Transcription
Hello, I hope you are all doing well. We're gonna do a little lab review session and keep it short, keep it punchy, keep it exciting. That's my goal, kind of like the live classes that I teach that you should be signing up for.
So, you know, I do my mentorship program and it's a year-long thing, and we do this every week, basically, for hours and hours. But I want to just give you all an example of how cool the class is in case you're ever thinking about taking it. And I think the average doctor, when they go through the class, is exposed directly during the class to, you know, at least three, four hundred cases. And of course, there's tons more that you can get if you're in the community and and working on all that stuff. So let us show you. And I'm kind of focusing on one common complaint with overweight, fatigue, depression-related things for today.
Alright, so, um, and let me show you like a schematic of what I think about here as the things that I want to talk about today. Boom! Alright, so brushing up on your lab skills, you can never get enough of that, right? The more of that you get, the better you get at it. A few of the clinical pearls about organic acids and ion panels, especially as related to weight loss and fatigue. Cigs and might not necessarily think about. And then a little bit on the genomics of all this and how the approach of functional genomics can work. And then perhaps on some non-responsive thyroid cases if we had time. That's kind of ambitious for 20 minutes, but let's see what he and I'll talk fast.
And the biggest picture when I think about is here, you know, intake, right? What are people eating? Metabolism, what are they burning up? And then where is the damage coming from? So controlling the appetite obviously helps people lose weight and get more energy. If they're eating appropriately, getting the metabolic rate up and running is essential. And that's going to involve two structures. That's going to involve the mitochondria and the liver. And one could say those are kind of intertwined deeply, anyways. But if your liver's not working, you're not going to burn fat. And if your mitochondria aren't working, can't burn anything. Barbs pattering. And we want to think about intake. So as we're going through the labs to think about these issues: intake, metabolism, attic, Andreea, liver, and where's all the damage coming from?
So let us take a look and see here for a few examples. I'm just going to go through a couple of examples to start with, an easier one first, then we can know how to escalate to something more challenging. And I think part of this is just repetition. Part of this is just seeing examples. Part of this is a thinking process, you know, thinking process being, you know, how you really going to approach these labs from an analytical perspective. And there's a simple way to approach them and a complicated way. And we're going to talk about the complicated way because that's the part that most people never learn about.
So the simple way, and let's look at each one of these areas here. The simple way to think about this on an organic acids panel, and this could be a Nutri-Eval, this could be a Great Plains test, this could be a Genova test, could be Organix Profile. The one that I use in my practice is the Organix with an X at the end from Genova. A lot of people like these other lab companies, that's fine too. But the rules remain the same, right? It's human physiology, doesn't matter what lab company you're using.
So the rules here are that when you're looking at mitochondrial markers, which is the basically that makes up the bulk of the first 21 markers, what we're thinking about are fat metabolism, carb metabolism, energy production itself. And then on the next page, you see these markers for B vitamins. And these are really amino acid metabolism markers, or you could call them protein metabolism markers, because that's what the B vitamins do, right? That's their function. So we've got fat metabolism, carb metabolism, amino acid metabolism, and then we've got metabolism metabolism, right? Which is the actual Krebs cycle, energy production itself. So these first 21 markers are about your metabolism.
So when these tests were first designed, based on the research at the time and the conventional scientific literature, these markers, if anything, were seen as being a problem when they're high. High levels of markers means that you've got a problem with that given nutrient or that particular pathway. No one really was thinking about or even wondering about what does it mean when these markers are low. And one could say then that when these markers are high, and this is what we often see on these tests, you give the related nutrient. However, when these markers are low, what do you do?
Well, when these markers are low, it means you have insufficient mitochondria. If there's a pattern of many, many of these markers being low, you have insufficient mitochondria. You need to rebuild mitochondria and jack back, check that system back up, right? You need to revive the mitochondria with these high-dose amino acid programs. So just be on the lookout for that as you go through these different examples. There's high levels that are easy to detect, you give the usual CoQ10 and magnesium and the B vitamins, whatnot. And then there's low levels on these tests that did that imply that there's a failed process. You don't have enough metabolic clump, you don't have enough mitochondria present. And that is directly tied into the thyroid problems that we often see. All right, goes hand-in-hand with the thyroid problems, underactive thyroid, underactive mitochondria. Those two are tied together. And then of course, the person's gonna be overweight and tired if that's happening. Okay, so that's one thing.
