the process, they can cause problems.
And we talked a little bit already about the process of oxidative stress. Super important process. Free radicals. You think about it like, it's like you're burning a fire when you're trying to get your metabolism going. It's like your mitochondria are basically, they're, it's like a controlled burn, you know, like the forest service does, right? So you're making all this energy inside your tissues, inside your mitochondria, and little sparks fly off of that. Those are the free radicals, just like sparks would fly off of fire if you're burning firewood to get energy, right? And if you have too many of those free radicals, they're going to start to cause damage. So excessive oxidative stress is a problem, okay? And we can measure for oxidative stress with the tests. And what we're worried about tonight is, is your oxidative stress damaging the mitochondria? And if so, your fat burning is going to be just taken down to its knees and down to a crawl. We're going to be worried about that.
So again, organic acids can measure for this stuff. I want to show you some examples of this. And here, looked at this a moment ago. We measure all these different phases with the organic acids, the burning of fat, the burning of carbs. We see how all these different, you know, intermediary steps in these cycles are working ultimately to make you the ATP that you need for energy. Now, the problem then comes about when the mitochondria are taking a hit or they're being physically damaged by toxins that are generating oxidative stress. Then this entire delicate system starts to break down. And honestly, I don't think the design team really anticipated 82,000 chemicals in the environment because we're not very well protected against them. And it's a new problem, right? It's only really been going on since maybe the late 1940s, early 1950s, this idea of releasing huge amounts of chemicals into the environment. It's a relatively new thing that we've thought of. And it's not slowing down, unfortunately. Hopefully someday we're going to figure this out.
So most of the organic acids that we look at, we're concerned about high levels. But what I want to talk about tonight is not the typical interpretation. High levels of these organic acids means that you're, you know, having a nutrient problem there, a nutrient deficiency. But low levels mean you're not even making the, you're not even making the attempt to make the energy. And so these low levels are what we're really concerned about. The mitochondria then are inactive. They're not able to take oxygen and make energy. They're just sluggish and they're not functioning well. And in fact, what we're starting to see basically is mitochondria, and this is scary, you guys, okay? Mitochondria that are either damaged from oxidative stress. So that would be like, uh, I think about like, um, I don't know, like to say you were riding a motorcycle 70 miles an hour in heavy traffic and then you crashed and you broke your pelvis, okay? That would be like a shattered mitochondria, okay? You're still alive, you're still work, you know, functioning, but things are pretty messed up, okay? So that's one thing that's happening to mitochondria. But what's even worse with these hypometabolic states that we're seeing now on the labs is a mitochondria. Now, you crashed on your motorcycle going 70 miles an hour, but you hit your head and you're dead. Okay? These mitochondrial numbers are just low. In certain people, they just don't have enough of the mitochondria left, okay? It's not that they're damaged, they're just gone. They're destroyed. They're dead, just like a human being can die.
And so then what do we need to do in that case? And this is complicated. And this is the new cutting-edge of therapy that I'm talking about tonight. We need to regrow our mitochondria. We need to grow new ones. And how do you grow new mitochondria? That's kind of the central question. How do you grow new mitochondria? How do you make them grow? What do you need to make mitochondria grow? Um, and we know what they do, they're making energy for us. But how do we make more of these guys? So the strategy here is a little different. There's like, and just kind of getting clear in my mind in the last couple months, thanks to Dr. Lord, there's two independent but related projects. One is getting the mitochondria to work better, the ones that are still left, okay? That would be like fixing the guy with the shattered pelvis, you know, making it work better. The other is just getting new ones to be produced. Now, obviously, you need to exercise, you need to eat a healthy diet, kind of assuming all that is happening, okay, in order to get more mitochondria. But then you need to think about what do mitochondria need to actually grow well? They need amino acids in order to form into the proteins which are going to, you know, produce the mitochondria. So a large part of the centers around free-form amino acid treatments, using special amino acids too, like tryptophan, which is the rate-limiting step in protein synthesis. And I know that's kind of an outrageous statement, but you should look this up. Don't believe anything I say, hopefully, wait until the talk is done. But as soon as the talk is done, go to Google and and type in something like, is tryptophan really the rate-limiting step for protein synthesis? Dr. Kaylor said it is, or something like that. Okay? It is. It's crazy. So if you need to be on free-form amino acids and a little bit of tryptophan to make this work. So it's easy to get formulas that don't, you know, aren't really designed for mitochondrial repair. They're designed for some other purpose. And you need to kind of know your physiology a little bit, okay?
