Preventing and Reversing Memory Loss

Hey folks, I hope you are all doing well and welcome. Dan Kala, share. I'm gonna talk about memory loss. Who am I? If you're the first time you've been to one of these, I don't know that's me right there, I guess. I've got all kinds of roles in this world now that I don't fully understand. Apparently, I'm the lead faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine's Practice Implementation Program. That was one of the biggest honors of my whole career to be working on the IFM faculty. There's the top doctors in the world, and I, every time I walk into the faculty dinners, I always think, "What am I doing here?" I feel like someone's gonna kick me out or something. It's a great escape with people, anyways.

I've done some research staff at Mayo Clinic. What I'm most excited about these days, really, as I'm working with Richard Lord. I'm gonna talk about some of his work tonight, one of the leading scientists in this, in this field, who developed a lot of the lab work that we use in functional medicine. I've been around for a long time and I'm happy to be alive and able to help people. I've been, I've spent the whole day today seeing patients and teaching doctor training programs. Still in the trenches with a private practice. I work with patients on the phone. If you know anyone that needs to talk to a good functional medicine doc, I have openings available. If you want to send people my way. And most of my time now, I spend just doing educational programs and I have a part-time practice when I work with people on the phone.

So tonight, it's kind of an interesting subject and I think, you know, this kind of goes back to my own personal experience as well. You know, my father, Richard Kalish, was a social psychologist, gerontologist, and he basically spent his career. He died when I was young, he died when I was in my 20s, but he spent his whole career studying older people, death, dying, aging folks. And one of the books that he was writing, he was actually working on this book well, the day he died, it was called "Midlife Loss." That's up on the screen there, "Coping Strategies." And that's my dad, Richard Kalish. So, Dad died, this book was still in a manuscript form, and it was all his best friends writing chapters about what happens in midlife. And so, anyways, I contacted all the other authors and they all kind of rallied and we finished the book together. And I wrote this whole long piece in here about my experience of dealing with my dad's death and stuff.

But, you know, one of the reasons why I think this is coming, you know, I was 20 years old, I didn't understand what midlife even meant. But now I'm at midlife, I'm 55, and I see the majority of my friends now who are my age and my high school buddies and people I grew up with who are dealing with a parent that has pretty serious cognitive decline issues. I mean, we'll go out for beers with the Berkeley boys, they'll be six of us sitting around a table drinking a beer, and this happens every couple months. And I mean, honestly, five out of the six of them have a parent that's dealing with this issue. And so it's pretty real. You know, maybe you have to get to be a little bit older till you really see how devastating the problem is. But the whole point of what we're talking about now tonight is, you know, how you could spot these problems in your 30s and 40s and 50s, you know, 20 or 30 years before anything really bad happens. And what I don't do, I don't work with people who have advanced cognitive decline in my practice. What I'm trying to do is catch those people 20 or 30 years before the problem would start, so they can take advantage of all the treatments that are available and avoid the problem in the first place. That's kind of what tonight's about.

Okay, and so we're going to talk about the underlying theories of cellular aging, investigate how you can modify or slow the aging process using a lab-based functional medicine approach. And the two big triggers for aging, and I think most of the scientific community agrees on this, and this is not an alternative medicine idea, a pretty standard idea, is that oxidative stress and inflammation are the biggest problems that we're facing. And so if you want to learn how to determine what are the risk factors for aging or accelerated aging, you want to know what are your oxidative stress markers like, and are you inflamed in some way? And then what are the supplements and lifestyle solutions you can do so that you slow down this whole process?

And something that a lot of scientists are studying. I know my son is, he just turned 21. I have that picture of him here. Great part of him, just turned 21 yesterday. There he is, my little guy. So I'll crown up. I don't know how that happened. He's got a beard. He used to be like three years old yesterday. But anyway, he's all grown up. So my son is studying physics and math in St. Louis at the University in St. Louis. And when the projects are working on is measuring mitochondrial growth rates. It's one of the things he does in his physics lab. And interestingly, Google has a whole company that's set up that's trying to figure out how to prevent aging. And Google is making this partnership with Washington University in St. Louis, and my son's kind of in the middle of this research project. But a lot of big companies like Google are trying to figure out how can we understand the aging process so we can reverse it. It's a hot topic in academia, it's a hot topic in the commercial world, right? Because everyone doesn't want to get older, you know, and we certainly don't want to lose our memories and have cognitive decline issues as we get older. And obviously, the population is aging, so it's becoming more and more important to understand this stuff.

