Dr. Todd Watts discusses the Role of Parasites in Chronic Diseases with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

1:16  Dr. Watts went through a lot of stress in 2008 during the recession and he lost his houses, his cars, and his health crashed and he suffered with Lyme Disease and Babesia and parasites and he had massive fatigue and brain fog and chronic back pain and joint pain, even while going to chiropractic college.  He discovered that parasites tend to upregulate Th2, which suppresses Th1.  He discovered that Mimosa Pudica Seed is really effective for both Lyme Disease and for parasites, so he launched his company Cellcore with a Mimosa Pudica product that he calls Para 1.  Mimosa helps in cleaning the GI system out and helps in clearing parasites that allows the immune system to rebalance and help take care of Lyme disease.

7:19  Dr. Watts believes that parasites are very common and parasites come through mosquito bites, flea bites, tick bites, through food, water and through being around household pets.  He does not feel that stool tests do a good job of screening for parasites. Stool tests will only screen for parasites that are in the stool and parasites are throughout the body and not always in the stool.  DNA based stool tests will only pick up parasites that they screen for and they only screen for a small handful of all the known parasites. Parasites upregulate part of our immune system and downregulate our Th1 function. This also results in motochondrial dysfunction and fatigue. 

11:47  Protocol for removing parasites. Dr. Watts said that when removing parasites the first step is to treat the gut, because if they’re not moving their bowels well and their lymphatic drainage isn’t working well, then they won’t be able to clear parasites and they will get swelling and headaches and skin problems. He recommends starting out with Para 1 and Para 2, which is a blend of Ayurvedic herbs, which helps to balance the gut and is antibacterial, antifungal, and antiparasitic.

14:46  Clearing parasites does not mean that we need to eliminate all toxins, but significantly reduces them and it also means that we have to deal with clearing toxins and we also need to restore our gut flora and the microbiome.

15:40  Toxins can store in our bones, fat, and other tissues in our bodies. A common understanding is that only oral chelating agents like DMSA and DMPS can pull these toxins out, but these substances may not really be true chelators because a chelator has ionic bonds, while fulvic acid and humic acids are natural substances that have many of the same properties as chelators and can help to remove toxins, though the FDA says that they cannot be called chelators.

 

 



Dr. Todd Watts, who’s nickname is “The Parasite Guy”, is one of the founders of CellCore Biosciences and he speaks regularly on foundational medicine and overcoming chronic illness.  He speaks often about parasites, Lyme disease, mold toxicity, and mitochondrial health.  He is the owner of Total Body Wellness Clinic in Meridian, Idaho.  CellCore is a professional supplement company that only sells through the offices of health care practitioners and their website is CellCore.com

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.



 

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Weitz:            Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates, and to learn more, check out my site, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me and let’s jump into the podcast.

Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters. Today, I’m excited to interview Dr. Todd Watts on how to overcome chronic health challenges like parasites, Lyme disease, mold toxicity, and other toxins. Our special guest today is Dr. Todd Watts, whose nickname is The Parasite Guy. He’s one of the founders of Cellcore Biosciences, and he speaks regularly on foundational medicine and overcoming chronic illness. He often speaks about parasites, Lyme disease, mold toxicity, mitochondrial health. He’s also the owner of Total Wellness Clinic in Meridian, Idaho. Dr. Watts, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Watts:            Dr. Ben, good to be here. You can call me Todd.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay. Thanks, Todd. So perhaps you can start by telling us about your personal health journey and how you were able to overcome your challenge with Lyme disease.

Dr. Watts:            So in 2008, the markets took a big hit, a lot of stress in my life and my health just crashed down and I lost everything, my houses, cars, and I went back to school to get my doctorate at the age of 41. With that, as I was going through that process, I had a lot of common symptoms that people have, chronic headaches, joint pain, a lot of brain function issues, word recall stuff, and I just couldn’t, even being at chiropractor school, I couldn’t get rid of my chronic back pain. I had wrist pain, joint pain in my hands and I couldn’t even recuperate it or work out. I went about almost nine, 10 years without being able to work out and recover. Probably the worst thing for me was fatigue. So I had fatigue, just general, this massive general fatigue, wanted to sleep all the time. Then the other thing was I had brain fatigue and muscle fatigue.

So I broke it down. Three things I had to overcome in fatigue world. For me, it was I got my overall energy back, but I still couldn’t work out. I still couldn’t recover, and then my brain started coming back after that. I realized later on that there’s different reasons why those other areas took longer to recover and have energy again.  So in my journey, and then becoming an doctor and helping other people with Lyme and Babesia. Babesia was probably a bigger factor than the Lyme was. Then in that journey, I realized that I kept cycling, and cycle issue is what a lot of us go through that have Lyme disease. I would do well for a while and then I’d crash, and do well for a while and crash.

I had this doctor say, “Hey, Todd. You probably have some issues with some parasites and you need to address parasites.” Well, I don’t know anything about parasites. I’ve heard of them. I lived in South America for a couple years, and I knew about them down there because you didn’t want to drink the water and you had to be careful what you ate. You didn’t eat the lettuce, and there’s a few things you didn’t eat because you know you’d get parasites. Well, I was 19-20 years old when I was down there and you’ll have diarrhea for a month. That’s just normal for being in South America, but I probably got parasite when I was down there.  So I started this journey and as I was working with people with chronic illness that as I started addressing parasites and understanding the immunology of how it works, all of a sudden my patients stopped cycling. My energy came back. I stopped cycling with Lyme and Babesia, and I got up to 90% better, and that’s where I then dove to more into the toxin world and understanding heavy metals and then getting into environmental toxins and glyphosate, and later on mold and mycotoxin illness, which wasn’t a struggle for me, but was a struggle for other people that I worked with quite significantly.

That’s where it helped me understand the importance of mitochondrial function and how that interacts with the immune system and then also Th1 versus Th2 immune function because if one side is suppressed because the other side is upregulated, which happens with parasites, parasites upregulate Th2, which suppresses Th1, which then you have all these viruses and Lyme and protozoan infections. It’s really hard to overcome that unless you take care of the other issue or mold will suppress them both and suppressing just overall mitochondrial function is an issue.  So for me, that was a big major hurdle in my area, and as I come across some new products that I brought to the market worldwide, which was Mimosa Pudica Seed, which is our Para 1 product, that massively changed my life, that also helped many thousands and thousands of other people in their journey. So my company, Cellcore, was launched with one product, and then we’ve developed other ones to help the process of people going through phases to get better in that long, long run.

Dr. Weitz:            Interesting. Interesting. We’re going to have Dr. Vojdani speak to our functional medicine group this month, and he’s got some new immune testing to look at Th1, Th2 balance and some other parts of the immune system.

Dr. Watts:            He’s great, and that’s fantastic. I remember listening to him speak before, and he said 60% of autoimmune disease is caught by toxicity, 30% by pathogens, and 10% other things. That stuck in my mind because at the time I thought, “Well, I thought pathogens, Lyme, and viruses, and these things cause most of autoimmune disease”.  He said, “No. It’s toxicity.”  He was right in what I’ve learned going through the process of understanding all the different types of toxins in today’s world and how we’re exposed to them on a daily basis through air, water, and food.

Dr. Weitz:            I noticed that one of the nutrition products you like to use for Lyme disease is Mimosa Pudica, which I interviewed Dr. William Rawls a few years ago and he mentioned that product and that’s not something I had heard of before. Is that something that you use regularly for Lyme patients?

Dr. Watts:            Well, when I first learned about it probably seven years ago, Dr. Klinghardt had been using a little bit of BioPure, but he didn’t have it available. As I dove into that product, he was using the bark of the whole seed, the whole plant. So I found a source out of India through an importer here from the US that I worked with, and he brought back to me one of the times was the seed itself. That’s where we launched our company four and a half years ago with just that product and how it works with Lyme disease is that it helps in cleaning the GI system out and also helps with clearing parasites in toxins that then allows the immune system to rebalance and help take care of Lyme disease issues.

Dr. Weitz:            Now, what do you think is the best way to test for parasites?

Dr. Watts:            Well, I always joke around is you put a couple fingers here and if you feel a pulse, you got a parasite. We live in this world that we all have them, and parasites can be in a whole variety of things, which 70% of them you can’t visualize or see. They come through mosquito bites, flea bites, tick bites, through food, through being around animals, through your water. I had a client I worked with, she was a pharmacist. Her husband was an engineer back east, and they found that they had parasites, and we found it in their water, in the municipality water that they had nematode larva in their municipality water. So it’s amazing where you think you’re getting clean access to stuff in the US but not always. So in reality-

Dr. Weitz:            We do a lot of stool testing and they screen for parasites and I have to say it doesn’t come off that often.  No. I totally agree with you. It rarely comes up. So I had to stop looking at that. I look at that as a factor of, “Okay. What’s going on maybe with different things?” but it rarely comes up with it, but then a proof I found is right in the toilet, and then in the research that I did with a lot of symptoms and the different types of parasites, if 78% of them are visible and they’re microscopic and they’re throughout the body, then how are you going to get that on a stool sample test?

Dr. Weitz:            Well, will the DNA technology pick it up?

Dr. Watts:            Oh, not necessarily because they’re not testing every parasite, right? They’re limited on how many parasites they’re testing and then are they testing Babesia? That’s a parasite. That’s like malaria. They tested malaria?  No, they’re not testing that. They’re testing for toxoplasma gondii or you start going into schistosoma or some of the hookworm stuff or the lung flukes. Lung flukes don’t come out in stool. So then you have liver flukes and you have pancreatic flukes. There’s blood flukes, and they start doing this deep dive into parasites, and there’s so many different kinds that they’re not testing for very many of them.  I just had to realize that I had to use more of my clinical knowledge and research versus relying on lab testing. Lab testing, there’s not a single lab test that’s accurate by itself, and that’s where I’ll use multiple lab tests to get a conclusion, but I also use common sense, assessment forms to help these people that have been sick for so long.

Dr. Weitz:            So you’re saying there’s really not a definitive task for parasites?

Dr. Watts:            No, not at all, not whatsoever. None of them are good. You have to assume that they have parasites. Otherwise, you’re going to have an imbalanced immune system because this is what happens. When people are coming to my clinic, they have a stack of labs like this and you look at, “Okay. What don’t they have?” So they have Lyme, and they have Bartonella, and they have cytomegalovirus, and they have HHV-6, and they have Epstein-Barr. There’s this whole list of everything they have. Do they really have an infection problem? No. They have an immune system problem.  So Th1 was suppressed. What suppresses Th1? This is my research. Then I found parasites do that, and it upregulates IgE and it upregulates other interleukins such as Interleukin 4, 5, and 13. That then will cause other suppression of issues within Th1 function. So when you start understanding the immune system with that, that just triggered my mind. It’s like, “Oh, wait a second. I’m treating Lyme all wrong years ago. I’ve been trying to treat the infection instead of looking at the bigger picture of how the body works, how the immune system works,” and when I did that, everything changed because when you’re looking at the function, what triggers the immune system?  There’s a cytokine called a mitokine. It’s an ATP molecule, which is what we use for energy, but also as a cellular signaling molecule outside the cell. So it tells our immune system, “Hey, look. There’s something going on here. So you’re going to be tired to fight this, and we’re not going to use that to make energy. We’re going to use that to fight and help your immune system work.”  That got my mind thinking like, “Okay. This is why I’ve been tired. This is why I’ve been fatigued. This is what I have going on here, why I can’t create this energy and work out again. It’s because there’s mitochondrial dysfunction due to toxins causing this problem.”

Dr. Weitz:            So what’s your protocol for getting rid of parasites?

Dr. Watts:            So what we do at first is because in my journey of helping people, the problem, “Oh, hey, let’s go after the gut and treat gut first because in functional medicine we learn you want to treat the gut first.” Now, what I’ve learned is people, if they’re not moving their bowels well and their drainage process isn’t working well, then they can have reactions and they can swell up. They can have headaches. They can have skin problems and breakouts. So the first step is to one, upregulate mitochondrial function so enzymatic processes can work, organs and systems can work. Make sure the bowels are moving, which we have a product for that and make sure the bile flow is moving.

So as you start getting these processes up, you get the bowels moving, the bile moving, the lymphatics moving, all this process, then the second phase to go in and start to clear things out of the bowels. So we have Para 1 and Para 2, which is the Mimosa Pudica Seed that helps to start clearing and scrubbing the gut, but also then a product that is Ayurvedically blended to help all three doshas, according to Ayurvedic medicine, and it really helps to balance the gut flora, clear out whether it’s bacteria, fungus, parasites. It’s a good broad overall herbal product.

Then we go deeper after that into more systemic parasites or infections as we go down the process. All along we’re we’re clearing and binding and we’re supporting drainage and we’re supporting energy. That process has really transformed my practice as well as many other doctors’ practices as we train and teach doctors, thousands of doctors that we’ve taught and trained now on this process, which has really helped people with chronic illness.

 



Dr. Weitz:            Interesting. I’ve really been enjoying this discussion, but I’d like to take a minute to tell you about a new product that I’m very excited about. I’d like to tell you about a new wearable called the Apollo. This is a device that can be worn on the wrist or the ankle, and it uses vibrations to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system. This device has amazing benefits in terms of getting you out of that stressed out sympathetic nervous system and stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. It has a number of different functions, especially helping you to relax, to focus, to concentrate, get into a deeper meditative state, even to help you sleep, and there’s even a mode to help you wake up. This all occurs through the scientific use of subtle vibrations.

                                For those of you who might be interested in getting the Apollo for yourself to help you reset your nervous system, go to apolloneuro.com and use the affiliate code, Weitz10. That’s my last name, WEITZ10. Now, back to the discussion.

 



 

Dr. Weitz:            How long do you find it typically takes to clear parasites?

Dr. Watts:            That’s a really good question because really, it’s an individual based thing because what I’ve learned is clearing parasites is not just about clearing parasites. It’s also helping support in the process of clearing toxins. You’ve got to clear toxins when you’re clearing parasites. You have to really help the emotional health because if you’re not clearing the parasites in your life, then parasites aren’t going to leave your body completely. You’re not going to balance it.  I don’t know that we ever clear parasites altogether because they have a role and function, but we have to get them down to a level that is not affecting our immune system so bad that then it doesn’t work, but there’s an emotional part to it. There’s a toxicity part to it, and then there’s a gut flora, restoring the microbiome in there that will then restore balance with parasites.

Dr. Weitz:            Now, one of the issues about toxins is that toxins tend to store in the body. They can store in the bone, they can store in the fat, they can store in various organs. From what I understand, I think the only way we can really get the toxins to come out of the bone and the other tissues is to use … I’m drawing a blank on the … What’s the oral DMSA, DMPS, the chelators, right? My understanding is if you use binders or something like that, that can get the toxins that are floating around the bloodstream, but the only way to get the toxins out from where they’re stored to get them out of the cells is to use oral chelating agents.

Dr. Watts:            So let’s take a look at what those oral chelating agents are, right? So you’re talking about DMPS, DMSA, and things. They have a very short life that they live, right? You have to constantly take them. They clear through the liver or, excuse me, through the kidneys. So you have to be cautious using these products. The other thing is they’re not a true chelator. So when we have a mixture what a chelator is, a chelator is those are ionic bonds, a double tail bond. They discuss that as a true chelator in certain realms of functional medicine, but a true chelator is a covalent bond, an organic process that occurs and happens, which happens with fulvic and humic acids.  So I think there’s just not full education on what a true chelator is, but we just put it out there just like we put out there, well, you have to be alkaline versus acidic. It’s a complete another rabbit hole that is inaccurate in functional medicine, as well as adrenal fatigue, which is another inaccurate thing that’s taught out there.

So when you’re looking at going deep in detoxing, part of it is supporting the proper enzymatic reactions within the body to do it. The other part is understanding what helps to chelate in the body. Well, metabolized toxins are bacteria. So then the bacteria and fungus and parasites all play a role with detoxifying or trying to balance the body itself, which is why people can have higher loads of fungus or candida or parasites or pathogenic bacteria because of the pleomorphic forms that have occurred.  So the toxins cause these things to pleomorph or to proliferate, which then become a problem, and what we’re doing or trying to do is to address those and just clear those things out without understanding that the processes is why is DMSA … You’re talking what are they chelating. So you’re thinking heavy metals is what I’m guessing, right?

Dr. Weitz:            Yup.

Dr. Watts:            So to me, heavy metals aren’t the main problem. Are you exposed to high heavy metals on a daily basis that are killing you and causing problems? No, you’re not. The key part that’s causing problems in people’s health is the 80 some thousand chemicals that is in the environment today and in our foods, whether it’s glyphosate, whether it’s all the different derivatives that go along with that, all the plastics. I mean, you can start going into a huge list of environmental chemicals. That’s what’s in your food, water, and the air that you’re getting at a much higher dosage than you are in heavy metal.

Dr. Watts:            Now, what makes a heavy metal bad for our bodies? I’ve asked this question to many doctors and they’re like, “Well, it’s just bad.” No. It’s the oxidative state of the heavy metal.

Dr. Weitz:            I mean, heavy metals have a whole lot of different negative effects. You take something like mercury, it’s estrogenic, it’s oxidative, it’s inflammatory, it’s neurogenic.