There's also all these other nutrients that help with the energy production that would be with just the getting the mitochondria working well. So again, I'm personally obsessed with automobiles, so I always think of this in car analogies. But think about like a car running out of gas. It's like your mitochondria just not having enough energy. They just don't have the nutrients they need to make energy. But what we're talking about is not only that, okay? That is a problem. But an even bigger problem, which is now the car is out of gas and it's crashed, right? It's damaged and it has to be repaired. That's what we're really focusing on. And again, the damage is coming from oxidative stress from environmental toxins. Now, you can have other sources of oxidative stress, and it's worth mentioning briefly that it's not all environmental toxins, okay? You can have, uh, exposure to pathogens, bacteria, parasites, yeast overgrowth, viral problems. It could be anything from Lyme disease to mold exposure that's going to cause the same oxidative damage and the same mitochondrial and thyroid type problems, okay? You could even do it with, uh, exercise overtraining. You can do it with, um, you know, a really, really horrible diet for a long period of time. So there's lots of ways that people can generate this. It's not just about environmental toxins. But, you know, what we want to do in terms of treatment on the treatment side is start to think about eliminating free radicals and get them under, getting them under control. Glutathione is kind of a classic way to do this, as are many of the other antioxidants. And I'll show you now on the testing here what we consider, uh, a problem, okay? Now, this is sort of a mixed lab, but I'm going to circle things on here so you guys can start to see a little bit how this plays out on the lab world. If you have a preponderance of markers that are elevated, that is the typical nutrient deficiency profile that we often see. But what worried, what we're worried about with the hypometabolic state is markers that are low, like these markers here, like this one that's underneath the detected limit, like these that are low right here, like this one that's underneath the detected limit. When you get a lot of low markers under these sections that have to do with ATP production, carb, fat burning, energy production, it means that there's a hypometabolic state present. You don't have enough mitochondria, or there's a lot of mitochondria that are damaged. You're not generating energy. You're not even generating abnormal elevations, right? Because you don't even, you're not even running this cycle. And that's, you know, by definition, what we call a hypometabolic state. These numbers are all low. And, and traditionally within the world of functional medicine, looking at organic acids, we've always been focused just on the high numbers. It's relatively new now for us to understand that the low levels of these chemical compounds can be even more important a problem.
Now, this spills over to this next page here. You'll see all these B vitamin markers underneath. DL stands for underneath the detected limit. So three in a row right there, underneath detected limit, underneath detected limit, underneath detected limit. And why is that so important? Well, let's go back and I'll show you here, then if you look at this earlier diagram on the energy production, if you can't detect the B vitamins, here they are right here. They're part of energy production. B vitamins, there, there's B, B vitamins right there. If you can't even detect CoQ10 levels, there's not enough of it. This system is, is so shut down, it's not even running, okay? Whereas again, usually historically, the last 30, 40 years in functional medicine, we've been obsessed with high levels of these chemicals. Now we're seeing a large number of our patients in an even worse situation where the levels are low. And, you know, I've only been in practice for 25 years. It's not that long in this scheme of the world, you know, is it? But this problem seems to be getting more common from everything that I've been able to observe. Um, it's gone from like, hmm, we don't know what that means to like, we see this every day. Again, underneath detected limit markers is a problem.