Okay, so aging and cellular death, natural process. I mean, obviously, we're all going to die. But we want to just figure out, are there ways that you can slow the rate of aging? And then what are the things that we all do every day that accelerate the rate of aging? And so there's some things that the literature shows clearly will slow the rate of aging, and these are in animal studies and in humans as well. Calorie restriction is the number one, which is interesting. Just overall healthy diet, yeah, you can help slow the rate with supplementation. What's what's Knights really about? And then even something as simple as meditation. Elizabeth Blackburn got the Nobel Prize in medicine talking about telomeres, right? And how you can, through meditation, lengthen your telomeres, which by definition lengthens your lifespan. So it doesn't have to be the stuff that I'm talking about tonight primarily, which is lab-based. That's just, to me, my role in this world is to communicate as much as possible the work that Richard Lord has taught me on the labs. But these other things are equally important, right?

And then the stuff that you don't want to do. We all know, don't smoke. You know, don't breathe. I was a joke. Environmental toxins are mostly airborne, so we're all kind of stuck with vitamin toxins. But we want to get people to not smoke if they're smokers, reduce the amount of food, the amount of sugar they're eating. All the things that cause inflammation are gonna accelerate your rate of aging, okay? And that's the lifestyle stuff. But what I really want to talk about tonight primarily is how this can play out with labs and I can measure everything. So oxidative stress or oxidative load is one item. Inflammation is the other. And then what are there different biochemical pathways that we can use to analyze these things? And so at this simplest level, and oxidative load or oxidative stress can be broken down to water-soluble and fat-soluble antioxidants, okay? And each of them protects different parts of your body. The water-soluble antioxidants protect the water portions of your body. The fat-soluble antioxidants protect the lipids or the fats, okay? And then on the inflammatory side, there's lots of markers we can look at. There's simple ones like homocysteine or even vitamin D that I'll give you a sense of if the person's suffering from extra inflammation or not. When we're inflamed, we use up our vitamin D. You'll see with low vitamin D levels, even in someone who lives like in Florida or Hawaii or something that's a lot of sun exposure. Kind urinate is a great marker to see if the brain is inflamed. Don't want your kind urinate to be high, that means your brain is inflamed. So there's lots of ways that we can test for this, and I'll show you some labs in a minute too.

Okay, so oxidation, what is that process? It's a normal process. So the way that the world was set up by powers greater than I could ever understand is that we have basically plants, right, growing in the ground. And plants grow. And whether it's a blueberry, you know, bush, or whether it's a broccoli thing that's growing, a piece of cabbage, whatever plants are growing. But there, unfortunately, are stuck outside pretty much 24 hours a day. So they're getting exposed to the ionizing radiation of the sun constantly, all day long. And so in order to protect themselves, so they don't get all fried and shriveled and dead, plants have developed these antioxidant systems that they grow. And we experience these antioxidant systems in form, in the form of pigments. We see the colors. So blueberries are blue and they have a certain kind of profile, right? Broccoli is green, has a different kind of, you know, strawberries are red, they have. So we're seeing the plant pigments. But what those pigments are, are the actual antioxidants that the plant has grown so that it hasn't get destroyed by the ionizing radiation of the sun. So what we do is we come along and we eat that plant. You have to kill it, you have to eat it. It's kind of brutal, but that's what we do. And we are then absorbing into our bodies that entire antioxidant system that that plant developed, not for us, but for itself. But it turns out that what protects the plants from the ionizing radiation of the sun also protects us from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, right? All you have to do is eat the plant. The plant did all the work to produce the antioxidant. You just gotta go out there and eat it.