Dr. Watts:            When you look at the state of the chemical or the metal or the mineral because mercury is a mineral, it’s a metal, heavy metals are minerals, all metals are mineral, minerals or metals, so what makes it that way? It’s the oxidative state that causes the damage or stress to the body or the ability to interact with other molecules in the body. So if you can neutralize that, if you can neutralize that by either donating or giving electrons or protons, then you’re going to downregulate the damage from those and then allow the body to clear those out.  Also, you go in there with other molecules like our binders that will help to attach to those molecules in many ways, those metals in many different ways in a covalent bonding system, which is a chelator. We can’t call then chelators because FDA won’t allow us to call them a chelator, but in the research, it’s what it shows it as. So only drugs can chelate. So only drugs can chelate according to the FDA. So anybody else that says that something chelates is is making an FDA claim that’s inaccurate.  So we have to be careful with what does that, but scientifically, a chelator is something that’s organic, uses carbon to bond with the science part of it. I work with work with metallurgists, biochemists, chemical engineers, quantum physicists in this stuff to understand why metal are bad. It’s the oxidative state and ability to interact with other molecules within the body. The other chemicals-

Dr. Weitz:            Your company has certain products that essentially serve the same function as our chelators?

Dr. Watts:            Exactly. Our goal is to do on a natural side and that have a lot longer lifespan, and not that you have to be on it every two hours or every four hours to go through and take these, and you don’t even have to take the binders on an empty stomach two hours away from everything. You can take them at any time with food, without food at any time. So that’s what we teach in our system with Cellcore Biosciences is we teach doctors the science behind all this information and why people even have lead toxicity or other heavy metals within the body, what’s the source and what’s going on.  What I have found clinically, this is really interesting, is that it’s rare that I find that heavy metals are the main source of people’s health issues. What I find is that it’s mycotoxins, it’s other toxicity from environmental toxins that drive other things that cause most of the problems because the amount of exposure is much higher level than heavy metals.

Dr. Weitz:            So for parasites, are you using typical anti-parasitic herbs?

Dr. Watts:            So we have three products. The fourth one is coming out later this month, Para 1, 2, 3, and 4. They’re different in their blends and what they do, and are they typical? No, they’re not typical. One is an Ayurvedic blend. One is Mimosa Pudica Seed on its own, which is we’re the founding company to bring this worldwide to the market. The other ones is the Ayurvedic herb with neem, clove, vidanga, holarrhena, kutaja, triphala, and then there’s another blend that’s a tincture that has a variety of herbs that aren’t always common that people utilize, but what I’ve found is I spent two and a half years on formulating this to be able to go and clear specific, really hard parasites to clear out, and to really have high effectiveness and see the results whether they’re parasites coming out of people’s noses, parasites coming out of people’s skin, ears, eyes, people pulling parasites out their mouth. I had people pulling parasites out their back end.  So when I look at, “Is my product effective?” well, according to the thousands of practitioners that are using my products, they say these are more effective than anything on the market because of the results their patients are getting. So I’ve used a lot of brands in my clinic right before I’ve ever had these products. I just didn’t find the same results that I was getting with that. So a big part of it was because I was trying to get my own self better and experimenting in that direction.

Dr. Weitz:            So some of these products that you’re using that are serving as binders or are made from humic acid and-

Dr. Watts:            So fulvic, humic acid extracts with other co-factors that will allow them to be highly effective and be able to have high energy, to bind, to remove and repair, as well as to feed the microbiome.

Dr. Weitz:            So what are humic and fulvic acid?

Dr. Watts:            So that’s a huge, long story, but fulvic acid and humic acid is … The humic tends to be black, and the fulvic tends to be a light powder. Combined, they can be great looking, but it’s a binder that a lot are familiar with that have high energy and ability to bind a variety of different toxins, especially the way we build them and the variety of the PHS that they come in makes a big difference. The electrical connectivity of those are certainly high to be able to have that energy to get them through the body and be able to bind and have the energy to pull them out of the body.  So they’re organic material. That is plant material that has been decomposed over thousands of years, that has been pulled out of the soil and decomposed by bacteria that then is utilized and extracted from the earth.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay. So let’s move on to mold toxins. Yep. So how do we test for mold toxins, and then what are some of the strategies for removing mycotoxins when patients are dealing with this issue?

Dr. Watts:            So there’s a variety of labs. I’ve used Great Plains Labs before. I’ve used Vibrant Labs in testing. They test a lot of different types of mold, but there’s Realtime labs, and there’s a variety of them. It just depends on what your favorite is. Currently, I’m using Vibrant Labs because they test for a lot of different types of mycotoxins. So I like to do the testing especially as I’m going through. So I have an assessment form that takes people through a variety of questions that will help me to look at do they possibly have Lyme or Bartonella or Babesia or parasites or mycotoxins and things, and then it helps me with the testing and I test everybody for mycotoxins because when I think I know the answer that they may not have mycotoxins and the next thing I know they’re not getting better, and then I test for mycotoxin and they have mycotoxin. So everybody that comes to my clinic, we test for mycotoxins.

What they do is they can suppress both Th1 and Th2 immune function. They suppress mitochondrial function, which suppresses immune function, which also suppresses energy. So then it creates a lot of oxidative stress in the body, and that’s why these people are a lot of times the worst when they’re sick because then they have Lyme and they have Epstein-Barr, and they have the mycotoxins and every illness out there, and then they’re sensitive to the environment.

So our process is to be able to help upregulate the processes and things that, one, clear and bind the mycotoxins, but two, also upregulate the enzymatic reactions that the mycotoxins suppress. So mycotoxins will downregulate NRF2 pathway, which in the cells downregulates the ability to convert these free radicals to water and also recycle glutathione in there that converts the free radical to a superoxide molecule all the way through to water.  So our goal is to get that process working, turn the energy factories on, and then bind the mycotoxins out and get the body working. It’s worth phenomenal. We’ve had great results looking from a clinical standpoint, looking at labs zero, three months, six months, nine months, and just seeing fantastic results on clearing mycotoxins out.  The key part, though, is they can be living and continue to live in mold and expect awesome results or if they have mycotoxins, which I have found in breast implants, if they’re in their body, then it’s really difficult until they get the breast implants removed.

Dr. Weitz:            Right. Do you use glutathione as part of your protocol for getting rid of mycotoxins?

Dr. Watts:            I actually don’t because glutathione doesn’t go systemic in the body. It’s utilized up in the digestive system. It’s a peptide, which means that it’s composed of three amino acids, and those three amino acids will be broken down in the stomach acid or through the pancreatic proteases that are created and then broken down to the individual amino acid and then utilized in the body.  So the best way to get glutathione in the cell is to recycle it, and that’s where we utilize our CT minerals, our MitoATP products, our HydrOxygen product, biomolecular oxygen type of products to be able to recycle the glutathione molecule, to upregulate the oxygen and upregulate all the protons and electrons within the cell function. That’s what our company specializes in is understanding things at a cellular level to recycle enzymatic reactions and processes to be able to take care of these problems.  Glutathione is best in the cell. The way it gets fixed is it goes from an oxidative state to a reduced state. It’s this constant recycling process and taking glutathione is not going to do that. So I haven’t had to use it, but I know a lot of doctors that do use it through functional medicine, but with the clients I’ve worked with it, it hasn’t been a necessary factor because I’m clearing the toxins, I’m clearing the infections, I’m upregulating the actual enzymatic processes that the body works on.  For example, the liver detoxification process, you have the phase one, phase two, and either phase three or transportation, bile flow. In phase one, what’s utilized in that process for cytochrome P450 is electrons, protons, oxygen, and a little bit of iron. Our products provide all those building blocks of life to be able to do that, and that’s what we did down to, and as my background I was telling you in biochemistry on teaching these things, that’s the basic molecules we’re looking at to repair the body is not a specific product, but how is that product helping at that cellular level to then make the changes that it needs.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay. Can you tell us about this TUDCA product that you use to help get the bile flowing?

Dr. Watts:            Yeah. So interesting. Years ago, Dr. Jay was looking at, “Okay. Hey, what do people do, all these body builders, what do they take to repair their liver from all those damaging, from all this steroids they’re taking?” They have a biohack. What is that biohack?” He learned, “Oh, it’s TUDCA.” So he started using the TUDCA or the TUDCA.

Dr. Weitz:            Body builders taking this stuff? I don’t recall hearing about that.

Dr. Watts:            Yeah. That’s what it shows in the research. So that’s Dr. Jay research. He’s a fanatic researcher. So he figured out because he loves to biohack it and buy all the machines and buy all the different things. He came across that. So this is years ago. So he started using it with his chronic Lyme patients. All of a sudden, all these heart issues people were having went away when they took TUDCA. He’s like, “Okay. What’s happening here?”  So we researched it for about two and a half years to finally get a product that would be sustainable and reproducible. So what it does is it is an anti-inflammatory bile acid. The body makes bile. It dumps into the intestines, the duodenum, and then from there, the microbiome, the bacteria will convert that into TUDCA, which is an anti-inflammatory bile acid that has all these huge health benefits. There’s tons and tons of research that we’ve produced and put out there on that stuff that can help from brain issues to leaky gut, to bile flow. So it helps the body recycle bile. It helps to produce more bile from the liver. It helps to repair the liver in many functions in there.  It’s been a phenomenal product for that process because if you get a stagnant bio, it’s a real thick bile, then you’re going to absorb more toxins and it’s going to go more systemic, and you’re going to have a constant problem with not just toxins and hormones and a lot of other things that you need to clear out through the liver. So that’s part of the process of our drainage funnel is, “Hey, let’s be sure that we have good movement of our colon, and let’s be sure we have good bile flow, unless we have good lymphatic flow so we can drain and clear the body in this natural way versus just trying to detox it.”

Dr. Weitz:            So what does TUDCA stand for?

Dr. Watts:            TUDCA is tauroursodeoxycholic acid.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay, and this is one of the bile acids?

Dr. Watts:            Yup. It’s one of our products called Advanced TUDCA. It has a few other products, a few other ingredients in there with that to make it effective for liver function and repair and all the things we talked about with repairing liver function and anti-inflammatory process throughout the whole body down at the cellular level.

 



Dr. Weitz:                            I’d like to interrupt this fascinating discussion we’re having for another few minutes to tell you about another really exciting product that has changed my life and the life of my family, especially as it pertains to getting good quality sleep. It’s something called the chiliPAD, C-H-I-L-I-P-A-D. It can be found at the website chilisleep.com, which is C-H-I-L-I-S-L-E-E-P dot com.

So, this product involves a water-cooled mattress pad that goes underneath your sheets and helps you maintain a constant temperature at night. If you’ve ever gotten woken up because temperature has changed, typically gets warmer, this product will maintain your body at a very even temperature, and it tends to promote uninterrupted quality deep and REM sleep, which is super important for healing and for overall health.

If you go to chilisleep.com and you use the affiliate code, Weitz20, that’s my last name, W-E-I-T-Z, 20. You’ll get 20% off a chiliPAD. So, check it out and let’s get back to this discussion.



 

Dr. Weitz:            So what are you typically finding for say a patient who comes in to see you with some chronic health issues, and you determine that they have parasites or most likely have parasites, and maybe they have some Lyme disease or mycotoxins? How long does it usually take to get resolution for this patient of their underlying condition as well as their current symptoms?

Dr. Watts:            That’s a complicated question, Ben.

Dr. Weitz:            Of course, it is, and everybody’s different, we’re all individuals and some people respond well and some people don’t respond well, but I’m just asking for some ballpark idea.

Dr. Watts:            Yeah. So that’s a great question to the fact that has that person been sick for 20 years and haven’t found the solution? Has that person been sick for two years? It’s a completely different thing. Is that person sensitive to even their environment versus somebody that can actually take products, right? I’ve worked with somebody that I worked on just trying to get to one capsule, one product for six months because of where they were beginning at and they couldn’t take anything.  We have a comprehensive protocol, which is a 10-month protocol that takes people through the whole process of what we call our Roadmap to Health. We also have a condensed version, our foundational protocol, for the average person that can go through clear toxins and get optimal health from what we have there. Then we also help guide doctors that a lot of people I work with and what our clinic has worked with. We go through and see how they do within that 10-month period of time or 12-month period of time because most of them have been sick for so long. Then it may be another year at that standpoint, but typically, we see results usually right away with things because we’re addressing the core issues. What are the core factors? How can we neutralize the oxidative stress in the body from these toxins that are in there or these infections that are in there? How can we upregulate the body’s ability to do work on its own? That’s the whole thing-

Dr. Weitz:            With oxidative stress, basically, we could potentially take a bunch of antioxidants, right?

Dr. Watts:            No, no, because antioxidants aren’t the problem. It’s not a lack of antioxidants. It’s what’s causing the oxidative stress in the first place, and that’s the approach is do you want to go to the source or do you want to just give something that’s going to help with the oxidative stress? My goal is, “Sure. All my products are chicken butt on oxidative stress.” There’s no doubt about that. My focus, though, is what’s that causative factor? So one of the things that we talk about here is toxins create deficiencies. If you have a deficiency problem, then there’s a toxin problem or you have a really, really, really bad diet, but most of the people I work with have impeccable diets because they’ve been trying to work on themselves for so long. I’m sure you work with a lot of people like that, too, where they really try and eat healthy. I don’t get the average person off the street that’s a diabetic person that’s eating horrible McDonald’s and everything else. They’re eating keto. They’re eating paleo, they’re eating autoimmune paleo. They’ve done every diet possible.  So it’s not that they have a lack of antioxidants. It’s the fact that we’re missing the exposure to the chemicals. We’re missing the chemicals that are in the body that are causing the problems. I tell you what, man, I have in here, in my office, as well as at my house, I have a distiller. I drink distilled in water because all the other systems have chemicals in their water and they don’t get the chemicals out. So it’s a huge, huge issue that we have. Of course, everything’s sprayed nowadays. So you have a huge, huge issue with all your foods.

Dr. Weitz:            Is reverse osmosis good enough or not?

Dr. Watts:            No.

Dr. Weitz:            What’s the difference between reverse osmosis and distillation?

Dr. Watts:            So distillation takes it from a liquid to a gas and then back to a liquid. So you can’t transfer those chemicals through that process. Reverse osmosis isn’t good enough to be able to do that, and there’s all kinds of problems. We have on our Cellcore website, we have a presentation that we go through an hour long discussing all the different types of things there.  So our goal is I don’t sell any of this stuff, but our goal is to be educated, to get the least amount of toxins in your body that are causing the problems. It has been amazing how I’ve seen changes just on changing the water they drink. In fact, Dr. Jay, I locked him one time, he’s like, “When I go to the airport, the only water that I seem to resonate with, smart water.”  I’m like, “Jay, you ever read it? It says distilled water. That’s why.” So he is drinking distilled water without even know he is drinking distilled water.

Dr. Weitz:            So where do you get this distilled water system from?

Dr. Watts:            So we got ours from a company called mypurewater.com. It’s one of Gerson clinic and some of these huge clinics that have been around for 20 to 40 years have been buying them from for many, many decades.

Dr. Weitz:            Is this a whole house thing or is it something under your sink that gives you drinking water?

Dr. Watts:            There’s a couple different systems. There’s not a whole house system. It’s a drinking water system. It’s not going to be all your water. The most important water is the water you consume. So that’s what we focus on. So they do have automated systems. One in here I have the water goes through it and then into a little thing. You push the button on your sink and you get the water. That holds 25 gallons at a time because I have 80 people that work here. Then at home, I have one that holds 12 gallons. It makes 10 gallons a day. It keeps it for my family of six and it’s our main system. I have another one that’s just at top, one that just sits on the countertop that can make up to three gallons a day, and it’s a small system.  So they have a variety of options that you can look at, but one of them, I forgot the clinic name. They had had that distiller for 40 years, and they’ve made it for NASA and some of these big companies. So I know it’s a quality unit and it’s a mom and pop place. It’s fantastic. It’s been in the family generations and a couple generations.

Dr. Weitz:            What is the company called again?

Dr. Watts:            Mypurewater.com.

Dr. Weitz:            My Pure Water, I’ll check it out. We drink distilled water here at the office. Now, one of the criticisms we get from that is, “Oh, you’re going to leach out all the minerals. Everybody’s going to be mineral deficient.”

Dr. Watts:            That’s a really good question. So let me ask, because I get the same thing. So the minerals you get in your water, let’s take a look at that and see what it does to the glass in your shower, what it does to your windows. Are those organic minerals? Oh, wait. They’re inorganic minerals. It’s like drinking rock. It actually doesn’t do good for your body. It’s not bioavailable minerals. Your minerals come from your food sources, not your water. Your minerals come from your foods, your vegetables and fruits. That’s where minerals come from.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay. So the minerals in the drinking water are inorganic and can’t be utilized.

Dr. Watts:            Exactly.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay.

Dr. Watts:            That’s why it’s called hard water.

Dr. Weitz:            Now, is the distilled water going to leach the minerals out of your body?

Dr. Watts:            So water is made up of two molecules, hydrogen and oxygen. The really necessary proton, hydrogen is the proton, and oxygen is the thing that binds up free radicals, and it’s interesting. People drink water and it goes into their body and you can cut them open and all of a sudden, where did that water go? Oh, that’s right. The body has this amazing natural way of getting oxygen from water and hydrogen.

Dr. Weitz:            You know that whole thing about heavy water and deuterium depleted depleted water, all that stuff?

Dr. Watts:            Yes, I know about that.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay.