The next thing here, and this is kind of confusing too, and you really think about, is these markers under neurotransmitters. If they are low, that means there's a depletion of that particular neurotransmitter. And if they're high, that means that there is an excessive burn rate of that given neurotransmitter. And a lot of these brain chemicals, including epinephrine, norepinephrine, which is tested by VMA, and late dopamine, which is tested by HVA, and serotonin, which is tested by 5-HIAA, a lot of these chemicals directly relate to appetite. And if they're out of balance, the person's gonna be hungry all the time, so they're going to eat too much, right? And that's going to cause them to be tired and overweight as well.
And then just to be a little provocative, I'm going to mention this other thing here just so you can think about this, which is under oxidative stress. We often, well, really exclusively think of oxidative stress as a problem, oxidative damage, right? High levels of these markers means this patient is suffering from oxidative stress, oxidative damage. And when we give antioxidants to prevent that problem from getting worse. And what happens if you have a lot of oxidative stress? You're high risk for cancer or heart disease, diabetes. Your cells and tissues are getting queued up, everything's getting damaged. You're just on your way out of this world. The higher your oxidative stress levels go, the more likely it is you're just going to have a catastrophic failure of one of your body systems and just fall apart. Well, it's not good. So we eat fruit, we eat vegetables, we take antioxidants to prevent all that.
But what does it mean when these oxidative stress markers are extremely low? Can they be too though? Well, think about it. Yeah, for sure. You can have not enough oxidative stress. How would that happen? If you're getting not enough energy production from not enough mitochondria. So oxidative stress, my mother, we think that Dr. Lord calls it now in my sessions with him, oxidative load, kind of like a little more of a vague term. Because oxidative load being excessive is super bad. Oxidative load being excessively low, not excessively high, but excessively low, shows a total lack of energy production, a lack of free radical production because of a lack of, you know, making energy, which is bad too. So be on the lookout for that. Too much oxidative stress, not enough. Too much mitochondrial function, not enough.
And there's one more example of this we'll see in this lab here. And this one's kind of mind-blowing. But man, this is just like the way it is, you guys. You know, for 20 years, I was just kind of pontificating based on all the stuff that I learned over all these other, you know, decades of really amazing teachers and kind of like my amalgamation of all that work. And now, you know, I get to work with Dr. Lord every Monday. Now he's just turning me into that lab reading maniac where, and he like, researches seven days a week on all this stuff. He's like, just saying things because he feels like that's might be what's happening. He's like, literally in the research books, day in and day out, seven days a week. And then when we get together, he just summarizes everything and tells me exactly what it all means, what I should do. So these are pretty important, kind of, I don't know, like rubber meets the road kind of stuff, you know?
So let me show you this one more thing here. Makes me sound really intelligent, but I'm just, you know, reiterating Richard Lord's summary of the research. Here's another one. This one is kind of mind-blowing too. Please, a lot of weight problems also. So when we think about fatty acids, we think about omega-3s primarily. And if your omega-3s are low, you're going to be inflamed. You want to give more omega-3s so you feel better. And these are the healthy fats, right? And we want to encourage fat burning. That's the whole point of people losing weight.
But what does it mean when your omega-6s are categorically low like this patient? What does that mean? Low omega-6? How could that even happen? What is that even? How does it even relate to anything that we think about? So low omega-6s, in a sense, are you under inflamed? There's not even a word for this, right? But there's not enough omega-6s. There's not enough of what we think of as the inflammatory portion of the essential fatty acids. A lot of patients have this problem. And if you're low in essential fats, your brain is going to be all screwed up. And you're gonna, you know, just want to eat fat all the time and not maybe make the best choices. I've never seen a human being go out and say, "Oh, I really am craving fat today. Instead of that ice cream or potato chips, I'm gonna go chew on an evening primrose branch or something, right?" No one ever does that in the history of humankind. No one has ever thought, "I'm gonna, you know, go just nosh on some flax seeds right now because I really want something fatty." People eat like fried chicken and french fries and, you know, ice cream and this, you know, the good stuff.