And if you're not eating right, or if your oxidative stress is massive, then you can take supplements called antioxidants to kind of make up for the deficit. And as we're just moving around, eating, breathing, and functioning, and exercising, we're generating more and more oxidative stress as part of being alive. So you're thinking of oxidative stress as like, basically, when we're making cellular energy, right? It's like a fire burning, and the sparks like flying off of there are what are called free radicals. And antioxidants help prevent these free radicals from causing problems. So you need, the more physically active you are, the more antioxidant support you need. The more health problems you have, the more antioxidant support you need, okay? And so how this works here, right, is that if you're under a lot of oxidative stress, either you're sick and there's a lot of inflammation and oxidative stress going on, or if you're physically active and there's a lot going on, then that oxidative load, or if you're not eating enough vegetables, right, that load is going to go up. And that's going to damage your mitochondria. And when it was mentioning this Google research project, it's not really a research project, it's the whole business. This whole Google division is devoted to understanding mitochondria because they're really considered one of the keys to aging. If your mitochondria are getting wiped out and aren't very healthy, you're going to age quickly and die. If your mitochondria are super vital and super healthy, they're going to stay healthy, then you're going to stay healthy, and your brain will stay in town, and good stuff will happen. And the mitochondria rely, if you just want to remember three simple things, CoQ10, magnesium, and oxygen are the three main requirements for a healthy mitochondria. Again, CoQ10, magnesium, and oxygen. CoQ10 and magnesium, you can take in supplement forms if you're not getting enough from your food. Oxygen obviously comes from breathing, so you want any kind of breathing exercise that you might do.

Now, the second area, right? Oxidative stress is one that accelerates aging. The second area is inflammation. And the body can be inflamed in all kinds of crazy ways. You can have brain inflammation, you can have inflammation in your GI tract, you can eat foods that are inflammatory, you can have toxin exposure that's inflammatory. We're just like walking through a sea of inflammatory risks as modern human beings, okay? And inflammation, according to all the latest research, is just about as important as oxidative stress in terms of accelerating the aging process. So this is why everyone's doing turmeric and things like that, right, or curcumin, because we want to take anti-inflammatories in to reverse any kind of pro-inflammatory stuff that we do. And so classic ways that we inflame ourselves: too much sugar, if you're gluten intolerant, eating gluten, not everybody has a problem with gluten, some people do. Pollution, you know, some of these things that we can't control, things like that are in the air and whatnot. And then GI infections, GI pathogens, those are classic. So foods, toxins, microbes, all these can stimulate an immune response, stimulate an inflammatory response.

So I'm really into doing these labs, as you all may know if you've seen this before. And we can test for all these things with the labs. So number one, and this is one of the more profound things you can do, it's part of every one of these ion panels and organic acids panels, is you can actually physically measure your oxidative stress, your oxidative load. That's as profound as anything that I could imagine. So these two markers, para-hydroxy-phenyl-lactate and 8-OHDG, or 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, these are kind of the classic ways in integrative and functional medicine that we measure oxidative stress. The one that's the most famous is the 8-OHDG, the one at the bottom, marker number 29. And if these markers are high, you're having a lot of oxidative stress. And what happens as a result of that is that the structures of the body are damaged. It's not unlike, well, it's like anything that it's like your human being getting damaged. Like if you were standing there and someone started to, you know, stab you, your body would get damaged, right? And then eventually you would die. So if a cell is just sitting there, or a piece of DNA is sitting inside a cell, and all of a sudden it's getting oxidized, or there's oxidative stress, it's just like stabbing a human being. That DNA is going to be destroyed, wiped out, dead, gone. And if that happens a lot, you're gonna be aging really fast, and you're gonna be at high risk for cancer, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, all these diseases that are related to oxidative stress, okay?

The other category of antioxidants that we can measure are the ones that relate to fat, or that are fat-soluble antioxidants, okay? The famous one again is CoQ10, alpha-tocopherol, gamma-tocopherol. It's a fancy way of saying vitamin C, vitamin E. Those are the vitamin E markers. And then vitamin A and beta-carotene, probably most even heard of. So fat-soluble antioxidants protect our lipids, or protect our fats. And so what's, think about things that are important that have fat. Your brain is 60% fat, and that's pretty important. Your cardiovascular system will be damaged if the lipids or fats are oxidized, right? And so stroke, heart disease, right? You know, many of the different brain conditions are related to lipids or fats being oxidized or damaged. And so again, think of oxidation is like a process. It's like, um, when you cut an apple in half and it starts to turn brown, that's an apple oxidizing. So our tissues, our fat tissues, our DNA can be oxidized. And if we don't have enough protection, that's going to happen. And that's going to decelerate aging. So you don't want your fats damaged, you want your DNA damaged. That is a bad thing.