Dr. Watts:            It’s still a theory, and I think the most important thing is that you have water that doesn’t have chemicals in it that is causing disease.

Dr. Weitz:            I’m with you on that.

Dr. Watts:            Okay? Pure, clean water, that’s all I care about. Just stop putting chemicals in your body. Stop going and buying food that has all these chemicals sprayed all over it and you wonder why you have a gluten problem because you’re eating glyphosate.

Dr. Weitz:            Right. Of course, yeah. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, there’s chemicals in our water, our food, our air. So the more we can do to reduce as many chemicals as possible, the better we’re going to be. We’re never going to get rid of all of them, but-

Dr. Watts:            No, we’re not, and that’s where our whole company is based off of products for detoxifying and helping to upregulate the body’s ability in infections and root cause illness. That’s all Dr. Jay and I study and research and then educate doctors on, the same thing of why, why are metals bad, what is radioactive elements, and did you know radioactive elements is a massive problem and maybe why people in maybe the Upper Midwest get a lot of Lyme disease because radium is only tested by the EPA. So you’re never going to do a heavy metals test and never see radium because it’s only tested by the EPA, and it’s in your water source.

177 million Americans have high levels of radium in their water. So you can go to environmental working group and you can see that information, and then if you just Google radium in water and you wonder why you have candida all the time, you wonder why you have fungus or you have a parasite problem, maybe you’re you’re drinking water or exposed to a lot of radioactivity that then goes where? Oh, yeah, the bones. So then you have a problem with calcium, not lead. I think lead probably is trying to offset all that radioactive elements in your body.  So I learned this really cruel story. I had this gal come to see me from New York and she had done 180 chelation, not kidding, chelation IVs.

Dr. Weitz:            Oh, wow!

Dr. Watts:            180. Is there a medical doctor over there?

Dr. Weitz:            That’s a lot. I can only imagine how much that costs and how much time it takes because it takes hours to chelate.

Dr. Watts:            Hours. You know her lead levels, how far they went down? They never even got into reading levels. They’ve been off the charts.

Dr. Weitz:            Wow.

Dr. Watts:            So my theory, I was talking to a scientist I work with because I’d like to talk to these other more organic or chemists and metallurgists and biologists and stuff, physicists that I work with because they think differently than us doctors do from a standpoint. He says, “Well, if you think about it, when you do an X-ray, what do you wear over at most of your body that you’re not X-ray”

Dr. Weitz:            Lead.

Dr. Watts:            Lead. What does lead do? It absorbs radiation. He’s like, “She probably has high amounts of radiation in her body, but the lead won’t let go because it’s trying to play a role.” Then I got me researching into, “Well, and I’ve heard of uranium.” I see that on the doctor’s data test and there’s thorium and there cesium, and then got into more, “What’s radioactive material in water? Radium.” I’m like, “What’s radium?” I started researching radium, and then now we have whole presentations and PowerPoints on radium and stuff and understanding how damaging that is to the body’s ability to heal.  Talk about oxidative stress. What’s worse oxidative stress wise than radioactive material? Nothing. Then first thing to grow back after Chernobyl is fungus and mushrooms to absorb all that radioactive material. Some people have chronic candida forever. It’s probably because they got radioactive material in their bodies.

Dr. Weitz:            I was just listening to a podcast recently, this Lex Friedman podcast and Elon Musk on there and Musk was totally dismissing the dangers of nuclear radiation and claimed that he actually went to Japan and ate food locally grown there shortly after the nuclear accident they had.

Dr. Watts:            Well, I could tell you that if you look at Chernobyl and some of these other things, there’s a lot of people that died of cancer after that and had deformities, babies having deformities. I don’t know. I’m glad you didn’t get sick. Fantastic. I don’t know what they did, but the fact is is there’s a lot of other research that shows otherwise.

Dr. Weitz:            Right. I totally agree with you. So Dr. Watts, this has been great. I’ve really enjoyed this discussion. How can our listeners and viewers find out about your products and your programs?

Dr. Watts:            So our website is cellcore.com, C-E-L-L-C-O-R-E. If you don’t have a practitioner, you have to have a practitioner to order products. So they can order through your account. They can get it through your patient direct code if you wanted to share that with them, but they can’t get Cellcore products without going through a doctor that way.

Dr. Weitz:            Oka. Great. For practitioners who are listening, who want to sign up to get an account, where do they go?

Dr. Watts:            Cellcore.com. Then we have account reps. So depending on your state, you’ll have a rep that you can work with and you can come. We have a phenomenal learning center on the back end of our website that we share a lot of the science behind it. Our goal is to educate and provide solutions that makes sense down to that cellular biochemical level. I have a passion for this because it changed my life. I’m 53 and I have way more energy than I did the last 15 years of my life, and it’s same thing for many of my patients I’ve worked with and clients I’ve worked with, whether they’re throughout the US, internationally, that their lives have been dramatically changed because of the research that we do in helping going after the core issue of how to repair the body.  We call it foundational medicine, going down the foundational core issues to restore that, and then going deeper later on into the functional processes that will help support the body. As you do that, the results are amazing by treating these root cause solutions. I just appreciate guys like yourself, Dr. Ben, that you’re out there really putting this information out there. You’ve had a lot of great people you’ve interviewed on your podcast and that are sharing a lot of great information about how to get better and what to do. Our goal is to help doctors and help people understand, take them to a new level of understanding of what makes us ill and how do we fixed that.

Dr. Weitz:            Absolutely. That’s the functional medicine model is not just treating symptoms, but getting to the root cause.

Dr. Watts:            Yup.

 


 

Dr. Weitz:            Great. Thank you very much. Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, please go to Apple podcasts and give us a five-star ratings and review that way more people will be able to find this Rational Wellness Podcast when they’re searching for health podcasts. I wanted to let everybody know that I do now have a few openings for new nutritional consultations for patients at my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition Clinic. So if you’re interested, please call my office, 310-395-3111 and sign up for one of the few remaining slots for a comprehensive nutritional consultation with Dr. Ben Weitz. Thank you and see you next week.

 

 

Dr. Ben Weitz discusses a Functional Medicine approach to Autoimmunity.

[If you enjoy this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, so more people will find The Rational Wellness Podcast. Also check out the video version on my WeitzChiro YouTube page.] 

 

Podcast Highlights

0:45   Autoimmune Diseases are very common and are increasing in the United States.  Autoimmune diseases are where our immune system, instead of fighting off foreign invaders, like viruses and bacteria, attacks our own cells, tissues, and organs.  Common autoimmune diseases include Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Grave’s hyper thyroid, rheumatoid arthritis, vitiligo, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, psoriasis, hair loss known as alopecia, inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative colitis, IBS, multiple sclerosis, and type I diabetes.

4:31  How should autoimmune diseases be treated?  Conventional medicine is focused on treating the symptoms, such as by giving thyroid hormone to patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, but often ignores the autoimmune condition.  And when medicine treats the autoimmune condition, such as in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, drugs are often prescribed that suppress part of the immune system to decrease this attack by the immune system on the body. These drugs can be chemotherapeutic agents like methotrexate or Cyclophosphamide and there are various types of newer drugs that target specific parts of the immune system, like the TNF alpha blocking drugs Remicade, Enbrel, and Humira.  The downside of such drugs is that by suppressing the immune system, they increase our risk of infections and of cancer. 

10:18  In Functional Medicine we try to find the root cause of their autoimmune disease, so we look at a number of possible triggers, including gut health and infections.  We might do a good stool test or we might screen for systemic infections through blood work.  If the protein structure/amino acid sequence of the bacteria or virus is similar to structural proteins in the body, you might have cross reactivity and the immune system attacks that organ or tissue in the body.  We may treat with herbal antimicrobials, other diet and lifestyle factors, as well as other gut healing formulas.

13:39  Food sensitivities.  You can have cross reactivity between the proteins in certain foods like gluten or dairy and proteins in the body and antibodies that attack foods can attack our organs, like our thyroid gland, leading to Hashimoto’s. Food sensitivities can be addressed by either following an elimination diet in which you avoid some of the most common foods that cause sensitivities or to do food sensitivity testing and then avoid foods that show reactivity to.

 

 



Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.

 



***Get 15% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s Daily Synbiotic by visiting  seed.com/drweitz 

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Podcast Transcript

 

Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates. And to learn more, check out my site, dr.weitz.com. Thanks for joining me. And let’s jump into the podcast.  Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Today, I will be doing a solo podcast. Typically, I interview another doctor or practitioner or researcher, but today I wanted to discuss a functional medicine approach to autoimmune diseases.

So what are autoimmune diseases? Well, autoimmune diseases are an increasingly common cause of sickness and death in the United States. And these diseases have been on a rise for at least the last 30 or 40 years. So what happens in an autoimmune disease is your immune system attacks yourself.  So our immune system, this is a system of cells and communication systems in the body that is designed to protect us from bacteria, viruses, parasites, our immune system’s involved in tissue repair and what our immune system does is it creates an inflammatory process, that’s how it keeps us safe. And because our digestive system is one of the ways in which we’re open to the world, food and liquid particles come into our mouth, go down through our digestive tract, come out the other end.  And therefore a huge portion of our immune system is centered around our digestive track, our intestines, et cetera. And that’s because that’s one of the ways that we most commonly interface with bacteria, and viruses, and fungi, and parasites, and also toxins that come into our bodies. It’s not the only way, but it’s one of the most common ways.

And so what happens in autoimmune diseases, our immune system instead of fighting off these external threats, turns inwards and ends up attacking our own tissues, our own cells, our own organs.  And in one way or another, our immune system is out of balance. Now, let’s talk about a few of the most common autoimmune diseases. And we know now that there are over 100 different autoimmune diseases that have been identified. And there’s a number of other common diseases that have autoimmune components. For example, heart disease has an autoimmune component.  There’s an inflammatory condition inside the walls of the arteries that plays a role in why cholesterol plaques start to build up in those arteries and eventually block off the blood flow. So some of the most common autoimmune diseases, probably the most common is Hashimoto’s hypothyroid. And this is a form of decreased thyroid function and probably the second most common one is Grave’s hyperthyroid.  After these two, the more common autoimmune diseases include rheumatoid arthritis, vitiligo, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, psoriasis, hair loss known as alopecia, inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. And now Dr. Pimentel has identified that the most common gastrointestinal condition IBS, often has an autoimmune origin, multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, on and on and on.  There’s a huge number of these autoimmune diseases.

Now, how should patients with autoimmune diseases be treated? Now, our medical system is essentially our conventional medical system is focused on finding out what symptoms patients have and then providing the treatments that are going to help modulate those symptoms. So, for example, if a patient comes into the office with hypothyroidism, well, that patient will typically be given thyroid medication.  In other words, their thyroid is not working the way it’s supposed to, so we will give thyroid medication. And then that’s the end of the story. But we know from lots of research that in the United States, the majority of cases of hypothyroidism are caused by an autoimmune process. We refer to this as Hashimoto’s. So what that means is your immune system is attacking your thyroid and over time, there’ll be more and more damage to your thyroid gland.  And essentially your thyroid will stop working, will the function of the thyroid will decrease. You may need more and more thyroid medication.

And the same thing occurs in autoimmune conditions that attack other systems of the body, whether it be other organs like your digestive tract, take somebody with Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis. These patients have an inflammatory condition in their intestinal tract.  Their immune system is attacking the lining of their small intestine, large intestine, et cetera. And so over time you’ll have damage, ulcerations, and all sorts of inflammatory situations going on in that epithelial layer of their intestinal tract.  That damage will lead to leaky gut. Over time, these patients tend to get worse. And when they do get worse, they sometimes require having part of their intestinal tract resected.  Just cut out because it’s so inflamed and damaged, it may not be able to come back or it could kill them.

Now, these autoimmune conditions are treated by the medical profession in general with drugs that suppress the immune system.  So we have an immune system that’s attacking our own tissues, and you can see how it could make sense to suppress the immune system.  The problem is that the immune system is needed to fight off infections and cancer.  And so when you suppress part of the immune system, you decrease its… But you potentially decrease its effectiveness for fighting off infections, and cancer, and for the other functions of immune system.  So what’s typically done for treating these autoimmune diseases is in a crisis situation or at the beginning, typically corticosteroids are used. These may also be used when there is flareups. Sometimes chemotherapy agents are used, sometimes older chemotherapy agents like methotrexate or other newer chemotherapy agents. And now we have a series of injectable drugs like the TNF alpha blocking agents like Humira, Remicade, and a bunch of newer medications and these all block some part of the immune system to dampen down the damage that’s liable to continue.

 


Dr. Ben Weitz:                   I’ve really been enjoying this discussion, but I’d like to pause for a minute to tell you about our sponsor for this episode. Seed’s Daily Symbiotic is a pre and probiotic, two in one capsule that supports your gut health, your skin health, and so much more.  It contains 24 clinically and scientifically strains of probiotics.  The first of its kind, not to mention they’re sustainably delivered every month.  In your first purchase, you’ll get a glass jar that is infinitely refillable. Your monthly refills are delivered in compostable, biodegradable and recyclable packaging.  Personally, since taking Seed’s Daily Symbiotic, I’ve noticed more bowel regularity and better gut motility.   So get 15% off your first month supply of Seed’s Daily Symbiotic, by visiting seed.com/drweitz.  So that’s visiting seed, S E E D .com/ D R W E I T Z, or by using code           D R W E I T Z, at your checkout.  And now, back to our discussion.

 


 

But what do we do in Functional Medicine?  Well, in functional medicine, we’re trying to find… We’re not just trying to treat the symptoms, not that patients don’t need their symptoms taken care of, not that patients with Hashimoto’s hypothyroid don’t need thyroid medication, they certainly do. But we also need to focus on the autoimmune condition, this situation where the immune system’s attacking your own organs and cells.  And we want to decrease that from happening because we don’t want the patient to have more and more damage over time.  So a functional medicine approach we’ll look at a number of different factors that affect the proper functioning of our immune system.  For one thing, we have issues like gut health and infections.  We can have gut infections like certain bacteria that can lead to autoimmunity.  We can have various types of chronic infections, some in the gut, sometimes systemic chronic infections.  We can have viral infections. And what happens with infections and a similar process happens with food sensitivities and toxins. And we’ll go into those in a few minutes, is that your immune system attacks say the virus or the bacteria, and then the protein structure of that virus or bacteria or the amino acid structure is similar to tissues in your body. And we get cross reactivity. So we get cross reactivity from the antibodies that are attacking the bacteria or virus, et cetera.  And then those antibodies start attacking part of our body. And so if we can determine what some of these underlying infections are, and then we can take appropriate steps.  In Functional Medicine, we tend to use specific types of herbs and other factors that we know can improve the health and help our body to fight off these infections. We’ll often use, say herbal products. And then we dampen that autoimmune process because we dampen that chronic infection.  And that’s one way in which we can help get this autoimmune process under control.

If there’s a big imbalance in the gut, we’ll often have leaky gut. Leaky gut is another process that can lead to increased auto immunity. And so healing up the lining of that gut, there’s specific protocols we can use with diet, lifestyle and targeted nutritional supplements.

We can also look at things like food sensitivities.  So what happens with food sensitivities is let’s say you have a food sensitivity to gluten, what happens in that case is your immune system attacks the gluten, and then it cross reacts because that gluten tissue has an amino acid structure that’s a similar to thyroid tissue and those antibodies that are attacking the gluten are now attacking your thyroid tissue. And so this can be one of the triggers for a series of autoimmune conditions such as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.

So I like to use with my patients either an elimination diet, where we take out some of the most common food sensitivities, and then after a period of time, we slowly test them back in to see if they have any reactions. The other thing we’ll do is at times is do food sensitivity testing with one of the more sophisticated panels and then take some of those foods out. And then in some cases, if they’re very strong food sensitivities, we will recommend that the patient’s simply not eat for example, gluten or dairy anymore, or we’ll have take them out for a period of time and then test them back and see if there’s any symptoms.

Now, in some cases, there are no symptoms. And yet we know that some of these factors can reduce that inflammatory process. And so if we see, for example, antibodies, autoantibodies say, we are tracking a patient with Hashimoto’s and let’s say they have thyroid peroxidase antibodies, and we see those go down significantly. That’s an indicator that we’re getting to somebody’s underlying causes for this autoimmunity.  And so while measuring thyroid antibodies is typically not done by the average conventional medical clinician, and I’m not criticizing them for not doing this because it’s not really part of the protocol and using a conventional medical approach, they don’t really have tools. There’s no commonly used drugs that can really help to affect this unless they go to this, some of these more severe, pretty harsh injectable immune blocking drugs.  So there’s reasons why it doesn’t make sense for conventional medical doctors to do this, but we want to track these auto antibodies because this is a measure of this underlying autoimmune process. And sometimes we’ll have patients who don’t have any symptoms.

So take myself, I discovered that I had a TSH that was elevated. Didn’t have any symptoms of hypothyroid, didn’t have fatigue, or hair loss, or dry skin, or any of the other symptoms of hypothyroid and was tracking my other thyroid factors, my T3, my T4, which were normal.  And then at some point in time my thyroid, my TSH went up more, I had mildly elevated thyroid peroxidase antibodies. So I took a Functional Medicine approach. I looked at some food sensitivities eliminated certain foods. I did some stool testing that showed certain bacteria that were overgrown, that could be autoimmune triggers.  I used certain herbs and other nutritional protocols to get my gut imbalance.  And I saw my thyroid antibodies decrease.

