Transcription
Hello everybody and welcome. I am Dr. Dan Kish, and I am excited to be here, uh, being, uh, supported by Vibrant Wellness in this effort. And we're going to talk about the Vibrant Wellness Organic Acids Test as part of our winter miniseries here, okay? And we're going to be specifically, it's a huge test with a lot of variables on it, but we're going to be talking about the essential component of the test, which you would look at first with every one of your patients, which is going to be mitochondrial function and mitochondrial health. Not to diminish the other aspects of this test, because you want to learn how to interpret all aspects of the test. I divide these into four categories, right? So we've got mitochondria, brain, detoxification capacity, and the GI markers. So you need to master all four of those, but we're just starting off with the most important one for today.
And the goal really is that you can look at that lab, understand what the heck it means, and design a supplement program and a lifestyle program for that particular patient so they can get better. And if you learn how to master correcting mitochondria, you will be a magician of sorts in terms of health, because not that many practitioners out there know how to test for and then correct mitochondria using high-powered supplement protocols combined with lifestyle. I've been teaching this work for a long time, over 20 years, and I've watched thousands of doctors learn how to do this. And in fact, in my mentorship program on Tuesday, we had two doctors, maybe eight or 10 months into their training with me in the mentorship, and they're both submitting retests on organic acids, and we're just watching the miracles unfold. You can learn how to do this, okay? Maybe not in 45 minutes a day, but if you start to sign up for some of the other courses that we offer, the boot camps and the mentorship, you can learn how to do this at a very effective level. Uh, but today, I want to give you some practical things that you can use right away and see if we can get you intrigued about this lab-based method of testing.
So, a little bit about me for those of you that are brand new to, uh, the Kish Institute. I'm the founder of the Kish Institute. I've trained thousands and thousands of practitioners. And in, uh, my various endeavors, I worked with the Mayo Clinic. In fact, we had five practitioners from the Mayo Clinic take my mentorship class. One of them, Larry Burstrom, actually took the class twice, which no one else in the history, as of the Kish Institute, has ever taken the class twice. So we worked really closely with Mayo Clinic for a while. We did a research study on the Kish method with them, which is pretty cool. Published that, like, in 2016. In the last 15 years or so, I've been working very closely with Richard Lord. And Richard is the scientist and lab director, uh, long retired now, who first developed organic acids testing. He conceptualized of it in the 1960s, 1970s. He had the opportunity to build out a lab company in the 1980s, and he retired. I grabbed him out of retirement, and he and I have been talking organic acids, uh, for almost 15 years. I think it's maybe 14 years now. And it's hard to even put Richard's position in the industry. For those of you that are new, he was the scientist that even thought of this kind of a test. He's the one that thought of fatty acid testing. He's the one that did the first amino acid testing. He's the one that did the first GI microbiome testing. And, um, his knowledge base is vast. So everything that I tell you in the subsequent lecture that's coming up is directly from Richard Lord. So the lineage here is Richard started this work 50 years ago. He spent a decade teaching me how to do this. Now I'm teaching you. None of this is my personal take on things. It's all directly from the scientist that first developed this work. And again, we're working in partnership with Vibrant Wellness, and they have stepped up to the plate in a pretty amazing way. And they are offering a free, that's free, that means no cost, Gut Zoomer test if you simply register for our boot camp on the Gut Zoomer class. Okay? So you got to pay for the class, but then you get a free test kit, which is obviously going to reduce the cost of the class quite a bit because you get to run a free test. So that is starting like imminently, January 14th. So if you're interested in the Gut Zoomer, learning more about how to interpret that test, I put like a year and a half into the curriculum that is this Gut Zoomer microbiome course. Um, it's never been taught before. It's the first time I've ever taught this particular material. It's all based on Richard Lord's work with the microbiome and his decade of training me. And if you're interested in getting this high-level, in-depth look at the microbiome and the Gut Zoomer test, scan that code there. If you don't have your cell phone in front of you, we'll be sending out emails with a little scan QR code thing, uh, shortly. But this is going to be a brand new class. I'm very excited about it. It's really, um, a decade of Richard training me, a year and a half of me putting the course together, and boom, you guys can just access that information very quickly. Um, you also, if you don't want to pay for the boot camp, you can simply take one of our free master classes. And we're giving these out to Vibrant Wellness customers. Again, you can scan that QR code. We'll email you these later, um, or you can take a snapshot with your phone or whatever. There's a code there that's required, Vibrant 24, but you'll be getting an email message in the next, uh, so with all this info. So free master class. And those of you that really want to jump in and learn how to treat the microbiome and get the knowledge of Richard Lord through Dr. Kish, sign up for the boot camp. All right.
Now, now let's jump in and look. Now, on a completely different note, now we're going to talk about mitochondrial health, mitochondrial function, how you can test for it, and how you can correct it. So I want to do a little slight of hand here for a second because I want to show you where we're going to go later now. And then there'll be time for questions at the end, too. So if you have questions, type them into your little chat box thing. So here's, here's where you want to end up. You want to end up where you see the organic acids test and you flip through each page and you go, "Okay, I understand all those markers that I get. Those now. The, yeah, that one. Oh, yeah, I understand that. That, that, that." And where we're really focusing on for today is this section right here where it says, "Logically Metabolism and Mitochondrial Function." And you see all the markers here. It's very difficult to learn the test interpretation by looking at the test because it doesn't make any sense, um, because it's just a test report. But what we're going to do is we're going to look at the pathways for the next hour. And then when you look at this test report, I want you to see not the markers, but the pathways. For what it's just like three things you got to learn for today: fat and ketones, that's called beta oxidation, okay? Beta oxidation, that's how we burn fat. Glycolysis, everyone's heard of that, that's insulin resistance markers, that's metabolic syndrome. Glycolysis, how you burn carbs. And then the citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle. It's used, the same thing is called different stuff. Citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle. If you just learn those three today, you'll be able to assess and correct mitochondrial problems. Remember, beta oxidation, that's the burning of fat. That's the fat section there. Things like adipic acid and suberic acid and ethylmalonic acid. We'll be going over those. Glycolysis, lactate and pyruvate, also called lactic acid and pyruvic acid. This is a little confusing. So in some scientific reports and some books and some lab reports, you'll hear people say lactic acid, sometimes they'll say lactate. So basically, they're interchangeable. Pyruvic acid or pyruvate. So some of the charts and graphs you're going to see will have one. You need to be able to translate. Ethylmalonic acid is ethylmalonate. Lactic acid is lactate. Okay? So hopefully that's not too confusing. And then the Krebs cycle. So three things: fat burning, carb burning, and energy production inside the mitochondria. So, and it, that's these slides that we're going to look at now, okay? But if you memorize and understand the pathways, then when you look at the lab report, you'll be like, "Oh, well, that makes sense."