Another really big system that helps protect our brain and our heart is the glutathione system. So glutathione is the body's major antioxidant system. It's very protective, and it's measured with these three markers here: alpha-hydroxybutyrate, pyroglutamate, and sulfate, all differently in different ways, measure their status or functioning of glutathione, okay? And that is super, super, super important for protecting, again, it's in part of a critical part of the antioxidant system. So if you're thinking about, you know, how does this actually play out? If you have oxidative stress, it can damage your mitochondria, and that can accelerate aging. If you have oxidative stress, it can damage your DNA, and that can accelerate aging. If damaged DNA, and if you have oxidative stress, it can damage your lipids or your fats, which make up the cell membranes, make up the brain. You can have damage that way. So either inflammation or oxidative stress can hit your mitochondria, your DNA, or your cell membranes or lipids and cause problems, right? And that's what we're concerned about here. And so you can actually see all this. Like, for example, this marker number 28 looks at the amount of oxidative damage that's occurring specifically to your DNA, as does the marker number 29. That's pretty amazing that you can do that. Marker, this marker here, lipid peroxides, measures whether your lipids or fats are being oxidized or damaged. And if that's the problem, pretty simple solution, you take some fat-soluble antioxidants like vitamin E, CoQ10, vitamin A. If there's a problem here, if the water-soluble ones, then you take a water-soluble nutrients like vitamin C, okay? And if the mitochondria are damaged, then you can take mitochondrial support that I mentioned earlier, CoQ10, magnesium, make sure you're doing breathing exercises. So for each one of these areas, we can see exactly what's happening and then how to fix it. It's pretty cool.

So there's another issue which is there, there's, I like to think of this as the lab testing is kind of an intellectually stimulating and interesting parts where you get all the data and information. But you really have to translate that into a person changing their lifestyle for any of this stuff to really matter, okay? So we want to think about how we can use the labs to inspire us to eat better, to, you know, to become less inflamed, to do all these different things. And a lot of that revolves around your diet. So I don't want to minimize that, it's just that everybody already knows that and there's plenty of other people talk about diet. So I don't feel like I want to spend an hour doing that. I want you to understand a little bit more about the regulatory pathways and how all this stuff works. First of all, I think the science is really cool. And otherwise, also, I think it's just your body, you should understand exactly how all this works, okay?

So again, these are sensing pathways, sometimes they're called nutrient sensing pathways, and they have to be regulated in a certain way. The classic one is gonna be insulin, right? And if you have high glucose levels, lots of sugar in your diet, you're in a pro-inflammatory state. Yeah, low glucose levels, you know, healthy diet, lots of vegetables, lots of beans, some grains, maybe some meat if you're a meat-eater, right? You're in an anti-inflammatory state. And so when we're looking at these regulatory pathways, insulin is an example of them. There's another one that's really famous called mTOR. And mTOR stands for, get ready for this, mammalian target of rapamycin. Alternatively, believe it or not, mTOR has two potential meanings. It also stands for mechanistic target of rapamycin. Took me about a month to figure out what mTOR really is. But basically, when mTOR is stimulated, cell growth rates go up, and it puts us at a higher risk for problems like cancer, okay? When's mTOR is calmed down, growth rates calm down, and you're at lower risk for diseases like cancer. AMPK is similar, but the, the dynamic is opposite. When it's high, it's considered a good thing, you're reducing inflammation. When it's low, it's considered a bad thing. But anyways, if you read a lot about this area of anti-aging, you're gonna run across these things. And if you can regulate these mechanisms, you can help decrease the rate of aging. And the classic way that people are trying to do this, it's pretty simple, it's super popular right now, called intermittent fasting. As one of my patients says, we used to call that skipping breakfast, basically. So, you know, having enough time between meals, leaving more than 12 hours between meals starts to stimulate these regulatory processes and helps prevent aging. And again, if you want to geek out on this stuff, mTOR and AMPK, or NPK, pretty interesting things to study.