And then I experimented with certain nutritional supplements because certain nutritional deficiencies can affect any autoimmune condition. In fact, nutritional deficiencies are actually not just frank deficiencies, but having less than optimal levels of nutrients. And this is something that we in the functional medicine world commonly see is there’s normal labs, and then there’s optimal labs. And when you look at a typical lab in the United States, there’s a reference range.  And that reference range, unfortunately is based on where the average American is and anything above that’s considered abnormal. Anything within that range, conventional approaches say, don’t worry about it. Unfortunately who wants to be like the average American. So when we look at something like vitamin D we’ll see that there’s a reference range that says under 30 is low, over 30 is fine. Don’t worry about it. However, there’s a ton of research showing that there is an optimal range that’s higher than 30. Now, there’s still debates exactly what it is.  Is it 40 to 60? Is it 50 to 70? Is it higher than that? So depending upon what you’re looking at, which studies, and your approach, but certainly the optimal range is different than the reference range. So when we’re going to look at nutritional deficiencies, we’re going to try to figure out what the optimal range is. So I had done some food sensitivity panels. I had done a nutritional panel on myself.

One of the nutrients that was especially was the most low was zinc. My vitamin D I struggled to get it up to… I try to target my vitamin D level in around 60. I try to get in that 50 to 70 range. For autoimmune disease. Sometimes it’s better to get it a little higher, and mine tends to go between 40 and 50. So I also did a genetic test and found out I don’t absorb zinc very well, or I have certain genetic factors that make it less likely that I’ll properly absorb zinc.

 



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So I started looking at some of these nutritional factors. I decided first to try adding a high dose iodine because some patients have reported doing better with high dose iodine. Iodine’s a crucial factor in thyroid. So when we talk about thyroid hormones, we have T4 and T3. The most commonly prescribed hormone is T4. T4 has four iodine molecules, T3 has three, T4 gets converted to T3. So iodine is crucial for formation of thyroid hormone.  So I decided to take a high dose iodine in my case, and in quite a number of cases of patients with Hashimoto’s. In fact, I would say most patients with Hashimoto’s don’t do well with iodine. So I took 12.5 milligrams of iodine and nature to eat some seaweed regularly. And my TSH went from nine to 25 and that’s certainly the wrong direction. So I cut the high dose iodine. I had then done that nutrition test. I decided to significantly increase my intake of zinc supplements, increase my vitamin D.  I went to 10,000 a day for a period of time while tracking it with lab testing. I also added 200 micrograms of selenium. I got stricter with eliminating certain foods that I sometimes tend to react to, that I enjoy eating and worked a little bit more on gut health. And I got my TSH down to four and a half and saw a decrease, an additional decrease in my thyroid antibodies.

So we know that nutritional deficiencies can be super important if you have nutritional deficiencies or levels of nutrient are less than optimal.  Those are another thing we can look at. We know that various toxins, heavy metals can play a role. And we also know that for depending upon which autoimmune disease, there’s certain infections, there’s certain heavy metals that tend to play a role. So one of the most important things, when I see a patient in a functional medicine consultation is looking at the whole picture, looking at their history from starting all the way from when they were born.  Were they born by vaginal delivery or C-section? Were they breastfed? Did they have a lot of ear infections? Did they have a lot of other infections? And I have to do multiple antibodies. Let’s look at where they live. Let’s look at their history, let’s look at all their symptoms. And then we get a picture of where the most likely potential underlying triggers might be for their potential autoimmune condition or their autoimmune condition that they may come in with that we know about.  And then we will try to target the things that look like the most likely possibilities. And we’ll do some very careful efficient lab testing that helps us to identify specific triggers, potential triggers for their autoimmune disease. And then step by step peeling back the layers of an onion, will try to eliminate some of those sensitivities, either food sensitivities or toxins and help maybe do a detox program, maybe do a gut health program, figure out what sort of environmental exposures they may be having, sure up nutritional deficiencies will hit the most likely factors first.

And then we’ll peel back that first layer of the onion. And then as they start feeling better, we may dive into the next layer. And as we do this, hopefully over time, and this is what I’ve seen in most of my patient population, we get people feeling better. We see their autoimmune markers improving and this is a way to treat the root causes of their chronic diseases and not simply treat their symptoms. And that’s something that functional medicine is really uniquely designed to do.

Now I did mention a number of things that can affect our autoimmune diseases. There are many, many other things. We know that stress, lack of sleep. We know that the way they other factors in their lifestyle, their amount of exercise or lack of exercise, and there’s quite a number of other things that affect our lifestyle factors that can affect their potential for autoimmune diseases. And these are things that we look at by taking a careful history by doing screening exams.  And then we want to do some careful testing. We want to be judicious about that. Over testing. We want to do the most efficient test. First, we want to get them done in the most economic manner for patients because some of these tests are expensive, but if we don’t test, then we’re just guessing. And I think from a functional medicine perspective, we want to get our patients feeling better. And we also want to put out the smoldering fire of autoimmunity that may be affecting this patient’s long term health and leading to more and more chronic diseases.

We know that patients who have an autoimmune disease are more likely to have another autoimmune disease. And are more likely to have damage to those targeted organs over time. So I hope I’ve given everybody some things to think about. Autoimmune diseases, how we can approach them from a functional medicine approach. The bottom line is by improving your diet and lifestyle, getting rid of toxins, shoring up nutritional deficiencies, improving our gut health.  There’s a lot we can do to reducing the chronic disease burden in this country and around the world. Thank you. And I look forward to speaking you with you next week.

 



 

Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please go to Apple Podcast and give us a five star ratings and review that way more people will be able to find this Rational Wellness Podcast when they’re searching for health podcasts.   And I wanted to let everybody know that I do now have a few openings for new nutritional consultations for patients at my Santa Monica, Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition Clinic. So if you’re interested, please call my office (310) 395-3111 and sign up for one of the few remaining slots for a comprehensive nutritional consultation with Dr. Ben weitz. Thank you and see you next week.

 

Dr. Damiana Corca discusses How to Improve Your Sleep with Dr. Ben Weitz.

[If you enjoy this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, so more people will find The Rational Wellness Podcast. Also check out the video version on my WeitzChiro YouTube page.] 

 

Podcast Highlights

2:50  What is good sleep?  It is falling to sleep within 10-20 min and sleeping for seven and a half to nine hours, depending upon the person and depending upon the season. Ideally you would like to sleep through the night, but it’s okay if you wake up once or twice briefly, such as to urinate, as long as you back to sleep pretty fast.  Our sleep typically happens in cycles of about 90 minutes and we typically have 5 or 6 of these cycles.  It is probably best not to wake up in the middle of one of these cycles.

6:34  There are very few people who only need 5 or 6 hours of sleep, despite claims from many that that is all they need.  Most of these people are just very driven for work and they run on the stress hormone cortisol.  But this is not that healthy.

10:18  Taking a 15 to 30 min nap is very beneficial, but take it no later than 1 or 2 pm in the afternoon. If the nap is too late, it might interfere with night time sleep.

 



Dr. Damiana Corca is a Holistic Sleep Specialist with training in acupuncture, Chinese medicine and functional medicine. She is committed to supporting people who struggle with sleep issues, by helping them discover the root cause of their sleep issue so they can get good sleep and continue to do so for the rest of their life.  Damiana has a local private practice in Boulder, CO and serves her clients worldwide through private telemedicine consulting and group sleep programs. She is the Founder of the Corca Sleep Method Program. Her website is DamianaCorca.com.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.



***Get 15% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s Daily Synbiotic by visiting  seed.com/drweitz 

or by using code DRWEITZ at checkout.



 

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Weitz:            Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness podcast for weekly updates, and to learn more, check out my site, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast.

Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Today, we will be talking about sleep. We all know about the importance of sleep, and there are so many people have problems with sleep. In fact, it’s rare. when I talk to somebody who says their sleep is great and they never have any issues. Today, we have Dr. Damiana Corca, who’s a holistic sleep specialist, and she’s also trained in acupuncture, Chinese medicine and functional medicine. Dr. Corca is committed to supporting people who struggle with sleep issues by helping them discover the root cause of their sleep issue so they can get good sleep. Damiana has a local private practice in Boulder, Colorado, and sees clients through telemedicine and group sleep program. She’s the founder of the Corca Sleep Method program. Dr. Corca, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Corca:            Thank you for having me.

Dr. Weitz:            So how did you come to specialize in sleep problems?

Dr. Corca:            The people let me know that they have trouble with sleep, and I started learning more and more about it and loved it, and eventually decided to focus on this to be able to serve people better. I remember my very first patient in private practice, I was living in Chattanooga, Tennessee and I believe she had fibromyalgia and also had some sleepy issues and I remember thinking, I’ll never forget that sensation in my body or not only a mental explanation of it that, “Oh, if I could just get her to sleep well, I think her pain will get a lot better.” Of course there are other components to this, her gut health and so on, but it was exactly that. And then little by little, I kept noticing, even if people didn’t come in with sleep issues as their main complaint, I noticed that if I just got them to sleep better, somehow everything got better. So eventually over the years, I just decided to focus on this and specialize in this.

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah, it’s really important to have a niche and it’s good to have a practice focus like that, and of course, sleep is so important for everything else. It allows our body to rejuvenate, our brain to heal and get rid of toxins and it’s just so important. Let’s start by defining what is good sleep?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah, good sleep I would say it’s falling asleep within 10 to 20 minutes, 30 minutes maximum and sleeping for seven and a half to nine hours, depending on the season, depending on the person and sleeping through the night ideally, but it’s okay if you wake up once or twice either briefly or just to urinate, as long as you go back to sleep pretty fast.

Dr. Weitz:            In fact, don’t we have these cycles of sleep throughout the night where we go at least into very light sleep?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. We do that all throughout the night. Typically, a sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes. It can be a bit longer. That’s why I tell people if we sleep five of those chunks at seven and a half hours, if you want to sleep longer, you don’t want to just increase by half an hour, ideally increase by an hour and a half. So you respect these sleep cycles. And the same thing if you wake up half an hour before the alarm clock, it’s best not to try to go back to sleep because you’re just going to wake up usually groggier or frustrated if you don’t fall asleep. If your body wakes up without any-

Dr. Weitz:            You mean because you’re in the middle of a cycle?

Dr. Corca:            Right, yeah. If your body woke up half an hour before the usual time, it’s doing you a service. It probably just ended a cycle. And it says, “Okay, it’s about time. It’s not quite, but it’s there. We don’t have enough time for another hour and a half of sleep.”

Dr. Weitz:            Now we’re going to get into the quality of sleep, but just for a minute to talk about the amount of sleep, most sleep experts say seven to nine hours. Is that what you think is a sweet spot?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah, I would say seven and a half just because it gives you five hour and a half chunks of sleep. So I see when people thrive, when people do well, they do seven and a half to eight and that’s because it might take a few minutes to fall asleep, you might be up for a little bit, so usually it completes that amount of cycle. So seven, I feel like it’s on the shorter side, and definitely we are told sometimes that nine hours is too much, but especially in the winter, if you can, it’s really wonderful. I’ve had a lot going on myself and I’ve noticed over the last month of two, I go to sleep at 9:00 and wake up at 6:00 and I feel amazing, So I just do that, which something of my patients can’t do, so that’s what I’m trying to help them with.

Dr. Weitz:            Now we know that taking too long to go to sleep is a problem. You were mentioning how long it takes to go to sleep, but apparently if you fall asleep right away, that’s not that good either. In fact, I’ve been tracking my sleep with an Oura ring in the last six months and I’m constantly finding out that I have low sleep latency because I fall asleep within one minute.

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. When we fall asleep within one minute, maybe you’re a little bit sleep deprived possibly, maybe we need a little more sleep. I tell people that it should take our body like five, 10 minutes to fully relax, to fully go into sleep, to like fully assess the environment, but if you are reading right before that, and you’re very relaxed and you’re so sleepy you’re just about to fall asleep and then you put your head down and fall asleep within one or two minutes, then that I wouldn’t say that’s a problem. That’s a good thing.

Dr. Weitz:            So what about people who say, “I sleep five, six hours. I’m fine. I don’t need more sleep.” What do you have to say to them?

Dr. Corca:            Well, I’ve only met, I think, a couple of people, two people, in the last decade when I talked to them, I questioned them, I came to the conclusion that yes, I think they might have some genetic variant and truly they do fine with six hours. They didn’t say five. I’ve never met anyone that I thought they just need five hours and that’s it and they’re very healthy.  Most people who run on five, six hours, they push themselves so hard and they run on the stress hormone cortisol and basically say it as kindly as possible, you’re basically lying to yourself. You’re so stressed and you’re pushing yourself so hard and maybe you are okay now, but it’s going to catch up with you. So it would be really wise to slow down because usually we get a lot more done actually, instead of putting all this physical and mental work, we can use our energy instead and life becomes a little easier. So then we don’t have to work so hard and keep telling ourselves that we only have so many hours in the day, we have to go faster and harder.

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah, I think unfortunately our society is very driven for work and more work and less sleep. I think that there’s a tendency to actually look down upon people who don’t work as many hours and it’s a different attitude in other parts of the world. I know in Europe, for example, it’s common for people to take six, eight weeks of vacation.

Dr. Corca:            Exactly.

Dr. Weitz:            Certain countries, I think Switzerland requires a week of vacation for every six weeks of work and here in the United States, you almost looked down upon for taking a vacation or taking time off or not working. Now, unfortunately, because of this work at home thing, it seems like people are being asked to work longer hours, like just keep taking phone calls and emails into the evening when normally you would be off work.

Dr. Corca:            Yes. It’s very important that we draw boundaries because otherwise there is always something to do. It never ends, truly, when you think like, “Okay, I’m all caught up on things and it’s all good,” and there is more and more and more, and of course at our place of work we can get asked to do more and more. So it’s up to us to draw boundaries.

Dr. Weitz:            So especially now where so many more people are working from home, do you have any advice for them, how do they draw those boundaries?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. One of the most helpful things for my patients and people that I talk to and from my programs is to look at the day, to split it in 12 hour chunks. So if we have 24 hours, so let’s say 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM is more about activity and work. I’m not saying to work all of those 12 hours, but to fit everything that’s more active within those 12 hours, and then the other 12 hours to really slow down. We typically only slow down for seven or eight and maybe some of that we’re not even asleep. So that’s the first step, to have those clear boundaries and say, “I’m never opening my computer, unless I want to watch a movie or something, after 7:00 PM. I’m not going to answer some emails after dinner,” nothing like that. That’s one place.

The other thing that you can draw some good boundaries, especially if you’re at home, is when you take your lunch break after lunch to lay down for 15, 20 minutes. You are at home, you can lay in your bed, you can get cozy and you can just listen to a meditation. It’s so beautiful, so luxurious, can be so pleasurable and you can just feel your body relaxing. Many people in the past, they said, “Well, I don’t have time. I don’t have the space,” but if you are at home, this is perfect. Just take a break in the middle of the day.

Dr. Weitz:            So you think, for example, taking a 30 minute nap is good for sleep?

Dr. Corca:            It’s very good. It’s amazing. It’s actually-

Dr. Weitz:            See, I’ve heard other sleep experts say, “No, no, no. It’ll take away from the sleep at night.”

Dr. Corca:            I have done this with multiple, multiple people and for some of them has been life changing. The people who are very sleep deprived, say they can’t sleep at night. The problem when you sleep deprived and stressed, is that the more stress you are, the more tired you are, the harder it is to fall asleep. It actually takes the same amount of energy to fall asleep as to stay awake. So we feel as if falling asleep is this passive thing that happens, and it feels like that when we’re healthy and it’s easy to fall asleep, but actually it takes a lot of things that need to happen within our body and our brain to fall asleep.  So if you’re stressed, if you’re sleep deprived, taking that 20 minute nap, I tell people to just set a timer for half an hour, 40 minutes at the maximum and lay down. It does not matter if you fall asleep or not, just focus on resting and maybe listening to a guided meditation, anything along those lines works. If you do it at least about eight hours before your bedtime, so typically, 1:00, 2:00 and you keep it under half an hour, I have never met a person that impacted them negatively.  The problem arises when you sleep too long and too late in the day. People usually sometimes wait until they get really sleepy around 3:00, 4:00, 5:00. Well, that’s dangerous, that’s too late. Then the body feels like, “Oh, I took a good nap, now I have energy,” and then they have trouble falling asleep or [crosstalk 00:12:33]

Dr. Weitz:            So it’s good to take a nap, but try to keep it to, say, 30 minutes and no later, say, then 3:00 in the afternoon?

Dr. Corca:            Perfect.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay.

Dr. Corca:            Perfect and focus on resting, it’s okay. So many people, it took them weeks until… They said, “Oh, I can’t fall asleep. I can’t nap. That’s not a thing for me,” and I’m like, “You’re just focus on resting. Even if you’re just allowing to feel your breath, feel your body, it’s amazing the way you feel in the afternoon.” So it’s very valuable.

Dr. Weitz:            Great. So let’s talk about quality of sleep and particular, two of the things that I’ve been tracking since I’ve been using the Oura ring is deep sleep versus REM sleep. Can you talk, what’s the significance of deep sleep and REM sleep and what do we need to know about them?

Dr. Corca:            These devices are really wonderful in the sense that they’re able to help us track how we sleep, but-

Dr. Weitz:            By the way, what is the best device for tracking sleep or devices?