So here's our fat burning. Remember, there's adipate, suberate, ethylmalonate. We just saw those. Here's our carb burning or glycolysis. There's your pyruvate or pyruvic acid and lactate or lactic acid. And here's your citric acid cycle, also known as the Krebs cycle. Okay? So can you burn fat? Can you burn carbs? Can you make energy? That's the series of questions. And then each one of these things in blue is a marker. Adipic acid, suberic acid, ethylmalonic acid. If those are off, you got a fat burning problem. There's the markers here. Pyruvic acid, lactic acid. If those are off, you got a carb problem. And then in the citric acid cycle, it's citrate, cis-aconitate, succinate. We're going to talk a lot about succinate at the end of this lecture. Succinate. So remember that one. Fumarate, malate. If those markers are high or low, you got a big problem with your Krebs cycle or citric acid cycle. And that's all you need to learn. Um, and you don't need to memorize these markers. You just need to be able to know there's three categories: fat burning, carb burning, and ATP production inside the mitochondria itself. Okay? And then, oh, down here, it's kind of important. The electron transport chain. I forgot to mention that. That's the final step. You know, that's the whole oxygen thing. But we're not really getting into oxygen today because that's a whole different topic.
Here's a slide on fat burning. And you really, if you understand these pathways, you're going to understand the lab report. So your body's going to take a fatty acid and burn it up for energy or fuel by shuttling it into the carnitine. So it's like an airport shuttle. Takes you to the rental car place, right? There's a shuttle for fats. The shuttle goes out, it grabs the fatty acid, it brings it into the mitochondria, it goes back and grabs another one and brings it back in. And it's not like the airport shuttle. If you've ever been in an airport, and I fly a lot for work, when you're waiting for that airport shuttle to pick you up, thinking, "Well, there's the budget one, but the Hertz one isn't there yet." And you're just waiting and waiting. This thing happens at a rate. I looked it up last year. It's something like 4.3 billion times per second in every cell of your body. So carnitine is hustling. Okay? Carnitine is like going and grabbing. But it's doing one fat at a time. Grabbing a fat, pulling it in. Grabbing a fat, pulling it in. Grabbing a fat, pulling it in. This is a very active process, and it's completely reliant upon a nutrient called carnitine. And if you're deficient in carnitine, guess what's going to happen? Or adipate, or adipic acid, suberate, or suberic acid, ethylmalonate, or ethylmalonic acid. Those are going to go sky-high if carnitine is not working. And that's basically everything you need to know about fat burning at this level. This is a detailed view because this is so important. And you're probably not going to, not a lot of people lecture on fat burning. I don't know why. It seems like the central problem in our entire culture is that people don't burn fat. I would, you know, there should be lectures on this every day. You should just wake up and have a lecture on this. Okay? Um, but, uh, let's, I'm going to get, that's a little bit in the weeds, but there's a reason for this because you're not going to hear this anywhere else, and it's really important.
So, palmitate or palmitic acid is the main fat that we use for fuel. Why is this important? Because at rest, 60, 70, maybe even 80% of the ATP you're producing comes from fat. So if you can't burn fat, you got a really big problem. You're going to store the fat as body fat. You're going to turn the fat into bad stuff like triglycerides and cholesterol. It's going to mess up your heart, mess up your blood vessels. It's going to make you not look that great because you're going to be obese. So being able to burn fat is super important. Burning carbohydrates is equally important, but people talk about insulin resistance all the time, and no one ever talks about this part of it. So you're going to miss this on your patients if you don't understand it, and then they're not going to get better. Okay?
So your body takes palmitic acid or palmitate, it's a fat, and it has to get that fat from the cytosol, the cell, past these two membranes. This is the mitochondria in the green. So there's an outer membrane and an inner membrane, okay? And it's not like the fat can just get into your mitochondria. If that could happen, I think if you ate a scoop of ice cream, you'd probably just die. Okay? This is highly regulated. That fat's out here, but it needs to get inside the mitochondria. So it has to go through the outer membrane and the inner membrane. And in order to get a fat across, a fat, I mean, it's kind of complicated, right? You can imagine. So your body has to sort of change this up somehow. And it does that using carnitine. So you can see the fat in the form of palmitoyl CoA is very large, and it's too big to fit across the membrane. So your body strips off part of it and crams on carnitine, and then it's small, and then it can get across. So that carnitine comes out, it grabs that fat, it brings it across this membrane, it shoots through this membrane here, and it gets inside the mitochondria where you burn it up, burn it up for energy. The carnitine then disengages, goes back out, and grabs another fat molecule. And this is happening like billions of times a second. If you don't have enough carnitine, this whole thing falls apart. It's a pretty common problem. We see it in patients every day. And you can solve it by giving the patient carnitine. How much? I don't know. Look it up. It's like 2,000 milligrams, maybe 3,000 milligrams a day. Probably want to add in some B vitamins, or it doesn't really work that well, okay? So B complex, plenty of B2, and carnitine, and you can fix this system. How do you know it's a problem? Because you're going to see adipic acid and suberic acid and ethylmalonic acid high. You know, okay, there's an issue. If you don't fix this, you can work on insulin all day long, and it's not going to be the ultimate solution that you want, okay?