So there are also some plants that mimic the effect of these regulatory pathways, and you don't have to starve yourself to death. Berberine is kind of in the news all the time now as having that effect. It's actually one of the few supplements I've been taking lately has so many positive effects, is really quite remarkable. So anyways, berberine mimics the effect of AMPK. It makes your body think that you didn't eat, which is kind of cool. It has a bunch of really good effects on your liver as well. And this reminds me of back in the day when I was living in a monastery in my early 20s. I moved to Thailand and I lived in a monastery for a couple years. And one of my good buddies, it's a picture of him, Ajahn Chon Diko. I knew him as Jim when we were in our 20s, became a monk. And one of the things that we did in Thailand for a couple years is would eat, depending what monastery you're living at, either one or two meals a day. They're really strict monastery in the north, Wat Pah Nanachat. You got one meal a day, right around 5:30, 6:00 in the morning. You got about 10-12 minutes to eat as much food as you could, and then that was it. You couldn't eat again the rest of the day. They were pretty strict. In the more relaxed, lackadaisical monastery I lived at for longer in the south of Thailand, near the beach, was got a little more casual. We got one meal around 5:00 in the morning, and then we got a second meal at 11 a.m. The rule was, you couldn't eat after 12:00 noon. And so all the monks in Thailand follow this rule. No, you never see a monk in Thailand eating after 12:00 noon. They would be disrobed and thrown in a ditch and kicked and spat upon. So anyways, pretty strict rule. The Buddha set this up 5,000 years ago. One meal a day, nothing after 12:00 noon. And not a new concept that we're talking about.

If you want to try to do this with food, I'm always thinking about things that you guys may not be thinking about. You know, that, you know, everybody knows about the blueberries and strawberries thing. But you can get a huge amount of antioxidant potential, what they call this ORAC values, right? Are super, super high for things like cloves, oregano, rosemary, thyme. If you look at the numbers on these, just adding cinnamon to your oatmeal in the morning can raise your antioxidant levels just massively, okay? So we can do this with food, and it doesn't have me food that's, you know, super expensive or complicated. Spices are probably one of the ways you can get the most potent antioxidant effect. And so I spice all my food really heavily. In fact, this morning I had oatmeal with cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Massive antioxidant potential. From lunch, I had, when I have for lunch? Well, so I, memory pro, I can't remember what happened. Oh, I had some fish and a salad, but I had this like, kind of turmeric lime thing that I put on it that's really tasty and good. So I try to incorporate these in every meal I have, and you get massive antioxidant potential again from spices.

Another way that you can reduce all the problems that we're talking about in terms of oxidative stress is by getting polyphenols in your diet, right? And those are the things that you're all probably familiar with. Those are the blueberries and the, the green teas and that kind of stuff. And the polyphenols are quite interesting in that the majority of polyphenols, the human body cannot absorb. So when you're eating those blueberries and drinking that green tea, the polyphenols, the antioxidants in there that are super healthy for you, are not for your body to absorb. Their molecular structure is too large and they can't get into your, into your bloodstream. What ends up happening is they get stuck in your digestive tract, and the commensal or healthy bacteria in your gut use them as a fuel supply. So when we're eating polyphenols, which are one of the most important groups of antioxidants known, we're not actually absorbing them, we're using them to grow out our microbiome, which is just like an interesting little factoid. And so you can measure your polyphenol markers here. You'll see benzoate, hipper-8, phenyl acetate. These are direct measures of polyphenol levels in the body. It's pretty cool. This is from an organic acid test. And so if these markers are all really low, I mean, you're not getting enough fruits and vegetables to make things work. If these markers are right in the high end of the normal range, it means that you are getting enough fruits and vegetables to make this whole thing work. And again, they measure this by measuring the bacterial growth in your intestinal tract because that's what the polyphenols do. But these are very, very important antioxidants and they have an anti-inflammatory effect by getting your bacteria and your gut to grow properly, okay? Turns out that the microbiome is super important.