Dr. Corca:            The most important thing actually, is that we feel good the next day. That is the most important thing is how we feel. Do we have energy? Do we feel clear minded? Secondarily, if we have one of these devices, I don’t endorse any of these companies, a lot of my patients use the Oura ring and it looks beautiful, it gives really fairly accurate information, and this is fairly accurate in comparison with how they feel. I always warn everyone not to look at the data first, but rather see how they feel and then later look at the data because what we do, we look at it and then we decide, “Oh, it doesn’t look good. I should be feeling bad,” and you just want to like really feel, “How do I feel? I feel okay,” and then yes, we can look at the data. The Fitbit is good and there are a bunch of other ones out there that can be helpful.

Also, I ask everyone not to focus so much on how much deep sleep you have exactly, how much REM sleep. Yes, it’s important, but also these devices are not perfect. Also, some of us move a lot more and yes, that can tell us information in itself. So I have found that it’s important to look at the bigger picture. Now, if we don’t have enough REM sleep, deep sleep, it reasonably looks really low. Like let’s say you have friends and they have the same device and you’re like, “Whoa, I only have half an hour of deep sleep and you have an hour and a half,” we want to look at the bigger picture, what could be disrupting the function of the body and understand this. Functional medicine really looks at the whole body and take gut infections, just chronic low grade gut infections that don’t necessarily take you to the hospital or drive you into the doctor’s office, but something is not quite right. Maybe you feel bloated, maybe you’re restless at night. There can be things that can be improved, that can increase the amount of deep sleep that you have of REM sleep.

So we want to look at the whole function of the body, looking at the gut health, because as you know, like if you improve the gut health, you improve serotonin, production, 90-something percent of it is produced in the gut. So that’s the way I look and I ask everyone not to over focus on that data, but the data is very helpful, especially if you have been collecting data from the Oura ring, for example, and then you do things to change and then you can see the improvement. Then that’s really, really helpful.

Dr. Weitz:            So what is the significance of deep sleep?

Dr. Corca:            It helps with numerous, numerous functions in the body and memory consolidations and emotion processing. So with the REM sleep, it all has its own function. Even light sleep is very, very important and one thing that I want to point out is that we typically have more of the deep sleep at the beginning of the night and that’s important to remember because some of my patients come in and say, “Well, I don’t have any deep sleep later in the night. Is there something wrong?” And a lot of people know that you’re supposed to have that at the beginning of the night, some people don’t. And so you want to keep in mind-

Dr. Weitz:            And then the REM sleep seems to occur more in the last several hours, right?

Dr. Corca:            Exactly, and that’s also important to know because sometimes people say, “Well, I seem to be more aware of my environment in the morning,” and that’s partially because of that and also we have more dreams in the morning. So I like to bring some normalcy because when we have sleep issues, we build a lot of anxiety around it and then we attach meaning to everything that we’re looking at and how we feel.

Dr. Weitz:            So, yeah, anxiety seems to be a factor that decreases our ability to sleep well. It’s interesting how anxiety and depression, which are often linked as common mood disorders, but they sort of have the opposite, it seems, significance with respect to sleep, whereas it seems like even though a lot of patients have both, patients who are anxious have more trouble sleeping, whereas patients who have depression tend to sleep more.

Dr. Corca:            That can be true, definitely with depression, especially here where I live, because we have winter and less sun and colder days. Definitely environmental-

Dr. Weitz:            And you’re in Colorado?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah, in Colorado, the seasonal effective disorder, some people get more depressed, they sleep more. Unfortunately, some of those people who develop seasonal effective disorder, even though have depression, they can also develop insomnia, which makes the depression worse. And yes, with anxiety, we have this over activated nervous system being in fight and flight mode, and then it’s not safe to settle into sleep. If you think about it, in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, the body and mind and spirit has to feel fairly safe because we’re very vulnerable. Think about it. You’re laying there in bed, you’re not aware of your environment.

So a certain amount of deep safety, and I’m not even talking about safety in your room because we live in houses with doors that are locked, so there isn’t really… generally, depending on which neighborhood you live, of course, you’re generally safe. It’s more about the stresses from our daily life, and even these, as I mentioned, gut infections or hormonal imbalances or just not having enough nutrients or having a food sensitivity that’s constantly aggravating your body, all of those like stressors in the body as well.

So I just want to say that’s not only emotional stress because I work with people, they tell me, “But my life is so good. I just can’t sleep and have anxiety and I don’t understand why.” So partially that physiological aspect is very important, and of course there is trauma from the past as a result that people are not consciously aware, but it’s still residing in their body.

 


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Dr. Weitz:            How important is it to respect our circadian rhythm for getting a good night’s sleep? I know that as it gets darker and the light tends to become a redder light, if you look at the sun setting, it’s redder and that tends to lead to melatonin secretion, which helps sleep, and then in the morning when the light comes up, we get the white light, which has a blue light, which stimulates cortisol, which tends to wake us up. How important is the timing of our sleep to, in some way, try to coordinate with our normal circadian rhythm?

Dr. Corca:            It’s very, very important a routine signal safety to the body, having that chaotic schedule creates stress, so that’s very, very important and then in the evening, as I was talking earlier about slowing down after 7:00 PM, I like to call it life after 7:00 PM because it can be kind of a different life and something that you do for yourself, you want to have that slowing down process and then making sure that you dim the lights, that you don’t look at the screens as much. It’s okay to watch a movie or if you want to scroll a little bit on social media and such, but I would allow about 45 minutes to an hour or putting away electronics and having a dimer yellow light. There’s those blue blocking glasses that you can use as well, but it’s not only about the light, it’s also about the activity that comes at you.

 So you want to calm it all down, read a book, listen to some music, do a little bit of stretching if you want to, whatever brings you pleasure. I always tell people you don’t want this to become another things or another thing that you have to do in the evening in order to fall asleep, but focus on what feels good because if you think about it, if you focus on what feels good for half an hour or an hour, that secretes a lot of feel good hormones and decreases cortisol, and as a result of that, you sleep better, but you also feel wonderful in the moment and that’s amazing.

This is what living in the moment is, it’s experiencing how you feel right here, right now. So that’s for the evening and again, kind of going at the same time to sleep consistently is important, but more important is also listening to your body. So if you’re not quite sleepy yet when it’s 10:00 and that’s your bedtime, don’t push it. Maybe you read a little longer, even if you’re going to be in bed a little shorter, because if you go to sleep a little slowly and your body’s not quite ready, then you’re laying in there and you can develop anxiety. So you don’t want to do that. So listening to your body and making sure you’re groggy and sleepy is very important.

Now, when you wake up in the morning, I would say it’s very, very important to keep it consistent and at the same time and not sleep in. If you need extra sleep, I’ll always tell people wind down earlier in the evening and go to sleep earlier and wake up at the same time because if you wake up at the same time the sleep becomes very efficient. Talking about increasing the quality of your sleep, that will increase the quality of your sleep because we have an internal clock and it kind of knows. I don’t know if you’ve slept well most of your life and a lot of you, you notice that you wake up at the same time no matter what, and that’s a really good thing. You want to honor that.

Dr. Weitz:            What about your sleep window? What if you tend to go to sleep at 2:00 in the morning? Is that less than optimal, for example?

Dr. Corca:            It is less than optimal, but some people have night jobs, and if that’s what it is, making sure you have your routine and consistency is very, very important. You’re not sleeping in, not fluctuating when you wake up and then it doesn’t matter if you wake up at 6:00 or 8:00 or 10:00 AM, to wake up at the same time and expose yourself to light, taking a walk, having some movement, eating breakfast, plenty of protein, 20 to 30 grams of protein is very important. If you are like me right now, like in Colorado, there is not enough light-

Dr. Weitz:            Why is eating 20 to 30 grams of protein so important?

Dr. Corca:            Because a lot of people do the opposite. They eat too much sugar, and then they have blood sugar fluctuations and that messes up with the cortisol, the stress hormone. So eating protein really sets up your body for stable energy, fully waking up and keeping your cortisol level steady, and then more so for the cortisol is just to eat in the morning. I know we live in a world where intermittent fasting is really popular and that can work too, I suppose, but for people who have sleep issues, I tell them for the time being to have breakfast. It doesn’t have to be a huge breakfast.

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah, you’re referring to the fact that intermittent fasting right now is considered very trendy, especially in the functional medicine world for promoting longevity and a lot of people do it by skipping breakfast.

Dr. Corca:            Right, yeah. And oftentimes, we go, we’re stressed in the morning and I think black coffee is allowed, so we just get this immense kick. We force the adrenal to give energy, but it’s also stressful to the body, so it’s not the healthiest way to go about it. Now, if you still want to do that, then you could do collagen powder, MCT oil in the coffee, doing two scoops of collagen powder gives you about 20 grams of protein. So that could be a possible alternative.

Dr. Weitz:            Now why collagen powder?

Dr. Corca:            The collagen powder gives you about 20 grams of protein and [inaudible 00:27:30] so-

Dr. Weitz:            Could use why protein or other forms of protein?

Dr. Corca:            You can, yes. I often recommend collagen powder just because a lot of people have issues with dairy products and even whey protein, so then collagen feels like the safest, but yeah, and it could be pea protein if you’re okay with the peas. So there are several choices there that could be replacing the full meal, but I do like to… I have a regular meal for breakfast, just some kind of a fish or meat and lots of vegetables. That’s typically my breakfast and it’s very helpful. So the other thing that I wanted to say about the morning is that if you don’t have access to the sun in-

Dr. Weitz:            You mention you have meat or fish in the morning.

Dr. Corca:            Yes.

Dr. Weitz:            But for some reason when you talk to a lot of people at the out breakfast, they’ll say, “Well, that’s not breakfast food. I have to have breakfast food.”

Dr. Corca:            I know.

Dr. Weitz:            What’s breakfast food? “Breakfast food.  I have to have cereal or waffles or toast, or I have to have all these carbs in the morning.”

Dr. Corca:            I know, I get it and I certainly like I literally sometimes miss it, I think about it and I’m like, “Wouldn’t really nice to just have some waffles with some butter and some fruit. That sounds so amazing,” but especially for women and for myself… For men too, but more so for women, especially women who go through menopause, it just really causes blood sugar issues and then morning you are hungry again and you reach for more coffee, your energy drops and you might have some more sugar.

If you want to lose weight or have a steady weight, if you want to have good energy, if you have thyroid issues, and you have want to have good energy, just try. Just try for me, just for a week, try have that different kind of breakfast and see how you feel. Don’t take my word for it from my experience, but just try it and see if you feel amazing and crave less sugars throughout the day and feel more stable and energized and you reach less for the coffee and for the stimulants and even in the afternoon, then… And most people, when they realize how good it feels, then they just do that and have the occasional typical breakfast some days just as a treat.

Dr. Weitz:            One thing, I don’t know why this came to mind for me, but among the people who have… A lot of people have trouble with sleep, but it seems like there’s a certain group of people that I’ve noticed and for me it tends to be women over the age of 70. I know a number of them have just given up, “That’s it, I don’t sleep. I’ve tried everything. Even if I get five hours, I’m happy.” Why do you think women and especially older women tend to have more problems with sleep?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. I think the functions on our body as we age, they’re just not working as well, they’re not optimized as well. Just, for example, the gut is not functioning as well, so maybe not enough probiotics to even make serotonin. They’re just, it’s just [crosstalk 00:30:48]

Dr. Weitz:            Do you think it’s a hormonal thing, lack of estrogen and…

Dr. Corca:            I think partially can be and partially neurotransmitters. I often do a neurotransmitter test, I look at GABA and serotonin and dopamine and histamine and all of that, and I think that’s partially what’s happening sometimes. I see those inflammatory kind of…

Dr. Weitz:            So when you run a test like that, what kinds of results do you get and what types of changes do you make as a result of the results?

Dr. Corca:            So to pick up on something that comes to mind, that this is a 70-something year old woman, I can’t remember exactly how old she is, one of the inflammatory markers that comes from the tryptophan kind of on the serotonin pathway, is very high, so that creates a certain amount of inflammation in the brain. I don’t think it allows us to sleep properly. So for her, I think just doing a high dose of procurement of active ingredient of Turmeric, it’s going to be really important, especially since she has pain as well.

Dr. Corca:            So I think spot on that would be helpful for her and I think it will impact her sleep. And she always said, she says, “I’ve gone through menopause for so many years and still I have a little bit of a temperature fluctuation at night.” We don’t want someone at that age to go on hormone replacement therapy, but a little of support with herbs, just a little bit to optimize the function of the body can move the needle a little bit.

Dr. Weitz:            So what kind of support will that be?

Dr. Corca:            Just herbs that support, it could be even for some women Black Cohosh. do different herbs, different combinations-

Dr. Weitz:            Okay. So many herbs that help with menopause?

Dr. Corca:            Exactly, yeah. Some of the combinations, I have Chinese herbs in them that can be helpful.

Dr. Weitz:            You used the rhubarb extract?

Dr. Corca:            Yes. Yeah, I believe. What is that company? I can’t remember the Metagenics who has that?

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah.

Dr. Corca:            That’s a wonderful, wonderful one. Also, the other thing that I tell people as they get older is-

Dr. Weitz:            Isn’t it amazing. I have some patients in that category too, that women in their 70s are still getting hot flashes or night sweats?

Dr. Corca:            I know, right? Because we’re told that like once [crosstalk 00:33:18] menopause you-

Dr. Weitz:            It can’t be because having big fluctuations in estrogen anymore. What is causing it?

Dr. Corca:            It’s in the brain, there is the temperature regulation, actually that’s… Like there is this little window and it’s too narrow and I think different kind of hormone levels helps to regulate that a little bit. So once that’s off, the ratio, the space to regulate it is too small, and then we go back and forth too easily.  The other thing that I really want to say about people who are any age, but really in the 70s and 80s, I think we’re told a lot like, “You’ve got to sleep. This is dementia prevention. Sleep is very, very important.” And yes, you can do various things as much as you can, but I don’t want people to obsess over it because that’s more stressful. If you just get a little short of sleep, but you feel wonderful, then I don’t want people to stress over that because the stress of it is literally worse. Again, I’m not saying not to do anything about it, but also not to [inaudible 00:34:21] for nine hours.

Dr. Weitz:            Right. Stressing over sleep is the biggest disrupter of sleep.

Dr. Corca:            Excuse me?

Dr. Weitz:            Stressing about not sleeping is the biggest disrupter to keep you from sleeping.

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. It’s all these ideas that we hear that are true in some cases, but there is more to it and, and it’s very important to, to understand these different aspects and not get anxiety over a particular idea, for sure.

Dr. Weitz:            So you mentioned temperature regulation. One of the things that I’ve incorporated into my sleep routine is using something called a Chilly Pad, which actually he cools me because sometimes in the middle of the night, we’re either getting Santa Ana winds or something, but it seems like the temperature will go up five, 10 degrees, and that will tend to wake me up. So if I have this constant temperature, that seems to make it easier to not wake up.

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. We have to have a lower body core temperature in order to settle into sleep. That happens naturally. That happens naturally actually a little bit in the afternoon and that’s why I believe we’re made for siestas, so that’s why I tell people to take a little nap.

Dr. Weitz:            Do you recommend something like that to maintain temperature?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah, it can be helpful. It definitely can be so helpful for people. I’ve heard a lot of good things about the Chilly Pad and there are other devices that are similar that can be truly a life saving, especially depending on where you live and the temperature of [crosstalk 00:36:02] for many people.

Dr. Weitz:            What are the most effective nutritional supplements for sleep? I know you’ve talked about a few already in terms of herbs that help to regulate some of the hormonal issues, especially that women have and we talked a little bit about cortisol secretion. Do you ever do like the cortisol testing and do you try to use supplements for that and what other kinds of sleep supplements do you find or effective, A, for falling asleep and B, for staying asleep?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. So let’s talk about the cortisol. Yes, I do the saliva testing because it’s super helpful. It gives us valuable information. We don’t want to assume it’s always generally safe to take certain adaptogenic herbs like as Ashwagandha, Rhodiola, and Holy basil, but-

Dr. Weitz:            So for doctors who say, “Oh, there’s no point in doing salivary testing.” I just listened to somebody else’s podcast who said, “Oh, this is a complete waste of time and money. If the patients are stressed, just give them some adaptogens.”

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. I find value in testing because… Okay, let me think of another patient just a few days ago. On Friday, I reviewed the test with her and she’s very fatigued and then she has anxiety at night and I kind of assumed that probably her cortisol is too low in the morning and too high at night, but we don’t want to assume, because we want to look at the overall curve. It should be higher in the morning and then lower in the evening, but also we want to look at the total output because if, let’s say, we start clearing cortisol at night, it can backfire. If she doesn’t have enough of that total output, it clears it really fast and then the body says, “Ooh, we don’t have enough cortisol because cortisol is helping [crosstalk 00:38:00]

Dr. Weitz:            So let me stop you right there. So what you’re saying is, is let’s say, you assume, “Oh, this person’s stressed and they’re having trouble with sleep. So I’ll just give them some adaptogens that are going to calm their cortisol secretion, and I’ll have them take it in the afternoon or the evening and that’ll help their sleep,” but maybe don’t don’t know that they actually have a very flat cortisol curve. They’re not producing enough cortisol, and now you’re down regulating their cortisol production even more by giving herbs like phosphatidylserine that are decreasing their cortisol. You might need to use a different set of nutritional supplements that help the body to produce more cortisol, to get that curve the way it’s supposed to be and you wouldn’t know that unless you did the salivary cortisol testing.