So then the second part, remember I said fat burning, carb burning, and then the citric acid or Krebs cycle itself. So this is the major enzyme involved in, uh, carbohydrate burning. It's called pyruvate dehydrogenase, and it takes pyruvate and converts it into acetyl CoA. And if you have too many carbohydrates and you're not doing this very well, then what's going to happen? You're going to get fat, you're going to get tired, you're going to become insulin resistant, you're going to become inflamed, you're going to be prone to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, many forms of cancer, even, okay? So this is a pretty important pathway. Pyruvate going to acetyl CoA, and it's run by this pyruvate dehydrogenase enzyme. And that enzyme is dictated by or, uh, or, um, needs to, or is required to have thiamine, or B1, lipoic acid, and then B2, B3, and B5, okay? So if you're deficient in any of these nutrients, then you're not going to burn carbs very well. And if you've eaten too many sweets throughout your life, too many carbohydrates, you'll have burned out your levels of these nutrients. Kind of notorious, if you're eating a lot of sugar, you're going to lose your B vitamins, right? And this enzyme is not going to work well, and then you're going to become insulin resistant, then you're going to have a problem. And if you can't feed carbs and fats into the mitochondria, there's a big issue. And I should show the one pathway just one more time as a reminder. This is the citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle is the final pathway. I have some more images on that coming up. So you just need to remember three things: fat burning, carb burning, and the Krebs cycle itself. Here's your fat burning. Here's your carb burning. And then we're going to get into more detail on, uh, the pathways in a minute, okay? So we'll come back to this. This is a little bit of redundancy or repetition in here, so you can actually kind of learn this.
I spent the first 20 years of my career not really understanding how or why to use carnitine. And I would look, I would run organic acids, like, "Oh, they're low in carnitine." And I would give people 500 milligrams of carnitine because that's what they'll, you know, was sort of common wisdom at the time. It never helped anybody, even a little bit. Like, nobody ever came back in all those years and said, "Wow, that carnitine just changed my life." So I just thought carnitine, and I thought beta oxidation wasn't that important. How stupid can I be? Like, I just wasn't dosing the person right. So the first day I was working with Richard Lord, and I'm like, "Yeah, this and this and that." He's like, "Oh, that's carnitine, beta oxidation. That's the most important thing in the whole." And then I'm like, "Well, I don't ever get any results from that." Richard was like, "What are you giving him?" I'm like, "Your name carnitine." "How much are you giving him?" "500 milligrams." And he was like, "Oh." He was kind of quiet for a minute because he's a very polite, elderly man from Georgia, and he's not going to like say, "Well, that was stupid, kid." Instead, he was like, "Well, you should look at my book." You know, what does it say in his book? The research shows you need like 2,500 milligrams of carnitine to make this system work properly. So underdosing people with the right product doesn't work. Case in point, okay? Dosing people with the right product at the right time, at the right dose, works extremely well. And I hope that all of you learn how to use carnitine just based on that comment. You don't spend 20 years of your career not learning, not knowing how to do it.
Environmental toxin exposures. This is really the central problem with our metabolically compromised patients. Of course, they are overeating, perhaps, and, you know, they're not exercising enough. We know that those are critical. But environmental toxin exposure damages mitochondrial enzymes in a way that just makes diet and exercise not be that relevant, to be honest. I eat healthy food every day and I exercise a lot, and I insist that my patients eat healthy food and exercise. I'm not saying those are not important, but this is more important. Environmental toxin exposure that damages mitochondria is more important. Is the most important of all these things. Now, of course, you can have stress trigger these problems, and we'll get into that later. You can have, you know, brain-related issues. There's all kinds of different potential problems. But what's missed a lot is the environmental toxin component and how that is damaging mitochondrial function. Once the mitochondria are damaged, then if you start to overeat, it just becomes this cascade of problems. If you're not exercising enough, the lack of muscle tissue just exacerbates the problem. So we've got an environmental toxin damaged mitochondrial system with too much energy coming in because people are overeating. So you have to store that extra calories as fat. And with lack of muscle tissue to burn up all this energy, which makes the whole situation even worse. But let's not forget the environmental toxin component to this, and that's maybe not, uh, being paid enough attention to over time. If this keeps on going, you become insulin resistant, your adrenals start to fail, your oxidative stress levels shoot up, you start to develop atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, you get overweight, you have metabolic syndrome, you have diabetes, you crave sweets all the time, you know, you're depressed, you're anxious, you can't sleep. It just goes on and on and on and on. And then the patients come in and they're like, "What's going on? I don't know. My body hurts everywhere. I'm in pain all the time. I'm exhausted. I have no sex drive." And I don't even want to think about what, you know, what's happening in my blood vessels. You know, that we have to unravel that. And this is the core component of unraveling that, which, you know, that and that problem is sort of the central problem for the majority of people in industrialized countries.