So a little bit about thyroid. There's some factoids here. Basically, a lot of Americans have it. Back to this diagram here. So any kind of a stress that pushes your cortisol is going to inhibit this conversion of T4 to T3. Emotional stress, dietary stress, inflammatory stress, oxidative stress. All of these things are going to block T4 to T3 conversion. You're going to have reverse T3 levels go up. Those same things that are messing your thyroid up at the same time are going to be damaging your mitochondria. So it's no wonder that we're seeing this now as sort of a pattern. It's the same causative agents that are triggering this in both cases. All right. And then what happens when your thyroid is downregulated? You gain weight, it's harder to get pregnant, you're tired all the time, your hair, skin, and nails don't look that great. And, you know, you're just often running in this kind of negative thyroid land. Stress suppresses all of these things. So you could theoretically become emotionally stressed enough that all this gets messed up. But, you know, honestly, what, what we're seeing now in all the doctors that I work with is that it's emotional stress isn't enough to trigger all this. You really got to have this toxin burden thrown in there as well. Okay? So I'm going to kind of, what would you say, sort of open up or amplify, accelerate our definition of what stress is. So this calls stress here, either emotional stress, could be dietary stress, or for tonight's talk, really, we're talking about inflammation and oxidative stress as the main sources of the problem. Okay? Cortisol gets all wackadoodle. Your T3, T4 conversion problem happens. Reverse T3 levels go up. That's slowing everything down on the thyroid and adrenal side. Plus your mitochondria aren't working well. And now you're just walking yourself into a pretty major problem.
Now, the cool thing about this is that, I mean, there's some good news and all this. I just like talk about bad things all the time. The good news is that, you know, we're having this conversation with all these doctors last week in my training program. And doctor after doctor is in class after class is saying, oh yeah, I see reverse T3 high and people that are hypometabolic on the organic acids. And guess what, Dan? When we start to give them some thyroid nutrients, even before we use thyroid medications, we start to work on their mitochondria, we see reverse T3 levels coming back down. Makes sense. So this is correctable. But you have to have this broader vision of the problem because if you just focus on the thyroid, you're not going to get as consistent a benefit. And if you just focus on the adrenals, not as consistent a benefit. And most people don't focus on the mitochondria. But if you did just focus on the mitochondria, you wouldn't get the same level of solution as well. And I don't know, this isn't that complicated when I think about what it really requires doctors to do. You know, it means that doctors need to, you know, check your thyroid and run an organic acids profile. It's not the end of the world, uh, in terms of complexity. It's just knowing what's going on. And, um, you know, appreciating that you can do a couple of labs and and start to figure this out.
So hypothyroidism, people become depressed, they gain weight, constipation, hair loss, sensitivity to cold, dry skin. None of this is good, right? This is just like an unpleasant thing all the way around. And it's similar to adrenal problems. Um, and again, this could be all triggered from inflammation and oxidative stress, which is what we're talking about tonight. There's other things that can trigger it as well. And inflammation of thyroid, we talked about this. Now, the problem is that in conventional medicine, often times they use a, a drug that has T4 in it. And remember, if you're not converting T4 to T3 in the first place, taking more T4 is not going to help the situation, okay? So if you're inflamed and your HPT axis is suppressed, that's the hypothalamic pituitary thyroid axis with pictures we're looking at earlier, the graphic thing, then you're going to have a suppression of the ability to produce T3. The inflammation then is going to drive all these hormone receptors crazy. And the inflammation is going to decrease your T4 to T3 conversion. So it really doesn't matter if you take a ton of T4, if you're not converting it to T3, you're not going to get the result you want from the prescription. And you need to again, think a little bit more about nutrients and other ways of fixing the thyroid that may be a little bit more comprehensive.
So inflammation triggers all this oxidative stress, toxins, etc. And here's a little diagram again, just so you can see how that thyroid hormones work. This is pretty important. We should all understand this. So you got your T4, ideally green light, you're making T3, happy, happy thyroid, fat burning is working. A little bit of reverse T3 putting the brakes on the metabolism, hey, that's fine. Even if you're driving fast, you need a little, you know, a little bit of braking once in a while. Production of reverse T3, red is bad. Now we've got the inability to convert T4 to T3, why? Because of toxins, oxidative stress, inflammation, whatever you want to call it. And your reverse T3 levels go up. You'll see that on your blood work. Boom. Now, remember, taking T4 doesn't necessarily help this problem. And sometimes TSH levels look normal when this is going on. So it's not a given that the standard TSH test is going to pick all this up. TSH is sitting way up here. This is one of the problems. Often times only TSH is tested for, and that may not reveal what's going on with this hypometabolic state. So you have to look a little deeper. And making sure, make sure that you're testing all the thyroid hormones, not just TSH, but T3, T4, and importantly for tonight's talk, reverse T3. All this can happen. We're worried about the upstream problem and why these conversions aren't happening in the first place, okay?