Dr. Corca:            Exactly. That’s exactly right and if you use phosphatidylserine assuming their cortisol is high at night, but the total output is too low, then we need a certain amount of cortisol because it has a lot of different good functions and then the person will feel temporarily better and then hour later they’ll have more anxiety and be wide awake and they don’t know why. And also like-

Dr. Weitz:            Then instead of using those adaptogenic herbs, which some people say, “Well, you can just use these for everybody,” you might need to use a different set of supplements. For example, you might want to use an adrenal supplement that includes licorice root, or glandulars or some combination of herbs that are better at building up cortisol production instead of calming it.

Dr. Corca:            Exactly. Yeah, definitely. So there are all these different… Yeah, exactly, as you explained subtle aspects and there is really no… You can guess or you can make an educated guess, especially if you’ve done a lot of tests and have worked with people, but I like to test. It’s, what, $160, it gives us such valuable information and some of these tests, they actually even test in the middle of the night. If you wake up, you can take a sample, so then you can see is the reason why they wake up cortisol related or not and it’s not always. In fact, I find that more than half of the people, they’re not waking up or because of that, there is something else that wakes them up and [crosstalk 00:40:21]

Dr. Weitz:            Right. There you go. So the cortisol testing may lead you to not use an adrenal adaptogen, or it may help with the timing of it. So for example, I just recently had a patient who is having trouble sleeping and falling asleep and I was thinking maybe he’s getting a cortisol rise in the evening, but it turns out he’s getting this big spike in the afternoon. So I may have used the same adrenal adaptogens, but I timed it more in the afternoon rather than in the evening. So the timing of the use of supplements may change depending upon the curve as well, and that’s another reason why, in this case, testing can be beneficial instead of just guessing.

Dr. Corca:            Yeah and honestly, for sleep issues I don’t think I’ve never seen a perfect, maybe 1% of people they’re like, “I don’t have to do anything for your cortisol.” There is always something I can do, but it different degrees of it. So I always find it helpful. So yeah, the timing, the type of supplements, it’s so important and also having a baseline, it’s super crucial. So depending on that it can depend a lot-

Dr. Weitz:            What are some of the other important supplements for regulating sleep? I know it changes depending upon the underlying causes and that’s super important. So if we have blood sugar problems, we’ll maybe need to use supplements to regulate blood sugar, as well as the right dietary approaches, exercise.

Dr. Corca:            Yeah, exactly. We’re were looking at the gut, looking at the hormones that carry toxins, the liver, there are many things, but I do find myself often trying to supporting the calming neurotransmitters, like the serotonin and GABA, and for serotonin you can take 5-HTP, but that’s not always what I do. There are other things that sometimes, like supporting the gut, it’s very, very important, so I always do that, but [crosstalk 00:42:27]

Dr. Weitz:            How do you support the gut? Do you use probiotics? Do you use other supplements?

Dr. Corca:            Usually if there is a gut component, I’ll see what the problem is. Yes, I tend to use digestive enzymes if it’s needed, it the infection is cleared or the infections, if we need to do an elimination diet, do an elimination diet to food sensitivity [crosstalk 00:42:47]

Dr. Weitz:            How will you clear infections? You use like antimicrobial herbs?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. So usually I do a stool test and so we look at the stool test, you probably do this as well, and we see what’s in there where the problem is and support that with herbs. Very rarely if there is a parasite or… Yeah, usually parasite is where I’ll recommend that maybe they get a short term prescription to support that, but in general, herbs and supplements seem to be super helpful to clear these imbalances and then support with probiotics and digestive enzymes and change the diet based on what they need. I try to not make it very restrictive because it’s hard on the people, but whatever I try to find whatever is the most helpful that moves the needle the most.

Dr. Weitz:            And if you make it too restrictive, that’s another source of anxiety.

Dr. Corca:            Exactly.

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah. So what are some of the best herbs or what are some of the best nutritional supplements for falling asleep? You mentioned five HTP. If you use five HTP, well how, how many milligrams will you use and then why will you sometimes use it and sometimes not use it?

Dr. Corca:            I tend to run this urinary test, [inaudible 00:44:07] he test, and that’s another test that if you look at some of the experts, they say, “Well, it’s not really representative of what’s happening in the brain,” and that’s true, especially because some of these, they get metabolized in the gut and the kidneys and all of that, but I have found it to be very helpful to give a general idea and I look at the trends rather than just taking everything literal.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay. So give me a couple of examples of results you get and then how will you supplement differently?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. Like for example, this patient, I review the test just a few days ago. She had had dopamine, histamine and PEA, which is a neurotransmitter. They were all trending high and that told me that there is a methylation issue likely. And then we had another test where we could see that the B vitamins are a little bit off, which totally made sense. Now we need to help her body methylate better. She probably has a genetic mutation. So this is just a very complex process that happens in the body like, I don’t know, some huge number every second, every millisecond, so-

Dr. Weitz:            So what did you do to give support for methylation?

Dr. Corca:            I just gave her, to begin with, because she’s young and I think she’s going to respond well, just some B vitamins with TMG and a little bit of SAM-e.

Dr. Weitz:            Like a B complex or a-

Dr. Corca:            A B complex. I have Sam and TMG, so a couple of other nutrients that help make that-

Dr. Weitz:            Oh, what particular supplement would that be?

Dr. Corca:            Oh my gosh, I don’t remember the name, but-

Dr. Weitz:            Okay, but a particular supplement that has B vitamins with TMG and SAM-e.

Dr. Corca:            And SAM-e Yeah, that will help lower the histamine. It will help lower the dopamine. Dopamine is so wonderful to give you gust for life and having motivation, but if it’s too high, you will not feel well and you’ll get [inaudible 00:46:10]. So that’s one example and actually her serotonin was on the high end and she just so happens that she has gut issues. So if we have gut issues and bacteria, that imbalance is going to drive the serotonin high, which is also not good. We don’t want it to be too low or too high.

Dr. Weitz:            So there’s a case where you did this testing. You might have used a nutritional supplement help with sleep that included 5-HTP, but in her case, because she had high serotonin, that’s something you would not do?

Dr. Corca:            Exactly. Yeah, that person would say, “Oh my gosh, I did [crosstalk 00:46:45]

Dr. Weitz:            Another example where you would change your recommendations based on the testing because testing rather than guessing can be helpful?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah, exactly. And then I always take the testing and really think about the person. Like, does this make sense? If it doesn’t make sense, I do what makes sense at first and see how it changes and then we’ll go back and look at the results or retest and figure it out. So we take everything with the grain of salt, but I find testing super helpful and in time, the more you test you start, already seeing patterns before you even have the test-

Dr. Weitz:            Which urinary neurotransmitter test will you use?

Dr. Corca:            I use ZRT most of the time.

Dr. Weitz:            What’s it called?

Dr. Corca:            The ZRT lab. The lab called Z-R-T.

Dr. Weitz:            Oh, ZRT. Yes. Good.

Dr. Corca:            So I tried a few different ones and they’re pretty good, but that one is very complete and then also we get some neurotransmitter testing and the Dutch test we could do for hormones, and also we get the organic acid test. We get a little bit of data, but when I want to be specific, I go for the ZRT test.

Dr. Weitz:            Right. Organic acid test. Do you get that through ZRT or you get that somewhere else?

Dr. Corca:            From Great Plains laboratory.

Dr. Weitz:            From Great Plains. Okay. Great. So maybe a couple of other hints on sleep. What about patients who have trouble staying asleep? Will you tend to use certain supplements for that and what about melatonin? Does melatonin help? When do you use melatonin?

Dr. Corca:            Let’s see, I use melatonin when it shows more if I test it in the Dutch test and on older people, I do one milligram and see how they do with that. We don’t-

Dr. Weitz:            One milligram, that’s really low.

Dr. Corca:            I know. We only produced about, at the highest, as teenagers we produce 0.9 milligrams and then is adults around 0.4, 0.5, and then as we age even less. So I have the liposomal, where you can do drops and ask people to just do one milligram and then possibly increase to two or three.

Dr. Weitz:            So liposomal melatonin?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah. Quicksilver Scientific, they have a good product that I like, because then you can play with the dosages and also you can do it gradually. You can take one milligram, one drop at 9:00 and then another about a 9:30 if you want to do kind of a gradual. Yes, there is the time release one as well, but I like this one, it works really well. Also, when people travel using melatonin, I find that it’s helpful to help with the jet lag. As far as falling asleep and staying asleep, I would have to think about that. It almost doesn’t seem like they’re different necessarily.

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah. I guess I’ve heard people say, “Oh, melatonin is better for falling asleep. Five HTP is better for staying asleep.” You haven’t really found that to be the case?

Dr. Corca:            Not necessarily. Think about it. If you have no serotonin, you’re going to feel anxious and you might have to trouble fall asleep. What I do find though, is that people tend to have [inaudible 00:49:57] susceptibilities and tendencies. So like when people wake up around 1:00 or 2:00 AM, it’s more digestive issues, hormonal issues, more than anything. Yes, the neurotransmitters can also get affected, like serotonin and therefore use 5-HTP. And then when people wake up early in the morning, their there are certain patterns. It may be sleep apnea, it may be just a lot of emotional stress, it might be hormonals or digestion, it’s a combination of things, but it can vary and it comes down to that root cause that I’ve mentioned to you now, what exactly is happening with the person?

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah. I know we’re close to wrapping up here, but we haven’t really mentioned sleep apnea and I know this can be an important player in a lot of people with sleep.

Dr. Corca:            It is and I think a lot of us think that this applies only to people who are overweight and that’s so not true. Yes, it’s more likely people who are overweight, but if I have even the slightest possibility in my mind that the person has sleep apnea, I recommend that they do a sleep study. Nowadays they’re all done at home, it’s pretty easy, usually the insurance pays for them, but the very least I ask people to buy a continuous oxygen monitor. You can buy it online usually for around $150 and it’s not a sleep study, but it’s fairly good information. And with that, it measures your oxygen throughout the night. You can see if the saturation drops under 92%, and if it is, then you got to take steps in that direction because you can be working on various things from different angles, but you have to address that sleep apnea issue.

Dr. Weitz:            I think a lot of people are apprehensive about getting tested for sleep apnea because all they’re thinking is, “I don’t want to use that CPAP machine.”

Dr. Corca:            Yeah, it’s true, but there are other… Like in functional medicine, we always want to work on the inflammation and if it is that you have extra weight, we can decrease that, but at the root of it is inflammation and yes, it could be structural, and then as you age things get more slack around here, the tongue falls in the back of the throat more easily. If we have inflammation in that area or even gut inflammation, it can make it worse. So there’s things that we can do. Even blood sugar imbalance, then that can increase the inflammation.  So there are a lot of things that we can do. And then the CPAP is not the only thing. We also have these mandibular devices that can pull your jaw forward and that can be super helpful for many people. So there are alternatives. It’s better to find out and know and do something about it instead of suffering and having other health effects over the years that you really don’t want to.

Dr. Weitz:            And what do you think about drugs for sleep?

Dr. Corca:            I think they can be helpful at the right moment. I’d rather have a person not develop severe anxiety or end up in the ER because they’re in such a distress. I don’t recommend them for long term because you’re not really addressing the root issues and it could be a dependency, even if it’s just mental, and you just want to leave… Sleeping is such a vital thing, something that we need every night, ideally you don’t want to be completely dependent on something [crosstalk 00:53:25]

Dr. Weitz:            What about CBD and marijuana? I hear a lot of patients relying on these kinds of things for sleep.

Dr. Corca:            CBD can be helpful. Again, in my mind CBD is something that it can be supportive naturally for a little while, until you figure out what’s happening in your body. THC, I find sometimes that with inflammation and temperature regulation issues in people and I’m not a big fan of it, but CBD can be helpful, and again, I never tell people to take CBD. It’s more like, “Yes, that’s that works for now. Let’s figure out why you can’t sleep, and let’s address the root cause.”

Dr. Weitz:            Right. Great. Okay. Any final thoughts you have for our listeners and viewers about sleep?

Dr. Corca:            Yeah, it’s to focus on how you feel the next day and there’s a lot of things that we didn’t get to touch on. Like, I don’t know, caffeine and just various things. I actually have these three gifts that I want to offer to you. I just kind of summarize a few myths around sleep, things that we think they’re true, they might not be true and what’s true about that.  So if you go to damianacorca.com, D-A-M-I-A-N-A-C-O-R-CA.com/sleepmyths So that would be sleep M-Y-T-H-S, there is a wonderful handout that I have that I think would be further helpful. Those are kind of like some basic things that you can do immediately and make sure you’re aware off. So then I feel like if those basic things we don’t take care of, then you never know, it might be as easy as taking care of those things, like understanding really when to stop the caffeine and understanding like what’s enough good sleep for you. Simple things, like is it good to drink milk before bedtime? I think that’s a big one a lot of people ask me sometimes.

Dr. Weitz:            Drink milk.

Dr. Corca:            I know it’s funny. So I explain all of those things and it’s at that link at damianacorca.com/sleepmyths. Other than that, yeah, I’m happy to help if anyone has any specific questions. So can go to my website or email me at damiana@damianacorca.com. Do you have any final questions that come to mind for me?

Dr. Weitz:            You just brought up like five other things that we could have covered, like caffeine and alcohol, and there’s a bunch, but there’s a lot of stuff that impacts sleep. I think we covered quite a bit.

Dr. Corca:            Yes.

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah. Good. Great. So, thanks for spending some time with us and making us more knowledgeable about sleep.

Dr. Corca:            Great. Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here with you.

 


 

Dr. Weitz:            Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness podcast. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please go to Apple podcast and give us a five star ratings and review. That way more people will be able to find this Rational Wellness podcast when they’re searching for health podcasts.  And I wanted to let everybody know that I do now have a few openings for new nutritional consultations for patients at my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition clinic. So if you’re interested, please call my office, (310) 395-3111, and sign up for one of the few remaining slots for a comprehensive nutritional consultation with Dr. Ben Weitz. Thank you and see you next week.

 

Tom Malterre discusses Nutritional Deficiencies as a Cause of Chronic Disease with Dr. Ben Weitz.

[If you enjoy this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, so more people will find The Rational Wellness Podcast. Also check out the video version on my WeitzChiro YouTube page.] 

 

Podcast Highlights

1:35   Testing for Nutritional Status.  Standard lab panels like a CBC with differential and a chemistry screen pick up broad issues that may be catastrophic, but they don’t pick up nuances. This allows us to see if a person’s ingredients for optimal cellular function are happening.  If you see that someone has estrogen out of balance, but you want to know why and this could be because their fatty acids are out of balance.  It could be because the co-factors that are used by enzymes that regulate estrogen levels.  Just looking at a thyroid panel or a hormone panel or even a gut panel, we don’t necessarily find out what is going on in your cells today and how to help that person.  Tom said that he believes as Dr. Sidney Baker taught us that all disease is caused by two primary things: 1. You’re getting things you don’t need, like toxins, pro-inflammatory foods and foods that you react to, stress, et. and 2. You are not getting enough of the things that you need, such as vital amines (vitamins), minerals, essential fatty acids or amino acids.  If you have arthritis, it can helpful to find out why you have a pro-inflammatory state?  Are you missing your vitamin C? Are you missing some of the things that stabilize complex 2 in your mitochondria? Are you missing fat soluble vitamins that might stabilize the membranes within your cells and therefore reduce the amount of oxidative stress and lipid peroxides?

5:55  The average person sees their doctor, who orders conventional lab testing that is very limited and does not tell us anything about nutrient status.  If we see that a person has diabetes, we never ask why they have diabetes?  Why does this person not metabolize their carbohydrates very well?  Are they having trouble metabolizing their fats?  If they cannot convert their glucose into acetyl-CoA, then they cannot use that glucose for fuel.  Are they missing some co-factors for the actual pyruvate dehydrogenase complex to work, so they can process glucose or fatty acids.  If people are doing a keto diet and consuming a lot of fat, we need to make sure that the fat is brought into the mitochondria via the carnitine shuttle and once in the mitochondria, it needs to go through beta oxidation, which requires specific nutrient co-factors.  But if they have loose stools and their stool floats, this may be a pattern of fat malabsorption and if they are following a high fat, keto type diet, then that diet is not working for them.  Maybe it’s because they need additional riboflavin or carnitine or perhaps they don’t make enough phospholipids, which means they are not producing enough bile that enables them to emulsify the fat and to be able to absorb it. If you have too much fat in the stool, this will draw with it fat soluble vitamins, so fat soluble vitamins will test low, as will essential fatty acids.

8:53  Vitamin D.  If a patient has a low vitamin D, that could be because they have fat malabsorption. This is why it is helpful to have fat soluble vitamins being measured, such as with ION 40 panel, which measures vitamin D, vitamin A, two forms of vitamin E, and CoQ10.  If all of these are in the first quintile, then we know we have trouble with fat digestion/absorption.  And vitamins D and A are important for immune system function. We also see that if glutathione levels go down, so do levels of immune cell function.