So you want to test for carb metabolism, of course. You also are doing these other labs that we're not talking about today. I'm just assuming you're testing and correcting their adrenal hormones. You're testing and correcting their toxin burden because that's what's damaging the mitochondria. You're dealing with their oxidative stress, okay? There's a bigger picture here, and we're just kind of honing in on the mitochondrial component of it. And then you're using the supplement programs that you're developing. And this is one of my favorite components to the work. Is you're using the supplement programs. I call it labs, the lifestyle, um, to leverage the person to get an, you know, to get some leverage over that person so that they can change their life. So the lab marker that shows that they're not burning fat leads you to talk to them about what a healthy diet should be. And the lab marker that says, "Hey, your glycolysis isn't working well," talk, you know, allows you to talk to them about stopping alcohol and stopping sugar for a few months. So using the lab markers to inform and educate and direct your, uh, lifestyle prescriptions is really key. And the classic ones are, beta oxidation is failed, they're not burning fat. What kind of exercise should they do? Who knows? See, anybody should type that in. What do you do? What kind of exercise would you suggest to a patient if their beta oxidation is screwed up and they're not burning fat? What's the main exercise that helps? The type of exercise? Uh, yeah, Zone 2. Very well done. Okay, now we're on a roll here. A couple of you got that right. So what about if their glycolysis isn't working well? How do you want to really stimulate the glycolytic pathways, though? And by the way, it's weights for everybody. Atifa said weights. Weights for everybody. How you going to really stimulate glycolysis? Zone 2 helps a lot, but you want to do high-intensity interval training too, right? Because that's when you really start to not burn any fat and burn a lot of sugars. Yeah, a lot of carbs. And weight training is true for everybody. But anyways, the point being that you can use this lab stuff to customize and direct exercise programs that you're doing. And again, I already mentioned this, you can test for all of these things with organic acids. All of them.
Now, B vitamins are at the core of everything that we're talking about. And if you removed B1 from any life form, not just humans, but any, anything that's alive, you know, it would cease to exist immediately. That's how important these energy supplies are. B vitamins are considered co-enzymes. I don't like that term because, you know, if you've ever gotten on an airplane, this just happened to me the other day. You get on an airplane, and there's two people in the front. There's a pilot and there's a co-pilot. And you're just naturally thinking that the co-pilot is somewhat expendable and not that important a part of this equation. The co-pilot's there kind of like as a backup. That is not true of co-enzymes. Co-enzymes are the star of the show. Co-enzymes are like the pilot. Co-enzymes are what are, they're part of the enzyme. They're what make the enzyme work. They're not like an optional thing. Like, I'm sure they could take off on a flight without the co-pilot sitting there, but you're not going to have an enzyme that does anything without the cofactor or the B vitamin. Now, if we're looking at here, and this was, uh, if you're looking at this diagram here, and you're thinking, "Well, why is he even showing us this?" It's just to show you that where the B vitamins are important. Where are they important? In what parts of what we're talking about are they important? Uh, well, there's a B vitamin up here that's glycolysis. There's a B vitamin here. There's B vitamins here and here. There's a B vitamins here that are breaking down amino acids. There's one-carbon metabolism, that's methylation, that's kind of an important thing. All run by B vitamins. Electron transport chain. Oh my gosh, B vitamins. Citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle. It's all about B vitamins. Here's our pyruvate again, we just talked about that. There's your B1, B2. It's fatty acid synthesis, fatty acid degradation. Whether you're making the fat or breaking the fat down, this is all run by B vitamins. And they're not optional. They're not the co-pilots. Okay? We call them co-enzymes, but they're the key players in making this happen. It's very easy to resolve. Every single one of these B vitamins will be in a B complex. You can use any brand that you want. You give one B complex with breakfast, one with lunch, you just got this whole thing covered. If you're not using B vitamins and you're trying to fix metabolic function, good luck. This is not going to work, even a little bit, okay?
And then here we have, uh, to make it kind of an equal representation, we have the electron transport chain. All right? So you take glucose, you convert it into pyruvate, we're going to get into that in more detail. And then that pyruvate comes down to acetyl CoA and goes into the Krebs cycle where we make energy. Or you take fatty acids, we just looked at this a minute ago, you bring them into the mitochondria, you run beta oxidation, and you turn them into energy in the citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle. Yeah, in order to make that happen, at the end of the citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle, having done its job, then you're going to have these things. Remember this from high school chemistry, biochemistry? Complex 1, complex 2, complex 3, complex 4, complex 5. They're jammed in the mitochondrial membrane. That's the electron transport chain, and that's where the real magic of ATP production happens. So we want to test and correct glycolysis, test and correct beta oxidation, test and correct the Krebs cycle, and make sure that everything is in place for the electron transport chain. And, and, and the mantra here, Richard Lord made me memorize this when I first started working with him. He said, "Listen, Dan, if I say mitochondria, I want you to think magnesium, CoQ10, and oxygen." And he said it like five times. So he really, he was serious. He wanted me to memorize it. I did. Apparently. I say mitochondria, directly from the mouth of Richard Lord. Now, you're going to think magnesium, CoQ10, and oxygen. Every one of these steps requires magnesium. Many, not all of them, but many of them are dependent on CoQ10. So you're always going to give anybody with a metabolic problem like this, magnesium, CoQ10, and oxygen. You don't have to give people oxygen. They're just breathing. So you just want to give them a breathing exercise, you know, make sure they're getting plenty of oxygen breathing. And you don't have to say, "Hey, sit down and do a breathing exercise." You can say, "Just get some physical exercise." Obviously, they're going to start to breathe more if they're working out. And then I'm just going to point out this because it's going to become important in a few minutes. Is this one here? That, that's complex 2. That's run by an enzyme called the succinate dehydrogenase enzyme. And what is an enzyme? An enzyme is a whole bunch of amino acids that got slammed together, right? Thanks to your DNA. And then that enzyme requires cofactors or coenzymes to work properly, like B vitamins. And succinate dehydrogenase, as an enzyme, is a very important and special one.