So are the thyroid labs? TSH, T4, T3, free T3 and T4. And then thyroid antibodies to see if you have Hashimoto's. That's a pretty comprehensive workup. And for what we're talking about tonight, the most common pattern we're seeing is damaged mitochondria and high levels of reverse T3. Your TSH may or may not be affected by that. So if you just have done a TSH test, you may still have this problem with the thyroid. It's just not severe, you know, it's not to the point yet where TSH is also being affected. Right? Picture thyroid treatments. Of course, we're always trying to reduce the inflammation, get the toxins out, correct the adrenals, do all these other things. That's kind of a given. But there are then nutrients that you can use. Iodine. You have to be super careful about. You have to work with someone who really understands how to use iodine. It does have a value, but it's also really dicey. You can mess yourself up with iodine. So this put a big question mark by that. Okay? It's really difficult to use iodine properly. So be careful. I would never, uh, you know, take iodine unless you work with a doctor that uses it all the time, okay? Because you can dose that wrong and you can be in some serious trouble. Selenium helps quite a bit also with thyroid. A little easier to work with. You're kind of likely to cause a problem there. There is a test you can do for iodine, uh, if you work with a doctor again, that's experienced with that. They can, you know, step you through that whole process. Don't go out and take a bunch of iodine. I just see that and badly for most people, okay? Selenium again is much safer to use. And selenium helps with the conversion of T4 to T3. That's pretty handy because that is at the heart of the problem that we're talking about. So again, self-treatment with iodine, don't even think about it. That's a bad idea. Bing bang. Selenium is pretty safe. Kelp, extraordinarily safe. Has some iodine in it, but, you know, you'd have to, it'd be impossible to overdose on kelp. I mean, you'd be throwing up before you took too much of that stuff. So it's just a seaweed, right? You can, that's a pretty safe way to go. And then in my practice, I use a lot of thyroid nutrient and herb combination products. And I use a lot of thyroid glandular. Uh, again, you're probably better off working with a doctor who does this all the time than trying to self-treat. Self-treatments can only get you so far with this, okay?
So key concepts here. Adrenal and thyroid issues arise together. But now we're really trying to focus on this idea of, uh, the metabolic patterns. And let me show you a couple other examples I pulled up here for lab testing. And we got, got a few more minutes. Yeah, we got a few more minutes. I don't know how one would function without the actual labs. But if you get the bigger picture concept and you start to think this through, I think you can be in good shape here. I'm really vehemently against, uh, self-treatment, though. I think it's just risky.
So here's, here's an example of what I was talking about earlier, which is sort of a typical com, uh, organic acids profile. And look at, see all the markers are high. These are nutrient deficiencies, which can be resolved by you taking the supplements that are indicated based on the lab. That is not a particularly challenging or complicated thing to figure out. And in fact, when people have that particular problem, they usually respond really quickly. You know, they're feeling better pretty darn fast. I'd say my average patient within a month, two months at the most, on a good solid program based on organic acids, is feeling like things are, you know, quite a bit better. All right. And let me show you here some other examples here. I want to show you an example of a complete workup too, so you can see what it looks like when we do a complete workup. And, you know, part of this is empowering you guys to get a basic understanding of how all this stuff works. And then you can kind of pressure the doctors around you to help you out, or you can find someone like me and work with me. I work with people primarily over the phone, so I work with people all over the world. Here, let me show you another example here. And we have kind of a special thing going this summer. We opened up some extra hours for new patients in the summer. So if you guys are interested in becoming a new patient of mine, you're welcome to sign up. Summertime is probably the best time because we have the extra time to fit people in right now. And the fall is going to get a little busier. I'm going to be doing more international teaching and traveling in the fall.