So they're also, we wanna think about inflammation at the cellular level, okay? And inflammation of the organ systems. So there's a bunch of different triggers for inflammatory damage. You can have things like infections, the microbes, the yeast, the funguses of the world, you know, food, and you can have toxins that can trigger these problems. And we can measure where that inflammation is occurring, okay? In terms of the aging process, and the worst thing that could happen is for this marker right here, kind urinate, to go up, okay? In this case, kind urinate should be a 1 or less. This person's kind urinate is 14. That's phenomenal. That's even possible. I don't know how my staff, where they found this lab example, but this one's pretty outrageous. So if kind urinate goes high, it means that the brain is inflamed. And that is obviously, in terms of memory, the worst place to get inflammation. I mean, inflammation in your gut is really bad. Inflammation in your brain is like DEFCON 10, right? That's like the most critical thing when we're talking about memory because it means that that inflammatory damage, that inflammatory process in the brain is damaging these very delicate structures. It would be like, I don't know, it would be like if you got a gallon of gasoline and you lit it on fire and just threw it on the floor in the living room of your house, right? You don't want inflammation in the brain. It's a super sensitive area. You don't want that area to get damaged. And so kind urinate, directing the cater of inflammation, again, specifically in the brain. And these are the different pathways that are quite interesting. But one of the things that happens is happens as kind urinate goes up, this other chemical called quinolinic goes up, and then that quinolinic goes over and stimulates these things called NMDA receptor. And what ends up happening, and the glutamate is part of the system, the al-glutamate is one of the most important neurotransmitters, right? And the system just jiggles and jiggles, and it shakes and it shakes, and it just, you know, eventually explodes and the cell dies, okay? So it gets overexcited from the inflammation. And that doesn't feel very good, right? People get anxious, people can't sleep very well, having an inflamed brain, you get mood swings, you get brain fog, you get memory problems, you know, I mean, you know, and can happen. And I've had this woman, not that long ago, she was maybe like 30, 35 years old, she was pretty young, and she was like, "My memory is not really good." I was like, "How is that?" They have memory tests you can do for older adults, but we're just talking in a new patient consult. And she's like, "Yeah, sometimes I can't even, you know, the other day I couldn't even remember my address." Like she couldn't remember her home address, and she's like 35 years old. So this inflammatory process can take a toll on people, you know, and it's, it's something that you can measure and start to figure out.

We can also measure digestive inflammation. We talked a lot about that in functional medicine. And you can measure the inflammation that comes about from toxin exposure, okay? By looking at liver detox pathways. It's really important in the modern era. Many people have chemical toxicity issues that are going to create inflammation, right? And that's going to accelerate aging. And then glutathione status, we talked about this earlier, that's something that you can test for as well.

So I want to show you now some lab examples here. Where'd it go? Sorry, I pulled it up already, but my computer seems to have hid it. That's a little weird. Hang on, I'll find it here. Uh-huh. Oh, gosh, that's never happened before. Yes, I got me downloaded again. Um, I was looking these before I got online. I'm not sure how this got screwed up. There we go. Oh, here they are. All right, there we go. Sorry about that. Bingo, bingo, bingo. All right. So now what we're looking for, right? Inflammation-related stuff, oxidative stress-related stuff. Oxidative stress, is it water-soluble or fat-soluble? Makes a difference because different structures are damaged. Inflammation, where's it coming from? What can we do about it? So I just want to now look through a standard ion panel lab and just point out how you can see this stuff. This page doesn't matter so much. These are amino acids. And that really what we're talking about tonight. So it's kind of skipped through there. We can talk about the brain later and amino acids. So right away, first marker that we've just talked about, homocysteine. If this marker is high, it means the person suffering from some kind of inflammation from somewhere. Minerals, these are very important. So potassium and magnesium, okay? If they're low, big problem. Magnesium is the most, remember we talked about the mitochondria and how important they are for the anti-aging movement that we're trying to get going here? Magnesium and CoQ10, the critical nutrients for that, okay? So if your magnesium levels are low, you're gonna have a major problem with all the issues that we're talking about. Oh, and when you also can measure toxins, obviously. The higher that the toxic burden is, the more arsenic or cadmium you have in your body, the more oxidative stress they're gonna have. That's what these things do. And lead and mercury are probably the most well-known. Everybody knows you don't want to get lead in the brain of a child, right? Mercury also not great. A lot of damage occurs, a lot of oxidative stress occurs from exposure to heavy metals like that.