So with lactate or lactic acid and pyruvate or pyruvic acid high, you're seeing the beginnings of insulin resistance, okay? What's this? This is the, um, graphical representations of the enzyme. This is what they look at. This is like a whole boatload of amino acids that have been put together, thanks to your DNA, into a, into these various structures. And then, you know, the amino acids are strung in a long string, and then based on their affinities for one another and their charges and everything, they fold up into, uh, these beautiful structures. I just think it's amazing that we actually know what they look like. This is pyruvate dehydrogenase in two different ways of looking at it, in the ribbon structure and then the other one. And why is that so important? Because the center of the problem is that glucose levels, in an ideal situation, glucose, a six-carbon molecule, gets split in half into pyruvate. Pyruvate or pyruvic acid, it then goes past the pyruvate dehydrogenase enzyme into the citric acid or Krebs cycle, and we burn it up for energy. And if there's a block here and that enzyme's not working well, you're going to see logically high pyruvate and in some cases also high lactate or lactic acid. So this enzyme here sits at a crossroads, which is going to help you process all your carbohydrate. And if that enzyme is not working well, you have a really big problem. And this is what's killing most people in our country right now, throughout the industrialized world. This mechanism here, too much glucose for whatever reason, because you're stressed and your body is telling you to make more cortisol, so your glucose levels are higher, because you're eating poorly, whatever it is that's causing the glucose to go high, um, is going to, you know, cause this enzyme to falter. And the enzyme itself can be damaged as well. But you can fix it. How do you fix it? I keep wanting to say it's easy. It's not that easy. You just got to, but you got to know it. You fix this is the enzyme. How do you fix it? Thiamine, lipoic acid, B2, B3, and B5, okay? That gets this enzyme working properly. And then a lot of people, and you too, we should add chromium. And, you know, there's other things for blood sugar regulation, obviously. But I'm just trying to show you the core ones and the core pathways. But all the blood sugar, uh, support products that we have, different supplement companies that you, um, probably work with, are going to have, you know, other things in them. They're going to have, in addition to the B vitamins, right? And lipoic acid, they're going to have chromium and biotin. And, well, biotin is one of the B's, but you, they're going to have like a blood sugar orientation. But they should at least have what we just mentioned there. Uh, that's that one's not too important. So, oh, here we go. So I'm just going to skip a few slides because I'm running a little behind here.
But this cortisol, when we're stressed, okay? Cortisol is released, a steroid hormone secreted by the adrenal glands. It makes fat and muscle cells resistant to the action of insulin and enhances the production of glucose by the liver. Now, that's a good thing if you're sitting on the beach, just relaxing, and three tigers jump out of the woods at you, or jungle, wherever you are, you know, and you're like, "Oh, this is not a good situation. I think I'm going to run really fast and then climb up that tree over there so I don't get eaten by these tigers." That's when you want a big surge of cortisol and catecholamines. That's when it really doesn't matter to you personally if you're burning fat or not. That's when you want a lot of glucose and a lot of energy to just get the heck out. But if you're under stress for long periods of time, obviously, this can go, you know, kind of turn on you in a way. So stress is a big component. Key takeaway is you got to test and correct the adrenal glands. Um, epinephrine, similar, same, same. And we're not going to have time to talk about it today, but in the organic acids test, there's a section, homovanillic acid and vanillylmandelic acid, that is specifically on catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, or norepinephrine. So you can measure all of this stuff too. And when you're really stressed and you have a lot of the catecholamine surging through your system, you're also going to have a similar problem with glucose. So stress is a big component to this. But remember, the organic acids test includes four things: mitochondria, brain, what we're talking about right here, right? Epinephrine or norepinephrine and dopamine, as well as serotonin markers. And, uh, liver detoxification capacity, oxidative stress, and all that stuff. And, uh, gut metabolites. So it's four big sections. We're just talking about one.
So here's the supplement solutions. If lactate or pyruvate are high, you're thinking the B vitamins, lipoic acid, chromium. And remember, CoQ10 and magnesium. That's the mantra. I say mitochondria, you say magnesium, CoQ10, oxygen. So CoQ10 and magnesium are part of every one of these programs. Adrenal issues, you can do all kinds of stuff with DHEA and pregnenolone. Most of the time, people with damaged mitochondria are going to need detoxification support. So you want to look at the detox markers on organic acids, and you're going to want to run a toxin panel to see what, what's happening there, because that's why the mitochondria are being damaged. They're going to also, you're also going to want to run an antioxidant profile. There's some antioxidant markers on organic acids. You may want more information. You can test for, you know, additionally for antioxidants.
All right, so I'm going to take a pause for a second here, have a sip of water, because we're into a separate section now, and I'm going to talk for another 12 minutes, maybe, and then we'll have time at the end for questions, okay? So type in your questions. I may not be able to answer them all, but I'll get to as many as I can.
Okay, so now, mitochondrial damage. We talked about in the first half of the talk, primarily a toxin-related issue. So you want to address the toxins, as well as fixing beta oxidation, as well as fixing, uh, you know, glucose metabolism, right? And the, and the, you know, ATP production in the Krebs cycle. But now, you back up for a second. You think about, okay, the, if you take toxins out of the picture, just for a second, the major source of oxidative stress, or reactive oxygen species, or ROS, reactive oxygen species in the body on a day-to-day basis is from mitochondrial energy production itself. Okay? And so the way that your body deals with the oxidative stress that the mitochondria are producing as a normal aspect of energy production is by protecting the system with glutathione, which is an antioxidant that your body can manufacture as much as it needs, hopefully, to deal with the mitochondrial imbalance. You, the imbalances created by the mitochondria. So your mitochondria make the oxidative stress by making energy. Your glutathione negates the oxidative stress or free radicals. And you can test for all this. So there is often going to be an imbalance here. You can have excessive oxidative stress and low glutathione levels, which puts your mitochondrial problem even more at risk of getting worse, okay? And you can check all that with a, with a simple organic acids test. So you can measure the detox capacity. You can measure a whole bunch of different ways of looking at glutathione and oxidative stress. So you get a bigger picture. And if they have a lot of oxidative stress, you want to treat that. That's going to protect the mitochondria. You can use things like N-acetylcysteine, glycine, glutathione itself, to protect the mitochondria while you're getting the mitochondria to work better. So if the oxidative stress markers are high, you want to protect the mitochondria with antioxidants in addition to the other stuff I mentioned a minute ago.