So if someone's chronically low in essential fatty acids, yeah, they're going to crave. And they were never gonna eat the right ones. So there's another way of getting people's weight to normalize also. You know, the essential fatty acids are essential for burning fat. And so then you have to get these in the right amount, or the whole thing falls apart. Okay, again, it's kind of counterintuitive because we think about omega-6s as bad. Like that's the corn oil, that's the vegetable oil, that's the safflower oil, that's the sunflower oil, that's all the bad stuff. But some people are really low in omega-6s and they need them in order to feel okay.
Alright, so those are just kind of like the odd things. Essential fatty acids, is it the threes or sixes? You know, don't always assume it's the omega-3s. Information in regards to oxidative stress, right? So oxidative stress, is there too much? Can you have too little? Yeah, you can. Mitochondrial markers, can they be too high? Absolutely. Can they be too low? Absolutely. Not enough mitochondria begets not enough energy production, turns into not enough oxidative stress. And you get these patients that are just physically exhausted. And none of this, all these systems were just down, right? Not enough of anything to make any of this stuff work. So I just wanted to point that out in case that wasn't obvious.
And then the solutions here are relatively simple. You know, like, for example, if you just give the omega-6s, evening primrose oil, some kind of GLA product, in a pretty hefty dose to a patient like this, they will get better, you know, in two or three months, pretty predictably. These levels will come up about one quintile every three to six months. So if you give them, you know, not a little bit, but a lot of GLA or evening primrose oil barrage, well, you'll see an increase of one quintile in about three to six months. So, you know, the ones that I use are coming like a couple hundred milligram capsule, 200 milligrams, 250. So usually I give two a day for a regular patient just to have a hormone issue or something. But if they have these markers low, I would give, you know, at least 500 milligrams a day. I'm sorry, at least a thousand milligrams a day, sometimes two thousand in the beginning, just to get these levels up. You retest them and then back it down. Okay. So a typical patient without labs, you might give them 500 milligrams a day. Someone with labs like this, you give them a thousand, two thousand milligrams a day, really move the needle quickly with the omega-6s.
If you're gonna work on this, may find X1 here where the person is low in these metabolism markers, fat metabolism, carb metabolism, protein metabolism, energy production, all these markers are low. You give them a hefty dose of free-form amino acids. Hefty dose is, you know, two teaspoons. That's going to be around 8 to 10 grams, two teaspoons all at one time of a powder version or free-form amino acid to chuck it down all at one time on an empty stomach. And boom, that'll get in and get their mitochondria. So try to reconstitute and you'll notice energy improvements, energy production improvements with that, you know, in a matter of weeks, sometimes even days.
And you have to be sure that the program includes tryptophan. So we heard choking about this. I was at this supplement company manufacturing site a few days ago, and I was talking with one of the, just absolutely brilliant women that does all their formulations and stuff, you know, their researcher. And I say, "Man, you have the best free-form amino acid powder." She's like, "Oh, thanks." And and let me see where is this. And when she came on board, their amino acid powder didn't have any tryptophan. And she made the logical conclusion as a biochemist that this essential amino acid is essential. That's why they call it the essential amino acid. You cannot produce a protein, the human body cannot synthesize a protein if, you know, if without tryptophan. So giving somebody a free-form amino acid powder without tryptophan, it's like giving them a beautiful 911 Porsche without wheels or tires, okay? That's so great, it's gonna look great in the garage, but you can't move the thing, can't do anything with it. So a free-form amino acid powder without tryptophan is like a car without wheels and tires, it's not going to do anything.
So most of the companies that we work with have amino acid powders that are great, but they're usually missing tryptophan. So just make sure that it's easy enough. You just give them that two teaspoons a day of the free-form amino acid powder, and then order some tryptophan from a company and dump one or two capsules of tryptophan into the powder. And boom, you got it. Okay? So you don't have to get it complicated or order some super special crazy stuff. Just make sure that with the free-form amino acid powder, you dump in one or two capsules of tryptophan. And boom, you'll have a formula that works every time. Without the tryptophan, it's not gonna work at all, okay? It's an essential amino acid because it's essential, it's required for the assembly of proteins. Without it, nothing's gonna work. And a lot of companies don't have tryptophan on their products because of some historical issues from way, way a long time ago. So it's often not in products, okay? So that's a way to rebuild mitochondria. We talked about the fatty acids. And then let's see, the third thing I mentioned was oxidative stress.