 

 



Tom Malterre has a master’s degree from Bastyr University, as well as advanced training in Functional Medicine from the Institute of Functional Medicine, where he is also part of the clinical faculty.  Tom has lectured on nutrition and supplementation across the country and he currently coaches doctors and health care practitioners on Functional Medicine protocols and he runs Whole Life Nutrition.  He has written The Elimination Diet and The Whole Life Nutrition Cookbook along with his wife, Alissa Segersten. 

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.



 

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz’s host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field, to bring you the latest in cutting edge, health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates, and to learn more, check out my site, drweitzs.com. Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters. Today, we have an interview with Tom Malterre on nutritional analysis, as part of an approach to helping patients overcome chronic health conditions. Our special guest today is Tom Malterre, who has a master’s degree from Bastyr University, as well as advanced training in functional medicine from The Institute of Functional Medicine, where he is also a part of the clinical faculty. Tom has lectured on nutrition and supplementation across the country. He currently coaches, doctors and healthcare practitioners on functional medicine protocols, in his progressive practitioner coaching program. And he also runs Whole Life Nutrition with his wife, Alyssa Segersten, and he’s written a number of books, including The Elimination Diet and The Whole Life Nutrition Cookbook. Tom, thanks for joining us.

Tom Malterre:                   Hey, Ben. Pleasure to be here, my friend.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Absolutely. We’ve been chatting a little bit on Facebook over the last several months, so I’m glad we finally put this together. So what are some of the benefits we can get from testing for nutritional status?

Tom Malterre:                   That’s a good question. So it’s interesting, I feel like I’m spoiled now. Anytime we’re trying to get an idea as to what’s going on with a person, we oftentimes rely on the person’s symptomology and we rely on conventional lab testing. And what I’m finding is, conventional lab testing, standard blood panels, don’t necessarily pick up nuances. They pick up broad issues that are occurring and whether or not it could be catastrophic. And when they don’t necessarily-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   What do you consider, standard lab panels?

Tom Malterre:                   Just a standard blood count, maybe with differential, cholesterol, possibly some sort of vertical auto profile, like a Cleveland HeartLab type analysis, type thing. It tells us about what’s going on in a certain aspect of a person’s health. But the reality is, human beings are built up of organ systems, and organ systems are built up of tissues, and tissues are built up of cells. So the reality is, you want to make sure that a person’s ingredients for optimal cellular function are happening. So this is one of those things where you go out and you say, “Wow, look at this person’s estrogen levels.” And you say, “Well, why is the estrogen out of balance?” Is it possible that the substrates for the estrogen itself, like the fatty acids are out of balance?  Is it possible that some of the co-factors for the enzymes that regulate estrogen levels are out of balance? Is it possible that some of the co-factors for the enzymes that detoxify or bio transform the estrogen are out of balance? You want to know all those details. By looking far upstream, and looking at a thyroid panel, looking at a hormone panel, or even looking at a gut panel, we don’t necessarily find out how to help that person today. What’s going on in that cell today? How can nourish that person to metabolize, transform, to detoxify, to exist in the presence of certain bugs. You’re always wanting to create an environment of resilience in the cell. And how do you do that? The same today, as we’ve learned from Sidney Baker from the get go, which is, all disease is caused by two primary things.

One, you’re getting things you don’t need. Two, you’re not getting enough things you do need. So you’re getting too many irritants and not enough nutrients, you’re getting toxins from mold, from air pollution, whatnot. You’re getting stress, you’re getting some sort of anti, or I should say, pro-inflammatory food components, like oxidized, fatty acids or whatnot. But you’re not getting enough of the things you do need. And those things are vital amines, they’re vitamins. They are minerals. They are essential fatty acids. They are amino acids, which is probably the most under looked aspect of functional medicine that I would suspect, are amino acids. And we don’t analyze those things. They are the primary building box for neurotransmitters, for cell repair, for proteins, for everything. But we don’t look at them. So I’ve said, why not? I’m a nutritionist, one who nourishes.

I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s in science and nutritional sciences. I’ve been studying it since I’ve been 10. Why not? We go in and we get a doctor’s diagnosis, and they’ll look at a set of symptoms. And they’ll say to you, “Well, you have diabetes or you have arthritis, or you have osteoporosis”, but they don’t necessarily say, why. Why do you have arthritis? You have pro-inflammatory markers in your system, but why do you have pro-inflammatory markers? Are you missing your vitamin C? Are you missing some of the things that stabilize complex 2 in your mitochondria? Why do you have a pro-inflammatory state? Are you missing fat soluble vitamins that might stabilize the membranes within your cells and therefore, reduce the amount of oxidative stress and lipid peroxides? Why don’t you check these things? You just take it for face value, that you have an inflammatory state, but why? So I ask, why?

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Well, I think one reason why, is because the average person is not really aware of all this. They go in and see their doctor and they say, “Well, all my labs were perfect. There’s nothing wrong.”

Tom Malterre:                   Right. Yeah. And that’s I think, where we run ourselves into little boxes. When you look at conventional lab testing and that’s all you know, or you look at a diagnostic code and that’s all you know, and you say, “I would like to treat diabetes.” Well, why does the person have diabetes? Does this person metabolize carbohydrates very well? Do they metabolize fats very well? Are they efficient with their mitochondrial energy function? It’s possible that this person cannot convert their glucose into acetyl-CoA. And if they cannot convert their glucose into acetyl-CoA, then they cannot use that glucose for fuel. Then that can cause a backing up of the system. They may have a lactate buildup. They may have symptoms of muscle pain and fatigue and whatnot. And they’ll have these blood sugar abnormalities. Why, what’s the chemistry?  How does glucose get broken down? Are we dealing with some sort of issue with the actual pyruvate dehydrogenase complex, missing some co-factors, to allow for the normal processing of glucose, or when it comes to fatty acids? I have a lot of people who are doing keto diets, carnivore diets, whatnot. They’re consuming a tremendous amount of fat and/or protein. And they’re not taking into consideration when they’re consuming the fat, that the fat has to be brought into the mitochondria, via carnitine shuttle. Once it’s in the mitochondria, it’s going to need to go through beta oxidation, beta oxidation needs specific nutrient co-factors. All these things are a chemical process.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   This is so the fats can be converted into energy in their body, because they’re eating very few carbohydrates.

Tom Malterre:                   That’s exactly right. It’s interesting, right? You run these panels and you see people who have then, an inability to digest fat, and they’re eating tons of fat. So you’ll see low levels of fatty acid, whether it’s monos, saturates, essential fatty acids, and you’ll see low levels of fat soluble nutrients. And you’ll see on the intake form, a pattern of fat malabsorption. So they’ll say, “I have looser bowel movements. I have multiple bowel movements per day. They’re floating, they’re lighter in color.”  And you say to yourself, “Wait a second, keto isn’t working for you. Keto might be the best thing for you, metabolically, but it’s not the best thing for you currently, physiologically.” Why? Possibly, they have a carnitine deficiency. Why? Possibly, because they need additional riboflavin. Why? Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe they’re not making enough phospholipids, and the phospholipids aren’t allowing them to produce adequate bile. The bile is not allowing them to emulsify the fat and then allow them to absorb the fats efficiently. And they’re ending up with the fats in the stool. When the fats are coming in the stool, the fats then draw with them, all the fat soluble vitamins. So there’s these nuantic pieces that you want to put together. You can’t just-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Well, that’s a great point right there. You could have somebody with low vitamin D, and if the vitamin D is being pulled out of their body because of fat malabsorption, and then we’re giving them more vitamin D and we’re going, “Gosh, why isn’t this person’s vitamin D going up?”

Tom Malterre:                   That’s definitely a panel that you want to look at too, is constantly look at the vitamin D. The neat thing about these nutrient panels that include fat soluble vitamins, like the ION 40, they include the vitamin D. So you can look at vitamin D, you can look at vitamin A, you can look at two E markers, both the alpha and gamma tocopherols, and then you can look at coenzyme Q10, and you can form an image on these panels where you look at, across the board, they’re in Quintiles. So five little segments, and you can see if everything’s in the first Quintile, then obviously you have an issue. You have an issue with a person getting in enough, fat soluble vitamins. If they have that issue, then where’s the conversation about looking at additional ox bile or looking at lipase or looking at something that would help that person digest, and therefore absorb their fats and their fat soluble vitamins. Because if they can’t get the fat soluble vitamins in, then what’s the use of supplement?

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Exactly. And we know vitamin D, among its many, many benefits, is immune system function. And we all know that right now, having a highly functioning immune system is super important.

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah. Well, that’s another aspect. It’s interesting. We’re seeing a lot of data coming out and I saw this through the Institute of Function Medicine, while studying toxicology. And when we saw that people were deficient in glutathione, and we saw their immune cell function went down. And when their glutathione levels go up, it appears their immune function improves. So you can track both, where the glutathione might be coming from, and the actual glutathione itself, indirectly, via some of these nutrient analysis. So if we were wanting to say, “Well, gosh, it’d be great if we could take a peak inside someone’s cell and determine if they’re taking their homocysteine and turning it into glutathione and keeping their glutathione levels up, and/or determining which specific amino acid substrates might be low in this person. This panel can’t look at cysteine, it oxidizes, but it can look at cystine, looks at homocysteine, looks at glycine and looks at glutamic acid.  So you can determine, am I low in all the substrates? Where is the metabolism going of these substrates? Am I producing enough glutathione. And we’ll see a imprint of that with pyroglutamic acid. So we can get a glimpse too, of what’s happening with the antioxidant detoxification systems, by looking in the urine and organic acids, by looking in the plasma, at amino acids or in some cases, the urine. But I always look at plasmas, it’s a longer picture of how long the amino acid levels have been low in the body, or high. Most of the time, people have low amino acids, not high. And in fact, once again, we have nine essential amino acids. Some are transitionally essential, and no one measures these things. These are the building blocks for all repair tissues.

You’ve got a person who’s got Ulcerative Colitis or Crohn’s, and they cannot seem to repair their intestinal tissue. And I run an ION panel on these people, and their amino acid levels are in the tank. Their phospholipid levels are in the tank, their magnesium levels in the tank, their zinc levels in the tank. They don’t have enough of the raw ingredients to help rebuild their own intestinal tract.  So when they’re actually getting injured by microbes, by food particles, by whatever it is, toxins, then they don’t have the ability to repair the tissue. So we know that the-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   That right there, is a great clinical insight for patients with chronic gut problems. You could have a patient dealing with IBS, SIBO, one of the other forms of dysbiosis, and you might be taking the appropriate steps that, normally are supposed to work to help this person get rid of, or reduce the levels of the problematic microbes. And you could be giving them probiotics to build up their microbiome. But if they’re lacking essential nutrients to allow their intestinal system to function properly and to heal and to repair, none of those are going to be effective.  And we may be running down various wrong paths, looking for the next problematic microbe, when we have to go back to the basics, which is, looking at the importance of our nutritional status, which of course, is something that only us in the functional medicine world look at, because conventional doctors are not going to do this. They might run a vitamin D or a serum B12, but that’s about the end of it because all the other tests are not going to be covered by insurance. And they have a 10 minute office visit anyway, limited by what insurance pays.

Tom Malterre:                   Exactly, and it’s not just the intestinal lining, it’s the mucus layer. So you need specific nutrients for mucus. Ideally, we’d have optimal electrolytes. People don’t even think about that for mucus production. There’s so many different things when it comes to structure of the human body, that are all chemical. You need the actual chemical ingredients to build rebuild, repair, do anything you need to do, with a human cell. So if you’re not thinking of the nutrients, you’re not thinking of what’s the optimal health of a cell.  So that’s why I’m always trying to get people to run these panels. And when you have these panels, the interesting piece is, and a lot of people will say, “Well, I’ve run these things and there’s no validity on these. And there’s no science to back this up.” You got to be kidding. I have a textbook that I keep in my desk drawer right here, with all my supplements.  It’s the Laboratory Evaluations… Oh, you can’t see that, but Laboratory Evaluation for Integrative and Functional Medicine, 2nd Edition by Richard Lord and Dr Bralley.  I spent time with Dr Richard Lord over a decade ago. We hang out at all the Functional Medicine conferences. They’re wonderful people, the Bralleys’ and Dr Lord. They’re from Metametrix, that now got absorbed into Genova, right?

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Right.

Tom Malterre:                   This crew was not wasting their time. They sat and buried themselves in scientific literature for decades, to come up with some of these evaluative tools. And then, the wonderful thing about this analysis is, there are checks and balances. So if you have a urinary organic acid, and it’s the only marker you have, like methylmalonic acid, for example, B12. And you’re like, “Well, gosh, does this person really have a functional B12 deficiency?” Well, the fatty acids that need to be transformed by adenosylcobalamin, into other metabolites that can be used for energy Succinyl-CoA at all, if they cannot be transformed, you’ll see a buildup in odd-chain, fatty acids on the panel. So you can see functional adenosylcobalamin deficiencies, via MMA and odd-chain, fatty acids. There are multiple, different ways throughout the test. Let me give you an example.  I had 46 year old female, just two days ago. And this 46 year old female has weight loss resistance. She has these immaculate standard panels. I’m working through another healthcare practitioner. I’m pulled in as a consultant sometimes, on cases.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Okay.

Tom Malterre:                   And this other practitioner shares these three different lab sets and they all look pretty immaculate, everything looks great on this woman. She’s fabulous, mentally, gut wise, supposedly everything’s great. How come she’s not losing weight, what’s going on? And so we look at essential fatty… Or excuse me, we look at essential amino acids. And all we see is these little things of this real big spike in valine real big spike in threeanine. And we’re like, “Huh, what’s the commonality between these two. Everything else looks relatively normal, straight down the middle.”

Well, those particular two amino acids need vitamin B6 in order to be metabolized. So you say, “Huh, okay. Let’s go down the list and look at alpha amino and butyric acid”, which is a marker of B6. And it’s skyrocketed. It’s huge. So immediately I can see, there’s this drastic need for vitamin B6. Well, B6 takes place in all these transaminase enzymes. So anytime you want to transfer one amino acid into a different shape amino acid, you have to have adequate B6. B6 takes place in the brain, when we’re transferring glutamate over to GABA. We need B6 as a specific co-factor, to calm down neuro excitability. B6 is needed all over the place. There are hundreds of different reactions, whether it’s a form of metabolism or metabolism itself, or for glucose or other things, B6 is everywhere.

B6 for tryptophan, B6 for the formation of melatonin, B6 for dopamine, it’s all over the place. So if you have a person who’s deficient in B6, you have a person who’s, malfunctioning across the board. And it’s interesting when you run nutrient analysis, one of the most common nutrient deficiencies I see in humans is B6. And it’s weird because you say, “Well, why B6?” Well, B6 can be wasted, via a certain gene analysis. You look at their genes and they might be having specific enzymes that allow them to either, use up or excrete or more B6. That’s one. Two is, certain medications will deplete B6. Come on, Ben, what kind of medication do we know in females all the time, is depleting B6? It’s oral-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Antidepressant.

Tom Malterre:                   Antidepressants, can be, and oral contraceptives. Well, guess what? This gal’s been on oral contraceptives for a couple decades. So it’s like, wow, she’s super deficient in the B6. Now, you partner that with a low tyrosine, she has a flat affect. She’s not really excited in life. And you say, “Oh, B6 is needed for dopamine metabolism.”

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   By the way, if that person were to get a serum B6, is that going to show us what we need to know?

Tom Malterre:                   Not always, interestingly enough. No, and you have this reflected here in a couple of different spots, but you’ll see it in the urinary organic acids, as kynurenate and Xanthurenate. And then you’ll see it again here, in the amino acids and alpha-Aminobutyric acid.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Now, why is it? I’ve seen a number of patients who, their serum B6 was actually high, but they needed B6.

Tom Malterre:                   Okay. Well, B6 is once again, needed all over the place. And so you’re not always going to find B6 just in circulation, where you want it to be. So if you’re using B6 intercellularly, if you’re using B6 in multiple use, and you’re looking in just one area in the serum to find out if your level is adequate, then you may not see what you’re looking for. Not only that, you need to transfer B6 into pyridoxal phosphate and if you’re looking at pyridoxine, and you’re looking at pyridoxine in the serum, you’re not necessarily going to determine if this person is utilizing the B6, in the bio available form because of their enzyme function, their co-factors for that enzyme, they may have insufficient magnesium, for example. And so they may not have functional use of their B6, even though they have B6 in circulation. So it’s not enough, right?

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Right.

Tom Malterre:                   So anyway, so we find out right away, this gal has a B6 insufficiency. And then we look down the line and gosh, there’s all sorts of things. Her thiamin is insufficient. Well, what do you need thiamin for? Well, thiamin is going to be the primary determinant, to turn on pyruvate dehydrogenates. So when a person is taking glucose and they’re turning that glucose into acetyl-CoA, as we were talking about earlier, it has to pass through pyruvate and pyruvate has to turn into acetyl-CoA. Well, that complex, it’s a big protein complex, it has to have thymine first and foremost, to come in contact with that pyruvate and then break it down into multiple different steps, with the help of B2 and B3 and B5 for acetyl-CoA. And then we also have alpha-lipoic acid, which stimulates the whole response.

So if you’re missing a B vitamin like B1, the whole complex slows down, you can’t get the energy from the pyruvate. You also cannot get energy from your branched-chain, amino acids, your isoleucine and leucine, and valine. Those things need to go through alpha-keto acid dehydrogenase as well, which needs the thiamin. So you’re not getting energy from amino acids. You’re not getting energy from your glucose. Then all of a sudden, what happens? The system backs up. You have some issues. You’re not utilizing your energy from your foods. Now, partner that with one more thing, she’s eating mostly keto. And what do we see? We see that same scenario we were just talking about, where the fat-soluble vitamins are low. The coenzyme Q10, the vitamin A, the beta-carotene, the vitamin E, they’re low, the vitamin D was low as well.