So there's this lineage here. And so, you know, and I, I don't know, I just kind of find this fascinating. So Rich, Roger Williams, most of you probably haven't heard of him. He's a very famous scientist. He was born in 1893, which kind of blows my mind. He was Richard Lord, my teacher's teacher. He was the, like, his graduate, what do you call it, when you're getting your PhD and someone's overseeing your dissertation, you know, that was so Richard was, uh, you know, under the tutelage of Roger Williams. And Roger Williams was, you know, the discoverer of folate. Like, who even, who could even think that you could figure that out? And pantothenic acid. His brother figured out thiamine. So these are top, top scientists. Richard Lord started to study with these guys in the 1960s. And he had this great realization, "Oh, I think B vitamins are really important. I think amino acids are really important." And then Richard decided, "I want to devote my life to learning how to test for these nutrients so we can fix health problems." He was, Richard was like in his mid-20s when he figured that out. What a genius, okay? So that's where this comes from. There's a long history of scientists helping us get to the point where we are today. All you guys need to do is order the organic acids test and give the right nutrients and lifestyle coaching, and you're going to get all these people better, okay? This is the science has already been done for you. It's all been laid out.
So what are these organic acids? They're mostly intermediaries or end-stage metabolites of energy production. That's what we're talking about, you know? And if the levels are high, it indicates a nutrient deficiency or an enzyme defect problem. And the key nutrients we talked about a lot already. Low levels on these tests indicate what's called a hypometabolic state, okay? That means in some patients, there's not enough mitochondria present. So you see a suppression of the markers. Most of the time, you're going to see high levels of these markers showing the enzyme's not working. There's a roadblock. So that, that metabolite is building up. Remember, if the succinate dehydrogenase enzyme is not working, that succinate is going to build up, right? And then the key nutrients, we can't say this enough: CoQ10, magnesium, B vitamins, carnitine. And then how much CoQ10? 200, 400, 600 milligrams a day. How much magnesium? 400, 600 a day. B vitamins, you know, B complex, one pill twice a day. Carnitine, we already said, maybe two or three grams a day. So you got to get the dosages to a decent level to make these things work. 50 milligrams of CoQ10 or 100 milligrams of magnesium is not going to get these enzyme systems working. I'm just sorry, it just doesn't work. And you can look in Dr. Lord's books if you want to get more details on the research behind all the dosing.
So oxidative stress is at the heart of the problem, right? Free radicals causing damage to the normal cells. DNA can get damaged by oxidative stress. You can have, obviously, blood vessels can be damaged from oxidative stress. Lipids can be damaged, right? Um, and mitochondria can be damaged. So oxidative stress is sort of a blanket bad thing. We're talking about oxidative stress and how it damages mitochondrial enzyme function today, but you're also, I mean, the same oxidative stress is going to be damaging DNA, damaging, you know, and causing inflammation in the brain, causing, you know, problems in other parts of the body. And then again, oxidative stress is generated by making energy. But excessive oxidative stress is what's going to damage the mitochondria.
So I'm going to spend a minute on a deep dive subject here, and then we're going to wrap up, okay? And I just want to, I don't have time to go over all the different enzymes, but I want to just talk about one enzyme, and then you can extrapolate that you need to learn, you know, maybe 10 or 15 of these at least to understand your mitochondria. And it's a, it's a super important place to start. And this is complex 2. This is succinate dehydrogenase. This is where you take succinate and you convert it to fumarate. And you're going to see succinic acid and fumaric acid are on the lab. You're measuring these things, okay? With the test. And what's very important about this particular enzyme is that it is, uh, it's got a bunch of iron associated with it, okay? That's going to become important in a moment. Complex 2, that's what it looks like. Succinate dehydrogenase. It needs riboflavin as a coenzyme. That's the non-protein portion of the enzyme. There it is again. Now you can see this is the actual enzyme here. Here is the enzyme. But where is it? What it, it's kind of, why is this image so different? Because see this structure here? That's the membrane of the mitochondria. Isn't that cool? That's the membrane. And you see this, I'm outlining there, that's the enzyme. It's crammed into the membrane. Remember the electron transport chain? This is it. And this thing gets all folded up and jammed into the actual membrane itself, which is pretty cool. And then what it's doing, and again, every enzyme, every, most of the organic acids markers are a result of these different enzymatic processes. So this is why I'm just giving you one example, as you can see where all this actually comes from, what you're actually measuring.
So your body wants to take succinate and convert it into fumarate. This is so you can go through the, uh, Krebs cycle. And in order to do that, you need riboflavin. And then you can see the electrons kind of flowing down here. And you also need CoQ10, ubiquinol. If you don't have riboflavin and CoQ10, this doesn't happen. Here's your mitochondrial membrane. It's not like it happens a little bit. It just doesn't happen at all. So your energy production, your mitochondrial health, is dependent on, in this example, B2 and CoQ10. And what, how are you going to know if B2 and CoQ10 are screwed up? Because succinate is going to go high on the organic acids test. Why? Because it's not converting over to fumarate. You can see if, if this is blocked, your fumarate levels are going to be low or low normal, and your succinate's going to go high. It's just like if you're stuck in traffic and you're like, "What is going on?" If there's a crash or a break in the enzyme, then whatever is behind there is going to build up. So succinate goes high, enzyme not working, tells you B2 and CoQ10 are the problem. And guess what? If you give enough B2 and CoQ10, it starts to work again. It's like magic, but not really. It's just biochemistry in action.