And then here's an example of our fat-soluble antioxidants that again protect the fat tissue from oxidative stress. CoQ10, vitamin E, vitamin A. This person is low in a couple of them, four of them. That's not good. That means that this person's lipids or fats are getting oxidized or damaged, right? And then lipid peroxides, that's a measure of whether the lipids themselves are getting damaged. The answer here is yes, they are. This marker is high. So right away, we know this person needs fat-soluble antioxidants as part of their anti-aging program. They also need a little vitamin D. Remember, we talked about inflammation burns up and uses up vitamin D. So a lot of people have low D. Also, I was going to look at low, if you don't go outside enough. Well, not really talking about the omega-3s tonight so much, but they're important, right? And they're what, probably in, especially in terms of, well, if I guess they're relevant in terms of, well, I've had to back up and explain this a little bit. So when we talk about fats getting oxidized or damaged, we're talking about cell membranes becoming damaged and then not functioning well, or other structures, for example, in the brain that are, you know, made out of fat. Omega-3s are the actual fats themselves that we're talking about. So you can have a lipid or a fat that's getting oxidized or damaged. When we look at low omega-3s, it means you don't even have enough of these fats in the first place, okay? So obviously, you're not gonna be able to assemble and make cell membranes if you're making threes or low. But that's kind of not exactly what we're supposed to talk about tonight, but it's related, it's kind of peripherally related.

And we just go through the rest of this test. These are kind of saturated fats that are kind of cool to measure. Trans fats, most people have heard of. And then we get to the mitochondrial section here. So these markers are actually all normal, but what you're looking for is dysfunction with the mitochondria, okay? Because oxidative stress, remember, damages the mitochondria, damages the DNA, can damage the lipids or fats. And we saw with this person, their oxidative stress load is damaging their fats. Mitochondrial markers look really good on this person, so there's not a problem there. And then we're wondering about the kind urinate. Oh, and look at this. So these are the markers for inflammation in the brain. Very, all these are low, that's good. There's not inflammation in the brain. And then we look at the water-soluble antioxidant markers. Here they are, right here. Are these two guys here? They're both okay, not perfect, but pretty good. So this person has fat-soluble antioxidant problems, not water-soluble. Their mitochondria are fine, okay? And they had low magnesium. All right. So right off the bat, you can see an anti-aging program for this person would be support them, support the body with magnesium, a little bit of vitamin D, get their water-soluble, I'm sorry, fat-soluble antioxidants up to protect their lipids, get them on some omega-3s, and all of a sudden you start to see the brain repair, the tissues repair, etc.

All right, let's look at one more, then we'll wrap it up. Case two. And again, we're not really talking about amino acids tonight, so I'm gonna skip through the amino acids. Homocysteine, we're looking for it high, being high meaning there's an inflammatory process. Low is something different, we're not talking about tonight. This again is another example of low levels of magnesium, that's gonna cause some problems with mitochondria, right? The toxic elements are not so bad up again. Fat-soluble antioxidants, two in a row, and you actually see this pretty often. So this person is not able to protect their fats very well, also have low vitamin D, like the last person. And this person has low omega-3 and omega-6s. Again, we're not talking about that tonight, but it's those are the lipids or the fats that we're worried about getting damaged. I'm gonna come back to this if we have a minute at the end. Trans fats, that's the stuff you get from margarine and margarine and stuff that's not good. Really shouldn't be eating trans fats. If you have high trans fats, that's a bad sign. Really mostly not used in the United States anymore. And then the mitochondria, ooh, this one's not so good. So these markers are low, so this has got, this person has low mitochondrial function, okay? That could be a result of inflammation or oxidative stress. And let's see, they're kind urinate, that's the brain inflammation marker. There's, you know, in the high range, highest range, not officially elevated, so it's okay. They're water-soluble antioxidant levels are normal, just like the last person. They have the fat-soluble antioxidant problem. And this is interesting, they have this marker, 2-methylhippurate, is high. It's a marker for xylene, which is a chemical. So we're seeing some evidence of chemical toxin exposure. The magnesium problem, a little bit with the fatty acids. And again, you can see, you can put together a customized program to address the issues like oxidative stress and inflammation that are directly related to this patient and their inflammatory problems and they're, um, you know, as the anti-aging program.