So if you're, we can look at all these antioxidant levels. I'll just show you real quick here. Here you go. So you can measure fat-soluble antioxidants, as you see here. These are the fat-soluble ones: CoQ10, vitamin E, vitamin A. Super great. Like this person is low in CoQ10, low in alpha-tocopherol. So in order to protect their lipids, protect their fats, you know, you want to get them more antioxidants. You can also measure water-soluble antioxidants. And you'll see that marker right down here, 8-OHdG, right here. And this person is a little high. You want to knock that number down. So they need some water-soluble antioxidants also. You have your choice, you know, you can use vitamin C, some people use glutathione, some people use anything that's water-soluble. And in fact, a lot of the formulas that we use are a combination of water and fat-soluble. So you don't necessarily have to break it out, but you should be able to differentiate between fat-soluble antioxidant needs and water-soluble.
And, you know, the main issue is that with the fat-soluble guys being low, you're really worried about damage to lipids or fats, like cardiovascular disease or neurological problems, you know, areas of the body where we have a lot of fat. And where the water-soluble antioxidants, you're worried about that to a certain extent. This is a slightly already with distinction, but you're even more worried about damage to the water compartments, right? And that would be where the DNA is housed inside the nucleus of the cell. So DNA replication going bad, you know, is gonna be an unhealthy thing for human beings, right? And we can have tumor development and cancer and whatnot. So you want to think about water-soluble antioxidants and fat-soluble antioxidants a little differently. And make sure you're getting the right ones. If people need them both, like this patient needs them both, so you can't go wrong with any formula. And look at the formulas that you sell and see how they're primarily fat or water-soluble. Just make sure you give the right antioxidants to the right person, okay? I certainly didn't know that for a lot of years and made that mistake a bunch. It all depends what you try to protect. Trying to protect the brain and their fat-soluble antioxidants. Although you're gonna want to use fat-soluble antioxidants. If you're trying to prove, you know, protect other tissues in the body like the DNA, you know, you don't want to use more than water-soluble side. If you don't care, like this person, then they have both problems, you can use something that has whatever the heck you want in it as a more complete treatment for the oxidant level pros.
Alright, so let me just summarize that. Think about these ups and downs, right? Think about everything on a spectrum. Spectrum. So that spectrum of too much or too little. What? Mitochondrial production of energy? Too much or too little? Well, I shouldn't say that. Mitochondrial markers, sorry, that's it. Mislead me. I take that back. We're a. So that mitochondrial markers on organic acids, too much or too little, okay? Omega-6 fatty acids, usually we think of them being too much as being an inflammatory problem. What about too little? Like I just showed you, too little. Too much? You got to see, you know, be flexible on that and see that as a spectrum kind of thing. Oxidative stress, too much for sure, we know that's a problem. But about too little? That would imply a lack of energy production, obviously. You can't. You can't. If someone has low oxidative stress markers, you can't give them antioxidants, that would make it worse.
Well, that's another good point. Like if someone has super low oxidative stress markers and the oxidants would make them worse, you can't bring up the antioxidant production if it's low in any other way than getting them to make more mitochondria, make more energy. Because remember, when we make energy, we generate a lot of free radicals. And so if the oxidative stress markers are excessively low and the person's tired all the time and I'm not physically active, as you get them more physically active, you can actually get their oxidative stress levels up. So there's a range in there, right? It's not an absolute. It's not lower the better or lower the better. Lower the better for any of these different things. That's kind of the point I want to make. So you guys can see that there's a spectrum.
Okay, so this is me for these days. I am on the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine. I'll be at this Seattle event coming up next month in September and doing a lot of work with Richard Lord. I've been in practice forever. We have this amazing class that we're going to be starting pretty soon, mentorship. It's a year-long program. We have a shorter six-month version of it too, if you don't want to do the full year. And we have a special offer. If you listen to this, you can save a thousand dollars off the tuition for the one-year mentorship class. We'll be starting in early September. And if you're curious, you can call and schedule some time with one of our folks to talk about it.