Now, this enzyme in particular can be damaged by environmental toxins. What a bummer. Okay? And how does that actually work? Well, it's, I think the one that's the most susceptible to oxidative stress from environmental toxins, this particular enzyme, that's why I picked it. It has the, the environmental toxins disrupt these iron-sulfur clusters on there. And once those get screwed up, yeah, you're just in trouble. You're just in big, big trouble. Heavy metals, chemicals, herbicides, pesticides can screw this enzyme up. And then it doesn't matter how much you eat well or how much you exercise, you're not going to get that mitochondrial system to work. How does it get damaged? Oxidative stress inhibition. There's all these kind of fancy things. You can study the science on this if you're interested. Um, but basically, you've got, this is a nice, slow diagram of what's happening. You've got an environmental toxin that's damaging complex 2. So now your electron transport chain is shut down. Now you're not going to burn fuel for energy very well. Now you're going to get obese, even if you try to eat clean and exercise. It's not going to be enough because the very mechanism you're trying to work better, make work better, is completely busted up. Okay? So impaired ATP production, even more oxidative stress, cellular damage. All this happens when this enzyme is broken. And imagine this happening at scale throughout the body with all these different enzymes. I'm just showing you one of these.
So the wrap-up here is: mitochondria sustain damage from a variety of sources. That's what's damaging our metabolism. Once it's damaged, you can't make enough energy. And if it's damaged from environmental toxin exposure, diet and exercise are not going to correct it. They're just not. And the patients are going to be tired, they're going to be fat, they're going to be depressed. They may even change their diet and start to exercise, not get the results that they expect. Dr. Joseph Pizzo is one of the greatest educators and practitioners in our field. He's been around for, I don't know, at least 50 years. He wrote a book about this.
whole toxin induced mitochondrial damage issue and how it's responsible for the Obesity epidemic. If you want to read more about it and understand it better, you can get his book called "The Toxin Solution."
Okay, and if you ever get a chance to hear him speak in person, I would jump on it because he's an amazing speaker. For those of you that joined us late, I'm going to get to questions in one minute. But before that, these are the offers that we have. This is like a super special offer, which we've never done before. It's a brand new course. I've never taught on the microbiome. I spent a year or two working on this, and Richard Lord spent about 10 years training me to understand how to even create this class. So we completely support Richard Lord's work here. And this is it, and it's, you know, new form. You get $500 off the class, uh, because you get a free Gut Zoomer test. You got to pay for the class first, okay? Then you get the free test kit. And we're also giving like a discount too. Oh my gosh, there's all kinds of things happening here. You get a 30% off discount, and you get the free test kit. Uh, anyways, it, it ends up being a pretty good deal. If you want to do this class, um, considering I spent a decade learning this stuff, you guys can pick up all this information pretty quickly, okay? It's a couple of month long course. There's some pretty intense lectures in there. But I really want to teach how the microbiome works, how the, um, bacteria in your gut are responsive, responsible for metabolic function, for immune function, cardiovascular health. You know, it's a, it's a kind of a detailed class. There's a lot of things to learn. And then there's practical solutions. We'll have, uh, live Q&A calls where we review the labs. So if you're in this class and you do your Gut Zoomer test, we want to look at your test in class, look at the tests of your patients in class, and go through them and interpret the labs together, okay?
And then if you don't want to sign up for that class, we have a free master class that you can take on lab ordering essentials. And that's about GI labs and that. So this is not a lab interpretation class. This is a class on how to get patients to order labs, how to explain the lab well enough to the patient that they want to order the Gut Zoomer. Okay? And so we're giving that one away for free. And those of you that want to join us for the, uh, multiple month microbiome class, it includes a bunch of live calls with me reviewing labs and a new curriculum that I just put together. You can sign for that, right?
So now I'm going to pause for a moment to. Oh, and before I do that, though, let me just show you, uh, the lab one more time. Try to just kind of run full circle, circle here, okay? So now when you look at your next organic acids test, you're going to see this section called fat and ketones. And in your brain, you're going to think, oh, I got this. That's beta oxidation. I understand that now. Here's our adipic acid, our ethylmalonic acid, who's our suberic acid? We just looked at slides on that. Those markers are high, they got a problem with beta oxidation. We talked a lot about pyruvic acid or pyruvate and lactic acid. Remember the pyruvate dehydrogenase enzyme? If P, it's simple, guys. If pyruvic acid is high, the enzyme's not working. If lactic acid is high, that enzyme system is not working. And it's B1, B2, B3, B5, lipoic acid, chromium, and magnesium, coenzyme Q10 and oxygen. And of course, you're going to do diet and lifestyle stuff. We're just not talking about that today. But you know, we're assuming in this world that everyone's eating healthy and or learning how to eat healthy, and everyone's exercising a lot. And then here's your Krebs cycle or citric acid cycle. These markers are high, you got a big problem with what? Magnesium and CoQ10 and oxygen. These markers are all drifting low, you have a hypometabolic case. It's a little bit different, okay? But you can, you know, you, you should see the pathways when you look at these sections of the test rather than see just a, a lab marker. And once you memorize the pathways, then it becomes self-evident what you want to treat, right?