So I just want to show you one more thing. And basically, what I'm trying, the bigger message I'm trying to get out there is that if you're having a problem with memory, or if you're worried about it, like I am, right? Because your parents or your friend's parents are having problems, then you can do these basic tests and you can see this stuff happening 20-30 years ahead of time. If you just, like this particular patient, they just took fat-soluble antioxidants, some essential fatty acids, a little extra magnesium for like a year, run the tests again, when the levels are normal, you can stop taking all this stuff. It's a lot of forever kind of thing. You just want to get your levels back up to normal so you have that normal protection against oxidative stress and that normal protection against inflammation. This is not as supplements for all of your lifetime kind of thing. It's just as you need them. And then when the retesting shows that your levels are normal, you can get off of them, okay?

Okay, so I always want to point out this one other thing because this happens to be on this lab. And this is a pattern that I think is one of the most important things I've learned in the last couple of years. So I want to talk about, every time I do in these talks, so it's a fat that you never really think about or hear about. See it right there, it's called palmitate. So palmitate is primarily produced in your liver. It's not a fat that you're gonna get a lot of in your diet necessarily, a little bit, but not a lot. So again, palmitate is a fat that you endogenously produce. Your liver makes this stuff, okay? It's not something that you're going to eat. And if palmitate is low, you're gonna have some really serious problems with your lipids or your fats. This isn't really directly related to the anti-aging talk, but this pretend that talks over and we have read a whole new talk now for a few minutes. This is a really, really important finding, okay? If you have low palmitate, and what you'll see on this lab is you'll see what Dr. Boyd calls the lesser than sign. You can see how we're trying to highlight it here. See how if you look at the markers above and below it, and I kind of connect the dots here, this is like, remember in third grade when you would get these like coloring books and you connect the dots? See how if I connect the dots, it makes an arrow pointing towards palmitate? This is a genetic disorder where the person is not able to make enough palmitate internally, okay? And how do we know that? Well, the lesser than sign shows that because the person has enough of the fats up here, right? It's just that when it comes to palmitate, the production is falling apart. So this is an inborn error of metabolism. This is a genetic defect in the production of fat by your liver. And this causes catastrophic problems. And now that I've seen this with Dr. Lord's new teachings, I'm seeing in patients like every week. It's a really common problem that I just never noticed before. I've never seen anyone teach this. I've never seen it written in the book anywhere that was really kind of obviously presented. I've never seen a seminar on it. So that's why I'm, I talk about it a lot. So if you're palmitate levels are low and you have this lesser than sign, if a genetic defect in the ability to produce palmitate, okay? And that is crippling because that's going to have a huge impact on everything that fat does in your body, okay? That means that every cell membrane that you try to assemble is gonna be messed up. That means that the 60% of your brain is made out of fat is not going to be in the, you know, constructed very well. So you could have memory problems, depression, anxiety, pretty severe stuff going on when your palmitate is low, okay? So if you happen to have run on one of these tests in the past, I'm almost guarantee you that your doctor missed this because it's relatively new. So just look for this lesser than sign, this arrow pointing to right towards palmitate, and that's your dead giveaway that there's a genetic issue kind of brewing there, okay? And there's a relatively easy solution for this. We put people on high dosages of omega-3 and omega-6, and that'll stimulate the body, they start to make more fat again in the liver, okay? And again, it's not dietary related, this is related to a genetic flaw in the production of fat. So just something to keep in the back of your mind if you ever run one of these labs, just keep an eye out for palmitate because that usually slips through the cracks. And, you know, most of the time when we think about saturated fat, you think, oh, I have low saturated fat, that's good, right? If you think that's a good thing because you think high saturated fat, you know, dropped you have a heart attack. But with palmitate, it's a little different story, okay? I'm going to do a conference or a similar class just on palmitate sometime next year, hopefully we'll get that done.

All right, so I'm going to wrap it up for tonight. I hope you guys have a great rest of your evening. If you're interested in becoming a patient, you know, contact the office. You can reach us at Kariswellness.com. And otherwise, I'll see you at the next webinar that we do in a month or so, okay? Take everyone.