And then we see monounsaturates low. We see saturates low, see essential fatty acids low. We see omega-6 low. So all of her fatty acids, all of her fat soluble vitamins, are trending low. So if these are all low, she may be on this higher fat diet. She may be trying to exist with keto. And she has a [inaudible 00:22:25] elevated, which is an indication of poor fatty acid metabolism. So we say, “Wait a second. Of course, she’s going to have fat loss resistance.” I don’t know if you’ve seen this, Ben, but I’ve run nutrient panels now, for 15, 16 years. And when I see people who are low in essential fatty acids, they hold onto their fat. The body, for some reason… I tell my own story here where I say, well, the body really needs these essential fatty acids.

And if it’s not getting the essential fatty acids, whatever fat it takes in, it will hold onto. It’s looking for that missing link. It’s wanting that piece. And so therefore, it has a difficult time letting go of the fat, until it receives the beneficial fats that make it function well. Now, if we looked at the fatty acid panel too, which is fascinating, we’ll see that she had a block on DPA, turning into DHA. We see she had some blocks from GLA to DGLA. Both of those things need elongase to work. And what does elongase need? Vitamin B6. So even some of her essential fatty acid, some of her prostaglandin forming, omega-6 fatty acids, they were out of whack, once again, because that B6 was missing. So there’s this wonderful story that gets told in your own chemistry, by looking at these nutrient analysis tests, but here’s the challenge-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   So let me just stop you on this particular case. So then, how much B6 and what form of B6 did you give her? How did you know how much B6 to give her? And did you use… Which form?

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah, so the reality is, I’m usually using higher doses of B6 than the average bear. And I’ll usually use 25 milligrams throughout the day, three to four times a day. So up to a hundred milligrams of B6, depending on the response, and usually titrating up. What I find is that, B6 travels really well with magnesium. So I’ll do a magnesium-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Do you use the P5P form?

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah. Depends on the person. So you’ll see responses and tolerance in different ways. It’s weird, some people do not respond well to P5P and some people do not respond at all to pyridoxine. So I’ll usually start out with a P5P/magnesium combo. And if there’s any sort of negative response, then I’ll move over to pyridoxine. So just a standard facility.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Okay.

Tom Malterre:                   But magnesium, I’ll usually have the magnesium along with it. Now, the magnesium is especially important when it comes pyridoxine, because you need it to convert over to P5P, which needs-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   How much magnesium will you use in a case like that?

Tom Malterre:                   Thank you for that, asking. I really appreciate it. So what I found with magnesium over the years is, number one, the magnesium receptor sites don’t really, optimally function above 200 milligrams per dose. So a lot of people who are doing single dosing of 400 milligrams or 600 milligrams at night for sleep or leg cramping or whatnot, I don’t see that works. I find that, when somebody does smaller dosing throughout the day, 125, 150 max, three, four times a day, that’s better, both absorbed and tolerance wise. And the reason people don’t tolerate magnesium is usually, they’re doing too high of a dose of a form that’s not well absorbed, that causes an osmotic gradient, draws the fluid out, causes the cramping. They flush out the content of the intestinal tract. So of course it keeps-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   We sometimes use that for constipation patients.

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah. Well, a lot of people do. They’ll use a citrate.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Right.

Tom Malterre:                   Hopefully they’re not using an oxide or a sulfate, like the Epsom salts, but my goodness-

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   What’s the negative effects of using an oxide or a sulfate?

Tom Malterre:                   Oh, oxides are miserable. They usually cause terrible cramping in people. Sulfates can as well, it’ll clear out the gut pretty significantly. I have a tendency, not to want to draw out fluid from the intestinal tract like that as much as possible. I will look at motility issues. I will look at bacteriological issues, absence of growth of certain organisms. Lactulose is incredibly underused when it comes to constipation, it’s bizarre. It’s a sugar, it’s a disaccharide. And that specific sugar, not only increases motility like nothing else, but it’s also a prebiotic. It seems to feed, acid forming organisms that change the pH of the upper intestinal tract. They help lower SIBO. It helps to help repair the intestinal lining. It’s one of the few things that’s been used in the medical literature, to repair a leaky gut and lower liver enzymes.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Interesting. It’s only available a prescription now, though.

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah. There was a petition going around a couple months back, to make it a non-prescription.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   It’s insane. We have a sugar that’s a prescription.

Tom Malterre:                   It’s a sugar. Yeah. Welcome to the United States. If you go to Canada or you go to Australia or you go to Europe, whatnot, it’s not. You can go up to a pharmacist, say, “Just hand this to me please.” And they’ll give you a big bottle. And when I used to be able to go across the border, that was an easy thing to do, but it’s crazy now. But I highly recommend considering things like that, as well as there’s probiotics, other prebiotics, dietary changes, essential fatty acids, which help. So instead of causing an irritation and causing something to flush out the contents of the intestinal tract, which will draw other minerals or nutrients with it, oftentimes I’m using secondary measures for normalizing bowel movements.

 


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Dr. Ben Weitz:                 Can you talk a little bit about, what we can tell about neurotransmitter imbalances from looking at amino acids? Because as you know, in this country, rates of depression and anxiety are really, super high. And over the last several years, have gotten much higher. And the conventional way of treating depression and anxiety is to, assume that this is a result of neurotransmitter deficiency and simply putting all the patients on SSRIs and similar drugs that say, increase serotonin levels.

Tom Malterre:                   Well, first off, one of the most under utilized therapies for anxiety I think is, recognizing that if a person is magnesium and B6 insufficient, they will be anxious. So I shouldn’t say they will be, the chances of them being anxious or having racing thoughts, the monkey mind, startling at loud noises, not being able to turn off their mind at night so they can get some rest, always being hypervigilant, what we call, wired and tired. So commonly Ben, so commonly is associated with a magnesium and B6 insufficiency.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   So which form of magnesium should we use for these patients?

Tom Malterre:                   Ah, thank you. So if the person has cognitive decline issues, the three and eight might be good to get in the central nervous system. If they are not dealing with that, then a maleate or glycinate, anything could work just fine, Atorate for cardiac stuff, whatnot. There’s or an orotate, whatever. But I’m less concerned about that. They seem to work even a citrate can work if it’s low enough dose and doesn’t create bowel spasms in somebody. But the big thing is, just the smaller doses throughout the day.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Okay.

Tom Malterre:                   That’s the thing that seems to get people to where they need to go.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   200 milligrams, what, two to three times a day, or even more?

Tom Malterre:                   Yep. Three to four times a day, if they have a big issue with it, especially if they’re quite anxious. But you ask questions. Do you have the eye twitching? Do you have the arm twitching? Do you have something going on that’s leading you to believe you may have a magnesium insufficiency? Are you startling at loud noises, whatnot? Do you have the leg cramps? Those are all telltale signs to show that you may have some extra need for magnesium. And if you do, then holy smokes, let’s go, let’s do it. And honestly, out of all the things that we see as patterns on these panels, after 16 years now of running these panels, what is it that I see? Consistent magnesium B6 insufficiency, consistent magnesium B6 insufficiency.

When I have people who are anxiolytic, when I have people who are having a hard time going to sleep, what is it that I see? Deficient magnesium and B6. So it’s one of the most solid patterns. So when I was trying to figure this out chemically, I looked of course, at this book that I have here, and it talks about the NMDA or the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor in the brain, which is a calcium channel. And that calcium channel is stimulated by glutamate. And the glutamate basically tells the brain, alert and alarm, pay attention, remember, remember, you need to know what’s going on right now. This could be something that’s incredibly beneficial to you or potentially harmful. So you need to know this, you need to know this, that glutamate signal is turned on by toxins, it’s turned on by blood sugar abnormalities.

It’s turned on by all sorts of different stressors. And that glutamate will turn on. Well, once the glutamate turns on, it causes an influx of calcium into that channel. And that causes that neuro excitability. How do you then regulate that? How does the body regulate the NMDA glutamate excitability? Well, two ways, primarily. Well multiple, actually. But the two primary ways that I’m seeing chemically is, you can take that glutamate and you can turn it into GABA. Glutamate is excitatory, GABA is calming. How do you do that? Well, you do that through an enzyme, and that enzyme is a B6 dependent enzyme. So you have B6 in adequate levels, you can convert that glutamate to GABA. Fantastic, there you go. You get the exact opposite effect. You get a calming effect. The other way is, you have this [inaudible 00:33:51] which is calcium that’s coming in, and you have another [inaudible 00:33:53], which is magnesium.

So two positive charges, two positive charges. And you can have adequate magnesium that will sit in the middle of this calcium channel. And as the calcium will come in, it will electrically repel the calcium. So if you have adequate magnesium, it regulates the amount of calcium that actually can come into this receptor. So you have two primary things, stopping the calcium influx and turning the actual signal of glutamate made into GABA, that can help you regulate the anxiety response. So Mag-B6 for anxiety. I would hope more and more people would start thinking about that. Now the other piece is, of course, you have the normal pathways of dopamine. Dopamine’s going to coming in, via phenylalanine going to tyrosine, tyrosine going into dopa, dopa going into dopamine, and then dopamine going down into norepi and epinephrine. And if you have too much, norepi or epinephrine, because you have a zinc insufficiency or riboflavin insufficiency, and you’re not working on the aldehyde dehydrogenase complexes, and you’re not really processing your adequate dopamine or R epinephrine, you’re going to have some issues with neuro excitability.

The neat thing about these nutrient panels is, you can get clues. You can say, well gosh, do I have enough zinc? Well, yeah, the mineral zinc is here on this panel. Do I have enough B vitamins? Well, there’s a lot of different markers on here that would indicate sufficient or insufficient B vitamins. So you can get these clues all over the place. Plus, you can look at the neurotransmitter precursors. So you see phenylalanine levels, you see tyrosine levels, you see the ratio of phenylalanine to tyrosine. So you see if the conversion’s happening very well. And then you also see some of these things like VMH, VA that are actual end-products of, part of the metabolism of these neurotransmitters. So vanilmandelate, homovanillate, these are markers to show you, are they succeeding in going down the process of both, making the neurotransmitters and metabolizing them successfully?

So you can start telling yourself stories about the chemistry of whether or not this person’s metabolism is working. Now, if you partner this with a gene panel, and this is where the magic comes in, when you start looking at the actual precursors, and then you start looking at the end products, and then you start looking at, how are their enzymes? Are they able to actually process efficiently and effectively? And if they’re not, and they have the co-factors that are challenged, well, no wonder this person is anxious or no wonder this person doesn’t feel like they’re satisfied with life or rewarded or whatnot. So you can really start putting the biochemical pieces together, as to where the blocks may be in neurotransmitter metabolism.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Awesome. This is fascinating stuff.

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah. And it’s actually quite freeing, Ben, because when I see standard clients that have not had lab analysis, whether it’s nutrient panel or gene panel or both or whatnot. The more pieces of information you get, the more of a story you can tell. I worked for a Alzheimer’s company for a while, that would charge people $50,000. They’d run these massive brain scans and $10,000 worth of labs. And then I would sit with the lab material for a number of days, and I’d put all the pieces together and then come back with a protocol or a plan. And it’s incredible, how specific you can get when you have all these pieces of analysis. You’re no longer guessing, you’ve tested, so you know exactly where to go next.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Yeah. And Dr Dale Bredesen has shown in the last year, that we can use a functional medicine approach on patients with Alzheimer’s and actually reverse the condition, and actually make people better, as compared to that recent drug that got approved for Alzheimer’s that cost $60,000 a year. Causes bleeding and inflammation in the brain, and nobody got better.

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah. That’s a wonderful breakthrough. He has done some fantastic work. And the amazing piece about his work was this. If you start with one intervention, you get zero results. Well, not zero, you get minimal results for a shorter period of time. The more interventions you add, changing your lifestyle, your sleep processes, your exercise, your psychological wellbeing. And then he has a whole host of nutritional items that he recommends for mitochondrial function or gut function, or essential fatty acids or whatnot, amino acids. There are all these different things that he’s examined that say, you know what, for each one of these that you include, the chances of this person getting better, improve up to a 38 point protocol.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   And by the way, I know they included the NutrEval in the analysis as well, among their lab testing.

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah. And once again, the NutrEval overlays the ION panel and vice versa. There are some slight differences. They’ve added a couple of new things like, oxalates and whatnot, to the NutrEval, but the ION 40 still has 20 additional amino acid markers. And it still has fat soluble vitamin markers that I enjoy looking at. So I’m old school. A lot of people like the NutrEval, because it comes out with this wonderful readout that tells you about all these algorithms. And it says, “This vitamin is low. This vitamin is low.” I’ve been doing this too long to want somebody else to tell me how to do it. I’ll look at it and I’ll say, “Well, if that’s going here and this is going there, wow, this person needs more glycine. So it’s a little different for me, but I really wish people would examine this.

And if they need assistance, they would somehow contact me and start a study group or whatever we have to do. But I would hope that people would understand, there are answers. There are clues, there are pieces of this investigation that you can add into your repertoire. You don’t have to just walk in and assume you know the diagnosis. Therefore, you assume you know the chemistry. I have to tell you, man, I’ve been so humbled by this, because I’ve been studying this for a very long time. And I’m reading the research and talking to colleagues and training colleagues and working on case studies with groups of people. And every time I run these, I’m always finding something that’s counter to what I thought it would be. So I think it’s smart for us to be humble and recognize, while we may have a whole plethora of things in our tool chest, without testing, we’re guessing.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Right. I love your test, don’t guess approach. And I also have found it very helpful in my functional medicine approach with patients. There’s an interesting trend in our profession, where some practitioners are out there saying, “If you run all these tests, then you’re treating the test and you’re overburdening the patient with excessive cost. And if the patient presents with these symptoms, just put them on this diet first. And if that doesn’t work, then use a couple of simple interventions. And most of the time that’s going to fix it. And all this other stuff is over testing and over charging and all this kind of stuff.”

Tom Malterre:                   Yeah, totally. I get it. And here’s what I would say. If you’re not up on it, you’re probably down on it. So this is what David Primler talked to me about a long time ago when I was talking to him at an AFMCP, years and years and years ago, he used to say, “People are down on what they’re not up on.” So if you haven’t run these for a number of years, they’re confusing. You look at them and you’re like, “Ah, chemistry. I don’t understand this.” But I’ve spent years, literally years going through the individual markers, reading the research on it, looking at the biochemical pathway, seeing how one biochemical pathway interacts with another biochemical pathway, and you see patterns forming. And you see that, well, yeah, this one’s not really accurate in this particular client because they’re gut’s so out of balance.

And this one’s not really accurate here, because they’re not digesting this amino acid very well, or I can’t really rely on this MMA value because they don’t really have adequate BCAAs. And so it’s not really going to tell me what their methylmalonic acid is looking like. So there’s a lot of little nuances that you have to gain with experience and time. And until you do, you’ll poo poo it. You’ll say, “There’s no validity to that. This doesn’t work.” This is an incredible tool, if you choose to understand what it is. You look at its limitations and you use it how you can, with limitations. But once you see the patterns and once you see it come out as hundreds of and hundreds, and now thousands and thousands of clients, you go, “Oh.”

This is one of many tools. And while I used to order these when they were $1,800. And now you order them and they’re $465. They have so much value, that I’ve never thought that I’ve wasted a person’s time and/or money, ever, not once. So I understand those arguments, and they’ll say, “You’re treating now, the lab.” Well, no, you look at the person’s symptoms. You look at the person’s history. You look at what they’re presenting with, right in front of you. You layer that with some of the information from this lab, and then hopefully you can get a gut panel and the gene panel and some other standard lab tech panels. And you start putting all those pieces together. And then you form the actual picture that determines where your plan or protocol is going to go.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   This is brilliant, Tom. I am really enjoying this discussion. I wish we had two more hours, but mither you, nor I have two more hours available. So we’re going to have to wrap it here. I’d love to come back and discuss some of these issues in the future. How can listeners and viewers find out more about the programs that you have to offer?

Tom Malterre:                   Yep. So some are on wholelifenutrition.net. So there’s a functional lab analysis course that I was teaching for a number of years, that I’ve stopped teaching now. But if I have enough interest, I’m happy to coach people on that. And they can just shoot me an email at plantsarewise@gmail and say, “Oh my gosh, I got to know this.” And if you got to know this, I’ll teach you, we’ll make it happen.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Awesome. Thank you so much, Tom.

Tom Malterre:                   Pleasure, Ben. Take care of yourself.

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Okay. Have a great day.

Tom Malterre:                   You as well, my friend. Bye-bye, now.

 


 

Dr. Ben Weitz:                   Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please go to Apple Podcast, give us a five star ratings and review. That way, more people will be able to find this Rational Wellness Podcast when they’re searching for health podcasts. And I wanted to let everybody know that, I do now have a few openings for new nutritional consultations, for patients at my Santa Monica, Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition Clinic. So if you’re interested, please call my office, (310) 395-3111 and sign up for one of the few remaining slots for a comprehensive, nutritional consultation with Dr Ben Weitz. Thank you, and see you next week.