Okay, so we looked at an example where all these markers were high. Now let's look at an example where they're not. This is the hypometabolic state that we're starting to work with. Let's count up the low ones. That is low, one. That is low, two. DL is underneath detected limit, that means it's low. So low, they couldn't even find it. That's a three. There's a four. There's a five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. 11 out of the 14 are either undetected or in the first or second quintile. So we're up to 11 for this poor person. All right. And let's go to the final section here. 11 is where we left off. Give me a 12, 13, 14, 15. 15 out of the 21 markers are either low or undetected. That is a metabolism that is not just hypo, it's like, we have to come up with a new term, extra hypometabolism, or something. 15 out of 21 markers are slowed to nothing. If you have six or more markers that are slowed, we consider it hypometabolism. 15, we don't even have a word for this yet, okay? But this is someone who could be out there on a treadmill working out. I mean, I hear this every day. Dr. Kaylor, I work out 40, 50 minutes every day. No, really, I do. I'm on a treadmill. I'm not bullshitting you about this. And I eat 1,200 to 1,500 calories every day. And that is it. And I've been doing this for six months. And all I do is keep getting fatter and fatter and fatter. And, you know, your conventional doctor's just going to think that you're lying. They're just going to think that you're making that up because they're trapped under this complete delusion that calories in equals calories out. You know, if we're going back to car analogies, that would like saying, yeah, you know, you put gas in your car, it should be working. And there's no engine in the car. And you're, and your one, your mechanic is like, well, you should just drive over here. Like, well, it doesn't have an engine. It doesn't matter how much gas you put in the thing. It's not, it's not a calories in calories out equation anymore, you guys. When the metabolism is damaged, it's calories in and you can't burn it. It's calories in and you can't burn it. This is a typical example. We see these in, in my, uh, doctor training program all the time, okay? Just complete wipe out. 15 out of 21 markers. There's no way this person could burn fat properly.
But the important point for tonight's talk is that this is often times linked in many, many cases to a functional thyroid problem as well. And that if you can work on both sides of these things, you can actually solve this. We're seeing good results with patients. We're seeing thyroid hormones coming back to normal with and without medication. A lot of the doctors that I train, you know, they're the medical docs, they can use drugs if they want, but they often times, I'd say most of them try to give two, three months of natural products for the thyroid to get it working properly along with this metabolic repair. We're seeing really wonderful results with patients. It's something that I think is important. And it's cutting edge. This is new information. You know, the hypometabolic pattern, I just became aware of, I don't know, maybe five, six years ago. And, um, learned more about it, you know, in the last year of working with Dr. Lord. And, and really feel confident in identifying it. And, you know, we just see this left and right. And in, in difference to my original teacher, Dr. Tim, you know, these are the patients for whom we do an adrenal program and the chest doesn't.
Really, it works. It works for their mood and their energy, but it doesn't help them with the fat burning. So, this combination of working with a hypometabolic person and getting these other things fixed makes a big difference.
I just want to show you real quick before we wrap up. And by the way, we have a recording of this. We'll send out, so if you guys want to pass this on to a friend, a neighbor, your doctor, or whatever. Um, and I spend the bulk of my time now, obviously, training doctors. So if you have a doctor that you think wants to do a training program, just send them over to the K Institute, and we'll, we'll get them, we'll get them going. About 60% of our new students are medical doctors. Um, the rest are chiropractors, acupuncturists, naturopaths, in general.
Uh, let me show you one more thing here. Uh, what was I going to show you? Sorry, I got a little distracted there. Hang on. Um, oh yeah, yeah, I want to show you one complete case. Yeah, I got a real one here that we just processed recently. Uh, I think this is it here. Yeah. All right, just so you can see what the bigger picture looks like, because we're kind of focusing on the narrow part now, but this, look at the bigger picture. All right.