Okay, so now let me, uh, take a few minutes out here for questions and here. So yes, Vibrant is operational in New York City. You have to ask the lab for details because I'm not really sure. But, uh, I know I just heard from a patient that they are operational there. Uh, yeah, you're all going to get a copy of a replay of this recording of this. Now, Lindsay's asking, if someone has only one marker of beta oxidation elevated or slightly elevated, that's a good question, Lindsay. And so Lindsay is saying, okay, what if there's only one marker elevated? Do you do a lower dose of carnitine? You know, Lindsay, no one's ever asked me that. It's a really important question. No, you don't. You don't. It's not graduated. They got the problem, you treat it. The thing is that in functional medicine, you know, there's so many things. If you're going to pick a lane on something and treat it, you should treat it as therapeutically as you can and then move on. But to your point, Lindsay, they may not need it for six months. Maybe they only need the carnitine for two or three months. I had a professional cyclist that was a patient. He, like, oh, my son was in like eighth grade, and he's in his middle of his PhD now. So this is like 15 years ago. Anyways, I remember this guy really well, his first name was Chris. So he's a, a, you know, like pro-level cyclist, but not anyone you ever heard of kind of cyclist, you know, but still, he's like, you know, serious about his bike riding. And we did his organic acid test. He was low on carnitine. The only thing I did for this guy was give him carnitine, 2,000, 3,000 a day. And that season, he just obliterated the competition. It made him so much stronger because if you're an endurance athlete, beta oxidation is kind of where it's at, you know? And if your carnitine levels are low, you're just, you know, wondering why everyone else is faster than you, even though you're training harder. So you can use this stuff for athletes. You can use it for people who are just overweight. You can use the carnitine solution for all these different situations.
Carnitine helps with fat loss? Absolutely yes, in all situations. Even if cholesterol and all that is normal, it's a, you know, it's related but somewhat independent. Uh, any particular type of carnitine? So yeah, there's acetyl-L-carnitine, which is a little more expensive or a lot more expensive than regular carnitine. And that's usually used more for brain-related programs. So we're just talking about plain old L-carnitine. Every company sells it, you know, it's a little pricey, uh, but not too bad. Um, but to get it up to 2,000 a day, you know, it's, you know, going to be two or three pills twice a day, typically for most people.
Let's see. Absolutely. If you're doing the carnitine and you're doing other things, it's for Robert, and you or Robin, if you're doing the carnitine and you're doing the other things needed to help support lipids, you should see a pretty significant change with with, um, what lipids look like on labs. But it's not just carnitine by itself. You have to have the whole picture in mind, right?
Let's see. Oh, Becky, how much time do we have? Do we know? This is Becky's question. Thank you, Becky, for asking this. And I promise this is not a plant. I did not pay Becky any money. I've never met Becky before. Um, we don't know each other. But here, this is like my favorite question of all time. Do we know what are the risk factors for having low carnitine or what are some of the root causes of this issue? Does someone needing carnitine usually need carnitine supplementation for the rest of their life? Oh my gosh, I'm so. All right. Uh, oh, and then, um, the dose should be around 2,000 to 3,000 a day for carnitine. It should be for, I would say six months, and you stop and retest. Six months, stop and retest. If you want to be cautious, you could do three months and stop and retest. When the markers look clear, you don't have to keep giving it, okay? This is a short-term therapeutic program based on the labs.
Let's see. Uh, oh, and here's a. I'm going to come back to the carnitine thing in a second, but I'm just scanning these other questions to see if. Oh, man, it's such a good question. I'm just going to do Becky's question. I'm sorry, everybody else, but this is so important because this is like a learning concept thing. Let me just show you, um, and I want to show you, you know, when I, I was working with Richard for, you know, 10 or 12 years, and, you know, I was thinking about it in retrospect and just thinking, what did he really teach me? You know, what he taught me was how to figure things out more than he taught me any specific piece of information. So Becky's got this question about like, well, it's, it's the most interesting question. Like, why would you be low in carnitine in the first place? Uh, it could be because you're a vegetarian. This is not a joke, but some of my best friends are vegetarians. My spiritual teacher is a vegetarian. I'm pro-vegetarian. I love vegetarians. I support vegetarians in any way that you, every way you could imagine. However, you can get low in carnitine if you're a vegetarian. Not, it doesn't happen to everybody, but it happens to some of them. So that's one potential reason.
There's other reasons, I guess, malabsorption. Your gut's not working. Do the Gut Zoomer test, you know? Uh, any nutrient that we're talking about that's deficient, it could easily and should be immediately the first suspicious thing you should think about is gut function. Are they, if they're eating meat on a regular basis, are they even absorbing the carnitine in the meat or not? Okay? So that, and then it could also be a production problem. So where do you make carnitine from? You make carnitine from lysine. We had one of the doctors in my class, maybe four or five years ago, in the mentorship, um, he figured this out. He had a constant need for carnitine. You take carnitine, you feel better, and he didn't take it, and found just went on and on and on. And then he finally figured out that he had actually a genetic problem with lysine. He didn't absorb lysine properly in his gut and he couldn't make carnitine. So you could have something odd like that happening. Or you could have what I'm showing on the screen right now, which is a long-chain fatty acid oxidation disorder, okay? And there's, it's a genetic disorder. It can be life-threatening, and people have a severe version of it, but a lot of people just have a really mild version of this, and it just keeps them unhealthy but doesn't put them in the hospital. So there can be a genetic component. And remember how I showed how complicated carnitine is with the shuttle and the enzyme, this and this and that? There's a lot of places that carnitine, uh, mechanism can go bad. There's a heavy reliance on all these different steps. And whenever you have a process in the body that has multiple step after step after step, step happening, you could have a genetic defect in any one of those steps. So carnitine is kind of prone to this kind of thing.
Um, and there's complex ways you can figure out if it's a genetic issue or not. I don't think we have time for that because we're out of time right now. But I want to thank Becky for asking that question. And I'll wrap up with that as a final thought, which is many of these organic acids markers will reflect nutrient deficiencies. However, many of these markers, when you learn the advanced level of interpretation, will show you that there's a genetic component. So there's a way to start to tease those variables out. Is this just a carnitine deficiency because of nutrient deficiency, absorption issues, diet stuff like that? Or is there a genetic component to this? And very often, we see a genetic component in our more, you know, chronically ill patients.
All right, I'm going to wrap it up now. I appreciate everybody joining the call and I hope to see you in one of these classes in the future. Okay, bye for now.