So here's a case. We test the adrenal hormones, boom, done. Salivate hormones. This person's got some cortisol and DHA problems. We check their GI tract looking for, oh, look, this person had Giardia. How cool is that? I just picked this randomly, okay? That's a problem. You have Giardia, you got a big problem. You got a major infection in your gut. Talk about inflammation. Okay, that's going to be a problem for your adrenals, for your thyroid, for your mitochondria, all that good stuff. This person also had Bacteroides fragilis. It's a horrible and good bacteria at the same time, isn't that weird? It's a normal bacteria, but if its levels are abnormal, it can cause a lot of problems. So this is basically a microbiome issue, microbiotic issue. And then this person also had, uh, problem with low immune response, low pancreatic enzymes, bunch of other stuff. And then here's your organic acids. So we see the adrenals, we see the gut. Now, are we looking at energy production problems? Absolutely, yes. You see the mitochondrial markers here. Some are high. This is when a person who has high levels, not low levels, okay? But give you an idea about a complete workup. You should check each one of these systems: hormones, gut, the mitochondria, the detox pathways, the vitamin minerals levels. You know, you know, most patients that I work with spend between probably $500 and $1,000 on lab work, but it's more information than they, most people have ever had in their entire lives, kind of all put together.
Right now, I have reluctantly put together a weight loss pack. I highly don't recommend you do these because I'm like into the lab testing. But if you're just not going to do lab testing, you can't afford it, you don't think it's worth whatever it is, you don't want to talk to your doctor, you can buy weight loss support packs. They'll lose a little bit of weight with this, maybe they'll buy some time and make you feel better enough till you want to get your, get into the hands of a, of a functional medicine doc that's going to support you. So I find it caved after 20 years of people asking me for a weight loss pack. But again, I don't really recommend this. I recommend the testing, but if you're not going to do the testing, you can burn off a few pounds doing these things, and they're certainly a lot, uh, safer and not going to get you into trouble in any way. Okay, you can buy those from my clinic if you're interested in, in a quick fix kind of approach and you're not ready for the testing.
Uh, let me see. There's a few questions that came in. I'm going to just cover a couple of the questions and then we're going to wrap it up for tonight. Uh, I probably have time for all the questions, but let me see what I can do here. Uh, let's see here. Uh, what sauna did I purchase? I, I'll post that. Uh, I did actually research the whole sauna thing obsessively for like three or four months. Um, not that I'm a sauna expert, but I finally threw my hands up. I found the best company and I bought it. There are some pretty cheap saunas out there, and I think especially with infrared, you got to be a little careful. Um, because, you know, if you buy a too cheap machine, you know, it's going to have, um, a lot of EMFs are given off. But we'll post this on a thing that I bought.
Uh, let's see. Sarah, glad you can see the slides. Yeah, the slides are going to be in the recording, so if you guys want to pass this on, please do. That's the whole point of this. I'm excited. We got 2,000 people signed up. Uh, that's, I think our highest number ever. I'm pretty psyched about that.
Uh, let's see. Other questions here. Is caffeine a stressor? Absolutely, yes. Um, caffeine will crank up your cortisol, which will in turn lower your thyroid hormone, and then you store fat. Plus, caffeine is metabolized in your liver, and so it kind of messes up your, your liver detox pathways. Um, diet, gluten-free. I'm still gung-ho on gluten-free diets, you know, as to the, in general, but it's not going to help with what we're talking about here necessarily. How do you get your MD to watch this? We'll send out links if you want your medical doctor to watch this.
Um, Dana, sounds like you're going to be a patient of mine in September. That's exciting. Good to know. Oh, this test that I did, um, that was the organic acids profile. It's very similar to a neutral. And let's see, best protocol. Yeah, so the best protocol would be carnitine, CoQ10, uh, PQQ, and then, uh, if you've got the really messed up metabolism, you got to do the free-form amino acids. Remember the free-form amino acids with a little bit of tryptophan, that's how you start to kind of crank these things up and get them back on track.
All right, gang, thank you for listening to this. We will do more of these. Now I'm kind of back on a roll to do a series of these and, um, open to your suggestions too about topics and whatnot. And I hope you have a great rest of your July, and we'll catch up with you soon. All right, bye for now.